More tales from Warhammer 40,000 by Dan Abnett

• GAUNT’S GHOSTS •

THE FOUNDING
Book 1: FIRST AND ONLY
Book 2: GHOSTMAKER
Book 3: NECROPOLIS

THE SAINT
Book 4: HONOUR GUARD
Book 5: THE GUNS OF TANITH
Book 6: STRAIGHT SILVER
Book 7: SABBAT MARTYR

THE LOST
Book 8: TRAITOR GENERAL
Book 9: HIS LAST COMMAND
Book 10: THE ARMOUR OF CONTEMPT
Book 11: ONLY IN DEATH

THE VICTORY
Book 12: BLOOD PACT
Book 13: SALVATION’S REACH

Book 14: THE WARMASTER

Book 15: ANARCH

THE SABBAT WORLDS CRUSADE

DOUBLE EAGLE

• EISENHORN •

EISENHORN
Book 1: XENOS
Book 2: MALLEUS
Book 3: HERETICUS

Book 4: THE MAGOS

RAVENOR
Book 1: RAVENOR
Book 2: RAVENOR ROGUE
Book 3: RAVENOR RETURNED

BEQUIN
Book 1: PARIAH: EISENHORN VS RAVENOR

I AM SLAUGHTER

BROTHERS OF THE SNAKE

TITANICUS

More tales from The Horus Heresy

HORUS RISING

LEGION

PROSPERO BURNS

KNOW NO FEAR

UNREMEMBERED EMPIRE

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

Introduction

A GHOST RETURN

OF THEIR LIVES IN THE RUINS OF THEIR CITIES

VERMILION LEVEL

IN REMEMBRANCE

FORGOTTEN

THE IRON STAR

GHOSTS AND BAD SHADOWS

YOU NEVER KNOW

FAMILY

KILLBOX

PESTILENCE

MASTER IMUS’S TRANSGRESSION

REGIA OCCULTA

MISSING IN ACTION

BACKCLOTH FOR A CROWN ADDITIONAL

THE STRANGE DEMISE OF TITUS ENDOR

THE CURIOSITY

PLAYING PATIENCE

THORN WISHES TALON

GARDENS OF TYCHO

THE KEELER IMAGE

PERIHELION

BLOOD GAMES

MISBEGOTTEN

PERPETUAL

THE LIGHTNING TOWER

MEDUSON

UNMARKED

LITTLE HORUS

BLACK GOLD

THE FALL OF MALVOLION

ORK HUNTER

MIDNIGHT ROTATION

BORN TO US

KILL HILL

THE INVITATION

ETERNAL

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Anarch’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

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

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

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

Introduction

It’s an odd admission, I’ll grant you, but I’ve never been a huge fan of the short story.

Let me qualify that. I feel I should. Particularly here, in the introduction to a collection of, you know, short stories and all. I completely admire the art of the form and those who have perfected it, like Saki or Poe or Borges, and I grew up devouring short stories by the likes of Bradbury and Vance. Indeed, two of my favourite writers today are Kelly Link and Ted Chiang, both of whom only write short-form prose (quite brilliantly). Furthermore, I entirely understand that writing is a matter of quality, not quantity, and that brevity is the soul of… etc., etc.

But as a writer, I’ve always preferred a longer form: the novel, or a decent run on a comic series. I like the expansive real estate a longer form affords you, the extended, wide-open space to develop characters and find out where they want to go. Oh, and just to be clear (he says, reading back the first paragraph above), I am not in any way comparing my output, such as it is, to those writers, or anyone like them. I mean, they’re not just higher up the story-telling ladder, they’re on a whole ‘nother ladder entirely.

Anyway… so, I like long-form. Boy, do I ever, as anyone who has demonstrated the endurance to follow a novel series like Gaunt’s Ghosts can attest. Fifteen plus novels, a million and a half words. Long, is what I’m saying. But at the start of my career working for Black Library, short stories were the way in, the starting place, the (literal) audition, and I wrote quite a lot of them, tentatively finding my feet in the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universes. And as time has gone on, producing short stories and novellas has been a useful and important way to support an ongoing novel series. They help to maintain interest and enthusiasm, for both the readers and the writer, during the inevitably long periods between new volumes. I also think that in this day and age the short story is enjoying a bit of a renaissance – both in SF and beyond – as it’s now a moment’s work to download and read a single story that in the past a reader could have not accessed individually.

But I don’t think of myself as a writer of short stories. That comes quite a long way down my list of priors, after ‘novelist’, ‘comic book writer’ and ‘game writer’.

In this volume, Black Library has collected up pretty much all of the short fiction I’ve produced for them over the years, and I find I am ever so slightly amazed that there are so many stories, and that the book is this fat. I’m also rather flattered that Black Library has felt them worthy enough to be anthologised.

I’m not downplaying these stories, or being modest: I actually think there are some great pieces here: pieces I’m very proud of, pieces I’m sure you’ll enjoy if you’ve never read them before, or enjoy again if you have.

There are no new stories in here, let’s be clear about that from the get-go. This is the closest I’m going to come to releasing a ‘best of…’ album. And some of these stories are pretty old. Collectively, they chart my rambling and exploratory progress through the Warhammer universes, an anabasis that has now lasted for more than two decades. Just to keep things neat, the anthology has been arranged by category rather than chronologically. The stories are grouped by the way they attach to different aspects and sub-genres of the Warhammer World… The Horus Heresy, Gaunt’s Ghosts, the Eisenhorn and Ravenor books (also known as ‘The Inquisitor Cycle’), and general 40K works.

There are various things of passing interest to be found here, ‘historically’ speaking. By ‘historically’, I mean ‘archaeologically’, and by ‘archaeologically’, I mean I really should have taken a longer run up and found a better way to explain what the heck I’m getting at.

Which is this… some of these stories reveal starting points, the seeds of things that later became bigger, or longer, or other. A lot of my early short stories were gathered up and transformed into the core of novels (a process called, in the trade, ‘fix ups’). A lot of the second Gaunt’s Ghosts novel, Ghostmaker, for example, started life as short stories, and the Gilead books and Hammers of Ulric were also built on the foundations of pre-existing short prose works. As I mentioned, short stories were my way into the universe at the start, and many characters, such as Ibram Gaunt and Gilead, were born in them.

I had no idea what I was creating at the time. I had no idea that these ‘throwaway’ characters would end up living in my head for years. Most of those early shorts are now so subsumed into the fabric of novels (they get substantially rewritten when you weave them into a bigger whole) that they cannot be extricated and printed alone any more. But we do have here ‘Black Gold’, one of the original stories that laid the groundwork for my Iron Snakes (Adeptus Astartes) novel Brothers of the Snake, and also one of those ‘early Gaunt’ stories, ‘Vermilion Level’, in its former and pre-gentrified state, written before I had any hint that Gaunt and his regiment would become the core of a massive, ongoing prose project or, come to that, before I realised I was going to become a novelist. Both stories are interesting, I feel, in a ‘before they were famous’ kind of way, like teenage snapshots, or hasty sketches made in advance of a major painting. They are perfect examples of the way characters who would go on to have bigger lives were first worked out, right there on the page. I was just making it up as I went along, and I’m not at all ashamed to admit it. It’s a working method I have never really abandoned.

On the flip side, some existing novel characters grew and developed in short stories that were written after, or alongside, the novel series in which they first appeared. The Eisenhorn and Ravenor stories included here, some of my favourites, filled in gaps between novels (‘Backcloth for a Crown Additional’, ‘Missing in Action’, ‘Thorn Wishes Talon’, ‘Regia Occulta’), or allowed me time to digress and tell the origins or fates of mainstays from the novels (‘Playing Patience’, ‘The Strange Demise of Titus Endor’). Others started out as ‘one off’ short stories, and then (and stories have an odd habit of doing this) reached out organically to connect other things (‘The Keeler Image’, which ties into The Horus Heresy).

In the Eisenhorn sub-section there are three stories that were either genuinely stand-alone when written (‘Pestilence’) or of themselves (the Drusher stories, ‘The Curiosity’ and ‘Gardens of Tycho’). They were never really intended to be part of anything, but as time has passed, connective tissue has grown around them, and they have become Eisenhorn stories (even though he isn’t actually in them), forming valuable preludes to the most recent Eisenhorn novel, The Magos.

Some of the Gaunt’s Ghosts stories follow similar patterns too: ‘Of Their Lives in the Ruins of Their Cities’ was deliberately composed to fit between two of the Gaunt novels, and the story sequence ‘You Never Know’, ‘Family’ and ‘Ghosts and Bad Shadows’ form what might be seen as a pretty vital plot bridge between the novels Salvation’s Reach and The Warmaster. Sometimes you have tangential ideas that won’t fit into a novel, so you put them on the side as their own thing; other times bridging a gap between novels feels essential.

This latter process is also represented by the Horus Heresy story ‘Perpetual’, which fits after the novel Know No Fear, and which gave me the time and space to talk more about a Heresy ‘side-strand’ plotline and its key character, Oll. Most of the Horus Heresy stories here were deliberate opportunities to execute character studies, or to develop themes that would have cluttered the flow of the Heresy: Amon of the Custodes in ‘Blood Games’; Rogal Dorn in ‘The Lightning Tower’; the early, pre-heresy days of big old, bad old Horus himself (before he was big, bad or old) in ‘Misbegotten’; the Shattered Legions in ‘Meduson’; and Little Horus Aximand in the story called… yes, you guessed it, ‘Little Horus’.

Little Horus Aximand was a character already in play in the novel series, and I just wanted to focus on him for a moment. But Amon was (originally) written merely to give me a chance to play around with the Custodes for a change. I had no idea, when I wrote it, what kind of significant player Amon Tauromachian would become, for me and for other Heresy writers, nor had I any idea that Meduson would be more than just a character in that short.

So, I suppose, the majority of these short stories aren’t short stories at all, in the end. They are either moments that have been woven into the ongoing lore of longer-form works after the fact, or they are sidebars and digressions specifically engineered to flesh out gaps. It seems my natural urge towards the longer form prevails after all.

Except, that is, for some of the stories in the Dark Millennium subsection. Some of those are definitely satellites of bigger things, but a number are bona fide short stories, self-contained and finite. They stand out to me as genuine curiosities (as Magos Drusher might say), as they remain in their own little times and places, complete and of themselves.

Well, so far. (I’m kidding!) Or am I? (No, I am!)

I think I should add, having described the convoluted familial relationships between so many of these stories and their ‘parent’ novel cycles; as firstborn children, as step-children, as foster children taken in at a later date, as children conceived to fill empty spaces… I feel I should point out that you don’t need to know anything about any of that, or anything about any of the novels either. The novels are there if you feel inspired to learn more or read further, and I’ll be glad if you do. But each story stands on its own, with a beginning, a middle and an ending. If you don’t know my other work, you might miss a few nuances, but you won’t get confused. Indeed, even if they are, or have become, pieces of much larger stories, they are nevertheless a perfectly good place to start.

For, in so many cases, they are where I started, and where those bigger stories first began.

Dan Abnett

Maidstone, June 2019

A GHOST RETURN

LOCATION: FORMAL PRIME, SABBAT WORLDS, 755.M41

They were walking by torchlight, finding their way by the criss-crossing beams of their lamp packs. They were deep underground, so of course it was going to be dark.

Except it seemed unnecessarily, extravagantly dark. Lightless. As though some kind of anti-light, an un-light, had been poured into the gloom to thicken it.

Every few seconds, and to no particular rhythm, the earth shook.

Ibram Gaunt could feel it through his boots. He swapped his lamp pack to his right hand and placed his left palm against the tunnel wall. He felt the rough surface transmit the vibrations. At every subterranean quiver, dirt trickled down from the ceiling or spilled from loose sections of the old, decaying arches.

The men in the advance squad could feel the shaking too, and it was putting them on edge. Gaunt could tell that by the way the beams of their lamps jerked and shifted at every tremble. Gaunt knew someone should say something. That someone was him, a part of his duty.

‘Shelling,’ he said. ‘The Warmaster has focused the artillery divisions on Sangrel Hive. It’s just shelling.’

‘Feels like the world’s moving,’ muttered one of the troopers.

Gaunt tilted his lamp to find the man’s face. Picked out starkly by the bright beam, Trooper Gebbs shielded his eyes at the glare.

‘It’s just shelling,’ Gaunt assured him. ‘Concussion from the shelling.’

Gebbs shrugged.

The ground shook. Pebbles skittered.

‘Why are we here?’ asked another man. Gaunt’s lamp beam moved to identify Trooper Ari Danks.

‘You getting all philosophical now, Ari?’ Gebbs asked with a chuckle made throaty by the dust in the air.

‘I just wondered what the Throne we were supposed to be doing,’ Danks replied. ‘There’s nothing out here. Just these endless, pitch-black bloody ruins…’

‘So you’d rather be hacking your way through Charismites in the hive-stacks, would you?’ asked Trooper Hiskol.

‘At least it wouldn’t be as black as up my–’

‘Enough,’ said Gaunt. He didn’t have to raise his voice, and the troopers didn’t have to turn their beams to see his face and read its expression. They ceased their chatter. Some of them had served long enough to remember when Gaunt had just been ‘the Boy’, Oktar’s cadet, but none of them were about to forget what that young cadet had become. Gaunt was the commissar. He was discipline.

The ground shook again. Gaunt heard a little river of grit spill down the curve of the tunnel wall. He had to admit that Trooper Danks had a point. What were they doing here?

Gaunt understood the mission parameters clearly enough, and frankly, given the intensity of the hive-war, this advance detail was a blessed relief.

Even so, he’d calculated the journey time that morning, overestimating to allow for detours where the maps didn’t match the navigable reality of the undersink, and they should have reached the destination two hours ago.

Gaunt told the men to wait, and used his lamp to pick his way along the unlit tunnel. The officer in charge of the detail was standing at the next bend, checking his charts.

Major Czytel glanced up at the lamplight bobbing towards him.

‘That you, Gaunt?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘We may have taken a wrong turn back there, Gaunt,’ Czytel said. ‘At that junction where the tunnel split.’

He turned and twitched his beam back the way they had come, partly as an indicator, partly to pick out Gaunt’s face.

Gaunt nodded. He’d presumed as much. Galen Czytel was old school, and most definitely remembered the time when Gaunt had merely been ‘the Boy’. Unlike the rank and file, he had never really got over the idea that Ibram Gaunt was an over-educated, over-privileged scholam boy with too much book-learning and not enough actual soldiering. Czytel liked what he called ‘honest men’. He seemed to be allergic to anybody who had an air of the officer class or entitlement. Czytel had ‘dragged himself’ up through the Hyrkan ranks. He’d freely tell you that, possibly several times in the course of one regimental dinner.

In fact, when Gaunt received his full promotion at Oktar’s deathbed on Gylatus Decimus, Czytel had been one of a group of officers who had formally requested that Gaunt be transferred out of the Hyrkan 8th to another unit. They felt that it would ‘undermine morale’ because the men ‘would not take seriously the authority of an individual who had previously been the regiment’s mascot’.

General Caernavar had thrown the request out quickly. Ironic that it was officers like Czytel, and not the regular troops, who had found such difficulty in accommodating Gaunt’s maturity.

Gaunt, for his part, had learned that it was best not to correct Czytel unless absolutely necessary. An officer’s mistake could be carefully smoothed over by a diligent commissar. An open argument between an officer and a commissar had potentially devastating effects on discipline.

‘We’ll go back,’ Gaunt said. ‘It’s not far. Or we could go on to the next intersection, and move east.’

‘The next intersection?’ asked Czytel.

In the lamplight, Gaunt could see that Czytel was looking at him with a sort of sneer. ‘You haven’t got your chart out. You just remember that, do you?’

‘I reviewed the route this morning,’ Gaunt replied. ‘I don’t have my chart out because–’

He stopped. He had been about to say ‘because you, as officer in charge, were leading the route’.

‘I will double-check,’ Gaunt said. ‘I could be wrong.’ He reached for the data-slate pouch attached to his webbing, but Czytel just handed over his own slate. It looked like impatience, that Czytel didn’t want to wait while Gaunt produced his and woke it up. But it was actually a small concession, one which allowed for the idea that Czytel might have made a navigational error. The major wanted to keep the peace too.

Gaunt reviewed the screen.

‘Yes, you see, sir? The next intersection seems to allow for access to this sinkway here. That should lead us directly to the shrine.’

‘If it is a shrine,’ said Czytel.

Which is the point of us being here, Gaunt thought, but did not say it. He just nodded.

Czytek turned the squad.

‘Pick it up! Let’s go!’ he called into the darkness.

The crusade had finally begun.

The crusade.

The top brass had been talking about it for years, and received wisdom was that the region known as the Sabbat Worlds was past saving. It was a vast territory at the rimward edge of the Segmentum Pacificus, a major Imperial holding that had, in the course of two bloody centuries been overrun by the marauding armies of the Sanguinary Worlds. Some worlds had fallen to the Eternal Archenemy. Others, like Formal Prime, had struggled on, surrounded by the barbarous foe, fighting to maintain their Imperial identities. The Sabbat Worlds deserved the protection of the Throne, their seneschals and governors pleaded for it, but liberation was a monumental task. Few thought that High Command would ever sanction the massive expenditure that a crusade war would require.

Until Slaydo. Lord Militant Slaydo was a persuasive beast, and with the victories of the Khulan Wars on his honour roll, he had been declared Warmaster and allowed to prosecute the Sabbat Worlds Crusade.

It was the biggest Imperial mobilisation in the segmentum for three centuries. The Departmento Tacticae Imperialis estimated it would take a century to successfully complete the campaign.

Ibram Gaunt had no real interest in looking that far ahead. The fighting to retake Formal Prime’s ancient and crumbling hives had been some of the most brutal and intense he’d experienced, and his career with the Hyrkans had not been lacking in bloodshed. Eight years since he’d joined the Imperial Guard as a Commissariat cadet, and he’d seen plenty of action, but nothing like this.

Sangrel Hive, the world’s most massive hab centre, was the stronghold of an enemy ‘magister’ or warlord, a monster called Shebol Red-Hand. His cult followers, the Charismites, held their ground with a zealous rage that was quite intimidating. The previous week, Gaunt had seen more men die in one hour than he thought possible.

So this, this lamplight detour mission into the rambling, pitch-black undersinks seventy kilometres beyond the recognised limits of Sangrel Hive, this could be seen as something of a perk. It got a squad of men out of the line for a few days. It had the personal sanction of the Warmaster. The surroundings might be dismal – the unnerving darkness, the steady seep of tarry ground-water, the smell of rot and mildew, the vermin, the unsafe sections of tunnel – but the Hyrkan soldiers were out of the front-line action, and there were no screaming waves of spear-wielding Charismites rushing their formation every few minutes.

The ground shook. Dirt trickled. Gaunt noted the agitation of the men once again, the flickering beams. He realised there was a chilly lick of sweat between his own shoulder blades. Sangrel Hive was a long way away. If they could feel the earth-shock of the artillery bombardment at this distance, what kind of hell had the main front turned into?

The assault on Formal Prime was part of Operation Redrake, the Warmaster’s opening move. Named after the famous predatory serpent, Redrake was intended to be a lightning strike against multiple targets: four significant worlds at the trailing edge of the Sabbat group: Formal Prime, Long Halent, Onscard and Indrid. Slaydo had chosen to lead the Formal Prime assault personally. It was the keystone world.

If Redrake failed, then the crusade was as good as botched before it had even got going. The High Lords of Terra would recall Slaydo. Tactics would be reconsidered. The Sabbat Worlds might be left to rot for another thousand years. Another ten thousand.

Gaunt tried not to think about it. He was an ambitious young man. He had achieved his status in the Hyrkans through sheer hard work and perseverance. He had welcomed the possibility of a major new campaign, because it was an opportunity for an ambitious young man to prove himself and make a name.

The reality was bitter and exhausting. War was not a glorious thing, no matter what memories or reputations resulted from it. War was about suffering and loss, about struggle and sacrifice. It was about blood. Just a few weeks into the opening engagements of the conflict, Ibram Gaunt no longer thought about it in terms of proving himself, or building a reputation.

He had realised that the Sabbat Worlds Crusade was something he was going to have to endure. It was something a man simply had to survive.

Gaunt wondered what kind of strength that feat was going to require. He wasn’t sure he had it. He wasn’t sure he’d ever had it. He was just an over-educated, over-privileged scholam boy with too much book-learning and–

The ground shook.

‘Here,’ said Gaunt. ‘Sir?’

Czytel turned. Gaunt shone his lamp down a side passage that was partly obscured by architectural debris.

‘This is the junction?’ the major asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Gaunt.

Czytel shrugged, and clambered through. The men followed, lasguns across their chests. Gaunt wanted to assign them a covering pattern, to send some men ahead to recon. However, the Hyrkans – excellent, well-drilled battlefield soldiers though they were – generally lacked an aptitude for scouting and recon.

Besides, it was not Gaunt’s place to issue commands. That was the officer’s job. Gaunt was merely the commissar.

The sinkway ran for about eighty metres, then opened out into a series of large, irregular caverns. It was part of the old arcology that had once formed the massive underhive realm of Sangrel, when the hive had been in its prime. Using his lamp, Gaunt could see rusted threads of technological out-ports and power cables embedded in the crumbling walls, and the remains of cross-arch roof supports and rockcrete pillaring. But the space was old, and had not been maintained at all in the century or more since the hive had shrunk and its outer quarters had been abandoned.

Like the undersink they had trekked through, it was derelict. The ceiling had collapsed in places, littering the ground with rubble and twisted metal rebar. Pools of oily water had accumulated in the darkness. Gaunt could hear the scratch of vermin. He could see the partial remains of an old, tiled floor: the relic of grander days.

There was light ahead. It seemed strange, out of place. Glow-globes and lumen units had been strung from the exposed girders or threaded up on wire supports to hook pins that had been power-sunk into the rock. They could hear the low, background throb of a generator.

Gaunt sniffed. He could smell rock dust, the fine dry powder kicked out by an excavator’s drill.

Czytel flashed a few gestures, and the advance sharpened up. Lasrifles swung up ready, covering style, as the men fanned out and prowled forward. Zennet, the squad’s sniper, unsleeved his long-las and popped the cover on the scope. He and Breccia, the squad’s sweeper, had been lugging the charge panniers, so Zennet took up a spot nearby, allowing him to both survey the area and stay close enough to guard the payload. Breccia began to unpack and assemble his sweeper broom. His lascarbine lay ready on the ground beside him.

Czytel had drawn his laspistol. With his left hand, he flashed some more fingers, indicating numbers and groupings. The advance scurried forward, switching off their lamp packs and adjusting their eyes to the light of the strung lumens.

Gaunt took out his bolt pistol. It felt far too heavy.

Danks and Hiskol were beside him. Gaunt nodded, and they moved ahead into the lit cavern.

Right in front of them was a woman in work overalls, carrying a tray of pot shards.

She saw them and yelped, dropping the tray as though it was red-hot. The contents smashed on the ancient tiles.

‘Calm. Calm!’ Gaunt told her. He reached for her and pulled her down into cover. ‘Don’t shout,’ he said firmly.

‘You’re Guard?’ she asked, breathless, looking up at him.

‘Yes.’

‘The Guard detail we sent for?’

‘Yes. You’re with the dig team?’

She nodded.

‘You scared the living shit out of me,’ she said.

‘Kallie? Kallie? Are you all right?’

A man’s voice echoed through the cavern. He appeared at the far end, bracing an autorifle.

‘Kallie? I heard you cry out. Kallie?’

‘Put it down,’ Danks told him, aiming his lasrifle from the cheek.

‘Do as he says,’ Hiskol emphasised, closing from the other side, lasrifle aimed, one eye closed.

‘Throne!’ the man said, and lowered his rifle to the floor, terrified.

‘Don’t let them hurt him!’ the woman told Gaunt.

Gaunt rose.

‘Stand down,’ he said. He approached the man, who was on his knees. Danks had kicked the autorifle away.

‘Imperial Guard,’ Gaunt said. ‘Hyrkan Eighth. Are you a member of the survey team?’

‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘Yes.’

‘We came in response to your message,’ Gaunt said. ‘I’ll need to see some identification.’

The man immediately reached for his pocket. Gaunt’s aim with the bolt pistol was unwavering.

‘Do it gently,’ he advised.

The man produced an ident slate and proffered it to Gaunt.

‘Wal Desruisseaux,’ he said. ‘Survey Advance. You scared me.’

‘Yeah, we’re supposed to do that,’ said Danks, his aim still steady.

Gaunt suppressed a smile. He studied the slate.

‘This survey was undertaken with the authority of the Warmaster,’ Desruisseaux said. ‘His personal authority–’

‘I understand,’ said Gaunt.

‘No, he really–’

Gaunt looked at the kneeling archaeologist.

‘I understand, sir. Warmaster Slaydo is particularly concerned that the crusade recovers, authenticates and preserves all traces of the Saint Beati Sabbat, especially her votive shrines. It is an underlying standing order. It explains why so many archaeological and survey teams have been allowed prominence in the vanguard. It explains your presence here, and why we have responded so directly to your call for help. Believe me, I understand sir.’

He tossed the slate back to the archaeologist. Desruisseaux caught it and got to his feet.

‘Are you the officer in charge of–’ Desruisseaux began.

‘Throne, no,’ replied Gaunt. ‘You’ll meet him shortly. How many of you are there?’

‘Eight,’ said the archaeologist.

‘Get them to come out right now. Into the open. My men are tight on their triggers. Let’s not have an incident.’

‘I thought you said they weren’t your men?’ said Desruisseaux.

‘Get them out front,’ said Gaunt.

They herded the eight archaeologists into the globe-lit inner cavern space. Czytel’s squad surrounded them and kept watch.

Desruisseaux was in charge. The girl that Gaunt had grabbed, the survey team’s second, was his wife.

‘Explain what you have found,’ Czytel said, lighting a lho-stick. ‘Come on, now, professor, we’ve come a long way through the dark.’

Desruisseaux glowered at him.

‘So have we, sir,’ he replied.

‘We’ve spent our lives documenting and determining the history of the Sabbat Beati,’ said Kallie. ‘This crusade provides us with an unparalleled opportunity to physically investigate her–’

Czytel blew a raspberry.

‘You’re an encumbrance is what you are. Throne-damned academics, worming away where war is happening. We’re dying, don’t you know, a Throne-awful lot as it is, without having to risk our lives protecting the likes of you.’

‘The Beati–’ Desruisseaux began.

‘Shut it,’ said Czytel.

‘But this shrine–’ the woman said.

‘What have you found?’ asked Gaunt.

It was a huge rockcrete plug, filling what might have once been the mouth of a tunnel or a cavern in the rock. The walls around were covered in votive offerings and the calcified drip of wax from a million candles. Though this undersink had been deserted for over a century, people had continued to come here and place offerings at the wall. This was sacred ground.

And it shook. The distant artillery bombardment made the cavern throb.

‘This is your shrine?’ asked Czytel.

‘Sir, yes. It is obviously so,’ Desruisseaux replied. ‘See the layers of votive wax here, and the number of offerings. Even in modern times, during the cruel reign of Shebol, hivers have flocked here through the dark to make observance.’

‘I don’t really know what I’m looking at,’ Czytel said, stepping back and frowning.

‘As I understand it,’ said Gaunt, ‘the shrine lies in the cavern beyond. This rockcrete plug is sealing the entrance.’

‘Exactly,’ said Kallie. ‘So, I take it you’ve brought the explosives?’

Breccia and Zennet had been carrying the charge panniers. Cold-packed fyceline gel in ten-mil cases. Enough to bring down a curtain wall.

‘Drill them in,’ Czytel ordered.

Breccia nodded and hurried to oblige.

‘Sir,’ said Gaunt, taking him to one side, ‘is that wise? We have no idea what we’re–’

Czytel turned to look at him.

‘Gaunt, they’ve called us in to blow up that rockcrete plug. Behind it, most probably, is a shrine to the Beati. If there is, the Warmaster will praise us. If there isn’t, then he will approve our efforts to confirm or deny. Whichever way it turns out, we are going to blow that plug out.’

Gaunt stepped back and took a moment to look at the cavern. The idea of revealing a genuine shrine to the saint thrilled him, but there was something unnerving about the tilt and balance of the light in the space, something that gave him pause.

‘There was some inscription here,’ Gaunt said.

‘Yes,’ said Kallie, following him along the wall beside the plug. ‘It collapsed. It crumbled.’

Nearby, Breccia was drilling charge holes into the plug. He was fitting the explosives into position a stick at a time. Gaunt knew there was about an hour before they’d have to withdraw to a safe distance. Breccia was good at his job.

He reached down into the stone litter at the foot of the wall and picked up a shard on which there was a scrap of inscribed script.

‘You never thought to piece this inscription together?’ he asked.

‘There’s been too much work to do,’ she replied. ‘Why?’

‘It looks significant,’ Gaunt said. ‘And it looks as if it’s been cut away deliberately. As if the surface had been chipped or blasted away.’

‘No, it just collapsed. It crumbled,’ she insisted. ‘It was very old.’

‘Exactly. But you didn’t think it was an imperative to reconstruct it?’

She looked at him.

‘You’re a soldier. What does it matter?’

‘I’m an over-educated, over-privileged scholam boy,’ Gaunt replied. ‘That’s why.’

Gaunt drew Czytel aside quietly and told him he thought they should stop placing the charges.

‘Stop?’ Czytel frowned.

‘I believe we need to know more about this site, major. We–’

‘For Throne’s sake, Gaunt,’ Czytel began. ‘That’s why we’re going to blow it open. To find out. To prove it is a shrine. This is a fool’s errand and a waste of time. I want it resolved one way or another.’

‘I have a gut feeling that detonating the charges would be a bad idea, sir,’ said Gaunt.

Czytel sniffed.

Gaunt’s gut feelings were all too real and all too unreliable. He’d almost been split in two by Dercius’s chainsword two years earlier. The sight of the scar across his belly made even veterans shiver.

Czytel looked at the young commissar.

‘We’re going to blow this open, Gaunt,’ he said. ‘We’re going to find this shrine, and we’re going to go back to the line and report a duty completed. The Warmaster will smile upon us, and we will all be warmed by that smile.’

Gaunt wanted to speak, but he hesitated.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

The ground shook.

Breccia was working diligently. Gaunt watched for a while, then wandered along the outer wall of the alleged shrine. To either side of the rockcrete plug, the tunnel walls were thick with wax from the candles pilgrims had brought to light. The wax had set around old, dry flowers, coins, medals and other votive offerings fixed to the wall. Though they had been on site for a good while, the survey team had made no attempt to clear the wax and examine the wall. Gaunt was still puzzled by their disinclination to recover the inscription. The only real effort they seemed to have made was in futile drilling to unseal the plug.

The ground shook.

‘Vedic?’ Gaunt called. The squad’s flame trooper hurried over from where he been waiting, chatting to fellow members of the advance.

‘Sir?’

‘Get a low heat on this section of wax,’ Gaunt told him.

Vedic frowned, but made no comment. He tightened the flamer’s light and washed a little fire over the wall. Old wax bubbled and streamed. Flowers crisped. Coins, loosened and heated, dropped onto the ground.

Gaunt had been hoping for more inscriptions, inscriptions that had been covered up by the wax. But the exposed wall was bare. The only inscription around the shrine entrance had been the one that had mysteriously crumbled.

He noticed that Breccia had stopped work.

‘What’s the matter?’ Gaunt asked, crossing to him before Czytel noticed. He walked up the stone ramp to where Breccia stood by the plug.

‘Something odd,’ Breccia said, looking a little worried. He didn’t want the commissar to think he was slacking.

He’d been using his sweeper unit to scan the plug and choose the best places to drill his charge holes.

‘When I got closer to this side,’ Breccia told Gaunt, ‘I started to get a ghost return. It’s not coming from the plug, but it’s strong. I’d say a lump of metal or something, buried in the wall this side of the plug.’

‘How deep?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Not deep at all.’

‘How big?’

‘The size of a munitions crate perhaps?’

‘What was the survey team doing if they didn’t detect this?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Beg your pardon, sir?’ asked Breccia.

‘Nothing,’ Gaunt said. ‘Keep placing the charges, or Czytel will get grumpy. Leave this with me.’

Gaunt unfastened his entrenching tool from his pack, locked the folding blade in place and started to dig away at the wall. It wasn’t as tough as rockcrete, but it took some effort to chip the surface away.

‘What the Throne are you doing?’ Desruisseaux called out.

‘Something you should have done,’ Gaunt replied. He nodded to the men to keep Desruisseaux and his team back. Stone chips and dust began to spatter out of the hole he was making.

‘Gaunt?’ Czytel asked, approaching.

‘One moment.’

‘Gaunt, in the name of the Throne–’

‘Just give me one moment, major,’ Gaunt said more firmly, working hard and not looking at the other officer.

‘I’m not in the mood for this, Gaunt,’ Czytel growled.

‘Just wait!’ Gaunt snapped. He’d made a hole, and exposed what appeared to be a small cavity or sealed alcove. He cut some more away, grabbed his lamp, and peered inside.

‘Throne!’ he gasped.

‘What is it?’ Czytel asked, crowding in behind him. ‘What can you see?’

Gaunt reached in with both hands and gently, reverently, lifted out the object inside the cavity.

It was old, covered in dust. It had evidently been damaged.

It was a helmet from a suit of Adeptus Astartes armour.

‘Glory!’ said Czytel.

Gaunt set it down, and wiped some of the dust away.

‘Iron Snakes,’ Gaunt said.

‘How do you know?’ asked Czytel.

‘I studied at scholam,’ Gaunt said. ‘The Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes were a particular draw for me. This emblem is of the Iron Snakes of Ithaka.’

‘Why was it buried in the wall?’ asked Breccia.

Czytel looked at Gaunt.

‘The Adeptus Astartes would only leave something this precious here if the place were significant,’ Gaunt said.

‘Exactly. A shrine,’ replied Czytel.

‘Or a warning,’ said Gaunt. He looked over at the vox officer.

‘Transmit to Assault Command,’ he said. ‘My security code. Ask them for instruction. Tell them I want to talk to someone in Tactical. Someone with archive access. Tell them we will wait and hold position here until the bombardment is over, if necessary.’

‘Gaunt!’ Czytel barked.

Gaunt turned to look at the advance’s commanding officer. He couldn’t remember ever seeing the major this angry before.

Czytel beckoned Gaunt over to him, away from the men.

‘Throne damn you, Gaunt,’ Czytel hissed, as soon as Gaunt was close enough. ‘I’ve had enough of this. You’re out of line. I’ll be speaking to the general about your performance. You don’t give orders. You do not have command here. You have gravely overstepped your remit, and–’

‘Then start giving some orders that make sense,’ Gaunt replied, his voice equally low. ‘With respect, sir, you seem to be ignoring basic evidence. There are questions here, too many questions. They should be resolved before we continue.’

‘Oh, such as?’

Gaunt hesitated. He thought of the serpent symbol etched on the helm, and how he had immediately connected it to the snake the operation was named after. Foolish. Such connections could be made wherever you looked in the galaxy. They meant nothing. Just another example of his oh-so-unreliable gut instinct. Except it didn’t feel unreliable.

He couldn’t explain it. He knew Czytel would ignore him if he tried, but he also remembered what Oktar had taught him: ‘In war, Ibram, the instincts that really count are the ones that feel so strong and sharp, you can’t put them into words.’

‘I think this is a mistake,’ he said.

‘What are you saying, Gaunt?’

‘I’m saying… your command decisions are questionable right now. You may disparage my education, sir, but I’ve always admired your inherent wit and intelligence, neither of which you seem to be employing at the moment. I’m asking for good judgement.’

Czytel’s face flushed red in the cheeks and jowls. He began, in a no longer suppressed tone, to tell Gaunt exactly what he thought of him. Gaunt let it come. He stepped back, not even listening. His mind was settled. He began rehearsing in his mind the precise wording of Commissariat Article 297. By the authority of my rank, and by the terms agreed in Article 297 of the code, I have to inform you your actions in command have been found unsound, and therefore you are hereby removed from command until further notice.

As a commissar, Gaunt had never had to resort to command level censure before. It was a serious step. As soon as Czytel stopped ranting, he would look him square in the eye and recite those words.

He hoped the evidence would uphold such a drastic action. If it didn’t, it would be the end of Gaunt’s career.

‘Sir!’

They both looked around. The vox-officer had approached them. He looked very uncomfortable.

‘Sir, I sent your message, as instructed,’ he said. ‘I told them quite specifically we would wait until the bombardment had stopped if necessary.’

‘And?’ asked Gaunt.

‘The bombardment ended about three hours ago, sir,’ said the vox-man.

No one spoke. Gaunt looked at Czytel, and saw a new emotion crossing the major’s face. The ground shook, and a little patter of dirt spilled down from the tunnel wall.

Gaunt turned, got back up on the ramp, and walked to the rockcrete plug. He took off his glove and pressed his hand against the plug’s outer surface.

He felt the vibration. He felt something heaving and shaking deep underground, behind the massive plug. Something trying to get out.

He looked back at Czytel.

‘We stop,’ he said. ‘Right now.’

There was a sudden blast of gunfire from behind them.

Everyone scattered, desperate for cover. Las-rounds zipped through the chamber. Gaunt ducked behind a support beam, and saw that Wal Desruisseaux had snatched a lasrifle from Trooper Gebbs and opened fire. Gebbs was dead. Another two men had been dropped, dead or badly hit. Blood decorated the ancient tiled floor.

Desruisseaux was retreating back up the cavern, firing from the hip on auto. In the confined space, it was enough to keep everybody ducking.

‘Get him! Shoot him!’ Czytel yelled, then grunted as a las-round hit his left elbow and spun him onto the ground. Head down, Gaunt dashed across the space to the major’s side.

‘I’m all right! I’m all right!’ Czytel growled, clutching his arm. ‘Just get the bastard!’

Gaunt nodded. He had already drawn his bolt pistol. He started yelling orders to the men pinned around him.

Desruisseaux had reached decent cover in the rear part of the chamber. He had excellent angles on any assault that came at him. That smacked of military training. It would be suicide to move until the maniac had run out of ammunition.

Gaunt realised they didn’t have that long. Desruisseaux was concentrating his fire on the area of the plug and the ramp. He was trying to hit the panniers of charges that Breccia had left there.

He was trying to set them off.

Gaunt winced as a las-round banged off the edge of one of the steel containers. The gel charges could take quite a lot of rough treatment before they’d detonate, but a square-on hit from a las-bolt was not a healthy idea.

‘Zennet!’ Gaunt yelled. The squad’s marksman was in cover on the other side of the chamber. He had lined up behind a pile of stone blocks, his long-las cradled. He had no clear angle.

‘I’m going to try to buy you one clean opening,’ Gaunt yelled over the gunfire. ‘Don’t waste it!’

Zennet nodded, and took aim.

Gaunt took a deep breath and then popped up fast, firing his bolt pistol in a two-handed grip. The bolt pistol was a powerful piece. Neither it, nor any of the other weapons carried by the advance, had enough penetrative power to get through the cover Desruisseaux was using, but the bolt pistol’s mass-reactive rounds exploded on impact. Unlike the las-fire that Czytel’s men had been able to throw at Desruisseaux, which had chipped and dented and sparked off his cover, the bolt-round produced a withering cluster of explosions that sent debris spitting and flying in all directions.

It was enough to make Desruisseaux start and react. He moved sideways, towards the cover of a nearby pillar.

He was open for a second.

Zennet took the shot and the long-las howled.

They looked at the body. Gaunt tore open the front of Desruisseaux’s worksuit, and they saw the old tattoo on his chest. It wasn’t something you’d want to look at for long.

‘A cultist,’ murmured Czytel. He was looking on as Danks bandaged his elbow.

‘A Charismite, I suspect,’ said Gaunt. He got up. ‘Check the other members of the survey team,’ he told Hiskol. ‘Have them strip down and check them for marks. He might have been working alone, infiltrating a genuine survey team, but I doubt it.’

Hiskol nodded.

‘So,’ mused Czytel, ‘the Ruinous Powers wanted us to do their dirty work for them.’

‘There’s something behind that plug,’ said Gaunt. ‘Something they wanted to let out. No doubt it would have caused great disruption to the invasion of Formal Prime. Maybe stopped the whole crusade in its tracks.’

He glanced back at the plug.

‘This cult evidently didn’t have access to the explosives they needed, so they bluffed us into doing it.’

‘What do you suggest we report?’ Czytel asked.

‘That we found a shrine. It just wasn’t one of ours.’

Gaunt paused.

‘Although, it was. The Iron Snakes closed this off a long time ago, and left a warning. I think the offerings here were offerings of respect to them and their efforts, not to whatever lies behind that plug. That’s our shrine, the wall outside. The years of devotion.’

Gaunt holstered his bolt pistol.

‘We inform the Inquisition and let them deal with it. The area will probably be interdicted. Some things are better left buried. For the good of the Imperium.’

He looked at the battered helm.

‘Though we should see if we can have this sent back to Ithaka. With honours.’

The ground shook.

‘Gaunt?’ said Czytel quietly. ‘What about… about our altercation? I want to–’

Gaunt shook his head.

‘It was a difficult situation. We both did what we thought best. My report will say so.’

‘But–’

‘For the good of the Imperium, remember?’ said Gaunt. ‘For the Hyrkan regiment, at least. Some things are better left buried.’

The ground shook again.

‘I think we should pull back from this area,’ said Czytel.

Gaunt nodded.

‘Look, I appreciate your attitude, Gaunt,’ Czytel said. ‘I showed you disrespect and I’m sorry. I think you’ve got a fine career ahead of you, no thanks to old bastards like me. Maybe one day you’ll end up serving alongside a major who’ll show you the proper respect, eh?’

Czytel tried to make a jolly laugh.

‘I’m sure I will, sir,’ said Ibram Gaunt.

OF THEIR LIVES IN THE
RUINS OF THEIR CITIES

It feels like the afterlife, and none of them are entirely convinced that it isn’t.

They have pitched up in a cold and rain-lashed stretch of lowland country, on the morning after somebody else’s triumph, with a bunch of half-arsed orders, a dislocating sense that the war is elsewhere and carrying on without them, and very little unit cohesion. They have a couple of actions under their belts, just enough to lift their chins, but nothing like enough to bind them together or take the deeper pain away and, besides, other men have collected the medals. They’re out in the middle of nowhere, marching further and further away from anything that matters any more, because nothing matters any more.

They are just barely the Tanith First and Only. They are not Gaunt’s Ghosts.

They are never going to be Gaunt’s Ghosts.

Silent lightning strobes in the distance. His back turned towards it and the rain, the young Tanith infantryman watches Ibram Gaunt at work from the entrance of the war tent. The colonel-commissar is seated at the far end of a long table around which, an hour earlier, two dozen Guard officers and adjutants were gathered for a briefing. Now Gaunt is alone.

The infantryman has been allowed to stand at ease, but he is on call. He has been selected to act as runner for the day. It’s his job to attend the commander, to pick up any notes or message satchels at a moment’s notice, and deliver them as per orders. Foot couriers are necessary because the vox is down. It’s been down a lot, this past week. It’d been patchy and unreliable around Voltis City. Out in the lowlands, it’s useless, like audio soup. You can hear voices, now and then. Someone said maybe the distant, soundless lightning is to blame.

Munitorum-issue chem lamps, those tin-plate models that unscrew and then snap out for ignition, have been strung along the roof line, and there is a decent rechargeable glow-globe on the table beside Gaunt’s elbow. The lamps along the roof line are swaying and rocking in the wind that’s finding its way into the long tent. The lamps add a golden warmth to the tent’s shadowy interior, a marked contrast to the raw, wet blow driving up the valley outside. There is rain in the air, sticky clay underfoot, a whitewashed sky overhead, and a line of dirty hills in the middle distance that look like a lip of rock that someone has scraped their boots against. Somewhere beyond the hills, the corpse of a city lies in a shallow grave.

Gaunt is studying reports that have been printed out on paper flimsies. He has weighed them down on the surface of the folding table with cartons of bolter-rounds so they won’t blow away. The wind is really getting in under the tent’s skirt. He’s writing careful notes with a stylus. The infantryman can only imagine the importance of those jottings. Tactical formulations, perhaps? Attack orders?

Gaunt is not well liked, but the infantryman finds him interesting. Watching him work at least takes the infantryman’s mind off the fact that he’s standing in the mouth of a tent with his arse out in the rain.

No indeed, Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt is not well liked. A reputation for genocide will do that to a man’s character. He is intriguing, though. For a career soldier, he seems surprisingly reflective, a man of thought not action. There is a promise of wisdom in his narrow features. The infantryman wonders if this was a mistake of ethnicity, a misreading brought about by cultural differences. Gaunt and the infantryman were born on opposite sides of the sector.

The infantryman finds it amusing to imagine Gaunt grown very elderly. Then he might look, the infantryman thinks, like one of those wizened old savants, the kind that know everything about fething everything.

However, the infantryman also has good reason to predict that Gaunt will never live long enough to grow old. Gaunt’s profession mitigates against it, as does the cosmos he has been born into, and the specific nature of his situation.

If the Archenemy of Mankind does not kill Ibram Gaunt, the infantryman thinks, then Gaunt’s own men will do the job.

A better tent.

Gaunt writes the words at the top of his list. He knows he’ll have to look up the correct Munitorum code number, though he thinks it’s 1NX1G1xA. Sym will know and–

Sym would have known, but Sym is dead. Gaunt exhales. He really has to train himself to stop doing that. Sym had been his adjutant and Gaunt had come to rely on him; it still seems perfectly normal to turn and expect to find Sym there, waiting, ready and resourceful. Sym had known how to procure a dress coat in the middle of the night, or a pot of collar starch, or a bottle of decent amasec, or a copy of the embarkation transcripts before they were published. He’d have known the Munitorum serial code for a tent/temperate winter. The structure Gaunt is sitting in is not a tent/temperate winter. It’s an old tropical shelter left over from another theatre. It’s waxed against rain, but there are canvas vents low down along the base hem designed to keep air circulating on balmy, humid days. This particular part of Voltemand seldom sees balmy humid days. The east wind, its cheeks full of rain, is pushing the vents open and invading the tent like a polar gale.

Under A better tent he writes: A portable heater.

He hardly cares for his own comfort, but he’d noted the officers and their junior aides around the table that morning, backs hunched, moods foul, teeth gritted against the cold, every single one of them in a hurry to get the meeting over so they could head back to their billets and their own camp stoves.

Men who are uncomfortable and in a hurry do not make good decisions. They rush things. They are not thorough. They often make general noises of consent just to get briefings over with, and that morning they’d all done it: the Tanith officers, the Ketzok tankers, the Litus B.R.U., all of them.

Gaunt knows it’s all payback, though. The whole situation is payback. He is being punished for making that Blueblood general look like an idiot, even though Gaunt had had the moral high ground. He had been avenging Tanith blood, because there isn’t enough of that left for anyone to go around wasting it.

He thinks about the letter in his pocket, and then lets the thought go again.

When he’d been assigned to the Tanith, Gaunt had relished the prospect as it was presented on paper: a first founding from a small, agrarian world that was impeccable in its upkeep of tithes and devotions. Tanith had no real black marks in the Administratum’s eyes, and no longstanding martial traditions to get tangled up in. There had been the opportunity to build something worthwhile, three regiments of light infantry to begin with, though Gaunt’s plans had been significantly more ambitious than that: a major infantry force, fast and mobile, well-drilled and disciplined. The Munitorum’s recruitment agents reported that the Tanith seemed to have a natural knack for tracking and covert work, and Gaunt had hoped to add that speciality to the regiment’s portfolio. From the moment he’d reviewed the Tanith dossier, Gaunt had begun to see the sense of Slaydo’s deathbed bequest to him.

The plans and dreams have come apart, though. The Archenemy, still stinging from Balhaut, burned worlds in the name of vengeance, and one of those worlds was Tanith. Gaunt got out with his life, just barely, and with him he’d dragged a few of the mustered Tanith men, enough for one regiment. Not enough men to ever be anything more than a minor infantry support force, to die as trench fodder in some Throne-forgotten ocean of mud, but just enough men to hate his living guts for the rest of forever for not letting them die with their planet.

Ibram Gaunt has been trained as a political officer, and he is a very good one, though the promotion Slaydo gave him was designed to spare him from the slow death of a political career. His political talents, however, can usually find a positive expression for even the worst scenarios.

In the cold lowlands of Voltemand, an upbeat interpretation is stubbornly eluding him.

He has stepped away from a glittering career with the Hyrkans, cut his political ties with all the men of status and influence who could assist him or advance him, and ended up in a low-value theatre on a third-tier warfront, in command of a salvaged, broken regiment of unmotivated men who hate him. There is still the letter in his pocket, of course.

He looks down at his list, and writes:

Spin this shit into gold, or get yourself a transfer to somewhere with a desk and a driver.

He looks at this for a minute, and then scratches it out. He puts the stylus down.

‘Trooper,’ he calls to the infantryman in the mouth of the tent. He knows the young man’s name is Caffran. He is generally good with names, and he makes an effort to learn them quickly, but he is also sparing when it comes to using them. Show a common lasman you know his name too early, and it’ll seem like you’re trying far too hard to be his new best friend, especially if you just let his home and family burn.

It’ll seem like you’re weak.

The infantryman snaps to attention sharply.

‘Step inside,’ Gaunt calls, beckoning with two hooked fingers. ‘Is it still raining?’

‘Sir,’ says Caffran non-committally as he approaches the table.

‘I want you to locate Corbec for me. I think he’s touring the west picket.’

‘Sir.’

‘You’ve got that?’

‘Find Colonel Corbec, sir.’

Gaunt nods. He picks up his stylus and folds one of the flimsies in half, ready to write on the back of it. ‘Tell him to ready up three squads and meet me by the north post in thirty minutes. You need me to write that down for you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Three squads, north post, thirty minutes,’ says Gaunt. He writes it down anyway, and then embosses it with his biometric signet ring to transfer his authority code. He hands the note to the trooper. ‘Thirty minutes,’ he repeats. ‘Time for me to get some breakfast. Is the mess tent still cooking?’

‘Sir,’ Caffran replies, this time flavouring it with a tiny, sullen shrug.

Gaunt looks him in the eye for a moment. Caffran manages to return about a second of insolent resentment, and then looks away into space over Gaunt’s shoulder.

‘What was her name?’ Gaunt asks.

‘What?’

‘I took something from every single Tanith man,’ says Gaunt, pushing back his chair and standing up. ‘Apart from the obvious, of course. I was wondering what I’d taken from you in particular. What was her name?’

‘How do you–’

‘A man as young as you, it’s bound to be a girl. And that tattoo indicates a family betrothal.’

‘You know about Tanith marks?’ Caffran can’t hide his surprise.

‘I studied up, trooper. I wanted to know what sort of men my reputation was going to depend upon.’

There is a pause. Rain beats against the outer skin of the tent like drumming fingertips.

‘Laria,’ Caffran says quietly. ‘Her name was Laria.’

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ says Gaunt.

Caffran looks at him again. He sneers slightly. ‘Aren’t you going to tell me it will be all right? Aren’t you going to assure me that I’ll find another girl somewhere?’

‘If it makes you feel better,’ says Gaunt. He sighs and turns back to look at Caffran. ‘It’s unlikely, but I’ll say it if it makes you feel better.’ Gaunt puts on a fake, jaunty smile. ‘Somewhere, somehow, in one of the warzones we march into, you’ll find the girl you’re supposed to be with, and you’ll live happily ever after. There. Better?’

Caffran’s mouth tightens and he mutters something under his breath.

‘If you’re going to call me a bastard, do it out loud,’ says Gaunt. ‘I don’t know why you’re so pissed off. You were walking out on this Laria anyway.’

‘We were betrothed!’

‘You’d signed up for the Imperial Guard, trooper. First Founding. You were never going to see Tanith again. I don’t know why you had the nerve to get hitched to the poor cow in the first place.’

‘Of course I was coming back to her–’

‘You sign up, you leave. Warp transfers, long rotations, tours along the rim. You never go back. You never go home, not once the Guard has you. Years go by, decades. You forget where you came from in the end.’

‘But the recruiting officer said–’

‘He lied to you, trooper. Do you think any bastard would sign up if the recruiters told the truth?’

Caffran sags. ‘He lied?’

‘Yes. But I won’t. That’s the one thing you can count on with me. Now go and get Corbec.’

Caffran snaps off a poor salute, turns and heads out of the tent.

Gaunt sits down again. He begins to collect up the flimsies, and packs away the bolter shell cartons holding them down. He thinks about the letter in his pocket again.

On his list, he writes:

Appoint a new adjutant.

Under that, he writes:

Find a new adjutant.

Finally, under that, he writes:

Start telling a few lies?

He pulls his storm coat on as he leaves the tent, partly to fend off the rain, and partly to cover his jacket. It’s his number one staff-issue field jacket, but it’s become too soiled with clay from the trek out of Voltis City to wear with any dignity. He has a grubby, old number two issue that he keeps in his kit as a spare, but it still has Hyrkan patches on the collar, the shoulders and the cuffs, and that’s embarrassing. Sym would have patched the skull-and-crossed-knives of the Tanith onto it by now. He’d have got out his sewing kit and made sure both of Gaunt’s field uniforms were code perfect, the way he kept the rest of Gaunt’s day-to-day life neat and sewn up tight.

Steamy smoke is rising from the cowled chimneys of the cook-tents, and he can smell the greasy blocks of processed nutrition fibre being fried. His stomach rumbles. He sets off towards the kitchens. Beyond the row of mess tents lies the canvas city of the Tanith position, and to the north-east of that, the batteries of the Ketzok.

Beyond that, the edge of the skyline flicks on and off with the unnervingly quiet lightning, far away, like a malfunctioning lamp filament that refuses to stay lit.

Slab is pretty gruesome stuff. Pressure-treated down from any and all available nutritional sources by the Munitorum, it has no discernible flavour apart from a faint, mucusy aftertaste, and it looks like grey-white putty. In fact, years before at Schola Progenium on Ignatius Cardinal, an acquaintance of Gaunt’s had once kneaded some of it into a form that authentically resembled a brick of plastic explosive, complete with fuses, and then carried out a practical joke on the Master of the Scholam Arsenal that was notable for both the magnificent extent of the disruption it caused, and the stunning severity of the subsequent punishment. Slab, as it’s known to every common Guard lasman, comes canned and it comes freeze-dried, it comes in packets and it comes in boxes, it comes in individual heated tins and it comes in catering blocks. Company cooks slice, dice and mince it, and use it as the bulk base of any meal when local provision sources are unavailable. They flavour it with whatever they have to hand, usually foil sachets of powder with names like groxtail and vegetable (root) and sausage (assorted). Ibram Gaunt has lived on it for a great deal of his adult and sub-adult life. He is so used to the stuff, he actually misses it when it isn’t around.

Men have gathered around the cook tents, huddled against the weather under their camo-cloaks. Gaunt still hasn’t got used to wearing his, even though he’d promised the Tanith colonel he would, as a show of unity. It doesn’t hang right around him, and in the Voltemand wind, it tugs and tangles like a devil.

The Tanith don’t seem to have the same trouble. They half-watch him approach, shrouded, hooded, some supping from mess cans. They watch him approach. There is a shadow in their eyes. They are a wild lot. Beads of rainwater glint in their tangled dark hair, though occasionally the glints are studs or nose rings, piercings in lips or eyebrows. They like their ink, the Tanith, and they wear the complex, traditional patterns of blue and green on their pale skins with pride. Cheeks, throats, forearms and the backs of hands display spirals and loops, leaves and branches, sigils and whorls. They also like their edges. The Tanith weapon is a long knife with a straight, silver blade that has evolved from a hunting tool. They could hunt with it well enough, silently, like phantoms.

Gaunt’s Ghosts. Someone had come up with that within a few days of their first deployment on Blackshard. It had been the sociopath with the long-las, as Gaunt recalled it, a man known to him as ‘Mad’. A more withering and scornful nickname, Gaunt can’t imagine.

Rawne says, ‘Here comes the fether now.’

He takes a sip from his water bottle, which does not contain water, and turns as if to say something to Murt Feygor.

‘But I paid you that back!’ Feygor exclaims, managing to make his voice sound wounded and plaintive, the wronged party.

Rawne makes a retort and steps back, in time to affect a blind collision with Gaunt as he makes his way into the cook tent. The impact is hard enough to rock Gaunt off his feet.

‘Easy there, sir!’ cries Varl, hooking a hand under Gaunt’s armpit to keep him off the ground. He hoists Gaunt up.

‘Thank you,’ Gaunt says.

‘Varl, sir,’ replies the trooper. He grins a big, shit-eating grin. ‘Infantryman first class Ceglan Varl, sir. Wouldn’t want you taking a tumble now, would I, sir? Wouldn’t want you to go falling over and getting yourself all dirty.’

‘I’m sure you wouldn’t, trooper,’ says Gaunt. ‘Carry on.’

He looks back at Rawne and Feygor.

‘That was all me, sir,’ says Feygor, hands up. ‘The major and I were having a little dispute, and I distracted him.’

It sounds convincing. Gaunt doesn’t know much about the trooper called Feygor, but he’s met his type before, a conniving son of a bitch who has been blessed with the silken vocal talent to sell any story to anyone.

Gaunt doesn’t even bother looking at him. He stares at Rawne.

Major Rawne stares right back. His handsome face betrays no emotion whatsoever. Gaunt is a tall man, but Rawne is one of the Tanith he doesn’t tower over, and he only has a few pounds on the major.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Rawne says.

‘Do you, Rawne? Is that an admission of unholy gifts? Should I call for emissaries of the Ordos to examine you?’

‘Ha ha,’ says Rawne in a laugh-less voice. He just says the sounds. ‘Look, that there was a genuine slip, sir. A genuine bump. But we have a little history, sir, you and I, so you’re bound to ascribe more motive to it than that.’

A little history. In the Blackshard deadzones, Rawne had used the opportunity of a quiet moment alone with Gaunt to express his dissatisfaction with Gaunt’s leadership in the strongest possible terms. Gaunt had disarmed him and carried Rawne’s unconscious body clear of the fighting area. It’s hard to say what part of that history yanks Rawne most: the fact that he had failed to murder Gaunt, or the fact that Gaunt had saved him.

‘Wow,’ says Gaunt.

‘What?’

‘You used the word ascribe,’ says Gaunt, and turns to go into the cook tent. Over his shoulder, he calls out, ‘If you say it was a bump, then it was a bump, major. We need to trust each other.’

Gaunt turns and looks back.

‘Starting in about twenty minutes. After breakfast, I’m going to take an advance out to get a look at Kosdorf. You’ll be in charge.’

They watch him pick up a mess tin from the pile and head towards the slab vat where the cook is waiting with a ladle and an apologetic expression.

He sits down with his tin at one of the mess benches. The slab seems to have been refried and then stewed along with something that was either string or mechanically recovered gristle.

‘I don’t know how you can eat that.’

Gaunt looks up. It’s the boy, the civilian boy. The boy sits down facing him.

‘Sit down, if you like,’ Gaunt says.

Milo looks pinched with cold, and he has his arms wrapped around his body.

‘That stuff,’ he says, jutting his chin suspiciously in the direction of Gaunt’s tin. ‘It’s not proper food. I thought Imperial Guardsmen were supposed to get proper food. I thought that was the Compact of Service between the Munitorum and the Guardsmen: three square meals a day.’

‘This is proper food.’

The boy shakes his head. He is only about seventeen, but he’s going to be big when he fills out. There’s a blue fish inked over his right eye.

‘It’s not proper food,’ he insists.

‘Well, you’re not a proper Guardsman, so you’re not entitled to a proper opinion.’

The boy looks hurt. Gaunt doesn’t want to be mean. He owes Brin Milo a great deal. Two people had gone beyond the call to help Ibram Gaunt get off Tanith alive. Sym had been one, and the man had died making the effort. Milo had been the other. The boy was just a servant, a piper appointed by the Elector of Tanith Magna to wait on Gaunt during his stay. Gaunt understands why the boy has stuck with the regiment since the Tanith disaster. The regiment is all Milo has left, all he has left of his people, and he feels he has nowhere else to go, but Gaunt wishes Milo would disappear. There are camps and shelters, there are Munitorum refugee programmes. Civilians didn’t belong at the frontline. They remind troopers of what they’ve left behind or, in the Tanith case, lost forever. They erode morale. Gaunt has suggested several times that Milo might be better off at a camp at Voltis City. He even has enough pull left to get Milo sent to a Schola Progenium or an orphanage for the officer class.

Milo refuses to leave. It’s as if he’s waiting for something to happen, for someone to arrive or something to be revealed. It’s as if he’s waiting for Gaunt to make good on a promise.

‘Did you want something?’ Gaunt asks.

‘I want to come.’

‘Come where?’

‘You’re going to scout the approach to Kosdorf this morning. I want to come.’

Gaunt feels a little flush of anger. ‘Rawne tell you that?’

‘No one told me.’

‘Caffran, then. Damn, I thought Caffran might be trustworthy.’

‘No one told me,’ says Milo. ‘I mean it. I just had a feeling, a feeling you’d go out this morning. This whole taskforce was sent to clear Kosdorf, wasn’t it?’

‘This whole taskforce was intended to be an instrument of petty and spiteful vengeance,’ Gaunt replies.

‘By whom?’ asks Milo.

Gaunt finishes the last of his slab. He drops the fork into the empty tin. Not the best he’d ever had. Throne knows, not the worst, either.

‘That general,’ Gaunt says.

‘General Sturm?’

‘That’s the one,’ Gaunt nods. ‘General Noches Sturm of the 50th Volpone. He was trying to use the Tanith First, and we made him look like a prize scrotum by taking Voltis when his oh-so-mighty Bluebloods couldn’t manage the trick. Throne, he even let us ship back to the transport fleet before deciding we should stay another month or so to help clean up. He’s done it all to inconvenience us. Pack, unpack. Ship to orbit, return to surface. March out into the backwaters of a defeated world to check the ruins of a dead city.’

‘Make you eat crap instead of fresh rations?’ asks Milo, looking at the mess tin.

‘That too, probably,’ says Gaunt.

‘Probably shouldn’t have pissed him off, then,’ says Milo.

‘I really probably shouldn’t,’ Gaunt agrees. ‘Never mind, I heard he’s getting retasked. If the Emperor shows me any providence, I’ll never have to see Sturm again.’

‘He’ll get his just desserts,’ says Milo.

‘What does that mean?’ asks Gaunt.

Milo shrugs. ‘I dunno. It just feels that way to me. People get what they deserve, sooner or later. The universe always gets payback. One day, somebody will stick it to Sturm just like he’s sticking it to you.’

‘Well, that thought’s cheered me up,’ says Gaunt, ‘except the part about getting what you deserve. What does the universe have in store for me, do you suppose, after what happened to Tanith?’

‘You only need to worry about that if you think you did anything wrong,’ says Milo. ‘If your conscience is clear, the universe will know.’

‘You talk to it much?’

‘What?’

‘The universe? You’re on first name terms?’

Milo pulls a face.

‘Things could be worse, anyway,’ Milo says.

‘How?’

‘Well, you’re in charge. You’re in charge of this whole task force.’

‘For my sins.’

Gaunt gets to his feet. A Munitorum skivvy comes by and collects his tin.

‘So?’ asks Milo. ‘Can I come?’

‘No,’ says Gaunt.

He’s walked a few yards from the mess tents when Milo calls out after him. With a resigned weariness, Gaunt turns back to look at the boy.

‘What?’ he asks. ‘I said no.’

‘Take your cape,’ says Milo.

‘What?’

‘Take your cape with you.’

‘Why?’

Milo looks startled for a moment, as if he doesn’t want to give the answer, or it hadn’t occurred to him that anyone would need one. He dithers for a second, and seems to be making something up.

‘Because Colonel Corbec likes it when you wear it,’ he says. ‘He thinks it shows respect.’

Gaunt nods. Good enough.

The advance is waiting for him at the north post, the end marker of the camp area. There are two batteries of Ketzok Hydras there, barrels elevated at a murky sky that occasionally blinks with silent light. Gunners sit dripping under oilskin coats on the lee side of their gun-carriages. Tracks are sunk deep in oozing grey clay. Rain hisses.

‘Nice day for it,’ says Colm Corbec.

‘I arranged the weather especially, colonel,’ replies Gaunt as he walks up. The clay is wretchedly sticky underfoot. It sucks at their boots. The men in the three squads look entirely underwhelmed at the prospect of the morning’s mission. The only ones amongst them who aren’t standing slope-shouldered and dejected are the three scout specialists that Corbec has chosen to round out the advance. One is the leader of the scout unit, Mkoll. Gaunt has already begun to admire Mkoll’s abilities, but he has no read on the man himself. Mkoll is sort of nondescript, of medium build and modest appearance, and seems a little weatherbeaten and older than the rank and file. He chooses to say very little.

Gaunt hasn’t yet learned the names of the two scouts with Mkoll. One, he believes, he has overheard someone refer to as ‘lucky’. The other one, the taller, thinner one, has a silent, faraway look about him that’s oddly menacing.

‘It may just have been me,’ says Corbec, ‘but didn’t we spend an hour or so in the tent this morning agreeing not to do this?’

Gaunt nods.

‘I thought,’ says Corbec, ‘we were to stay put until the Ketzok had been resupplied?’

They were. The purpose of the expedition is to evaluate and secure Kosdorf, Voltemand’s second city, which had been effectively taken out in the early stages of the liberation. Orbit watch reports it as ruined, a city grave, but the emergency government and the Administratum want it locked down. The whole thing is a colossal waste of time. Voltis City, which had been the stronghold for the charismatic but now dead Archenemy demagogue Chanthar, was the key to Voltemand. The Kosdorf securement is the sort of mission that could have been handled by PDF or a third-tier Guard strength.

General Sturm is playing games, of course, getting his own back, and doing it in such a way as to make it look like he is being magnanimous. As his last act before passing control of the Voltemand theatre to a successor, Sturm appointed Gaunt to lead the expedition to Kosdorf, a command of twenty thousand men including his own Tanith, a regiment of Litus Battlefield Regimental Units, and a decent support spread of Ketzok armour.

Everyone, including the Litus and the Ketzok, have seen it for what it is, so they’ve started making heavy going of it, dragging their heels. At this last encampment, supposedly the final staging point before a proper run into Kosdorf, the Ketzok have complained that their ammo trains have fallen behind, and demanded a delay of thirty-six hours until they can be sure of their supplies.

The Ketzok are a decent lot. Despite a bad incident during the Voltis attack, Gaunt has developed a good working relationship with the armoured brigade, but Sturm’s edict has taken the warmth out of it. The Ketzok aren’t being difficult with him, they’re being difficult with the situation.

‘The Ketzok can stay put,’ says Gaunt. ‘There’s no harm getting some exercise though, is there?’

‘I suppose not,’ Corbec agrees.

‘In this muck?’ someone in the ranks calls out from behind him.

‘That’s enough, Larks,’ Corbec says without turning. Corbec is a big fellow, tall and broad, and heavy. He raises a large hand, scoops the heavy crop of slightly greying hair out of his face, and flops it over his scalp before tying it back. Raindrops twinkle like diamonds in his beard. Despite the bullying wind, Gaunt can smell a faint odour of cigars on him.

Gaunt wonders how he’s going to begin to enforce uniform code when the company colonel looks like a matted and tangled old man of the woods.

‘This is just going to be a visit to size the place up,’ says Gaunt, looking at Mkoll. ‘I intend for us to be back before nightfall.’

Mkoll just nods.

‘So what you’re saying is you were getting a little bored sitting in your tent,’ says Corbec.

Gaunt looks at him.

‘That’s all right,’ Corbec smiles. ‘I was getting pretty bored sitting in mine. A walk is nice, isn’t it, lads?’

No one actually answers.

Gaunt walks the line with Corbec at his side, inspecting munition supplies. They’re going to be moving light, but every other man’s got an extra musette bag of clips, and two troopers are carrying boxes of RPGs for the launcher. Nobody makes eye contact with Gaunt as he passes.

Gaunt comes to Caffran in the line.

‘What are you doing here?’ Gaunt asks.

‘Step forward, trooper,’ says Corbec.

‘I thought I was supposed to stay with you all day,’ Caffran replies, stepping forward. ‘I thought those were my orders.’

‘Sir,’ says Corbec.

‘Sir,’ says Caffran.

‘I suppose they are,’ says Gaunt and nods Caffran back into the file. A march in the mud and rain is the least you deserve for talking out of turn, Gaunt thinks, especially to a civilian.

There’s a muttering somewhere. They’re amused by Caffran’s insolence. Gaunt gets the feeling that Corbec doesn’t like it, though Corbec does little to show it. The colonel’s position is difficult. If he reinforces Gaunt’s authority, he risks losing all the respect the men have for him. He risks being despised and resented too.

‘Let’s get moving,’ says Gaunt.

‘Advance company!’ Corbec shouts, holding one hand above his head and rotating it with the index finger upright. ‘Sergeant Blane, if you please!’

‘Yes, sir!’ Blane calls out from the front of the formation. He leads off.

The force begins to move down the track into the rain behind the sergeant. Mkoll and his scouts, moving at a more energetic pace, take point and begin to pull away.

Gaunt waits as the infantrymen file past, their boots glopping in the mire. Not one of them so much as glances at him. They have their heads down.

He jogs to catch up with Corbec. He had hoped that getting out and doing something active might chase away his unhappiness. It isn’t working so far.

He still has that letter in his pocket.

‘Back again?’ asks Dorden, the medicae.

The boy hovers in the doorway of the medical tent like a spectre that needs to be invited in out of the dark. The rain has picked up, and it’s pattering a loud tattoo off the overhead sheets.

‘I don’t feel right,’ says Milo.

Dorden tilts his chair back to upright and takes his feet down off the side of a cot. He folds over the corner of a page to mark his place, and sets his book aside.

‘Come in, Milo,’ he says.

In the back of the long tent behind Dorden, the medicae orderlies are at work checking supplies and cleaning instruments. The morning has brought the usual round of complaints generated by an army on the move: foot problems, gum problems, and gut problems, along with longer term conditions like venereal infections and wounds healing after the Voltis fight. The orderlies are chattering back and forth. Chayker and Foskin are play-fencing with forceps as they gather up instruments for cleaning. Lesp, the other orderly, is bantering with them as he prepares his needles. He’s got a sideline as the company inksman. His work is generally held as the best. The ink stains his fingertips permanent blue-black, the dirtiest-looking fingers Dorden’s ever seen on a medical orderly.

‘How don’t you feel right?’ Dorden asks as Milo comes in. The boy pulls the tent flap shut behind him and shrugs.

‘I just don’t,’ he says. ‘I feel light-headed.’

‘Light-headed? Faint, you mean?’

‘Things seem familiar. Do you know what I mean?’

Dorden shakes his head gently, frowning.

‘Like I’m seeing things again for the first time,’ says the boy.

Dorden points to a folding stool, which Milo sits down on obediently, and reaches for his pressure cuff.

‘You realise this is the third day you’ve come in here saying you don’t feel right?’ asks Dorden.

Milo nods.

‘You know what I think it is?’ asks Dorden.

‘What?’

‘I think you’re hungry,’ says Dorden. ‘I know you hate the ration stuff they cook up. I don’t blame you. It’s swill. But you’ve got to eat, Brin. That’s why you’re light-headed and weak.’

‘It’s not that,’ says Milo.

‘It might be. You don’t like the food.’

‘No, I don’t like the food. I admit it. But it’s not that.’

‘What then?’

Milo stares at him.

‘I’ve got this feeling. I think I had a bad dream. I’ve got this feeling that–’

‘What?’

Milo looks at the ground.

‘Listen to me,’ says Dorden. ‘I know you want to stay with us. This man Gaunt is letting you stay. You know he should have sent you away by now. If you get sick on him, if you get sick by refusing to eat properly, he’ll have the excuse he needs. He’ll be able to tell himself he’s sending you away for your own good. And that’ll be it.’

Milo nods.

‘So let’s do you a favour,’ says Dorden. ‘Let’s go to the mess tent and get you something to eat. Humour me. Eat it. If you still feel you’re not right, well, then we can have another conversation.’

The lightning leads them. The rain persists. They come up over the wet hills and see the city grave.

Kosdorf is a great expanse of ruins, most of it pale, like sugar icing. As they approach it, coming in from the south-east, the slumped and toppled hab blocks remind Gaunt more than anything of great, multi-tiered cakes, fancy and celebratory, that have been shoved over so that all the frosted levels have crashed down and overlapped one another, breaking and cracking, and shedding palls of dust that have become mire in the rain. A shroud of vapour hangs over the city, the foggy aftermath of destruction.

Overhead, black clouds mark the sky like ink on pale skin. Shafts of lightning, painfully bright, shoot down from the clouds into the dripping ruins, straight down, without a sound. The bars underlight the belly of the clouds, and set off brief, white flashes in amongst the ruins where they hit, like flares. Though the lightning strikes crackle with secondary sparks, like capillaries adjoining a main blood vessel, they are remarkably straight.

The regular strobing makes the daylight seem strange and impermanent. Everything is pinched and blue, caught in a twilight.

‘Why can’t we hear it?’ one of the men grumbles.

Gaunt has called a stop on a deep embankment so he can check his chart. Tilting, teetering building shells overhang them. Water gurgles out of them.

‘Because we can’t, Larks,’ Corbec says.

Gaunt looks up from his chart, and sees Larkin, the marksman assigned to the advance. The famous Mad Larkin. Gaunt is still learning names to go with faces, but Larkin has stood out from early on. The man can shoot. He’s also, it seems to Gaunt, one of the least stable individuals ever to pass recruitment screening. Gaunt presumes the former fact had a significant bearing on the latter.

Larkin is a skinny, unhappy-looking soul with a dragon-spiral inked onto his cheek. His long-las rifle is propped over his shoulder in its weather case.

‘Altitude,’ Gaunt says to him.

‘Come again, sir?’ Larkin replies.

Gaunt gestures up at the sky behind the bent, blackened girders of the corpse-buildings above them. Larkin looks where he’s pointing, up into the rain.

‘The electrical discharge is firing from cloud to cloud up there, and it can reach an intensity of four hundred thousand amps. But we can’t hear the thunder, because it’s so high up.’

‘Oh,’ says Larkin. Some of the other men murmur.

‘You think I’d march anyone into a dead zone without getting a full orbital sweep first?’ Gaunt asks.

Larkin looks like he’s going to reply. He looks like he’s about to say something he shouldn’t, something his brain won’t allow his mouth to police.

But he shakes his head instead and smiles.

‘Is that so?’ he says. ‘Too high for us to hear. Well, well.’

They move off down the embankment, and then follow the seam of an old river sluice that hugs the route of a highway into the city. There’s a fast stream running down the bed of the drain, dirty rainwater that’s washed down through the city ruin, blackened with ash, and then is running off. It splashes and froths around their toecaps. Its babbling sounds like voices, muttering.

There’s the noise of the falling rain all around, the sound of dripping. Things creak. Tiles and facings and pieces of roof and guttering hang from shredded bulks, and move as the inclination of gravity or the wind takes them. They squeak like crane hoists, like gibbets. Things fall, and flutter softly or land hard, or skitter and bounce like loose rocks in a ravine.

The scouts vanish ahead of the advance, but Mkoll reappears after half an hour, and describes the route ahead to Corbec. Gaunt stands with them, but there is subtle body language, suggesting that the report is meant for Corbec’s benefit, and Gaunt is merely being allowed to listen in. If things turn bad, Mkoll is trusting Corbec to look after the best interests of the men.

‘Firestorms have swept through this borough,’ he says. ‘There’s not much of anything left. I suggest we swing east.’

Corbec nods.

‘There’s something here,’ Mkoll adds.

‘A friendly something?’ Corbec asks.

Mkoll shrugs.

‘Hard to say. It won’t let us get a look at it. Could be civilian survivors. They would have learned to stay well out of sight.’

‘I would have expected any citizens to flee the city,’ says Gaunt.

Mkoll and Corbec look at him.

‘Flight is not always the solution,’ says Mkoll.

‘Sometimes, you know, people are traumatised,’ says Corbec. ‘They go back to a place, even when they shouldn’t. Even when it’s not safe.’

Mkoll shrugs again.

‘It’s all I’m saying,’ says Corbec.

‘I haven’t seen bodies,’ replies Gaunt. ‘When you consider the size of this place, the population it must have had. In fact, I haven’t seen any bodies.’

Corbec purses his lips thoughtfully.

‘True enough. That is curious.’ Corbec looks at Mkoll for confirmation.

‘I haven’t seen any,’ says Mkoll. ‘But hungry vermin can disintegrate remains inside a week.’

They turn to the east, as per Mkoll’s suggestion, and leave the comparative cover of the rockcrete drainage ditch. Buildings have sagged into each other, or fallen into the street in great splashes of rubble and ejecta. Some habs lean on their neighbours for support. All glass has been broken, and the joists and beams and roofs, robbed of tiles or slates, have been turned into dark, barred windows through which to watch the lightning.

The fire has been very great. It has scorched the paving stones of the streets and squares, and the rain has turned the ash into a black paste that sticks to everything, except the heat-transmuted metals and glass from windows and doors. These molten ingots, now solid again, have been washed clean by the rain and lie scattered like iridescent fish on the tarry ground.

Gaunt has seen towns and cities without survivors before. Before Khulan, before the Crusade even began, he’d been with the Hyrkans on Sorsarah. A town there, he forgets the name, an agri-berg, had been under attack, and the town elders had ordered the entire population to shelter in the precincts of the basilica. In doing so, they had become one target.

When Gaunt had come in with the Hyrkans, whole swathes of the town were untouched, intact, preserved, as though the inhabitants would be back at any moment.

The precincts of the basilica formed a crater half a kilometre across.

They stop to rest at the edge of a broad concourse where the wind of Voltemand, brisk and unfriendly, is absent. The rain is relentless still, but the vapour hangs here, a mist that pools around the dismal ruins and broken walls.

They are drawing closer to the grounding lightning. It leaves a bloody stink in their nostrils, like hot wire, and whenever it hits the streets and ruins nearby, it makes a soft but jarring click, part overpressure, part discharge.

An explosive device of considerable magnitude has struck the corner of the concourse and detonated, unseating all the heavy paving slabs with the rippling force of a major earthquake. Gravity has relaid the slabs after the shockwave, but they have come back down to earth misaligned and overlapping, like the scales of a lizard, rather than the seamless, edge-to-edge fit the city fathers had once commissioned.

Larkin sits down on a tumbled block, takes off one boot, and begins to massage his foot. He complains to the men around him in a loud voice. The core of his complaint seems to be the stiff and unyielding quality of the newly-issued Tanith kit.

‘Foot sore?’ Gaunt asks him.

‘These boots don’t give. We’ve walked too far. My toes hurt.’

‘Get the medicae to treat your foot when we get back. I don’t want any infections.’

Larkin grins up at him.

‘I wouldn’t want to make my foot worse. Maybe you should carry me.’

‘You’ll manage,’ Gaunt tells him.

‘But an infection? That sounds nasty. It can get in your blood. You can die of it.’

‘You’re right,’ Gaunt says. ‘The only way to be properly sure is to amputate the extremity before infection can spread.’

He puts his hand on the pommel of his chainsword.

‘Is that what you want me to do, Larkin?’

‘I’ll be happy to live out me born days without that ever happening, colonel-commissar,’ Larkin chuckles.

‘Get your boot back on.’

Gaunt wanders over to Corbec. The colonel has produced a short, black cigar and clamped it in his mouth, though he hasn’t lit it. He takes another out of his pocket and offers it to Gaunt, perhaps hoping that if Gaunt accepts it, it’ll give him the latitude to break field statutes and light up. Gaunt refuses the offer.

‘Is Larkin taunting me?’ Gaunt asks him quietly.

Corbec shakes his head.

‘He’s nervous,’ Corbec replies. ‘Larks gets spooked very easily, so this is him dealing with that. Trust me. I’ve known him since we were in the Tanith Magna Militia together.’

Gaunt throws a half shrug, looking around.

‘He’s spooked? I’m spooked,’ he says.

Corbec smiles so broadly he takes the cigar out of his mouth.

‘Good to know,’ he says.

‘Maybe we should head back,’ Gaunt says. ‘Push back in tomorrow with some proper armour support.’

‘Best plan you’ve had so far,’ says Corbec, ‘if I may say so.’

The Tanith scout, the tall, thin man with the menacing air, appears suddenly at the top of a ridge of rubble and signals before dropping out of sight.

‘What the hell?’ Gaunt begins to say. He glances around to have the signal explained by Corbec or one of the men.

He is alone on the concourse. The Tanith have vanished.

What the feth is he doing, Caffran wonders? He’s just standing there. He’s just standing there out in the open, when Mkvenner clearly signalled...

He hears a sound like a bundle of sticks being broken, slowly, steadily.

Not sticks, las-shots; the sound echoes around the concourse area. He sees a couple of bolts in the air like luminous birds or lost fragments of lightning.

With a sigh, Caffran launches himself from under the cover of his camo-cloak, and tackles Colonel-Commissar Gaunt to the ground. Further shots fly over them.

‘What are you playing at?’ Caffran snaps. They struggle to find some cover.

‘Where did everyone go?’ Gaunt demands, ducking lower as a zipping las-round scorches the edge of his cap.

‘Into cover, you feth-wipe!’ Caffran replies. ‘Get your cloak over you! Come on!’

The ingrained, starch-stiff commissar inside Gaunt wants to reprimand the infantryman for his language and his disrespect, but tone of address is hardly the point in the heat of a contact. Perhaps afterwards. Perhaps a few words afterwards.

Gaunt fumbles out his camo-cloak, still folded up and rolled over the top of his belt pouch. He realises the Tanith haven’t vanished at all. At the scout’s signal, they have all simply dropped and concealed themselves with their cloaks. They are still all around him. They have simply become part of the landscape.

He, on the other hand, nonplussed for a second, had remained standing; the lone figure of an Imperial Guard commissar against a bleak, empty background.

The behaviour of a novice. A fool. A... what was it? Feth-wipe? Indeed.

Corbec looks over at him, his face framed between the gunsight of his rifle and the fringe of his cape.

‘How many?’ Gaunt hisses.

‘Ven said seven, maybe eight,’ Corbec calls back.

Gaunt pulls out his bolt pistol and racks it.

‘Return fire,’ he orders.

Corbec relays the order, and the advance company begins to shoot. Volleys of las-shots whip across the concourse.

The gunfire coming their way stops.

‘Cease fire!’ Gaunt commands.

He gets up, and scurries forwards over the rubble, keeping low. Corbec calls after him in protest, but nobody shoots at Gaunt. You didn’t have to be a graduate of a fancy military academy, Corbec reflects, to appreciate that was a good sign. He sighs, gets up, and goes after Gaunt. They move forwards together, heads down.

‘Look here,’ says Corbec.

Two bodies lie on the rubble. They are wearing the armoured uniform of the local PDF, caked with black mud. Their cheeks are sunken, as if neither of them have eaten a decent plate of anything in a month.

‘Damn,’ says Gaunt, ‘was that a mistaken exchange? Have we hit some friendlies? These are planetary defence force.’

‘I think you’re right,’ says Corbec.

‘I am right. Look at the insignia.’

‘Poor fething bastards,’ says Corbec. ‘Maybe they’ve been holed up here for so long, they thought we were–’

‘No,’ says Mkoll.

Gaunt hasn’t seen the scout standing there. Even Corbec seems to start slightly, though Gaunt wonders if this is for comic effect. Corbec is unfailingly cheerful.

The chief scout has manifested even more mysteriously than the Tanith had vanished a few minutes ago.

‘There was a group of them,’ he says, ‘a patrol. Mkvenner and I had contact. We challenged them, making the same assumption you just did, that they were PDF. There was no mistake.’

‘What do you mean?’ asks Gaunt.

‘I thought maybe they were scared,’ says Mkoll, ‘scared of everything. Survivors in the rubble, afraid that anything they bumped into might be the Archenemy. But this wasn’t scared.’

‘How do you know?’ asks Gaunt.

‘He knows,’ says Corbec.

‘I’d like him to explain,’ says Gaunt.

‘You know the difference between scared and crazy, sir?’ Mkoll asks him.

‘I think so,’ says Gaunt.

‘These men were crazy. There were speaking in strange tongues. They were ranting. They were using language I’ve never heard before, a language I never much want to hear again.’

‘So you think there are Archenemy strengths here in Kosdorf, and they’re using PDF arms and uniforms?’

Mkoll nods. ‘I heard the tribal forces often use captured Guard kit.’

‘That’s true enough,’ says Gaunt.

‘Where did the others go?’ asks Corbec, looking down at the corpses glumly.

‘They ran when your first couple of volleys brought these two over,’ says Mkoll.

‘Let’s circle up and head back,’ says Corbec.

There’s a sudden noise, a voice, gunfire. One of the other scouts has reappeared. He is hurrying back across the fish-scale slabs of the square towards them, firing off bursts from the hip. A rain of las-fire answers him. It cracks paving stones, pings pebbles, and spits up plumes of muck.

‘Find cover!’ the scout yells as he comes towards them. ‘Find cover!’

They have jammed a stick into the ruins of Kosdorf, and wiggled it around until the nest underneath the city has been thoroughly disturbed.

Hostiles in PDF kit, caked in dirt, looking feral and thin, are assaulting the concourse area through the ruins of an old Ecclesiarchy temple and, to the west of that, the bones of a pauper’s hospital.

They look like ghosts.

They come surging forwards, out of the dripping shadows, through the mist, into the strobing twilight. In their captured kit, they look to Gaunt like war-shocked survivors trying to defend what’s left of their world.

‘Fall back!’ Corbec yells.

‘I don’t want to fight them,’ Gaunt says to him as they run for better cover. ‘Not if they’re our own!’

‘Mkoll was pretty sure they weren’t!’

‘He could have been wrong. These could be our people, come through hell. I don’t want to fight them unless I have to.’

‘I don’t think they’re going to give us a choice!’ Corbec yells back.

The Tanith are returning fire, snapping shots from their corner of the open space. The air fills with a laced crossfire of energy bolts. The mist seems to thicken as the crossfire stirs the air. Gaunt sees a couple of the men in Kosdorfer uniforms crumple and fall.

‘In the name of the Emperor, cease your firing,’ he hollers out across the square. ‘For Throne’s sake, we serve the same master!’

The Kosdorf PDFers shout back. The words are unintelligible, hard to make out over their sustained gunfire.

‘I said in the name of the Emperor, hold your fire,’ Gaunt bellows. ‘Hold your fire. I command you! We’re here to help you!’

A PDFer comes at him from the left, running out of the shadows of the hospital ruins. The man has a hard-round rifle equipped with a sword bayonet. His eyes are swollen in their sockets, and one pupil has blown.

He tries to ram the bayonet into Gaunt’s gut. The blade is rusty, but the thrust is strong and practiced. Gaunt leaps backwards.

‘For the Emperor!’ Gaunt yells.

The man replies with a jabbering stream of obscenity. The words are broken, and have been purloined from an alien language, and he is only able to pronounce the parts of them that fit a human mouth and voicebox. Blood leaks out of his gums and dribbles over his cracked lips.

He lunges again. The tip of the sword bayonet goes through Gaunt’s storm coat and snags the hip pocket of his field jacket underneath.

Gaunt shoots the man in the face with his bolt pistol.

The corpse goes over backwards, hard. Bloody back-spatter over-paints the dirt filming Gaunt’s face and clothes.

‘Fire, fire! Fire at will!’ Gaunt yells. He’s seen enough. ‘Men of Tanith, pick your targets and fire at will!’

Another PDFer charges in at him through an archway, backlit for a second by a pulse of lightning. He fires a shot from his rifle that hits the wall behind Gaunt and adds to the wet haze fuming the air. Gaunt fires back and knocks the man out of the archway, tumbling into two of his brethren.

The Tanith advance has been rotated out of line by the sudden attack, and Gaunt has been pushed to the eastern end of the formation. He has lost sight of Corbec. It is hard to issue any useful commands, because he has little proper overview on which to base command choices.

Gaunt tries to reposition himself. He hugs the shadows, keeping the crumbling pillars to his back. The firefight has lit up the entire concourse. He listens to the echoes, to the significant sound values coming off the Tanith positions. Gaunt can hear the hard clatter of full auto and, in places along the rubble line, see the jumping petals of muzzle flashes. The Tanith are eager, but inexperienced. The lasrifles they have been issued with at the Founding are good, new weapons, fresh-stamped and shipped in from forge worlds. Many of the Tanith recruits will never have had an automatic setting on a weapon before; most will have been used to single shot or even hard-round weapons. Finding themselves in a troop-fight ambush, they are unleashing maximum firepower, which is great for shock and noise but not necessarily the most effective tactic, under any circumstances.

‘Corbec!’ Gaunt yells. ‘Colonel Corbec! Tell the men to select single f–’

He ducks back as his voice draws enemy fire. Plumes of mire and slime spurt up from the slabs he is using as cover. Impacts spit out stinging particles of stone. He tries shouting again, but the concentration of fire gets worse. The vapour billowing off the shot marks gets in his mouth and makes him retch and spit. Two or three of the PDFers have advanced on his position, and are keeping a heavy fire rate sustained. He can half see them through the veiling mist, calmly standing and taking shots at him. He can’t see them well enough to get a decent shot back.

Gaunt scrambles backwards, dropping down about a metre between one rucked level of paving slabs and another, an ugly seismic fracture in the street. Loose shots are whining over his head, smacking into the plaster facade of a reclining guild house and covering it with black pockmarks. He clambers in through a staring window.

A Tanith trooper inside switches aim at him and nearly shoots him.

‘Sacred Feth. Sorry, sir!’ the trooper exclaims.

Gaunt shakes his head.

‘I snuck up on you,’ he replies.

There are four Tanith men in the ground floor of the guild house. They are using the buckled window apertures to lay fire across the concourse from the east. They’d been on the eastern end of the advance force when it turned unexpectedly, and thus have been effectively cut off. Gaunt can’t chastise them. Oddities of terrain and the dynamic flow of a combat situation do that sometimes. Sometimes you just get stuck in a tight corner.

For similar reasons, he’s got stuck there with them.

‘What’s your name?’ he asks the man who’d almost shot him, even though he knows it perfectly well.

‘Domor,’ the man replies.

‘I don’t think we want to spend too much more time in here, do we, Domor?’ Gaunt says. Enemy fire is pattering off the outside walls with increasing fury. It is causing the building to vibrate, and spills of earth, like sand in a time-glass, are sifting down from the bulging roof. There’s a stink of sewage, of broken drains. If enemy fire doesn’t finish them, it will finish the building, which will die on their heads.

‘I’d certainly like to get out of here if I can, sir,’ Domor replies. He has a sharp, intelligent face, with quick eyes that suggest wit and honesty.

‘Well, we’ll see what we can do,’ Gaunt says.

One of the other men groans suddenly.

‘What’s up, Piet?’ Domor calls. ‘You hit?’

The trooper is down at one of the windows, pinking rounds off into the concourse outside.

‘I’m fine,’ he answers, ‘but do you hear that?’

Gaunt and Domor clamber up to the sill alongside him. For a moment, Gaunt can’t hear anything except the snap and whine of las-fire, and the brittle rattle of masonry debris falling from the roof above.

Then he hears it, a deeper noise, a throaty rasp.

‘Someone’s got a burner,’ says the trooper in a depressed tone. ‘Someone out there’s got a burner.’

Domor looks at Gaunt.

‘Gutes is right, isn’t he?’ he asks. ‘That’s a flamer, isn’t it? That’s the noise a flamer makes?’

Gaunt nods.

‘Yes,’ he says.

None of the Munitorum skivvies has the nerve to argue when Feygor helps himself to one of the full pots of caffeine on the mess tent stove.

Feygor carries the pot over to where Rawne is sitting at a mess table with the usual repeat offenders. Meryn, young and eager to impress, has brought a tray of tin cups. Brostin is smoking a lho-stick and flicking his brass igniter open and shut. Raess is cleaning his scope. Caober is putting an edge on his blade. Costin has produced his flask, and is pouring a jigger of sacra into each mug ‘to keep the rain out’.

Feygor dishes out the brew from the pot.

‘Come on, then,’ says Rawne.

Varl grins, and slides the letter out of his inside pocket. He holds it gently by the bottom corners and sniffs it, as though it is a perfumed billet-doux. Then he licks the tip of his right index finger to lift the envelope’s flap.

He starts to read to himself.

‘Oh my!’ he says.

‘What?’ asks Meryn.

‘Listen to this... My darling Ibram, how I long for your strong, manly touch...’ Varl begins, as if reading aloud.

‘Don’t be a feth-head, Varl,’ warns Rawne. ‘What does it actually say?’

‘It’s from somebody called Blenner,’ says Varl, scanning the sheet. ‘It goes on a bit. Umm, I think they knew each other years back. And from the date on this, he’s been carrying it around for a while. This Blenner says he’s writing because he can’t believe that Gaunt got passed over after “all he did at Balhaut”. He’s asking Gaunt if he chose to go with “that bunch of no-hope backwoodsmen”, which I think would be us.’

‘It would,’ says Rawne.

Varl sniffs. ‘Anyway, this charming fellow Blenner says he can’t believe Gaunt would have taken the field promotion willingly. Listen to this, he says, “what was Slaydo thinking? Surely the Old Man had made provision for you to be part of the command structure that succeeded him. Throne’s sake, Ibram! You know he was grooming! How did you let this slight happen to you? Slaydo’s legacy would have protected you for years if you’d let it”.’

Varl looks up at the Tanith men around the table. ‘Wasn’t Slaydo the name of the Warmaster?’ he asks. ‘The big honking bastard commander?’

‘Yup,’ says Feygor.

‘Well, this can’t mean the same Slaydo, can it?’ asks Costin.

‘Of course it can’t,’ says Caober. ‘It must be another Slaydo.’

‘Well, of course,’ says Varl, ‘because otherwise it would mean that the feth-wipe commanding us is a more important feth-wipe than we ever imagined.’

‘It doesn’t mean that,’ says Rawne. ‘Costin’s right. It’s a different Slaydo, or this Blenner doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Go on. What else is there?’

Varl works down the sheet.

‘Blenner finishes by saying that he’s stationed on Hisk with a regiment called the Greygorians. He says he’s got pull with a Lord General called Cybon, and that Cybon’s promised him, that is Gaunt, a staff position. Blenner begs Gaunt to reconsider his “ill-advised” move and get reassigned.’

‘That’s it?’ asks Rawne.

Varl nods.

‘So he’s thinking about ditching us,’ murmurs Rawne.

‘This letter’s old, mind you,’ says Varl.

‘But he kept it,’ says Feygor. ‘It matters to him.’

‘Murt’s right,’ says Rawne. ‘This means his heart’s not in it. We can exert a little pressure, and get rid of this fether without any of us having to face a firing squad.’

‘Having fun?’

They all turn. Dorden is standing nearby, watching them. The boy Milo is behind him, looking pale and nervous.

‘We’re fine, Doc,’ says Feygor. ‘How are you?’

‘Looks for all the world like a meeting of plotters,’ says Dorden. He takes a step forwards and comes in amongst them. He’s twice as old as any of them, like their grandfather. He’s no fighter either. Every one of them is a young man, strong enough to break him and kill him with ease. He pours himself a mug of caffeine from their tray.

Costin makes a hasty but abortive attempt to stop him.

‘There’s a little–’ Costin begins, in alarm.

‘Sacra in it?’ asks Dorden, sipping. ‘I should hope so, cold day like this.’

He looks across at Varl.

‘What’s that you’ve got, Varl?’

‘A letter, Doc.’

‘Does it belong to you?’

‘Uh, not completely.’

‘Did you borrow it?’

‘It fell out of someone’s pocket, Doc.’

‘Do you think it had better fall back in?’ asks Dorden.

‘I think that would be a good idea,’ says Varl.

‘We were just having a conversation, doctor,’ says Rawne. ‘No plots, no conspiracies.’

‘I believe you,’ Dorden replies. ‘Just like I believe that no lies would ever, ever come out of your mouth, major.’

‘With respect, doctor,’ says Rawne, ‘I’m having a private conversation with some good comrades, and the substance of it is of no consequence to you.’

Dorden nods.

‘Of course, major,’ he replies. ‘Just as I’m here to find a plate of food for this boy and minding my own business.’

He turns to talk to the cooks about finding something other than slab in the ration crates.

Then he looks back at Rawne.

‘Consider this, though. They say it’s always best to know your enemy. If you succeed in ousting Colonel-Commissar Gaunt, who might you be making room for?’

‘Where’s the chief?’ Corbec asks, ducking in.

‘Frankly, I’ve been too busy to keep tabs on that gigantic fether,’ Larkin replies.

‘Oh, Larks,’ murmurs Corbec over the drumming of infantry weapons, ‘that lip of yours is going to get you dead before too long unless you curb it. Disrespecting a superior, it’s called.’

Larkin sneers at his old friend.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘You’d write me up.’

He is adjusting the replacement barrel of his long-las, hunkered down behind the cyclopean plinth of a heap of rubble that had once been a piece of civic statuary.

‘Of course I would,’ says Corbec. ‘I’d have to.’

Corbec has got down on one knee on the other side of a narrow gap between the plinth and a retaining wall that is leaning at a forty-five degree angle. Solid-round fire from the enemy is travelling up the gap between them, channelled by the actual physical shape, like steel pinballs coursing along a chute. The shots scrape and squeal as they whistle past.

Corbec clacks in a fresh clip and leans out gingerly to snap some discouraging las-rounds back up the gap.

‘Why?’ Larkin asks. ‘Why would you have to?’

Larkin laughs, mirthlessly. Corbec can almost smell the rank adrenaline sweat coming out of the wiry marksman’s pores. The stress of a combat situation has pushed Larkin towards his own, personal edge, and he is barely in control.

‘Because I’m the fething colonel, and I can’t have you bad-mouthing the company commander,’ Corbec replies.

‘Yeah, but you’re not really, are you?’ says Larkin. ‘I mean, you’re not really my superior, are you?’

‘What?’

‘Gaunt just picked you and Rawne. It was random. It doesn’t mean anything. There’s no point you carrying on like there’s suddenly any difference between us.’

Corbec gazes across at Larkin, watching him screw the barrel in, nattering away, stray rounds tumbling past them like seed cases in a gale.

‘I mean, it’s not like your shit suddenly smells better than mine, is it?’ says Larkin. He looks up at last and sees Corbec’s face.

‘What?’ he asks. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

Corbec glares at him.

‘I am the colonel, Larks,’ he snarls. ‘That’s the point. I’m not your friend any more. This is either real or there’s no point to it at all.’

Larkin just looks at him.

‘Oh, for feth’s sake!’ says Corbec. ‘Stop looking at me with those stupid hang-dog eyes! Hold this position. That’s an order, trooper! Mkoll!’

The chief scout comes scurrying over from the other corner of the plinth, head down. He drops in behind Larkin and looks across the gap at Corbec.

‘Sergeant Blane’s got the top end of the line firm. I’m going back down that way,’ Corbec says, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. ‘We seem to have lost Gaunt.’

‘It’s tragic,’ says Larkin.

‘Keep this section in place,’ Corbec continues.

Mkoll nods. Corbec sets off.

‘What’s got into him?’ Larkin mutters.

‘Probably something you said,’ says Mkoll.

‘I don’t say anything we’re not all thinking,’ Larkin replies.

Outside, the flamer makes its sucking roar again.

All four of the Tanith men with Gaunt express their unhappiness in strong terms. Gutes and Domor are cursing.

‘We’re done for,’ says another of them, a man called Guheen.

‘They’ll just torch us out like larisel in a burrow,’ says the fourth.

‘Maybe–’ Gaunt begins.

‘No maybe about it!’ Gutes spits.

‘No, I was trying to say, maybe this gives us a chance we didn’t have before,’ Gaunt tells them.

He ducks down beside Gutes again, and peers out into the mist and rain, craning for a better view. There is still no sign of the flamer, but he can certainly hear it clearly now, retching like some volcanic hog clearing its throat. He can smell promethium smoke too, the soot-black stench of Imperial cleansing.

He looks up at the ominously low ceiling bellying down at them.

‘What’s upstairs?’ he asks.

‘Another floor,’ says Guheen.

‘Presuming it’s not all crushed in on itself,’ adds Domor.

‘Yes, presuming it’s not,’ Gaunt agrees. ‘Which of you is the best shot?’

‘He is,’ Domor says, pointing to the fourth man. Guheen and Gutes both nod assent.

‘Merrt, isn’t it?’ Gaunt asks. The fourth man nods.

‘Merrt, you’re with me. You three, sustained fire pattern here, through these windows. Just keep it steady.’

Gaunt clambers over the scree of rubble and broken furniture to the back of the chamber. A great deal of debris has poured down what had once been the staircase, blocking it. Wires and cabling hang from ruptured ceiling panels like intestinal loops. Water drips. Broken glass flickers when the lightning scores the sky outside.

Merrt comes up behind Gaunt and touches his arm. He points to the remains of a heat exchanger vent that is crushed into the rear wall of the guild house like a metal plug. They put their shoulders against it and manage to push it out of its setting.

Light shines in. The hole, now more of a slot thanks to the deformation of the building, looks directly out on to rubble at eye level. They hoist themselves up and out, on to the smashed residue of a neighbouring building that has been annihilated, and has flooded its remains down and around the guild house, packing in around its slumped form like a lava flow sweeping an object up.

Gaunt and Merrt pick their way up the slope, and re-enter the guild house through a first-floor window. The floor is sagging and insecure. A few fibres of waterlogged carpet seem to be all that’s holding the joists in place.

‘You’re a decent shot, then?’ Gaunt murmurs.

‘Not bad.’

‘Pull this off, I’ll recommend you for a marksman lanyard.’

Merrt grins and flashes his eyebrows.

‘Should’ve got one anyway,’ he says. ‘The last one went to Larkin. After his psyche evaluation, marksman status was the only special dispensation Corbec could pull to get his old mate a place in the company.’

‘Is that true?’ Gaunt asks.

‘You ought to know. I thought you were in charge?’

Gaunt stares at him.

‘I’m really looking forward to meeting a Tanith who isn’t insolent or cocksure,’ says Gaunt.

‘Good luck with that,’ says Merrt.

Gaunt shakes his head.

‘I’ve got a smart mouth, I know,’ says Merrt. ‘I said a few things about Larkin getting my lanyard, earned some dark looks from the Munitorum chiefs. My mouth’ll get me in trouble, one day, I reckon.’

‘I think you’re already in trouble,’ says Gaunt. He gestures out of the window. ‘I think this qualifies.’

‘Feels like it.’

‘So you reckon you’re good?’

‘Better than Larkin,’ says Merrt.

They settle in by the window. The mist shrouding the concourse and the surrounding ruins has grown thicker, as though the discharge of weapons has caused some chemical reaction, and it’s disguising the enemy approach.

Below, about fifteen metres shy of them, they can see the blasts of the approaching flamer, like a sun behind cloud.

‘Nasty weapon, the flamer,’ says Gaunt.

‘I can well imagine.’

‘Then again, it is essentially a can or two of extremely flammable material.’

‘You going to be my shot caller?’ Merrt asks.

‘We have to let it get a little closer,’ says Gaunt. ‘You see where it burps like that?’

Another gout of amber radiance backlights the fog in the square below.

Merrt nods, raising the lasrifle to his shoulder.

‘Watch which way the glow moves. It’s moving out from the flamer broom.’

‘Got it.’

‘So the point of origin is going to be behind it, and the tank or tanks another, what, half a metre behind that?’

The flamer roars again. A long, curling rush of fire, like the leaf of a giant fern, emerges from the mist and brushes the front of the guild house. Gaunt hears Domor curse loudly.

‘He’s widened the aperture,’ Gaunt tells Merrt. ‘He’s seen buildings ahead, and he’s put a bit of reach on the flame, so he can scour the ruins out.’

Merrt grunts.

‘We’ve got to do this if we’re going to,’ says Gaunt.

There is another popping cough and then another roar. This time, the curling arc of fire comes up high, like the jet of a pressurised hose.

Gaunt grabs Merrt, and pulls him back as the fire blisters the first-storey windows. It spills in through the window spaces, roasting the frames and sizzling the wet black filth, and plays in across the ceiling like a catch of golden fish, coiling and squirming in a mass, landed on the deck of a boat.

The flames suck out again, leaving the windows scorched around their upper frames and the ceiling blackened above the windows. All the air seems to have gone out of the room. Gaunt and Merrt gasp as if they too have just been landed out of a sea net.

Gaunt recovers the lasrifle and checks it for damage. Merrt picks himself up.

‘Come on!’ Gaunt hisses.

As Merrt settles into position again, Gaunt peers down into the swirl.

‘There! There!’ he cries, as the flames jet through the mist and rain again.

Merrt fires.

Nothing happens.

‘Feth!’ Merrt whispers.

‘When the flame lights up, aim closer to the source,’ Gaunt says.

The flamer gusts again, ripping fire at the front of the guild house.

Merrt fires again.

The tanks go up with a pressurised squeal. A huge doughnut of fire rips through the mist, rolling and coiling, yellow-hot and furious. Several broken metal objects soar into the air on streamers of flame, shrieking like parts of an exploding kettle.

Gaunt raises his head cautiously and looks down. He can see burning figures stumbling around in the fog, PDF troopers caught in the blast. They sizzle loudly in the rain.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he says to Merrt.

Gaunt calls to the three Tanith men below, and all five leave the guild house together and work their way back along the edge of the concourse to the advance main force, skirting the open spaces.

‘I’ve been looking for you,’ says Corbec matter-of-factly when Gaunt appears.

‘Not hard enough, I’d say,’ Gaunt replies.

Corbec tuts, half entertained.

‘You set something off over there?’ he asks.

‘Just a little parlour trick to keep them occupied while we got out of their way.’

‘“A little parlour trick”...’ Corbec chuckles. ‘You’re a very amusing man, you know that?’

‘Wait till you get to know me,’ says Gaunt.

Corbec looks at him sadly and says nothing.

‘What shape are we in, colonel?’ Gaunt asks.

‘Fair,’ Corbec replies.

‘No losses so far?’

‘Couple of scratches. But look, their numbers are increasing all the time. Another hour or so, we could start losing friends fast.’

‘Can we vox in for support?’

‘The vox is still dead as dead,’ says Corbec.

‘Recommendation?’

‘We pull back before the situation becomes untenable. Then we rustle up some proper strength, come back in, finish the job.’

Gaunt nods.

‘There are problems with that,’ he says.

‘Do tell.’

‘For a start, I’m still not sure who we’re fighting.’

‘It’s tribal Archenemy,’ says Corbec, ‘like Mkoll says. They’ve just ransacked the city arsenal.’

Gaunt touches his arm and draws him out of earshot.

‘You never left Tanith before, did you, Corbec?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Never fought on a foreign front?’

‘I’ve been taught about the barbaric nature of the Archenemy, if that’s what you’re worried about. All their cults and their ritual ways–’

‘Corbec, you don’t know the half of it.’

Corbec looks at him.

‘I think they are Kosdorfers,’ Gaunt says. ‘I think they were, anyway. I think the Ruinous Powers, may they stand accursed, have salvaged more than kit and equipment. I think they’ve salvaged men too.’

‘Feth,’ Corbec breathes. Rain drips off his beard.

‘I know,’ says Gaunt.

‘The very thought of it.’

‘I need you to keep that to yourself. Don’t say anything to the men.’

‘Of course.’

‘None of them, colonel.’

‘Yes. Yes, all right.’

Corbec’s taken one of his cigars out again and stuck it in his mouth, unlit.

‘Just light the damn thing,’ says Gaunt.

Corbec obeys. His hands shake as he strikes the lucifer.

‘You want one?’

‘No,’ says Gaunt.

Corbec puffs.

‘All right,’ he says. He looks at Gaunt.

‘All right,’ says Gaunt, ‘if we give ground here and try to fall back, we leave ourselves open. If they take us out on the way home, they’ll be all over our main force without warning. But if we can manage to keep their attention here while we relay a message back...’

Corbec frowns. ‘That’s a feth of a lot to ask, by any standards.’

‘What, the message run or the action?’ asks Gaunt.

‘Both,’ says Corbec.

‘You entirely comfortable with the alternative, Corbec?’

Corbec shrugs. ‘You know I’m not.’

‘Then strengthen our position here, colonel,’ Gaunt says. ‘We can afford to drop back a little if necessary. Given the visibility issues, the concourse isn’t helping us much.’

‘What do you suggest?’ asks Corbec.

‘I suggest you ask Mkoll and his scouts. I suggest we make the best of that resource.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Corbec turns to go.

‘Corbec – another thing. Tell the men to select single shot. Mandatory, please. Full auto is wasting munitions.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Corbec stubs out his cigar and moves away. Keeping his head down, Gaunt moves along the shooting line of jumbled pavers and column bases in the opposite direction.

‘Trooper!’

Caffran looks up from his firing position.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘It’s your lucky day,’ says Gaunt.

He gets down beside Caffran and reaches into his jacket pockets for his stylus and a clean message wafer.

His hip pocket is torn open and flapping. It’s empty. He checks all the pockets of his jacket and the pockets of his storm coat, but his stylus and the wafer pad have gone.

‘Do you have the despatch bag, Caffran?’

Caffran nods, and pulls the loop of the small message satchel off over his head. Gaunt opens it, and sees it is in order: fresh message wafers, a stylus, and a couple of signal flares. Caffran has taken his duty seriously.

Gaunt begins writing on one of the wafers rapidly. He uses a gridded sheet to draw up a simple expression of their route and the layout of the city’s south-eastern zone, copying from his waterproof chart. Rain taps on the sheet.

‘I need you to take this back to Major Rawne,’ he says as he writes. ‘Understand that we need to warn him of the enemy presence here and summon his support.’

Gaunt finishes writing and presses the setting of his signet ring against the code seal of the wafer, authorising it.

‘Caffran, do you understand?’

Caffran nods. Gaunt puts the wafer back into the message satchel.

‘Am I to go on my own?’ Caffran asks.

‘I can’t spare more than one man for this, Caffran,’ says Gaunt.

The young man looks at him, considers it. Gaunt is a man who quite bloodlessly orders the death of people to achieve his goals. This is what’s happening now. Caffran understands that. Caffran understands he is being used as an instrument, and that if he fails and dies, it’ll be no more to Gaunt than a shovel breaking in a ditch or a button coming off a shirt. Gaunt has no actual interest in Caffran’s life or the manner of its ending.

Caffran purses his lips and then nods again. He hands his lasrifle and the munition spares he was carrying to Gaunt.

‘That’ll just weigh me down. Somebody else better have them.’

The young trooper gets up, takes a last look at Gaunt, and then begins to pick his way down through the ruined street behind the advance position, keeping his head down.

Gaunt watches him until he’s out of sight.

Under Mkoll’s instruction, the advance gives ground.

Working as spotters out on the flanks, Mkoll’s scouts, Bonin and Mkvenner, have pushed the estimate of enemy numbers beyond eight hundred. Gaunt doesn’t want to show that he is already regretting his decision not to pull out while the going was good.

Against lengthening, lousy odds, he’s committed his small force to the worst kind of combat, the grinding city fight, where mid-range weapons and tactics become compressed into viciously barbaric struggles that depend on reaction time, perception and, worst of all, luck.

The Tanith disengage from the edge of the concourse, which has become entirely clouded in a rising white fog of vapour lifted by the sustained firefight, and drop back into the city block at the south-west corner. Here there are two particularly large habitat structures, which have slumped upon themselves like settling pastry, a long manufactory whose chimneys have toppled like felled trees, and a data library.

The scouts lead them into the warren of ruined halls and broken floors. It is raining inside many of the chambers. Roofs are missing, or water is simply descending through ruptured layers of building fabric. The Tanith melt from view into the shadows. They cover their cloaks with the black dirt from the concourse, and it helps them to merge with the dripping shadows. Gaunt does as they do. He smears the dirt onto his coat and pulls the cloak on over the top, aware that he is looking less and less like a respectable Imperial officer. Damn it, his storm coat is torn and his jacket is ruined anyway.

They work into the habs. Gunfire cracks and echoes along the forlorn walkways and corridors. Broken water pipes, weeping and foul, protrude from walls and floors like tree stumps. The tiled floor, what little of it survives, is covered with broken glass and pot shards from crockery that has been fragmented by the concussion of war.

Gaunt has kept hold of Caffran’s rifle. He’s holstered his pistol and got the infantry weapon cinched across his torso, ready to fire. It’s a long time since he’s seen combat with a rifle in his hands.

Mkoll looms out of the filmy mist that fills the air. He is directing the Tanith forward. He looks at Gaunt and then takes Gaunt’s cap off his head.

‘Excuse me?’ says Gaunt.

Mkoll wipes his index finger along a wall, begrimes it, and then rubs the tip over the silver aquila badge on Gaunt’s cap.

He hands it back.

‘It’s catching the light,’ says Mkoll.

‘I see. And it’s not advisable to wear a target on my head.’

‘I just don’t want you drawing fire down on our unit.’

‘Of course you don’t,’ says Gaunt.

Every few minutes the gunfire dies away. A period of silence follows as the enemy closes in tighter, listening for movement. The only sound is the downpour. The entire environment is a source of noise: debris and rubble can be dislodged, kicked, disturbed, larger items of wreckage can be knocked over or banged into. Damaged floors groan and creak. Windows and doors protest any attempt to move them. When a weapon is discharged, the echoes set up inside the ruined buildings are a great way of locating the point of origin.

The Tanith are supremely good at this. Gaunt witnesses several occasions when a trooper makes a rattle out of a stone in an old tin cup or pot and sets up a noise to tempt a shot from the demented Kosdorfers. As soon as the shot comes, another Tanith trooper gauges the source of the bouncing echo and returns fire with a lethal volley.

The enemy becomes wise to the tricks, and starts acting more circumspectly. Unable to out-stalk the Tanith, the Kosdorfers begin to call out to them from the darkness.

It is unnerving. The voices are distant and pleading. Little sense can be made of them in terms of meaning, but the tone is clear. It is misery. They are the voices of the damned.

‘Ignore them,’ Gaunt orders.

They have to stick tight. The enemy has a numerical advantage. By getting out of the open, the Tanith has forced its own spatial advantage.

Gaunt wonders if it will be enough.

The ruins still feel like a grave site, a waste of mouldering funereal rot. He wonders if this place will mark the end of his life and soldiering career; a well-thought-of officer who wound up dying in some strategically worthless location because he didn’t make the right choices, or shake the right hand, or whisper in the right ear, or dine with the right cliques. He’s seen men make high rank that way, through the persuasive power of the officers’ club and the staff coterie. They were politicians, politicians who got to execute their decisions in the most literal way. Some were very capable, most were not. Gaunt believes that there is no substitute at all for practical apprenticeship, for field learning to properly supplement the study of military texts and the codices of combat. Slaydo had believed that too, as had Oktar, Gaunt’s first mentor.

The vast mechanism of the Imperial Guard, as a rule, did not. Slaydo had once said that he believed he could, through proper reform of the Guard, improve its efficiency by fifty or sixty per cent. Soberly, he had added that mankind was probably too busy fighting wars to ever initiate such reforms.

There is truth in that. Gaunt knows for a fact that Slaydo had a reform bill in mind to take to the Munitorum after the Gorikan Suppression, and again after Khulan. Every time, a new campaign beckoned, a new theatre loomed to occupy the attentions of military planners and commanders. The Sabbat Worlds, now it was the Sabbat Worlds. Slaydo had committed to it mainly, Gaunt knew, for personal reasons. After Khulan, the High Lords had tempted Slaydo with many offers: he’d had the pick of campaigns. He had turned them down, hoping to pursue a more executive office in the latter part of his life and work to the fundamental improvement of the Imperial Guard, which he believed had the capacity to be the finest fighting force in known space.

However, the High Lords had outplayed him. They had discovered his old and passionate fondness for the piety of Saint Sabbat Beati and the territories she had touched, and they had exploited it. The Sabbat Worlds had long since been thought of as unrecoverable, lost to the predations of the Ruinous Powers spreading from the so-called Sanguinary Worlds. No commander wanted to embrace such a career-destroying challenge. The High Lords wanted a leader who would stage the offensive with conviction. They sweetened the offer with the rank of Warmaster, sensing that Slaydo would be unable to resist the opportunity to liberate a significant territory of the Imperium that he felt had been woefully neglected and left to over-run, and at the same to acquire a status that allowed him much greater political firepower to achieve his reforms.

Instead, Balhaut had killed him. All he accomplished was the commencement of a military campaign that was likely to last generations and cost trillions of lives.

Thus are dreams dashed and good intentions lost. Everything returns to the dust, and everything is reduced to blind fighting in the shadowed ruins of cities against men who were brothers until madness claimed their minds.

Everything returns to the dirt, and the dirt becomes your camouflage, and hides your face and your cap badge in the dark, when death comes, growling, to find you out.

Faced alone, out of sight of the other men, the ruination of Kosdorf brings tears into his eyes.

Caffran understands the urgency of his mission, but he’s also smart enough not to run. Headlong running, as the chief scout has pointed out so often, just propels a man into the open, into open spaces he hasn’t checked first, across hidden objects that might be pressure-sensitive, through invisible wires, into the line of predatory gunsights.

Caffran is fit, as physically fit as any of the younger men who’ve been salvaged from Tanith. That’s one of the reasons he’s been selected as a courier.

The advance came into the grave city as a unit, testing its way and proceeding with recon. Now he’s exiting alone, a solitary trooper, protected by his wits and training. There’s no doubt in his mind that the enemy will have spread strengths out through the dead boroughs surrounding the fighting zone to catch any stragglers.

Kosdorf reminds him of Tanith Magna. Architecturally, it’s nothing like it, of course. Tanith Magna was a smaller burg, high-walled, a gathering of predominantly dark stone towers and spires rising from the emerald canopy of Tanith like a monolith. It had nothing of Kosdorf’s dank, white, mausoleum quality. It’s simply the mortality of Kosdorf that has stabbed him in the heart. Caffran knows that Tanith Magna doesn’t even persist as a ruin any more, but Voltemand’s second city, in death, inevitably makes him think of it, and the ruins become a substitute for his loss.

More than once, he feels quite sure he knows a street, or a particular corner. Memories superimpose themselves over alien habs and thoroughfares, and nostalgia, fletched with unbearable melancholy, spears him. He thinks he recognises one flattened frontage as the public house where he used to meet his friends, another shell as the mill shop where he had been apprenticed, and a broken walkway as the narrow street that had always taken him to the diocese temple. A patch of burned wasteland and twisted wire is most certainly the street market where he sometimes bought vegetables and meat for his ageing mother.

This terrace, this terrace with its cracked and broken flagstones, is definitely the square beside the Elector’s Gardens, where he used to meet Laria. He can smell nalwood–

He can smell wet ash. Lightning jags silently.

He wipes a knuckle across his cheekbone, knowing that humiliating tears are mixing with the rain on his face.

He takes a deep breath. He isn’t concentrating. He isn’t paying enough attention. He stops to get his bearings, trusting the innate wiring of the Tanith mind to sense direction.

If the God-Emperor, who Caffran dutifully worshipped all his life at the little diocese temple, has seen fit to take everything away from him except this single duty, then Caffran is fething well determined to do it properly. He–

He feels the hairs prick up on the back of his neck.

The las-shot misses his face by about a palm’s length. Just the slightest tremor of a trigger finger was the difference between a miss and a solid headshot. The light and noise of it rock him, the heat sears him, flash-drying the dirty tears and rain on his cheek into a crust.

Caffran throws himself down, and rolls into cover. He scrabbles in behind the foundation stones of a levelled building. Two more rounds pass over him, and then a hard round hits the block to his left. Caffran hears the distinctly different sound quality of the impact.

He thanks the God-Emperor with a nod. The enemy has just provided information. A minimum of two shooters, not one.

Caffran gets lower still. With his face almost pressing into the ooze, he repositions himself, and risks a look around the stone blocks.

Another shot whines past him, but it is speculative. The shooter hasn’t seen him. A filthy PDFer is hopping across the rubble towards his position, clutching an old autorifle. He looks like a hobbled beggar. The puttee around one of his calves is loose and trailing, and his breeches are torn. His face is concealed by an old gas mask. The air pipe swings like a proboscis, unattached to any air tank. One of the glass eye discs is missing.

Behind him, a distance back, a second PDFer stands on the top of a sloping section of roof that is lying across a street. He has a lascarbine raised to his shoulder and sighted. As the PDFer in the gas mask approaches, the other one clips off in Caffran’s general direction.

Caffran draws his only weapon, the long Tanith knife.

He stays low, hearing the crunch of the approaching enemy trooper. He can smell him too, a stench like putrefaction.

Another las-shot sings overhead. Caffran tries to slow his breathing. The footsteps get closer. He can hear the man’s breath rasping inside the mask.

Caffran turns the knife around in his hand until he is holding the blade, and then very gently taps the pommel against the stone block, using the knife like a drum stick.

Chink! Chink! Chink!

He hears the enemy trooper’s respiration rate change, his breath sounds alter as he turns to face a different direction. His footsteps clatter loose stone chips and crunch slime. He is right there. He is coming around the other side of the stone block.

The moment he appears, Caffran goes for him. He tries to make full body contact so he can bring the man over before he can aim his rifle. Caffran tries to force the muzzle of the rifle in under one of his arms rather than point it against his torso.

Locked together, they tumble down behind the block. The autorifle discharges.

From his vantage on the fallen roof slope, the other trooper hesitates, watching. He lowers his lasrifle, then raises it to sight again.

A shape pops back into view over the stone slab, a filthy shape, with a grimed gas-masked face. The watching trooper hesitates from firing.

The figure with the gas mask brings up an autorifle in a clean, fluid swing and fires a burst that hits the hesitating PDFer in the throat and chest, and tumbles him down the roof slope, scattering tiles.

Caffran drops the autorifle and wrenches off the gas mask as he falls to his knees. He gags and then vomits violently. The stench inside the borrowed mask, the residue, has been foul, even worse than he could have imagined. The mask’s previous owner lies on his back beside him, beads of bright red blood spattering his mud-caked chest. Caffran slides the warknife out and wipes the blade.

Then he throws up again.

He can hear activity in the ruins behind him. It’s time to move. He stares at the autorifle, and tries to weigh up the encumbrance against the usefulness of a ranged weapon. He reaches over and searches the large canvas musette pouches his would-be killer has strapped to the front of his webbing. One is full of odd junk: meaningless pieces of stone and brick, shards of pottery and glass, a pair of broken spectacles and a tin of boot polish. The other holds three spare clips for the rifle, and a battered old short-pattern autopistol, a poor quality, mass-stamped weapon with limited range.

It will have to do. He puts it into his pocket.

It’s really time to move.

It’s getting dark. Night doesn’t drop like a lid on Voltemand like it did on Tanith. It fills the sky up slowly, billowing like ink in water.

The rain’s still hammering the Imperial camp, but the dark rim of the sky makes the silent lightning more pronounced. The white spears are firing every twenty or thirty seconds, like an automatic beacon set to alarm.

The boy’s asleep, legs and arms loosely arranged like a dog flopped by a grate. Dorden hates to abuse his medicae privileges, but he believes that the God-Emperor of Mankind will forgive him for crushing up a few capsules of tranquiliser and mixing them into the boy’s broth. He’ll do penance if he has to. They had plenty of temple chapels back in the city, and a popular local saint, a woman. She looked like the forgiving sort.

The boy’s on a cot at the end of the ward. Dorden brews a leaf infusion over the small burner and turns the page of his book, open on the instrument rest. It’s a work called The Spheres of Longing. He’s yet to meet another man in the Imperial Guard who’s ever heard of it, let alone read it. He doubts he will. The Imperial Guard is not a sophisticated institution.

Nearby, Lesp is cleaning his needles in a pot of water. He’s done two or three family marks tonight at the end of his shift, a busy set. His eyes are tired, but he keeps going long enough to make sure the needles are sterile for the next job. Lesp is always eager to work. It’s as if he’s anxious to get down all the Tanith marks before he forgets them. Dorden sometimes wonders where Lesp will ink his marks when he runs out of Tanith skin to make them on.

The boy kicks as a dream trembles through him. Dorden watches him to make sure he’s all right.

The doorway flap of the tent opens and Rawne steps in out of the lengthening light and the rain. Drops of it hang in his hair and on his cloak like diamonds. Dorden gets to his feet. Lesp gathers his things and makes himself scarce.

‘Major.’

‘Doctor.’

‘Can I help you?’

‘Just doing the rounds. Is everything as it should be here?’

Dorden nods.

‘Nothing untoward.’

‘Good,’ says Rawne.

‘It’s getting dark,’ Dorden says, as Rawne moves to leave.

‘It is.’

‘Doesn’t that mean the advance unit is overdue?’

Rawne shrugs. ‘A little.’

‘Doesn’t that concern you?’ asks Dorden.

Rawne smiles.

‘No,’ he says.

‘At what point will it concern you?’ Dorden asks.

‘When it’s actually dark and they’re officially missing.’

‘That could be hours yet. And at that point it will be too late to mobilise any kind of force to go looking for them,’ says Dorden.

‘Well, we’d absolutely have to wait for morning at least,’ says Rawne.

Dorden looks at him, and rubs his hand across his face.

‘What do you think’s happened to them?’ he asks.

‘I can’t imagine,’ says Rawne.

‘What do you hope’s happened to them?’ Dorden asks.

‘You know what I hope,’ says Rawne. He’s smiling still, but it’s just teeth. There’s no warmth. It’s like lightning without thunder.

Dorden sips his drink.

‘I’d ask you to consider,’ he says, ‘the effect it would have on the Tanith Regiment if it lost both of its senior commanding officers.’

‘Please, doctor,’ says Rawne, ‘this isn’t an emergency. It’s just a thing. They’ve probably just got held up somewhere.’

‘And if not?’

Rawne shrugged.

‘It’ll be a terrible loss, like you said. But we’d just have to get over it. We’ve had practice at that, haven’t we?’

The emaciated ghosts of Kosdorf come at them through the skeletal ruins. They have become desperate. Their need, their hunger has overwhelmed their caution. They loom through useless doors and peer through empty windows. They clamber out of sour drains and emerge from cover behind spills of rubble. They fire their weapons and call out in pleading, raw voices.

The rain has thickened the dying light. Muzzle flashes flutter dark orange, like old flame.

The Tanith knot tight, and fend them off with precision. They fall back through the manufactory into the data library.

It’s there they lose their first life. A Tanith infantryman is caught by autogun fire. He staggers suddenly, as if winded. Then he simply goes limp and falls. His hands don’t even come up to break his impact against the tiled floor. Men rush to him, and drag him into cover, but Gaunt knows he’s gone by the way his heels are kicking out. Blood soaks the man’s tunic, and smears the floor in a great curl like black glass when they drag him. First blood.

Gaunt doesn’t know the dead man’s name. It’s one of the names he hasn’t learned yet. He hates himself for realising, just for a second, that it’s one less he’ll have to bother with.

Gaunt keeps the nalwood stock of Caffran’s lasrifle tight against his shoulder and looses single shots. The temptation to switch to auto is almost unbearable.

The lobby of the data library is a big space, which once had a glass roof, now fallen in. Rain pours in, every single moving drop of it catching the light. Kosdorfer ghosts get up on the lobby’s gallery, and angle fire down at the Tanith below. The top of the desk once used by the venerable clerk of records stipples and splinters, and the row of ornate brass kiosks where scholars and gnostics once filled out their data requests dent and quiver. Floor tiles crack. The delicate etched metal facings of the wall pit and dimple.

Corbec looks out at Gaunt from behind a chipped marble column.

‘This won’t do,’ he shouts.

Gaunt nods back.

‘Support!’ Corbec yells.

They’ve been sparing with their heavy weapon all day. They’re only a light advance team, and they weren’t packing much to begin with.

The big man comes up level with Corbec, head down. He’s carrying the lascarbine he’s been fighting with, but he’s got a long canvas sleeve across his back. He unclasps it to slide out the rocket tube.

The big man’s name is Bragg. He really is big. He’s not much taller than Corbec, but he’s got breadth across the shoulders. There’s a younger Tanith with him, one of the kids, a boy called Beltayn. He’s carrying the leather box with the eight anti-tank rockets in it, and he gets one out while Bragg snaps up the tube’s mechanical range-finder.

‘Any time you like, Try!’ Larkin yells out from behind an archway that is becoming riddled with shots.

‘Shut your noise,’ Bragg replies genially. He glances at Gaunt abruptly.

‘Sorry, colonel-commissar, sir!’ he says.

‘Get on with it, please!’ Gaunt shouts. It’s not so much the heavy fire they’re taking, it’s the voices. It’s probably his imagination, but the pleading, moaning voices of the Kosdorfers calling out to them are starting to make sense to him.

Beltayn goes to offer up the rocket to Bragg’s launcher, and a las-bolt fells him. Gaunt’s eyes widen as the rocket tumbles out of the hands of the falling boy and drops towards the tiled floor.

It hits, bounces, a tail-fin dents slightly.

It doesn’t detonate.

Gaunt dashes forward. Corbec has reached Bragg too. Bragg has picked up the rocket. He taps it cheerfully against his head.

‘No fear,’ he says. ‘Arming pin’s still in.’

Gaunt snatches the rocket, and stoops to the box to swap it for an undamaged one.

‘See to the boy!’ he says to Corbec.

‘Just a flesh wound!’ Corbec replies, hunched over Beltayn. ‘Just his arm.’

‘Get him back to the archway!’

‘I can’t leave–’

‘Get his arse back to the archway, colonel! I’ll do this!’

‘Yes sir!’

Corbec starts dragging the boy back towards the main archway. Men come out of cover to help him. Gaunt gets a clean rocket out of the box. He rolls it in his hands to check it by eye. It’s been a long time since he loaded, a long time since he learned basic skills. A long time since he was the boy, the Hyrkan boy, apprenticed to war, born into it as if it was a family business.

‘Set?’ he asks the big man.

‘Yes, sir!’ says Bragg.

Gaunt fits the rocket and removes the arming pin. Bragg hoists the top-heavy tube onto the shelf of his shoulder and takes aim at the lobby gallery. Gaunt slaps him twice on the shoulder.

‘Ease!’ he yells.

‘Ease!’ Bragg yells back. The word opens the mouth and stops the eardrums bursting.

Bragg pulls the bare metal trigger. The ignition thumps the air, and blow-back spits from the back of the tube and throws up dust. The rocket howls off in the other direction, on a trail of flame. It hits the gallery just under the rail, and detonates volcanically. The entire gallery lifts for a second, and then comes down like an avalanche, spilling rubble, stonework, grit, glass and men. It collapses with a drawn-out roar, a death rattle of noise and disintegration.

Gaunt looks at Bragg. Bragg grins. Their ears are ringing.

Gaunt signals back to the archway.

They run in through the archway, through the smoke blowing from the lobby. They get down. Corbec has signalled a pause while they wait to hear how the enemy redeploys.

It gets quieter. The building settles. Rubble clatters as it falls now and then. Glass tinkles.

Gaunt sinks down next to Bragg, his back to a wall.

‘First time that time,’ says Larkin from a corner nearby.

‘I know,’ says Bragg. He looks at Gaunt. He’s proud of himself.

‘Sometimes I miss,’ he explains.

‘I know,’ says Gaunt. The big man’s nickname is Try Again because he’s always messing up the first shot.

Gaunt sits quiet for a minute or two. He wipes the sweat off his face. He thinks about trying again, and second chances. Sometimes there just isn’t the opportunity or the willingness to make things better. Sometimes you can’t simply have another go. You make a choice, and it’s a bad one, and you’re left with it. No amount of trying again will fix it. Don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for you, to cut you slack; you made a mistake you’ll have to live with.

It was like failing to play the glittering game when he had the chance as one of Slaydo’s brightest; like leaving the Hyrkans; like trying to salvage anything from the Tanith disaster; like thinking he could win broken, grieving men over; like coming out with a small advance force into a city grave, just because he was bored of sitting in his tent.

He takes his cap off, leans the crown of his head back against the damp wall and closes his eyes. He opens them again. It’s dark above him, the roofspace of the library. Beads of rainwater and flakes of plaster are dripping and spattering down towards him, catching the intermittent lightning, like snow, like the slow traffic of stars through the aching loneliness of space.

He remembers something, one little thing. He puts his hand in his pocket, just to touch the letter, just to put his fingers on the letter his old friend Blenner sent him: Blenner, his friend from Schola Progenium, manufacturer of fake plastic explosives and practical jokes.

Blenner, manufacturer of empty promises, too, no doubt. The letter’s old. The offer may not still stand, if it ever did. Vaynom Blenner was not the most reliable man, and his mouth had a habit of making offers the rest of him couldn’t keep.

But it’s a small hope, a sustaining thing, the possibility of trying again.

The letter is gone.

Suddenly alert, torn from his reverie, Gaunt begins to search his pockets. It’s really gone. The pocket he thought he’d put it in is hanging off, thanks to the thrust of a rusty sword bayonet. All the pockets of his field jacket and storm coat are empty.

The letter’s lost. It’s outside somewhere in this grave of a city, disintegrating in the rain.

‘What’s the matter?’ asks Bragg, noticing Gaunt’s activity.

‘Nothing,’ says Gaunt.

‘You sure?’

Gaunt nods.

‘Good,’ says Bragg, sitting back again. ‘I thought you might have the torments on you.’

‘The torments?’

‘Everyone gets them,’ says Bragg. ‘Everyone has their own. Bad dreams. Bad memories. Most of us, it’s about where we come from. Tanith, you know.’

‘I know,’ says Gaunt.

‘We miss it,’ says Bragg, like this idea might, somehow, not be clear to anyone. ‘It’s hard to bear. It’s hard to think about what happened to it, sometimes. It gets us inside. You know Gutes?’

Bragg points across at Piet Gutes, one of the men who was in the guild house with Domor. Like all the Tanith, Gutes is resting for a moment, sitting against a wall, feet pulled in, gun across his knees, listening.

‘Yeah,’ says Gaunt.

‘Friend of mine,’ says Bragg. ‘He had a daughter called Finra, and she had a daughter called Foona. Feth, but he misses them. Not being away from them, you understand. Just them not being there to return to. And Mkendrick?’

Bragg points to another infantryman. His voice is low.

‘He left a brother in Tanith Steeple. I think he had family in Attica too, an uncle–’

‘Why are you telling me this, trooper?’ Gaunt asks. ‘I know what happened. I know what I did. Do you want me to suffer? I can’t make amends. I can’t do that.’

Bragg frowns.

‘I thought,’ he starts to say.

‘What?’ asks Gaunt.

‘I thought that’s what you were trying to do,’ says Bragg. ‘With us. I thought you were trying to make something good out of what was left of Tanith.’

‘With respect, trooper, you’re the only man in the regiment who thinks that. Also, with respect to the fighting merits of the Tanith, I’m an Imperial Guard commander, not a miracle worker. I’ve got a few men, a handful in the great scheme of things. We’re never going to accomplish much. We’re going to be a line of code in the middle of a Munitorum levy report, if that.’

‘Oh, you never know,’ says Bragg. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter if we don’t. All that matters is you do right by the men.’

‘I do right by them?’

‘That’s all we want,’ says Bragg with a smile. ‘We’re Tanith. We’re used to knowing where we’re going. We’re used to finding our way. We’re lost now. All we want from you is for you to find a path for us and set us on it.’

Someone nearby says something. Corbec holds up a hand, makes a gesture. Pattering rain. Otherwise, silence. Everyone’s listening.

Gaunt pats the big man on the arm and goes over to join Corbec.

‘What is it?’ he asks.

‘Beltayn says he heard something,’ Corbec replies. The boy is settled in beside Corbec, the wounded arm packed and taped. He looks at Gaunt.

He says, ‘Something’s awry.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asks Gaunt.

Corbec indicates he should listen. Gaunt cranes his neck.

The Kosdorfers are moving. They’re talking again. Their whispers are breathing out of the ruins to reach the Tanith position.

Gaunt looks sharply at Corbec.

‘I think I can understand the words,’ he says.

‘Me too,’ Corbec nods.

Gaunt swallows hard. He’s got a sick feeling, and he’s not sure where it’s coming from. The feeling is telling him that he’s not suddenly comprehending the Kosdorfers because they are speaking Low Gothic.

He’s understanding them because he’s learned their language.

The boy wakes up with a start.

‘Go back to sleep,’ Dorden tells him. ‘You need your sleep.’

Dorden’s standing in the doorway of the tent, watching the evening coming in.

Milo gets up.

‘Are they back yet?’ he asks.

Dorden shakes his head.

‘Someone needs to go and look for them,’ the boy says flatly. ‘I had another dream. A really unpleasant one. Someone needs to go and look for them.’

‘Just go back to sleep,’ Dorden insists. The boy slumps a little, and turns back to his cot.

‘You dreamed they were in trouble, did you?’ Dorden asks, trying to humour the boy.

‘No,’ replies the boy, sitting down on the cot and looking back at the medicae. ‘That’s not why I have the feeling they’re in trouble. I didn’t dream it, that’s just common sense. They’re overdue. My bad dream, it was just a dream about numbers. Like last night and the night before.’

‘Numbers?’ asks Dorden.

Milo nods. ‘Just some numbers. In my dream, I’m trying to write these numbers down, over and over, but my stylus won’t work, and for some reason that’s not a pleasant dream to have.’

Dorden looks at the boy. He asks, ‘So what are the numbers, Brin?’, still humouring him.

The boy reels the numbers off.

‘When did he tell you that?’ Dorden asks.

‘Who?’

‘Gaunt.’

‘He didn’t tell me anything,’ says the boy. ‘He certainly didn’t tell me those numbers. I just told you, they were in my dream. I dreamed about them.’

‘Are you lying to me, Brin?’

‘No, sir.’

Dorden keeps staring at the boy a minute more, as if a lie will suddenly give itself away, like the moon coming out from behind a cloud.

‘Why do those numbers matter?’ the boy asks.

‘They’re Gaunt’s command code,’ says Dorden.

‘Explain yourself,’ the voice demands. It comes out like an echo, from the ruins, the ghost of a voice. ‘Explain yourself. We don’t understand why.’

The voice tunes in and out, like a vox that’s getting interference.

‘We’re hungry,’ it adds.

Corbec looks at Gaunt. He wants to reply, Gaunt can see it on his face. Gaunt shakes his head.

‘You left us here,’ the voice says. It’s two or three voices now, all speaking at once, like two or three vox sets tuned to the same signal, their speakers slightly out of sync. ‘Why did you leave us here? We don’t understand why you left us behind.’

‘Feth’s sake is that?’ Corbec mutters to Gaunt. All good humour has gone from him. He’s looking pinched and scared.

‘You left us behind, and we’re hungry,’ the voices plead.

‘I don’t know,’ says Gaunt. ‘A trick.’

He says it, but he doesn’t believe it. It’s an uglier thing than that. The voices don’t really sound like voices when you listen hard, or vox transmits either. They sound like... like other noises that have been carefully mixed up and glued together to make voice sounds. All the noises of the dead city have been harvested: the scatter of pebbles, the slump of masonry, the splinter and smash of glass, the creak of rebar, the crack of tiles, the spatter of rain. All those things and millions more besides, blended into a sound mosaic that almost perfectly imitates the sound of human speech.

Almost, but not quite.

Almost human, but not human enough.

‘You left us behind, and we’re hungry. Explain yourself. We don’t understand why you left us. We don’t understand why you didn’t come.’

The Tanith are all up, all disturbed. Knuckles are white where hands grip weapons. Everyone’s soaking wet. Everyone’s watching the dripping shadows. Gaunt needs them to keep it together. He knows they can all hear it. The inhuman imperfection in the voices.

‘I know what that is,’ says Larkin.

‘Steady, Larks,’ growls Corbec.

‘I know what that is. I know, I know what that is,’ the marksman says. ‘I know it. It’s Tanith.’

‘Shut up, Larks.’

‘It’s Tanith. It’s dead Tanith calling to us! It’s Tanith calling to us, calling us back!’

‘Shut up please, Larks!’

‘Larkin, shut your mouth!’ Gaunt barks.

Larkin makes a sound, a mewling sob. Fear’s inside him, deep as a bayonet.

The voices are out there in the dark and the rain. The words seem to move from one speaker to the next. Dead speakers. Broken throats.

‘We don’t understand why you didn’t come. We don’t understand. We don’t know who we are any more. We don’t know where we belong.’

Gaunt looks at Corbec.

‘We getting out?’ he asks.

‘Through the back way?’

‘Whatever way we can find.’

‘What happened to holding this place until reinforcements arrive?’ asks Corbec.

‘No one’s coming this way that we want to meet,’ says Gaunt.

Corbec turns to the advance force.

‘Get ready to move,’ he orders.

The voice pleads, ‘Where do we belong? We don’t know where we belong.’

‘It’s Tanith!’ Larkin cries out. ‘It’s the old place calling out to us!’

Gaunt grabs him, and pushes him against a wall.

‘Listen to me,’ he says. ‘Larkin? Larkin? Listen to me! Get yourself under control! Something worse than death happened here, something much worse!’

‘What?’ Larkin whines, wanting to know and not wanting to know.

‘Something Tanith was spared, do you understand me?’

Larkin makes the sobbing sound again. Gaunt lets him go, lets him sag against the wall. He turns, and the men are all around him. Mkoll’s right there, Mkvenner too, looking as if they’re going to step in and pull Gaunt and Larkin apart. The Tanith men are all staring at him. No one’s looking away.

‘Do you understand?’ Gaunt asks them. ‘All of you? Any of you?’

‘We understand what you did,’ one of them says.

‘Oh, this isn’t helping anything, lads!’ Corbec rumbles.

Gaunt ignores Corbec and laughs a brutal laugh. ‘I’m a destroyer of worlds, am I? You credit me with too much power. Indecent amounts of it. And anyway, I don’t much care what you think of me.’

‘Let’s go! Let’s go now,’ says Corbec.

‘There’s only one thing I want you to understand,’ Gaunt says.

‘What’s that?’ asks Larkin, his mouth trembling.

‘The worst thing you can imagine,’ says Gaunt, ‘is not the worst thing. Not by a long way.’

In the open, the rain is heavy, like a curtain. Caffran knows he’s never going to make it. The straggly figures hunting him are closing in, and they’ve been calling to him for the last ten minutes, using the voices of people he used to know, twisted by bad vox reception.

‘We don’t know why you left us,’ the voices plead. ‘Where do we belong? We don’t know where we belong.’

Caffran’s feet are sore. He’s got the pistol in his hand. Its clip is empty. He’s killed three more men on his way out of the ruins.

The voices call out, ‘We’ve forgotten what we’re supposed to be.’

He’s reached the ramparts of the hills, with the city grave at his back. He kneels down. The Imperial camp is somewhere ahead, below and far away. He can’t see it, because rain and night shadows are filling the valley, but he knows it must be there. Too far, too far.

There are signal flares in his message satchel. He’s pulling them out as the heavy raindrops bounce off his shoulders and his scalp. Does he need to find higher ground? There’ll be obs positions looking this way, won’t there? Spotters and look-outs?

The voices call to him.

He stands and fires a flare. It makes a hollow bang and soars up into the wet air, a white phosphor star with a gauzy tail, like a drawing of a comet in an old manuscript. It maxes altitude, and then starts to descend, slow, trembling, drifting.

Caffran’s watching it, the other flare in his hand ready to fire. He knows there’s no point.

The flare looks too much like the silent lightning.

There are figures on the hillside around him. They come towards him.

They call out to him.

Bonin locates the remains of a depository entrance in the south-western corner of the data library, and they exit, via the basement stacks. They make their break out from there.

The basement is flooded, up to their hips. They have to cannibalise an RPG shell to make a charge to blow the hatch open. Then they’re out into the street, into the rain, and they’re drawing heavy fire right from the start.

Gaunt orders bounding cover, and they push along a street from position to position. They stay in good formation, despite the level of fire coming at them. No one switches back to full auto, despite the temptation.

Even so, the advance is pushing the limits of the ammo supplies it’s packing.

They begin to string out into a longer and longer line. They make it to the circus where two dead boulevards cross, and pick their way through the underwalks of the crippled tramway shelters to achieve the far side. Volleys of shots rain off the crumpled metal roofs of the shelters. The objective is the arterial route that joins the eastern boulevard. Gaunt and Corbec tell Blane to push ahead and edge back to bring the rear of the line up.

The advance is halfway across the circus when it’s rushed by enemy ambushers. The ambushers come out of one of the underwalks that looked like it was choked with rubble. They’re armed like trench raiders with clubs and mauls and butcher hooks. They hit the Tanith advance in the midsection of its bounding spread. They rush Gaunt as he’s trying to direct the force forwards.

Gaunt goes down and his head strikes something. He’s too stunned to know what’s happened. A raider swings a hook to split his head and finish him.

Mkoll intercepts the raider, and guts him with his silver warknife. He meets the next one head-on, somehow evades a wide swing from a spiked mace, and rams the knife up through the throat so the point exits the apex of the skull.

Corbec’s also been caught in the initial rush. He takes his attacker over with him, and breaks his neck using body weight and a wrestling hold he’d learned watching his old dad compete at the County Pryze fair.

He looks up in time to see Mkoll pull the knife out. Blood ribbons up in a semicircle, like a red streamer in the rain, and the raider curves backwards in the opposite direction. Through the sheeting rain, Corbec can see more raiders coming out of the underwalk at Mkoll. Corbec’s lasrifle is wedged under the corpse of the man he just killed. He yells Mkoll’s name. He yells idiot and feth too, for good measure. Mkoll’s las is strapped over his shoulder. He’s facing three men with just his knife.

There’s the whine of a small but powerful fusion motor, the unmistakable whir of a chainsword firing up. Gaunt comes in beside the scout. Gaunt’s got blood down the side of his face and his cap’s gone missing. The three raiders are too close to Mkoll for Gaunt to risk a shot with his rifle or his bolter.

He takes a head clean off with his chainsword. The neck parts in a bloodmist venting from the blade’s moving edge. Corbec can see from Gaunt’s stance and the way he presents that he’s been trained in sword work to the highest degree. Covered in dust and blood, on a slope of rubble, fighting feral ghouls, he still looks like a duelling master.

Gaunt lunges and puts the chainsword through the torso of a second raider, freeing Mkoll enough to tackle the last of the group in quick order. More are running in from the underwalk. Gaunt rotates, extending, and slices the chainsword around in a wide, straight-armed arc that neatly removes the top of a skull like a lid.

Corbec’s on his feet. He pulls his lasrifle in against his gut and flips the toggle over. Then he rakes the mouth of the underwalk. Full auto flash lights up the rubble. Figures twist and jerk. He exhausts a power clip, and then lobs his last grenade down the underwalk to take care of any stragglers.

Gaunt looks around for his cap.

‘Why didn’t you do that?’ he asks Mkoll.

‘You wanted to conserve ammo,’ says Mkoll.

‘In all fairness, he probably could have taken them all with his knife,’ says Corbec.

From up ahead, towards the east boulevard, they hear lasrifles starting to cut loose on full auto. The chatter is unmistakable.

‘Ah. I’ve set a bad example,’ says Corbec.

Gaunt moves forward, shouting orders. He heads towards the front of the advance force, trying to restore firing discipline. Right away, he realises how badly broken their formation is. The ambush to the midsection of the spread has almost cut the advance in two. It’s the beginning of the end. The enemy is exploiting their flaws, breaking them down, cutting them into manageable parts, reducing them. He knows the signs. It’s exactly what he’d do.

It’ll be over in minutes.

The back of the party is lagging too far behind. Gaunt tries to get the forward section to drop back and rejoin it, or at least hold position and not extend the break. It’s still pushing ahead to try to reach the arterial route. Corbec’s hollering at men, calling them by their first names, names Gaunt’s never heard, let alone learned. Full auto fire is clattering away up ahead. Some PDFers loom over the rubble line, and Gaunt drops them with support fire from Domor and Guheen.

‘Single shots! Single shot fire!’ he’s yelling.

He sees the Tanith fanning towards him, firing on full auto. At least one of his orders has got through, he thinks. At least they’ve swung back to keep the unit whole.

Then he’s eyes-on, properly. These Tanith aren’t members of the advance.

Rawne rakes a couple of bursts into the rubble line, and then approaches Gaunt as reinforcements pour in behind him.

‘Major?’

‘Sir.’

‘Surprised to see you.’

‘We ran into Caffran,’ Rawne says.

‘You ran into him?’

‘We saw his flare. He was heading home, but we were already on our way out.’

‘Why is that, major?’ Gaunt asks.

‘Concern was expressed to me by the medical chief that the advance was overdue. A support mission seemed prudent, before it got dark and out of the question.’

‘It’s appreciated, Rawne. As you can see, things are a little lively.’

Rawne keeps looking at his timepiece.

‘Let’s keep falling back apace,’ he says. ‘Let’s not outstay our welcome.’

Gaunt nods. ‘Lead the way.’

Rawne turns and yells out to the men running his flanking units. Varl and Feygor get their fireteams to interlock firing patterns. They lay down a kill zone of las-fire that moves with the Tanith like a shadow. It burns through ammo, but it covers the retreat off the east boulevard and onto the main arterial route. They leave spent munition clips behind them, and the pathetic corpses of the enemy.

Adare and Meryn distribute ammo to Blane and the forward portion of the advance. Gaunt sees Caffran with Varl’s squad. He tosses his rifle and his musette bag back to him. Caffran catches them and nods.

Rawne’s still glancing at his timepiece.

‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’ he shouts. It’s really getting dark. The fluttering, stammering barrage of the gun battle is lighting up the whole city block.

‘We’re going as fast as we can,’ Gaunt says to Rawne.

Rawne looks at him, and sucks in a breath between clenched teeth that suggests that there’s no such thing as too fast.

Gaunt hears a noise, a swift, loud, rushing hiss, the sound of a descent, of a plunge, of an angelic fall from grace. It ends in a noise shock that quakes the ground and nearly knocks him down. It feels like the lightning has found its voice at last.

Then it happens again and again.

Light blinds them. Bright detonations rip through the eastern boroughs of Kosdorf, some as close as a block or two away from their position. Blast overlaps blast, detonation touches detonation. It’s precision wrath. It’s bespoke annihilation.

‘The Ketzok,’ yells Rawne to Gaunt. ‘A little early,’ he admits.

Gaunt watches the heavy shelling for a moment, hand half-shielding his eyes from the flash. Then he turns the Tanith out of the zone with a simple hand signal.

It’s too loud for voices any more.

Dorden cleans his head wound.

‘It’s going to mend nicely,’ he says, dropping the small forceps into an instrument bath. Threads of blood billow through the cleaning solution like ink in water.

Gaunt picks up a steel bowl and uses it as a mirror to examine the sutures.

‘That’s neat work,’ he says. Dorden shrugs.

Outside, in the morning light, the Ketzok artillery is still pounding relentlessly, like the slow, steady movement of a giant clock. Munitions resupply is an hour away, the bombardiers report. A huge pall of smoke is moving north across the sky over the hills.

‘Rawne says you were instrumental in urging him to mount a reinforcement,’ Gaunt says.

Dorden smiles.

‘I’m sure Major Rawne was simply following standard operational practices,’ he says.

Gaunt leaves the medicae tent. There’s still rain in the air, though now it’s spiced with the stink of fyceline from the sustained bombardment. The camp is active. They’ll be striking soon. Directives have come through, order bags from command. The Tanith are being routed to another front line.

He’s got things to think about. A week spent getting the regiment embarked and on the lift ships will give him time.

‘Sir.’

He turns, and sees Corbec.

‘Caligula, I hear,’ says Corbec.

‘That’s the next stop,’ Gaunt agrees. They fall into step.

‘I don’t know much about Caligula,’ says Corbec.

‘Then request a briefing summary from the Munitorum, Corbec,’ says Gaunt. ‘We have libraries of data about the Sabbat Worlds. It would pay the regiment dividends if the officers knew a little bit about the local conditions before they arrived in a fighting area.’

‘I can do that, can I?’ asks Corbec.

‘You’re a regimental colonel,’ says Gaunt. ‘Of course you can.’

Corbec nods.

‘I’ll get on it,’ he says.

He grins, flops back his camo-cape, and produces one of his cigars and a couple of lucifers from his breast pocket.

‘Thought you might enjoy this now we’re outside field discipline conditions,’ he says.

Gaunt takes the gift with a nod. Corbec knocks him a little salute and walks away.

Gaunt goes into his quarters tent to spend an hour packing his kit. The rain is tapping on the roof skin.

His spare field jacket is hanging on the back of the folding chair. Someone’s sponged it clean and brushed up the nap. They’ve taken off the Hyrkan badges and sewn Tanith ones on in their place.

There is no clue at all as to who has done this.

Gaunt takes off the muddy coat and jacket he’s been wearing all night and slips the spare on, not even sure it’s his. He strokes it down, adjusts the cuffs and puts his hands in the pockets.

The letter’s in the right-hand hip pocket.

He slides it out and unfolds it. He’d been so certain it was in his number one field jacket. So certain.

He reads it, and re-reads it, and smiles, hearing the words in Blenner’s voice.

Then he strikes one of the lucifers Corbec gave him, and holds the letter by the lower left-hand corner as he lights the lower right. It burns quickly, with a yellow flame. He holds on to it until the flames approach his fingertips, and then shakes it into the ash box beside his desk.

Then he goes out to find some breakfast.

VERMILION LEVEL

‘After the intense battle to retake the manufacturing hives of Caligula, High Commander Macaroth’s crusade force came about and chased the breaking chaos elements into the edges of Canopus and Nubila Reach. It was the start of the twelfth year of the Sabbat Worlds Campaign, the Imperial liberation of a hundred system cluster in the Segmentum Pacificus, and the first major advantage gained since Slaydo’s massive victory at Balhaut.

‘As the fast fleet components advanced, many regiments of the Imperial Guard, exhausted from the Caligula offensive, took precious shore leave on Pyrites before receiving new battle orders and moving to the next assembly point…’

– from A History of The Later Imperial Crusades

DAY TWO NINETY, NUBILA REACH, DEEP SPACE

The two Faustus-class Interceptors swept in low over a thousand slowly spinning tonnes of jade asteroid and decelerated to coasting velocity. Striated blurs of shift-speed light flickered off their gunmetal hulls and the mauve haze of the Nubila Reach nebula hung as a backdrop for them, a thousand light years wide.

Each of these patrol interceptors was an elegant barb about one hundred paces from jutting nose to raked tail. The Faustus were lean, powerful warships that looked like serrated cathedral spires with splayed flying buttresses at the rear to house the main thrusters. Their armoured flanks bore the Imperial Eagle, and the green markings and insignia of the Segmentum Pacificus Fleet.

In the command seat of the lead ship, Wing Captain Torten LaHain forced down his heart rate as the ship decelerated. Synchronous mind-impulse links hooked his metabolism to the ship’s ancient systems, and he lived and breathed every nuance of its motion, power output and response.

LaHain was a twenty-year veteran, who’d piloted Faustus Interceptors for so long, they seemed an extension of his body.

He glanced down into the flight annex directly below and behind the command seat, where his observation officer was at work at the navigation station.

‘Well?’ he asked over the intercom.

The observer checked off his calculations against several glowing runes on the board. ‘Steer five points starboard. The astropath’s instructions are to sweep down the edge of the gas clouds for a final look, and then it’s back to the fleet.’

Behind him, there was a murmur. The astropath, hunched in his small throne-cradle, stirred. Hundreds of leads linked the astropath’s socket-encrusted skull to the massive sensory apparatus in the Faustus’s belly. Each one was marked with a small, yellowing parchment label, inscribed with words LaHain didn’t want to have to read. There was a smell of incense, and unguents.

‘What’s up with him?’ asked LaHain.

The observer shrugged. ‘Who knows? Who wants to?’ he mused.

The astropath’s brain was constantly surveying and processing the vast wave of astronomical data that the ship’s sensors pumped into it, and psychically probing warpspace beyond. Small patrol ships like this, with their astropathic cargo, were the early warning arm of the Fleet. The work was hard on the psyker’s mind, and the odd moan or grimace was commonplace. There had been worse. They’d gone through a nickel-rich asteroid field the previous week, and the psyker had gone into spasms.

‘Flight check,’ said LaHain into the intercom.

‘Tail turret, ready by the Emperor,’ crackled back the servitor at the rear of the ship.

‘Flight engineer, ready, aye!’ fuzzed the voice of the engine chamber.

LaHain signalled his wingman. ‘Moselle… you run forward and begin the sweep. We’ll lag a way behind you as a double check. Then we’ll pull for home.’

‘Mark that,’ replied the pilot of the other ship, and it gunned forward, a sudden blur that left twinkling pearls in its wake.

LaHain was about to kick in behind when the voice of the astropath came over the link. It was rare for the man to ever speak to the rest of the crew.

‘Captain… move to the following coordinates and hold. I am receiving a signal. A message… source unknown.’

LaHain did as he was instructed and the ship banked around, motors flaring in quick, white bursts. The observer swung all the sensor arrays to bear.

‘What is this?’ asked LaHain, impatient. Unscheduled manoeuvres off a carefully set patrol sweep did not sit comfortably with him.

The astropath took a moment to respond, clearing his throat. ‘It is an astropathic communiqué, struggling to get through the warp. It is at the very edge of its range. I must gather it and relay it to Fleet Command.’

‘Why?’ asked LaHain. This was all too irregular.

‘I sense it is secret. It is primary level intelligence. It is Vermilion level.’

There was a long pause, a silence aboard the small, slim craft broken only by the hum of the drive, the chatter of the displays and the whirr of the air-scrubbers.

‘Vermilion…’ breathed LaHain. It was a near-mythical clearance level. Even main battle schemes usually only warranted a Magenta. He felt an icy tightness in his wrists, a tremor in his heart. Sympathetically, the interceptor’s reactor fibrillated. LaHain swallowed. A routine day had just become very un-routine. He knew he had to commit everything to the correct and efficient recovery of this data.

‘How long do you need?’ he asked over the link.

Another pause. ‘The ritual will take a few moments. Do not disturb me as I concentrate. I need as long as possible,’ said the astropath. There was a phlegmy, strained edge to his voice. In a moment, that voice was murmuring a prayer. The air temperature in the cabin dropped perceptibly.

LaHain flexed his grip on the rudder stick. He looked out of the canopy at the swathe of pinkish mist that folded away from him into the heart of the nebula a billion miles away. The cold, stabbing light of older suns slanted and shafted through it like dawnlight on gossamer. Dark-bellied clouds swirled in slow, silent blossoms.

‘Contacts!’ yelled the observer suddenly. ‘Three! No, four! Fast as hell and coming on strong!’

LaHain snapped to attention. ‘Angle and lead time?’

The observer rattled out a set of coordinates and LaHain steered the nose towards them. ‘They’re coming in fast!’ the observer repeated. ‘Throne of Earth, but they’re moving!’

LaHain looked across his over-sweep board and saw the runic cursors flashing as they edged into the tactical grid.

‘Defence system activated! Weapons to ready!’ he barked. Drum autoloaders chattered in the chin turret forward of him as they armed the autocannons, and power reservoirs whined as they powered up the main forward-firing plasma guns.

‘Wing Two to Wing One!’ Moselle’s voice rasped over the long range voxcaster. ‘They’re all over me! Break and run! Break and run in the name of the Emperor!’

The other Interceptor was coming at him at close to full thrust. LaHain’s enhanced optics, amplified and linked via the canopy’s systems, saw Moselle’s ship while it was still a thousand kilometres away. Behind it, lazy and slow, came the vampiric shape of predatory ships of Chaos. Fire patterns winked in the russet darkness. Yellow traceries of venomous death.

Moselle’s scream – abruptly ended – tore through the voxcast.

The racing Interceptor disappeared in a rapidly expanding, superheated fireball.

The three attackers thundered on through the firewash.

‘They’re coming for us! Bringing her about!’ yelled LaHain and threw the Faustus round, gunning the engines. ‘How much longer?’ he bellowed at the astropath.

‘The communiqué is received. I am now relaying…’ gasped the astropath, at the edge of his limits.

‘Fast as you can! We have no time!’ said LaHain.

The sleek fighting ship blinked forward, thrust-drive roaring blue heat. LaHain rejoiced at the singing of the engine in his blood. He was pushing the threshold tolerances of the ship. Amber alert sigils were lighting his display. He was being crushed into his command chair.

In the tail turret, the gunner servitor traversed the twin autocannons, hunting for a target. He didn’t see the attackers, but he saw their absence: the flickering darkness against the stars.

The turret guns screamed into life, blitzing out a scarlet-tinged, boiling stream of hypervelocity fire.

Indicators screamed shrill warnings in the cockpit. The enemy had obtained multiple target lock.

Down below, the observer was bawling up at LaHain, demanding evasion procedures. Over the link, the flight engineer was saying something about a stress-injection leak.

LaHain was serene.

‘Is it done?’ he asked the astropath calmly.

There was another long pause. The astropath was lolling weakly in his cradle. Near to death, his brain ruined by the trauma of the act, the psyker murmured, ‘It is finished…’

LaHain turned the Interceptor in a savage loop and presented himself to the pursuers with the massive forward plasma array and the nose guns blasting. He couldn’t outrun them or outfight them, but by the Emperor, he’d take at least one with him before he went.

The chin turret spat a thousand heavy bolt rounds a second. The plasma-guns howled phosphorescent death into the void. One of the shadow-shapes exploded in a bright blister of flame, its shredded fuselage and mainframe splitting out and being carried along by the burning, incandescent bow-wave of igniting propellant.

LaHain scored a second kill too. He ripped open the belly of another attacker, spilling its pressurised guts into the void. It burst like a ripe fruit, spinning round in the shuddering impact and spewing its contents like a firetrail after it.

A second later a rain of toxic and corrosive warheads, each a sliver of metal like a dirty needle, raked the Faustus end to end. They detonated the astropath’s head and explosively atomised the observer out through the punctured hull. Another killed the flight engineer outright and exploded the reactor interlock.

Two billiseconds after that, stress fractures shattered the Faustus class Interceptor like a glass bottle. A super-dense explosion boiled out from the core, vaporising the ship and LaHain with it.

The corona of the blast rippled out two kilometres until it vanished in the nebula’s haze.

DAY THREE TEN, PYRITES

The Imperial Needle of Cracia was quite a piece of work, Colonel Colm Corbec of the Tanith Ghosts decided. It towered over Cracia, the largest and oldest city on Pyrites, a three thousand metre ironwork tower, raised four hundred years before, partly in honour of the Emperor but mostly in honour of the engineering skill of the Pyriteans. It was taller than the jagged turrets of the Arbites Precinct, and dwarfed even the great twin towers of the Ecclesiarch palace.

On cloudless days, the city became a giant sundial, with the spire as the gnomon. City dwellers could tell precisely the time of day by which streets of the city were in shadow.

Today was not a cloudless day. It was winter season in Cracia and the sky was a dull, unreflective white like an untuned vis-caster screen. Snow fluttered down out of the leaden sky and iced the gothic rooftops and towers of the old, grey city, edging the ornate decorations, the wrought guttering and brass eaves, the skeletal iron fire escapes and the sills of lancet windows.

But it was warm down here on the streets. Under the stained glass, ironwork awnings that edged every thoroughfare, the walkways and concourses were heated. Kilometres below the city, ancient turbines pumped warm air up to the hypercaust beneath the pavements and circulated under the awning levels. A low-power energy sheath broadcast at first floor height stopped rain or snow from ever reaching the pedestrian levels.

At a terrace cafe, Corbec, first sergeant of the Tanith First-and-Only, a big man with unruly black hair and a smile in his eyes, sipped his beer and rocked back on his black, ironwork chair. They liked black ironwork here on Pyrites. They made everything out of it. Even the beer, by the taste of it.

A shadow apparently bigger than the Imperial Needle blotted out the daylight. ‘Are we set?’ asked Trooper Bragg.

Corbec squinted up at the huge, placid-faced trooper, the biggest man in the regiment. ‘It’s still early. They say this town has quite a nightlife, but it won’t get going until after dark.’

‘Seems dead. No fun,’ said Bragg drearily.

‘Hey, lucky we got Pyrites rather than Guspedin. By all accounts that’s just dust and slag and endless hives.’

The lighting standards down each thoroughfare and under the awnings were beginning to glow into life as the automated cycle took over. But it was still daylight.

‘We’ve been talking–’ Bragg began.

‘Who’s “we”?’ asked Corbec.

‘Uh, Larks and me… and Varl. And Suth.’ Bragg shuffled a little. ‘We heard about this little wagering joint. It might be fun.’

‘Fine.’

‘Cept it’s, uh–’

‘What?’ asked Corbec, knowing full well what the ‘uh’ would be.

‘It’s in a cold zone,’ said Bragg.

Corbec got up and dropped a few coins of the local currency on the glass-topped table next to his empty beer. ‘Trooper, you know the cold zones are off-limits,’ he said smoothly. ‘The regiments have been given four days’ recreation in this city, but that recreation is contingent on several things: reasonable levels of behaviour, so as not to offend or disrupt the citizens of this most ancient and civilised burg; restrictions to the use of prescribed bars, clubs, wager-halls and brothels; and a total ban on Guard personnel leaving the heated areas of the city. The cold zones are lawless.’

Bragg nodded. ‘Yeah… but there are five hundred thousand Imperial Guardsmen on leave in Cracia, clogging up the starports and the tram depots. Each one has been to fething hell and back in the last few weeks. Do you honestly think they’re going to behave themselves?’

Corbec pursed his lips and sighed. ‘No, Bragg. I do not. Tell me where this place you’re talking about is. I’ve an errand or two to run. I’ll meet you there later.’

In the mirror-walled, smoky bar of the Polar Imperial, one of the better hotels in uptown Cracia, right by the Administratum complex, Commissar Vaynom Blenner was describing the destruction of the battleship Eradicus. It was a complex, colourful evocation, and involved the skilled use of a lit cigar, smoke rings, expressive gestures and throaty sound effects.

Around the table, there were appreciative hoots and laughs.

Ibram Gaunt watched and said nothing. Tall, powerful, lean with close-cropped hair, fierce eyes and a face as slender as his name, he was often silent. It disarmed people.

Blenner had always been a showman, even back in their days at the Commissariat. Gaunt always looked forward to their reunions: Blenner was about as close as he came to having an old friend, and it strangely reassured him to see Blenner’s face, constant through the years when so many faces perished and disappeared.

But Blenner was also a terrible boast, and he’d become weak and complacent, enjoying a little too much of the good life. For the last decade, he’d served with the Greygorian Third. The Greys were efficient, hard working, and few regiments were as unswervingly loyal to the Emperor, it was said. They’d spoiled Blenner.

Blenner hailed the waiter and ordered another tray of drinks for the officers at his table. Gaunt’s eyes wandered across the crowded salon, where the officer classes of the Imperial Guard relaxed and mixed.

On the far side of the room, under a vast, gilt-framed oil painting of Imperial Titans striding to war, he caught sight of officers in the grey and gold uniform of the Royal Volpone 50th, the so-called Bluebloods.

One of them was a big, arrogant aristocrat that Gaunt knew all too well – Major Gizhaum Danver de Banzi Haight Gilbear, the Bluebloods’ second in command.

Their gaze met for a few seconds. The exchange was as warm and friendly as a pair of automated range finders getting a mutual target lock.

‘Commissar Gaunt?’

Gaunt looked up. A uniformed hotel porter stood by his armchair, his head tilted to a position that was both obsequious and superior. Snooty ass, thought Gaunt. Loves the Guard all the while we’re saving the universe for him, but let us in his precious hotel bar to relax and he’s afraid we’ll scuff the furniture.

‘There is a boy, sir,’ said the porter disdainfully. ‘A boy in reception who wishes to see you.’

‘Boy?’ asked Gaunt.

‘He said to give you this,’ continued the porter. He held out a silver Tanith ear hoop suspectly between velveted finger and thumb.

Gaunt got to his feet and followed him out.

Across the room, Gilbear watched him go. He beckoned over his aide with a surly finger. ‘Go and find Sergeant Tomas and some of his clique. I think there will be games tonight.’

Gaunt followed the strutting porter out into the marble foyer. His distaste for the place grew with each second. Pyrites was soft, pampered, so far away from the harsh warfronts. They pay their tithes to the Emperor and in return ignore completely the darker truths of life beyond their civilised domain. Even the Imperial troops stationed here as a permanent garrison seemed to have gone soft.

Gaunt broke from his reverie and saw Brin Milo hunched under a potted ouroboros tree. The boy was wearing his Ghost uniform and looked most unhappy.

‘Milo? I thought you were going with the others. Corbec said he’d take you with the Tanith. What are you doing in a stuffy place like this?’

Milo fetched a small data-slate out of his thigh pocket and presented it. ‘This came through the voxcaster after you’d gone, sir. Executive Officer Kreff thought it best it was brought straight to you. And, as I’m supposed to be your adjutant, they gave the job to me.’

Gaunt almost grinned at the boy’s weary tone. He took the slate and keyed it open. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘All I know, sir, is it’s a personal communiqué delivered on an encrypted channel for your attention forty–’ he paused and consulted his timepiece. ‘Forty-seven and a half minutes ago.’

Gaunt studied the gibberish on the slate. Only an identifying touch of his thumbprint on the decoding icon unscrambled it. For his eyes only indeed.

It read: ‘Have need of your services sooner than anticipated. You only friend in area close enough to assist. Go to 1034 Needleshadow Boulevard. Use our old identifier. Treasure to be had. Vermilion treasure. Rael.’

Gaunt snapped the slate shut as if caught red-handed. His heart pounded for a second. Throne, how many years had it been since his heart had pounded with that feeling… was it really fear?

He saw Milo looking at him in curiosity.

‘Trouble?’ asked the boy innocuously.

‘A task to perform…’ murmured Gaunt. He opened the data-slate again and pressed the ‘wipe’ rune to expunge the message.

‘Can you drive?’ he asked Milo.

‘Can I?’ said the boy excitedly.

Gaunt calmed his bright-eyed enthusiasm with a wave of his hand. ‘Go down to the motorpool and scare us up some transport. A staff car. Tell them I sent you.’

Milo hurried off. Gaunt stood for a moment in silence. He took two deep breaths… and then a hearty slap on the back almost felled him.

‘Ibram! You dog! You’re missing the party!’ growled Blenner.

‘Vey, I’ve got a bit of business to take care of…’

‘No no no!’ said the tipsy, red-faced commissar, smoothing the creases in his leather greatcoat. ‘How many times do we get together to talk of old times, eh? How many? Once every damn decade it seems like! I’m not letting you out of my sight! You’ll never come back, I know you!’

‘Vey… really, it’s just tedious regimental stuff…’

‘I’ll come with you then! Get it done in half the time! Two commissars, eh? Put the fear of the Throne Itself into them, I tell you!’

‘Really, you’d be bored… it’s a very boring task…’

‘All the more reason I come! To make it less boring! Eh? Eh?’ exclaimed Blenner. He edged the vintage brandy bottle that he had commandeered out of his coat pocket so that Gaunt could see it. So could everyone else in the foyer.

Any more of this, thought Gaunt, and I might as well announce my activities over the tannoy. He grabbed Blenner by the arm and led him down to the garage entrance.

‘You can come,’ he hissed, ‘Just… behave! And be quiet!’

The girl gyrating on the apron stage to the sounds of the tambour band was quite lovely and almost completely undressed, but Major Rawne was not looking at her.

He stared across the table in the low, smoky light as Vandross Geel poured two shot glasses full of oily, clear liquor.

Even as a skeleton, Geel would have been a huge man. But upholstered as he was in three hundred kilos of chunky flesh, he made even Bragg look undernourished. Major Rawne knew full well it would take over three times his own body mass to match the opulently dressed racketeer. He was also totally unafraid.

‘We drink, soldier boy,’ said Geel in his thick Pyritean accent and lifted one shot class with a gargantuan hand.

‘We drink,’ agreed Rawne, picking up his own glass. ‘Though I would prefer you address me as Major Rawne. Racketeer boy.’

There was a dead pause. The crowded cold zone bar stilled. The girl stopped gyrating.

Geel laughed.

‘Good! Good! Very strong! Ha ha ha!’ He chuckled and knocked his drink back in one. The bar resumed talk and motion, relieved.

Rawne slowly and extravagantly gulped his drink. Then he lifted the decanter and drained the other litre of drink without even blinking. He knew that it was a rye-based alcohol with a chemical structure similar to that used in troop transport anti-freeze. He also knew he’d taken four counter-intoxicant tabs before coming in. Four tabs that had cost fortune on the black market trade, but it was worth it. It was like drinking spring water.

Geel forgot to close his mouth for a moment and then recovered his composure.

‘Major Rawne can drink like Pyritean!’ he said with a complimentary tone.

‘So the Pyriteans would like to think…’ said Rawne. ‘Now let’s to business.’

‘Come this way,’ said Geel and got to his feet. Rawne fell into step behind him and Geel’s four huge bodyguards fell in behind him.

Everyone in the bar watched them leave by the back door.

On stage, the girl had just shed her final, tiny garment and was in the process of spinning it around one finger prior to hurling it into the crowd. When she realised no one was watching, she stomped off in a huff.

In a snowy alley behind the club, a grey, beetle-nosed, six-wheeler truck was waiting. ‘Liquor. Smokes. Text slates with dirty books. Everything you asked for,’ said Geel expansively.

‘You’re a man of your word,’ said Rawne.

‘Now, the money. Two thousand Imperial credits. Don’t waste my time with local rubbish. Two thousand Imperial.’

Rawne nodded and clicked his fingers.

Trooper Feygor stepped out of the shadows carrying a bulging rucksack.

‘My associate, Mister Feygor,’ said Rawne. ‘Show him the stuff, Feygor.’

Feygor stood the rucksack down in the snow and opened it. He reached in.

And pulled out a laspistol.

The first two shots hit Geel and smashed him back down the alley.

With practised ease, Feygor grinned as he put an explosive blast through the skulls of the outraged bodyguards.

Rawne dashed over to the truck and climbed up into the cab.

‘Let’s go!’ he roared to Feygor who scrambled up onto the side even as Rawne threw it into gear and roared it out of the alleyway.

As they screamed away under the archway at the head of the alley, a big dark shape dropped down into the truck, landing on the tarp-wrapped contraband in the flatbed.

Feygor, hanging on tight and monkeying up the restraints onto the cargo bed, saw the stowaway and lashed out at him. A powerful jab brought him down cold and laid him out in the canvas folds of the tarp.

At the wheel, Rawne saw Feygor fall in the rear view scope and panicked as the attacker swung into the cab beside him.

‘Major,’ said Corbec.

‘Corbec!?’ Rawne exploded. ‘You! Here?’

‘I’d keep your eyes on the road if I were you,’ said Corbec glancing back. ‘I think Geel’s men are after a word with you.’

The truck raced on down the snowy street. Behind it came four angry limousines.

‘Oh, feth!’ said Major Rawne.

The big, black staff-track roared down the boulevard under the glowing lamps in their ironwork frames. Smoothly and deftly it slipped around the light evening traffic, changing lanes. Drivers seemed willing to give way to the big, sinister machine with its throaty engine note and its gleaming double-headed eagle crest.

Behind armoured glass in the tracked passenger section, Gaunt leaned forward in the studded leather seats and pressed the speaker switch. Beside him, Blenner poured two large snifters of brandy and chuckled.

‘Milo,’ said Gaunt into the speaker. ‘Not so fast. I’d like to draw as little attention to ourselves as possible, and it doesn’t help with you going for some new speed record.’

‘Understood, sir.’ said Milo over the speaker.

Sat forward astride the powerful nose section, Milo flexed his his hands on the handlebar grips and grinned. The speed dropped. A little.

Gaunt ignored the glass Blenner was offering him and flipped open a data-slate map of the city’s streetplan.

Then he thumbed the speaker again. ‘Next left, Milo, then follow the underpass to Zorn Square.’

‘That… that takes us into the cold zones, commissar,’ replied Milo over the link.

‘You have your orders, adjutant,’ Gaunt said simply and snapped off the intercom switch.

‘This isn’t Guard business at all, is it, old man?’ asked Blenner wryly.

‘Don’t ask questions and you won’t have to lie later, Vey. In fact, keep out of sight and pretend you’re not here. I’ll get you back to the bar in an hour or so.’

I hope, he added under his breath.

Rawne threw the truck around a steep bend. The six chunky wheels slid alarming on the wet snow. Behind it, the heavy pursuit vehicles thrashed and slipped.

‘This is the wrong way!’ said Rawne. ‘We’re going deeper into the damn cold zone!’

‘We didn’t have much choice,’ replied Corbec. ‘They’re boxing us in. Didn’t you plan your escape route?’

Rawne said nothing and concentrated on his driving. They were flung around another treacherous turn.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked Corbec at last.

‘Just asking myself the same thing,’ Corbec reflected lightly. ‘Well, truth is, I thought I’d do what any good regimental colonel does for his men on a shore leave rotation and take a trip into the downtown districts to rustle up a little black market drink and the like. The men always appreciate a colonel who looks after them.’

Rawne scowled, fighting the wheel.

‘Then I happened to see you and your sidekick Feygor, and I realised that you were doing what any good sneaking low-life weasel would do on shore leave rotation. To wit, scamming some local out of contraband so he could sell it to his comrades. So I thought to myself… I’ll join forces. Rawne’s got exactly what I’m after and without my help, he’ll be dead and floating down the Cracia River by dawn.’

‘Your help?’ spat Rawne. The glass at the rear of the cab crazed suddenly as bullets smacked into it.

Both men ducked.

‘Yeah…’ said Corbec, pulling a laspistol out of his coat. ‘I’m a better shot than Feygor.’

Corbec wound his door window down and leaned out, firing back a quick burst of heavy las fire from the speeding truck.

The front screen of one of the black vehicles exploded and it skidded, clipping one of its companions before slamming into a wall and spinning, nose to tail, three times before coming to rest in a spray of glass and debris.

‘I rest my case,’ said Corbec.

‘There’s still three of them out there!’ said Rawne.

‘True,’ said Corbec, loading a fresh power cell, ‘but canny chap that I am, I thought of bringing spare ammo.’

Gaunt made Milo park the staff-track round the corner from Needleshadow Boulevard. He climbed out into the cold night. ‘Stay here,’ he told Blenner, who waved back jovially from the cabin. ‘And you,’ Gaunt told Milo.

‘Are you armed, sir?’ the boy asked.

Gaunt realised he wasn’t. He shook his head.

Milo drew his silver Tanith dagger and passed it to the commissar. ‘You can never be sure,’ he said simply.

Gaunt nodded his thanks and moved off.

The cold zones like this were a grim reminder that society in a vast city like Cracia was deeply stratified. At the heart were the great Palace of the Ecclesiarch, and the Needle itself. Around that, the city centre and the opulent, wealthy residential areas were patrolled, guarded, heated and screened, safe little microcosms of security and comfort. There, every benefit of Imperial citizenship was enjoyed.

But beyond, the bulk of the city was devoid of such luxuries. Kilometre after kilometre of crumbling, decaying city blocks, buildings and tenements a thousand years old, rotted on unlit, unheated, and uncared for streets. Crime was rife here, and there were no Arbites. Their control ran out at the inner city limits. It was a human zoo, an urban wilderness that surrounded civilisation. It reminded Gaunt of the Imperium itself – the opulent, luxurious heart surrounded by a terrible reality it knew very little about.

Light snow, too wet to settle, drifted down. The air was cold and moist.

Gaunt strode down the littered pavement.

1023 Needleshadow Boulevard was a dark, haunted relic. A single, dim light glowed on the sixth floor.

Gaunt crept in. The foyer smelled of damp carpet and mildew. There were no lights, but he found the stairwell lit by hundreds of candles stuck in assorted bottles. The light was yellow and smoky.

By the time he reached the third floor, he could hear the music. Some kind of old dance hall ballad by the sound of it.

The old recording crackled. It sounded like a ghost.

Sixth floor, the top flat. Shattered plaster littered the worn hall carpet. Somewhere in the shadows, vermin squeaked.

The music was louder, murmuring in this room on an old audio-player.

The apartment door was ajar and light, brighter than the hall candles, shone out, the violet glow of a self-powered portable field lamp.

His fingers around the hilt of the knife in his greatcoat pocket, Gaunt entered.

The room was bare to the floorboards and the peeling paper. The audio-player was perched on top of a stack of old books, warbling softly. The lamp was in the corner, casting its spectral violet glow all around the room.

‘Is there anyone here?’ asked Gaunt, surprised at the sound of his own voice.

A shadow moved in an adjoining bathroom.

‘What’s the word?’ it said.

‘What?’

‘I haven’t got time to humour you. The word.’

‘Eagleshard,’ said Gaunt, using the code word he and Rael Tagore had shared years before on Estragon Prime.

The figure seemed to relax. A shabby, elderly man in a dirty civilian suit entered the room so that Gaunt could see him. He was lowering a small, snub-nosed pistol of a type Gaunt wasn’t familiar with.

‘Who are you?’ Gaunt asked.

The man arched his eyebrows in reply. ‘Names are really quite inappropriate under these circumstances.’

‘If you say so,’ said Gaunt.

The man crossed to the audio-player and keyed in another track. Another old fashioned tune, a jaunty love song full of promises, started up.

‘I am a facilitator, a courier, and also very probably a dead man,’ the stranger told Gaunt. ‘Have you any idea of the scale and depth of this business?’

Gaunt shrugged.

‘I have spoken to one person, the person who sent me here tonight to meet you. I have no illusions as the seriousness of the matter, but as to the depth, the complexity…’

The man studied him. ‘The Navy’s Intelligence Network has established a cobweb of spy systems throughout the Sabbat Worlds to try and ascertain the nature of Macaroth’s true agenda.’

‘So I have been told.’

‘I’m a part of that cobweb. So are you, if you but knew it. The truth we are uncovering is frightening. Warmaster Macaroth has Imperial dreams, my friend.’

Gaunt felt impatience rising in him. He hadn’t come all this way to listen to arch speculation. ‘Why am I here?’ he said.

The man paused. ‘Two nights ago, associates of mine in Cracia intercepted a signal sent astropathically from a scout ship in the Nubila Reach. It was destined for Macaroth’s Fleet headquarters. Its clearance level was Vermilion.’

Gaunt blinked. Vermilion.

The man took a small crystal from his coat pocket and held it up so that it winked in the violet light.

‘The data is stored on this crystal. It took the lives of two psykers to capture the signal and transfer it to this. Macaroth must not get his hands on it.’

He held it out to Gaunt.

Gaunt shrugged. ‘You’re giving it to me?’

The man pursed his lips. ‘Since my network here on Cracia intercepted this, we’ve been taken apart. Macaroth’s own spy network is after us, desperate to retrieve the data. I have no one left to safeguard this to. I contacted my off-world superior, and he told me to await a trusted ally. Whoever you are, friend, you are held in high regard. You are trusted. In this cold war, that means a lot.’

Gaunt took the crystal from the man’s trembling fingers. He didn’t quite know what to say. He didn’t want this vile, vital thing anywhere near himself, but he was beginning to realise what was at stake.

The older man smiled at Gaunt. He began to say something.

The wall behind him exploded in a firestorm of light and vaporising bricks. Two fierce blue beams of las fire punched into the room and sliced the man into three distinct sections before he could move.

Gaunt dived for cover in the apartment doorway. He drew Milo’s blade, for all the good that would do.

He could hear feet thundering up the stairs.

From his vantage point at the door he watched as two armoured troopers swung in through the exploded wall. They were big, clad in black, insignia-less combat armour, carrying compact lascannons. Adhesion clamps on their knees and forearms showed how they had scaled the outside walls to blow their way in with a directional limpet mine.

Lasguns in hand, they surveyed the room, sweeping their green laser tagger beams.

One spotted Gaunt prone in the doorway, and opened fire.

Las-fire punched through the doorframe, kicking up splinters and began stitching along the plasterboard wall.

Gaunt dived headlong. He was dead! Dead, unless–

The old man’s pistol lay on the worn carpet under his nose. It must have skittered there when he was cut down.

Gaunt grabbed it, thumbed off the safety and rolled over to fire.

The gun was small, but the odd design clearly marked it as an ancient and priceless specialised weapon. It had a kick like a mule and a roar like a Basilisk.

The first shot surprised Gaunt as much as the two stealth troops and it blew a hatch-sized hole in the wall.

The second shot exploded one of the attackers.

A little rune on the grip of the pistol had changed from ‘5’ to ‘3’. Gaunt sighed. This thing clearly wasn’t over-blessed with a deep magazine.

The footfalls on the stairway got louder and three more stealth troopers stumbled up, wafting the candle flames as they ran.

Gaunt dropped to a kneeling pose and blew the head off the first. But the other two opened fire up the well with their lasguns and then the remaining trooper in the apartment behind him began firing too.

The cross-blast of three lasguns on rapid-burst tore the top hallway to pieces. Gaunt dropped flat so hard he smashed his hand on the boards and the gun pattered away down the top steps.

After a moment or two, the firing stopped, and the attackers began to edge forward to inspect their kill. Dust and smoke drifted in the half-light. Some of the shots had punched up through the floor and carpet just centimetres from Gaunt’s nose, leaving smoky, dimpled holes. But Gaunt was intact.

When the trooper from the apartment poked his head round the door, fifteen centimetres of hard-flung Tanith silver impaled his throat and dropped him to floor, jerking and spasming.

Gaunt leapt up. A second, two seconds, and he would have the fallen man’s lasgun in his hands, ready to blast down the stairs….

But the other two from below were in line of sight. There was a flash and he realised their green laser taggers had swept over his face and dotted on his heart.

There was a quick and frantic burst of las-fire and a billow of noxious burning fumes washed up the stairs over Gaunt.

Blenner climbed the stairs into view, carefully over stepping the smouldering bodies, a smoking laspistol in his hand.

‘Got tired of waiting,’ he sighed. ‘Looks like you needed a hand anyway, eh, ’Bram?’

The grey truck, with its single remaining pursuer, slammed into high gear as it went over the rise in the snowy road, leaving the ground for a stomach-shaking moment.

‘What’s that?’ said Rawne wildly a moment after they landed again and the thrashing wheels reengaged the slippery roadway.

‘It’s called a roadblock, I believe,’ said Corbec.

Ahead, the cold zone street was closed by a row of oilcan fires, concrete poles and wire. Several armed shapes were waiting for them.

‘Get off the road! Get off the road!’ bawled Corbec. He leaned over and wrenched at the crescent steering wheel.

The truck slewed sideways in the slush and barrelled beetle-nose first through the sheet-wood doors of an old, abandoned warehouse.

There, in the dripping darkness, it grumbled to a halt, Its firing note choking away to a dull cough.

‘Now what?’ hissed Rawne.

‘Well, there’s you, me and Feygor…’ Corbec began. Already the trooper was beginning to pull himself groggily up in the back. ‘Three of Gaunt’s Ghosts, the best damn fighting regiment in the Guard. We excel at stealth work and look! We’re here in a dark warehouse.’

Corbec readied his laspistol. Rawne pulled his own and did the same. He grinned.

‘Let’s do it,’ he said.

Years later, in the speakeasies and clubs of the Cracian cold zones, the story of the shoot-out at the old Vinchy Warehouse would do the rounds. Two thousand shots were fired, they say, one thousand, nine hundred and eighty of them by the twenty armed men, Vandross Geel’s enforcers, who went in to smoke out the off-world gangsters.

All twenty died, each shot by a single lasblast (which accounts neatly for the other twenty shots).

No one ever saw the off-world gangsters again, or found the truck laden with stolen contraband that had sparked the whole affair off.

The staff-track whipped along down the cold zone street, heading back to the safety of the city core.

In the back, Blenner poured another two snifters of his expensive brandy. This time, Gaunt took the one offered and knocked it back.

‘You don’t have to tell me what’s going on, ‘Bram. Not if you don’t want to.’

Gaunt sighed. ‘If I had to, would you listen?’

Blenner chuckled. ‘I’m loyal to the Emperor, Gaunt, and loyal to my old friends. What else do you need to know?’

Gaunt smiled and held his glass out as Blenner refilled it.

‘Nothing, I suppose.’

Blenner leaned forward, earnest for the first time in years. ‘Look, ‘Bram… I may seem like an old fogey to you, grown fat on the luxuries of having a damn near perfect Regiment… but I haven’t forgotten what the fire feels like. I haven’t forgotten the reason I’m here. You can trust me to hell and back and I’ll be there for you.’

‘And the Emperor,’ Gaunt reminded him with a grin.

‘And the bloody Emperor,’ said Blenner and they clinked glasses.

‘I say,’ said Blenner a moment later, ‘Why is your boy slowing down?’

Milo pulled up, wary. The two staff-tracks blocking the road ahead had their headlamps on full beam, but Milo could see they were painted in the colours of the Volpone Bluebloods.

Large, shaven-headed figures armed with batons and entrenching tools were climbing out to meet them.

Gaunt climbed out of the cabin as Milo brought them to a halt. Snow drifted down. He squinted at the men beyond the lights.

‘Gilbear,’ he hissed.

‘Gaunt,’ said Gilbear, stepping forward. He was stripped to his vest and oiled like a prizefighter. The wooden spoke in his hands slapped into a meaty palm.

‘A reckoning, I think,’ he said.

Gaunt sighed. ‘Out here, in the cold zones, where our bodies won’t be reported for months. An opportunity for you and your numerous brainless brethren to kick some manners into me and my two friends.’

‘Put like that… yes.’

‘A moment, please…’ said Gaunt holding up a finger. He turned to Milo and whispered, ‘Brin… just how fast can you drive this buggy?’

‘Fast enough,’ whispered Milo, ‘and I know exactly where to go…’

Gaunt turned back to the Blueblood heavies in the lamplight and smiled. ‘After due consultation with my staff, Gilbear, I can now safely say: burn in hell, you mindless dog!’

He leapt back aboard. Milo had the track gunned and slewed around in a moment, even as the enraged Guardsmen rushed them.

Another three seconds and Gaunt’s ride was roaring off down the snowy street at a dangerous velocity, the big engines raging.

Squabbling and cursing, Gilbear and his men leapt into their own machines and gave chase.

Trooper Bragg kissed his lucky dice and let all three of them fly. A cheer went up across the wagering room and piles of chips were pushed his way.

‘Go on, Bragg!’ chuckled Mad Larkin at his side, ‘do it again, you fething old drunk!’

Bragg chuckled and scooped up the dice.

This was the life, he thought. Far away from the warzone and the death, here in a smoke filled dome in the cold zone back end of an ancient city, him and his friends, a few pretty girls and wager tables open all night.

Varl was suddenly at his shoulder.

‘The game can wait, Bragg… we’ve got business.’

Bragg and Larkin kissed their painted lady friends goodbye and followed Varl out through the rear exit onto the boarding ramp. Suth was there, Meryn, Caffran, Kalen, Obel, Brostin, Raglon… almost twenty of the Ghosts.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Bragg.

Caffran jerked his thumb down to where Corbec, Rawne and Feygor were unloading booze and smokes from a battered six wheeler.

‘Colonel’s got us some tasty stuff to share, bless his Tanith heart.’

‘Very nice,’ said Bragg licking his lips, not entirely sure why Rawne and Feygor looked so annoyed. Corbec smiled up at them all.

‘Get everyone out here! Lets have a party, boys! For Tanith! For us!’

There was cheering and clapping. Varl leapt down into the bay and opened a box with his Tanith knife. He threw bottles up to those around.

‘Hey!’ said Raglon suddenly, pointing out into the snowy darkness beyond the club’s bay. ‘Incoming!’

The staff track slid into the bay behind Corbec’s truck and Gaunt leapt out.

A cheer went up and somebody tossed him a bottle.

Gaunt tore of the stopper, took a deep swing and then pointed out into the darkness.

‘Lads! I could do with a hand…’ he began.

Gilbear leaned forward in the cab of his speeding staff-track, and looked through the screen where the wiper was slapping snow away.

‘Now we have him! He’s stopped at that place ahead!’

Gilbear flexed his hand and struck it with his baton.

Then he saw the crowds of jeering Ghosts around the drive-in bay. A hundred… two hundred.

‘Oh... no,’ he managed.

The bar was almost empty and it was almost dawn. Ibram Gaunt sipped the last of his drink and eyed Veynom Blenner, who was asleep face down on the bar beside him.

Gaunt took out the crystal and tossed it up on his hand once, twice.

Corbec was suddenly beside him.

‘A long night, eh, commissar?’

Gaunt looked at him, catching the crystal in a tight fist.

‘Maybe the longest so far, Colm. I hear you had some fun.’

‘At Rawne’s expense, you’ll no doubt be pleased to hear. Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’

Gaunt smiled. ‘I’d rather buy you a drink,’ he said, motioning to the weary barkeep. ‘And yes, I’d love to tell you. And I will, when the time comes. Are you loyal, Colm Corbec?’

Corbec looked faintly hurt. ‘To the Emperor, I’d give my life,’ he said without hesitating.

Gaunt nodded. ‘And I too. The path ahead is really hard. As long as I can count on you.’

Corbec said nothing but held out his glass. Gaunt touched it with his own. There was a tiny chime.

‘Gaunt’s Ghosts,’ said Corbec.

Gaunt smiled softly.

‘Gaunt’s Ghosts.’

IN REMEMBRANCE

The Gaunt’s Ghosts novel Necropolis put Commissar Gaunt and the Tanith First in the front line of the desperate defence of the hive-city Vervunhive against their Chaos-infested rival Ferrozoica. It proved a momentous conflict for the Tanith. As well as testing them to their limits, it introduced a slew of new Verghastite characters who would quickly become veteran regulars of the unit. There was tragedy as well: by the end, many Tanith would never leave while Gaunt himself was critically wounded, felled at the moment of his triumph over the evil warlord Heritor Aspodael. But even while their commissar lies at the brink of death, the Tanith First soldier on through the dead city of Vervunhive.

To tell you the truth, it was a long time ago and I didn’t really spend much time with them. It’s pushing it to say I knew them at all, really. It was just a job, you see. A well paid commission between my more serious works. I never expected it to become… Well, the thing I am most famous for.

I doubt any of them remember me. I honestly doubt any of them are alive any more. It’s been sixty years since the hive war on Verghast, and Imperial Guardsman is not a career with long-term prospects.

No, they’re probably all long dead by now. If so, may the Emperor of Mankind rest them, every one. I had a friend who worked in the Munitorum at NorthCol who was kind enough to pass me copies of Imperial dispatches so I could follow their movements and fortunes. For a few years, it pleased me to keep track of them. When I read of their successes on Hagia and Phantine, I poured a glass of joiliq and sat in my studio, toasting their name.

But I stopped after a while. Sooner or later, I knew, the news would be bad. I have my memories, and they’re enough.

I was a young man then. Just twenty-eight. I actually trained, would you believe it, in the Scholam Lapidae in Ferrozoica. Zoica, of all places! But by the time of the war I had been living and working in NorthCol for about seven years. I’d visited Vervunhive half a dozen times, usually in regard of a commission, twice to consult with a fine toolmaker whose tungsten-nosed chisels I favoured. He died during the siege. A loss to my profession.

I well remember arriving in Vervunhive in the first days after the conflict. I barely recognised the place. War had smashed the majesty out of it and left it crumpled and deformed. It reminded me of nothing so much as a toppled statue; brought down, shattered, its scattered debris hinting at its former grace. You could trace what it had been from the wreckage but you could never put it back together again.

And they never did.

I remember getting off the transport in the gusting smoke and thinking that it didn’t much look like a victory.

No matter where you went, there was smoke. Ash caked every surface, inside and out. Sooty flakes of it billowed in the air. The great bulk of the Main Spine was miserably buckled and punctured, and wept smoke from more holes than I could count. The sky was black. So very black. They said the smoke-storms roiling from Vervunhive could be seen from space.

I was utterly lost for a second. It had expected it to be bad, but this…

A voice started me out of my reverie. It said something like, ‘What are you standing there for, you gakking fool?’ Something like that, only more colourful. I found a VPHC officer glowering at me and realised I was standing in the middle of the transit concourse with floods of people moving around me, along with loaders, transports, troop trucks. I was pretty much in the way, gawping there like that, though to tell the truth only the VPHC staffer seemed to care. I showed him my papers.

He seemed contemptuous. I think he actually laughed at my explanation of why I was there. Then he pointed me over to the far side of the concourse, through the crowds, to where men were loading a grimy truck under a shrapnel-puckered awning.

‘They’re the ones you want,’ he said.

I picked up my bag and walked across to them. My throat was already dry with the omnipresent smoke. Six men were working as a human chain to sling crates into the flatbed. They were all dressed in matt-black fatigues which were patched and ragged and in desperate need of boil washing. The men were uniformly black haired and pale skinned. Most had tattoos on their cheeks, brows or forearms, and silver studs in their ears. The biggest of them was a hairy brute with a fabulously tangled beard and huge arms like tree limbs. Blue spirals wound up through the black hair on those massive forearms. He was whistling a jaunty tune, but his lips were so dry and cracked, the noise was more like the whine of a weary dog.

His name was Colm Corbec, and he was, incredibly, the colonel.

‘Who’re you?’ he said, hardly pausing in his work.

‘Thoru. Jeshua Thoru. The… uh… artist.’

‘Never heard of you.’

‘Well,’ I began, ‘I’m not famous, as such… I never supposed you would have…’

He stopped his work suddenly and looked at me. The men behind him thumped to a halt, straining with boxes. ‘I’m sure you’re very good,’ he said kindly, ‘I meant no offence. Me and fine art, we’re not, you know, close. I wouldn’t know an oil painting if it came and bit me on the arse. You a painter?’

‘No, I’m a sculptor.’

‘A sculptor, eh?’ he nodded at that, as if impressed, and resumed his labour, catching a carton and humping it off onto the truck. ‘A sculptor. Fancy. You do statues, then?’

‘Uh, yes. Actually, I specialise in bas-relief friezes and installations, but I…’ I realised I was losing him fast. ‘Yes, I do statues.’

‘Good for you.’

‘I’ve been commissioned,’ I said.

‘Me too, lad. I’m a colonel.’

‘No, I…’ I paused. The other men were looking at me like I was a madman. One of them, a good-looking, sharp-eyed man younger and smaller than his commander, flexed an augmetic shoulder and eyed me cautiously.

‘I think he means artistically commissioned, chief,’ he said.

‘Does he now?’ said Corbec.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘House Chass has paid me to produce a monument in honour of this… event.’

‘What event?’

‘The victory of Vervunhive,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ said Corbec. He looked around, as if seeing for the first time the mutilated, burning city. ‘So that’s what this is.’

‘My papers are official and up to date,’ I said, producing them. He wasn’t interested in looking. ‘I’ve been granted permission to interview the Tanith First in order to… uhm… plan my work.’

‘Us?’ said the younger man with the augmetic shoulder.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Lady Chass was most specific. She wanted the Tanith First especially to be commemorated.’

‘I’ve never been commemorated before,’ said the younger man, a sergeant as it seemed from what was left of his rank pins.

‘Keep working at that pace, Varl,’ said Corbec, ‘and I’ll commemorate you myself. With the toe of me boot.’

They finished loading the truck and climbed aboard. I hesitated, not sure what to do. Corbec looked down from the cab at me. ‘Well, lad,’ he said. ‘You’d better come with us, hadn’t you?’

The Guard transport truck had clearly been wounded in the suspension during the fighting. We rattled down one street and the next, bone-shaken. I rode in the cab, squeezed in between Corbec and the sergeant. After a few minutes, the latter sniffed.

‘Funny smell,’ he said. ‘Sweet, scenty.’

‘Yeah,’ said Corbec, also sniffing. I couldn’t smell anything except the rank odour of unwashed bodies, old sweat and smoke. ‘Have you had a bath today?’ he asked me.

‘Yes!’ I said indignantly.

‘That’d be it, then,’ said Corbec.

‘Lucky bastard,’ said the other, Varl.

We joined a main arterial, slowing to skirt around burnt-out vehicles and sags of shelled rubble where building fronts had collapsed out over the roadway. Ahead, habbers were queuing for food and basic humanitarian supplies at a relief station set up in an old assembly plant. The arterial was almost a kilometre long, and the ragged queue lined it from end to end.

Corbec stared at them from the truck’s filthy window as we drove by. The homeless, the bereaved, the hungry, the sick. Thin people with hollow faces and broken hopes, their eyes blank and sunken. Their skin was uniformly white, their clothing grey with ash and black with dirt. It was as if the world had become monochrome. He seemed fascinated.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘They… they look like the old photopicts of me grandparents and kin,’ he replied with surprising honesty. There was a terrible sadness in his tone. ‘We had this great nalwood mantle over the kitchen hearth back home in County Pryze. Me mam stood the photopicts there, each one in a little frame. Uncles, aunts, distant cousins, weddings, baptisms. I always thought they looked so stiff and awkward, so soulless, you know? Black and white faces, like those out there.’

His words were mournful, and quite unlike anything I had ever expected to hear coming from such a hairy brute of a warrior. Lady Chass had asked me to try and capture the soul of the Tanith, and here, unexpectedly and without much searching, I seemed to have glimpsed it.

‘Sometimes,’ Corbec added, clearing his throat, ‘and now would be one of those times, I wished I’d stuffed a few of those ragged old picts into me kitbag the morning I left home for the Founding Fields. They’d meant much to me, just relatives I’d barely met. Never met. Folks whose lives I knew nothing about. But now, if only I had them, they’d be like lifeline back to Tanith.’

‘Where is Tanith?’ I made the mistake of asking.

‘Nowhere, Mister Artist, sir,’ Corbec said, suddenly rousing out of his despond. ‘It’s dead and it’s gone and we’re all that’s left. That’s what makes us ghosts, you see.’

The long line of miserable faces continued to flicker past the cab windows.

‘Let me get this straight… we won here, right, chief?’ asked Sergeant Varl snidely. Varl was driving the truck, a contraband lho-stick dangling from his lips. The heady fumes filled the cab and made my eyes water, but Corbec seemed content to let it pass.

‘Yeah, we won. Behold and marvel, this is what winning looks like.’

Varl pulled the truck into the loading dock of Medical Hall 67/mv. ‘Stay here,’ Corbec told him, climbing down from the cab. ‘You can come with me, if you like,’ he said to me as an afterthought and strode off towards the front steps of the battered building. I ran to catch up. Almost immediately, we were surrounded by children. Hab-urchins, refugees, all smeared in filth.

I didn’t know what to do. Corbec had handed out the last of his dry rations and calorie packs days ago. The children mobbed him, pulling at his hands, tugging at his fatigues, ignoring his repeated murmur of apology.

The truck horn sounded. The kids looked round.

‘Hey!’ called Varl. ‘Hey, over here! C’mon! Cake-bars!’ He held up some of the foil-wrapped bars and waggled them.

The flock of children pulled away from us and swarmed around the truck, leaping to catch the cakes as Varl tossed them out from the carton on the seat.

Corbec watched for a moment and smiled. ‘Varl and me scored the cake rations from a collapsed Munitorum storehouse. We’d intended them to be a treat for the Ghosts.’ I realised he thought Varl had made a good call. This was more important.

We entered the Medical Hall. Inside the doorway was a stack of leaking sacks full of medical waste that lent the entrance a ghastly, pervasive fragrance. Beyond that was a train of linen carts, piled with soiled bedding. Two medics were fast asleep on the stacks of discoloured sheets. Even the roar of the incoming liberation warships hadn’t woken them. They had worked until they had dropped. Someone had probably put them there.

Corbec knew the route to the room. He been visiting every day for over two weeks now, he said. He was looking for someone called Dorden.

‘Doc? Doc?’

‘He’s sleeping,’ said a woman quietly, coming in behind us.

Her name was Curth, Corbec told me later. He’d met her before a few times, but didn’t know her at all well. A Verghastite local, a chief surgeon. Fething pretty, he said, if you liked small, well-made women with heart-shaped faces, and Corbec clearly did. But, he said emphatically, as if I was in any doubt, fancying Curth was like fancying the wife of a Sector Governor. He was a lowly spitball colonel and she was a senior civilian medic. Doc Dorden had the highest respect for her, and that was enough for a simple soul like Corbec. She’d proved herself here at Vervunhive. Corbec didn’t think much of the idea of women in combat zones, but Curth was somebody the Ghosts could really use. He wondered if she’d heard about Warmaster Macaroth’s Act of Consolation. Probably she had. There wasn’t a chance in feth she’d take it up, in his opinion.

‘Act of Consolation?’ I had asked.

‘A recruitment drive,’ he had explained. ‘A chance for brave Vervunhivers to become Ghosts like me.’

Anyway, she had appeared behind us, like a ghost herself.

‘Is he alright?’

‘He’s stable, colonel,’ said Curth.

‘I meant the Doc, actually.’

‘Oh.’ She smiled. It was a damn fine smile, and I could tell Corbec enjoyed it. ‘Yes, he’s fine. Tired. He pulled three shifts straight and wasn’t going to sleep even then. So I… I spiked his caffeine with aeldramol.’

She looked guilty, particularly with me there. Corbec sniggered.

‘You zonked him out?’

‘It was… ahm… medically necessary.’

‘Excellent work, Surgeon Curth. My compliments. Dorden is a bugger when it comes to taking care of himself. Don’t fret, I won’t write you up.’

‘Thank you, colonel.’

‘Seeing as how you’re not service, I think you can call me Colm.’

‘Okay. You’ve come to see the patient, I presume?’

‘I have. By the way, this is Mister Thoru. He’s an artist, so he is.’

‘An artist?’ she said. ‘Wait a minute… Thoru? The sculptor?’

‘Yes,’ I said, infinitely pleased.

‘You did the frieze over the portico of the Imperial Hospice in NorthCol.’

‘I did. Last year.’

‘It was very good. I have friends on the hospice acquisition committee. They were very pleased with the work.’

‘That’s gratifying. Thank you.’

Curth pulled back the plastic tent screening the door and led us through into the intensive care room. Guided by some instinct, I held back and let Corbec go in ahead.

The patient lay on a hydraulic cot, tented in clear plastic. His body was laced with bio-feeds and life-support tubes. A chrome respirator puffed and wheezed beside the cot and a resuscitrex cart stood ready.

‘Give me a minute, Mister Thoru, surgeon.’

‘It’s Ana, Colm.’

‘Is it so?’ Corbec smiled. ‘Well, Ana. A moment, if you’d be so kind.’

‘Of course.’

We backed off out and she slithered the plastic curtain back into place.

‘Who is that?’ I whispered to Curth.

‘Ibram Gaunt. Colonel-commissar of the Tanith First-and-Only.’

The House Chass savants had briefed me about Gaunt. The hero of Vervunhive, they were calling him.

Gaunt had taken his wound destroying the abomination known as Heritor Asphodel. He’d been at the gates of death for three weeks, without regaining consciousness. I peered through the curtain. The sutures of his most recent thoracic surgery stood stark against his pale, tight flesh.

‘So why are you here?’ Curth asked me.

‘I’ve been commissioned to create a memorial for the war. House Chass has hired me. They want something suitable and noble, and they arranged for me to tour with the Tanith for appropriate inspiration.’

‘Good luck,’ she said.

‘Why? Am I looking in the wrong place?’

Curth shook her head. ‘I just don’t think there’s very much nobility to be found in this misery. What little there is belongs to the Tanith Ghosts, and I doubt very much you could capture that.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s very particular,’ she said and walked away.

I looked back through the gap in the screen curtain.

‘Hey, boss. It’s Corbec. Just checking in.’ Corbec sat himself down next to the cot.

‘What’s to tell? Well, it’s a mess, basically. The hive is a mess. But you know what victory looks like, huh? The men are holding together. That old Tanith spirit. Varl asked me to ask you, if you die, can he have your coat? Heh! How about that? I think Baffels is shaping up well as a squad leader, but he needs a bit of a boost, confidence wise. Maybe you could take him on one side, when you’re up and about again?’

The respirator puffed and sighed.

‘The liberation is kicking off. The war-machines went through the outhabs yesterday afternoon, ready to head out into the salt grasslands, hunting the last of the Zoicans. Feth me! Those Titans! They say there’s Adeptus Astartes inbound too – Iron Snakes and Imperial Fists. The Warmaster ain’t taking no chances.’

The vitals monitor continued to ping.

‘They miss you, Ibram. The men. Me too. You gave us this victory and it’s only right you share it. Don’t go dying on us, you hear me?’

Corbec fell silent for a moment and stared down at the floor.

‘You know, it’s not fething fair,’ he said finally. ‘We won, but there are millions of civilians dying out there. Habbers, outhabbers, spiners. I saw some on my way in. It breaks my fething heart. You know what I thought? Well, I’ll tell you, seeing as I have your undivided attention. I thought of Tanith. Yeah, Tanith. I thought of the millions we lost. My kin. My kind. My fething world. I looked at those pinched, fethed-up faces and I thought… Tanith. The folks of Tanith might have looked like this if we’d stayed and fought and won. Driven out the enemy. And you know what?’

The respirator thumped slowly.

‘I’m glad. That’s what. I’m glad it was all over and done with like that. Your call, Ibram, good call. I never really said it to you before, and I’m only saying it now because, feth knows, you can’t hear me. But I’m glad we did what we did. Seeing this. I’d far rather that Tanith died quick and clean that suffer this kind of victory. My people deserved it. Not dying, I mean. But dying cleanly. This… this… crap, they wouldn’t have deserved this. Better Tanith died, quick and complete, than…’

Corbec paused.

‘You know what I mean. You’ve put troopers out of their pain too, I know it. It’s better when it’s quick. Better than this.’

Corbec got to his feet.

‘Well, that’s me for today. I’ve said my bit. You come back to us, you hear me? Come back to us.’

We went back out to the waiting truck and drove down to the billet where the Ghosts were stowed. Corbec seemed flat and quiet after his visit to the Medical Hall, and told me he was going to catch some rest. He put me into the care of massive trooper called Bragg.

‘You detailed, Try?’ Corbec asked. I didn’t know at that point why Corbec called him ‘Try’.

‘Yes, chief. Outhab sweep.’

‘Take him out for a tour,’ he told Bragg, indicating me. ‘Show him what it’s all about. And look after him, okay?’

I was afraid of Bragg to begin with. He was just so imposing and big. I quickly discovered he had a gentle heart that quite belied his ogrish appearance.

He gave me grey fatigues to wear in place of my rich blue civilian suit, and carefully strapped a spare ballistic vest around my torso. ‘It should be quite enough, Mister Thoru,’ he said. ‘But you can never be too careful.’ He had made a special effort to learn my name when we were introduced, and now used it respectfully. I felt I had been taken under his wing.

The men of his patrol assembled in the dusty air of the manufactory shed.

Bragg wasn’t in charge. Lead fell to an older, bearded man called Baffels. Baffels was terribly serious about everything, like he had something to prove. I learned later he had only recently been promoted. There were eight others: a sniper called Larkin, a flame-trooper called Brostin, a scout called Doyl and five troopers called Domor, Milo, Feygor, Yael and Mktag.

They were an odd bunch, though they worked well together with the fluid ease that comes with shared experience. They all seemed to defer slightly to Larkin, the marksman, although he seemed to me a skinny, twitchy wretch liable to snap at the slightest provocation. They called him ‘Larks’ or ‘Mad Larkin’, neither of which gave me any reassurance. They seemed to respect him, however. Bragg told me that Larkin had given the unit its name, dubbing them all Gaunt’s Ghosts early on. I tried to talk to Larkin about that, but he said little. Just being close to him made me edgy. He radiated nervous energy and was forever fiddling with his weapon. After a while, I left him alone for the sake of my own sanity.

Doyl was a handsome man in his mid-twenties, the perfect subject for an uplifting statue. But he was even less forthcoming that Larkin.

‘He’s a scout,’ Bragg told me, as if that explained everything. Brostin, stinking of promethium, was a rough-hewn oaf with a bad line in inappropriate jokes. Domor was a sound type, thoughtful and reserved. He sported augmetic eyes and the men called him ‘Shoggy’, though they never told me why. His face and arms were pink with freshly healing burn tissue and this was his first patrol since he had been injured. I asked him how he had been hurt. Apparently a lasgun had exploded in his hands during close combat with Heritor Asphodel. I desperately wanted him to tell me more about that, but he wouldn’t be drawn.

Mktag and Feygor were both in their thirties. Mktag was a cheery sort with a blue spiral tat around his left eye. Feygor was something else entirely. He had been wounded in the throat during the siege, and had fresh augmetics in his voice box. He was lean and surly, and, as it seemed to me, by far the most dangerous member of the unit.

Milo was the youngest, just a boy, really. Bragg told me Milo had only recently been awarded the rank of trooper. Before that he had been the only non-com to escape Tanith, saved by the colonel-commissar personally.

Yael wasn’t much older. His lean adolescent body was just beginning to fill out with adult bulk. But there was a look in his eyes that showed he had grown up a long time since.

We went out into the southern outhabs. The purpose of the patrol, Bragg told me, was to smoke out the last vestiges of the Zoican host. They were lying low in the rubble mass, he said, dug in like splinters.

It all seemed alarmingly casual to me, but Bragg carried the sort of heavy autocannon that normally required a turret to mount it on, so I stuck close to him.

We left the city via what remained of the Hieronymo Sondar Gate. Several of the war’s key battles had been fought here, and a few kilometres east along the vast, pock-marked curtain wall was Veyveyr Gate, the railhead that had seen the most savage engagement of the entire conflict.

The scale of the war was apparent to me now. Behind me stood the massive, spired bulk of Vervunhive, ringed by what remained of the great defensive curtain wall. In front, stretching out southwards as far as I could see, lay the outer habitats, the mining districts, the collieries, the manufactories, the great belt of urban structure that skirted the main hive itself. This was where the longest phase of the war had been fought, a relentless, invasive attrition, street to street, as the hosts of Zoica advanced towards the curtain wall and the inner hive. We passed beside the wreckage of some of the Zoican war machines: not just tanks and AFVs, but massive things shaped like spiders or crustaceans. Their colossal hulls were seared black from the fires that had consumed them.

It was a bright, sunny day, but the veils of smoke had stained the light almost green and settled a skein of haze across the middle distance like mist. A light wind from the southern grasslands lifted dust in little flurries and eddies. Speeders, drop-ships and shrieking Imperial interceptors crossed the sky back and forth, and the horizon to the south was flickering with flashes and tremors of light. Out in the grasslands, the fleeing remnants of the Zoican army were being hunted down to extinction.

For a while, there was activity everywhere. Columns of refugees, limping towards the city, laden with handcarts and baby carriages full of salvaged belongings. Foot patrols of Imperial Guardsmen. Trains of injured and, far worse, caravans of dead being shipped away for mass burial. Munitorum work crews and pioneer regiments engaged in the hopeless task of restoring some order to the carnage. I jumped with fright when a loud explosion roared through the manufactory block just west of us, but Bragg reassured me it was just an engineering detail blowing up some structure that was too dangerous to leave standing.

Narmenian tanks with dozer blades were clearing rubble and human debris from the main arterials, allowing light military convoys to speed more freely through the ruins. The Ghosts I was with had nothing but praise for the Narmenians, and saluted each tank that passed with waves and raised fists. From the reports I had read, Grizmund’s Narmenian Armour had made a vital contribution to the victory, as had the Roane Deepers, the Vervun Primary and the ‘scratch companies’ of Vervunhive guerrillas. But Lady Chass had been quite specific. Gaunt’s Ghosts were the ones she wished to celebrate. I wondered why her affections lay specifically with them. I supposed it was because of Gaunt himself. He had taken overall command at the crucial time, and secured the eventual victory almost personally.

I wished then I could have met him, rather than seeing his near-dead body in an infirmary bed.

The outhabs were terribly desolated. They had been pulverised by artillery so hard that barely a building was left standing. The ground was a tangle mass of shattered rockcrete and twisted metal spars. The air was thick with oily smoke, and where it wasn’t, it was heavy with dust sifted off the rubble. There were fragments of human bone in the litter underfoot, white and burned clean. At first I thought they were shards of broken porcelain, until I saw one with an eye socket.

The piteous ruin that had befallen these worker habs was evident in every metre of the soil.

I began to feel unwell. This was upsetting, overwhelming. The genial Colonel Corbec had sent me on this trip deliberately. He obviously thought I could do with some sort of wake up call.

I resented that. I was fully awake to Vervunhive’s misery. I didn’t need to be shown it like this.

And there was no end to it. We crossed a sub-street that was littered with bodies. The air was noxious with corruption and full of flies. Corbec was a bastard, I decided. Whatever he thought of me and my commission, I wasn’t looking for this kind of inspiration.

I realised Larkin was crying. It shook me to see it. And, though I know what you’re thinking, it didn’t diminish him in any way. I’d known from the first moment I saw him he was an emotionally vulnerable man. He didn’t falter in his duty for a moment. He kept up the pace, covered all the angles he was asked to. He didn’t even seem to be aware that he was crying. But he wept.

I have seen women weep. I have seen children weep. I have seen weak men sob.

I have never, in the sixty years since then, seen a soldier weep. That is the most aching sadness of all. Larkin’s tears washed his filthy cheeks clean in long runnels. He kept about his business. To see a man trained and ready to kill cry for the fallen is to see true tragedy.

‘Larkin… won’t you shut the feth up?’ Feygor said.

‘I’ve… I’ve got something in my eye,’ Larkin said. I wanted to step forward and speak up in his defence, but Feygor looked meaner than ever. Besides, he had a lasrifle.

‘Just shut up with the fething sobbing,’ Feygor said, his voice flat and toneless because of the augmetic larynx sewn into his throat.

‘Leave him alone,’ said Baffels.

‘Yeah,’ said Mktag. ‘We’ll all be crying if Gaunt dies.’

Feygor spat. ‘He’s dead already.’

‘He is not!’ Domor said. ‘He’s hurt bad, but he’s not dead.’

‘Like they’d tell us if he was,’ Feygor commented.

‘They would!’ said Domor.

‘Those eyes make you blind, Shoggy?’ asked Brostin. ‘We’re just the poor, simple dog-soldiers. They wouldn’t tell us until it mattered. Bad for morale.’

‘Think what you want,’ said Yael. ‘I reckon they’d tell us.’

‘Gaunt’s not dead,’ said Milo.

‘How so?’ asked Feygor.

‘I visit him every day. He wasn’t dead this morning.’

‘Yeah,’ said Brostin, ‘but was he alive?’

Milo didn’t reply.

‘He was an hour ago,’ I ventured.

‘Who asked you?’ Feygor spat.

‘His name is Mister Thuro,’ said Bragg. ‘Be respectful.’

‘Feth to respect,’ said Feygor.

‘Shut up, all of you!’ Doyl hissed.

We took cover in an old bakery, the side of which had been blown out. Doyl, with Feygor, scouted forward. I began to be convinced that I shouldn’t have come.

‘This Act of Consolation thing,’ Mktag said as we hunkered low. ‘Do you think anybody will take it?’

‘They’d be mad to,’ said Yael.

‘I think some will,’ Domor disagreed.

‘Yeah, some… the crazies…’ said Brostin.

‘Keep it down, will you?’ Baffels called.

Brostin dropped his voice. ‘You’d have to be mad to sign up. And these hivers, I don’t know about them. Do we want their kind in our ranks?’

‘I’ve seen them fight,’ said Domor. ‘The scratch companies. They’re good. I’d be proud to have them with us.’

‘They’re not Tanith!’ Brostin growled.

‘No, they’re not,’ said Bragg. ‘But I’ve seen them too. They fight like bastards.’

‘Maybe, but would you be happy for them to take the Tanith colours? Eh?’ Brostin asked. ‘They’re not Tanith! Feth this Act of Consolation… let them found their own regiment. They’re not fething Tanith!’

‘I was with Gaunt on the Spike raid, with a bunch of Verghast scratchers,’ said Larkin suddenly. ‘You were there too, Bragg. And you, Shoggy. The scratch company gave everything. That leader of theirs – what was his name?’

‘Kolea,’ said Bragg.

‘Yeah… he was a piece of work. Totally driven.’

‘Whatever.‘ Brostin said, unconvinced.

Doyl and Feygor returned to us. The way ahead was clear. We trawled forward through the landscape.

I think it was about then that I saved several lives. I had been looking at the devastation with a sculptor’s eye for engineering. I said to Bragg: ‘That way ahead. The slump of rockcrete looks like it’s been disturbed.’

‘How can you tell?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just know from the feel of things how they should lie. That’s not true. It’s been drilled.’

Bragg called a halt. He tossed a rock onto the slumped slab and the resultant blast took out the ground and flung masonry debris through the air.

‘Good call, Mister Thuro,’ said Feygor.

‘If you can’t be anything except sarcastic, Feygor, shut the feth up!’ Domor said.

‘I’m not being sarcastic,’ Feygor said, sarcastically.

‘Shut the feth up!’ several of them chorused.

‘It’s this thing! This thing!’ Feygor insisted, rapping at the aug-unit in his throat with a dirty finger. ‘It makes me sound fething sarcastic even when I’m not!’

It was perfectly true. The raspy monotone of the implant rendered every word he uttered in a deadpan flatness. He was going to be sarcastic for the rest of his life.

‘Be fair, you’re sarcastic most of the time anyway,’ said Brostin.

‘Not always.’

‘How can we tell when you’re not being sarcastic?’ asked Yael.

‘Maybe he could hold up a hand when he’s actually being sarcastic for real,’ Mktag suggested. ‘Like a signal.’

‘Oh, that’s a good idea,’ said Feygor.

Everyone looked at him. Slowly, reluctantly, he raised a hand.

I think we were all about to explode out laughing, even Feygor, but Doyl suddenly raised a hand himself, and the gesture had nothing to do with sarcasm.

We were all huddled low, and the dust from the booby-trap blast was still falling and settling. Wordlessly, Doyl pointed at two sites in the ruins ahead that seemed to me to be no different from the rest of the place. Then he made a couple of swift, deft hand signals.

Baffels nodded, and made a few gestures of his own. At once, Domor, Yael and Doyl slid to the left, crawling through the jumbled wasteland, and Feygor, Brostin and Milo went to the right.

‘Keep low,’ Bragg mouthed at me and I needed no encouragement. Damn House Chass should have paid me danger money for this. Bragg extended the bipod stand of his heavy weapon and nested it in pile of rubble. Mktag crouched beside him, unclasping ammo drums from his pack and feeding them to the munition port in the side of Bragg’s support gun. Then he spread out the camouflage capes both he and Bragg were carrying and draped them out over their shoulders. Baffels was lying on his belly a few metres to the right, using a spotter periscope to survey out over the shattered brickwork. I realised I couldn’t see Larkin. Then I realised he was immediately to my left, prone, with his sniper rifle raised in a firing position. Like the support gunners, he was draped in his camo-cape and though he was almost close enough for me to reach out and touch him, I had to look hard to see him. His concealment was extraordinary. I understand that is a trademark skill of the Tanith Ghosts.

I felt exposed, and entirely in the wrong place. I tried to curl up tighter against a cleft in the wall, but my feet dislodged loose stones and I got a dirty look from Larkin.

I could hear my own heart. I could smell brick dust and sweat, my own included. The sunlight seemed unpleasantly hot. There was the barest whisper of close-link vox exchanges.

Time seemed to slow down and stretch out, like a quiet, slow passage in a piece of music. It occurred to me then that I could never be a soldier. The waiting would kill me. It’s ironic, I know. I can spend months on a work, whole weeks minutely carving some tiny part of it. I am obsessive with detail, and never care how long it takes to get something perfect, because the success of the whole might depend on one small part.

And this was the same, the same sort of meticulous craft. But here it was applied to war. The Guardsmen were singularly mindful to get this small preparation right, to have the patience to succeed. If a victory in war and a statue can be compared, and you’ll forgive me but I’m not entirely sure they can, then achieving them, creating them, depends on detail and effort and patience. Curled up there in that outhab ruin, cursing the wait and the intolerable delay, I was about to live through the worst ten minutes of my life. And I am utterly convinced that I would not be alive now if the Ghosts had rushed a second of it.

I’d never heard a las-weapon discharge before, not for real. I’d seen plenty of newsreels, of course, displaying our glorious soldiery in acts of staged victory, but I know now that the deep, resonating bangs of those weapons were dubbed on afterwards. Real guns make a sharp, cracking nose, like breaking sticks. It’s thin, dry, and it doesn’t sound at all important. I heard the cracking noise and wondered what it was. I was about to be educated.

I was about to be educated in all sorts of ways.

Baffels was suddenly whispering urgently into his vox. I knew something was happening, and then there was a very loud crack right next to me. Larkin had fired. He fired again, and I recognised my own stupidity. The cracking sounds I had been hearing was the fight already underway.

There was a strange strobing of the light around me, like the daylight was flickering. Dust kicked up from a half-fallen wall behind our position and several clumps of stone fell out. I realised we were being fired at. The flickering of the daylight was being caused by bright las-rounds passing over us, almost invisible against the hard glare of the sky. Then a shot stung by against the bricks and I saw it clearly. A dart of seething fire, tinged red, the size of a man’s middle finger, so bright it hurt my eyes, so fast it was barely there.

Bragg’s cannon woke up. It also didn’t make the sound I was expecting. It rattled metallically like the rock drills I sometimes use on larger works. It burped out irregular bursts of hard, spitting bangs, strung together very fast and overlayed by the tinny rattle of the mechanism and the feeding ammunition belt. Spent cases rained down underneath the heavy weapon and made a tinkling, pinging sound as they bounced off the rocks.

Milo, Feygor and Brostin suddenly reappeared, running back frantically and throwing themselves down into cover with us. As soon as they were down, Feygor and Milo rose on their knees and started firing indiscriminate shots over the cover wall with their lasrifles.

Brostin was struggling with his flamer unit.

‘What the feth’s the problem?’ Baffels cried.

‘We came up on a gang of them. Maybe six or seven, and we had them cold, but Brostin’s damn burner jammed!’ Feygor rasped out the explanation as he continued with his firing. Heavier shots were falling around us now, each one making a dull, hollow sound as it exploded into the rubble.

‘Get it working!’ Baffels yelled.

‘I’m trying!’ Brostin replied. ‘The igniter’s dead.’

‘Feth! They’re coming!’ Milo called. ‘I see them moving!’

‘Larkin!’ Baffels almost screamed.

‘Can’t get a clear shot,’ Larkin hissed.

‘Fething thing!’ said Baffels, now unscrewing the blackened cover of the flamer’s nozzle. I dared to raise my head.

‘Where’s Doyl’s group?’ Milo asked.

‘Dug in, under fire. They’re pinned,’ said Baffels. ‘Where the feth is this heat coming from now?’

‘To the left! There!’ Feygor growled.

Bragg yanked his aim around and twisted the heavy cannon on its stand. Mktag tried to move with him. They were already onto their third drum of ammo.

Bragg fired in the direction Feygor had indicated.

‘Try again, Bragg!’ Feygor and Mktag cried out in unison. Now I understood the darkly ironic nickname.

Bragg fired another burst and then the belt ran out and Mktag was a few seconds late lining up the next box. Bragg shot a look in my direction. He smiled at me, trying to look reassuring. Try again, Bragg, I thought. Enemy fire was whipping all around him, and he just sat there, grinning a half-arsed grin that was supposed to perk me up and make me feel all right. Colonel Corbec had told him to look after me and he didn’t want to let me down.

‘It’ll be okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll be through this in a minute.’

Even today, sixty years later, I have a lasting memory of Trooper Bragg at that moment. His simplicity and his genuine sense of optimism. Simply his courage. I have no way of knowing what became of Trooper Bragg. I hope fate was kind to him.

‘We need that flamer!’ Baffels yelled, firing his weapon alongside Milo now. The heavy cannon opened up once more.

Brostin said something incomprehensible and tried to poke a cleaning rod down the mouth of the burner.

I crawled over to him. Though it was much bigger and heavier, the flamer resembled in principle the sort of heat-gun we sometimes used to work metals and ductile plastics. On a commission for House Anko two years before, I had been plagued by a heat-gun that had regularly refused to light.

‘It’s not the nozzle,’ I said.

‘It is so the fething nozzle!’ spat Brostin. ‘It’s dust in the fething nozzle! Get the feth out of my face! You shouldn’t even be here!’

‘It’s not the nozzle,’ I repeated firmly. ‘It’s the secondary igniter. The fuel pipe is twisted or blocked and nothing’s getting through to light the pilot.’

‘Feth off and away with you!’

Ignoring him, I reached out and yanked the secondary fuel pipe out of its plug. Liquid fuel dribbled out over my hands.

‘Get off it! Get him off me!’ Brostin yelled. I was sure he was about to hit me.

I grabbed a cleaning rod and inserted it into the pipe, dragging out a fat plug of fuel-soaked matter. ‘Now try it!’

Brostin looked murderously at me and reconnected the pipe. He squeezed the burner’s heavy trigger bar and a small fireball coughed out of the nozzle. The igniter flame suddenly lit up: a hard, blue finger of heat.

‘Feth me!’ said Brostin.

‘Don’t mention it,’ I said.

Brostin swung round with the active weapon and fired it over the barricade. Spurts of ferocious yellow fire swished over the rubble. I heard screams.

With the flamer firing, Milo, Feygor and Baffels dropped back into cover and fitted long, silver blades to their weapons.

‘Is it going to come to that?’ I asked the boy Milo.

‘Who knows?’ he said.

Baffels called out. Apparently there was now crossfire from Doyl’s wing. The flamer had broken the deadlock. For all I could tell, the Emperor himself might just have arrived on a goat. I had no idea how they could read the chaotic situation like that, even with comlinks. It was just madness. Rocks and dust and flying jags of lethal, coherent light.

‘Go!’ said Baffels. I didn’t know what ‘go’ meant, but suddenly Feygor, Milo, Brostin and Baffels were gone. They leapt up and charged into the smoke. I could hear furious cracking, and the breathy hush of the flamer.

Then Mktag rose from his prone position like he had been jerked up from behind by his webbing. He twisted and fell over. For a moment, I didn’t understand what was happening. It seemed as if Mktag was just behaving stupidly, mucking around, kicking with his legs.

But Mktag had been shot. Right there in front of me. He fell at my feet, his heels drumming the ground, his hands spasming. A tiny plume of smoke spiraled up from the little black hole a las-round had made in his forehead. There was no blood. The shot had cauterised the entry wound and it didn’t have enough power to exit his skull. Its heat and force had been expended getting into his cranium and incinerating his brain.

It was quite simply the most awful thing I have ever seen. His body thrashing, trying to live, the brain extinguished. I think if there had been more blood, more obvious physical damage, I could have coped better.

But it was just such a tiny hole.

And then he was utterly still, and that was the worst part of all.

I was still staring at Mktag when the others returned. Bragg had laid his cape over the corpse, and Larkin was crouched beside it, brokenly reading a rite of grace from the back pages of his Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer. The battle was done, the pocket of Zoican resistance wiped out.

I never did see even a glimpse of the enemy.

It was dusk when we returned to the city. Doyl and Baffels carried Mktag all the way. Bragg and Brostin tried to buck me up, claiming my improvisation with the faulty flamer had saved the day. By the time we reached the curtain wall, their version of events had me as the hero, winning the entire encounter. They were generous souls, these Ghosts. Brostin in particular had no reason to admit I’d been right. They realised, I suppose, that I was a civilian and they’d taken me too far. They felt sorry for me. I’d survived their rite of passage and acquitted myself well.

I suppose I should have been flattered by the inclusion. Honoured to earn the respect of such warriors.

But Mktag’s death had unsettled me profoundly. The memory of it had burned into my brain so deeply that I was sure it had left a little, smoking hole in my skull. I was no soldier, despite what Brostin and Bragg cheerfully said. I had no basis of experience with which to deal with this shock, no inoculation, no Fundamental Training brutalisation to take the sting away.

I was an artist, for the God-Emperor’s sake! A soft, protected artist from a secure world where death happened behind closed doors or drawn curtains. For all I tried to make my work contain such eternal concepts as truth and grace, nobility and humanity, they were empty gestures. My work was empty. I despised every thing I had ever done, all the artistic triumphs I had been so pleased with. They were nothing, barren, vapid. Devoid of any real human truth.

Real truth was out there in the shattered outhabs of Vervunhive. Real truth was waiting and silence, courage and stealth. Real truth was the ability to function in extremes. To fire a cannon and miss and try again. To fix a silver blade to the end of a las-weapon and leap from safety into a shroud of smoke, prepared as you did so to really use that makeshift spear.

Real truth was as real as a tiny hole in a man’s forehead.

I had not been scared during the patrol. I had been bored, horrified, perplexed, impatient. But at no point had I actually succumbed to terror. Once we were back, fear consumed me. I shook. I could barely speak.

I sat, swathed in Bragg’s camo-cape, in the doorway of the billet. Troopers moved around me, getting on with their work. I wondered why they didn’t seem scared. If they were scared, and they were still just getting on with it, that was truly terrifying.

I saw Bragg talking with Corbec and pointing in my direction. Corbec disappeared, but a few moments later the young trooper, Milo, came to find me.

‘Colonel Corbec wants me to take you to the Medical Hall.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘I know. But he wants the medics to check you out. You’ve had quite a day, Mister Thuro.’

We walked through the battered streets as night fell. The stars came out, fighting to shine through the smoke. High above, moonlight glinted on the hulls of the vast warships in low orbit.

‘How do you do it?’ I asked the boy.

‘Do what, sir?’

‘Shut it out? The fear? The trauma? Did they beat it out of you in basic training?’

Milo looked at me strangely. ‘Who ever said we shut it out?’ he asked.

‘But you can’t…’ I began. ‘You can’t live like that. Continue to live, I mean, day in, day out, with that kind of stress, that kind of fear. You must cope somehow. Shut it out.’

He shook his head. ‘I’m scared every minute of my life.’

‘But how do you keep going?’

Milo shrugged. ‘I’ve never thought about it. It’s just what we do. What we’re asked to do. We’re Imperial Guard.’

I have never forgotten those words.

I had to wait an hour or so in the Medical Hall until I was seen. A kindly old doctor, the man Dorden that Corbec had been looking for, got to me eventually and pronounced me fit. He offered me something to calm me, but I turned him down. I asked after Gaunt, and he told me I could go and see for myself.

He led me through the wards of the Medical Hall. We passed the beds of soldiers, many of them Ghosts, wounded in the war. Dorden stopped frequently to check on them. He told me names – Mkoll, Bonin, Wheln, so many I forgot – and recounted the circumstances of their injuries.

I wanted to see Gaunt again before he died. I wanted to see him now I had seen the kind of men he had bred.

A group of men and women were waiting in the dim hallway outside his chamber when we arrived. A few Ghosts, but mostly Vervunhivers. Dorden knew them all. There was a big, grim-looking miner that Dorden called Mister Kolea; a one-eyed factory boss in declining years who introduced himself as Agun Soric; a badly wounded Vervun Primary Captain called Daur; a fierce-looking gang-girl called Criid who was accompanied by a young Tanith trooper.

‘Why are they here?’ I asked Dorden.

‘They want to see Gaunt.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they’ve all accepted the Act of Consolation, them and hundreds like them,’ Dorden whispered. ‘They’ll be joining our regiment and coming with us, God-Emperor help them.’

‘Why have they come here?’

‘To be close to Gaunt. He’s the reason most of them have signed up. They want to be here of he lives… or if he dies. They’ve signed their lives to his cause. It matters to them.’

The motley band keeping the vigil outside Gaunt’s room seemed content to wait there, but I went forward and slipped into his room. No one stopped me. The plastic drapes were drawn, and I was about to sweep them aside when I realised the beloved colonel-commissar already had company.

I paused in the doorway, peering in through the curtain. A lean, dangerous-looking man in black Tanith fatigues was sitting at Gaunt’s bedside in the blue gloom. He was a major. Major Rawne, as I found out later.

I knew I shouldn’t be there. I’d felt awkward that morning eavesdropping on Corbec, but this was far more invasive.

Still, I couldn’t draw myself away.

I listened.

‘You dare die,’ Rawne was muttering at Gaunt. ‘You dare die on me, you fething bastard. Die now and I’ll never forgive you. It can’t be this way. I won’t let it.’

I started to back away, realising I had heard too much.

‘If you’re going to die, it’s got to be me that kills you. Me, you hear, you bastard? Me. Otherwise, it isn’t fair. I’ve got to be the one. I need to be the one. Not some Chaos bullet. You live, you bastard. You wake up and live so that I can kill you properly.’

He suddenly looked up and saw I was there. He rose and thundered towards me. ‘What the feth are you doing?’

I backed off. He’d balled his fists and his face was readably furious despite the half-light. He was going to hurt me.

‘Who the feth are you?’ he snarled, slamming me against the wall.

‘Great God-Emperor!’ I stammered. ‘Look–’

He turned. He saw what I saw.

Ibram Gaunt’s eyes were open.

I never got to speak with Gaunt. Once he was well enough, they moved him to a medical frigate. And I barely saw any of the Tanith after that either. My transport back to NorthCol had been arranged, and a message from House Chass urged me to start on my work.

I missed three deadlines, and risked the wrath of Lady Chass. I scrapped five working models, and destroyed two works in the very last stages. They weren’t right.

Eventually, the piece was cast in steel. I wasn’t much satisfied with that either. To me, it had no truth, no real truth. But House Chass couldn’t be denied any longer.

It stands today in the centre of what was once Vervunhive’s Commercia. The hive has been levelled, and most of the land turned back to pasture and grassland. Shards of rock, bits of bone and spent shell cases can still be found on the windy slopes amongst the grasses.

It’s become my most famous work. There’s irony. To say I was really, truly pleased with it, I’d have to raise a hand, like Feygor. I’ve done so much since that seems to me more important. But you can’t choose what you leave behind.

A single Imperial Guardsman, cast in steel rendered down from the broken weapons left in the ruins of the hive. It’s not even specifically a Tanith Ghost, and it has no special likeness. One fist is raised, not in victory but in determination, a gesture like the one Baffels made. There is a set to the shoulders that resembles Colonel Corbec’s relaxed stance, a set to the head that always reminds me of Trooper Bragg’s reassuring backwards glance. There’s Milo’s honesty in it, I like to think, and Rawne’s venom. It has, like all statues, Mktag’s awful stillness.

It’s called the Chass Memorial, and on the plinth it announces in large chiselled letters that House Chass paid for its construction in memory of the fallen of Vervunhive. In very much smaller letters, it says it is a work by Thuro of NorthCol. It stands on a grassy slope, guarding the necropolis that was once called Vervunhive. It may stand forever.

There’s nothing of Gaunt himself in it, because I never knew him. Like I said, I never knew any of them, not really. But his men are in it, so I suppose he is too.

FORGOTTEN

‘Well,’ said Mad Larkin. ‘Tell it.’

Mkoll shook his head.

‘Spoilsport,’ Larks chuckled. He took a slug of sacra from the dirty glass he was cradling in his wiry hand.

‘Mkoll doesn’t tell stories,’ said Rawne, leaning back against a stack of pulse sacks. When the voidship Highness Ser Armaduke had set out on its mission, Aft Hold 134 had been piled to the ceiling with sacks of dried pulses for the mess hall. Now there were only a few heaps of them left, and what remained in the dank chamber had mildewed and spoiled. It had been a long tour, and supplies were low. Supplies of everything.

Rawne brushed a sack louse off his jacket and refilled his glass.

‘You don’t tell stories, do you, chief?’ he said. ‘Not often.’

‘Not often,’ Mkoll replied. He had a drink of his own in his powerful, life-scarred hands, but he had only taken a sip.

‘He said he had one,’ Larkin protested. ‘He should tell it. Make him tell it.’

‘I doubt I could make him do anything,’ replied Rawne quietly.

Mkoll smiled to himself, and looked down at his drink. Around them, the ancient, hulking starship throbbed and creaked. The warp played around its hull, stressing and squeezing it, and ice formed in the long walks of the companionways. It was cold.

‘Fire’s dying,’ said Rawne, reaching for some more dirty sacking to throw on it.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Brostin, sitting up.

‘Not with your flamer this time, eh?’ advised Rawne.

Brostin grinned, and held up his dirty palms in a ‘forgive me’ gesture. He was a big man, heavy, inked and hairy. He got to his feet, unsteady from drink, and fished around for combustibles in the trash at the back of the hold.

‘I told a story,’ Larkin sulked. ‘It was a good one too.’

‘Fething mad in the head, you are,’ Brostin called out from the rear. ‘As if a statue would talk to you.’

‘It was an angel,’ protested Larks. ‘Weren’t you listening?’

‘Listening to you being mad in the head,’ Brostin grumbled back.

‘It was a good story,’ Larkin insisted. ‘Wasn’t it good, Eli? Proper spooky. Proper chilling. A ghost story.’

‘Wasn’t bad,’ Rawne mused, thinking about something else.

‘And yours wasn’t bad either,’ Larkin acknowledged, raising his glass. ‘Decent and chilling.’

Rawne sighed. He’d made his up, just off the cuff. Larkin had delighted in the gory bits. They’d been in the field, on this tour, for so long, they’d used up all their stories. They’d heard them all a thousand times over. Especially Brostin’s story about the goat.

‘I told a story too,’ Brostin called out, still trying to find kindling. ‘It was about a goat.’

‘It was awful,’ said Larkin.

‘Least I told it,’ Brostin replied. He came back to the fireside with an armful of dubious litter and began to feed it, piece by piece, into the rusty fire cage, blowing on the sparks to get the fire going again. Despite the impoverished quality of his kindling, the fire grew quickly, until the flames were dancing and the orange light distorted shadows of them all around the galvanised walls. Brostin had a particular affinity with fire. It seemed to like him. It seemed to obey him.

‘There we go,’ he said, pleased with his efforts. He wiped his nose with the back of his paw, leaving a sooty mark, and sat down again. Rawne passed him a refill.

‘I could tell it again, if you like,’ he offered. ‘The one about the goat.’

‘No!’ Larkin and Rawne chorused.

‘Only saying,’ shrugged Brostin.

‘The chief should tell his story,’ Larkin said. ‘He should. Make him. It’s Candylmass and everything. Make him tell his story.’

‘I wish I’d never mentioned it,’ Mkoll said quietly.

‘Well, you did,’ said Rawne.

‘Make him fething tell it!’ Larkin cried out, his voice over-loud from sacra.

‘Yeah, tell it,’ said Brostin.

‘I’d prefer not to,’ Mkoll began.

‘Leave him be,’ said Rawne.

‘Is everything all right in here?’ a voice asked.

They all looked around. There was a tall shadow standing in the hold doorway, looking in. They started to get to their feet in a hurry.

‘As you were,’ said Gaunt, stepping into the firelight. ‘I was passing. Just doing my rounds. I heard voices.’

‘Larks was being noisy, sir,’ said Rawne. ‘My apologies.’

‘Settle back,’ said Gaunt. ‘No standing on my account.’

‘I wasn’t being rowdy, sir,’ said Larkin, sitting down again. ‘It’s just that we was telling stories, and the chief here has one and he won’t tell.’

‘Stories?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Ghost stories,’ said Larkin. ‘Fireside stories. Chillers to keep you warm on a cold night like this.’

‘I see,’ said Gaunt.

‘I told a story,’ said Brostin.

‘You did?’ asked Gaunt.

‘It was about a goat,’ Brostin nodded. ‘Do you want to hear it?’

‘You really don’t,’ said Rawne.

‘We need some new stories,’ said Larkin. ‘You got any, sir?’

Gaunt hesitated.

‘Not so much,’ he said.

‘Shame,’ said Larkin. ‘There ought to be stories. It’s Candylmass after all. We always tell stories on Candylmass night.’

‘Candylmass?’ Gaunt asked. He hadn’t realised. It made him feel out of touch. ‘It isDeath has forgotten me, that’s what they claimed he said. So the stories went. Whenever death did its tally and marked its stick, as it does regular for all our lives, somehow it always left him off. It missed him. He was never in the headcount. He was never brought to account. Death forgot him and passed him by.

‘I went out, three nights in a row, over the wire and into the zone. I went out to hunt him. Bring him down. He was too dangerous. He’d taken too many lives, too many liberties. It was killing morale too. The men were all spooked. Who would be next? Who’s turn would it be to end up in pieces on the wire come morning? The fiend, he was in the darkness, in all of it. He moved, and the night moved with him, to hide him as if it was ashamed of him and didn’t want the light to see him. The fiend and the night, they were in cahoots. Accomplices in murder. One watched and covered while the other killed. This fiend, he was a night-thing. He was a ghost.’

Mkoll looked at Gaunt.

‘In the old sense of the word, sir,’ he explained.

‘I get it,’ said Gaunt.

‘So I went out, three nights in a row. Into the blackness of the zone, in among the tumble wire and the corpses left to rot, the stink pools and the waterlogged trenches. There was no one out there. No sound except the shelling faraway, the fire on the horizon. No movement. A dead zone. Abandoned. Churned up and left raw. Smelled of blood and mud and maggots. You all know the smell. But for this fiend, there was no spore. No prints, no tracks, no traces. No sounds, no smells in the night. I knew he was out there, but I couldn’t find him.’

He took another sip.

‘Third night, I was out a long way. Zone mortalis, land of the dead. Pitch black and wet as feth. I was quiet, you know me. I was quiet and I was hunting, and still there was no trace. But I knew, I just knew, back of my neck, hairs on my arms, the fiend was there. He was covered up by his friend, the night. He was watching me, stalking me. I had no trace of him, but he had my track. Don’t know how. I think the night had told him where I was and how to find me.’

‘You don’t make no noise,’ Larkin objected.

‘I don’t, and I didn’t then,’ said Mkoll. ‘I’ve never been so careful. Slow steady, cape around me, skin dabbed down, gun-shine smudged back with muck. I kept low, sectioning the area. I thought to myself, Oan, sooner or later you’ll catch him. Sooner for later he’ll get bold or stupid and make a move, and you’ll have him. You’ll hear a sound, or see a twitch. You’ll have him and he’ll be gone. But nothing. Then I knew.’

‘Knew what?’ asked Larkin.

‘The fiend had me. He was stalking me all right, and, somehow, maybe thanks to the complicity of the night, he had me. When I moved, he came with me, closer and closer. Every step I took in the dark, every move I made, he matched. He was toying with me. He was playing. He was making me suffer before he came in to close the deal.’

Mkoll sat back, and thought for a moment, remembering.

‘So I decided that I was out of choices. I wanted him and he wanted me. I couldn’t find him, but sure as feth he could find me. So I let him find me.’

‘You what?’ asked Brostin.

‘It was the only thing I could think of,’ said Mkoll. ‘I knew that if I just turned back, he’d pick me off on my way back to the lines. He had me, so I played that. I became the bait. On purpose. I made myself the bait. I waited. I walked around. I made myself clumsy. I made noises.’

He smiled softly, amused by the memory.

‘That was hard. Deliberately making noises. Kicking up a stone, making a splash in a trench pool. Just enough not to be obvious. Like I was a newblood trooper, lost and alone, bumbling in the dark. Of course, I knew he could take me from a distance. Longshot… hotshot, maybe, like Larks would do it. One to the head from half a mile, and I’d never know anything about it. But I was counting on the fact that I knew how he liked to do it. I knew he liked to make his kills up close. Wet. That’s what the fiend liked best of all. That’s what got him off. Getting in close, to prove how invisible he was, getting in close and killing with his hands and teeth. I counted on that fact. It was his thing. He prided himself on it. He prided himself on the notion that he was so invisible, even death had forgotten him.

‘I moved along. It was so dark, I can’t tell you. I felt that night was right upon me, me in particular, like night had concentrated on me. A special night, blacker than anything. Unnatural. Anyway, he was close so I waited. I slung my rifle over my shoulder, and took out my silver. Kept it in my hand, blade down. The blackness was there more than ever, and I waited and waited.’

He took another sip.

‘And then the fiend was on me.’

Larkin gasped quietly. There was an odd silence in the hold space, no sound except the crackle of the flames.

‘Nothing there at first,’ said Mkoll very softly. ‘Nothing. Not a breath. Not even a hint of body heat. I was alone, I swear it. And then, then there was a hand on my throat. A cold, cold hand. Just like that. Just there.’

He put his right hand to his throat, and held it there, clasped.

‘I don’t know how he did that. I’ll never know. One minute, I was alone, the next, the fiend was right there, hand on my neck. Just a cold touch to let me know I was dead already. I couldn’t even see him.’

‘Feth!’ said Larkin.

‘He knew I was done for. That must have been the way with all his kills. Just that sudden, cold touch from nowhere, and the victim would freeze, not believing what was happening or how it could be happening. The fiend could take his time after that. He could enjoy his work. And they wouldn’t fight back.

‘I found my voice. From somewhere, I don’t know. I found my voice, and I asked, “what are you”? And this voice, worst voice I ever heard, wet and thick and old, it replied, “I am your end. Death has forgotten me”. I replied, “How does death forget anyone”? And the voice, Throne, it was a horrible sound, it said, “Death is careless. It makes mistakes. It lost sight of me in the night, and now it can’t find me again. It has forgotten me, and now I mock it with my life”. That’s what it said. Death has forgotten me.’

He looked at the other four men.

‘Then I saw its teeth in the darkness. I saw them open to bite. To tear out my throat. I thought my time was done, but I was ready.’

‘What happened?’ asked Larkin, his voice a whisper.

‘I had my war knife, remember?’ said Mkoll. ‘I had my straight silver. I told him something, just before his bite came snapping in, and then I used my knife.’

‘And it was done?’ Brostin breathed.

Mkoll nodded.

‘Closest I ever came,’ he said. ‘Closest I’ve ever been to death.’

He glanced at Larkin.

‘The end,’ he said. ‘You wanted the story. That was it.’

He raised his glass.

‘Candylmass,’ he said. ‘The Emperor protects, provided you’re armed and ready.’

They all drank.

‘What was it?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Sir?’ Mkoll replied.

‘You said you told him something,’ said Gaunt. ‘What did you tell him?’

Mkoll sighed.

‘I told him I remembered him after all,’ he said.

THE IRON STAR

I

Under an iron star set in a sky the colour of raw meat, the Ghosts of Tanith made their loyal but weary advance towards...

Dammit. What was the place called? He thought about it for a moment. The somewhere-or-other bridge. He was sure the name would come back to him. He looked around for his map, but his eyes were hurting again, and he couldn’t find it.

It was a bridge, anyway. Another bridge. Another fething objective. This particular bridge lay at the western tip of... of... the some such plateau, on a world called... called who the feth cares any more.

Truth be told, he certainly didn’t. It was just another world and another battle.

The Ghosts didn’t care either. They simply advanced, loyal but weary, weary but loyal, neither quality first, neither quality last.

They were tired, there was no mistaking that. They toiled through the mud, under the raw-meat sky, heads low, hearts lower, their banners as limp as their spirits, lonely in life, and lonely in death.

In the distance, across the mire, the black figures gathered to watch them.

During long crusades, Guard regiments could stay on the frontline without rotation for years at a time. Such was the size of the Imperium, whole seasons could be lost simply making shift aboard carrier transports from one zone world to the next.

The Ghosts of Tanith had been on frontline deployment for decades, without rotation, since the day their home world had blinked out in a hot puff of scatter-light.

He had been petitioning of late for his regiment to be rotated out of the line. He had become increasingly insistent on the subject. The phrase ‘loyal but weary’ appeared in almost every one of his dispatches to High Command. Late at night, under canvas or in the mud-stink of a dugout, or in the noon heat at a roadside during a rest stop, he worked hard to get the tone of his petitions right. If it pleases you, sirs... begging your accommodation on this small matter, my masters... The Ghosts were not cowards, but they had been pushed hard for too long. They yearned for respite and rotation. They were tired.

He knew he was.

His face was more drawn and lean than ever. These days, he walked with a bone-sore limp. When he washed, on those few, precious occasions when water actually pumped through a trench camp’s shower block, he stood under the pitiful rusty trickle, scrubbing lice and dirt from his limbs, and found himself looking down at a body scored and welted by the traces of so many old wounds that he had lost track of their origins. This? Where had he got this? Fortis Binary? And this, this old puckered gouge? Where had he come by that? Monthax? Aexe Cardinal? Vervunhive?

It no longer seemed to matter. These days, it was often a struggle just to remember where he was.

‘Are we still on... on thingumajig?’ he had asked his adjutant that morning while shaving.

His adjutant, whose name he was sure he knew well, had frowned, thinking the question over.

‘Thingumajig? Uh... yes. I believe so, sir,’ the adjutant had replied.

The names really weren’t of any consequence any more, the names of cities or continents or worlds. Each one was just a new place to get into, and then get out of again, once the job was done. He’d stopped worrying about the names. He just concentrated on the jobs, loyal but weary, weary but loyal.

Sometimes, he was so tired he even forgot his own name.

He dipped his old cut-throat razor into the chipped bowl, washing off the foam and the residue of shorn bristles. He looked at his reflection in the cracked shaving mirror. Though the reflection didn’t seem to have a face at all, he recognised it anyway.

Ibram Gaunt. That was it. Ibram Gaunt.

Of course it was.

II

His eyes hurt. They hurt at night, when he was working at his latest pleading dispatch by the glow of a lamp, and they hurt by day, under the radioactive glimmer of the iron star. They hurt when he stared out across the mire to look at the black figures gathering to watch them.

The iron star was an ugly thing. It throbbed in the sky like an ingot cooling from the furnace. The sky was marbled black and red, like hung meat. The throb of the star made his head ache and his eyes run. Sometimes, when he dabbed the tears off his face, his fingertips came away red.

III

A scout came running back along the muddy track. The track was so muddy that it was impassable to wheeled vehicles. The Tanith were up to their shins in the slime. The strange part was, there had been no rain, not a drop of rain since they had made planetfall on who the feth cares anymore. Well, none he could remember, anyway.

Things lurked in the mud. If you scraped it back, or dug it away to commence trench work, you risked striking the turret tops of tank regiments that had been sucked down under the ooze, or exposing the bodies of dead men, pale and sightless.

‘There’s so much mud,’ he said, watching the scout as he approached. ‘So much mud, but no rain. Why is that?’

‘Don’t you know where you are, Ibram?’ asked Medic Curth.

‘I don’t,’ he smiled. ‘That’s a terrible confession for a commanding officer to make, isn’t it?’

She grinned back. Curth was thin, but very pretty. ‘Under the circumstances, I’ll forgive the lapse, Ibram.’

‘Good,’ he said, nodding.

‘So, where are we?’ he added. ‘Remind me?’

She leaned down and whispered into his ear.

IV

A scout came running back along the muddy track. It was Leyr. No, Bonin. No, it was Leyr. ‘Ten units,’ Leyr reported. ‘They’re dug down behind that stand of trees to the left of the bridge.’

‘Well, we’ve got to get across the bridge,’ Gaunt said.

‘Of course we have,’ said Medic Curth.

‘This really isn’t the time for a medical opinion,’ Gaunt told her.

‘Sorry,’ she said, with a deferential nod of her head. She stood back to let some of the senior officers close in around Gaunt.

‘The bridge is vital,’ Major Baskevyl said.

‘Agreed,’ said Captain Daur.

‘No question about it,’ nodded Captains Arcuda and Obel.

‘Absolutely vital,’ Commissar Hark concurred. ‘We have to get across it, or–’

‘Or what?’ asked Cadet-Commissar Nahum Ludd. The young man looked nervous. He glanced sidelong at Hark. Commissar Viktor Hark looked daggers at the youngster. ‘Try to keep up, Ludd,’ he hissed. ‘We have to get across the bridge before someone dies.’

‘Oh,’ said Ludd. ‘Oh, right.’

‘Another ten units,’ said Curth.

‘Another ten?’ Gaunt asked. ‘I thought there were just ten. Just ten, wasn’t it, Leyr?’

‘Uhm, yes, sir. Ten units,’ said Leyr.

‘Just enough to hold us here,’ said Curth.

‘We really have to bring this operation to a successful close,’ said the old doctor, Dorden.

Gaunt nodded.

‘Of course we do,’ he said. ‘I want this operation finished by nightfall. Ten, then. Ten. What are we looking at? Regular Gaurist forces or what? Ten units of what?’

‘Blood, sir,’ replied Leyr.

‘Blood Pact?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, that’s a tough dance on anybody’s card,’ Gaunt said. ‘May I take a look?’

He hurried up through the mud behind Leyr. The mud was deep, and it kept slowing him down, sucking at his boots, so that he advanced like a man wading through a dream. His heels, deep in the mire, kept knocking against skulls and helmets and the turrets of long-lost armour pieces.

Bonin, Mkoll and Maggs were waiting for them at the turn of the track. They hunkered down together behind a swirl of razor wire.

‘How are you holding up, sir?’ Maggs asked him.

‘Don’t ask him questions, Maggs,’ Mkoll hissed. ‘We’re not here to ask him questions.’

‘Sorry,’ said Maggs.

‘I’m fine, since you asked, Maggs,’ said Gaunt. ‘Why did you ask?’

Maggs looked awkward.

‘It’s been a long tour,’ Bonin said. ‘You look tired, sir.’

‘Do I?’ Gaunt responded.

‘Just... Just want to make sure you’re all right,’ nodded Maggs.

‘Don’t I look all right?’ Gaunt asked.

‘You have tears,’ Maggs began. He pointed to his own cheek. ‘Tears that look like blood,’ he added.

‘Oh, that keeps happening,’ Gaunt tutted, wiping his face. ‘It’s this iron star. Don’t you feel it too?’

The scouts nodded.

‘So, come on,’ Gaunt said. ‘I’ve come all the way up here to see. Show me.’

V

‘Ten units of blood,’ said Mkoll, passing the scope to Gaunt. ‘There, in the trees, to the left of the bridge.’

Gaunt peered through the scope. His eyes hurt. The trees weren’t trees at all. They were angular stalks of chrome metal with thin, rod-like branches. The branches supported luminous white blossom, flower heads that glowed like lamp-packs. The trees were standing in a long thicket on a bank of mud that wallowed down into the river below the bridge. There were bloated bodies drifting in the stagnant water of the river. For a moment, Gaunt was afraid that he might be able to name every single one of the dead.

‘To the left,’ Mkoll advised.

Gaunt adjusted his sight. He saw the Blood Pact. Ten units, all right. He could make out crimson spiked helmets, black-iron grotesk masks, and infantry uniforms dyed maroon with blood. They were clambering up the riverbanks, milling like fire-ants, constructing siege platforms along the stinking river to support mortars. He could hear the scrape and hum of their tools.

‘Ten units, all right,’ said Gaunt. ‘Mkoll?’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘What’s this bridge called again? I forget.’

Mkoll hesitated. ‘It’s the... the... somewhere-or-other-bridge, sir.’

Gaunt laughed. ‘You don’t know either, do you, chief?’

Mkoll laughed back. ‘So many worlds, so many objectives, sir. What can I tell you? Let me check my maps.’

‘You do that,’ said Gaunt. ‘My eyes hurt.’

‘That’ll be the iron star,’ said Leyr.

‘We have to seal this artery right now,’ said Curth.

‘Seal it?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This artery here.’

‘You mean the river?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Uhm... what?’

‘You mean the river?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It’s vital we tie it off and seal it.’

Gaunt nodded. ‘Well, we’ve got ten units to handle, but I agree. Mkoll?’

‘Oh, we can manage it, sir,’ Mkoll assured him.

Gaunt nodded. He looked at Curth and frowned.

‘I thought I left you with the command team, medic,’ he said.

She pulled down her surgical mask and smiled at him. ‘You did, Ibram, but you know me,’ she said. ‘If we’re about to get casualties, I need to be up front.’

‘Good. Good thinking,’ he murmured.

VI

The bridge, the something-or-other-bridge, was a dirty, iron monster. It looked as if it had been wrought from metal extracted from the iron star’s heart, and left to cool. It stretched out across the stagnant river on its pilings, ominous and forbidding. The bridge was so long, and the dead river so broad, they couldn’t see the far side. Gaunt wondered if he’d ever get across. It seemed like such a long way, and he was very tired. It felt as if time was running out.

‘Is it true, sir? Is time against us?’

Gaunt turned. Kolea, Varl, Domor and Criid had advanced to join him. He was pleased to see them, four of his best officers, four of his best Ghosts.

‘What was your question?’ he asked.

‘Time, sir,’ said Gol Kolea. ‘They say time is against us.’

‘Ten units of Blood Pact, right on the river here,’ Gaunt replied. ‘We’ve got to get this artery secure and get across the bridge by nightfall.’

Kolea nodded. Varl and Criid exchanged uneasy looks.

‘How are your eyes, sir?’ asked Domor.

Gaunt looked at him. ‘Sore. They hurt. Thanks for asking.’

‘Shoggy’ Domor gestured to the bulbous augmetic eyes that had earned him his nickname and smiled.

‘I know how it is with eyes,’ he said.

‘Of course you do, Shoggy,’ Gaunt replied. ‘It’s just this iron star. It hurts my head.’

‘Nobody likes it,’ said Varl.

‘Sorry to say, we just have to get on and make the best of this,’ said Gaunt. ‘So, this artery? This river? How do we seal it? Suggestions?’

‘We could burn it,’ said Kolea. ‘Cauterise it.’

Gaunt nodded. ‘Bring up the flamers. Hurry back to your companies and prepare to lead them forwards.’

The four of them hesitated.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Gaunt asked.

‘We wanted to stay with you,’ said Domor.

‘We wanted to stay by your side,’ said Varl.

‘That’s very loyal,’ Gaunt replied. ‘Get your Ghosts ready, and I’ll join you on the bridge. Come on, look lively! Do you want to live forever?’

Reluctantly, they backed away. Criid stared at him.

‘We don’t want you to die,’ she said.

‘That’s enough of that, Criid,’ Curth called out.

VII

Gaunt stood on the rise above the dead river. The iron star throbbed. His eyes hurt.

He looked at the chrome trees and their luminous blossom. He heard the scrape and hum of the Blood Pact work teams, finishing their defences.

He turned.

The black figures were still gathering out across the mire. There were half a dozen of them now, silent, faceless, watching.

‘You’ve gone quiet,’ said Curth.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘You’ve gone quiet,’ she repeated. ‘Ibram? Say something.’

He sighed.

‘It’s those fething figures,’ he said. ‘Those black figures. They’ve been watching us for a while.’

‘What figures?’ Dorden asked.

‘Can’t you see them?’ he asked. ‘There. Out there. Watching us. There was only one to begin with, but there are more now.’

‘Ibram?’ said Curth softly. ‘There’s no one there.’

‘Yes, there is. I can see them. Stay here.’

‘Ibram?’ Curth said. ‘Ibram, where are you going?’

‘Stay here, Ibram,’ Dorden urged.

‘Stay with us,’ said Curth.

‘Just a moment,’ he replied. ‘I’ll be right back. Just give me a moment.’

‘Ibram, you can’t go wandering off on your own,’ said Curth. ‘It’s not safe.’

‘Just give me a moment.’

He started to walk, sliding, slipping in the mire, his boots digging deep. He tried to keep sight of the black figures. Behind him, the voices calling out to him faded away.

It was further than he thought. Twice, he tripped over buried helmets and tank hatches, and fell. On both occasions, he lay in the mud for a while, not entirely sure he ever wanted to get up again. He was tired. His eyes hurt.

He staggered on, knee-deep in the wet, red mud. It smelled of rot and death. No surprise there. Battlefield mire often reeked of the blood and viscera that had soaked into it. Over the years, he’d become accustomed to the smell, but this was particularly strong, like an open gut wound or fresh arterial spill.

The black figures didn’t seem to be coming any closer, no matter how hard he toiled towards them. They remained distant, watching.

‘Who are you?’ he yelled, but his voice was hoarse and the black figures declined to answer.

VIII

‘Where has he gone?’ Curth asked. ‘Ibram? Ibram, come back!’

‘He’s not responding,’ said Dorden. ‘We’ve got to bring him back.’

‘Ten units!’ Curth yelled. ‘Now!’

‘I don’t think he can hear us,’ said Dorden. ‘He’s too far away.’

‘Someone’s got to bring him back,’ said Curth. ‘Someone’s got to reach him and bring him back!’ She pulled down her mask and looked around. ‘Larkin? Over here! On the double!’

IX

He couldn’t see the black figures any more. They’d somehow vanished into the mist. He had gone too far and lost his bearings. No-man’s-land stretched away in all directions.

Well, that was stupid, he told himself. I have no idea where I am any more. I’m lost out here.

The iron star was the only constant. He looked up at it, ignoring the pain in his eyes. Perhaps he could take a bearing off it and find his way back. He couldn’t even hear Curth and Dorden any more.

He was so tired. He sat down in the mud, and wiped his eyes. His hands became wet with blood. So stupid to have wandered so far.

He thought about lying down and taking a nap. His head would be clearer after a nap. Just a quick nap. Just a moment to rest his eyes.

He looked up. The black figures stood around him, silent and grim. Mist fumed around them, battlefield vapour. The figures gazed down at him from under their hoods.

He rose to his feet, aching, unsteady.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

None of them replied.

‘Who the feth are you and why are you watching me?’ he demanded.

The figures remained silent.

He lunged forwards and pulled at the nearest figure’s cowl, trying to see its face.

‘Who are you?’ he yelled.

There was a loud crack, and the figure’s head exploded in a clap of light.

Gaunt turned.

‘What are you doing all the way out here, sir?’ Larkin asked, lowering his long-las.

‘I...’ Gaunt began.

He turned back. The figures had vanished again.

‘Did you see them?’ he asked Larkin.

Larkin was quietly reloading his piece.

‘Ominous black figures, gathering around a battlefield and waiting for slaughter to begin, you mean, sir?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Yes!’

‘I see ’em all the time,’ said Larkin, slapping his next hot-shot load in place, ‘but I’m not the most reliable witness, am I?’

‘You’ve got the best eye I’ve ever known, Larks,’ replied Gaunt.

‘Maybe. Through a scope, maybe. But my brain, it’s wired funny. I see all sorts of feth. I’m surprised at you, though.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Gaunt.

‘You? Jumping at shadows? Going off by yourself into feth knows where?’ Larkin grinned. ‘You were always the level-headed one. More even than Mkoll or Daur or Rawne. You always kept it together.’

‘I still am, Larks,’ said Gaunt. ‘But I saw them. The black figures. You saw them too. You put a round through one of their skulls!’

Larkin shook his head. ‘I fired a warning shot to get your attention. You were floundering around out here in the mud, yelling at no one like a total idiot.’

‘Was I?’

Larkin nodded. ‘It wasn’t a good look. It didn’t inspire much confidence. Pardon me for saying so, sir.’

Gaunt sat down in the mud again, heavily.

‘I’m just so tired, Larks,’ he said. ‘You know? So tired. We’ve been on the line too long. I don’t know how much longer I can do this.’

‘Longer than the rest of us, I trust,’ smiled Larkin, ‘or we’re all fethed.’

Gaunt looked up at his loyal master marksman. ‘Larkin,’ he said. ‘I see things. I keep seeing things. Worse than that, there are things I don’t see. I know they’re there, but I don’t see them.’

‘Your eyes, is it?’ asked Larkin.

‘Yes. They hurt.’

‘That’s no surprise, seeing as what they did to you.’

‘What? What does that mean?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Nothing. Forget I said it,’ said Larkin.

‘Who did what to me?’ Gaunt asked.

Larkin shook his head. ‘You’ve seen a lot, that’s all I’m saying, sir. In your career, you’ve seen a lot of stuff, more than many men could stand seeing in a lifetime. You’ve seen destruction. You’ve seen death. You’ve seen friends and comrades perish right in front of you.’

‘I have. I really have,’ said Gaunt.

‘Let’s get you back to the line, shall we?’ Larkin asked, offering Gaunt his hand.

‘You can see the way?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Of course, I’m Tanith. I may not be a scout, but I’ve got the Tanith instinct. Follow me. Let’s get you out of here before the black figures come back.’

Gaunt frowned. ‘I thought you said there weren’t any black figures?’

Larkin shrugged. ‘Just because I see ’em all the time, doesn’t mean they’re real. Come on.’

X

They trudged back towards the Ghost lines under the iron star.

‘I’m tired, Larks,’ Gaunt said, after a while. ‘Let me rest for a moment.’

‘Not here,’ Larkin replied, ‘it’s not safe. Keep going. You can rest when we reach the lines.’

‘I’ve got to stop,’ said Gaunt, ‘just for a moment. Let me stop for a moment and close my eyes.’

XI

‘I brought him back as far as I could,’ said Larkin sadly. ‘He doesn’t want to come any further.’

‘He’s got to,’ replied Curth. ‘He’s just got to.’

‘He’s not listening to me any more,’ said Larkin. ‘He’s just stopped.’

XII

Sometimes, when he was able to steal an hour to sleep, stretched out in a habitent, or curled up on a rotting bunk in a dugout, he dreamed of a world called Jago. The dreams were powerful, and full of miserable and lingering pain.

Given that he had stopped remembering, or even caring to remember, the names of the places he and the Ghosts had toiled through, loyal and weary, weary and loyal, he wondered why Jago in particular had remained in his memory and his dreams.

It had been a dry, dusty, wind-blown place. The dust had seeped into everything, and the wind had made a sound like air singing through the openings of skulls whose tops had been sawn off. Dry and dead, that was Jago. Dry and dead, and not oozing with mud and humid like... like who the feth cares anymore.

He had other dreams, sometimes. An old man called Boniface sometimes quizzed him about theology and philosophy in an old library. The old man, scarred and mutilated beyond belief, sat in a brass chair. In the dream, Gaunt would ask Boniface about his father, and the old man would refuse to reply.

Another dream involved someone called Uncle Dercius. Uncle Dercius would arrive unexpectedly. Gaunt would be playing with a carved wooden frigate on the sundecks, and would look up in glee as Uncle Dercius walked in. Uncle Dercius had a strange look on his face. He had a gift for Ibram. It was a signet ring.

In a different dream, someone called Colm Corbec was waiting for him in a woodland glade. Tall, bulky, bearded, Corbec was dressed in Tanith black, and smiled when Gaunt approached. Gaunt could smell the resin sap of nalwood. He knew Corbec was the greatest friend he’d ever had, and the greatest friend he’d ever lost.

Another dream, ebbing from some memory of a hive city, was filled by Merity Chass, of the noble House Chass. She was young and beautiful, and became even more beautiful when her dress slid away. Her voice was as soft as her skin. She said...

XIII

‘For Throne’s sake, wake up!’

Gaunt started. Astonishingly, he had actually been dozing off. That had never happened before, not in three decades of soldiering. I must be getting weary. Loyal but weary.

‘Don’t fret, Rawne,’ Gaunt told his number two. ‘I’m right here. Just resting my eyes.’

‘It’s Curth, Ibram.’

‘Oh. Yes, of course.’

‘You were a long way away from me then.’

‘I’m just tired, Curth. Just napping for a moment.’

‘Try to stay with us. We’ve got to close this artery and cross the bridge.’

‘Before nightfall.’

‘Exactly,’ she replied.

‘Let’s get this done, then,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to the flamers.’

XIV

The flame troopers gathered around him. Brostin, Dremmond, Lubba, Lyse, Nitorri and the rest. They stank of promethium fuel, their stock in trade.

‘Where the Throne are your flamers?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Well, we left them outside,’ said Lubba.

‘Outside?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Lubba meant back on the track over there, sir,’ Dremmond said quickly. He nudged Lubba with a heavy, grubby arm. ‘Idiot.’

‘Our tanks are being topped up just now,’ said Brostin, with a broad grin. ‘We’re all ready to go. You give the word.’

‘You understand the objectives?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Why don’t you run through them, just for us?’ Dremmond suggested.

‘Haven’t the company leaders briefed you?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Well, of course they have,’ said Brostin.

‘Immaculately,’ said Lyse.

‘We just, uhm, like to hear it from you in person, sir,’ said Brostin.

Gaunt chuckled. ‘Very well. We have to get across this bridge by nightfall. Ten units of blood. Blood Pact. You’ve got to cauterise this artery right now.’

‘Artery?’ asked Lubba.

‘This river.’

Lubba nodded.

‘Not a problem,’ said Brostin. He took out a lho-stick.

‘Not here!’ Curth called out.

‘I’m not going to light it, doc,’ Brostin protested.

‘They’d see the spark,’ said Gaunt.

‘Who’s that, sir?’ asked Brostin, sucking on his unlit lho-stick.

‘The Blood Pact down on the river.’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ Brostin replied. ‘That’s why I’m being careful. We’re ready to go as soon as you want.’

‘Then get to it,’ said Gaunt. ‘And Brostin?’

‘Sir?’

‘Say hello to Mister Yellow for me.’

XV

The iron star throbbed. The bridge waited. It seemed all too close to nightfall.

Gaunt adjusted his cap, brim first, checked the load of his bolt pistol, and drew out his power sword, the famous blade of Hieronymo Sondar. It purred as he switched it on.

He rose up, the mud squelching around his boots.

‘First and Only!’ he yelled.

Whistles blew, and line officers called out orders for readiness.

‘Straight silver!’ Gaunt instructed. Clicks and clatters sounded down the Ghost formation as the Tanith fixed their warknives to their bayonet lugs.

‘Flamers advance!’ Gaunt called.

The flame-troopers climbed up out of the forward dugouts they’d crawled to. As they rose, their tanks thumped, and spears of liquid flame spat down across the river’s edge. On their hastily constructed siege platforms, the Blood Pact troopers screamed as inferno engulfed them.

Mortar charges, carried over the dead river on pontoons, began to catch off and explode. Bodies and fragments of splintered wood were hurled up into the air on ferocious spurts of fire.

‘Advance!’ Gaunt ordered, and the line officers repeated the call. He began running. Sword raised, he slipped and slithered in the mire. He heard the Ghosts behind him, the crack and fizzle of lasrifles, the roar of voices.

Enemy fire began to whip his way. It was so bright and quick, it hurt his eyes.

‘Keep on them!’ he yelled.

‘Steady, Ibram,’ Curth warned.

‘Get into cover, medicae!’ he shouted at her.

‘I’m staying right with you,’ Curth whispered.

He ploughed on into the billowing smoke. The air smelled of fyceline, blood and slime. Stray shells whumped in and kicked up mud that spattered across him. Blast concussions made the smoke eddy and swirl in curious patterns, like ripples on water. The noise was overwhelming.

He saw shapes moving towards him in the smoke ahead. Blood Pact troopers loomed into view, charging up from the river to meet them. Feral sounds and inhuman heresies issued from the screaming mouth-slits of their iron masks. Grim human trophies, like finger-bones and ears, jangled from their webbing and their munition belts.

Some of the Blood Pact carried lasrifles, with bayonets fixed. Others brandished spears or billhooks, or spiked hammers made for trench fighting. Their howls rose in intensity as they caught their first glimpse of the Imperial troops.

‘Into them! Break their backs!’ Gaunt shouted. ‘The Emperor Protects!’

He didn’t falter in his stride. If anything, he ran faster, raising his bolt pistol to shoot, swinging his sword back. For a beautiful moment, the weariness left him. It just lifted off him. He felt as if he could take on the Archenemy single-handed. He felt the way he had done as a young man, with the whole galaxy before him.

He fired two shots and knocked down a pair of charging Blood Pact troopers, who went over as if they had been demolished by wrecking balls.

Then he was in amongst the rest. He swung the power sword, and the blade went clean through a throat. A billhook sang towards his face, and he chopped it away and then drove the sword, point-first, through the billhook-owner’s torso. Shapes whirled around him. This was the killing time, close combat, face-to-face, without quarter or compunction. Gaunt had tangled with the Archon’s Blood Pact often enough to know that they fought like wolves, and seldom relented. Many were hard-bred Imperial Guardsmen, who had defected, or who had been seduced away from the power of the Throne by the perversions of Chaos. The Blood Pact was one of the few forces in the Archenemy’s host with proper military training and discipline.

Ghosts slammed into the brawl around him, black shapes stabbing with glittering silver bayonets. Lasweapons went off point-blank, thumping bodies off their feet into the mire. Figures wrestled and grappled.

Gaunt shot another Blood Pact trooper who was charging at him with a spear, and then ducked as a trench-mace came down to crush his skull. He kicked out the legs of the trooper with the mace and, as the man fell, Gaunt cleaved his sword through his shoulderblades and spine. Another came close, at Gaunt’s elbow, and Gaunt made a quick back-turn and rammed the pommel and grip of his sword into the man’s throat. The Blood Pact trooper stumbled backwards, choking, and Gaunt finished his work with a fencing master’s thrust. Two more hurled themselves at him. A rusty bayonet grazed Gaunt’s arm, ripping the sleeve of his storm coat. He fired wildly, instinctively and, though wild, the bolt-round blew a leg off at the hip. The other enemy trooper swung his billhook down, but Gaunt blocked it with his sword. The powered blade cut the billhook in half. Gaunt sliced his sword-arm backwards, and ran the blade in a slash across the man’s chest. Blood exploded from the massive wound. The trooper dropped to his knees, masked face tilted up at the sky, and Gaunt took his head off.

‘Tell your heathen masters the Ghosts have come for them!’ he yelled into the darkness.

Las-bolts rained down through the smoke cover like incandescent drizzle, and made sucking, sizzling punctures in the mire. Gaunt heard the rasp and belch of flamers from nearby. Further off, mortars were grunting like bullfrogs at the river’s edge, and autocannons were rattling like infernal mill engines.

Gaunt looked around, trying to assess the fight, but the smoke was shrouding everything. All he could see was blurred figures mobbing in the half-light. Someone lobbed a star-shell into the sky, where it wobbled and bobbed like a second, brighter iron star, but it did nothing to improve visibility.

His blood was up. As he faced down and killed three more Archenemy troopers, Gaunt recognised the fury in his heart. It was the old fury, a courage and a determination he had begun to fear he’d lost. These last few years, it had started to feel as though its fire had died out, leaving nothing in his soul but dull embers.

Some gust of passion had breathed upon those coals, and rekindled the flames. With a measure of sadness, Gaunt realised that he only ever felt decently human when he was locked in the madhouse of battle. His dead soul blazed, and his dull limbs cast off their aches and pains. His mind became clear. His life, the very essence of his life as an Imperial soldier, was here, vital and vibrant in the insanity of combat.

Only on the razor-edge of life and death could he feel alive. Only in death could he live.

A Blood Pact officer, an etogaur, lunged out of the cinder-smog. He was a massive beast, with corded muscle bulging under his bloodstained coat. His grotesk was dirty gold. His huge greatsword was running with Imperial gore.

The etogaur growled as he looked around for another Guardsman to butcher.

‘Over here, you son of a gak,’ Gaunt roared.

XVI

Ana Curth bent over her patient. Battlefield medicine was not a precise art. Her scrubs were smeared with blood.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘His vitals are bright and strong, but he seems to be slipping away.’

Dorden put his hand on her shoulder. ‘We’ve done all we can.’

‘No.’

‘Ana, we have hundreds of casualties to treat. Perhaps–’

‘No,’ she said, emphatically. ‘I’m not going to give up.’

‘Look at his wounds,’ Dorden said, nodding down at the stricken patient. ‘The Blood Pact has done its work as brutally as ever.’

‘There’s still a chance,’ she said, reaching for a clean scalpel. ‘There’s always a chance.’

XVII

The etogaur uttered some abominable battle-cry, and expertly whirled his greatsword around his head and shoulders in a display of strength. It was a powered blade, and its gleaming length crackled with indigo sparks, like thread veins of electricity.

Gaunt’s bolt pistol was spent. There was no time to reload. That suited him fine. He wanted this to be sword work.

The etogaur rushed him. Gaunt raised the sword of Hieronymo Sondar to parry the first swing, and managed to do so, but the sheer power of the heavy blade’s impact jarred his wrist and forced him to brace his stance. The etogaur was fast. He evidently knew swordplay, and he revealed a master’s finesse, even though he was wielding a monstrous, heavy blade designed for wholesale slaughter rather than duelling.

Gaunt blocked three more quick blows, turning his sword with a dextrous touch. The etogaur was using the sheer weight of his blade for momentum, swinging each blow into the next, changing his grip on the double-handed pommel to swoop and turn the greatsword around his body for maximum kill power.

The etogaur brought the greatsword around in a bodyline cut. Gaunt stopped it dead with a flat-blade parry, and then drove back, robbing the etogaur of swing momentum. With brute force, the etogaur hefted up his blade, and tried to swing again. His sword was twice as long as Gaunt’s. He had reach. He had power.

His boots sloshing in the mire, Gaunt outpaced him, and turned around his left flank. The etogaur tried to turn, but Gaunt drove in a slice that the etogaur barely parried away. He was wrong-footed, unbalanced.

As the etogaur tried to regain his poise and bring his greatsword up, Gaunt ripped his sword in. The weight of the blade cut through the greatsword’s grip. It cut through the etogaur’s right wrist, and severed all the digits of his left hand.

The etogaur uttered a bark of disbelief. He took a step backwards, blood squirting from his wrist stump and his dismembered hand. He stared at Gaunt through the eye-slits of his dirty gold mask, awaiting the finishing stroke.

Gaunt aimed his sword at the etogaur, tip first. ‘Run,’ he said. ‘Run and tell them. The Ghosts of Tanith have come, and they will kill you all.’

The etogaur began to howl. He turned, and stumbled away into the smoke, bleating out his distress and his terror.

Gaunt allowed himself a smile. He could feel tears of blood on his face.

Turning, he saw a Ghost nearby, beset by two Blood Pact troopers. He hurled himself into the brawl, and severed the spine of one of the Archenemy warriors with his sword. The beleaguered Ghost used the advantage to lance the other Blood Pact marauder with his bayonet.

‘Are you in one piece?’ Gaunt asked as the Ghost yanked his blade out of the corpse.

‘I’m all right, sir,’ the Ghost replied. Gaunt realised that it was Beltayn, his adjutant.

‘Good to see you, Bel. How’re you holding up?’

‘This is a pretty bad fix, sir, isn’t it?’ said Beltayn. His face was ash-white.

‘We’ll be fine, Bel.’

‘I think, sir...’

‘What?’

‘Something’s awry.’

Gaunt laughed and gestured at the smoke, flames and corpses around them. ‘You figured that out all by yourself, did you?’

Beltayn shook his head.

‘I mean, I’ve heard things on the vox,’ he said. ‘We’ve broken their spirit here, but it sounds like they’ve got reinforcements moving in on our flank.’

‘More Blood Pact?’

‘No, sir. From the vox-bursts, it sounds like the Sons of Sek.’

Gaunt felt a chill. The Blood Pact were daemons enough. Their cohorts had been raised by the Archon with the specific intention of matching the Imperial Guard in the Sabbat Worlds theatre. Anakwanar Sek was the Archon’s most fearsome lieutenant commander. Inspired by the example of the Blood Pact, Sek had developed his own elite force. Gaunt had seen the Sons at work on... where was it... Gereon, that was it, Gereon. The Sons of Sek had appeared to be even more formidable than the Blood Pact. The Sons had an appetite for atrocity. The Ghosts had yet to enjoy the dubious pleasure of meeting them in full combat.

‘Where’s Rawne?’ asked Gaunt.

‘I don’t know, sir,’ Beltayn replied.

‘Baskevyl, then? Daur? Kolea?’

‘I can’t get them on the vox.’

‘Get me Corbec, at least!’

Beltayn looked at him oddly.

‘What?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Colonel Corbec, sir... he’s been dead these last five years.’

Gaunt paused. ‘Of course he has. Of course he has...’

‘Sir?’

‘Bel, we have to get this bridge secured before nightfall.’

Beltayn looked up at the smoke cover overhead. ‘And when will that be, do you think?’

‘I don’t know. We just have to get the bridge secured.’

‘I don’t even know where the bridge is any more,’ said Beltayn.

‘It’s over that way,’ Gaunt replied, gesturing over his left shoulder. ‘It’s close. Bel, I need you to run back and rally the main force. I need you to find Rawne or Kolea and get them ready. Let them know we’re about to be flanked by the Sons. Tell them I’m gathering up the forward elements and heading for the bridge.’

‘Is that wise, sir?’ asked Beltayn.

‘The bridge is our objective, Beltayn. We need to secure it. Tell Rawne I’m forming up every Ghost I can find and leading them towards the bridge approach. He’s got to cover our arses from a flank attack. Come on, Bel. It’s not rocket science!’

Beltayn nodded. He took up his las and turned to go. Then he paused, and offered Gaunt his hand.

‘Bel?’

‘In case we don’t meet again, sir,’ said Beltayn. ‘I want you to know that it’s been an honour to serve.’

Gaunt took Beltayn’s hand. ‘It’s been an honour to serve with you, Dughan. But we will meet again.’

‘We’d better,’ said Beltayn, and ran off. Gaunt watched until his adjutant had vanished into the shrouding smoke.

He turned, and continued to advance.

Blood Pact bodies littered the mud, some already sinking into its fathomless embrace. Gaunt thought he’d find Ghost platoons ahead, but there was no sign of them. They’d pushed in beside him. Where the feth had they vanished to?

He reloaded his bolt pistol as he trudged forwards. He could smell the river. The spinning, twisting smoke was eclipsing the sky. All sounds and signs of fighting had abated.

His eyes started to hurt again. He couldn’t see far in the damned smoke.

Then he saw Nessa.

XVIII

Nessa Bourah was one of his finest snipers. She’d served through the Vervunhive siege as part of the people’s resistance, and joined the Ghosts at liberation.

Nessa had taken up a shooting pitch in a muddy foxhole on the river bank, and was scoping for a target. Saturation bombing during the battle of Vervunhive had rendered her profoundly deaf. Without a spotter, she was entirely unaware of the Blood Pact trooper closing in behind her, machete raised.

Gaunt raised his bolt pistol, sighted it, and blew the Blood Pacter’s head off. Nessa jumped in surprise as the body crashed down beside her. She turned and raised her long-las.

It’s me, Gaunt signed.

Nessa lowered her rifle.

‘You took me by surprise,’ she said, in her delicious, slightly nasal accent.

‘Not as much as he would have,’ Gaunt suggested.

She touched his chin, and turned his face towards her.

‘So I can see!’ she demanded. ‘So I can see your mouth!’

Sorry, he signed.

He got down in the foxhole beside her, making sure she could see his face.

‘Where are the others? The others?’ he asked.

Nessa shook her head. ‘I haven’t seen anyone. It’s quiet.’

‘Something’s wrong,’ he said.

‘What?’

Something’s wrong, he signed. He’d made a point of learning the art after Vervunhive. Nessa wasn’t the only deaf trooper in his regiment. Many of them, like Nessa, had eschewed augmetics, favouring the strength of silence in war.

‘We should be very quiet,’ she agreed.

If we should be quiet, why aren’t you signing to me? he signed.

‘I’m deaf. I can read your signing,’ she said. ‘How would you read mine?’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

Nessa reached out a hand and ran her finger along his cheek, circling his right eye.

‘I did like your eyes so very much,’ she said. ‘They were so strong. I suppose they can be replaced.’

‘Replaced? What are you talking about?’

‘They took your eyes, sir. Out in the wastelands of Jago, they took your eyes.’

‘What the feth are you talking about?’

She shrank back. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought you knew.’

‘Knew what? No one’s taken my eyes. I can see you. Nessa, I can see you!’

‘Just like I can hear you,’ she replied. ‘It’s funny, that, isn’t it?’

‘Nessa–’

‘I’m sorry. I’m glad you can see me. I really am.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. His eyes had started to hurt again. The iron star was burning down through the smoke.

You’re blind and I’m deaf, she signed. What a great partnership. I just wish I could stay here with you.

‘Nessa?’ he cried. ‘Nessa?’

Gaunt was alone in the foxhole. Nessa had gone. Her long-las and ammo belt lay beside him, as if she’d just been there. He could still smell her.

‘I’m not blind,’ he told nobody. ‘I’m not blind. I can see this. I can see the river. I can see the bridge.’

XIX

The bridge seemed as far away as ever. As the smoke slowly cleared and dusk settled, Gaunt watched the bridge from the foxhole cover. He studied it through Nessa’s scope. Where had she gone? She’d been right there.

She’d been right–

He saw movement down by the bridge. He adjusted the scope and, by the evil light of the iron star, saw the black figures gathering at the mouth of the bridge. There were a dozen of them. They were watching him.

He took up the long-las, checked its load, and wondered about his aim. Could he hit one of them at this range? Nessa could, Larks too, but Gaunt was not a trained marksman. Maybe he could place a shot amongst them and scare them off.

They were beginning to annoy him. What did they want? Did they want him? Had they come for him? He wasn’t having that.

He lowered the rifle. There was no point wasting ammo. He was going to need it. He could hear drums, drums beating the skewed, alien tempos of the Sons of Sek.

There was going to be a great deal more bloodshed before the night was out.

He wondered if he had the strength to face it. He was so tired. His eyes hurt.

What had Nessa meant? Who took my eyes?

His body ached. Sleep seemed like such a perfect release. Just for a minute, perhaps? A few minutes sleep.

He closed his eyes.

XX

There was a long, squealing tone, a warning note.

‘Flatline!’ Dorden cried.

‘Paddles!’ Curth yelled, tears in her eyes.

‘It’s no good–’

‘Paddles! Seventy mil adrenolec shunt! Another ten units!’

The note whined on.

‘Ana, it’s a flatline. There’s no purpose in prolonging–’

‘Give me the fething paddles now!’ she demanded.

XXI

He did not dream. There was only darkness. It was a lonely place. He couldn’t even sense the iron star any more. There was just a sound, a persistent whining note. It cut through his empty, dreamless darkness, droning, squealing, monotonous.

He woke with a start, slammed awake as if by some vast shock. The whining note quit, and was replaced by the thump of the enemy drums.

He was still in the foxhole. The world was cast in twilight. Who the feth cares anymore was just minutes away from nightfall.

Something had woken him. Some kind of contact had brought him back from the darkness of his sleep.

‘This’ll never do,’ a voice said.

He sat up. ‘Who’s there?’

‘Going to sleep on the job? You’d have given us double RIP duties if you’d caught us doing that,’ another voice chuckled.

‘Who’s there?’ Gaunt demanded, reaching for his bolt pistol. ‘I can’t see you! Who’s there?’

‘Of course you can’t see us,’ said a third voice. It was very flat and artificial, and carried no emphasis or emotion. It sounded sarcastic. ‘You can’t see anything.’

‘But it’s all right, sir,’ said a fourth voice, a young voice. ‘We can see you.’

‘So you’re safe,’ said the first voice. It was a rich, genial, reassuring voice. ‘For now, anyway.’

‘Gotta get moving, mind,’ said the flat sarcastic voice. ‘Can’t stay here forever.’

‘And we can only look after you for a little while,’ said the second, chuckling voice.

Gaunt rose to his feet, swinging the bolt pistol around blindly. ‘Show yourselves!’

‘Well, if it makes it easier for you,’ sighed the first voice.

Gaunt blinked. Four men were suddenly visible, crouching around the foxhole, staring in at him. They were Ghosts, in black Ghost kit, their weapons loose but ready in their hands.

‘Better?’ asked their bearded leader.

‘Corbec?’ Gaunt whispered.

‘Hello, ’bram,’ said Colm Corbec with a grin. ‘Been a while. Looks like you’ve been through the fething wars.’

‘Colm, it’s good to see you,’ said Gaunt, lowering his pistol. ‘I thought I was alone out here. What are our strengths? How many other Ghost platoons made it this far?’

Corbec smiled and shook his head. He glanced at his companions. ‘Just the five of us. We’ll have to make do, won’t we, lads?’

The other three nodded.

‘It’s good to see you,’ Gaunt repeated.

‘You’re not seeing us,’ said the owner of the monotone voice. ‘You’re not seeing anything. They took out your eyes.’

‘Hush your drone, Feygor,’ said Corbec. ‘He doesn’t understand.’

Feygor shrugged.

‘But it is good to see you again, sir,’ said the biggest of the four Ghosts with a chuckle. ‘Maybe we should toast to old times with a sip of sacra?’

‘We need clear heads just now, Bragg,’ said Corbec. ‘We’ve got to get to the bridge.’

‘Well, it was just a thought,’ said Try Again Bragg.

‘There’s no point us trying to get to the bridge,’ said Gaunt. ‘There are only five of us. What good would that do?’

‘It’s what matters,’ said the youngest Ghost. ‘It’s why we’re here.’

‘I don’t understand, Caff,’ said Gaunt.

‘Let’s just get over the bridge, sir,’ said Caffran. ‘Then you’ll understand everything.’

XXII

They left the safety of the foxhole and began to track their way down towards the bridge. The river was a dead thing, full of corpses. The ruins of the Blood Pact platforms smouldered in the evening haze. Gaunt could still hear the drums of the Sons of Sek, pounding like an irregular heartbeat.

Caffran took point, sweeping ahead with his lasrifle. The boy was good, sharp, a potential scout. Gaunt tried to remember why he hadn’t promoted Caffran to Mkoll’s unit. It was a clear oversight. Gaunt must have had a good reason not to send the boy on.

Corbec and Feygor flanked Gaunt, weapons ready. Corbec was humming an old Tanith wood-song. The sound of it made Gaunt feel much more comfortable. Just like the old days. Corbec would hum along to Milo’s pipes. Why didn’t that happen any more? Where had Corbec been, these last few combat tours?

Gaunt remembered Beltayn saying something about Corbec. He couldn’t quite recall what it was.

Feygor was quiet. Everything he said sounded like a petulant sarcastic jibe thanks to his artificial larynx. He kept his comments to himself.

Try brought up the rear, lugging his twin autocannons.

‘Just like old times, huh?’ he said.

‘Noise discipline!’ Corbec hissed.

‘Yeah, just like old times,’ said Bragg.

Caffran held up a hand for full stop. They halted. Gaunt readied his pistol and his sword. He’d wanted to bring Nessa’s long-las, but Corbec had told him Nessa might want it back and he should leave it be.

‘Caff?’ Gaunt called.

Movement, Caffran signed.

‘Great,’ said Feygor. This time, his sarcasm was intentional.

The drumming had got louder and faster, like a racing heart.

‘What have we got, Caff?’ asked Corbec softly, crawling forwards.

‘Sons of Sek between us and the bridge,’ Caffran reported. ‘Dozens of them.’

‘What about the watchers?’ asked Gaunt.

‘The what?’ asked Feygor.

‘The watchers in black,’ said Gaunt.

‘Oh, them,’ said Bragg. ‘They’re just your imagination, they are.’

‘What?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Everyone shut up,’ said Corbec. ‘We’re about to wade into the deep and stinky. Everyone locked? Everyone loaded?’

‘Yes, sir,’ the three Ghosts replied.

‘’Bram?’

Gaunt nodded. ‘I’m ready, Colm. Who wants to live forever?’

‘Well, you, I hope,’ said Corbec. ‘For a while, at least. That’s the whole point of this.’

Gaunt looked at him.

‘You’ve got to live, Ibram,’ said Corbec. ‘You’ve just got to. That’s the way of it. You’re important, more important than you can imagine. You and the Ghosts, it’s going to be down to you. The whole Crusade depends on you. Win or lose, it’s going to be down to you in the end.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Colm,’ Gaunt said.

‘I know you don’t,’ said Corbec, ‘but you will.’

‘You said “me and the Ghosts”,’ said Gaunt. ‘You’re Ghosts too.’

‘Yes, we are,’ said Bragg. ‘We really are.’

‘Let’s do this, shall we, gents?’ Corbec suggested. ‘On three. One, two...’

XXIII

The Sons of Sek were the hardest bastards Gaunt had ever encountered on the field of war. Chasing for the bridge, the five Ghosts ploughed into them. The fight turned to hell. It wasn’t exhilarating. The old fury didn’t relight.

It was a bloody, butchering slog. It was war at its darkest and most tenacious.

The Sons came at them from all sides in the twilight. Drumming was the only sound Gaunt could hear. Feygor, Caffran and Corbec slammed off shots as they came in, and Bragg followed on, blasting with his cannons. He mowed them down. The Sons of Sek were so many, he didn’t have to try again. Gaunt’s sword swung and struck. He emptied his bolt pistol four times.

He thought they would be overwhelmed. He thought they weren’t going to make it, but they were fast, and they were good, and they had surprise on their side, despite the incredible ferocity of the Sons of Sek.

They were Ghosts. They were five of the best Guardsmen the Imperium had ever produced.

They covered one another. They checked and turned with expertise. They watched the flanks, they plastered the angles, they fired in turns to stagger reloading. At any given point in the action at least three of them were shooting.

They cut through the Sons like an elite strike force, because they were an elite strike force. They were immortals. They were gods of war.

They reached the bridge.

XXIV

‘On you go, then,’ said Corbec.

‘We all go across,’ said Gaunt. He turned to look at the four Ghosts. They were standing, weapons ready, in a semi-circle behind him, facing the bridge.

‘That’s not how it works,’ said Feygor.

‘We can’t cross the bridge,’ said Caffran.

‘But you’ve got to,’ said Bragg.

‘I’m not about to leave you here,’ said Gaunt.

‘That’s just how it goes,’ said Corbec. ‘You go on alone from here. You cross the bridge. We stay on this side.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we have to,’ said Corbec. ‘We can’t cross over, but you can. Now go on with you. Don’t make us wish we hadn’t made this effort. Cross the fething bridge, ’bram. Cross it.’

‘But–’

‘Cross it!’ snapped Bragg.

‘You’ll see us again soon enough, sir,’ said Caffran.

‘Unless you do end up living for ever,’ said Feygor.

Gaunt turned and looked at the bridge. It was vast and empty and iron, and it seemed to stretch away as far as he could see.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m tired. My eyes hurt. I don’t know if I can make it all that way.’

‘You have to,’ said Caffran. ‘They’re waiting for you on the other side.’

‘I’m so tired, Caff,’ Gaunt said. ‘Can’t I stay here with you?’

‘Get on with you!’ Corbec growled.

‘I don’t think I can make it all the way,’ said Gaunt.

‘We can’t come with you,’ said Corbec. ‘We can’t carry you over there. Someone else will have to help you.’

‘Colm?’ Gaunt said, sinking to the ground.

‘See you in another life, all right?’ said Corbec.

Gaunt was alone.

XXV

‘Get up,’ said Rawne.

Gaunt looked up. ‘Eli?’

‘Get up, you fether. Get up.’

‘Eli?’

Rawne peered down at him. ‘Don’t you dare do this to me, Gaunt. If anyone’s going to finish you, it’s going to be me. Don’t you dare do this.’

Gaunt clambered to his feet. ‘I don’t like your tone, Major Rawne.’

‘Oh, bite me,’ said Rawne. ‘Come on, you bastard. You’re coming back with us.’

‘Us?’ murmured Gaunt.

‘Seyadhe true, soule,’ said Eszrah ap Niht. Eszrah and Rawne scooped Gaunt up between them and began to walk him across the bridge.

‘It’s so fething far,’ muttered Gaunt. ‘And the Sons of Sek... the Sons of Sek are right behind us.’

‘The Sons of Sek can eat my arse,’ said Rawne. ‘You’re coming home with us. Throne, you weigh a ton. Try using your legs! Help a fether out!’

‘I’m trying, Rawne. My eyes hurt so much.’

‘They put your eyes out in the wastelands of Jago,’ said Rawne. ‘The Blood Pact torturers virtually hacked you to pieces. Curth and Dorden, they’ve been fighting to patch you together again. You’ll get new eyes. Augmetics. You’ll get grafts and organ bionics. Just keep walking.’

‘Jago?’ Gaunt whispered. He began to remember.

‘Oh, don’t be such a pussy, Gaunt! I’ve come all this way for you!’ Rawne tried to check his temper. ‘Me. Me, for Throne’s sake. Don’t you dare die on me now!’

‘I...’ Gaunt said, feeling himself almost dragged along by Rawne and the Nihtgane. ‘I remember. The iron star.’

‘The what?’ asked Rawne.

‘The iron star,’ Gaunt replied. ‘A heated poker, a branding iron, stabbing into my eyes, burning them out, taking them. Oh Throne.’

‘Stay with me, Ibram! We’re almost there!’

‘Histye, Soule,’ whispered Eszrah ap Niht. ‘Life, it bekkons.’

XXVI

The watchers in black were waiting for them at the far end of the bridge.

‘Give him over to us,’ one said.

‘Yeah, feth you,’ Rawne replied, struggling to hold Gaunt upright. ‘Feth you very much!’

‘He’s gone too far,’ said the leader of the black figures. ‘The poor, poor boy. He’s seen enough. Let him sleep now. Let him rest. We’ll take care of him. Don’t eke out his agony. Don’t force him to come back into a world that he hates.’

‘Get out of our way,’ said Rawne.

‘Ibram’s at his end. It would be a mercy,’ said the leader of the black figures. ‘We’ll take good care of him, Eli. Trust us. We’ll nurse him into the darkness. It’s what we do.’

He lowered his cowl. It was Zweil. Around him, the other ayatani priests pulled back their hoods.

‘Come on, Eli,’ Zweil said. ‘He’s done enough. Let him rest. Let us sing him to sleep. Let us anoint his body and send him off to the final rest. He deserves it. He deserves it. His war is done.’

Slumped between Eszrah and Rawne, Gaunt slowly looked up.

‘Father,’ he said, blood dribbling from his gutted eye sockets, ‘I thank you for your compassion. I really do. Rest is so tempting. It’s so very, very tempting. But I don’t think I’m done yet.’

Zweil sighed. ‘I was only trying to help.’

‘Then don’t help me die, father,’ Gaunt said. ‘Help me live.’

XXVII

The ayatani priests carried Gaunt’s body off the bridge onto the far side of the river. Wet with Gaunt’s blood, Rawne and Eszrah followed them.

‘I’ve got a pulse!’ Curth cried.

‘Thready but solid,’ Dorden noted.

‘Ten units of blood!’ Curth ordered.

‘Will he live?’ asked Rawne, pulling down his surgical mask.

‘You’ve all been through here,’ Curth replied, ‘all the Ghosts. You’ve tried to reassure him, and keep him stable. Yes, Eli, despite everything, I think he might live yet.’

‘He deserves the peace of death,’ said Zweil, sitting at the end of the cot. ‘I could still give him the last rites.’

‘I don’t think that’s going to be necessary, father,’ said Dorden.

Gaunt stirred.

‘Colm...’ he murmured.

‘He’s dreaming again,’ said Rawne.

XXVIII

From: Curth, medicae functionary, Tanith First.

To: Acting Commander, Elikon HQ, Jago.

It pleases me to be able to inform you, sir, that Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt has roused from his coma. The injuries Colonel-Commissar Gaunt suffered at the hands of the Blood Pact torturers were severe (please see my request for augmetic optical implants). He suffered three systemic organ failures on the table, and the loss of his eyes is a terrible mutilation. Skin grafting will continue for several months.

I am, however, delighted to report that Ibram Gaunt is alive.

Your honoured servant

Ana Curth (medicae).

XXIX

‘Are we still on... on Jago?’ he had asked his adjutant that morning while shaving.

His adjutant, Beltayn, had frowned, thinking the question over.

‘Jago? Uh... yes. I believe so, sir,’ he had resplied.

The names really weren’t of any consequence any more, the names of cities or continents or worlds. Each one was just a new place to get into, and then get out of again, once the job was done. He’d stopped worrying about the names. He just concentrated on the jobs, loyal but weary, weary but loyal.

Sometimes, he was so tired he even forgot his own name.

He dipped his old cut-throat razor into the chipped bowl, washing off the foam and the residue of shorn bristles. He looked at his reflection in the cracked shaving mirror. Though the reflection didn’t seem to have eyes, he recognised it anyway.

Ibram Gaunt. That was it. Ibram Gaunt.

Of course it was.

GHOSTS AND BAD SHADOWS

AIGOR 991, TWENTY-ONE DAYS OUT
FROM SALVATION’S REACH, 782.M41
(THE 27TH YEAR OF THE SABBAT WORLDS CRUSADE)

I

For the second time that day, they were making a hole in the forests.

The first hole had been made just before dawn. The Highness Ser Armaduke, once a proud Tempest-class frigate, now an old workhorse saved from the breaker’s yard for one last, suicidal run, had dropped out of the warp six hours earlier. The ship had limped into a low orbit above Aigor 991, and hung there for a while, nose down, while the Officer of Detection mapped the northern landmass, compared the geophysical profile to Battlefleet charts, and then plotted the target resolution. As the first rays of the rising sun began to hardlight the warship’s battered starboard side, the Armaduke fired its principal batteries at the surface.

The strike – from the Armaduke’s perspective just a brief flash of light on the nightside below – annihilated six acres of rainforest, and left a smoking patch of earth that was geologically stable and operationally close enough to the destination. Then the Armaduke launched six drop-ships: four long-pattern Arvus landers, and two Falco boats.

Aigor 991, a small, uninhabited world, was almost entirely swathed in dense rainforest across the northern continent. The forestation grew very rapidly, so any sections cleared or burned back did not stay clear for long. Aigor 991 had last been visited by a Battlefleet supply tender twenty-one months earlier. No sign of that mission’s landing clearance remained.

In the pale, rising light, the six landers had thundered in over the forest canopy and made landfall on the steaming, scorched turf the Armaduke had opened for them.

II

Through the trees, Gol Kolea could hear the rasp of flamers and the whicker of industrial blades. He could smell hot smoke, which had an acid bite to it, and a reek of sap so sharp that it smelled like disinfectant.

He turned, eyeing the dense forest around him. Slivers of sunlight, slender as las-beams, speared down through the canopy. Everything else was a deep emerald gloom. He was standing in shadow.

The shadow of trees. Gol didn’t know much about trees, as he had not been closely acquainted with them in the rockcrete halls of Vervunhive. Ironic that he, a Verghastite, and Baskevyl, a Belladon, had been chosen to head up the surface detail; any Tanith would have loved it. Maybe that’s why Gaunt had made the selection. Probably didn’t want some Tanith officer getting all misty-eyed and nostalgic about forests instead of keeping his mind on the job.

‘We’re in the right zone?’ he asked Fapes, Baskevyl’s adjutant.

‘Yes, sir,’ Fapes replied. ‘And that’s the third time you’ve asked.’

‘We’re here for a resupply,’ Gol snapped back. ‘Promethium and munitions. Seeing as we’ve precious little of either, it would be a feth-fool waste to use up tanks of prom clearing the wrong zone.’

‘Definitely would, sir,’ Fapes replied. He raised his auspex and squinted. ‘I’ve got a hard bounce off stone in there, and the coordinates are matched and confirmed. It’s the silo.’

Remote Depot Aigor 991. Secret. Hidden. An emergency cache that the Navy kept stocked and supplied to provide for out-haul missions beyond the range of secure Navy bases and planetary yards.

The mission profile was twofold. Burn off a landing strip from orbit, and then, from there, move in to manually clear the silo location proper with flamers and servitor teams. It was too dicey to try to clear the silo location directly from orbit: a slight miscalculation could risk vaporising the cache, even given the surgical precision of Shipmaster Spika’s gunnery officers. Once the silo was opened up, freight landers could come in and start loading.

‘This is the zone, right?’ asked Major Baskevyl, approaching them through the green shadows.

‘He just asked that,’ said Fapes.

‘I just asked that,’ said Kolea.

‘Because it would be a feth-fool waste of prom if we were clearing in the wrong place,’ said Baskevyl.

‘A point already well noted,’ said Fapes.

They had six platoons between them, essentially composed of three from Kolea’s C Company, and three from Baskevyl’s D. The rest of the surface team was made up of worker servitors from the ship’s engineering and cargo divisions, plus a few Battlefleet officers as supervisors.

A squad of men from one of Baskevyl’s platoons struggled past through the undergrowth, carrying fresh promethium tanks up from the landing strip. A Navy officer, impeccable in his dark blue uniform with its silver brocade, walked with them. He was carrying precisely nothing at all, probably because he had urgent dabbing-his-brow-with-a-silk-handkerchief and smoking-a-lho-stick duties to perform. Kolea didn’t know the man’s name.

‘Guard gets to do all the hard work,’ said Baskevyl.

‘That, my friend, is the entire story of the galaxy,’ replied Gol.

‘At least we get to breathe some fresh air,’ Baskevyl shrugged.

‘This is fresh?’ asked Kolea, wrinkling his nose.

‘Well, not now we’re torching the place, no,’ said Baskevyl. ‘Still, better than ship air. That’s like living in an armpit.’

‘Or a sock that someone’s still wearing,’ said Fapes. They gazed at him.

‘I’ll carry on with the… checking things, sirs,’ Fapes said.

Bask’s micro-bead beeped. He exchanged a few words, then looked back at Kolea.

‘Maggs says he’s found the silo,’ he said.

‘Let’s go take a look,’ said Kolea.

III

They walked through the trees together. The occasional spears of sunlight made the green shadow all the more oppressive. Insects hummed. There had been birdsong earlier, but the roar of the flamers and the chatter of blades had sent them bursting from the canopy in startled flocks.

‘It has two moons,’ said Baskevyl.

‘What does?’

‘Aigor 991. Two moons.’

‘How do you know that?’ asked Kolea.

‘Because I read the briefing packet.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Because you didn’t read the briefing packet?’

‘I read the bits that Hark highlighted,’ said Kolea. ‘It was forty gakking pages long. I don’t need to know about annual rainfall, highest elevation and the lesser-spotted wood-gargler.’

‘The real reason is you can’t read long words, isn’t it, Gol?’

Kolea glared at him, then saw Baskevyl’s grin.

‘Funny man,’ said Gol.

‘So, anyway, it has two moons–’

‘Why? Why are you telling me this?’

‘Because you can’t read.’

‘Bask–’ Gol growled.

‘Because we’re getting a day out, that’s why,’ replied Baskevyl, ‘and I want you to enjoy the sights and natural wonders of the world, and I want to be able to explain them to you in painstaking detail.’

‘Couldn’t you just club me to death with a log?’

‘Two moons. I want you to appreciate the sights.’

Kolea halted and stared up at the sky. Baskevyl did the same. All they could see were soaring tree trunks, coils of creepers, and a sea of green leaves, all locked in shadow.

‘Sights?’ Kolea said. ‘It’s not going to really fething matter if there are two moons, is it?’

IV

The stink of smoke and promethium grew stronger. Kolea felt the wet of sap vapour in the air.

The work teams had cleared a decent stretch. Kolea saw Lyse and Zered moving into the dense undergrowth, hosing curls of yellow flame from their burner units. The noise of other flamers roared from nearby. Servitors hacked into foliage with whirring cutting blades or raked away cut or burned greenery.

Kolea’s adjutant Rerval was waiting for them at the edge of the clearance area, with Luffrey, the sergeant in charge of Baskevyl’s second platoon, and Caober, Kolea’s chief scout.

Rerval flipped out a data-slate, slapped it to stabilise the flickering screen, and then scrolled open a schematic. In the shadow, the screen underlit his face.

‘Definitely the right zone, sirs,’ he said.

‘Fapes will be delighted,’ said Kolea.

‘Beg pardon, major?’ asked Rerval.

‘Go on,’ said Kolea with a ‘never mind’ gesture.

‘The silo is here,’ said Luffrey, leaning in to point to the slate. ‘Large structure. Out front is a broad rockcrete apron, the landing platform. That’s what we’re clearing now.’

‘Estimates?’ asked Baskevyl.

‘Providing we don’t hit any snags,’ said Caober, ‘and the tanks don’t run out, I think we’ll have it open by nightfall.’

‘You’ll get to see the moons after all,’ Baskevyl said to Kolea.

‘Moons?’ asked Luffrey.

‘There are two–’ began Baskevyl.

‘Don’t get him started again,’ warned Kolea. He looked at Caober. ‘Let’s get a look at this silo.’

‘Maggs is waiting for you,’ said Caober.

‘Luff,’ said Baskevyl, ‘lead us over. Caober, go find the senior Navy man and bring him to join us at the silo. He’s got the access codes.’

‘Which one is the senior Navy man?’ asked Caober.

‘Tall,’ said Kolea. ‘Dark blue tunic, silver brocade, walks like he’s got an RPG lodged in his rectum.’

‘Pretty much describes them all,’ said Caober.

‘Well, he probably isn’t doing very much except standing around,’ said Kolea.

‘Still much of a muchness,’ said Caober.

‘Then use your improbably acute Tanith scouting skills and locate him,’ said Kolea.

‘On it,’ said Caober.

V

Led by Luffrey and Rerval, Kolea and Baskevyl headed into the clearance area. They passed Lyse, kneeling to connect up a fresh promethium tank, her goggles pushed up onto her sweaty forehead.

‘How are you doing?’ asked Kolea.

‘It’s fething hot,’ said Lyse. ‘Hot and wet and nasty.’

‘Good to see morale at a high,’ said Kolea.

‘And the shadows–’ began Lyse.

‘The what?’

‘The shadows, sir,’ she said, snap-fitting the last hose and rising to her feet. ‘The shadows here are really dense.’

‘Dense?’

‘I don’t know. It’s creepy here, isn’t it?’

‘It’s verdant,’ said Baskevyl.

‘What does that mean?’ asked Lyse.

‘It’s lush and green and beautiful,’ said Baskevyl, ‘and the shadows are just part of its dark, primordial grace. Also, it has two moons.’

‘The feth?’ asked Lyse, blankly.

‘You got that from the briefing packet, didn’t you?’ Kolea said to Baskevyl.

‘No indeed,’ said Baskevyl. ‘As a man unafraid of long words, I composed it myself, in order to reassure Trooper Lyse here that this isn’t the kind of death hole we usually end up with as a working environment.’

‘To be truthful, it didn’t really work,’ said Lyse. ‘And now I think you’re creepy as well.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Kolea told her. ‘Major Baskevyl will be dead by nightfall. By my hand. With a log. Carry on with your work.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The quartet moved on as Lyse started burning again. They passed two hacking servitors, then reached the lip of the stone apron Luffrey had mentioned. It rose about two metres above the forest floor, and the ancient rockcrete was scabbed with lichen, as well as scorch marks from flamers.

Kolea wondered how long the place had stood, and which long-dead Navy architect had commissioned it. The Navy had been building remote depots and supply drops for thousands of years. They were like ancient reliquaries. Like tombs.

Now I’m creeping myself out, Kolea thought.

They hauled themselves up onto the apron. Baskevyl, first up, reached out a hand to haul his friend Kolea. More flamer teams were working up there, led by Neskon, Dremmond and Lubba, brought in from other companies because of their fire expertise. Kolea raised a hand to Neskon, and the flame-trooper nodded back as he hosed liquid flame into the undergrowth. They had cleared part of the apron, and Kolea could already see some of the chevron markings on the platform emerging.

Caober’s estimate had been generous, though. There was a lot to clear. They would be working into the night, until morning perhaps, as the vegetation was so thick.

Now they were standing in a cleared patch, with hard sunlight falling on them, it made the shadows of the forests and undergrowth seem darker. Creepy, just like Lyse had suggested. Bad shadows. Where had he heard that phrase? Bad shadows. Too dark. Too dense. The air was bright, the sun was strong, and the sky was pale blue, but where the forests stood, the shadows were as thick as Old Night.

‘Hey, Gol,’ said Baskevyl. He pointed up at the soft, blue sky. ‘I told you.’

Two moons, vague as smudges of white chalk dust, one larger than the other, were just visible in the daylight sky, faint as ghosts.

‘I imagine you’re feeling terribly pleased with yourself right now,’ said Kolea.

‘It’s a moment I’m going to cherish,’ said Baskevyl grinning. ‘Me and my old pal, under the ghost moons, contemplating the natural glories of the universe.’

Kolea sighed.

‘Do they have names?’ he asked.

‘What?’ asked Baskevyl.

‘The two moons? Do they have names?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Baskevyl. ‘Does it matter?’

‘A sight so beautiful, one should know the names.’

Bask paused.

‘You’re taking the piss, aren’t you?’ he asked.

‘He really is,’ said Rerval, sniggering.

‘I really fething am,’ growled Kolea. ‘Now let’s get on with the job.’

VI

They moved across the cleared part of the apron and back into the overgrowth. It was like stepping behind a curtain, from a lit room into a lightless one. Bad shadows surrounded them again. They seemed darker than before, deep green and black like the abyssal depths of an ocean, but Kolea reminded himself their eyes had become accustomed to light out in the cleared space.

‘This way,’ said Rerval, and immediately tripped over a creeper root. He picked himself up, and had to slap the data-slate a few times to get it to relight.

‘Classy,’ said Luffrey.

‘This thing,’ said Rerval, brandishing the data-slate, ‘works even better when it’s been pushed up someone’s arse sideways.’

‘Classier,’ laughed Luffrey.

Kolea ignored the banter. Luff and Rerval were good friends. They often sparred like this.

‘Give yourself a moment,’ said Baskevyl quietly. ‘Let your eyes get used to the darkness again. Just a moment, and then no more falling down like an idiot.’

They paused.

‘See? Better, right?’ asked Baskevyl.

‘Sure,’ said Kolea, but he didn’t think it was. The shadows seemed just as dark as before.

Bad shadows. Who had said that?

Kolea pulled out a lamp pack and switched it on. The lance of white light illuminated tree boles and snaking creepers as he played it around.

‘Come on,’ he said.

They crunched and clambered through the undergrowth. After a few minutes, they came upon the rusted skeleton of a Valkyrie gunship, entombed in a tangle of branches and leafy suckers.

‘How long’s that been here?’ Luffrey wondered.

‘Can’t be since the last supply drop,’ said Rerval. ‘It looks ancient.’

‘We’ll need to clear it, too,’ said Kolea. He looked at Baskevyl. ‘You think the servitors can move it?’

Bask shook his head.

‘I’ll vox up and have some heavies transported down,’ offered Rerval.

‘Yeah, do that,’ said Kolea.

Rerval pulled the vox-caster pack off his back, set it down, and began to nurse it to life.

‘Armaduke, Armaduke, this is the surface team, copy?’

Static buzzed.

Rerval repeated his call.

‘Nothing,’ he said, looking up at Kolea.

Kolea moved his lamp beam so as not to blind his adjutant.

‘This happens,’ said Baskevyl.

‘Yeah, all the time,’ said Kolea.

‘No, here,’ said Bask. ‘It was in the briefing packet. Vox-links can be disrupted from time to time by atmospheric magnetics.’

‘Let me guess,’ said Kolea. ‘The two moons?’

‘Uhm, yes, actually,’ said Baskevyl.

‘Yet they were so beautiful,’ Kolea snapped caustically. He looked at Rerval.

‘Try again in a few minutes,’ he told the adjutant.

‘Sir.’

Rerval rose and reslung the ’caster.

VII

‘You took your time,’ said Wes Maggs.

‘It was dark, and some of us fell over,’ said Kolea.

‘By some of us, he means Rerval,’ said Baskevyl. ‘Hey, Wes.’

Wes Maggs was the lead scout of D Company. He was also a rare example of a non-Tanith making the scout grade. He was crouched, gun flat across his thighs, his back against an ancient rockcrete wall. He rose, threw the majors a casual salute, and looked at Rerval.

‘You fell down?’

‘There was a creeper-related incident,’ said Rerval.

‘Try the vox again,’ Kolea told Rerval.

‘This is the silo?’ Baskevyl asked Maggs.

Maggs looked up into the dense darkness.

‘Pretty much. Right place, right ref. Big place, though you can’t see much of it.’

Kolea approached the rockcrete wall and placed a hand on it. It was wet with moss and lichen.

‘It slopes,’ he said.

‘Schematics say the depot is underground,’ said Maggs. ‘The cap, this part, is a pyramid.’

Like an ancient tomb, Kolea thought.

‘What’s up?’ Baskevyl asked him.

‘Nothing.’

‘Your face just then.’

Kolea drew Baskevyl to one side.

‘I’ll be honest, Braden,’ Kolea whispered. ‘I don’t like this, not one bit. There’s something about this place. Like Lyse said. It’s creepy.’

‘It’s just a depot, Gol.’

‘I know, I know, but the whole thing… the shadows… the trees… It’s just hitting all my alarm buttons.’

‘I thought you were a bit jumpy,’ said Baskevyl.

‘Sorry. I can’t explain it. Something…’

Baskevyl placed a reassuring hand on his friend’s massive shoulder.

‘I’ll tell you what it is, shall I?’ said Baskevyl.

‘Yeah, please do.’

‘Salvation’s Reach.’

‘What?’ asked Kolea.

‘We just went through fething hell.’

‘We’ve been through worse. I’ve been through worse,’ whispered Kolea.

‘The last time is always the worst,’ Baskevyl replied. ‘It’s the freshest. At the fething Reach, we lost friends. We lost good men. You’re still all wound up. You’re still on… what is it that Hark calls it?’

‘Fight time,’ said Kolea.

‘Yeah, right, fight time. You’re expecting the worst, and this isn’t it. You’re wound up tight.’

‘Maybe. And you’re not?’ asked Kolea.

‘Of course. I just don’t let it show like you do.’

‘Because you’re a professional soldier and I’m some scratch company lout?’ asked Kolea.

Baskevyl paused. He withdrew his hand.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘Because I’m Braden Baskevyl and you’re Gol Kolea and we do things differently, according to our characters.’

Kolea nodded.

‘Yeah, sorry. That was terrible of me. Sorry, Braden. I… Sorry.’

‘It’s fine,’ said Baskevyl.

‘It’s not,’ said Kolea. ‘That was out of line. I’m sorry. I just want you to know… There’s something about this place that has been freaking me out since we arrived. And it’s not just the fact we’re only three weeks out of combat.’

Baskevyl shrugged.

‘I know,’ said Baskevyl. ‘I felt it too, the moment I got here. I was trying to ignore it. It’s the shadows. Under the trees. The shadows are just… bad shadows. Like–’

‘What did you say?’ asked Kolea.

‘When?’ asked Baskevyl.

‘Just then. You said “bad shadows”.’

‘So?’

‘Where did you hear that, Bask?’

‘I didn’t hear it anywhere. I just said it. With words.’

Kolea looked away.

‘What’s the matter?’ Baskevyl asked him.

Kolea unslung his rifle.

‘Bad shadows. I don’t know why, but that phrase means something. I wish I could remember why.’

VIII

‘Vox?’ Baskevyl asked.

Rerval shook his head. He’d been trying for five minutes.

‘Keep the cans on, Rerval,’ Baskevyl advised. ‘You might hear something.’

Rerval nodded, and hooked the headphones back over his ears. He gathered up the vox set.

‘Let’s get working,’ said Kolea. ‘Let’s find the access point.’

‘What?’ asked Rerval, too loudly, headphones on.

Maggs dumb-signed him, Verghast style.

‘All right. The entrance,’ Rerval said, consulting the data-slate. He slapped it a few times. ‘Eighteen metres that way.’

He pointed.

‘Let’s move,’ said Kolea.

‘What?’ asked Rerval. ‘No, you’re all right,’ he added. ‘I see what you’re doing.’

IX

Maggs had brought a machete. It was probably a meat cleaver from the Armaduke’s cook rooms, but it served as a machete. He hacked back the vines and creepers that blocked their route along the wall. It was ridiculously dark. The shadows were upon them like a weight.

In the distance, Kolea could hear the rush of flamers. He kept his weapon tight and ready.

‘What was that you said?’ asked Rerval from behind him. Kolea turned. His adjutant was pulling off his headphones.

‘You get a contact?’ Kolea asked.

‘No, no. You said something.’

‘No one said anything,’ said Luffrey.

‘You said “eagle stones”. One of you did,’ Rerval said.

‘What the gak are “eagle stones”?’ asked Maggs.

‘No one said anything,’ said Kolea.

‘But I heard it, sir,’ said Rerval.

‘Just keep moving,’ Baskevyl advised.

They continued. There was no sound except the squelch of their boots in the muck, the hack and chop of Maggs’s blade, and their panting. It was hot. They were all sweating hard.

‘All right, stop fething me about,’ said Rerval suddenly.

They looked back at him.

‘What?’ asked Luffrey.

‘Someone said it again. Just then,’ said Rerval. ‘“Eagle stones. I want the eagle stones. Bring them to me.”’

‘You heard that?’ asked Kolea.

‘Like a whisper, sir,’ nodded Rerval.

‘Honestly?’

‘Swear by the Throne.’

Kolea looked back at the others.

‘A joke’s a joke, but that’s enough,’ he said. ‘Tell me, right now, which one of you is pissing this boy about?’

In the green-black gloom, they all shook their heads.

‘Then I’m going to abort this mission immediately,’ said Kolea.

‘Shit!’ said Baskevyl. ‘Gol, we can’t do that! After the Reach, we’re down to twenty per cent munitions and fifteen per cent promethium! We need this resupply.’

‘Yeah,’ said Gol, ‘but more than that, we need to stay alive. Something’s here. Bad shadows, Bask. Bad fething shadows.’

‘Come on, Gol,’ said Baskevyl. ‘Another few metres and we’ll be at the door. By nightfall, we’ll have the apron cleared. We need this.’

‘No. I’m calling it,’ Kolea said firmly.

‘Gol,’ said Baskevyl, ‘if we don’t make this resupply, we’ll be down to the dregs the next fight that comes along. Las-packs. Bolter shells. Promethium. Feth, we need them.’

Kolea looked at his friend’s shadowed face.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Keep going. I want to know where Caober is with that fething Navy man. Rerval? Cans on. Keep hailing the ship.’

‘Sir.’

‘If I find out any of you is playing tricks,’ Kolea warned the rest of them, ‘know this. I have a log. With Baskevyl’s name on it. But names can easily be changed.’

X

‘And behold,’ announced Maggs, wiping sap off his blade. ‘The front door.’

It was a huge cargo hatch, double-overlocked and festooned with creepers and vines. It lay at an angle, recessed into the pyramid’s slope, as if attempting to bathe in a sun it would never see for long.

There was a crunch. Kolea turned hard, gun at his hip, ready to fire. Maggs was a microsecond behind him.

‘Easy, easy!’ Caober called. ‘Feth, you’re jumpy.’

‘Shit,’ murmured Kolea, lowering his rifle.

Caober approached. There was a Navy officer with him. The man was clearly not used to doing anything except standing on a steel bridge shouting orders and sipping amasec. Each step he took was a gingerly attempt to avoid getting filth on his shiny boots. He had an augmetic monocle implant. His hair was silver, and oiled back. He wore a dark blue uniform with silver brocade. He walked stiffly, upright. Like he had a concealed warhead up his back passage, Gol thought.

‘This is–’ Caober began.

‘I am Senior Fedrush Arskil, Master of Materiel for the Highness Ser Armaduke,’ the man said.

‘Arskil?’ whispered Luffrey. ‘That’s a joke just waiting to happen, isn’t it?’

‘Stow that, Luff,’ Baskevyl hissed.

‘Who is in charge here, I wonder?’ Arskil enquired, leaning forward, his monocle whirring to focus.

‘I am,’ said Kolea and Baskevyl at the same time.

‘He is,’ Baskevyl added, looking at Gol. ‘He is.’

‘Your ruffian here,’ said Arskil, indicating Caober with a dismissive gesture, ‘led me through these vile woods in the belief there was something to inspect.’

‘Sorry about the vile woods and the ruffian, sir,’ said Kolea. ‘We have located the access hatch. Do you have the codes?’

‘Naturally,’ said Arskil, producing a sleek data-slate.

‘I’m not a ruffian,’ Caober observed quietly.

‘We will revisit that issue when we haven’t got people around,’ Kolea told him. ‘You hear anything coming in?’

‘Like what?’ Caober asked.

‘Dunno. Voices?’

‘I did not, sir,’ Caober replied.

‘Hatch codes as requested,’ Arskil said, handing the data-slate to Kolea.

‘Thank you, sir. One thing. That eye of yours…’

‘I lost my eye in the last Battle of Khulan,’ Arskil declared, as though everyone was interested. ‘Shrapnel from the desk of the Master of Artifice as it exploded. He died, poor soul. I mourn him still. Warp torpedo through three decks, just beneath the bridge of my ship. Took out the entire deck plating of the bridge and–’

‘Terrible, sir, terrible,’ said Kolea. ‘But that eye? The augmetic? It can see in the dark?’

‘Why of course, young man. I have worn it since Khulan and it has never failed me.’

‘Tell me then,’ Kolea asked, gently turning the Navy officer to look out into the undergrowth. ‘Do you see anything?’

‘Such as what, good fellow?’ asked Arskil.

‘I don’t know. Anything?’

‘Trees. A great deal of them’ said Arskil. ‘Creepers, vine. The heat-swell of your flamer units, in the distance. Woods from here to the rim of the apron, eighty-nine metres away. Fifty-one metres that way, I see the ruined chassis of a Valkyrie gunship.’

‘Well spotted. Nothing else?’

‘No, my good man,’ Arskil replied.

‘Nothing at all?’ Kolea pressed.

‘No, nothing. Why do you ask me so repeatedly? It’s just shadows out there. Bad shadows, mark you, but still.’

‘Bad shadows?’ Baskevyl asked, seizing on the phrase. ‘Why would you call them that?’

Arskil looked surprised. ‘Serious and unusual levels of light depletion. It quite foxes my augmetic. Sometimes the old eye can get a little stiff.’

Bask looked at Kolea.

‘Open the hatch, sir,’ Kolea said to the Navy man.

‘Ah, can’t you do it, my good man?’ Arskil replied. ‘I gave you the slate. I don’t want to get my gloves dirty.’

XI

Gol raised the slate and studied the access codes. He slunked back the heavy metal weather-cover of the hatch controls, exposing the keypad.

‘Weapons set,’ he told his team. They all stood ready.

‘Why are you Astra Militarum devils so wary?’ Arskil asked.

‘Because we’ve danced this dance before, more than once,’ Caober replied. ‘Besides, we’re ruffians.’

Kolea began to punch the code into the old, worn keypad. A yellow light glowed, and then turned green. The massive hatch opened, ripping root tendrils and creepers aside.

A sigh breathed. Ancient air. Stale air.

Kolea turned suddenly.

‘I heard it that time,’ he stated. ‘“Bring them to me.” Someone distinctly said “Bring them to me.” Which one of you was it?’

Rerval, Caober, Maggs, Luffrey and Baskevyl looked at one other.

‘Nobody said anything, Gol,’ Bask replied.

‘You really are quite agitated, sir,’ remarked Arskil. ‘I wonder why you–’

His head came off.

One moment it was attached to his body, the next it was spinning away into the shadows, slack-mouthed, trailing a corkscrew spray of blood.

Arskil’s severed neck vented arterial spray. His headless body sank to one knee, as if he were about to be decorated or promoted, and then fell over. Copious amounts of blood darkened his dark blue tunic and stained his brocade.

‘Wait,’ said Rerval, almost baffled. ‘His head just came clean off. How the feth did that happen?’

Kolea and Maggs were already firing, loosing wild shots into the trees. Baskevyl, Luffrey and Caober swiftly followed suit. Rerval found his weapon and started shooting too.

‘There’s something in the trees!’ Maggs yelled.

‘There’s something in the fething shadows!’ Kolea yelled back.

‘Keep shooting!’ Bask cried.

‘At what?’ Kolea shouted.

The air was full of sap and shot-torn leaves. Vines burst and snapped. Creepers spurted juice.

‘What’s happening?’ Rerval yelled, firing on full auto.

Bad shadows, Kolea thought, bad shadows.

Something uncurled from the darkness to his left. A squiggle of malicious blackness.

It looked like–

Gol Kolea remembered. He remembered. The memory stabbed into his head like a warknife.

Tona’s cabin. Dinner. Just a precious few nights before.

Yoncy. His baby girl Yoncy.

A drawing. He still had it in his pocket. It had shown an anguished, heartfelt black squiggle of chalk made by his child’s hand. The squiggle had been ground into the paper. The chalk stick Yoncy had used had broken several times during the furious effort. There had been something desperate about the marks, as if the child had been trying to destroy the paper and erase an image so terrible that she hadn’t wanted it to take form.

‘I was going to draw more trees,’ Yoncy had explained, ‘but I picked up black instead of green by accident, and it made a bad shadow shape, and I didn’t like it so I scribbled it out.’

He could hear her saying it.

Bad shadow.

Bad shadow.

Kolea pump-ejected a spent clip and slammed home a fresh one. He kept firing at the bad shadow.

The picture had been done in coloured chalk. There had been spiky things, several figures, and two sickle shapes in what Gol had presumed was the sky. The sickle shapes had made no sense at the time. Now they did. Two moons. Two crescent ghost moons, just as he had seen them with Baskevyl. There had been something else, too, a triangle. A pyramid. The depot pyramid.

‘Are these trees?’ Gol had asked, pointing.

‘Yeah,’ Yoncy had agreed, eating her stew with relish.

There were trees every fething where around him.

‘Who’s this?’ Gol had asked, pointing to the figures.

‘That’s you, silly. You and Uncle Rerval and Uncle Bask and Uncle Luffrey.’

They were all present. All of them.

‘How can a shadow be bad?’ Kolea’s son Dalin had asked, at the table.

Yoncy had wiggled her hands and picked up her dolly.

‘A bit like a monster.’

She had leaned over on her seat and pointed at the drawing in Gol’s hands.

‘See? Look? You’re killing it. Those jaggy lines? Per-chew chew chew chew chew! You’re shooting it with your gun. Per-chew chew! I used yellow chalk.’

That might as well be all I have, Gol thought, and switched to full auto.

Beside him, Luffrey shuddered and dropped, eviscerated by a blade of shadow. Coils of pink, wet intestines squirted out of his belly onto the black mulch like paste from a tube.

‘Holy Feth!’ Gol cried.

His voice made no sound. He couldn’t hear himself.

The world had fallen silent. It had been muted.

It had frozen, hushed, in shadow.

In the sudden silence, Gol Kolea felt cold breath against his cheek.

‘Who are you?’ he whispered. ‘What are you?’

‘I am here,’ a voice replied. Each word sounded like a slow scrape of chalk on paper.

A black shadow prowled around him in the darkness, angular, impossible, anti-geometric.

‘What are you?’ Gol repeated, frantically.

‘I,’ the black shadow whispered, ‘am the Voice of Sek.’ Again, the awful dry scrape of broken chalk. The thing’s voice was impossibly loud, but Gol was sure only he could hear it.

‘Bring me the eagle stones,’ scraped the shadow, at his side and yet far away at the same time, ‘or your child will perish.’

‘You bastard!’ Gol snarled. ‘Leave her alone!’

Something scratched in the darkness. A chuckle. A scribbled shadow circled him.

‘You think you can have your damaged mind healed by the touch of a weakling Imperial saint,’ the shadow scratched, ‘and not become, by the same process, a conduit for daemons?’

‘Get out of my head!’

‘Bring them to me!’ the voice dry-scraped.

‘I don’t know what you want from me!’ Gol declared. He could smell chalk dust.

‘You will, Gol Kolea. You will come to understand. Do it, or the bad shadow will fall upon you once more. I will fall upon you and your offspring.’

In the darkness, a black mouth open and smiled.

‘You bastard!’ Kolea yelled, and resumed firing.

XII

They had blown the undergrowth to pieces with their gunfire. Sap dripped from broken and torn shoots.

‘Cease fire,’ Kolea said.

They were all spent anyway.

‘What just happened?’ Baskevyl asked, looking at the two corpses tangled on the ground. One was gutted, the other had no head.

‘Luff!’ Rerval cried, falling to his knees beside his friend’s body. ‘Oh no! Oh fething feth! No!’

‘Abort this mission,’ said Kolea. ‘Abort it right now.’

XIII

The old lamps set into the walls of the Highness Ser Armaduke’s stark debrief room hummed and fizzled, their shades yellowed with age.

Ibram Gaunt scrolled through the data-slate again, and then set it down.

‘So, you aborted the mission, major?’ he asked.

‘I did, sir,’ Kolea replied, standing to attention in front of the metal table.

‘Do you consider that a prudent command choice, major?’ asked Commissar Hark, sitting at Gaunt’s left.

‘I do, sir,’ Gol replied. ‘It should have been routine, but two deaths. A thing–’

‘You describe it as a daemon, sir,’ said Shipmaster Spika, sitting at Gaunt’s right.

‘I know no other word for what I saw and sensed and felt, shipmaster,’ Gol replied. ‘It spoke. It killed. It had no form except shadow. We shot at it, with multiple barrages. It did not die.’

Silence. Gol felt he should add more.

‘Sirs,’ he said, ‘I appreciate with full concern our lack of munitions. I really do. We stand in a bit of a fix without resupply. Do not suppose for a moment that I would have aborted lightly. But in all good conscience, I could not continue. Lives were taken, and I supposed that more lives would have been taken if I had tried to continue.’

‘That is reasonable,’ said Hark.

‘One of yours, one of mine,’ Gaunt said to Spika. The shipmaster nodded.

‘Sir,’ Gol said to Spika. ‘If I could have in any way protected your man, I would have. It was so sudden. It came upon us so suddenly. Also, if I may say, I aborted because I did not dare risk bringing it back aboard with us.’

‘This thing,’ said Gaunt, ‘it said it was the Voice of Sek?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And it wanted something from you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It wanted… what was it? Eagle stones?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Yes.’

‘What are they?’ asked Hark.

‘I have no idea, Commissar Hark, sir,’ said Gol Kolea.

‘Do we have any data on that?’ Gaunt asked Hark. ‘Eagle stones?’

‘Nothing, Ibram.’

‘Major Kolea,’ said Gaunt, ‘is there anything you’ve left out or omitted from your report?’

Gol paused. Of course there is, he thought. The fact that it knew my name, and that I had children. The fact that everything matched Yoncy’s drawing. The fact that it called me a conduit for daemons. How can I tell you that? How can I tell you those things and not have you execute me where I stand? I cannot speak of them, because if I am dead, executed for heresy, who will protect my children? Or will you just execute them, too, or hand them to the Black Ships? Who will know enough to protect the Ghosts? I will deny this darkness, this shadow. I am strong. I am Gol Kolea. The Saint herself has touched me and blessed me. I will protect my family and the regiment from this. It will be my personal, private duty, and I will not fail.

‘No, sirs,’ Gol said.

Gaunt glanced at Hark. Hark nodded. Then Gaunt looked at Spika, who shook his head.

Gaunt looked up at Kolea.

‘Despite the parlous state of our operational supply levels,’ he said, ‘we support your decision. Given the circumstances, it was right to abort. Major Baskevyl has vouched for you, and we take that seriously. We also respect your command choices on the ground. No charges will be pending.’

‘Thank you, sirs,’ Kolea said.

‘You made the best decision, Gol,’ said Hark, ‘under terrible circumstances. We’re backing you. There will be no mark on your service record.’

‘I am gratified by your support, sirs,’ said Kolea.

‘Shipmaster?’ said Gaunt, turning to Spika. ‘Supply depot Aigor 991 is no longer viable. Have your gunnery officers annihilate the site, and process that information through Battlefleet channels.’

‘I will,’ said Spika.

‘Full batteries,’ Gaunt advised. ‘Burn that site.’

‘I’ll raze the whole damned landmass, sir,’ Spika replied. ‘For my man Arskil, if nothing else.’

‘He was a good man, shipmaster,’ Kolea said.

Spika paused. ‘Really? I always thought he was a bit of a pompous fool.’

‘I was just being respectful,’ said Gol.

‘And I should too, major,’ Spika said, rising. ‘The man’s dead. He was crew. I shouldn’t bad-mouth him.’

‘He died well, in the service of the God-Emperor,’ said Gol.

‘Did he?’ asked Spika.

‘No,’ sighed Gol. ‘He didn’t.’

‘He was slain by darkness,’ sighed Spika. ‘Pompous fool or not, he didn’t deserve that.’

‘Nobody deserves that,’ said Kolea.

‘Dismissed, major,’ said Hark.

Gol Kolea made the sign of the aquila, turned smartly, and left the cabin.

XIV

He was halfway down the companionway outside when he heard Gaunt call his name. Gol stopped and turned. Gaunt approached him.

‘Gol?’

‘Sir?’

‘Are you all right?’

‘It was a bad situation, sir,’ Gol said.

Gaunt put a hand on Gol’s shoulder. It was reassuring, but oddly uncomfortable. Gaunt seldom showed connection like this.

‘Gol,’ said Gaunt quietly. ‘Gol, we’ve been together for an age now. Since Vervunhive. I think you’re… You’re the most foursquare and dependable officer I have in my command.’

‘Sir–’

‘I mean it, Gol,’ said Gaunt. ‘I am blessed with fine company officers. Bask. Daur. Kolosim. Obel. Sloman. Elam. Shoggy. Rags. Theiss. Arcuda… Rawne.’

‘Even him, sir?’

Gaunt smiled.

‘Of course, even him,’ he said.

‘Of course.’

‘But you,’ said Gaunt, ‘you are the rock. The core. The foundation. You have, in a way, filled the void Corbec left. You are rooted. You are true. I depend on you more than I depend on any other company commander.’

‘I am honoured that you say that, sir,’ said Kolea.

‘So if you need me,’ said Gaunt, ‘if you want to talk to me, off the record. If there’s anything, anything at all, I need you to know that you can come to me with it.’

‘I appreciate your words, sir, very much,’ said Kolea.

‘Good,’ said Gaunt. ‘Gol, is there anything else about the circumstances of Aigor 991 that you want to tell me about? Man to man, not subordinate to commander? Just two men talking? Two friends?’

Gol Kolea thought about the drawing in his pocket. He wanted to take it out, unfold it, and show it to Gaunt, whom he loved and admired above all other men.

But the consequences. The consequences. To those he loved most. The inevitable outcome. The inevitable Imperial outcome.

‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘Thank you for your frankness, but no, sir.’

Gaunt nodded.

‘Sir,’ said Kolea. ‘May I enquire… where are we headed next?’

‘Urdesh,’ replied Gaunt. ‘The forge world.’

‘Urdesh,’ Kolea echoed. ‘Well, I look forward to serving you there, sir.’

Gaunt patted him on the arm, and nodded.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Carry on.’

Gaunt turned and walked away.

Gol began walking towards the troop billets, his head down, a weight upon him that he wasn’t sure would ever lift. He had a battle ahead of him, and the battle wasn’t Urdesh.

In the patchy ghost light of the companionway’s glow-globes, he cast a bad shadow behind him.

YOU NEVER KNOW

THE HIGHNESS SER ARMADUKE,
NINE DAYS OUT FROM SALVATION’S REACH, 782.M41
(THE 27TH YEAR OF THE SABBAT WORLDS CRUSADE)

‘Where are we?’ asked Mabbon Etogaur.

Sergeant Varl waited until the cell’s heavy, armoured shutter had finally closed behind him, then glanced around the tiny cell, his eyes narrowed in concentration, his lips pursed.

‘I can’t be sure,’ Varl replied, ‘but I think it’s the brig.’

‘Oh, Sergeant Varl,’ said Mabbon. ‘I had almost forgotten your rapier wit.’

Varl grinned. He slung his lasrifle across his back, then gestured with both hands, palms up, fingers flapping.

‘Up, pheguth,’ he ordered. ‘You know the drill.’

Mabbon sighed. He put his book down on the bare cot, and slowly rose to his feet from the metal stool. He raised his arms. Shackles clinked, dangling from his wrists. The chains around his ankles were secured to the deck by a steel floor-pin.

Varl reached forward to start the search. He hesitated at the last minute.

‘Play nice, all right?’ he told the prisoner.

‘Don’t I always?’

Varl started searching. Pockets, hems, seams, cuffs. He was meticulous. He was practiced. He’d done it many times before.

‘Really, sergeant?’ said Mabbon patiently, arms wide. ‘Do you think, in the six hours since that cell door last opened and this pantomime last occurred, that I have somehow managed to obtain and conceal a weapon?’

‘You never know,’ said Varl. ‘You might have finally worked a splinter of metal off the deck plates. Or forced a screw out of the bed-frame and cunningly sharpened it.’

‘Oh, I wish I’d thought of either of those things,’ said Mabbon, looking up at the ceiling as Varl worked.

Varl started checking the manacles and the ankle hobbles.

‘Or picked the lock of my shackles?’ Mabbon added.

‘You never know.’

Varl moved behind him.

‘You might have dismantled the bed and the stool,’ Varl said, ‘and ingeniously fashioned them into a lasweapon.’

Something akin to a smile passed across Mabbon’s scarred face.

‘You really overestimate my abilities, sergeant,’ he said.

‘Well, that was an exaggeration for illustrative purposes,’ replied Varl.

Varl came back round to face him.

‘Open,’ said Varl.

Mabbon opened his mouth. Varl peered in. Then he slid his index finger inside.

‘No closey-closey,’ Varl said. Mabbon said nothing. Varl ran his finger around Mabbon’s gums, around his cheeks, and under his tongue.

When he was done, Varl removed his finger. Mabbon closed his mouth. Varl moved to the side, and scrutinised Mabbon’s ear.

‘No autocannon concealed in there?’ Mabbon asked.

‘Ha ha,’ said Varl. ‘Oh, wait.’

‘What?’ asked Mabbon.

‘I think I see light shining in through the other ear,’ said Varl. Mabbon did not react to the quip.

Varl stepped back.

‘All right. Sit.’

Mabbon sat. Varl began to sweep the room.

‘This really isn’t necessary,’ said Mabbon.

‘You know the drill. Standing order. A search every six hours.’

‘I know the drill,’ said Mabbon. ‘I have remarked on its pointlessness before.’

‘Yet, as you can see, we are still going to do it,’ replied Varl, busy.

‘And I am still going to remark,’ said Mabbon sadly. ‘I have reached a point at which I am prepared to both criticise and mock the practice.’

Varl was checking the cot.

‘Look, you know fething well,’ said Varl, ‘it’s not really shards of metal or sharpened spoons we’re worried about. You could get up to all sorts in here when you’re unsupervised.’

‘All sorts of what?’ asked Mabbon.

‘Badness,’ said Varl, gesturing vaguely. ‘Crazy Archenemy badness. Ritual shit. I’ve seen shit in my days, mister, and I know what’s possible. You could summon something.’

‘Summon something?’

‘Yeah,’ said Varl. ‘We could open the hatch and find you’ve conjured up some daemon-spawn of arsebag to sick on us.’

‘I am a soldier, Varl,’ said Mabbon. ‘An officer. I have commanded hosts of men. I am not, however, a warlock.’

‘You never know,’ said Varl. ‘We’ve only got your word for that.’

He picked up the book Mabbon had been reading and leafed through the pages. Then he shook it to see if anything would fall out. Nothing did.

Varl studied the spine.

‘The Spheres of Longing?’ he read.

‘It’s an intriguing read.’

‘Never heard of it,’ said Varl.

‘I’m improving my mind. I am trying to learn the mindset of the Imperium. To… understand and remember its ways.’

‘What do you mean, “understand and remember”?’ Varl asked.

‘To better assist you,’ said Mabbon.

Varl paused.

‘When you were a man–’ Varl began.

‘I am still a man,’ Mabbon said.

‘Not so much. When you were a man, why did you… I mean, how… How does a man become what you are?’

‘The blood claimed me,’ said Mabbon.

‘The blood?’ asked Varl.

‘Sergeant, for all the “stuff” you claim to have seen, I assuredly know that you have no grasp of what life is like in the Sanguinary Worlds. I was Astra Militarum once, just like you. Then the Archon took me, and the blood claimed me, and I became an officer in his Pact.’

‘Then the Sons. You change sides a lot, don’t you?’ asked Varl.

‘Every chance I get,’ replied Mabbon. ‘Every effort I make is to reclaim my humanity. To purge the blood. To make amends. To become again the person I once was. That is why I read. I am gradually remembering what it is to be a human of the Imperium.’

‘You say that like it’s a good thing.’

‘You never know,’ said the etogaur.

Varl pulled a face.

‘You know the real reason this search drill is pointless?’ asked Mabbon.

‘Surprise me.’

‘It’s pointless,’ said Mabbon, ‘because if I wanted to escape, I would have done so by now. And I could have done. You do not have to search me, because I want to be here. I am willingly assisting the Imperium, because it is the only thing I have left in my life that means anything. I will not destroy that one last, fragile thing by doing something stupid or disruptive.’

‘Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ said Varl. He took out a pack of lho-sticks, lit one and, after a pause, offered the pack to Mabbon.

Mabbon shook his head.

‘Whatever happens,’ said Varl, exhaling smoke, ‘I mean, whatever you do, you know things aren’t going to end well, right? Things are not going to end well for you at all.’

‘Things are not going to end well for anybody,’ replied Mabbon.

‘I’m just saying.’

‘Apart from some small measure of redemption,’ said Mabbon, ‘death is the only thing I have to look forward to.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Varl abruptly. He stepped forward, studying the wall.

‘What’s what?’

‘These scratches here. These marks. Did you do that?’

Mabbon hesitated.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘With what?’ asked Varl, sharp.

Mabbon raised the heavy cuff of his manacles.

‘Why?’

‘I make a scar on the wall every time I am searched,’ said Mabbon. ‘You search me every six hours, thus I have some measure of the passage of time.’

‘What good is that?’ asked Varl.

‘I am no man,’ said Mabbon. ‘I am no thing. I have no liberty. No self-determination. No comfort. No knowledge of where I am or what I am any more. But I can at least know when.’

‘This is just a tally, then?’ Varl asked, touching the row of scratches.

‘Just a tally.’

‘Not the fethed-up markings for some ritual?’ asked Varl, looking at him sharply.

‘No, they are not the fethed-up markings of some ritual,’ said Mabbon.

‘I’ll have to tell Rawne,’ said Varl.

‘I understand,’ the etogaur replied.

‘He’ll probably–’

‘Move me to another cell and have a servitor grind the wall-plate smooth again. I understand.’

Varl nodded.

‘Sorry,’ Varl said.

‘Thank you,’ said Mabbon.

‘For what?’

‘Sorry is the most human thing anyone has said to me in a very long time,’ said Mabbon Etogaur.

Varl stared at him for a moment.

Then he turned to the shutter and banged on it.

‘Open two!’ he yelled. ‘I’m coming out!’

The shutter began to grind open. Varl looked back at the seated etogaur.

‘It’s 0417, day 18, 782. Just ask me. Just ask.’

‘And you’ll tell me?’

‘You never know,’ said Varl. ‘See you in six hours. You’ll still be here, right?’

‘You never know,’ replied Mabbon Etogaur.

FAMILY

THE HIGHNESS SER ARMADUKE,
SIX DAYS OUT FROM SALVATION’S REACH, 782.M41
(THE 27TH YEAR OF THE SABBAT WORLDS CRUSADE)

I

Earlier that day, in the old ship’s canteen, they’d had a conversation.

Gol Kolea and Dalin Criid, father and son.

A father and a son who had been estranged and then brought back together by the fluid circumstances of war, and who seldom liked to acknowledge their blood connection.

The hellweather fight for Salvation’s Reach was just six days behind everyone, fresh in the regimental thoughts, fresh as the healing wounds and the grieving memories. The Ghosts were bedded down again, locked into shipboard trudge routines, enduring the span of another long-haul passage to wherever their next home would be.

Nowhere pleasant, that was Gol’s guess. No one had told them, not Gaunt, not Hark, not Fazekiel. There had been talk of a resupply stop at some depot, because munitions were fething low, but no one had announced their final destination.

Nowhere pleasant; it never was. That was Guard life. One storm to the next, with weeks of tedium in between. Hurry up and wait. Wait, then hurry up.

Gol had filled the containers in his mess tray with slab and bean slop from the dispensary, and then looked for a seat. He caught Dalin’s eye, saw the boy gesture. There was a space next to him.

Next to his son. The one he had thought dead for so very long. The fight they had waged at the Reach had been bitter and costly, but it had been nothing compared to Vervunhive. Bedded down with the scratch companies, facing the Zoican hordes every hour of every day, knowing your family were dead–

Until it turned out some of them weren’t.

Gol sat. He was a big man. Even though there was a spare seat, Baskevyl and Luffrey had to scrunch up to accommodate him.

‘How’s the food?’ Gol asked Dalin.

‘Wet, sir,’ Dalin smiled.

‘Don’t “sir” me, Dal,’ said Gol, twiddling his fork and looking for a promising target on the tray in front of him.

‘You’re a major, major,’ said Dalin.

Gol shrugged.

‘All right. I thought you were doing that “son to father” thing.’

Dalin forked up some beans.

‘We’ve never really done that,’ he said. ‘Had a chance to, I mean. I’m not being funny. Not blaming. I mean, we just… our relationship is–’

‘I get it.’

‘All right. Good.’

‘How are you, Dal?’ asked Kolea.

‘Pretty good, all things considered. The Reach. That was a feth-storm.’

‘It was a victory.’

‘I know,’ said Dalin. ‘But the people we lost… Merrt. And the Doc. And–’

Kolea put his fork down.

‘Something wrong?’ asked Dalin.

‘This food is terrible,’ said Gol.

‘I’m sort of getting used to it,’ said Dalin, chewing. ‘I mean, it is shit, but we’ve been on this hulk so long, it almost feels like home.’

‘Won’t be home for long,’ said Kolea.

‘No, I suppose… No.’

‘It feel like home to you, Dal?’

‘I don’t know what home’s supposed to feel like, so I suppose it does, sir.’

Gol looked at him.

‘Gol,’ said Kolea. ‘You can call me Gol when we’re not in the line or on parade.’

‘Yeah?’ asked Dalin.

‘Yeah,’ said Gol. ‘My pa made me call him Gyn. Said he wanted me to know his name, not his function. Or something.’

‘Your pa was called Gyn?’ asked Dalin.

Gol Kolea sighed.

‘You didn’t know your grandpa’s name? So much you don’t know.’

‘You should tell me some time,’ Dalin said. He paused. ‘You should tell me some time, Gol,’ he corrected.

Gol nodded. He resumed eating. He stopped again after a few moments.

‘This stuff really is shit,’ he said.

Dalin moved beans around his tray.

‘Tona–’

‘What?’ asked Gol.

‘Tona, she’s cooking tonight,’ said Dalin. ‘She can proper cook, too. Family meal. Why don’t you come along?’

‘Ah, I don’t think–’ Gol shrugged.

‘Why don’t you?’ asked Dalin.

‘Tona and I, we have an understanding,’ said Gol. ‘I stay out of it. She’s your family now, and she won that right.’

‘Caff was my family, too, and he’s gone,’ said Dalin. ‘We’re all family, aren’t we? Us Ghosts? All of us. Hey-hey! Major Kolea’s coming for supper. Where’s the harm in that? I’ll have a word with mum–’

‘Mum? You call her mum?’

‘Yeah? Why?’ asked Dalin.

‘No reason you wouldn’t,’ said Gol. ‘Sorry.’

‘I’ll have a word with Tona,’ said Dalin. ‘She’ll be fine about it. Decent food, all right? A nice conversation. Yoncy will love to see her Uncle Gol.’

‘I’m not going to step back into something I was better off staying out of,’ said Gol.

Dalin looked down at his food, disappointed.

‘You won’t be,’ he said. ‘You’d be very welcome.’

‘Well, I’ll come then,’ said Gol.

Dalin looked up, smiling.

‘Mum serves up at fifth bell, sharp,’ he said.

‘Check with her, for gak’s sake,’ Kolea said, ‘and let me know if I’m not welcome. I’ll understand.’

Dalin nodded. ‘You will be,’ he said.

Gol sighed.

‘Dal?’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Does Yoncy know?’

‘She was too young. I didn’t even know my grandpa’s name till just then. You’re her Uncle Gol.’

Dalin got up.

‘Gonna police my tray,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you at fifth.’

‘Unless you tell me otherwise. And for feth’s sake tell me otherwise.’

Dalin nodded and walked away.

‘Couldn’t help overhearing that,’ said Baskevyl.

‘Really?’ asked Gol.

‘Well, you’re practically sitting in my lap,’ Bask smiled.

Gol smiled back and shook his head.

‘Go have supper with your son, Kolea,’ said Baskevyl. ‘He’d like that. If you want my advice.’

‘I really don’t,’ replied Gol Kolea.

II

Fifth bell. There was a distant thrum of the old ship’s engines, labouring, propelling them through the empyrean. The hab bays smelled of stale, recycled air and disinfectant. They smelled like armpit.

Kolea hesitated, then knocked on the compartment door.

Tona Criid opened the hatch and looked out at him. Kolea suddenly smelled the cooking. It made his mouth water.

‘Hello, Gol,’ she said. ‘Dal said you were coming.’

‘If it’s not an imposition.’

‘Are you a fething idiot? Come in.’

The cabin was warm and steamy. Criid was wearing combat-issue trousers and a white tee-shirt.

‘Larks and Varl, they both come here all the time,’ she said. ‘Rerval too. And Shoggy. It’s ridiculous that you don’t. And regularly, too. You should see them, Gol. You should be in their lives, at least a little.’

‘Food smells good,’ Gol said.

‘I’ve got actual ground meat, and actual legumes. Plus actual spices. Scared them all up from the Navy mess. To be fair, Gaunt put a word in. The Navy eats better than we do.’

‘Gaunt put a word in?’ asked Gol.

‘He takes an interest in morale.’

‘I’ve got this,’ said Gol, producing a bottle of amasec.

‘Oh, good boy,’ Tona smiled.

‘Stole it from the Navy wardroom.’

‘Even better.’

She was a handsome woman, tall and lean, with short hair. She had been a ganger on Verghast, and had somehow managed to save and look after Gol’s kids during the siege. The siege had killed Gol’s wife, Livy, and occupied Gol’s entire attention. He had believed he had lost his whole family in the murder-war until, by odd chance, he had discovered that his children had not just been rescued, they had actually been adopted as part of the Ghost entourage.

A child ran into the room, zooming a doll. She was small, pretty, oddly intent, her hair in pigtails.

Yoncy.

‘Hello, Yoncy,’ said Gol.

‘Hello to you, Uncle Gol. Are you coming for supper?’

‘I am.’

She laughed, and screamed out of the room again.

‘She… she seems very small for her age,’ Gol said.

‘I feed her well enough,’ said Criid, stirring something in a pot.

‘I wasn’t saying you didn’t,’ said Gol.

‘All right.’

‘Dalin is a grown man now,’ Gol said. ‘Yoncy’s only a few years behind him, but he seems like a child.’

‘“He”?’

‘What?’ said Gol.

‘You said “he”,’ said Tona, confused.

Gol paused.

‘Did I?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Then I misspoke,’ said Gol. ‘She seems like a child still.’

‘That happens with girls,’ Criid replied. ‘They seem young… then a sudden growth spurt. Six months from now, you mark my words, she’s going to be a nightmare. The young troopers will be dying at her feet. I’ll be fending them off with a crew-served weapon. Every mother’s nightmare.’

‘Tona?’

‘Yeah?’ she replied.

‘I think we’ve all seen enough nightmares in our years together to know what a real one looks like,’ said Gol.

She nodded, shrugging. ‘That’s the fething truth,’ she replied.

‘That said,’ Gol smiled, ‘I’ll be right beside you with an axe-rake.’

She laughed.

‘Tona?’

‘What?’ she asked.

‘I’ll never be able to properly thank you for what you’ve done,’ he said. ‘Saving my children. Looking after them.’

‘Don’t, Gol.’ Tona put the wooden spoon down and looked away.

‘I mean it.’

‘Gol–’

‘That’s why I stay apart,’ Gol said. ‘I was no father to them. Ever. I worked long hours, then the war came… You did all this, Tona. You built this, despite the circumstances. You know I need to stay away so as not to spoil everything you’ve done.’

‘Eat with us, once in a while,’ said Tona. ‘Be present. It doesn’t have to be like this for you. And they will benefit. After all, Dalin knows who you are.’

‘Dal’s a grown man,’ said Gol.

‘Yoncy will be grown, too, very soon,’ she replied.

‘I just wanted you to know that I appreciate everything. More than I can say.’

He hugged her. It was involuntary.

‘Uncle Gol? Are you mum’s boyfriend?’ asked Yoncy from behind them.

The embrace broke quickly.

‘I’m not,’ he said.

‘Of course he’s not,’ laughed Tona, turning back to the stove.

III

They were a third of the way down the amasec. Gol had just taken second helpings of the stew.

‘Swear to feth,’ he said. ‘This is the best food I’ve eaten in years.’

‘Told you,’ said Dalin.

‘It’s ’ummy,’ said Yoncy.

‘So I hear Gaunt has put you on companion duty with Meritous,’ Gol said to Dalin.

Dalin nodded.

‘That’s a career advancement,’ said Tona.

‘Just doing my job,’ Dalin smiled.

‘Watching over Gaunt’s son?’ asked Gol. ‘There’s an advantage there. You should exploit it.’

‘Just doing my job,’ repeated Dalin.

‘You like him, though?’ asked Tona.

‘He’s all right.’

‘Opportunities don’t come often,’ Gol said, forking up another mouthful. ‘Use every chance you get. Be visible. Be conspicuous. Be vital. Felyx Meritous Chass is going to be a big noise in the Guard one day. Bloodline. Father and son. Use that to your advantage. Rising officers remember those who help them on the way up.’

‘Father and son, bloodline,’ Dalin nodded. ‘All right then.’

Gol put his fork down.

‘Sorry, Dal,’ he said. ‘I… That was feth-dumb of me. I see the irony.’

‘No, it was good advice,’ Dalin smiled back, ‘for everyone to take.’

Gol returned the smile.

‘I stand corrected,’ he said.

‘Here, here,’ said Tona quietly. She picked up her glass.

‘To bloodlines,’ she toasted. ‘To the fething bloody Guard and the family it makes for us.’

Dalin, Tona and Gol clinked glasses.

‘Bloodlines,’ said Dalin.

‘Family,’ said Tona.

‘May the Guard guard them all,’ said Gol.

They knocked the drink back. Yoncy watched them, then picked up her water glass, mimicked Tona’s toasting gesture, and guzzled a mouthful.

‘May the Guard guard them all,’ she declared, sing-song.

Tona smiled. Gol poured more amasec.

‘Yon?’ Dalin said, looking over at her. ‘Where’s the medal I gave you? The badge of the Sabbat Beati? You always wear it.’

‘It got lost,’ Yoncy said. ‘When the nasty man attacked me. It got torn off. I never found it.’

‘Oh,’ said Dalin. ‘I’ll get you a new one.’

‘I don’t want a new one.’

‘No?’

‘It used to hurt me,’ said Yoncy, eating.

Dalin frowned at Tona.

Tona touched her fingertips to the hollow of her throat.

‘Yoncy sometimes got a rash,’ she said, ‘from the metal. Contact eczema, Dorden called it–’

She went quiet. Gol and Dalin looked down at their plates. The casual mention of the old medicae’s name had reminded them of a loss none of them were yet used to. Yoncy kept eating, oblivious.

‘Contact eczema,’ Dalin said, anxious to break the silence. ‘Well, we can’t have that. I’ll find you something else, Yon. Something else to watch over you and keep you safe.’

Yoncy paused and studied her food.

‘I have everyone to watch over me and keep me safe,’ she said, earnestly. ‘I realised that when I lost the medal. It’s like I woke up and remembered who I was.’

‘What, honey?’ asked Tona, frowning.

‘Like in the morning?’ said Yoncy. ‘When you wake up and remember who you are and where you are? Like that.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Gol.

‘I’m a ghost, aren’t I?’ the girl asked, looking at him. ‘We’re all ghosts, aren’t we?’

Gol nodded.

‘Can I have seconds, mum?’ Yoncy asked. Her darting mind didn’t seem to stay on a subject for very long. ‘Can I, mum? I like the stew.’

‘Haven’t you had enough?’ smiled Tona.

‘I’m not full,’ Yoncy said. ‘I’m growing!’

Tona grinned at Gol and went off to fetch the pot from the stove.

Yoncy had gravy around her mouth. She tapped her spoon, then looked back at Gol.

‘Uncle Gol?’ she said.

‘Yes, Yoncy?’

‘Are you my dad?’

Gol looked at Dalin, who, with some effort, didn’t react. Tona turned from the stove with a fierce stare.

‘Why would you ask me that, Yoncy?’ Gol asked. He had a tight feeling in his chest.

‘Because people say you are,’ said Yoncy.

‘What people?’ asked Tona, coming forward and dishing out a ladle of food onto Yoncy’s plate.

‘The ghosts,’ said Yoncy. ‘The ghosts I hear around me. They say it all the time. Are you? Are you, Gol?’

Gol Kolea took a breath.

‘No, Yoncy,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’

She suddenly slithered off her seat and ran out of the room.

‘I forgot!’ she cried.

‘Yoncy! You wanted seconds!’ Tona called after her.

‘I will eat them all up! Just wait!’ Yoncy called back.

She returned to the table with a crumpled sheet of paper and handed it to Gol.

‘I made this,’ she said. ‘I made this picture for you.’

Gol took the paper and looked at it. Yoncy resumed eating, with great resolve.

The picture had been done in coloured chalk. There were spiky things, several figures, and two sickle shapes in what Gol presumed was the sky. There was something else too, a triangle and a furious, heartfelt black squiggle inside it. The squiggle had been ground into the paper, and it was clear that the chalk stick had broken several times during the rendering. There was something filthy and malicious about it, as if the child had been trying to punish the paper.

‘Are these trees?’ Gol asked, pointing.

‘Muhm,’ agreed Yoncy, eating, mouth full.

‘Who’s this?’ asked Gol, pointing to the figures.

‘That’s you, silly. You and Uncle Rerval and Uncle Bask and Uncle Luffrey.’

‘What about this?’ Gol asked, indicating the sickle shapes.

Yoncy shrugged, too busy eating.

‘And this?’ Gol asked, pointing to the squiggle.

Yoncy pushed her plate away. It was empty.

‘I didn’t mean to draw that. I tried to scribble it out. I didn’t want it in the picture.’

‘What was it, Yon?’ asked Tona.

‘I was going to draw more trees, but I picked up black instead of green by accident, and it made a bad shadow shape, and I didn’t like it so I scribbled it out.’

Yoncy shrugged. ‘Did I spoil the picture, Uncle Gol?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Gol. ‘It’s a great picture.’

Dalin reached over and pointed to the squiggle.

‘How can a shadow be bad?’ Dalin asked.

‘It’s just a drawing,’ Yoncy replied, as if that were obvious.

‘Yes, but bad how?’ Dalin asked again.

She wiggled her hands and picked up her dolly.

‘A bit like a monster,’ she replied.

She leaned over on her seat and pointed at the drawing in Gol’s hands.

‘See? Look? You’re killing it. Those jaggy lines? Per-chew chew chew chew chew! You’re shooting it with your gun. Per-chew chew! I used yellow chalk.’

‘Is it dead now?’ Gol asked.

‘Silly Gol! It wasn’t ever alive. It’s just a drawing. I thought you’d like it. I drew it for you.’

‘I… I love it,’ he said.

IV

Tona put Yoncy to bed. She and Gol and Dalin sat up for a while afterwards, drinking the amasec.

‘She’s very creative,’ said Gol.

‘Always has been. Always drawing,’ said Dalin.

‘I ought to go,’ Gol said, rising.

‘There’s still amasec,’ said Tona.

‘I ought to go.’

‘You ought to come back again soon, too,’ said Tona.

‘The food was great,’ said Gol.

‘Hey,’ Tona said. She held out the drawing. ‘Don’t forget this. She’ll be cross if she finds out you left it behind. She drew it for you.’

Gol took the drawing. He folded it up and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

It stayed there until the day he died.

‘Goodnight,’ he said.

‘Goodnight,’ said Tona.

‘Goodnight, Gol,’ Dalin smiled.

Gol closed the door behind him. He was about ten steps down the companionway when the tears came.

They weren’t necessarily bad tears.

KILLBOX

It was coming for him. It was coming to finish him.

‘You do not stand a chance,’ the warrior had told him. ‘I mean, you are skilled. For a human. But in this, you do not stand a chance in hell.’

The warrior had laughed to punctuate this statement. It wasn’t a very human laugh, and it wasn’t pleasant to hear.

Mkoll didn’t take kindly to being told what his chances were. He listened to orders, he accepted tactical advice, but when it came to outcome assessments, he tended to switch off. He’d been a scout and a soldier for a long time. That fact alone demonstrated his ability to beat the odds. A soldier who had survived for a decent career had either been lucky, or had learned how to look risk right in the eyes and spit in its face.

If Mkoll had listened – if he’d ever listened – to outcome assessments and risk evaluation, the back-of-the-briefing-packet crap that the Tactical Division always supplied, then he would have been dead long ago. At Fortis Binary, at Vervunhive, at Cirenholm, on Gereon… feth, right at the start on Tanith. He certainly would never have made it through the shit-storm of Salvation’s Reach. Outcome assessments sapped the will and they punctured confidence. They told you, matter of fact, in the pale blue type that chattered out of the Tactical Division’s cogitators, that you were going to fail. Sometimes they even told you when, where and how badly you were going to fail.

That kind of crap cut a man’s heart out before he’d even begun. If a soldier went into a fight believing he was going to lose because some rear echelon expert fether had told him so, then he was already dead.

So Mkoll never listened. He never read that part of the packet. He zoned out when the Tactical Division adjuncts stood up in briefings and began to drone on.

There was always a chance.

There was a long chamber behind Engine House Two – some kind of machine shop – which he’d labelled ‘Killbox one’. There were two routes from there to a relay room aft. He’d named that relay room ‘Killbox two’. Below that, a ladder-well led down two deck levels to a venting station: a large, ducted compartment with an oddly sloping roof. The venting station was ‘Killbox three’. Near to that, along a transit tunnel, was a slender walk-bridge spanning the chasm of the ship’s main heat sink, a canyon of machined steel cliffs that dropped away so far that you couldn’t see the bottom. The walk-bridge, that was ‘Last Fething Chance.’

Mkoll hadn’t made a map. Not a paper one anybody could see, at least. The map was in his head. They’d been on the Highness Ser Armaduke for weeks, first for the long haul out to Salvation’s Reach, and now for the slow drag back to Imperial territory. The bloody raid was three weeks behind them. To stay fit, to stay sharp, Mkoll had taken to patrolling the massive old warship, measuring it out, learning its nooks and crannies.

Where possible, he did that with every location he found himself stationed in. He made time to learn the lie of the land, to know it front and back, to navigate it in his mind, and in his sleep, and with his eyes closed. He found out every secret place, every hidden corner, every rat-run, every air-shaft, every crawlway, every concealed hatch. That kind of information could keep you alive, no matter your chances.

The Armaduke was a strange place. Mkoll had come to know it better than any other ship he’d ever made shift on. The populated areas of the crew decks and company spaces were busy, well-lit and relatively clean. To most souls aboard, those areas were the whole ship. That was where people lived and worked.

But the populated areas were just a small fraction of the ship’s mass, like the peak of a sea-mount rising above sea level. The dark bulk lay beneath. Vast areas of machine space, engine housing, vent systems and vacant compartments. There were bilges, junk stores, decommissioned chambers, abandoned holds… rusty, decaying sections that had been closed down following damage, or places that simply hadn’t been visited in centuries. Mkoll estimated that four-fifths of the ship were ‘subdeck’ like that: gloomy, backstage hull-spaces visited only by servitors, the odd maintenance sweep and people who got lost.

During his patrols, Mkoll had seen a lot down there. The furnace-heat of the main Engine Rooms, where the air swirled with sparks and soot. The water-load reservoirs where the air smelled of stagnant filth, where there was a constant sound of dripping. The waste plants. The chambers where the massive Ogryn stokers crashed after their long shifts, dark caverns of dirty bedding and sweat-stink where they drank and played dice and snored. He’d sat amongst them in the firelight, like a child visiting the ritual lair of giants, and they hadn’t even known he was there.

He’d seen the machine shop chambers where the servitors gathered in silent clusters, and hummed binaric pulses to each other as spider-servitors crawled over them, repairing their manipulators and servicing perished joint-seals. Those chambers smelled of oil and ozone, and made his throat dry. He’d entered holds that hadn’t been opened in a lifetime, and found crates of forgotten supplies: boxes of perishables that had become caskets of dust where it was impossible to tell what they had once contained, or rooms filled with stacks of self-heating meal cans, the faded labels stencilled with Munitorum issue dates that were three centuries old.

Edible still. He’d found that out too.

He’d found a compartment on what had once been a berth deck that had belonged to a senior officer at some point in the ship’s past. It had been closed off, but the contents remained. A bed, a desk, some books, dress uniforms hanging on a rail, a framed pict of a long-dead family, all thickly layered in dust. He hadn’t stayed there long. He had felt like he was intruding.

Patiently, he had learned the Armaduke’s inner secrets. Every corner, every by-way.

There was always a chance.

Mkoll knew it was coming for him when he heard the tins.

There would be no warning that the game had begun in earnest, so he had set some for himself. Simple motion alarms made of mono-filament wire stretched taut across thresholds and hatchways, and tied off to rusty, battered mess tins he had rescued from one of the low-deck junk heaps.

He was in Sub Three Six. He’d just done a twenty kilometre run around the upper circuit of holds, stow-spaces and reservoir bays. Long routes on shift transport had taught him that you had to keep fit, or you’d end up arriving at the next fight zone flabby from ship rations, and with muscle tone lost to shipboard grav levels.

He heard the tins, distant. A clatter. He paused, took a sip of water from the flask in his hand, then tied up his kit and pulled his jacket back on. All the while he listened for more noise, knowing there would be none.

He assessed direction. The clatter of tins had seemed to come from his left, but he knew the way sound travelled in Sub Three Six. It was more likely an acoustic bounce, and therefore had actually come from his right. Mkoll’s painstaking close reading of the ship had grown to include all the thousands of different sounds it made, the creaks and groans and throbs and ambient hums, and the ways sound travelled in every location.

The right. Probably the alarm line he’d tied at Sub Three Eight.

It would be closing fast. It would be coming for him.

Mkoll put on his camo-cloak, picked up his las-rifle, and began to move. He ran without making a sound, each bootfall expertly placed, knowing when to duck under low pipes or step over trunking.

‘Killbox one’ was out, for the time being at least. He didn’t want to double-back and run into what was hunting him. He took a service tunnel to starboard, crossed an empty transit hall and–

He pulled up, stepped back out into the long transit hall, and listened. The fore-aft transits provided great acoustics. He screened out the pulsing rumble of the drive rooms and waited. That creak. Just there, at the edge of hearing. A heavy weight shifting on the loose deck plates of Sub Three Seven?

Whatever was coming after him had speed – more speed than he could hope to muster. Inhuman speed. But that speed came with a price, especially given the mass involved. It was inhumanly quiet, but it simply couldn’t be as quiet as him.

Mkoll continued on. He left the transit hall, followed the slow incline of a service tunnel down to Sub Eight, and then took the narrow corridor left in a loop to ‘Last Fething Chance’. Ceiling lights above him swayed slowly on their chains, nudged by the vibration of the ship; the constant, bucking push-pull of the Warp.

He heard another creak, and froze. No, not a footfall this time. Just the fabric of the Armaduke flexing under stress somewhere.

He reached the walk-bridge. The canyon of the heat sink dropped away below him and rose above him into the roof of the hull. A warm breeze was coming from the lightless depths, murmuring in the chasm.

Mkoll strapped his rifle across his back, and pulled himself up onto the narrow rail of the slender footbridge. Like an acrobat at a carnival show, he walked the rail, heel to toe, arms outstretched, until he reached the middle of the arc. There, he lowered into a crouch, gripping the rail on either side of his feet with both hands.

Acoustics in the transit hallway were good. In the canyon of the heat sink, they were miraculous, like a gift sent by the Saint herself. Sounds moved along the canyon from all parts of the ship. He could even hear the faint chatter of cogitators on the secondary bridge far above him. The heat sink conducted vibration too, and he could feel that through his palms on the rail.

He sorted the sounds carefully; the sounds and the tiny shudders of the rail.

It was definitely to his left now. On the port side of the ship. One or perhaps two decks up, less than two hundred metres away, closing fast.

Coming for him. Coming to finish him.

It probably had a heat-lock already, or was reading his scent. No visual yet, though. No line-of-sight.

Mkoll had about sixty seconds if it played it stealthy, or less than thirty if it decided to be brazen.

He slid down from the rail onto the walk-bridge, and crossed it to the far side. There, he activated the shutter release and closed the hatch to the bridge, but stayed on the bridge side of it.

He swung back over the rail and climbed down, until he was clinging to the underside of the walk-bridge. He didn’t look down. He was veiled in the shadow of the bridge’s underside, clinging to the greasy pneumatic struts with his hands and heels.

He heard something above him.

It was on the bridge. It had arrived from the same direction he had come. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel each silent but immense footstep as its mass made the narrow walk-bridge tremble.

No sound. It was making no sound. It had tracked him, by heat and scent, to the chasm. Now it had his scent more keenly, leading across the bridge to the closed hatch.

The warm breeze gusting up from the heat sink far below was masking his body temperature.

He hung on. He felt like he was starting to steam and broil. Sweat began to trickle down his spine. His hands were damp on the warm, oily struts. Much more sweat, and his scent track would become fresh and obvious.

Much more heat, and his hands would slip off the struts.

It moved directly over him. He heard the faint clink of a metal heel on bridge decking. It paused.

He stopped breathing.

Seconds ticked by. He gently tilted his head to the right. Light from overhead was casting a vague shadow of the bridge against the canyon wall below. It was enough to see the dark bulk on the bridge above him. A huge shadow, powerful and relentless.

It moved again, down to the far end, to the closed hatch.

He heard the shutter open and close.

Had it fallen for his trick? Had it thought he had gone through the hatch and closed it after him?

No. It was far, far smarter than that.

It was still on the bridge. He could feel it. It had done what he had done. It had made a show of opening and closing the shutter as if it had gone through it, but it had remained behind.

Waiting.

We can both wait, Mkoll thought.

He hung, silently. Moments passed. He had to breathe again, but he did so as gently and slowly as he could.

Was it still there, or was his mind playing dirty tricks on him?

He waited.

He felt the walk-bridge wobble slightly as it shifted its weight. Yes, it was still there, waiting, just like him.

A minute. Another minute. Two more.

There was a sigh. The shutter opening. It closed again.

Now it had gone.

Mkoll let out a long, slow breath through lips curled in an ‘o’. He started to move, crawling back along the underside of the walk-bridge. His arms and legs were beginning to tire, and he placed each new hand- or toe-hold with deliberate care.

He reached the far end, the end he had started from. Slowly, he crawled out from under the bridge, and clambered back over the rail.

There was no one there. He had to double-check. It was frighteningly clever and calculating. There had been every chance he would come out of the shadows and find it waiting there, smiling down at him.

The walk-bridge was empty.

Mkoll went back the way he had come, but diverted off towards a through-deck ladder that took him up into a stowage space and then into ‘Killbox three’. The venting station. Steam billowed from the grilles in the floor, and verdigris caked the oddly sloping ceiling. It was a well-lit space, but there was no point taking out the light rigs.

It could see in the dark. Close up, it could hear his heartbeat and the pulse of the blood in his veins.

Mkoll was hunting the way he had learned to hunt back in the forests of Tanith. You stalked the prey, but ultimately you let the prey come to you, on your terms. That was the key part. You made the terrain yours, you used yourself as a lure, and you brought the prey into an area you could control. The killboxes. Any one of them would do. The killboxes or ‘Last Fething Chance’. Mkoll had chosen four areas that he felt gave him good access and egress, areas he could use to his advantage. If he could draw it into any one of them, he could finish the business.

He’d rigged up a small hide at the end of Killbox three a few days before, just some flakboard and a spare camo-cloak, screened off by a cluster of pipework. He was about to take up position when he heard a rattle of mess tins.

Something wasn’t right.

The mono-filament wire had been tripped somewhere to his left, causing the tins to rattle. He was sure about the direction, but that meant that somehow, it had managed to circle around him. How had it done that? How had it moved so far and so fast without him being aware of it? It had re-crossed the heat sink trench and encircled him, moving in from entirely the wrong direction.

Mkoll knew at once that he couldn’t control Killbox three any more. The hide was pointing in the wrong direction.

He knew he had to reconsider quickly. It had tripped more tins, which meant it was moving fast, putting speed above caution. It knew where he was, and it was coming for him with eager confidence.

He hurried to the end of the venting station and entered the ladder-well, clambering up into the relay room he’d designated Killbox two. There were two points of concealment there, one in a parts locker on the right-hand wall, the other further down to the left behind a workbench. As he stood there deciding which one gave him the best options, he heard something move in the venting station below him. It wasn’t loud, just a slight impact of metal on metal, but he separated it easily from the ambient noise of the ship around him. It was below him, less than ten metres. It was moving even faster than he had estimated.

He wasn’t sure if he’d have enough time to get into either of the concealment positions fast enough. He needed to keep it at arm’s length, keep it at bay for as long as possible to give himself maximum edge.

He needed a distraction. Killbox one was going to be the best option, and he had to buy a little time. He scooped up a couple of washers from the grubby workbench and, as he headed for the exit tunnel that led to Killbox one, he turned and tossed them underhand into the ladder-well.

He heard them rattle and ping as they bounced down the shaft. He heard more movement as something moved to investigate.

Then he exited fast, drawing on all the stealth skills he had accumulated in his long career. He left Killbox two making less sound than a couple of washers falling down a ladder well.

Killbox one, the machine shop, was a large and gloomy space with heavy deck plates. Unlike the other zones he had ear-marked, it had too many access points, but that drawback was more than compensated for by the shape and space of the room. Besides, Mkoll knew which direction the threat was coming from, so only the hatch access to the relay room mattered. He’d pre-constructed a hide in this Killbox too, but there were two other concealment points, and he chose one with a raised angle that had the best line of sight on the hatch.

He hauled himself into position, and lined up his rifle. No time to spare, no time to waste fussing. Just line up and be ready.

He waited. He waited, his finger resting beside the trigger.

Silence.

There was no sign of movement.

It couldn’t have lost his scent. Even with the distraction, it had been so close on his heels.

Mkoll froze.

It was in the machine shop. It was right there with him in Killbox one.

But it had come from the opposite direction. Instead of emerging from the hatch that he was sighted on, it had entered the room from the hatch behind him.

He had no idea how it had done that. He had no idea how it had looped around to circle him. He started to pick apart his mental map of the ship to try to figure out how it could have got the drop on him. Maybe a hatch or inspection tube he’d missed. Maybe a–

He shook the ideas away. They were just distractions. It didn’t matter how it had got around him. All that mattered was that it had. All that mattered was that it was right here, right now.

Mkoll didn’t breathe. He didn’t move. He waited, the hairs on his neck rising. It was so close. It prowled forward, the mass of it a shadow in the gloom. He heard the faint hum of auto-systems and targetters. It was hunting for him. It was going to locate him in another second or two.

But it was in his cross-hairs.

‘Bang,’ said Mkoll.

The Space Marine froze, and then slowly turned its bulk around. Sar Af, the White Scar, narrowed his inhuman eyes and saw Mkoll hunched amongst the overhead pipework, rifle aimed. Mkoll’s las-rifle was set to full auto. No matter how fast Sar Af moved, it wouldn’t be faster than the stream of las-shots aimed at his unprotected head.

Sar Af smiled.

‘Clever little man,’ he said.

Mkoll nodded back, his aim not wavering.

‘Game to me,’ he said.

Sar Af lowered his boltgun.

‘The Tanith Ghosts,’ he said, ‘they come with a good reputation. Especially for covert action. Good… by human standards. But you have proved something today. It has been an education, sergeant, taking this challenge with you. I would venture to say I have never met a human as cunning as you.’

‘I’ll take that, sir,’ said Mkoll.

‘I assume you prepared? Walked the ground? Chose your locations?’

‘Yes.’

Sar Af nodded.

‘Wise and diligent,’ he said. ‘The only way you could hope to even the odds. We of the Adeptus Astartes always prepare too. Prepare for the worst. We prepare for an enemy to be better than us, to have some edge, and adjust accordingly. That is why the Adeptus Astartes always win.’

Mkoll allowed himself a small smile.

‘Except this time, sir,’ he suggested.

‘Mmm,’ replied Sar Af, as though amused by something.

Mkoll felt a chill creep up his spine. His attention had been fixed on the White Scar. He realised there was something behind him.

He turned. Holofurnace of the Iron Snakes stood in the doorway, his boltgun trained on Mkoll. Eadwine of the Silver Guard, weapon ready and fixed, slowly emerged from the cover of a lateral hatch.

All three Space Marines had their weapons on him.

Mkoll slowly lowered his aim.

‘I asked my battle-brothers to shadow us as we played our game,’ said Sar Af.

‘Is that really sporting?’ asked Mkoll. ‘A fair contest?’

Eadwine snorted.

‘Not at all, sergeant,’ said Sar Af, ‘but then when is war ever sporting? This contest was never fair to begin with. War is about victory. That is all that matters. And that is why the Adeptus Astartes prevails. When the odds stack against us, we revise the rules and change the odds.’

Mkoll shrugged. He dropped down from the pipework onto the deck in front of the towering Sar Af.

‘Well then, sir,’ Mkoll said, ‘I will admit defeat. I’ll cherish the fact that, according to the original rules of this contest, I bested you. Me, a lone human. But I will concede that I don’t stand a chance against all three of you. If this had been real, you would have ended me.’

‘You did well, Mkoll,’ said Holofurnace. ‘Savour the fact that you got the drop on our finest hunter.’

Mkoll nodded.

‘Except I did more than that,’ he said. He looked down at the deck beneath them. The three Space Marines slowly looked down too.

‘I knew from the start I didn’t really stand a chance against Brother Sar Af,’ said Mkoll. ‘Not a fething chance in hell, even if I out-stealthed him and lured him into a killbox. So I set a trap, just to be sure. And look at that. My trap has caught three Space Marines.’

The deck of the machine shop was rigged. The three Space Marines could see the soft packs of explosives wedged under the deck plates they were standing on, the detonators wired and set.

‘Boom,’ said Mkoll.

Eadwine and Holofurnace stared at Mkoll in disbelief.

‘But… but if you trigger this trap,’ said Eadwine, ‘you will perish with us.’

‘Of course I will,’ said Mkoll casually. ‘But that’s why the poor bloody Guard always win. We’re expendable. One trooper for three over-powered, post-human adversaries? That’s a victory.’

There was a moment of silence, then Sar Af began to laugh. It was a loud, long and delighted laugh.

‘Well played, sergeant,’ he said. ‘He has us, brothers. He has us cold.’

Holofurnace hissed a curse. Eadwine nodded, his face grim.

‘I will concede stalemate,’ Eadwine said.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Mkoll. ‘I appreciate the opportunity to test myself against you.’

He knelt down, and began to rip the packets of explosives from the edges of the deck plate.

‘Throne!’ exclaimed Holofurnace. ‘Be careful with those!’

‘These?’ asked Mkoll, holding up one of the packs. ‘They’re just bags of powdered caffeine mix.’

Sar Af began to laugh all over again.

‘That’s the other thing about the Guard,’ said Mkoll. ‘We bluff like bastards too.’

PESTILENCE

The Archenemy infects this universe. If we do not pause to fight that infection here, within our own selves, what purpose is there in taking our fight to the stars?

– Apothecary Engane,
from his Treatise on Imperial Medicine

I

It is my belief that memory is the finest faculty we as a species possess. Through the function of memory, we are able to gather, hone and transmit all manner of knowledge for the benefit of mankind, and the endless glory of our God-Emperor, may the Golden Throne endure forever more!

To forget a mistake is to be defeated a second time, so we are taught in the sermons of Thor. How may a great leader plan his campaign without memory of those battles won and lost before? How may his soldiers absorb his teaching and improve without that gift? How may the Ecclesiarchy disseminate its message to the universal populace without that populace holding the teachings in memory? What are scholars, clerks, historians or chroniclers but agencies of memory?

And what is forgetfulness but the overthrow of memory, the ruination of precious knowledge, and an abhorrence?

I have, in the service of His Exalted Majesty the Emperor of Terra, waged war upon that abhorrence all my life. I strive to locate things forgotten and return them to the custody of memory. I am a scrabbler in dark places, an illuminator of shadows, a turner of long unturned pages, an asker of questions that have lapsed, forever hunting for answers that would otherwise have remained unvoiced. I am a recollector, prising lost secrets from the taciturn universe and returning them to the safe fold of memory, where they might again improve our lot among the outflung stars.

My particular discipline is that of Materia Medica, for human medicine was my original calling. Our understanding of our own vital mechanisms is vast and admirable, but we can never know too much about our own biology and how to protect, repair and improve it. It is our burden as a species to exist in a galaxy riven by war, and where war goes, so flourish its hand-servants, injury and disease. It may be said that as each war front advances, so medical knowledge advances too. And where armies fall back in defeat or are destroyed, so medical knowledge retreats or is forgotten. Such are the lapses I seek to redress.

Upon that very purpose, I came to Symbal Iota late in my forty-eighth year, looking for Ebhoe. To provide context, let me say that this would be the third year of the Genovingian Campaign in the Obscura Segmentum, and about nine sidereal months after the first outbreak of Uhlren’s Pox among the Guard legions stationed on Genovingia itself. Also known, colloquially, as blood-froth, Uhlren’s Pox was named after the first victim it took, a colour-sergeant called Gustaf Uhlren, of the 15th Mordian, if memory serves me. And I pride myself it does.

As a student of Imperial history, and Materia Medica too, you will have Uhlren’s Pox in your memory. A canker of body and vitality, virulently contagious, it corrupts from within, thickening circulatory fluids and wasting marrow, while embellishing the victim’s skin with foul cysts and buboes. The cycle between infection and death is at most four days. In the later stages, organs rupture, blood emulsifies and bubbles through the pores of the skin, and the victim becomes violently delusional. Some have even conjectured that by this phase, the soul itself has been corroded away. Death is inescapable in almost every case.

It appeared without warning on Genovingia, and within a month, the Medicae Regimentalis were recording twenty death notices a day. No drug or procedure could be found that began to even slow its effects. No origin for the infection could be located. Worst of all, despite increasingly vigorous programmes of quarantine and cleansing, no method could be found to prevent wholesale contagion. No plague carriers, or means of transmission, were identifiable.

As an individual man weakens and sickens, so the Imperial Guard forces as a whole began to fail and falter as their best were taken by the pestilence. Within two months, Warmaster Rhyngold’s staff were doubting the continued viability of the entire campaign. By the third month, Uhlren’s Pox had also broken out (apparently miraculously and spontaneously, given its unknown process of dispersal) on Genovingia Minor, Lorches and Adamanaxer Delta. Four separate centres of infection, right along the leading edge of the Imperial advance through the sector. At that point, the contagion had spread to the civilian population of Genovingia itself, and the Administratum had issued a Proclamation of Pandemic. It was said the skies above the cities of that mighty world were black with carrion flies, and the stench of biological pollution permeated every last acre of the planet.

I had a bureaucratic posting on Lorches at that time, and became part of the emergency body charged with researching a solution. It was weary work. I personally spent over a week in the archive without seeing daylight as I oversaw the systematic interrogation of that vast, dusty body of knowledge.

It was my friend and colleague Administrator Medica Lenid Vammel who first called our attention to Pirody and the Torment. It was an admirable piece of work on his part, a feat of study, cross-reference and memory. Vammel always had a good memory.

Under the instruction of Senior Administrator Medica Junas Malter, we diverted over sixty per cent of our staff to further research into the records of Pirody, and requests were sent out to other Genovingian worlds to look to their own archives. Vammel and I compiled the accumulating data ourselves, increasingly certain we had shone a light into the right shadow and found a useful truth.

Surviving records of the Torment incident on Pirody were painfully thin, though consistent. It was, after all, thirty-four years in the past. Survivors had been few, but we were able to trace one hundred and ninety-one possibles who might yet be alive. They were scattered to the four cosmic winds.

Reviewing our findings, Senior Malter authorised personal recollection, such was the gravity of the situation, and forty of us, all with rank high administrator or better, were despatched immediately. Vammel, rest his soul, was sent to Gandian Saturnalia, and was caught up in a local civil war and thereafter killed. I do not know if he ever found the man he was looking for. Memory is unkind there.

And I, I was sent to Symbal Iota.

II

Symbal Iota, where it is not covered in oceans that are the most profound mauve in colour (a consequence, so I understand, of algae growth), is a hot, verdant place. Rainforest islands ring the equatorial region in a wide belt.

I made ’fall at Symbalopolis, a flat-topped volcanic outcrop around whose slopes hive structures cluster like barnacles, and there transferred to a trimaran, which conveyed me, over a period of five days, down the length of the local island group to Saint Bastian.

I cursed the slowness of the craft, though in truth it skated across the mauve seas at better than thirty knots, and on several occasions tried to procure an ornithopter or air conveyance. But the Symbali are a nautical breed who place no faith in air travel. It was tortuous, and I was impatient. It had taken ten days to cross the empyrean from Lorches to Symbal Iota aboard a Navy frigate. Now it took half that time again to cross a distance infinitesimally smaller.

It was hot, and I spent my time below decks, reading data-slates. The sun and sea wind of Symbal burned my skin, used as it was to years of lamplit libraries. I took to wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat above my Administratus robes whenever I ventured out on deck, a detail my servitor Kalibane found relentlessly humorous.

On the fifth morning, Saint Bastian rose before us out of the violet waters, a pyramidal tower of volcanic flue dressed in jungle greenery. Even as we crossed the inlet from the trimaran to the shore by electric launch, turquoise seabirds mobbing over our heads, I could see no discernible sign of habitation. The thick coat of forestation came right down to the shore, revealing only a thin line of white beach at its hem.

The launch pulled into a cove where an ancient stone jetty jutted out from under the trees like an unfinished bridge. Kalibane, his bionic limbs whirring, carried my luggage onto the jetty and then helped me over. I stood there, sweating in my robes, leaning against my staff of office, batting away the beetles that circled in the stifling humidity of the cove.

There was no one there to greet me, though I had voxed word of my approach several times en route. I glanced back at the launch pilot, a dour Symbali, but he seemed not to know anything. Kalibane shambled down to the shore-end of the jetty and called my attention to a copper bell, verdigrised by time and the oceans, that hung from a hook on the end of the pier.

‘Ring it,’ I told him, and he did, cautiously, rapping his simian fingers against the metal dome. Then he glanced back at me, nervously, his optical implants clicking under his low brow-ridge as they refocused.

Two sisters of the Ecclesiarchy shortly appeared, their pure white robes as stiff and starched as the bicorn wimples they wore on their heads. They seemed to regard me with some amusement, and wordlessly ushered me to follow them.

I fell in step behind them, and Kalibane followed, carrying the luggage. We took a dirt path up through the jungle, which rose sharply and eventually became stepped. Sunlight flickered spears of light through the canopy above and the steaming air was full of exotic birdsong and the fidget of insects.

At a turn in the path, the Hospice of Saint Bastian Apostate suddenly stood before me. A great, stone-built edifice typical of the early Imperial naïve, its ancient flying buttresses and lower walls were clogged with vines and creepers. I could discern a main building of five storeys, an adjacent chapel, which looked the oldest part of the place, as well as outbuildings, kitchens and a walled garden. Above the wrought iron lych-gate stood a weathered statue of our beloved God-Emperor smiting the Archenemy. Inside the rusty gate, a well-tended path led through a trimmed lawn, punctured by tombstones and crypts. Stone angels and graven images of the Adeptus Astartes regarded me as I followed the sisters to the main door of the hospice.

I noticed then, fleetingly, that the windows of the two uppermost storeys were rigidly barred with iron grilles.

I left Kalibane outside with my possessions and crossed the threshold behind the sisters. The main atrium of the hospice was a dark and deli- ciously cool oasis of marble, with limestone pillars that rose up into the dim spaces of the high vault. My eyes lighted on the most marvellous triptych at the altar end, beneath a stained-glass oriole window, which I made observance to at once. In breadth, it was wider than a man’s spread arms, and showed three aspects of the saint. On the left, he roamed the wilderness, in apostasy, renouncing the daemons of the air and fire; on the right, he performed the miracle of the maimed souls. In the centre panel, his martyred body, draped in blue cloth, the nine bolter wounds clearly countable on his pallid flesh, he lay in the arms of a luminous and suitably mournful Emperor.

I looked up from my devotions to find the sisters gone. I could feel the subliminal chorus of a psychic choir mind-singing nearby. The cool air pulsed.

A figure stood behind me. Tall, sculptural, his starched robes as white as his smooth skin was black, he seemed to regard me with the same amusement that the sisters had shown.

I realised I was still wearing my straw hat. I removed it quickly, dropping it onto a pew, and took out the pict-slate of introduction Senior Malter had given me before I left Lorches.

‘I am Baptrice,’ he said, his voice low and genial. ‘Welcome to the saint’s hospice.’

‘Higher Administrator Medica Lemual Sark,’ I replied. ‘My dedicated function is as a recollector, posted lately to Lorches, Genovingia general group four-five-seven-seven decimal, as part of the campaign auxiliary clerical archive.’

‘Welcome, Lemual,’ he said. ‘A recollector. Indeed. We haven’t had one of your breed here before.’

I was uncertain quite what he meant, though in hindsight, the detail of his misunderstanding still chills me.

I said, ‘You were expecting me? I voxed messages ahead.’

‘We have no vox-caster here at the hospice,’ Baptrice replied. ‘What is outside does not concern us. Our work is focused on what is inside... Inside this building, inside ourselves. But do not be alarmed. You are not intruding. We welcome all who come here. We do not need notice of an arrival.’

I smiled politely at this enigmatic response, and tapped my fingers on my staff. I had hoped they would be ready for me, and have everything in place so that I could begin my work immediately. Once again, the leisurely pace of Symbal Iota was weighing me down.

‘I must, Brother Baptrice, proceed with all haste. I wish to begin my efforts at once.’

He nodded. ‘Of course. Almost all who come to Saint Bastian are eager to begin. Let me take you through and provide you with food and a place to bathe.’

‘I would rather just see Ebhoe. As soon as it is possible.’

He paused, as if mystified.

‘Ebhoe?’

‘Colonel Fege Ebhoe, late of the Twenty-Third Lammark Lancers. Please tell me he is still here! That he is still alive!’

‘He... is.’ Baptrice faltered, and looked over my pict-slate properly for the first time. Some sort of realisation crossed his noble face.

‘My apologies, Higher Sark. I misconstrued your purpose. I see now that you are an acting recollector, sent here on official business.’

‘Of course!’ I snapped. ‘What else would I be?’

‘A supplicant, coming here to find solace. An inmate. Those that arrive on the jetty and sound the bell are always that. We get no visitors except those who come to us for help.’

‘An... inmate?’ I repeated.

‘Don’t you know where you are?’ he asked. ‘This is the Hospice of Saint Bastian, a refuge for the insane.’

III

An asylum! Here was an inauspicious start to my mission. I had understood, from my research, that the Hospice of Saint Bastian was home to a holy order that offered sanctuary and comfort for those brave warriors of the Emperor’s legions who were too gravely wounded or disabled by war to continue in service. I knew the place took in the damaged and the lost from warzones all across the sector, but I truly had no notion that the damage they specialised in was wounds to the psyche and sanity. It was a hospice for the deranged, individuals who presented themselves at its gates voluntarily in hope of redemption.

Worst of all, Baptrice and the sisters had presumed me to be a supplicant! That damned straw hat had given me just the air of madness they were expecting. I was lucky not to have been unceremoniously strapped into a harness and placed in isolation.

On reflection, I realised I should have known. Bastian, that hallowed saint, was a madman who found sanity in the love of the Emperor, and who later cured, through miracles, the mentally infirm.

Baptrice pulled a bell cord, and novitiates appeared. Kalibane was escorted inside with my luggage. We were left alone in the atrium, as Baptrice went to make preparations. As we waited, a grizzled man with an old tangle of scar-tissue where his left arm had been crossed the hall. He was naked save for a weathered, empty ammunition belt strung around his torso. He looked at us dimly, his head nodding slightly. Then he padded on his way, and was lost from view.

Somewhere, distantly, I could hear sobbing, and an urgent voice repeating something over and over again. Hunched at my side, his knuckles resting on the flagstones, Kalibane glanced up at me anxiously, and I put a reassuring hand on his broad, hairy shoulder.

Figures appeared around us: haggard, tonsured men in long black ecclesiarch vestments, and more phantom sisters in their ice-white robes and horned cowls. They grouped in the shadows on either side of the atrium, and watched us silently. One of the men rehearsed silently from long ribbons of parchment that a boy-child played out for him from a studded casket. Another scribbled in a little chapbook with his quill. Another swung a brass censer around his feet, filling the air with dry, pungent incense.

Baptrice reappeared. ‘Brethren, bid welcome to Higher Administrator Sark, who has come to us on official business. You will show him every courtesy and cooperation.’

‘What official business?’ asked the old priest with the chapbook, looking up with gimlet eyes. Magnifying half-moon lenses were built into his nasal bone, and rosary beads hung around his dewlapped neck like a floral victory wreath.

‘A matter of recollection,’ I replied.

‘Pertaining to what?’ he pressed.

‘Brother Jardone is our archivist, Higher Sark. You will forgive his persistence.’ I nodded to Baptrice and smiled at the elderly Jardone, though no smile was returned.

‘I see we are kindred, Brother Jardone. Both of us devote ourselves to remembrance.’

He half-shrugged.

‘I am here to interview one of your... inmates. It may be that he holds within some facts that even now may save the lives of millions in the Genovingian group.’

Jardone closed his book and gazed at me, as if waiting for more. Senior Malter had charged me to say as little as I could of the pandemic, for news of such a calamity might spread unrest. But I felt I had to give them more.

‘Warmaster Rhyngold is commanding a major military excursion through the Genovingian group. A sickness, which has been named Uhlren’s Pox, is afflicting his garrisons. Study has shown it may bear comparison with a plague known as the Torment, which wasted Pirody some three decades past. One survivor of that epidemic resides here. If he can furnish me with any details of the incident, it may be productive in securing a cure.’

‘How bad is it, back on Genovingia?’ asked another old priest, the one with the censer.

‘It is... contained,’ I lied.

Jardone snorted. ‘Of course it is contained. That is why a higher administrator has come all this way. You ask the most foolish things, Brother Giraud.’

Another man now spoke. He was older than all, crooked and half-blind, his wrinkled pate dotted with liver spots. A flared ear-trumpet clung to the robes of his left shoulder with delicate mechanical legs. ‘I am concerned that questioning and a change to routine may disturb the serenity of the hospice. I do not want our residents upset in any way.’

‘Your comment is noted, Brother Niro,’ said Baptrice. ‘I’m sure Higher Sark will be discreet.’

‘Of course,’ I assured them.

It was late afternoon when Baptrice finally led me upstairs into the heart of the hospice. Kalibane followed us, lugging a few boxed items from my luggage. Ghostly, bicorned sisters watched us from every arch and shadow.

We proceeded from the stairs into a large chamber on the third floor. The air was close. Dozens of inmates lurked there, though none glanced at us. Some were clad in dingy, loose-fitting overalls, while others wore ancient fatigues and Imperial Guard dress. All rank pins, insignia and patches had been removed, and no one had belts or bootlaces. Two were intently playing regicide on an old tin board by the window. Another sat on the bare floor planks, rolling dice. Others mumbled to themselves or gazed into the distance blankly. The naked man we had seen in the atrium was crouching in a corner, loading spent shell cases into his ammunition belt. Many of the residents had old war wounds and scars, unsightly and grotesque.

‘Are they... safe?’ I whispered to Baptrice.

‘We allow the most stable freedom to move and use this common area. Of course, their medication is carefully monitored. But all who come here are “safe”, as all who come here come voluntarily. Some, of course, come here to escape the episodes that have made regular life impractical.’

None of this reassured me.

On the far side of the chamber, we entered a long corridor flanked by cell rooms. Some doors were shut, bolted from outside. Some had cage-bars locked over them. All had sliding spy-slits. There was a smell of disinfectant and ordure.

Someone, or something, was knocking quietly and repeatedly against one locked door we passed. From another we heard singing.

Some doors were open. I saw two novitiates sponge-bathing an ancient man who was strapped to his metal cot with fabric restraints. The old man was weeping piteously. In another room, where the door was open but the outer cage locked in place, we saw a large, heavily muscled man sitting in a ladder-back chair, gazing out through the bars. He was covered in tattoos: regimental emblems, mottoes, kill-scores. His eyes glowed with the most maniacal light. He had the tusks of some feral animal implanted in his lower jaw, so they hooked up over his upper lip.

As we passed, he leaped up and tried to reach through the bars at us. His powerful arm flexed and clenched. He issued a soft growl.

‘Behave, Ioq!’ Baptrice told him.

The cell next door to Ioq’s was our destination. The door was open, and a sister and a novitiate waited for us. The room beyond them was pitch-black. Baptrice spoke for a moment with the novitiate and the sister. He turned to me. ‘Ebhoe is reluctant, but the sister has convinced him it is right that he speaks with you. You may not go in. Please sit at the door.’ The novitiate brought up a stool, and I sat in the doorway, throwing out my robes over my knees. Kalibane dutifully opened my boxes and set up the transcribing artificer on its tripod stand.

I gazed into the blackness of the room, trying to make out shapes. I could see nothing.

‘Why is it dark in there?’

‘Ebhoe’s malady, his mental condition, is exacerbated by light. He demands darkness.’ Baptrice shrugged.

I nodded glumly and cleared my throat. ‘By the grace of the God-Emperor of Terra, I come here on His holy work. I identify myself as Lemual Sark, Higher Administrator Medica, assigned to Lorches Administratum.’

I glanced over at the artificer. It chattered quietly and extruded the start of a parchment transcription tape that I hoped would soon be long and informative. ‘I seek Fege Ebhoe, once a colonel with the Twenty-Third Lammark Lancers.’

Silence.

‘Colonel Ebhoe?’

A voice, thin as a knife, cold as a corpse, whispered out of the dark room. ‘I am he. What is your business?’

I leaned forwards. ‘I wish to discuss Pirody with you. The Torment you endured.’

‘I have nothing to say. I won’t remember anything.’

‘Come now, colonel. I’m sure you will if you try.’

‘You misunderstand. I didn’t say I “can’t”. I said I “won’t”.’

‘Deliberately?’

‘Just so. I refuse to.’

I wiped my mouth, and realised I was dry-tongued. ‘Why not, colonel?’

‘Pirody is why I’m here. Thirty-four years, trying to forget. I don’t want to start remembering now.’

Baptrice looked at me with a slightly helpless gesture. He seemed to be suggesting that it was done, and I should give up.

‘Men are dying on Genovingia from a plague we know as Uhlren’s Pox. This pestilence bears all the hallmarks of the Torment. Anything you can tell me may help save lives.’

‘I couldn’t then. Fifty-nine thousand men died on Pirody. I couldn’t save them though I tried with every shred of my being. Why should that be different now?’

I gazed at the invisible source of the cold voice. ‘I cannot say for sure. But I believe it is worth trying.’

There was a long pause. The artificer whirred on idle. Kalibane coughed, and the machine recorded the sound with a little chatter of keys.

‘How many men?’

‘I’m sorry, colonel? What did you ask me?’

‘How many men are dying?’

I took a deep breath. ‘When I left Lorches, nine hundred were dead and another fifteen hundred infected. On Genovingia Minor, six thousand and twice that number ailing. On Adamanaxer Delta, two hundred, but it had barely begun there. On Genovingia itself... two and a half million.’

I heard Baptrice gasp in shock. I trusted he would keep this to himself. ‘Colonel?’

Nothing.

‘Colonel, please...’

Cold and cutting, the voice came again, sharper than before. ‘Pirody was a wasted place...’

IV

Pirody was a wasted place. We didn’t want to go there. But the Archenemy had taken the eastern continent and razed the hives, and the northern cities were imperilled.

Warmaster Getus sent us in. Forty thousand Lammark Lancers, virtually the full strength of the Lammark regiments. Twenty thousand Fancho armour men and their machines, and a full squad of Adeptus Astartes, the Doom Eagles, shining grey and red.

The place we were at was Pirody Polar. It was god knows how old. Cyclopean towers and columns of green marble, hewn in antique times by hands I’m not convinced were human. There was a strangeness to the geometry, the angles never seemed quite right.

It was as cold as a bastard. We had winter dress, thick white flak coats with fur hoods, but the ice got in the lasguns and dulled their charges, and the damned Fancho tanks were forever refusing to start. It was day, too: day all the time. There was no night, it was the wrong season. We were so far north. The darkest it got was dusk, when one of the two suns set briefly, and the sky turned flesh-pink. Then it would be daylight again. We’d been on and off for two months. Mainly long-range artillery duels, pounding the ice-drifts. No one could sleep because of the perpetual daylight. I know two men, one a Lammarkine, I’m not proud to say, who gouged out his eyes. The other was a Fancho.

Then they came. Black dots on the ice-floes, thousands of them, waving banners so obscene, they...

Whatever. We were in no mood to fight. Driven mad by the light, driven to distraction by the lack of sleep, unnerved by the curious geometry of the place we were defending, we were easy meat. The forces of Chaos slaughtered us, and pushed us back into the city itself. The civilians, about two million strong, were worse than useless. They were pallid, idle things, with no drive or appetite. When doom came upon them, they simply gave up.

We were besieged for five months, despite six attempts by the Doom Eagles to break the deadlock. Faith, but they were terrifying! Giants, clashing their bolters together before each fight, screaming at the foe, killing fifty for every one we picked off.

But it was like fighting the tide, and for all their power, there were only sixty of them.

We called for reinforcements. Getus had promised us, but now he was long gone aboard his warship, drawn back behind the fleet picket in case things got nasty.

The first man I saw fall to the Torment was a captain in my seventh platoon. He just collapsed one day, feverish. We took him to the Pirody Polar infirmium, where Subjunctus Valis, the Apothecary of the Doom Eagles company, was running the show. An hour later, the captain was dead. His skin had blistered and bubbled. His eyes had burst. He had tried to kill Valis with a piece of the metal cot he had torn from the wall brace. Then he bled out.

You know what that means? His entire body spewed blood from every orifice, every pore. He was a husk by the time it was over.

In the day after the captain’s death, sixty fell victim. Another day, two hundred. Another day, a thousand. Most died within two hours. Others lingered... for days, pustular, agonised.

Men I had known all my life turned into gristly sacks of bone before my eyes. Damn you, Sark, for making me remember this!

On the seventh day, it spread to the Fancho as well. On the ninth, it reached the civilian population. Valis ordered all measure of quarantine, but it was no good. He worked all hours of the endless day, trying to find a vaccine, trying to alleviate the relentless infection.

On the tenth day, a Doom Eagle fell victim. In his Torment, blood gouting from his visor grilles, he slew two of his comrades and nineteen of my men. The disease had overcome even the Adeptus Astartes purity seals.

I went to Valis, craving good news. He had set up a laboratory in the infirmium, where blood samples and tissue-scrapes boiled in alembics and separated in oil flasks. He assured me the Torment would be stopped. He explained how unlikely it was for a pestilence to be transmitted in such a cold clime, where there is no heat to incubate and spread decay. He also believed it would not flourish in light. So he had every stretch of the city wired with lamps so that there would be no darkness.

No darkness. In a place where none came naturally, even the shadows of closed rooms were banished. Everything was bright. Perhaps you can see now why I abhor the light and cling to darkness.

The stench of blood-filth was appalling. Valis did his work, but still we fell. By the twenty-first day, I’d lost thirty-seven per cent of my force. The Fancho were all but gone. Twelve thousand Pirodian citizens were dead or dying. Six Doom Eagles had succumbed.

Here are your facts if you want them. The plague persisted in a climate that should have killed it. It showed no common process of transmission. It brooked no attempt to contain or control it, despite efforts to enforce quarantine and cleanse infected areas with flamers. It was ferociously contagious. Even Space Marine purity seals were no protection. Its victims died in agony.

Then one of the Doom Eagles deciphered the obscene script of one of the Chaos banners displayed outside the walls.

It said...

It said one word. One filthy word. One damned, abominable word that I have spent my life trying to forget.

V

I craned in at the dark doorway. ‘What word? What word was it, colonel?’ With great reluctance, he spoke it. It wasn’t a word at all. It was an obscene gurgle dignified by consonants. The glyph-name of the plague-daemon itself, one of the ninety-seven Blasphemies that May Not Be Written Down.

At its utterance, I fell back off my stool, nausea writhing in my belly and throat. Kalibane shrieked. The sister collapsed in a faint, and the novitiate fled.

Baptrice took four steps back from the doorway, turned, and vomited spectacularly.

The temperature in the corridor dropped by fifteen degrees.

Unsteady, I attempted to straighten my overturned stool and pick up the artificer that the novitiate had knocked over. Where it had recorded the word, I saw, the machine’s parchment tape had begun to smoulder.

Screaming and wailing echoed down the hall from various cells. And then, Ioq was out.

Just next door, he had heard it all, his scarred head pressed to the cage bars. Now that cage door splintered off its mount and crashed to the corridor floor. Berserk, the huge ex-Guardsman thrashed out and turned towards us.

He was going to kill me, I’m certain, but I was slumped and my legs wouldn’t work. Then Kalibane, bless his brave heart, flew at him. My devoted servitor rose up on his stunted hind limbs, the bionics augmenting his vast forelimbs throwing them up in a warning display. From splayed foot to reaching hand, Kalibane was eleven feet tall. He peeled back his lips and screeched through bared steel canines.

Froth dribbling from his tusked mouth, Ioq smashed Kalibane aside. My servitor made a considerable dent in the wall.

Ioq was on me.

I swept my staff of office around, and thumbed the recessed switch below the head.

Electric crackles blasted from the staff’s tip. Ioq convulsed and fell. Twitching, he lay on the floorboards, and evacuated involuntarily. Baptrice was on his feet now. Alarms were ringing and novitiates were rushing frantically into the corridor with harness jackets and clench poles.

I rose and looked back at the dark doorway. ‘Colonel Ebhoe?’

The door slammed shut.

VI

There would be no further interview that afternoon, Brother Baptrice made plain, despite my protests. Novitiates escorted me to a guest chamber on the second floor. It was whitewashed and plain, with a hard, wooden bed and small scriptorium table. A leaded window looked out onto the graveyard and the jungles beyond.

I felt a great perturbation of spirit, and paced the room as Kalibane unpacked my belongings. I had come so close, and had begun to draw the reluctant Ebhoe out. Now to be denied the chance to continue when the truly dark secrets were being revealed!

I paused by the window. The glaring, crimson sun was sinking into the mauve oceans, throwing the thick jungles into black, wild relief. Seabirds reeled over the bay in the dying light. Stars were coming out in the dark blue edges of the sky.

Calmer now, I reflected that whatever my internal uproar, the uproar in the place itself was greater.

From the window, I could hear all manner of screams, wails, shouts, banging doors, thundering footsteps, rattled keys. The word of blasphemy that Ebhoe had spoken had thrown all the fragile minds in this house of insanity into disarray, like red-hot metal plunged into quenching cold water. Great efforts were being made to quieten the inmates.

I sat at the teak scriptorium for a while, reviewing the transcripts while Kalibane dozed on a settle by the door. Ebhoe had made particular mention of Subjunctus Valis, the Doom Eagles Apothecary. I looked over copies of the old Pirody debriefings I had brought with me, but Valis’ name only appeared in the muster listings. Had he survived? Only a direct request to the Doom Eagles Chapter house could provide an answer, and that might take months. The Adeptus Astartes are notoriously secretive, sometimes downright blatant in their uncooperative relationship with the Administratum. At best, it might involve a series of formal approaches, delaying tactics, bargaining. Even so, I wanted to alert my brethren on Lorches to the possible lead.

I damned Saint Bastian when I remembered the place had no vox-caster! I couldn’t even forward a message to the astropathic enclave at Symbalopolis for transmission off-world.

A sister brought me supper on a tray. Just as I was finishing, and Kalibane was lighting the lamps, Niro and Jardone came to my chamber.

‘Brothers?’

Jardone got right to it, staring at me through his half-moon lenses. ‘The brotherhood of the hospice have met, and they decided that you must leave. Tomorrow. No further audiences will be granted. We have a vessel that will take you to the fishing port at Math Island. You can obtain passage to Symbalopolis from there.’

‘I am disappointed, Jardone. I do not wish to leave. My recollection is not complete.’

‘It is as complete as it’s going to be!’ he snapped.

‘The hospice has never been so troubled,’ Niro said quietly. ‘There have been brawls. Two novitiates have been injured. Three inmates have attempted suicide. Years of work have been undone in a few moments.’

I nodded. ‘I regret the disturbance, but–’

‘No buts!’ barked Jardone.

‘I’m sorry, Higher Sark,’ said Niro. ‘That is how it is.’

I slept badly in the cramped cot. My mind, my memory, played games, going over the details of the interview. There was shock and injury in Ebhoe, that was certain, for the event had been traumatic. But there was something else: a secret beyond anything he had told me, some profound memory. I could taste it.

I would not be deterred. Too many lives depended on it.

Kalibane was slumbering heavily when I crept from the chamber. In the darkness, I felt my way to the stairs, and up to the third floor. There was a restlessness in the close air. I moved past locked cells where men moaned in their sleep or muttered in their insomnia.

At intervals, I hugged the shadows as novitiate wardens with lamps made their patrols. It took perhaps three-quarters of an hour to reach the cell block where Ebhoe resided. I stalked nervously past the bolted door of Ioq’s room.

The spy-slit opened at my touch.

‘Ebhoe? Colonel Ebhoe?’ I called softly into the darkness.

‘Who?’ his cold voice replied.

‘It is Sark. We weren’t finished.’

‘Go away.’

‘I will not, until you tell me the rest.’

‘Go away.’

I thought desperately, and eagerness made me cruel. ‘I have a torch, Ebhoe. A powerful lamp. Do you want me to shine it in through the spy-hole?’

When he spoke again, there was terror in his voice. Emperor forgive me for my manipulation.

‘What more is there?’ he asked. ‘The Torment spread. We died by the thousand. I cannot help with your cause, though I pity those men on Genovingia.’

‘You never told me how it ended.’

‘Did you not read the reports?’

I glanced up and down the dark cell block to make sure we were still alone. ‘I read them. They were... sparse. They said Warmaster Getus incinerated the enemy from orbit, and ships were sent to relieve you at Pirody Polar. They expressed horror at the extent of the plague-loss. Fifty-nine thousand men dead. No count was made of the civilian losses. They said that by the time the relief ships arrived, the Torment had been expunged. Four hundred men were evacuated. Of them, only one hundred and ninety-one are still alive according to the records.’

‘There’s your answer then.’

‘No, colonel. That’s no answer! How was it expunged?’

‘We located the source of infection, cleansed it. That was how.’

‘How, Ebhoe? How, in the God-Emperor’s name?’

‘It was the height of the Torment. Thousands dead...’

VII

It was the height of the Torment. Thousands dead, corpses everywhere, pus and blood running in those damnably bright halls.

I went to Valis again, begging for news. He was in his infirmium, working still. Another batch of vaccines to try, he told me. The last six had failed, and had even seemed to aggravate the contagion.

The men were fighting themselves by then, killing each other in fear and loathing. I told Valis this, and he was silent, working at a flame burner on the steel workbench. He was a huge being, of course... Adeptus Astartes, a head and a half taller than me, wearing a cowled red robe over his Doom Eagles armour. He lifted specimen bottles from his narthecium, and held them up to the ever-present light.

I was tired, tired like you wouldn’t believe. I hadn’t slept in days. I put down the flamer I had been using for cleansing work, and sat on a stool.

‘Are we all going to perish?’ I asked the great Apothecary.

‘Dear, valiant Ebhoe,’ he said with a laugh. ‘You poor little man. Of course not. I will not allow it.’

He turned to face me, filling a long syringe from a stoppered bottle. I was in awe of him, even after the time we had spent together.

‘You are one of the lucky ones, Ebhoe. Clean so far. I’d hate to see you contract this pestilence. You have been a faithful ally to me through this dark time, helping to distribute my vaccines. I will mention you to your commanders.’

‘Thank you, Apothecary.’

‘Ebhoe,’ he said, ‘I think it is fair to say we cannot save any who have been infected now. We can only hope to vaccinate the healthy against infection. I have prepared a serum for that purpose, and I will inoculate all healthy men with it. You will help me. And you will be first. So I can be sure not to lose you.’

I hesitated. He came forwards with the syringe, and I started to pull up my sleeve.

‘Open your jacket and tunic. It must go through the stomach wall.’ I reached for my tunic clasps.

And saw it. The tiniest thing. Just a tiny, tiny thing. A greenish-yellow blister just below Valis’ right ear.

VIII

Ebhoe fell silent. The air seemed electrically charged. Inmates in neighbouring cells were thrashing, restless, and some were crying out. At any moment, the novitiate wardens would come.

‘Ebhoe?’ I called through the slit.

His voice had fallen to a terrified whisper, the whisper of a man who simply cannot bear to put the things haunting his mind into words.

‘Ebhoe?’

Keys clattered nearby. Lamplight flickered under a hall door. Ioq was banging at his cell door and growling. Someone was crying, someone else was wailing in a made-up language. The air was ripe with the smell of faeces, sweat and agitated fear.

‘Ebhoe!’

There was no time left. ‘Ebhoe, please!’

‘Valis had the Torment! He’d had it all along, right from the start!’ Ebhoe’s voice was strident and anguished. The words came out of the slit as hard and lethal as las-fire. ‘He had spread it! He! Through his work, his vaccines, his treatments! He had spread the plague! His mind had been corrupted by it, he didn’t know what he was doing! His many, many vaccines had failed because they weren’t vaccines! They were new strains of the Torment bred in his infirmium! He was the carrier: a malevolent, hungry pestilence clothed in the form of a noble man, killing thousands upon thousands upon thousands!’

I went cold. Colder than I’d ever been before. The idea was monstrous. The Torment had been more than a waster of lives; it had been sentient, alive, deliberate... planning and moving through the instrument it had corrupted.

The door of Ioq’s cell was bulging and shattering. Screams welled all around, panic and fear in equal measure. The entire hospice was shaking with unleashed psychoses.

Lamps flashed at the end of the block. Novitiates yelled out and ran forward as they saw me. They would have reached me had not Ioq broken out again, rabid and slavering, throwing his hideous bulk into them, ripping at them in a frenzy.

‘Ebhoe!’ I yelled through the slit. ‘What did you do?’

He was crying, his voice ragged with gut-heaving sobs. ‘I grabbed my flamer! Emperor have mercy, I snatched it up and bathed Valis with flame! I killed him! I killed him! I slew the pride of the Doom Eagles! I burned him apart! I expunged the source of the Torment!’

A novitiate flew past me, his throat ripped out by animal tusks. His colleagues were locked in a desperate struggle with Ioq.

‘You burned him.’

‘Yes. The flames touched off the chemicals in the infirmium, the sample bottles, the flasks of seething plague water. They exploded. A fireball... Oh gods... brighter than the daylight that had never gone away. Brighter than... fire everywhere... liquid fire... flames around me... all around... oh... oh...’

Bright flashes filled the hall, the loud discharge of a las weapon.

I stepped back from Ebhoe’s cell door, shaking. Ioq lay dead amid the mangled corpses of three novitiates. Several others, wounded, whimpered on the floor.

Brother Jardone, a laspistol in his bony hand, pushed through the orderlies and ecclesiarchs gathering in the hall, and pointed the weapon at me.

‘I should kill you for this, Sark. How dare you!’

Baptrice stepped forwards and took the gun from Jardone. Niro gazed at me in weary disappointment.

‘See to Ebhoe,’ Baptrice told the sisters nearby. They unlocked the cell door and went in.

‘You will leave tomorrow, Sark,’ Baptrice said. ‘I will file a complaint to your superiors.’

‘Do so,’ I said. ‘I never wanted this, but I had to reach the truth. It may be, from what Ebhoe has told me, that a way to fight Uhlren’s Pox is in our reach.’

‘I hope so,’ said Baptrice, gazing bitterly at the carnage in the hall. ‘It has cost enough.’

The novitiates were escorting me back to my room when the sisters brought Ebhoe out. The ordeal of recollection had killed him. I will never forgive myself for that, no matter how many lives on Genovingia we saved.

And I will never forget the sight of him, revealed at last in the light.

IX

I left the next day by launch with Kalibane. No one from the hospice saw me off or even spoke to me. From Math Island, I transmitted my report to Symbalopolis, and from there, astropathically, it lanced through the warp to Lorches.

Was Uhlren’s Pox expunged? Yes, eventually. My work assisted in that. The blood-froth was like the Torment, engineered by the Archenemy, just as sentient. Fifty-two medical officers, sources just like Valis, were executed and incinerated.

I forget how many we lost altogether in the Genovingia group. I forget a lot, these days. My memory is not what it was, and I am thankful for that, at times.

I never forget Ebhoe. I never forget his corpse, wheeled out by the sisters. He had been caught in the infirmium flames on Pirody Polar. Limbless, wizened like a seed-case, he hung in a suspensor chair, kept alive by intravenous drains and sterile sprays. A ragged, revolting remnant of a man.

He had no eyes. I remember that most clearly of all. The flames had scorched them out.

He had no eyes, and yet he was terrified of the light.

I still believe that memory is the finest faculty we as a species own. But by the Golden Throne, there are things I wish I could never remember again.

MASTER IMUS’S
TRANSGRESSION

‘I suppose,’ he sniffed, ‘you get a lot of cases like mine.’

The officer did not reply. In the ten minutes since Master Imus had been received, the officer had made very few remarks, except to announce his credentials and ask a few general questions.

Master Imus had presented himself, of his own volition, at the portico of the dark, unfriendly building late that afternoon. He had been invited to wait in an anteroom off the inner yard.

The anteroom was cold and forlorn. The fretful fingers of individuals previously invited to wait there had marked the white plaster with a greasy patina, and pacing feet had worn the wooden floor. There were no windows, but light poked in through a trio of dingy filters. From outside, faraway, Master Imus could hear the street noises of workers flooding home to their habs and their evening meals.

Master Imus sat in one of the old wooden chairs provided.

A clerk attended him first. The clerk led Master Imus through to a side office panelled in dark wood, and sat him at a small desk. The clerk was hunched over with the weight of the stenogram built into his chest. He sat on a stool, handed Master Imus a form, and told him to read out the questions printed on it and answer them in his own words. As Master Imus spoke, haltingly at first, the clerk’s bird-foot hands pecked the keys of the stenogram and recorded his comments. The stenogram clattered like an adding machine, a sound that made Master Imus feel exceptionally sad.

When the form was completed, the clerk left the office, and was replaced, after a few minutes, by a second clerk. The second clerk led Master Imus into a chamber that smelled of machine heat, and was cluttered with banks of whirring cogitators.

The second clerk examined Master Imus’ papers, and copied them on one of the cogitators. Several versions of Master Imus’ biographical particulars flashed up on the multiple screens for a moment and then faded into a dull, green glow. This slow, silent dissolution of all he was seemed unpleasantly symbolic to Master Imus.

He was taken back to the anteroom, and left alone again. The daylight was ebbing. A small lamp had been lit in his absence. Master Imus waited for twenty minutes, and then the officer arrived.

‘Johan Imus?’ the officer asked as he entered the room, reading from a data-slate.

Master Imus stood up.

‘That’s me, sir,’ he said.

The officer was a tall, well-made man with dark hair. He was dressed, and this came as no surprise to Johan Imus, in black clothes and a black leather coat. The officer looked Master Imus up and down with unforthcoming eyes, and announced his credentials with a cursory wave of his rosette.

‘You have been received for inspection. Follow me, please,’ he said.

Master Imus followed him obediently. He followed him across the twilit yard, in through an archway, and up an endless flight of varnished stairs. The officer opened a door, and ushered Master Imus into a small room. The room had a large, ornamental fireplace that looked as if it had not seen a fire in centuries. A gilt clock ticked on the mantle. There was a rug on the wooden floor, and two plain chairs on either side of a desk. An armchair stood in one corner, a comfortable and friendly item of furniture that Master Imus never got to sit in.

They took their seats on either side of the desk.

‘What is the nature of the crime you are confessing?’ the officer asked, after studying the data-slate for a few minutes.

‘Not a crime, as such,’ Master Imus replied hastily.

‘No?’

‘A transgression. Yes, transgression, that is a better word altogether.’

‘The nature of the transgression, then?’

‘I have already explained this,’ Master Imus offered, ‘to the clerk.’

The officer scrolled back through the slate’s files. ‘Have you born false witness to this statement as I read it?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Were you coerced, invited or urged to make this report?’

‘No, sir,’ Master Imus said. ‘I have come here of my own volition. I... I said as much.’

‘That is noted here, strenuously. You made that point several times during the preliminary examinations.’

‘I simply wanted it to be clear,’ said Master Imus. ‘I was persuaded to come here by my own conscience, nothing else.’

The officer was silent for a moment. ‘You say you have been suborned by the Ruinous Powers, drawn into their evil, and set upon an unholy task?’

Master Imus nodded.

‘I suppose,’ he sniffed, ‘you get a lot of cases like mine.’

‘Everything must be held carefully to account,’ stated Johan Imus. ‘I am an indentured book-keeper and a citizen of Imperial Hesperus, the latter an honour I hold even more dear than my work at Slocha and Daviov et Cie. My father was keeper of books for Slocha and Daviov, and his before him. My work, like theirs, involves the enumeration of company accounts, the allocation of funds, the scrutiny of audits, and the day-to-day upkeep of financial income and outgoings. I have held my post for sixty-two years, and run a department of eighteen under-keepers. No, I have no wife. No kin to speak of. My work is my life.

‘Slocha and Daviov? An illustrious auction house, surely you’ve heard of it? Well, it maintains offices in the Garcel Commercia, just off the Place Fourteenth Jaumier. In the main, we deal with antique furnishing, silks, Sameterware, Brashin mannequins, and fine arts. The sale rooms are on Varsensson’s Street, beside the lifter depot. There are open fare sales every Mainsday, and specialist auctions every other Solday. Occasionally, we hold irregular fetes for particular customers or particular treasures. Last Gorgonsday, we offered a list that included eight small ouslite busts by Sambriano Kelchi and a series of humaniques from the jokaero ruins on Tornish.

‘No, sir, I am no connoisseur. My salary does not provide me with the funds to collect or speculate. But funds are my business. I am painstaking and exact in my work. I would never wish to cause Master Slocha or Master Daviov professional embarrassment by misplacing a decimal point or wrongly adding a column of figures.

‘This is why I have come. I do not make mistakes.

‘Ah, well, now you ask, we come to the meat of it, I suppose. Last Solday I set out to review the quarterly accounts. The year end looms, and the Imperial tithe statements must be returned correctly. I found an error. Well, not an error so much as an aberration. Something that could not be accounted for. It was an idle annoyance at first, but the more I studied the pages of the ledger, the more peculiar it became.

‘There was a void, you see. A void – a gap or empty place in the flow of the accounts that defied explanation. It was as if a page or two were missing from my ledger.

‘No, not at all. This was the master ledger. Only I had access to it.

‘Sir, you belittle my craft with such a question. I keep books, and I have kept books my whole life. I am a creature of accuracy. It was not simply a matter of a creeping error, a stray sub-total. There were figures missing. Simply missing. And yet, a page or two on, the books balanced, seamlessly, as if there had been no hole.

‘This is what I mean by the word ‘void’. Numbers are my language, my life. I know when they are lying. There was a void in the accounts, and the more I struggled to identify it, the more the figures hid it from me. It was as if they were closing ranks to conceal the truth.

‘Why have I come to you with a book-keeping error? Sir, again you mock me. It was no error. I reviewed and recalculated. I redid the accounts eight times. As I added to this column and subtracted from that, the numbers began to betray me. They became numbers that I did not understand.

‘Sir, I believe I have calculated something that should not be. I believe I have found the Number of Ruin.’

He regarded Master Johan Imus for a moment. Such a small man, shrivelled by age, his sparrow bones lost in heavy robes that had evidently been cut to fit his father or his grandfather. The gilt clock ticked on the mantle. Its face had no hands, a simple ordo trick. The constant, measured ticking was all that mattered. Tock, tock, tock, flicking time away without a trace of its passage on the enamelled face. Guilt got them all in the end.

Imus possessed a small, neat face with a wide, slit mouth that might have revealed a toothy grin had the circumstances been different. His hair was straggly and white, and he wore half-moon eyeglasses. His knuckles bulged with arthritis.

‘The Number of Ruin?’ asked the officer.

Imus nodded. ‘That is my transgression. Will it be painless?’

‘Will what be painless?’

Imus strugged. ‘My punishment. I presume... Well, censure is inadequate. Will it be burning? Poison?’

The officer had been making notes in a small copy book. He dipped his pen into the desk’s power well.

‘Do you believe you have committed a crime, sir?’ he asked.

‘No, no not at all. But I believe I have become a crime. I am a criminal thing.’

‘I see.’

Master Imus sat forwards and adjusted his eyeglasses. ‘I see you are quite a young man, sir. Will this have to go to a superior?’

‘My superior?’

‘Yes, sir. I imagine something this grave-’

‘My master’s name is Hapshant. He is indisposed, an old ailment. I hold the rank of interrogator, as I told you. I can deal with this matter.’

‘Oh, good. That’s good. Very good. So, how will you proceed?’

The officer stared at Master Imus. ‘Forgive me, Imus, you don’t seem alarmed at all by this process.’

‘Alarmed?’ Imus echoed. ‘Of course I’m alarmed. I’m terrified. I’ve been terrified of this day all my life.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it happens to us all, sooner or later, doesn’t it? Every day of my working life, I have walked to work up Sarum Street, and come by this place, so dark and unfriendly. I never pass it without a shudder. It is mortality. It is the fate that awaits us all should we cross the line. Do you think it was easy coming here today? No, sir. It has taken me a week to find the confidence. This afternoon, as I raised my hand to rap at the door, my courage almost fled. But I am a true citizen of Imperial Hesperus. I am a true son of the Emperor. It was my duty to report this, no matter what fate awaits me.’

The officer nodded. The clock ticked.

‘Tell me what you understand by “the Number of Ruin”,’ said the officer.

Master Imus sat back and shrugged. ‘It is an impossible number, an abomination. It is a notation of filthy power. Numbers own power, you see. My father raised me to respect three and seven, thirteen and the triple sixes, the primes, the constants. But the Number of Ruin, that is the number of–’

‘Of?’

‘Of the warp,’ Imus whispered, looking to one side and then the other as if in fear of being overheard.

The officer nodded his head. ‘So Hapshant has taught me. Can you show me the number? Can you write it down?’

‘Are you mad?’

‘This room is warded and I am armed. Can you show me the number?’ Master Imus took a data-slate from his robe pocket. It was battered and worn from use. He activated it and entered a series of digits into the display.

‘There are the accounts,’ he said, pausing before handing the slate over. ‘I have selected the key section. Please be careful.’

The officer held out his hand. ‘Show it to me, please, sir.’

Master Imus hesitated. ‘What did you say your name was, young man?’ ‘Eisenhorn,’ the officer replied. ‘Interrogator Eisenhorn of the Emperor’s Holy Ordos. Why?’

‘Please, please be careful with this, Interrogator Eisenhorn.’

Master Imus handed the old data-slate to the officer. The officer looked at the screen with a slight frown.

The gilt clock stopped ticking. A strange silence filled the room.

‘I–’ the officer began to say, and caught fire. Blue flames, as hot as a burner torch, consumed his skin and roasted the flesh off his bones until nothing remained except dripping, blackened meat and a charred skull wrenched into a rictus by heat-tightened sinews. The data-slate dropped onto the desk from a smoking, skeletal hand with a thump. The officer’s clothing was untouched.

The flames guttered out and the scorched corpse slumped forwards with a crack of dry ligaments. Imus got up and backed away. His eyes were wide. He fought back a terrible desire to urinate.

‘Someone,’ he murmured, ‘someone, anyone... help me!’ He reached the door and tried to open it, but it was locked. He knocked on it, gingerly, as if hoping someone on the other side might open it without being put to too much trouble.

A hand took his arm.

‘Please sit down, Master Imus,’ the officer said.

Master Imus started rather badly and recoiled with such surprise he banged his elbows and the back of his head against the door. The officer, who was not burned in any way, was standing in front of him.

‘Master Imus?’

Master Imus began to shake. Then he started to hiccup. He continued to stare at the officer.

‘What did you see?’ the officer asked.

‘You were on fire,’ replied Master Imus. ‘You caught fire. The fire burned you until you were dead!’

‘Master Imus?’

Johan Imus repeated his previous commentary, this time forcing his voice to actually make some sounds.

‘Ah,’ said the officer, ‘an illusion, that’s all, necessary to the work.’

‘Necessary?’ asked Master Imus. ‘Necessary how? To what work?’

‘To my work.’ The officer gestured towards the chair Imus had vacated. He paused. His tone became more sympathetic. ‘I apologise. I have shaken you, haven’t I?’

Master Imus shrugged and managed a small, dry laugh. ‘Indeed. I have never seen a man combust before. I have never even seen a man die. How was the illusion done? What was the point of frightening me?’

The officer’s sympathetic air melted. ‘I’m not about to answer any questions, sir. All the questions will be mine.’

There were a great many of them. They came at Master Imus so rapidly, he became rather flustered. The officer asked him the names of his parents, and his votation numeral, and inquired of his political leanings. He asked Master Imus to account for his whereabouts on certain dates stretching back two years. He asked if Master Imus could operate a cogitator, if he held keys to the auction house premises, if he had ever been off-world, and where his family originated from. Master Imus attempted to answer as best he could. Sometimes a new question came at him before the last answer had been completely recited. Is there a record of public misdemeanours in your family? How long have you resided at your current address? Can you detail your diet in general terms? Are you receiving medicae treatment for any ailment? Have you ever been to Ausolberg? How many languages do you speak? How many languages do you read? Do you dream? What do you dream about? How often do you attend templum services? Have you ever taken the Standard Psykana Test? Have you ever been in trouble before?

‘Am I in trouble now?’ asked Master Imus.

He was made to wait in the anteroom again. Night had fallen. The lamp, almost out of promethium, fluttered valiantly.

The officer came to get him, and led him out into the street. The evening was warm and humid. Master Imus could smell the roasting and poaching and frying underway in the kitchens of the local eating houses. A few pedestrians passed by along the pavement under the street lamps.

‘Where are we going?’ Master Imus asked.

‘What did I tell you about questions?’ the officer asked. Master Imus pursed his lips and shrugged.

Two men joined them from the dark building. One was an old, shuffling being in long, dark robes. The other was a young man, of an age and mode of dress that matched the officer’s. This man was more handsome, however, more genial in his countenance.

‘Is this the fellow?’ he asked.

The officer nodded.

‘Let’s process this, Gregor,’ the man requested. ‘I had plans for tonight.’ They walked down the street. The officer and the other young man walked on either side of Master Imus, like an escort of gaolers walking a convict to the scaffold. The old, hunched man followed them.

‘We will inspect your hab,’ the officer said.

‘Of course,’ said Master Imus. ‘It’s not far.’

Master Imus took out his keys and opened the deadbolts of his door one by one. A baby was crying loudly on the floor below, and the stairwell was pungent with the odour of steamed cabbage. Mistress Elver, from down the landing, came out and made a point of sweeping her front step so she could get a good look at the dark men Master Imus had brought home with him.

As Master Imus finished the business of unlocking, the officer’s companion turned to look at Mistress Elver.

‘Are these your eyes, goodwife?’ he called. ‘I found them in the back of my head.’

Mistress Elver bridled and went inside. The young man laughed.

‘Don’t start, Titus,’ the officer said.

The other man leaned against the wall.

‘Nosey old bitch,’ he remarked.

‘Forty-eight,’ said the old man lurking behind them.

‘Forty-eight what?’ asked the officer, turning.

‘Steps. Two flights of twenty-four. Asquar spruce, not local. Vitrian glass in the lamp housings, though some of them have been replaced by cheaper alternatives.’

‘And this is pertinent how?’ inquired the young man called Titus. The old man shrugged with a bionic hiss. ‘Oh, it’s not.’

Master Imus opened the door. He felt rather ashamed of the musty smell that breathed out of the doorway.

The officer produced a docket.

‘Sign this,’ he told Master Imus.

‘What is it?’

‘A waiver. Interrogator Endor and I are about to search your residence.’ Master Imus initialled the docket.

The two interrogators entered the hab. Master Imus followed them, and the old man shuffled in behind him.

The old man sniffed.

‘Sec vinegar,’ he said.

‘What?’ asked Master Imus.

‘Sec vinegar, and kayleaf.’

‘I use the vinegar to clean my fingers,’ said Master Imus. ‘It’s the only thing that gets the ink out.’

‘The only thing that gets the ink out,’ the old man repeated.

‘And I use kayleaf, in a paste, to regrind my quills.’

‘You don’t smoke it then?’ asked the old man.

‘Smoke it? Why?’

‘As a balm against rheumatic inflammation?’

‘No.’

‘Ah,’ the old man said. He shuffled forwards into the living room, his legs creaking like a servitor’s. He was terribly hunched, and his augmetic eyewear clicked as it hunted. ‘You should. It’s very medicinal. It would help your hip.’

‘My hip?’ asked Master Imus.

‘You walk with a slight counter rotation. Two centimetres short on each right step. You shuffle, sir. I presume it is rheumatism.’

Master Imus felt quite dismayed. These three men had intruded into his home. The officer was in his bedroom, overturning the mattress. The other man, Endor, was in the little side kitchen, sniffing the contents of various jars. No one new had been inside Master Imus’ hab for years. It felt like a violation.

‘Are you the inquisitor?’ Master Imus asked.

‘Me? Bless you, no,’ replied the old man. ‘Why would you think that?’

‘I just assumed...’

The old man shuffled over to the sideboard. ‘Fuse-fit sampwood. No maker’s mark. A vase.’

He picked the vase up.

‘Please be careful,’ Master Imus said.

The old man ignored him. He held the vase in his spindly fingers. ‘Sameterware. Third Dynasty.’ He looked inside it. ‘Oh, paper clips.’

The officer came back from the bedroom holding several books.

‘You have books,’ he said.

‘Is there something wrong with that?’ asked Master Imus.

‘You like poetry?’

‘The Early Imperials. The Tacits. Is that a crime?’

‘This is,’ said Endor. He walked in from the side kitchen with something in his hand. There was an ugly, almost triumphant grin on his face. Master Imus realised that what he first registered as handsome in the features of the officer’s companion was in fact a cruel arrogance. Interrogator Endor was accustomed to winning.

‘What is it?’ asked the officer.

‘Buried at the bottom of a jar of caffeine,’ Endor replied. He held out his hand. Six little pills lay in his palm.

‘Yellodes,’ he said.

‘Most perturbatory,’ said the old man.

‘They’re not mine,’ said Master Imus.

Master Imus sat on the threadbare couch tugging at his robe.

‘They’re not mine. Not mine, not at all. I don’t use that sort of thing. I wouldn’t even know how to get that sort of thing.’

‘Zespair Street, or the dealers that frequent the depot,’ said the old man.

‘Be quiet, Aemos,’ said the officer. He stared down at Master Imus. ‘This is a bad turn of events for you. It compounds things.’

‘They’re not mine. How many times do I have to say it?’

‘They were in your kitchen,’ said Endor, who seemed to be relishing Master Imus’ discomfort.

‘I didn’t put them there.’

‘Oh, so someone just came in and hid them in your caffiene, did they?’

‘That must be it. I can think of no other explanation.’

‘I’ve had enough. Let’s process him.’

‘Slow down, Titus,’ said the officer.

‘He’s up to his ears in it.’

‘Slow down, I said.’

‘I had plans for tonight,’ Titus Endor scowled.

‘Fantastic for you. Give me the tablets.’

Endor tipped the yellodes into the officer’s hand. The officer sat down on the couch next to Master Imus.

‘Get lost,’ he told his companions. Endor went out onto the landing to smoke a lho-stick. The old man shuffled away to examine the books in the bedroom.

‘I’ll be frank. This is going badly for you, sir,’ the officer explained to Master Imus.

‘I realise that.’

‘The matter of the accounts is the main thing. But the yellodes. They complicate the matter.’

‘I understand.’

‘They are a prohibited substance. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, they’re yellodes.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Master Imus.

‘This isn’t the first time I’ve inspected an individual’s hab and found evidence of drug use. Obscura, gladstones, that sort of business. But yellodes... They’re mind expanders. We typically find them in circumstances connected to cult activity.’

‘Cult?’

‘We often find them used in association with prohibited texts and deviant knowledge. A man who has the Number of Ruin might use yellodes to help him fathom it and master its use.’

Master Imus put his head in his hands. ‘They’re not mine.’

‘Is the Ur-Saker yours?’

‘The what?’

‘I found it between the Frobisher and the early Tacits in your bedroom.’

‘I don’t know what an Ur-Saker is. I don’t know its significance.’

‘It’s a proscribed text. It defines the methodological use of psychotropic drugs in gnomic enlightenment. So that was just placed there too, was it? Someone just put it there?’

‘They must have done!’

The officer sighed. ‘Master Imus, you brought a matter to our attention, a serious matter. The numbers you showed me in the ledger are quite pernicious.’

‘And I came of my own volition! Remember that!’

‘I do, and that leaves me with two possibilities. You are a practising heretic with a pathological desire to be caught and condemned.’

‘Or?’

‘Or, Master Imus, you have been set up to take the fall for someone. There’s one last thing I would like to do. It’s necessary, for my work.’

‘What is it, sir?’ asked Master Imus.

The officer turned to look at him. His face was no longer human. It was a snout of rancid, gnashing teeth, spatulate and broad, with sharp edges. The snout opened, drooling spit, and seemed about to bite Master Imus’ face clean off. Master Johan Imus smelled the pit-stink of the warp, and the shadows of dark places where no human ever willingly walked. He saw a monstrous horror lunging at him, pallid tentacles whipping up out of the distended throat. He cried out in fear and wet himself.

‘I’m sorry I had to do that, Master Imus,’ said the officer, wiping his mouth.

Titus Endor came in from the stairhead. ‘Throne, Gregor. I felt that.’

‘Sorry. Would you and Aemos please stay here and tidy the place? And help Master Imus to get cleaned up?’

‘I had plans for tonight,’ replied Endor.

‘And now I have plans of my own,’ said the officer.

Titus Endor stayed until midnight, and then made some vague excuse and left. The old man remained with Master Imus until dawn. They played regicide, and talked of antiques.

The officer returned at first light.

‘The matter is settled,’ he said. ‘Thank you for your cooperation.’

When Master Imus went to work the next day, he found that Slocha and Daviov et Cie had been closed down. With immediate effect and until further notice, the seal on the door said.

Most of the staff had gathered in the street, bewildered and despondent. ‘Master Slocha was shot,’ muttered one of the underkeepers.

‘He was shot last night by the Inquisition,’ another confirmed.

‘Oh dear!’ said Master Imus.

Three days later, the officer called on Master Imus at his hab.

‘Won’t you sit down, sir?’ invited Master Imus.

‘I’ve come to tell you that you’ve been formally cleared of all charges,’ the officer said.

‘Even my transgression?’

‘Even that.’

‘I’m very relieved,’ said Master Imus.

‘Your employer was conducting bad business, heretical business, in fact. He was engaged in the importation of illicit texts under the cover of the auction house’s primary dealings. We’d been after him for a year. We had no proof of his activities.’

‘I see.’

‘Your employer knew we were on to him, of course. He set you up to act as a distraction. He wanted us to concentrate on you instead of him. And we would have, if you hadn’t been so honest as to bring the matter to our attention.’

‘Did you kill Master Slocha?’ asked Johan Imus.

‘I’m afraid I did.’ The officer rose. ‘Well, I must be on my way.’

‘What happens now?’ asked Master Imus.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I have no job to go to. The auction house is finished. What will become of me?’

‘I’m sorry, sir. That’s not my problem.’

The officer turned to leave.

‘I think I might be allowed to ask one question, in all fairness,’ said Master Imus.

‘Ask it.’

‘Why was it necessary?’

‘Why was what necessary?’ asked the officer.

‘Why was it necessary to scare me?’

‘Fear simplifies the mind, Master Imus. It is so strong and pure, it quite empties the head and removes all barriers and falsehoods. I scared you so I could read the truth inside you, the honest part of you that you could not dissemble. I’m sorry about that.’

‘You’re a psyker, then?’ Master Imus asked.

+Yes.+

‘Ah. I see. If you can read into the future, tell me... I have no job, and no references. I am too old and set in my ways to retrain. I have no means of support. I came forward of my own free volition, helped you hunt out a heretic and proved my innocence, and I am left the poorer for it. What do I do now?’

+I’m a mind-reader, not a clairvoyant.+

‘Right. Thank you for your candour anyway.’

‘Goodbye, Master Imus.’

Interrogator Eisenhorn closed the door behind him.

Master Imus sat on the threadbare couch. From the floor below, he could hear a baby crying. He could hear the knock of the landlord, going from hab to hab for the week’s rent. Master Imus’ rent dues were in the sideboard drawer. This week’s, and the next’s, but nothing more.

Master Imus was glad he had come forward, and glad he had spoken out. Duty was duty, after all. He tried to inflate some sense of civic pride in his heart.

But he wished, more than anything, he had just kept himself to himself.

REGIA OCCULTA

I crossed over into Jared County via the pass at Kulbrech. Air links were down, because of the Cackle, so a reluctant motorised unit of the local militia conveyed me from the capital as far as Kulbrech Town, and then only because the Jared Commissioner had been so insistent. This was – oh – 223.M41, and I was only just out on my own.

Even then, at the very dawn of my career, I was treated with a mixture of fear and suspicion. The rosette, or the title ‘inquisitor’, or a combination of both, fairly focused the minds of those who met me. This attitude bores me these days. Back then, it gave me a sort of vulgar sensation of power.

Inquisitor Flammel had been killed six months before in a miserable warp transit accident, and I had been posted as a locum to cover his circuit, which was the fief worlds of the Grand Banks in the coreward reaches of the Helican sub. Circuit work is a drudge, and one acts, in the main, as an itinerant magistrate, travelling from planetary capital to planetary capital, reviewing flotsam cases gathered by the local authorities. Most are trivial and hardly ordo business, scares conjured up by superstition and petty disputation, though I had spent eight weeks on New Bylar working through a caseload that eventually exposed a traffic in low-grade, unsanctioned psykers.

From New Bylar, I went to Ignix, the smallest and most peripheral of the fief colonies, a place locally regarded as the back end of all creation.

Ignix did not disappoint. Small, wet and whorled with ravines and meandering trenches created by an eternity of rainfall eroding its way down into the frothing seas, the planet is administratively divided into counties, each one millions of square kilometres.

Its capital is called Foothold, for it was there the first settlers made planetfall. They were miners, mineral extraction being the only profitable occupation a man can find on Ignix. Not long into their habitation, the miners of Ignix specialised and became wet miners, panning and sifting the planet’s thousand thousand fast waterways, many of them temporary run-offs that surge one day and are gone the next, for precious ores.

Wet mining fortunes had built Foothold into a decent-sized but drab town. All the worthwhile minerals had been shipped off-world in return for hard cash, and the place had been constructed from the residue. The buildings were stained and grim, many of them fabricated from locally cast rockcrete or a type of melta-formed pumice brick. I was put up in an airless residentiary, and went to the courthouse every day to review the pending cases. None of them deserved my attention, or even the rubber stamp of the ordos.

I had been there four days when the Cackle began. The name is a local one, a more appropriate description would be seasonal electrocorporeal storms. A by-product of Ignix’s orbital variations and the virile behaviour of the star it circles, the storms visit each yearly cycle and blanket the northern hemisphere with a steady, florid electromagnetic display. The sky lights up. Corposant nests on rooftops and masts. Vox-links suffer. There is a continuous sound in the air, like a dry, evil chuckle, hence the name.

Some years it’s mild, others it’s bad. 223 was a bad year.

The Cackle was so fierce, it prevented any and all passage by air, including shuttle links from the lift harbour to starships at high anchor. Transfers on and off Ignix were suspended, and I was stuck for the duration, which turned out to be three weeks.

There was some novelty to be enjoyed at first. The flickering lights in the sky, day and night, were quite sublime, and produced certain hues that I swear I have never encountered since.

But the constant dirty chuckle became onerous and tormenting, as did the rancid, metallic sweat the charged air drew out of me. It was fuggy and close, and I quickly wearied of getting shocks from every damn metallic object I touched or used. I came to realise why the late Flammel had made Ignix a low priority on his circuit.

With the cases done with, there was little to do but wait for the Cackle to subside. I read, and studied, and struck up passing friendships with several similarly stranded travellers living in the residentiary, merchants mostly. Perhaps friendships is too strong a word: I knew them well enough to share a drink or a conversation or a game of regicide with, but nothing more. They understood what I was, and it made them nervous around me. For the first time in my career, that vulgar sensation of power began to feel like a burden.

Towards the end of the first week of enforced occupation, a message arrived from the commissioner of Jared County. Due to the vox-out, it was brought by a biker who had run the flooding levees and wash plains of the county limits overnight. I can only assume the commissioner had paid the man well, for he was in a poor state by the time he arrived. The Foothold administrator, an old fellow called Wagneer, brought the message slip to me and waited while I read it.

‘He seems most insistent, this commissioner,’ I remarked.

‘Mal Zelwyn? He’s a good sort, very dutiful. He knew you were in town on circuit duties, and evidently hopes you might oblige him.’

I held the slip up.

‘Do you think this is genuine, administrator?’ I asked.

Wagneer shrugged his sloping shoulders. ‘Sounds like a hot one to me, but what do I know? I don’t have rosette training.’

Zelwyn, the commissioner of Jared County, had reported a pair of killings in his township, the unimaginatively named Jared County Town. He suspected cult activity, and requested an assessment by the circuit inquisitor. I would have dismissed it except for two facts. One, I had nothing better to do, and two, Zelwyn had written:

The victims suffered deep, random cuts and slashes to the body, having been slain by a crushing head wound. Each victim was missing its left ear.

‘How do I get there? Can you scare up a transport for me?’ I asked.

Wagneer laughed at the idea. ‘In this? All right, I’ll see what I can do.’

The local militia took me overland to the pass in a Centaur, hooded against the rain and bulked out with yellow swim-bladders to allow for the fording of flash floods. The crew was not at all happy about the outing, but bit their tongues because of what and who I was. After twelve hours grinding along mud tracks and waterlogged gulches, they got me through the pass, over the iron bridge, and into Kulbrech Town.

As we crossed the old, rusting bridge, I watched the corposant crackle and dance across the posts and stanchions.

In Kulbrech Town, an odious shanty backwater, transit was arranged to carry me on the next leg of my journey. The Centaur turned back to Foothold. I went on in a cargo-8 that had seen better days.

‘There’s been killing, you know?’ the driver mentioned, conversationally.

‘I had heard something to that effect.’

The driver nodded. Tiny threads of static were playing across his knuckles as he nudged the wheel.

‘Four dead,’ he said.

I can honestly say that I quite admired Jared Commissioner Maldar Zelwyn. What he lacked in almost everything he made up for in sheer optimism. He showed me around Jared County Town personally, and made it clear he was tremendously proud of it.

The town straddled twelve river threads, and it seemed to be all bridges and decking and cantilevered platforms. Habs stacked up high above the steep, rain-river chutes. Water throbbed and rattled and chugged down the channels through the town on its journey from the hills to the sea. As he drove me across the New Bridge, Zelwyn proudly explained how he had seen to its construction five years earlier, for the benefit of the community. It was a large metal structure connecting the Commercia quarter to the merchantman residences, and was evidently a boon to working practices. Before the bridge, the merchants had been obliged to take taxi boats from their homes to the Commercia every day. The river it crossed was one of the largest and most powerful bisecting Jared County Town, and the New Bridge was equipped with elevating sections so it could lift to admit the passage of trade ships and other water traffic coming inshore from the coast to the warehouse docks. It was an impressive piece of engineering, lit up, as we rode across it, by the unending light-show of the Cackle. Zelwyn clearly worked hard to support and improve his community, at the back end of all creation though it was.

We drew up on the glistening wharfs of the Commercia, and got out of the bulky land car. Zelwyn was a stocky man in his late forties with thinning hair and a heavy, bushy moustache. He took a data-slate out of his overcoat pocket.

‘All the victims were discovered in the Commercia district,’ he told me. ‘Here’s a plan of the locations. It seems arbitrary to me.’

I agreed, but I didn’t say so. ‘Is there crime scene data? Forensic material?’

‘I’m having it processed for you,’ he replied.

‘And you’ve got four now?’

‘Two more since I sent my message,’ he confirmed.

‘Is there a pattern?’

‘Apart from the way they were killed?’ he asked, and shook his head. ‘There’s no connection between the victims, except for the area they worked in – a trolley pusher, a warehouseman, a junior mercantile clerk, and a whore. We haven’t been able to connect any variables. As far as we know, they didn’t know each other.’

‘But you have a theory?’ I asked him.

He nodded. ‘The killer lives somewhere in the Commercia.’

‘Because?’

‘Each killing took place at a time when the New Bridge was raised. There was no crossing to the merchant district. To me, that says it must be local.’

I nodded. ‘But just a regular killer, surely? Not an ordo matter?’

‘We’ve had our share of murders over the years, inquisitor,’ Zelwyn replied. ‘My office handles the cases. But this… the random mutilation, the missing ears–’

‘What do you think that signifies?’ I asked.

‘Trophy taking?’ he suggested. ‘Cults do like to take trophies, I understand. Ritual, I suppose. It smacks of ritual.’

‘I reckon it might.’

‘Yeah, I thought so,’ said Zelwyn.

‘Why?’

‘You wouldn’t be here otherwise.’

The Cackle grew more fierce as night pushed in. When we left the Commercia, rain was beginning to fall, and sirens hooted, warning that the New Bridge was about to raise its hydraulic spans. The river was at flood tide.

I reviewed the victims in the frosty twinkle of the town morgue. Preservation methods in Jared County were not ordo standard. The cadavers had been dumped in bulk freezer units, and came out on their gurneys caked in frost, their vulnerable tissues blackened and cold-burned.

‘Sorry,’ said Zelwyn, watching me work. ‘I wish… our facilities could be better.’

‘Forget about it,’ I replied.

I used probes and skewers on the frigid bodies, sampling and measuring. The hacking wounds, some so deep they looked like claw marks, were especially ugly. They smiled like happily parted lips, their mouths full to the brim with frozen black ice.

‘Cult work, then?’ he asked, after a few minutes. ‘Have I got a cult here I need to deal with?’

‘No, a hunter,’ I replied.

‘A hunter?’

I nodded.

‘What does that mean?’

‘Trophy taking is a hunter’s quirk – an ear, a finger, a lock of hair.’

‘But that’s ritual, isn’t it?’ Zelwyn asked.

‘Hunters have rituals too,’ I said. He looked downcast.

‘Not a cult thing, then?’

‘You sound disappointed.’

The Jared commissioner managed a weak smile. ‘Of course not. It’s just that I’d hoped I was on the money. I wanted to impress you. If this is simply some nut-job serial, I’ve wasted your time, and I should have known better.’

‘Not to mention,’ I added, wickedly, ‘that if this had been cult work, I’d have dealt with it for you?’

Zelwyn shook his head.

‘I’m sorry to have cost you a journey, sir,’ he said.

I felt rather ashamed of my attitude. I put down the probe, wiped frosted blood off my gloved hand, and turned to face him. ‘Look, I’ve nothing better to do. Let me help you anyway.’

‘You’d do that?’ he asked, rather taken aback.

‘Of course. Why not?’

‘Because you’re… you know…’

‘An inquisitor? Inquisitors don’t like serial killings any more than commissioners do,’ I said. ‘I have certain skills, Commissioner Zelwyn. I think I can bring this animal down.’

He smiled. It was the warmest, most genuine thing I’d seen in years.

I was just trundling the last corpse back into its freezer when a militia officer came into the morgue and whispered something to Zelwyn.

He turned to look at me. I felt his pain. I mean, I actually felt it. The psyker talents that would later serve me and shape my career were still raw and unshaped in those days, but my empathetic function nevertheless resounded at his distress.

‘While we were busy here…’ he began.

‘Talk to me, Zelwyn.’

He took a deep breath. ‘While we were fussing around here, there’s been another death.’

‘Is the body still in situ?’

He nodded.

‘Let’s see it.’

We had to wait for five minutes while the New Bridge lowered its spans to let us cross into the Commercia district. Zelwyn let one of his militiamen drive us. The Jared commissioner’s hands were shaking too much to be trusted.

Corposant lit up the bridge. The sky made strange colours that twisted and turned. Rain fell. The river below us rushed along, rich in sediment, towards the distant sea.

Lana Howey had worked the wharf for twelve years, and was a regular face at the drink-stops and taverns along the hem of the Commercia. She’d once been popular, a fast girl with good looks and impressive legs, but the work had taken its toll. In the months before her death, she had earned her income turning tricks for specialist customers, men who were more interested in what she was prepared to do rather than the way she looked.

Now she was dead.

Her body lay on the ground floor of a warehouse just off Commercia Main. It had been discovered by a night watchman. Slim, too slim, and wearing too much make-up, she lay naked and awkward under the over-bright portable lamps. The blood from the deep, slashing incisions had pooled under her in a slick. Her left ear was missing.

‘Same as the others,’ said Zelwyn, shuddering.

‘No,’ I said, crouching beside the body.

‘No?’

‘No, she’s still–’

I wanted to say alive, but that would have been wrong. She wasn’t alive anymore, but she was fresh, fresh compared to the freezer-burned residue Zelwyn had shown me earlier.

‘The hunter again?’ Zelwyn asked.

‘Looks like it. The ear, you notice?’

‘Why do you think it’s a hunter, Inquisitor Eisenhorn?’ Zelwyn asked.

‘The slash wounds,’ I replied. ‘You see? So deep. These are the kind of deep cuts that a hunter might administer to accelerate decomposition. A kill he doesn’t want, and which he wants to rot away quickly.’

Zelwyn pursed his lips. ‘What are you going to do now, sir?’

‘I’m going to ask you and your people to get out of this place. Withdraw to a sixty-metre perimeter.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t ask me that, commissioner.’

‘I want to stay,’ said Zelwyn.

‘On your own head, then. Get your people out.’

Later on in my career, I only ever undertook auto-seances when I had a properly qualified astrotelepath to assist me. Such acts can take a toll. Back then, I was young and headstrong, and full of my own energy and will. It’s a wonder I ever survived.

‘Bolt the door,’ I said to Zelwyn. He obliged. His men had gone. ‘Do what I say and don’t interrupt me,’ I added.

‘Right,’ he said.

He stood back, near the heavy warehouse door, watching. I knelt beside the hacked corpse and sighed.

Outside, the Cackle sputtered and pulsed.

‘Lana Howey?’ I called softly.

I felt Zelwyn open his mouth, to ask why in the name of the Throne I was talking to a dead body. I think it was about then that he finally woke up to what was going on. I sensed fear bubbling up inside him, along with a strong desire to be outside with his men after all. He’d never seen anything like this done before.

‘Lana Howey?’

The warehouse air took on the glossy, cold feel of hyper-reality. The light refined in clarity, and small details became impossibly sharp. The various odours of the place: soot, rockcrete, oil, sacking, thinners and the body itself, were suddenly more concentrated, more pronounced.

‘What am I doing here?’ asked the late Lana Howey.

I heard Commissioner Zelwyn groan. I felt his gnawing fear.

‘Lana Howey?’ I called.

‘Hello, mister. What’s your pleasure, then, sir?’

‘Lana, my name is Gregor.’

‘That’s a lovely name. Gregor. You’re a handsome one for sure, Gregor. What can I do for you tonight?’

‘Where are you, Lana Howey?’

‘I’m in the warehouse, with you, silly man. This is my place. Don’t you fret. It’s quiet here, discreet. You’re a regular, aren’t you? I know your face.’

‘You’ve never seen me before, Lana Howey. You’ll never see me again.’

‘I doubt that,’ she sniggered. Her chuckle was the scratchy glee of the Cackle. ‘I bet you’ll be back again for more, soon enough.’

‘I need you to focus, Lana Howey,’ I said.

‘Focus? What? Why do you keep using my name, my whole name, like that? Is that your thing, mister?’

+Lana?+

I felt Zelwyn fighting back an urge to throw open the door bolts and run. I really hadn’t wanted him to be here in the first place. All he could see was me kneeling beside the body. He could not see what I could see.

An after-image of the victim had appeared to me. She was wearing a cheap, revealing dress and had taken a seat on a nearby freight trunk, one leg crossed over the other. The raised foot was swinging impatiently.

+Lana? Can you hear me?+

‘How do you know my name, mister?’ the image asked, watching me.

+Administratum files. Lana, who was it?+

‘Who was it that what? Come on, I’ve got punters waiting. What are you on about?’

+Lana. Please let me see. Who did this to you?+

‘Who did what to me? Look, I haven’t got all night,’ she breathed. ‘Show me some money, mister.’

I reached into my pocket and produced three crowns. The air was very cold. My breath was steaming, and so were the open wounds on the corpse in front of me. On the trunk, image Lana swung her leg.

‘That’ll do it,’ she said. ‘What do you want? Full service, all the stuff?’ She stood up abruptly and reached down to pull her dress off over her head. It was only then that she seemed to notice the body on the floor.

The image stared down at it for a long time, her hands frozen in the act of bunching up her dress to drag it over and off. When she looked at me again, her eye make-up was blotted and running.

‘When?’ she asked.

+Not long ago.+

‘Oh, Throne. What did I ever do to deserve that?’

+Nothing. Lana, I want to know who it was. Will you show me?+

She showed me.

She showed me, her voice growing steadily quieter and quieter, and when she was done, she faded altogether without any protest, casting me one last, hurt look with her make-up-stained eyes.

I took off my storm coat and laid it over the corpse.

Outside, dawn was no more than an hour away. The rain had eased off and the Cackle had dropped in intensity. Zelwyn stood by the waiting militia transports, taking repeated draws from an old hip flask. When I walked up, he offered it to me. I took a big swallow.

‘Are you–?’ he began

‘I need a moment.’ The work had drained me, not so much sapping my will as abrading my emotions.

‘Can the details move in, at least?’ he asked.

I nodded. Several militia officers and two coroners with a stretcher went into the warehouse at Zelwyn’s nod. After a few minutes, someone brought me my coat.

I gestured to Zelwyn and walked away in the direction of the New Bridge.

‘It’s a good thing I stayed,’ I told him. ‘This turns out to be an ordo matter after all.’

‘A cult?’

‘No, and not a hunter either… At least it could be either of those things, but that’s not what makes it an ordo matter. We’re dealing with a regia occulta.’

‘Hidden way,’ he translated. Zelwyn was no fool, he had High Gothic.

‘That’s the literal translation. In the Ordo Malleus, it has a more specific meaning.’

‘Go on.’

‘A regia occulta is a pathway… A tunnel or portal, if you like, that links our reality with that of the warp.’

‘Is it a deliberate thing?’ he asked.

‘Perhaps. Cults and heretics do sometimes open them deliberately. But it could be a natural occurrence. Most are. The fabric of space is thin in places, you see, and sometimes there are leaks.’

He shook his head and a sad smile appeared under his heavy moustache. ‘I don’t actually know much about the warp, sir,’ he said.

‘Nor should you, commissioner. It’s forbidden lore. I’m just telling you what you need to know. There is a regia occulta in Jared County Town, and it’s right here.’

We were standing at the Commercia end of the New Bridge.

It took Zelwyn just a few minutes to have the bridge and its feeder roads closed off and barricaded by the militia. Another hour, and it would have been teeming with traffic heading in for work.

‘Can you tell me why this only happens when the bridge is up?’ Zelwyn asked. ‘I mean, surely that would block a crossing?’

‘I’ll do better than tell you,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you.’

We took up a position at the Commercia end; me, Zelwyn and four men from the militia armed with powerful autorifles. At my nod, the commissioner signalled to the bridge machine room on the far bank, and the operators engaged the hydraulics. Ponderously, with a dull squeal like gates opening, the massive spans began to lift.

The Cackle fluoresced in the dawn sky over our heads. Blue ropes of fizzling corposant writhed and trickled like snakes around the iron finials of the bridge towers, and traced their way along the rising edges of the gigantic metal spans.

The hydraulics cut out when the spans were at a standard lifted position, at about forty degrees from the horizontal. We waited, looking up the steep metal slope of the span facing us. Below us, out of sight, the fast-running river gurgled and hissed.

We waited for ten minutes. Corposant gathered in increasingly heavy ribbons around the raised tips of the bridge span, as if attracted there in concentration, like lightning drawn to a conductor.

There was a dry electric crack, and we smelled ozone. One of the militiamen pointed. A whip of corposant had flicked out from the tip of one span and connected with the tip of the other, like a squiggle of electrostatic voltage crackling between two insulated orbs. It remained there, jerking and sizzling, like a bright, twisting rope tying the two halves of the raised bridge together. This feature had not been evident in the patchy disposition Lana Howey had shown me, but I suddenly felt I had discerned the key mechanism of the infernal regia occulta.

One of the militiamen started to say something, but I already knew ‘it’ was happening. The hairs on my neck were raised. I felt something akin to a ball of ice in my stomach, and a searing pain behind my eyes.

The killer came into view. He simply manifested out of nowhere, as if the air had parted like a curtain and let him through. He appeared high up on the span ahead of us, and began to plod down the steep slope. He did not see us at first. We heard his feet slapping heavily on the metal roadway.

Though humanoid, he wasn’t human. I was the largest man in our party, and he was twice my mass and half my height again. He came wrapped in a heavy, ragged cloak of animal skins with a hood drawn up. His shoulders were very broad.

The pain behind my eyes was getting worse by the second. I could barely focus.

‘Kill it,’ I said.

We opened fire: four military-grade autorifles, firing reinforced rounds with fifty per cent more grain in them than standard, Zelwyn’s lasgun, and my Tronsvasse assault pistol. The noise was stunning, and the muzzle flash a strobing flutter. The killer was dead in just a few seconds. Our firepower tore him apart and shredded his foul cloak, though he possessed such astonishing strength that he actually managed to walk into our fusilade a step or two, trying to shrug it off, before it overcame him.

He fell heavily, and rolled down the slope.

‘He’ was a mature ork warrior. Released by his spasming paws, a huge cleaver and a large metal cudgel lay on the roadway beside him. We approached slowly. Greenskins are notoriously hard to kill, and though we had blown this one wide open, I fired three more rounds into its skull to be on the safe side. Ichor, almost black in the dawn light, ran down the slope. The mangled corpse showed signs of body paint, tribal markings and lots of crude piercings and bangles. Fresh human ears were strung around its throat on a wire.

‘A greenskin?’ Zelwyn murmured. ‘But this isn’t green space. There haven’t been any orks in this sub for generations.’

‘It didn’t come from this sub,’ I said. I was finding it hard to speak or concentrate. The pain behind my eyes was even worse than before. It felt like a hot wire. ‘It came from whatever random site this regia occulta connects to. This beast went hunting one day, and ended up here. We’ll never know, I fancy, where… where…’

‘Inquisitor? Inquisitor Eisenhorn?’ I heard Zelwyn say. I felt his hand catch my arm. The pain behind my eyes had turned into full-blown psyk agony. I could barely stand, let alone speak.

And I really wanted to speak. I needed to. I needed to yell out, ‘It’s not over!’

The regia occulta was still open. While we had been standing there, gawping at the ork’s cadaver, a second one had walked in through the hidden way.

For such a massive thing, it moved very fast. I moved like lead, transfixed by the pain the seething warp gate was lancing into my receptive mind.

I heard a feral roar, and smelled a foul animal scent. I fell, shoved aside, I think. An autorifle fired.

The ork slew the first militiaman as he landed among us, splitting the fellow straight through the crown with his jagged cleaver. The man collapsed under the force of the blow, his sectioned skull spilling open as the blade jerked back out, his heels drumming the ground. The ork caught another man by the throat, yanked him off his feet, and bit away his face.

It is awful to reflect that this unfortunate lived for at least another ten minutes.

The ork broke the back of a third militiaman with a stinging cudgel blow, before making off in great bounding leaps towards the unlit buildings of the Commercia. Zelwyn and the sole remaining militiaman fired after it. The man with the broken back lay on the ground, screaming.

‘Eisenhorn?’ Zelwyn yelled.

+Lower. The. Bridge.+

I didn’t want to use my will on the poor fellow, but I had no choice. My mouth wouldn’t work. Zelwyn wet himself as my mind intruded upon his. To his credit, he rallied and signalled the machine room.

The New Bridge slowly rattled and clanked back into place. The corposant charge between the spans shorted out and vanished as the opposite ends touched.

My mind cleared at once, the pain draining back. The regia occulta was shut.

Blood had streamed out of my nose and soaked the front of my jacket. I got up and ran towards the warehouses. The ork had vanished from sight. I had to find it, before it found anyone else. A greenskin is dangerous enough. This one was enraged, possibly wounded, and knew it was cut off and pursued by its mortal foe, man.

Zelwyn ran after me. The remaining militiaman stayed put, too shocked to move, his rifle limp in his white-knuckled hands.

‘Get back, Zelwyn!’ I shouted. ‘Gather your militia in full force.’

‘Like hell!’ he yelled back. He shouted over at the units waiting behind the barricades, and they moved forwards after us. We entered the most likely venue, a warehouse stacked with mineral hoppers. Glow globes hung from the rafters, but not all of them worked. Frail daybreak glimmered through the rooflights.

‘In here?’ Zelwyn whispered, panting.

I held up my hand for hush. The place was quiet, except for the mocking chuckle of the Cackle. I tried to reach out with my mind, but I was drained, and no human psyker can read the greenskin mind. They are blunt to us. I took a deep breath instead, and smelled the air: mineral stink, wet rocks, and a hint, just a hint, of animal odour.

We edged forwards. I saw dark, wet spots on the rockcrete floor, leading between the piled hoppers. Unless someone had recently carried a leaky promethium drum through the place, Zelwyn had managed to wound the creature right enough. I touched one of the spots. It oozed warmth.

‘It’s here,’ I whispered.

Zelwyn already knew that. It had come out of the shadows, nightmarishly silent for something so big, and seized him by the throat. I turned slowly.

The ork had pulled the Jared commissioner in against its massive chest like a mother hugging a baby to its breast. Its left paw entirely encircled the man’s neck. Zelwyn’s eyes were wide, and his face was pale. The ork raised its right hand and gently rested the massive cleaver on Zelwyn’s scalp. Tiny trickles of blood ran down Zelwyn’s face.

The bull-ork’s yellow eyes, deep in the brow-ridged sockets, glared at me. Its heavy, flaccid lips wrinkled and twitched. Its tongue, huge and greasy, worked behind its rotting peg teeth. Each one of those teeth was the size of my palm.

The ork was not a bright beast, but it was smart enough, instinctive enough, to recognise its predicament. It was bargaining with me, a life for a life. This much I knew. Otherwise, Zelwyn would have been dead already.

I thought about taking a shot, but dared not risk hitting the commissioner. I was too spent, and it was no time to try my aim. Besides, greenskins are notoriously hard to kill. Even if I hit it, one round from a Tronsvasse would not do the trick.

All I had was my will. I couldn’t impel the ork in any way, but Zelwyn was a different matter.

Without hesitation, I reached into the commissioner’s panicking mind. He was still clutching his laspistol, dangling at his side. I squeezed his finger for him. The shot blew clean through the arch of the ork’s slabby right foot.

The greenskin convulsed in pain, but I already had a grip on Zelwyn’s motor function, and I threw him forwards. I felt his astonishment as his body acted without his permission. He flew out of the ork’s briefly weakened grip so fast and hard, he careered forwards and bounced face-first off the hopper to my right.

I was already firing, my weapon braced in a two-handed grip. I emptied the assault pistol’s clip into the greenskin’s chest, filling the air with drenching black mist and driving the monster into the stack of mineral hoppers behind it. It smashed heavily into the metal siding, but remained on its feet.

I ejected the dead clip, and let it drop and clatter to the floor as I snapped home a reload from my coat pocket. I tore off the second clip in one go, firing into the ork’s face and neck. The back of its vast skull banged repeatedly against the hopper behind it. Spray-patterns of ichor splashed out across the hopper’s side.

It swayed, then took another step towards me.

‘Oh, for Throne’s sake,’ I hissed, ‘just die.’

It died. The stack of hoppers, unsettled by the repeated impacts, creaked and toppled, crushing the ork in an avalanche of rock ore, clinker and iron crates. The noise was deafening. I shielded my face. Dust billowed up, and slowly settled.

I helped the Jared commissioner to his feet. He was quaking badly. Both of us were coated with a film of rock dust. He looked at the mangled heap of wreckage, where dark, clotted ichor seeped out from under the heaps of spoil.

‘Holy shit,’ he murmured.

There was no way, or no way in the understanding of the ordos, anyway, to close a regia occulta. I made it quite clear to Zelwyn that the New Bridge should never, ever be raised again, for it was that very raising, during the Cackle, that produced the unique combination of effects necessary for the regia occulta to function. He needed no persuasion. The day before I left Jared County Town, he had the machine room dismantled and the heavy gauge hydraulics uncoupled. I understand, though I cannot confirm the fact, that the New Bridge was swept away in a freak flood tide some years later. It was never replaced. The regia occulta never reoccurred in Jared County Town.

Commissioner Zelwyn, who went on to serve his community for six and a half decades, kept one of the ork cleavers on his office wall, and enjoyed telling visitors that the dried blood on its points was his.

The morning I left, he came to see me off.

‘I hope I never see you again, inquisitor,’ he said, shaking my hand.

‘I hope so too, commissioner.’

He paused. ‘I meant that in a good way,’ he added.

‘So did I,’ I said.

I crossed over into Foothold County via the pass at Kulbrech. The reluctant motorised unit of the local militia was there to meet me, the engine of the Centaur idling. They weren’t glad to see me, but I was glad to see them. The Cackle was dying away, and I would soon be gone from Ignix.

The Cackle was dying away, but it insisted on having the last laugh. Many years later, at the end of my life, the mocking elements of Ignix would return to haunt me. But this was – oh – 223.M41, and I was only just out on my own.

MISSING IN ACTION

I lost my left hand on Sameter. This is how it occurred. On the thirteenth day of Sagittar (local calendar), three days before the solstice, in the mid-rise district of the city of Urbitane, an itinerant evangelist called Lazlo Mombril was found shuffling aimlessly around the flat roof of a disused tannery, lacking his eyes, his tongue, his nose and both of his hands.

Urbitane is the second city of Sameter, a declining agro-chemical planet in the Helican subsector, and it is no stranger to crimes of cruelty and spite brought on by the vicissitudes of neglect and social deprivation afflicting its tightly packed population. This act of barbarity stood out for two reasons. First, it was no hot-blooded assault or alcohol-fuelled manslaughter, but a deliberate and systematic act of brutal, almost ritual mutilation.

Second, it was the fourth such crime discovered that month.

I had been on Sameter for just three weeks, investigating the links between a bonded trade federation and a secessionist movement on Hesperus at the request of Lord Inquisitor Rorken. The links proved to be nothing – Urbitane’s economic slump had forced the federation to chase unwise business with unscrupulous shipmasters, and the real meat of the case lay on Hesperus – but I believe this was the lord inquisitor’s way of gently easing me back into active duties following the long and arduous affair of the Necroteuch.

By the Imperial calendar it was 241.M41, late in that year. I had just finished several self-imposed months of recuperation, meditation and study on Thracian Primaris. The eyes of the daemonhost Cherubael still woke me some nights, and I wore permanent scars from torture at the hands of the sadist Gorgone Locke. His strousine neural scourge had damaged my nervous system and paralysed my face. I would not smile again for the rest of my life. But the battle wounds sustained on KCX-1288 and 56-Izar had healed, and I was itching to renew my work.

This idle task on Sameter had suited me, so I had taken it and closed the dossier after a swift and efficient investigation. But latterly, as I prepared to leave, officials of the Munitorum unexpectedly requested an audience.

I was staying with my associates in a suite of rooms in the Urbitane Excelsior, a shabby but well-appointed establishment in the high-rise district of the city. Through soot-stained, armoured roundels of glass twenty metres across, the suite looked out over the filthy grey towers of the city to the brackish waters of the polluted bay twenty kilometres away. Ornithopters and biplanes buzzed between the massive city structures, and the running lights of freighters and orbitals glowed in the smog as they swung down towards the landing port. Out on the isthmus, through a haze of yellow, stagnant air, promethium refineries belched brown smoke into the perpetual twilight.

‘They’re here,’ said Bequin, entering the suite’s lounge from the outer lobby. She had dressed in a demure gown of blue damask and a silk pashmeena, perfectly in keeping with my instruction that we should present a muted but powerful image.

I myself was clad in a suit of soft black linen with a waistcoat of grey velvet and a hip-length black leather storm coat.

‘Do you need me for this?’ asked Midas Betancore, my pilot and confidant.

I shook my head. ‘I don’t intend to be delayed here. I just have to be polite. Go on to the landing port and make sure the gun-cutter’s readied for departure.’

He nodded and left. Bequin showed the visitors in.

I had felt it necessary to be polite, because Eskeen Hansaard, Urbitane’s Minister of Security, had come to see me himself. He was a massive man in a double-breasted brown tunic, his big frame offset oddly by his finely featured, boyish face. He was escorted by two bodyguards in grey, armour-ribbed uniforms, and a short but handsome, black-haired woman in a dark blue bodyglove.

I had made sure I was sitting in an armchair when Bequin showed them in so I could rise in a measured, respectful way. I wanted them to be in no doubt who was really in charge here.

‘Minister Hansaard,’ I said, shaking his hand. ‘I am Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn of the Ordo Xenos. These are my associates Alizebeth Bequin, Arbites Chastener Godwyn Fischig and savant Uber Aemos. How may I help you?’

‘I have no wish to waste your time, inquisitor,’ he said, apparently nervous in my presence. That was good, just as I had intended it. ‘A case has been brought to my attention that I believe is beyond the immediate purview of the city Arbites. Frankly, it smacks of warp corruption, and cries out for the attention of the Inquisition.’

He was direct. That impressed me. A ranking official of the Imperium, anxious to be seen to be doing the right thing. Nevertheless, I expected his business might be a mere nothing, like the affair of the trade federation, a local crime requiring only my nod of approval that it was fine for him to continue and close. Men like Hansaard are often over-careful, in my experience.

‘There have been four deaths in the city during the last month that we believe to be linked. I would appreciate your advice on them. They are connected by merit of the ritual mutilation involved.’

‘Show me,’ I said.

‘Captain?’ he responded.

Arbites Captain Hurlie Wrex was the handsome woman with the short black hair. She stepped forwards, nodded respectfully, and gave me a data-slate with the gold crest of the Adeptus Arbites on it.

‘I have prepared a digested summary of the facts,’ she said.

I began to speed-read the slate, already preparing the gentle knock-back I was expecting to give to his case. Then I stopped, slowed, read back.

I felt a curious mix of elation and frustration. Even from this cursorial glance, there was no doubt this case required the immediate attention of the Imperial Inquisition. I could feel my instincts stiffen and my appetites whetten, for the first time in months. In bothering me with this, Minister Hansaard was not being over-careful at all. At the same time, my heart sank with the realisation that my departure from this miserable city would be delayed.

All four victims had been blinded and had their noses, tongues and hands removed, at the very least.

The evangelist, Mombril, had been the only one found alive. He had died from his injuries eight minutes after arriving at Urbitane Mid-rise Sector Infirmary. It seemed to me likely that he had escaped his ritual tormentors somehow before they could finish their work.

The other three were a different story.

Poul Grevan, a machinesmith; Luthar Hewall, a rug-maker; Idilane Fasple, a midwife.

Hewall had been found a week before by city sanitation servitors during routine maintenance to a soil stack in the mid-rise district. Someone had attempted to burn his remains and then flush them into the city’s ancient waste system, but the human body is remarkably durable. The post-mortem could not prove his missing body parts had not simply succumbed to decay and been flushed away, but the damage to the ends of the forearm bones seemed to speak convincingly of a saw or chainblade.

When Idilane Fasple’s body was recovered from a crawlspace under the roof of a mid-rise tenement hab, it threw more light on the extent of Hewall’s injuries. Not only had Fasple been mutilated in the manner of the evangelist Mombril, but her brain, brainstem and heart had been excised. The injuries were hideous. One of the roof workers who discovered her had committed suicide. Her bloodless, almost desiccated body, dried out – smoked, if you will – by the tenement’s heating vents, had been wrapped in a dark green cloth similar to the material of an Imperial Guard-issue bedroll, and stapled to the underside of the rafters with an industrial nail gun.

Cross-reference between her and Hewall convinced the Arbites that the rug-maker had very probably suffered the removal of his brain stem and heart too. Until that point, they had ascribed the identifiable lack of those soft organs to the almost toxic levels of organic decay in the liquescent filth of the soil stack.

Greven, actually the first victim found, had been dredged from the waters of the bay by a salvage ship. He had been presumed to be a suicide dismembered by the screws of a passing boat until Wrex’s careful cross-checking had flagged up too many points of similarity.

Because of the peculiar circumstances of their various post-mortem locations, it was pathologically impossible to determine any exact date or time of death. But Wrex could be certain of a window. Greven had last been seen on the nineteenth of Aquiarae, three days before his body had been dredged up. Hewall had delivered a finished rug to a high-rise customer on the twenty-fourth, and had dined that same evening with friends at a charcute in mid-rise. Fasple had failed to report for work on the fifth of Sagittar, although the night before she had seemed happy and looking forward to her next shift, according to friends.

‘I thought at first, a serial predator might be loose in mid-rise,’ said Wrex. ‘But the pattern of mutilation seems to me more extreme than that. This is not feral murder, or even psychopathic, post-slaying depravity. This is specific, purposeful ritual.’

‘How do you arrive at that?’ asked my colleague, Fischig. Fischig was a senior Arbites from Hubris, with plenty of experience in murder cases. Indeed, it was his fluency with procedure and familiarity with modus operandi that had convinced me to make him a part of my band. That, and his ferocious strength in a fight.

Wrex looked sidelong at him, as if he was questioning her ability. ‘Because of the nature of the dismemberment. Because of the way the remains were disposed of.’ She looked at me. ‘In my experience, inquisitor, a serial killer secretly wants to be found, and certainly wants to be known. He will display his kills with wanton openness, declaring his power over the community. He thrives on the terror and fear he generates. Great efforts were made to hide these bodies. That suggests to me the killer was far more interested in the deaths than in the reaction to the deaths.’

‘Well put, captain,’ I said. ‘That has been my experience too. Cult killings are often hidden so that the cult can continue its work without fear of discovery.’

‘Suggesting that there are other victims still to find...’ said Bequin casually, a chilling prophecy as it now seems to me.

‘Cult killings?’ said the minister. ‘I brought this to your attention because I feared as much, but do you really think–’

‘On Alphex, the warp-cult removed their victims’ hands and tongues because they were organs of communication,’ Aemos began. ‘On Brettaria, the brains were scooped out in order for the cult to ingest the spiritual matter – the anima, as you might say – of their prey. A number of other worlds have suffered cult predations where the eyes have been forfeit... Gulinglas, Pentari, Hesperus, Messina... Windows of the soul, you see. The Heretics of Saint Scarif, in fact, severed their ritual victims’ hands and then made them write out their last confessions using ink quills rammed into the stumps of–’

‘Enough information, Aemos,’ I said. The minister was looking pale. ‘These are clearly cult killings, sir,’ I said. ‘There is a noxious cell of Chaos at liberty in your city. And I will find it.’

I went at once to the mid-rise district. Grevan, Hewall and Fasple had all been residents of that part of Urbitane, and Mombril, though a visitor to the metropolis, had been found there too. Aemos went to the Munitorum records spire in high-rise to search the local archives. I was particularly interested in historical cult activity on Sameter, and on date significance. Fischig, Bequin and Wrex accompanied me.

The genius loci of a place can often say much about the crimes committed therein. So far, my stay on Sameter had only introduced me to the cleaner, high-altitude regions of Urbitane’s high-rise, up above the smog-cover.

Mid-rise was a dismal, wretched place of neglect and poverty. A tarry resin of pollution coated every surface, and acid rain poured down unremittingly. Raw-engined traffic crawled nose to tail down the poorly lit streets, and the very stone of the buildings seemed to be rotting. The smoggy darkness of mid-rise had a red, firelit quality, the backwash of the flares from giant gas processors. It reminded me of picture-slate engravings of the Inferno.

We stepped from Wrex’s armoured speeder at the corner of Shearing Street and Pentecost. The captain pulled on her Arbites helmet and a quilted flak coat. I began to wish for a hat of my own, or a rebreather mask. The rain stank like urine. Every thirty seconds or so an express flashed past on the elevated trackway, shaking the street.

‘In here,’ Wrex called, and led us through a shutter off the thoroughfare into the dank hallway of a tenement hab. Everything was stained with centuries of grime. The heating had been set too high, perhaps to combat the murky wetness outside, but the result was simply an overwhelming humidity and a smell like the fur of a mangy canine.

This was Idilane Fasple’s last resting place. She’d been found in the roof. ‘Where did she live?’ asked Fischig.

‘Two streets away. She had a parlour on one of the old court-habs.’

‘Hewall?’

‘His hab is about a kilometre west. His remains were found five blocks east.’

I looked at the data-slate. The tannery where Mombril had been found was less than thirty minutes’ walk from here, and Greven’s home a short tram ride. The only thing that broke the geographical focus of these lives and deaths was the fact that Greven had been dumped in the bay.

‘It hasn’t escaped my notice that they all inhabited a remarkably specific area,’ Wrex smiled.

‘I never thought it had. But “remarkably” is the word. It isn’t just the same quarter or district. It’s an intensely close network of streets, a neighbourhood.’

‘Suggesting?’ asked Bequin.

‘The killer or killers are local too,’ said Fischig.

‘Or someone from elsewhere has a particular hatred of this neighbourhood and comes into it to do his or her killing,’ said Wrex.

‘Like a hunting ground?’ noted Fischig.

I nodded. Both possibilities had merit.

‘Look around,’ I told Fischig and Bequin, well aware that Wrex’s officers had already been all over the building. But she said nothing. Our expert appraisal might turn up something different.

I found a small office at the end of the entrance hall. It was clearly the cubbyhole of the habitat’s superintendent. Sheaves of paper were pinned to the flakboard wall: rental dockets, maintenance rosters, notes of resident complaints. There was a box-tray of lost property, a partially disassembled mini-servitor in a tub of oil, a stale stink of cheap liquor. A faded ribbon-and-paper rosette from an Imperial shrine was pinned over the door with a regimental rank stud.

‘What you doing in here?’

I looked around. The superintendent was a middle-aged man in a dirty overall suit. Details. I always look for details. The gold signet ring with the wheatear symbol. The row of permanent metal sutures closing the scar on his scalp where the hair had never grown back. The prematurely weathered skin. The guarded look in his eyes.

I told him who I was, and he didn’t seem impressed. Then I asked him who he was and he said, ‘The super. What you doing in here?’

I use my will sparingly. The psychic gift sometimes closes as many doors as it opens. But there was something about this man. He needed a jolt.

‘What is your name?’ I asked, modulating my voice to carry the full weight of the psychic probe.

He rocked backwards, and his pupils dilated in surprise. ‘Quater Traves,’ he mumbled.

‘Did you know the midwife Fasple?’

‘I sin her around.’

‘To speak to?’

He shook his head. His eyes never left mine. ‘Did she have friends?’

He shrugged.

‘What about strangers? Anyone been hanging around the hab?’

His eyes narrowed. A sullen, mocking look, as if I hadn’t seen the streets outside.

‘Who has access to the roofspace where her body was found?’

‘Ain’t nobody bin up there. Not since the place bin built. Then the heating packs in, and the contractors has to break through the roof to get up there. They found her.’

‘There isn’t a hatch?’

‘Shutter. Locked, and no one has a key. Easier to go through the plasterboard.’

Outside, we sheltered from the rain under the elevated railway.

‘That’s what Traves told me too,’ Wrex confirmed. ‘No one had been into the roof for years until the contractors broke their way in.’

‘Someone had. Someone with the keys to the shutter. The killer.’

The soil stack where Hewall had been found was behind a row of commercial properties built into an ancient skin of scaffolding that cased the outside of a toolfitters’ workshop like a cobweb. There was what seemed to be a bar two stages up, where a neon sign flickered between an Imperial aquila and a fleur-de-lys. Fischig and Wrex continued up to the next scaffolding level to peer in through the stained windows of the habs there. Bequin and I went into the bar.

The light was grey inside. At a high bar, four or five drinkers sat on ratchet-stools and ignored us. The scent of obscura smoke was in the air.

There was a woman behind the counter who took exception to us from the moment we came in. She was in her forties, with a powerful, almost masculine build. Her vest was cut off at the armpits and her arms were as muscular as Fischig’s. There was a small tattoo of a skull and crossbones on her bicep. The skin of her face was weathered and coarse.

‘Help you?’ she asked, wiping the counter with a glass-cloth. As she did so I saw that her right arm, from the elbow down, was a prosthetic.

‘Information,’ I said.

She flicked her cloth at the row of bottles on the shelves behind her. ‘Not a brand I know.’

‘You know a man called Hewall?’

‘No.’

‘The guy they found in the waste pipes behind here.’

‘Oh. Didn’t know he had a name.’

Now I was closer, I could see the tattoo on her arm wasn’t a skull and crossbones. It was a wheatear.

‘We all have names. What’s yours?’

‘Omin Lund.’

‘You live around here?’

‘Live is too strong a word.’ She turned away to serve someone else.

‘Scary bitch,’ said Bequin as we went outside. ‘Everyone acts like they’ve got something to hide.’

‘Everyone does, even if it’s simply how much they hate this town.’

The heart had gone out of Urbitane, out of Sameter itself, about seventy years before. The mill-hives of Thracian Primaris eclipsed Sameter’s production, and export profits fell away. In an effort to compete, the authorities freed the refineries to escalate production by stripping away the legal restrictions on atmospheric pollution levels. For hundreds of years, Urbitane had had problems controlling its smog and air-pollutants. For the last few decades, it hadn’t bothered any more.

My vox-earplug chimed. It was Aemos. ‘What have you found?’

‘It’s most perturbatory. Sameter has been clear of taint for a goodly while. The last Inquisitorial investigation was thirty-one years ago standard, and that wasn’t here in Urbitane, but in Aquitane, the capital. A rogue psyker. The planet has its fair share of criminal activity, usually narcotics trafficking and the consequential mob-fighting. But nothing markedly heretical.’

‘Nothing with similarities to the ritual methods?’

‘No, and I’ve gone back two centuries.’

‘What about the dates?’

‘Sagittar thirteenth is just shy of the solstice, but I can’t make any meaning out of that. The Purge of the Sarpetal Hives is usually commemorated by upswings of cult activity in the subsector, but that’s six weeks away. The only other thing I can find is that this Sagittar fifth was the twenty-first anniversary of the Battle of Klodeshi Heights.’

‘I don’t know it.’

‘The sixth of seven full-scale engagements during the sixteen-month Imperial campaign on Surealis Six.’

‘Surealis... that’s in the next damn subsector! Aemos, every day of the year is the anniversary of an Imperial action somewhere. What connection are you making?’

‘The Ninth Sameter Infantry saw service in the war on Surealis.’

Fischig and Wrex had joined us from their prowl around the upper stages of the scaffolding. Wrex was talking on her own vox-set.

She signed off and looked at me, rain drizzling off her visor.

‘They’ve found another one, inquisitor,’ she said.

It wasn’t one. It was three, and their discovery threw the affair wide open. An old warehouse in the mill zone, ten streets away from Fasple’s hab, had been damaged by fire two months before, and municipal work-crews had moved in to tear it down and reuse the lot as a site for cheap, prefab habitat blocks. They’d found the bodies behind the wall insulation in a mouldering section untouched by the fire. A woman and two men, systematically mutilated in the manner of the other victims.

But these were much older. I could tell that even at a glance.

I crunched across the debris littering the floorspace of the warehouse shell. Rain streamed in through the roof holes, illuminated as a blizzard of white specks by the cold blue beams of the Arbites’ floodlights shining into the place.

Arbites officers were all around, but they hadn’t touched the discovery itself.

Mummified and shrivelled, these foetally curled, pitiful husks had been in the wall a long time.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

Fischig leaned forwards for a closer look. ‘Adhesive tape, wrapped around them to hold them against the partition. Old. The gum’s decayed.’

‘That pattern on it. The silver flecks.’

‘I think it’s military-issue stuff. Matt-silver coating, you know the sort? The coating’s coming off with age.’

‘These bodies are different ages,’ I said.

‘I thought so too,’ said Fischig.

We had to wait six hours for a preliminary report from the district Examiner Medicae, but it confirmed our guess. All three bodies had been in the wall for at least eight years, and then for different lengths of time. Decompositional anomalies showed that one of the males had been in position for as much as twelve years, the other two added subsequently, at different occasions. No identifications had yet been made.

‘The warehouse was last used six years ago,’ Wrex told me.

‘I want a roster of workers employed there before it went out of business.’

Someone using the same m.o. and the same spools of adhesive tape had hidden bodies there over a period of years.

The disused tannery where poor Mombril had been found stood at the junction between Xerxes Street and a row of slum tenements known as the Pilings. It was a foetid place, with the stink of the lye and coroscutum used in the tanning process still pungent in the air. No amount of acid rain could wash that smell out.

There were no stairs. Fischig, Bequin and I climbed up to the roof via a metal fire-ladder.

‘How long does a man survive mutilated like that?’

‘From the severed wrists alone, he’d bleed out in twenty minutes, perhaps,’ Fischig estimated. ‘Clearly, if he had made an escape, he’d have the adrenaline of terror sustaining him a little.’

‘So when he was found up here, he can have been no more than twenty minutes from the scene of his brutalisation.’

We looked around. The wretched city looked back at us, close packed and dense. There were hundreds of possibilities. It might take days to search them all.

But we could narrow it down.

‘How did he get on the roof?’ I asked.

‘I was wondering that,’ said Fischig.

‘The ladder we came up by...’ Bequin trailed off as she realised her gaffe.

‘Without hands?’ Fischig smirked.

‘Or sight,’ I finished. ‘Perhaps he didn’t escape. Perhaps his abusers put him here.’

‘Or perhaps he fell,’ Bequin said, pointing.

The back of a tall warehouse overshadowed the tannery to the east. Ten metres up there were shattered windows.

‘If he was in there somewhere, fled blindly, and fell through onto this roof...’

‘Well reasoned, Alizebeth,’ I said.

The Arbites had done decent work, but not even Wrex had thought to consider this inconsistency.

We went round to the side entrance of the warehouse. The battered metal shutters were locked. A notice pasted to the wall told would-be intruders to stay out of the property of Hundlemas Agricultural Stowage.

I took out my multi-key, and disengaged the padlock. I saw Fischig had drawn his sidearm.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I had a feeling just then... like we were being watched.’

We went inside. The air was cold and still, and smelled of chemicals. Rows of storage vats filled with chemical fertilisers lined the echoing warehall.

The second floor was bare-boarded and hadn’t been used in years. Wire mesh had been stapled over a doorway to the next floor, and rainwater dripped down. Fischig pulled at the mesh. It was cosmetic only, and folded aside neatly.

Now I drew my autopistol too.

On the street side of the third floor, which was divided into smaller rooms, we found a chamber ten metres by ten, on the floor of which was spread a sheet of plastic, smeared with old blood and other organic deposits. There was a stink of fear.

‘This is where they did him,’ Fischig said with certainty.

‘No sign of cult markings or Chaos symbology,’ I mused.

‘Maybe not,’ said Bequin, crossing the room, being careful not to step on the smeared plastic sheet. For the sake of her shoes, not the crime scene, I was sure. ‘What’s this? Something was hung here.’

Two rusty hooks in the wall, scraped enough to show something had been hanging there recently. On the floor below was a curious cross drawn in yellow chalk.

‘I’ve seen that before somewhere,’ I said. My vox bleeped. It was Wrex.

‘I’ve got that worker roster you asked for.’

‘Good. Where are you?’

‘Coming to find you at the tannery, if you’re still there.’

‘We’ll meet you on the corner of Xerxes Street. Tell your staff we have a crime scene in the agricultural warehouse.’

We walked out of the killing room towards the stairwell. Fischig froze, and brought up his gun.

‘Again?’ I whispered.

He nodded, and pushed Bequin into the cover of a door jamb.

Silence, apart from the rain and the scurry of vermin. Gun braced, Fischig looked up at the derelict roof. It may have been my imagination, but it seemed as if a shadow had moved across the bare rafters.

I moved forwards, scanning the shadows with my pistol. Something creaked: a floorboard.

Fischig pointed to the stairs. I nodded I understood, but the last thing I wanted was a mistaken shooting. I carefully keyed my vox and whispered, ‘Wrex. You’re not coming into the warehouse to find us, are you?’

‘Negative, inquisitor.’

‘Standby.’

Fischig had reached the top of the staircase. He peered down, aiming his weapon.

Las-fire erupted through the floorboards next to him, and he threw himself flat.

I put a trio of shots into the mouth of the staircase, but my angle was bad.

Two hard round shots spat back up the stairs, and then the roar and flash of the las came again, raking the floor.

From above, I realised belatedly. Whoever was on the stairs had a hard-slug sidearm, but the las-fire was coming down from the roof.

I heard steps running on the floor below. Fischig scrambled up to give chase, but another salvo of las-fire sent him ducking again.

I raised my aim, and fired up into the roof tiles, blowing out holes through which the pale light poked.

Something slithered and scrambled on the roof.

Fischig was on the stairs now, running after the second assailant.

I hurried across the third floor, following the sounds of the man on the roof.

I saw a silhouette against the sky through a hole in the tiles, and fired again. Las-fire replied in a bright burst, but then there was a thump and further slithering.

‘Cease fire! Give yourself up! Inquisition!’ I bellowed, using the will. There came a much more substantial crash sounding like a whole portion of the roof had come down. Tiles avalanched down, and smashed in a room nearby.

I slammed into the doorway, gun aimed, about to yell out a further will command. But there was no one in the room. Piles of shattered roof slates and bricks covered the floor beneath a gaping hole in the roof itself, and a battered lasrifle lay among the debris. On the far side of the room were some of the broken windows that Bequin had pointed out as overlooking the tannery roof.

I ran to one. Down below, a powerful figure in dark overalls was running for cover. The killer, escaping from me in just the same way his last victim had escaped him – through the windows onto the tannery roof.

The distance was too far to use the will again with any effect, but my aim and angle were good. I lined up on the back of the head a second before it disappeared, began to apply pressure–

–and the world exploded behind me.

I came round cradled in Bequin’s arms. ‘Don’t move, Eisenhorn. The medics are coming.’

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘Booby trap. The gun that guy left behind? It exploded behind you. Powercell overload.’

‘Did Fischig get his man?’

‘Of course he did.’

He hadn’t, in fact. He’d chased the man hard down two flights of stairs and through the main floor of the warehall. At the outer door onto the street, the man had wheeled around and emptied his autopistol’s clip at the chastener, forcing him into cover.

Then Captain Wrex, approaching from outside, had gunned the man down in the doorway.

We assembled in Wrex’s crowded office in the busy Arbites Mid-Rise Sector-house. Aemos joined us, laden down with papers and data-slates, and brought Midas Betancore with him.

‘You all right?’ Midas asked me. In his jacket of embroidered cerise silk, he was a vivid splash of colour in the muted gloom of mid-rise.

‘Minor abrasions. I’m fine.’

‘I thought we were leaving, and here you are having all the fun without me.’

‘I thought we were leaving too until I saw this case. Review Bequin’s notes. I need you up to speed.’

Aemos shuffled his ancient, augmetically assisted bulk over to Wrex’s desk, and dropped his books and papers in an unceremonious pile.

‘I’ve been busy,’ he said.

‘Busy with results?’ Bequin asked.

He looked at her sourly. ‘No, actually. But I have gathered a commendable resource of information. As the discussion advances, I may be able to fill in blanks.’

‘No results, Aemos? Most perturbatory,’ grinned Midas, his white teeth gleaming against his dark skin. He was mocking the old savant by using Aemos’ favourite phrase.

I had before me the work roster of the warehouse where the three bodies had been found, and another for the agricultural store where our fight had occurred. Quick comparison brought up two coincident names.

‘Brell Sodakis. Vim Venik. Both worked as warehousemen before the place closed down. Now they’re employed by Hundlemas Agricultural Stowage.’

‘Backgrounds? Addresses?’ I asked Wrex.

‘I’ll run checks,’ she said.

‘So... we have a cult here, eh?’ Midas asked. ‘You’ve got a series of ritual killings, at least one murder site, and now the names of two possible cultists.’

‘Perhaps.’ I wasn’t convinced. There seemed both more and less to this than had first appeared. Inquisitorial hunch.

The remains of the lasrifle discarded by my assailant lay on an evidence tray. Even with the damage done by the overloading powercell, it was apparent that this was an old model.

‘Did the powercell overload because it was dropped? It fell through the roof, didn’t it?’ Bequin asked.

‘They’re pretty solid,’ Fischig answered.

‘Forced overload,’ I said. ‘An old Imperial Guard trick. I’ve heard they learn how to set one off. As a last ditch in tight spots. Cornered. About to die anyway.’

‘That’s not standard,’ said Fischig, poking at the trigger guard of the twisted weapon. His knowledge of guns was sometimes unseemly. ‘See this modification? It’s been machine-tooled to widen the guard around the trigger.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

Fischig shrugged. ‘Access? For an augmetic hand with rudimentary digits?’

We went through to a morgue room down the hall where the man Wrex had gunned down was lying on a slab. He was middle-aged, with a powerful frame, going to seed. His skin was weatherbeaten and lined.

‘Identity?’

‘We’re working on it.’

The body had been stripped by the morgue attendants. Fischig scrutinised it, rolling it with Wrex’s help to study the back. The man’s clothes and effects were in plasteen bags in a tray at his feet. I lifted the bag of effects, and held it up to the light.

‘Tattoo,’ reported Fischig. ‘Imperial eagle, left shoulder. Crude, old. Letters underneath it... capital S period, capital I period, capital I, capital X.’

I’d just found the signet ring in the bag. Gold, with a wheatear motif. ‘S.I. IX,’ said Aemos. ‘Sameter Infantry Nine.’

The Ninth Sameter Infantry had been founded in Urbitane twenty-three years before, and had served, as Aemos had already told me, in the brutal liberation war on Surealis Six. According to city records, five hundred and nineteen veterans of that war and that regiment had been repatriated to Sameter after mustering out thirteen years ago, coming back from the horrors of war to an increasingly depressed world beset by the blight of poverty and urban collapse. Their regimental emblem, as befitted a world once dominated by agriculture, was the wheatear.

‘They came back thirteen years ago. The oldest victim we have dates from that time,’ said Fischig.

‘Surealis Six was a hard campaign, wasn’t it?’ I asked.

Aemos nodded. ‘The enemy was dug in. It was ferocious, brutal. Brutalising. And the climate. Two white dwarf suns, no cloud cover. The most punishing heat and light, not to mention ultraviolet burning.’

‘Ruins the skin,’ I murmured. ‘Makes it weatherbeaten and prematurely aged.’

Everyone looked at the taut, lined face of the body on the slab.

‘I’ll get a list of the veterans,’ volunteered Wrex.

‘I already have one,’ said Aemos.

‘I’m betting you find the names Brell Sodakis and Vim Venik on it,’ I said.

Aemos paused as he scanned. ‘I do,’ he agreed.

‘What about Quater Traves?’

‘Yes, he’s here. Master Gunnery Sergeant Quater Traves.’

‘What about Omin Lund?’

‘Ummm... yes. Sniper first class. Invalided out of service.’

‘The Sameter Ninth was a mixed unit, then?’ asked Bequin.

‘All our Guard foundings are,’ Wrex said proudly.

‘So, these men... and women...’ Midas mused. ‘Soldiers, been through hell. Fighting the corruption... Your idea is they brought it back here with them? Some taint? You think they were infected by the touch of the warp on Surealis, and have been ritually killing as a way of worship back here ever since?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I think they’re still fighting the war.’

It remains a sad truth of the Imperium that virtually no veteran ever comes back from fighting its wars intact. Combat alone shreds nerves and shatters bodies. But the horrors of the warp, and of foul xenos forms, steal sanity forever, and leave veterans fearing the shadows, and the night and, sometimes, the nature of their friends and neighbours, for the rest of their lives.

The Guard of the Ninth Sameter Infantry had come home thirteen years before, broken by a savage war against mankind’s Archenemy and, through their scars and their fear, had brought their war back with them.

The Arbites mounted raids at once on the addresses of all the veterans on the list, those that could be traced, those that were still alive. It appeared that skin cancer had taken over two hundred of them in the years since their repatriation. Surealis had claimed them as surely as if they had fallen there in combat.

A number were rounded up. Bewildered drunks, cripples, addicts, a few honest men and women trying diligently to carry on with their lives. For those latter I felt especially sorry.

About seventy could not be traced. Many may well have disappeared, moved on, or died without it coming to the attention of the authorities. But some had clearly fled. Lund, Traves, Sodakis, Venik for starters. Their habs were found abandoned, strewn with possessions as if the occupant had left in a hurry. So were the habs of twenty more belonging to names on the list.

The Arbites arrived at the hab of one, ex-corporal Geffin Sancto, in time to catch him in the act of flight. Sancto had been a flamer operator in the Guard, and like so many of his kind, had managed to keep his weapon as a memento. Screaming the battle cry of the Sameter Ninth, he torched Arbites in the stairwell of his building, before the tactical squads of the judiciary vaporised him in a hail of gunshots.

‘Why are they killing?’ Bequin asked me. ‘All these years, in secret ritual?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You do, Eisenhorn. You so do!’

‘Very well. I can guess. The fellow worker who jokes at the Emperor’s expense and makes your fragile sanity imagine he is tainted with the warp. The rug-maker whose patterns suggest to you the secret encoding of Chaos symbols. The midwife you decide is spawning the offspring of the Archenemy in the mid-rise maternity hall. The travelling evangelist who seems just too damn fired up to be safe.’

She looked down at the floor of the Land Speeder. ‘They see daemons everywhere.’

‘In everything. In every one. And, so help them, they believe they are doing the Emperor’s work by killing. They trust no one, so they daren’t alert the authorities. They take the eyes, the hands and the tongue... all the organs of communication, any way the Archenemy might transmit his foul lies. And then they destroy the brain and heart, the organs which common soldier myth declares must harbour daemons.’

‘So where are we going now?’ she asked.

‘Another hunch.’

The Guildhall of the Sameter Agricultural Fraternity was a massive ragstone building on Furnace Street, its facade decaying from the ministrations of smog and acid rain. It had been disused for over two decades.

Its last duty had been to serve as a recruitment post of the Sameter Ninth during the founding. In its long hallways, the men and women of the Ninth had signed their names, collected their starchy new fatigues, and pledged their battle oath to the God-Emperor of mankind.

At certain times, under certain circumstances, when a proper altar to the Emperor is not available, Guard officers improvise in order to conduct their ceremonies. An Imperial eagle, an aquila standard, is suspended from a wall, and a sacred spot is marked on the floor beneath in yellow chalk.

The guildhall was not a consecrated building. The founding must have been the first time the young volunteers of Urbitane had seen that done. They’d made their vows to a yellow chalk cross and a dangling aquila.

Wrex was leading three fire-teams of armed Arbites, but I went in with Midas and Fischig first, quietly. Bequin and Aemos stayed by our vehicle. Midas was carrying his matched needle pistols, and Fischig an auto shotgun. I clipped a slab-pattern magazine full of fresh rounds into the precious bolt pistol given to me by Brytnoth of the Adeptus Astartes Deathwatch Chapter.

We pushed open the boarded doors of the decaying structure and edged down the dank corridors. Rainwater pattered from the roof, and the marble floor was spotted and eaten by collected acid.

We could hear the singing. A couple of dozen voices uttering the Battle Hymn of the Golden Throne.

I led my companions forward, hunched low. Through the crazed windows of an inner door we looked through into the main hall. Twenty-three dishevelled veterans in ragged clothes were knelt down in ranks on the filthy floor, their heads bowed to the rusty Imperial eagle hanging on the wall as they sang. There was a yellow chalk cross on the floor under the aquila. Each veteran had a backpack or rucksack and a weapon by their feet. My heart ached. This was how it had gone over two decades before, when they came to the service, young and fresh and eager. Before the war.

Before the horror.

‘Let me try... try to give them a chance,’ I said.

‘Gregor!’ Midas hissed.

‘Let me try, for their sake. Cover me.’

I slipped into the back of the hall, my gun lowered at my side, and joined in the verse.

One by one, the voices died away, and bowed heads turned to look at me. Down the aisle, at the chalk cross of the altar, Lund, Traves and a bearded man I didn’t know stood gazing at me.

In the absence of other voices, I finished the hymn.

‘It’s over,’ I said. ‘The war is over and you have all done your duty. Above and beyond the call.’

Silence.

‘I am Inquisitor Eisenhorn. I’m here to relieve you. The careful war against the blight of Chaos that you have waged through Urbitane in secret is now over. The Inquisition is here to take over. You can stand down.’

Two or three of the hunched veterans began to weep.

‘You lie,’ said Lund, stepping forwards.

‘I do not. Surrender your weapons, and I promise you will be treated fairly and with respect.’

‘Will... Will we get medals?’ the bearded man asked, in a quavering voice.

‘The gratitude of the God-Emperor will be with you always.’

More were weeping now. Out of fear, anxiety or plain relief.

‘Don’t trust him!’ said Traves. ‘It’s another trick!’

‘I saw you in my bar,’ said Lund, stepping forwards. ‘You came in looking.’ Her voice was empty, distant.

‘I saw you on the tannery roof, Omin Lund. You’re still a fine shot, despite the hand.’

She looked down at her prosthetic with a wince of shame.

‘Will we get medals?’ the bearded man repeated, eagerly.

Traves turned on him. ‘Of course we won’t, Spake, you cretin! He’s here to kill us!’

‘I’m not–’ I began.

‘I want medals!’ the bearded man, Spake, screamed suddenly, sliding his laspistol up from his belt with the fluid speed only a trained soldier can manage.

I had no choice.

His shot tore through the shoulder padding of my storm coat. My bolt exploded his head, spraying blood across the rusty metal eagle on the wall.

Pandemonium.

The veterans leapt to their feet, firing wildly, scattering, running.

I threw myself flat as shots tore out the wall plaster behind me. At some point, Fischig and Midas burst in, weapons blazing. I saw three or four veterans drop, sliced through by silent needles, and another six tumbled as shotgun rounds blew them apart.

Traves came down the aisle, blasting his old service-issue lasrifle at me. I rolled and fired, but my shot went wide. His face distorted as a needle round punched through it, and he fell in a crumpled heap.

Wrex and her fire-teams exploded in. Flames from some spilled accelerants billowed up the wall.

I got up, and then was thrown back by a las-shot that blew off my left hand.

Spinning, falling, I saw Lund, struggling to make her prosthetic fingers work the unmodified trigger of Traves’ lasgun.

My bolt-round hit her with such force she flew back down the aisle, hit the wall, and tore the Imperial aquila down.

Not a single veteran escaped the Guildhall alive. The firefight raged for two hours. Wrex lost five men to the experienced guns of the Sameter Ninth veterans. They stood to the last. No more can be said of any Imperial Guard unit.

The whole affair left me sour and troubled. I have devoted my life to the service of the Imperium, to protect it against its manifold foes, inside and out.

Not against its servants. However misguided, they were loyal and true. However wrong, they were shaped that way by the service they had endured in the Emperor’s name.

Lund cost me my hand. A hand for a hand. They gave me a prosthetic on Sameter. I never used it. For two years, I made do with a fused stump. Surgeons on Messina finally gave me a fully functional graft.

I consider it a small price to pay for them.

I have never been back to Sameter. Even today, they are still finding the secreted, hidden bodies. So very many, dead in the Emperor’s name.

BACKCLOTH FOR A
CROWN ADDITIONAL

Lord Froigre, much to everyone’s dismay including, I’m sure, his own, was dead.

It was a dry, summer morning in 355.M41, and I was taking breakfast with Alizebeth Bequin on the terrace of Spaeton House when I received the news. The sky was a blurry blue, the colour of Sameterware porcelain, and down in the bay the water was a pale lilac, shot through with glittering frills of silver. Sand doves warbled from the drowsy shade of the estate orchards.

Jubal Kircher, my craggy, dependable chief of household security, came out into the day’s heat from the garden room, apologised courteously for interrupting our private meal, and handed me a folded square of thin transmission paper.

‘Trouble?’ asked Bequin, pushing aside her dish of ploin crepes.

‘Froigre’s dead,’ I replied, studying the missive.

‘Froigre who?’

‘Lord Froigre of House Froigre.’

‘You knew him?’

‘Very well. I would count him as a friend. Well, how very miserable. Dead at eighty-two. That’s no age.’

‘Was he ill?’ Bequin asked.

‘No. Aen Froigre was, if anything, maddeningly robust and healthy. Not a scrap of augmetics about him. You know the sort.’ I made this remark pointedly. My career had not been kind to my body. I had been repaired, rebuilt, augmented and generally sewn back together more times than I cared to remember. I was a walking testimonial to Imperial medicae reconstruction surgery. Alizebeth, on the other hand, still looked like a woman in her prime, a beautiful woman at that, and only the barest minimum of juvenat work had preserved her so.

‘According to this, he died following a seizure at his home last night. His family is conducting thorough investigations, of course, but...’ I drummed my fingers on the tabletop.

‘Foul play?’

‘He was an influential man.’

‘Such men have enemies.’

‘And friends,’ I said. I handed her the communique. ‘That’s why his widow has requested my assistance.’

But for my friendship with Aen, I’d have turned the matter down. Alizebeth had only just arrived on Gudrun after an absence of almost eighteen months, and would be gone again in a week, so I had resolved to spend as much time with her as possible. The operational demands of the Distaff, based on Messina, kept her away from my side far more than I would have liked.

But this was important, and Lady Froigre’s plea too distraught to ignore. ‘I’ll come with you,’ Alizebeth suggested. ‘I feel like a jaunt in the country.’

She called for a staff car to be brought around from the stable block, and we were on our way in under an hour.

Felippe Gabon, one of Kircher’s security detail, acted as our driver. He guided the car up from Spaeton on a whisper of thrust, and laid in a course for Menizerre. Soon we were cruising south-west over the forest tracts and the verdant cultivated belt outside Dorsay, and leaving the Insume headland behind.

In the comfortable, climate-controlled rear cabin of the staff car, I told Alizebeth about Froigre.

‘There have been Froigres on Gudrun since the days of the first colonies. Their house is one of the Twenty-Six Venerables, that is to say one of the twenty-six original noble fiefs, and as such has an hereditary seat in the Upper Legislature of the planetary government. Other, newer houses have considerably more power and land these days, but nothing can quite eclipse the prestige of the Venerables. Houses like Froigre, Sangral, Meissian. And Glaw.’

She smiled impishly at my inclusion of that last name.

‘So... power, land, prestige... a honeytrap for rivals and enemies. Did your friend have any?’

I shrugged. I’d brought with me several data-slates Psullus had looked out for me from the library. They contained heraldic ledgers, family histories, biographies and memoirs. And very little that seemed pertinent.

‘House Froigre vied with House Athensae and House Brudish in the early years of Gudrun, but that’s literally ancient history. Besides, House Brudish became extinct after another feud with House Pariti eight hundred years ago. Aen’s grandfather famously clashed with Lord Sangral and the then Governor Lord Dougray over the introduction of Founding Levy in the one-nineties, but that was just political, though Dougray never forgave him, and later snubbed him by making Richtien chancellor. In recent times, House Froigre has been very much a quiet, solid, traditional seat in the Legislature. No feuds, that I know of. In fact, there hasn’t been an inter-house war on Gudrun for seven generations.

‘They all play nicely together, these days, do they?’ she asked.

‘Pretty much. One of the things I like about Gudrun is that it is so damned civilised.’

‘Too damned civilised,’ she admonished. ‘One day, Gregor, one day this place will lull you into such a deep sense of tranquil seclusion that you’ll be caught with your pants down.’

‘I hardly think so. It’s not complacency, before you jump down my throat. Gudrun – Spaeton House itself – is just a safe place. A sanctuary, given my line of work.’

‘Your friend’s still dead,’ she reminded me.

I sat back. ‘He liked to live well. Good food, fine wines. He could drink Nayl under the table.’

‘No!’

‘I’m not joking. Five years ago, at the wedding of Aen’s daughter. I was invited and I took Harlon along as... as I don’t know what, actually. You weren’t around, and I didn’t want to go alone. Harlon started bending his lordship’s ear with tales of bounty hunting, and the last I saw of them they were sprinting their way down their fourth bottle of anise at five in the morning. Aen was up at nine the next day to see his daughter off. Nayl was still asleep at nine the following day.’

She grinned. ‘So a life of great appetites may have just caught up with him?’

‘Perhaps. Though you’d think that would have shown up on the medicae mortus’ report.’

‘So you do suspect foul play?’

‘I can’t shake that idea.’

I was silent for a few minutes, and Alizebeth scrolled her way through several of the slates.

‘House Froigre’s main income was from mercantile dealings. They hold a twelve point stock in Brade ent Cie and a fifteen per cent share in Helican SubSid Shipping. What about trade rivals?’

‘We’d have to expand our scope off-planet. I suppose assassination is possible, but that’s a strange way to hit back at a trade rival. I’ll have to examine their records. If we can turn up signs of a clandestine trade fight, then maybe assassination is the answer.’

‘Your friend spoke out against the Ophidian Campaign.’

‘So did his father. Neither believed it was appropriate to divert funds and manpower into a war of reconquest in the subsector next door when there was so much to put in order on the home front.’

‘I was just wondering...’ she said.

‘Wonder away, but I think that’s a dead end. The Ophidian War’s long since over and done with, and I don’t think anyone cares what Aen thought about it.’

‘So have you got a theory?’

‘Only the obvious ones. None of them with any substantiating data. An internecine feud, targeting Aen from inside the family. A murder driven by some secret affair of the heart. A darker conspiracy that remains quite invisible for now. Or...’

‘Or?’

‘Too much good living, in which case we’ll be home before nightfall.’

Froigre Hall, the ancestral pile of the noble House Froigre, was a splendid stack of ivy-swathed ouslite and copper tiles overlooking the Vale of Fiegg, ten kilometres south of Menizerre. Water meadows sloped back from the river, becoming wildflower pastures that climbed through spinneys of larch and fintle to hem the magnificent planned gardens of the house; geometric designs of box-hedge, trim lawn, flowering beds and symmetrical ponds. Beyond the sandy drive, darkened woods came right down to skirt the back of the great hall, except for where a near-perfect sulleq lawn had been laid. Aen and I had spent several diverting afternoons there, playing against each other. A kilometre north of the house, the gnarled stone finger of the Folly rose from the ascending woods.

‘Where to put down, sir?’ Gabon asked over the intercom.

‘On the drive in front of the portico, if you’d be so kind.’

‘What’s been going on here?’ Alizebeth asked as we came in lower. She pointed. The lawn areas nearest to the hall were littered with scraps of rub- bish – paper waste and glittery bits of foil. Some sections of grass were flat and yellow as if compressed and starved of light.

Tiny stones, whipped up by our downwash, ticked off the car’s body-work as we settled in to land.

‘Oh, my dear Gregor!’ Lady Freyl Froigre almost fell into my arms. I held her in a comforting embrace for a few patient moments as she sobbed against my chest.

‘Forgive me!’ she said suddenly, pulling away and dabbing her eyes with a black lace handkerchief. ‘This is all so very terrible. So very, very terrible.’

‘My deepest sympathies for your loss, lady,’ I said, feeling awkward.

A houseman, his arm banded in black, had led us into a stateroom off the main hall where Lady Froigre was waiting. The blinds were drawn, and mourning tapers had been lit, filling the air with a feeble light and a sickly perfume. Freyl Froigre was a stunning woman in her late sixties, her lush red hair, almost flame-pink it was so bright, pulled back and pinned down under a veil coiff of jet scamiscoire. Her grief-gown was slate epinchire, the sleeves ending in delicate interwoven gloves so that not one speck of her flesh was uncovered.

I introduced Alizebeth, who murmured her condolences, and Lady Froigre nodded. Then she suddenly looked flustered.

‘Oh, my. Where are my manners? I should have the staff bring refreshments for you and–’

‘Hush, lady,’ I said, taking her arm and walking her down the long room into the soft shade of the shutters. ‘You have enough on your mind. Grief is enough. Tell me what you know and I will do the rest.’

‘You’re a good man, sir. I knew I could trust you.’ She paused and waited while her current wracks subsided.

‘Aen died just before midnight last night. A seizure. It was quick, the physician said.’

‘What else did he say, lady?’

She drew a data-wand from her sleeve and handed it to me. ‘It’s all here.’ I plucked out my slate and plugged it in. The display lit up with the stored files.

Death by tremorous palpitations of the heart and mind. A dysfunction of the spirit. According the the medicae’s report, Aen Froigre had died because of a spasm in his anima.

‘This means...’ I paused, ‘...nothing. Who is your physician?’

‘Genorus Notil of Menizerre. He has been the family medicae since the time of Aen’s grandfather.’

‘His report is rather... non-specific, lady. Could I present the body for a further examination?’

‘I’ve already done that,’ she said softly. ‘The surgeon at Menizerre General who attended said the same. My husband died of terror.’

‘Terror?’

‘Yes, inquisitor. Now tell me that isn’t the work of the infernal powers?’ There had, she told me, been a celebration. A Grand Fete. Aen’s eldest son, Rinton, had returned home two weeks before, having mustered out of his service in the Imperial Guard. Rinton Froigre had been a captain in the 50th Gudrunite and seen six years’ service in the Ophidian Subsector. Such was his father’s delight on his return, a fete was called. A carnival feast. Travelling players from all around the canton had attended, along with troupes of musicians, acrobats, armies of stall holders, entertainers, and hundreds of folk from the town. That explained the litter and faded patches on the lawn. Tent pitches. The scars of marquees.

‘Had he any enemies?’ I asked, pacing the shuttered room.

‘None that I know of.’

‘I would like to review his correspondence. Diaries too, if he kept them.’

‘I’ll see. I don’t believe he kept a diary, but our rubricator will have a list of correspondence.’

On the top of the harpsichord was a framed portrait, a hololith of Aen Froigre, smiling.

I picked it up and studied it.

‘The last portrait of him,’ she said. ‘Taken at the fete. My last connection with him.’

‘Where did he die?’

‘The Folly,’ said Lady Froigre. ‘He died in the Folly.’

The woods were damp and dark. Boughs creaked in the late afternoon wind, and odd birdsong thrilled from the shadows.

The Folly was a stone drum capped by a slate needle. Inside, it was bare and terribly musty. Sand doves fluttered up in the roof spaces. Cobwebs glazed the bare windows.

‘This is where I found him,’ said a voice from behind me.

I turned. Rinton Froigre stooped in under the doorframe. He was a well-made boy of twenty-five, with his mother’s lush red hair. His eyes had a curious, hooded aspect.

‘Rinton.’

‘Sir,’ he bowed slightly.

‘Was he dead when you found him?’

‘No, inquisitor. He was laughing and talking. He liked to come up here. He loved the Folly. I came up to thank him for the fete that he had thrown in my honour. We were talking together when suddenly he went into convulsions. Just minutes later, before I could summon help, he was dead.’

I didn’t know Rinton Froigre well, though his service record was very respectable, and I knew his father had been proud of him. Aen had never mentioned any animosity from his son, but in any noble house there is always the spectre of succession to consider. Rinton had been alone with his father at the time of death. He was a seasoned soldier, undoubtedly no stranger to the act of killing.

I kept an open mind – literally. Even without any invasive mental probing, it is possible for a psionic of my ability to sense surface thoughts. There was no flavour of deceit about Rinton’s person, though I could feel carefully contained loss, and the tingle of trepidation. Small wonder, I considered. Uncommon are the citizens of the Imperium who do not register anxiety at being quizzed by an inquisitor of the Holy Ordos.

There was no point pressing him now. Rinton’s story might easily be put to the test with an auto-seance, during which psychometric techniques would simply reveal the truth of his father’s last moments to me.

Rinton walked me back to the Hall, and left me to my ponderings in Aen’s study. It was as he had left it, I was told.

The room was half–panelled, and lined for the most part with glazed shelves of neatly bound books and data-slates. Discreet glow-globes hovered around the edges of the room at head height, set to a low luminosity, and a selection of scroll-backed couches and over-stuffed chairs were arranged in front of the high-throated ceramic fireplace with its wood-burning fusion stove.

The desk, under the diamond-paned west windows, was a wide crescent of polished duralloy floated a metre off the carpet by passive suspensor pods. The desk was clean and bare.

I sat at it, depressing slightly the hydraulics of the writing chair – I was half a head taller than Aen Froigre. I studied the mirror-smooth, slightly raked surface of the desk. There was no sign of any control panel, but a gentle wave of my hand across it woke up heat-sensitive touch-plates engraved into the duralloy’s finish. I touched a few, but they needed Aen’s touch – probably a combination of palmprint and genekey – to unlock them.

That, or inquisition-grade software. I unpinned my Inquisitorial rosette, which I had been wearing on the sternum of my black leather coat, and slid open the signal port. Holding it low over the desk, I force fed the touch-plates with several magenta-level security override programs. It gave up the fight almost at once, opening systems without even the need for passwords.

Built into the stylish desk – an item of furniture that had clearly cost Aen a lot of money – was a fairly powerful cogitator, a vox-pict uplink, a message archive, two filing archives, and a master control for the simple, limited electronic systems built into the Hall. Separate pages of each file and message could be displayed as a facsimile on the blotter plate, and a touch of a finger turned them or put them away. Aen had destroyed all paper records.

I played with it for some time, but the most interesting thing I found was a log of invoices for services provided at the fete, and a list of the invitations. I copied both into my data-slate.

Alizebeth and Gabon arrived while I was busy with that. Alizebeth had been interviewing the household staff, and Gabon had been out, walking the grounds.

‘There were over nine hundred guests here, sir,’ he said, ‘and maybe another five hundred players, musicians, entertainers and carnival folk.’

‘Where from?’

‘Menizerre, mostly,’ he replied. ‘Local entertainers, a few troubadours and some street tumblers from the biweekly textile market. The biggest individual groups were Kalikin’s Company, an acclaimed troupe of travelling actors, and Sunsable’s Touring Fair, who provided the games and rides and diversions.’

I nodded. Gabon was as thorough as usual. A short, spare man in his one-fifties with cropped black hair and a bushy moustache, he had been with the Dorsay Arbites for about seventy years before retiring into private service. He wore a simple, refined dark blue suit that had been ingeniously tailored to hide the fact that he was wearing a handgun in a shoulder rig.

‘What about you?’ I asked Alizebeth. She sat down on one of the couches.

‘Nothing scintillating. The staff seem genuinely shocked and upset at the death. They all react with outrage at the idea your friend might have had any enemies.’

‘It seems quite clear to me that he did have some,’ I said.

Alizebeth reached into the folds of her gown and fished out a small, hard object. She tossed it onto the desk top, and it landed with a tap.

There it extended four, multijointed limbs, and scurried across onto my palm.

I turned the wriggling poison-snooper over, and pressed the recessed stud on its belly. A little ball of hololithic energy coalesced above its head-mounted projector, and I read it as it slowly scrolled around on its axis. ‘Traces of lho, obscura and several other class two and three narcotics in the garden area and the staff quarters. Penshel seed traces found in the stable block. More lho, as well as listeria and E. coli in small amounts in the kitchen section... hmmm...’

Alizebeth shrugged. ‘The usual mix of recreational drugs one might expect, none in large quantities, and the kitchen’s as hygienic as anywhere. You’d probably get the same sort of readings from Spaeton House.’

‘Probably. Penshel seeds, they’re quite unusual.’

‘A very mild stimulant,’ said Gabon. ‘I didn’t know anyone still used that stuff. Time was, it was the drug of choice in the artists’ quarter of Dorsay, back when I was on the force. The seeds are dried, rolled and smoked in pipes. A little bohemian, an old man’s smoke.’

‘Most of the outdoor traces can be put down to the visiting entertainers,’ I mused, ‘plus a little off-duty pleasure from the staff or loose-living guests. What about the stable block? Are any of Froigre’s ostlers penshel smokers?’

Alizebeth shook her head. ‘They’d cleared large parts of the stable area to provide spaces for the fair stall-holders.’

I put the snooper down on the desk, and it wriggled back and forth for a few moments until it got enough purchase to right itself. ‘So nothing untoward, in fact. And certainly no significant toxins.’

‘None at all,’ said Alizebeth.

Damn. Given the description of Aen’s death, I had been quite sure poison was the key, perhaps some assassin’s sophisticated toxin that had not shown up on the initial medicae report. But Alizebeth’s snooper was high-grade and thorough.

‘What do we do now?’ she asked.

I passed her my data-slate. ‘Send the contents of this to Aemos by direct vox-link. See what he can come up with.’

Uber Aemos was my ancient and trusted savant. If anyone could see a pattern or make a connection, it was him.

Evening fell. I went outside, alone. I felt annoyed and frustrated. In fact, I felt thwarted. I’d come there as a favour to my old friend’s widow, offering my services, and in most respects I was overqualified. I was an Imperial inquisitor, and this was most likely just a job for the local Arbites. I had expected to have the entire matter sewn up in a few hours, to settle things swiftly in a quick, unofficial investigation, and leave with the thanks of the family for sparing them a long, drawn-out inquest.

But the clues just weren’t there. There was no motive, no obvious antagonist, no aggressor, but still it seemed likely that Aen Froigre had been killed. I looked at the medicae report again, hoping to find something that would establish natural causes.

Nothing. Something, someone, had taken my friend’s life, but I couldn’t tell what or who or why.

The evening skies were dark, stained a deep violet and smeared with chasing milky clouds. An early moon shone, passing behind the running trails of cloud every minute or so. A wind was gathering, and the stands of trees beside the lawn were beginning to sway and swish. The leaves made a cold sound, like rain.

I walked over to my flyer, popped the cargo trunk and took out Barbarisater. I slowly freed it from its silk bindings, and drew the long, gleaming blade from its machined scabbard. Barbarisater had been an heirloom sword, a psychically attuned weapon from the forges of distant Carthae, and slaved to the minds of the generations of warrior women who had wielded it. Enhancing its strength with pentagrammic wards, I had used the long sabre in my battle against the heretic Quixos, during which struggle it had been broken below the tip. Master swordsmiths had remade the blade from the broken main portion, creating a shorter, straighter blade by rounding off and edging the break and reducing the hilt. A good deal smaller than its old self, now more a single-handed rapier than a hand-and-a-half sabre, it was still a potent weapon.

Naked, in my hand, it hummed and whined as my mind ran through it and made it resonate. The incised wards glowed and sobbed out faint wisps of smoke. I walked across the grass under the seething trees, holding the blade before me like a dowsing rod, sweeping the scene, letting the blade-tip slide along the invisible angles of space. Twice, on my circuit of the lawns, it twitched as if tugged by sprite hands, but I could discern nothing from the locations.

But there was something there. My first hint of a malign focus. My first hint that not only was foul play involved, but that Lady Froigre might be right.

Though they had left only the slightest traces behind them, infernal powers had been at work here.

Alizebeth came into my room at eight the next morning. She woke me by sitting down on the side of my bed, and handed me a cup of hot, black caffeine as I roused.

She was already dressed and ready for work. The day was bright. I could hear the household coming to life: pans clattering in the kitchen block, and the butler calling to his pages in the nearby gallery.

‘Bad storm in the night,’ she said. ‘Brought trees down.’

‘Really?’ I grumbled, sitting up and sipping the sweet, dark caffeine. I looked at her. It wasn’t like Bequin to be so perky this early.

‘Out with it,’ I said.

She handed me a data-slate. ‘Aemos has been busy. Must’ve worked all night.’

‘Through the storm.’

‘There was no storm up his way. It was local.’ I didn’t really hear that reply. I was caught up in a close reading of the slate.

Failing to cross-match just about every detail I had sent him, Aemos had clearly become bored. The list of guests I had sent him had led to nothing, despite his best efforts to make connections. The caterers and performers had revealed nothing either. No links to the underworld or cult activity, no misdeeds or priors, except for the usual clutch of innocent and minor violations one might expect. One of the travelling actors had been charged with affray twenty years before, and another had done time for grievous wounding, that sort of thing.

The only item that had flagged any sort of connection was the description of Aen Froigre’s death. Aemos had only turned to that rather vague clue once he’d exhausted all others.

In the past twenty months, eleven people in the Drunner Region of Gudrun, which is to say the coastal area encompassing Menizerre, Dorsay and Insume all the way to Madua chapeltown, had died of a similar, mystery ailment. Only a tight, deliberate search like the one Aemos had conducted would have shown up such a connection, given the scale of the area involved and the size of population. Listed together, the deaths stood out like a sore thumb.

Here, Aemos had come into his own. Another clerk might have sent those findings to me and waited for direction, but Aemos, hungry to answer the questions himself, had pressed on, trying to make a pattern out of them. No simple task. There was nothing to demographically or geographically link the victims. A housewife here, a millkeeper there, a landowner in one small village, a community doctor in another, seventy kilometres away.

The only thing they had in common was the sudden, violent and inexplicable nature of their demises: seizures, abrupt, fatal.

I set down my cup and scrolled on, aware that Alizebeth was grinning at me.

‘Get to the last bit,’ she advised. ‘Aemos strikes again.’

Right at the last, Aemos revealed another connection.

A day or two before each death, the victim’s locality had been paid a visit by Sunsable’s Touring Fair.

Lady Froigre was most perturbed to see us about to leave.

‘There are questions here still...’ she began.

‘And I’m going to seek the answers,’ I said. ‘Trust me. I believe my savant has hit upon something.’

She nodded, unhappy. Rinton stepped forwards, and put his arm around his mother’s shoulders.

‘Trust me,’ I repeated, and walked out across the drive to my waiting flyer. I could hear the sound of chainblades, and turned from the car to walk around the side of the hall. One of the trees brought down in the night’s freak storm had crushed part of the stable block, and the housemen were working to saw up the huge trunk and clear it.

‘Is that where you detected Penshel seed?’ I asked Alizebeth when she came to find out what was keeping me.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Fetch my blade.’

I called the housemen away from their work, and walked into the collapsed ruin of the stable, crunching over heaps of coarse sawdust. The ivy-clad tree still sprawled through the burst roof.

Alizebeth brought me Barbarisater, and I drew it quickly. By then, Lady Froigre and Rinton Froigre had emerged to see what I was doing.

Barbarisater hummed in my hand, louder and more throatily than it had done the previous night. As soon as I entered that part of the stable block, the particular stall the tree had smashed, it jumped. The taste of Chaos was here.

‘What was this used for?’ I asked. ‘During the fete, what was this area used for?’

‘Storage,’ said Lady Froigre. ‘The people from the fair wanted to keep equipment and belongings out of sight. Food too, I think. One man had trays of fresh figs he wanted to keep out of the light.’

‘And the hololithographer,’ said Rinton. ‘He used one of those stalls as a dark room.’

So how do you find a travelling fair in an area the size of the Drunner Region? If you have a copy of their most recent invoice, it’s easy. The fair-master, eager to be paid for his services at Froigre Hall, had left as a payment address an inn eighty kilometres away in Seabrud. From the invoice, I saw that Aen had been asked to mail the payment within five days. The fair moved around a great deal, and the travelling folk didn’t believe much in the concept of credit accounts.

From Seabrud, we got a fix on the location of Sunsable’s Fair.

They had pitched on a meadow outside the village of Brudmarten, a little, rustic community of ket-herds and weavers that was flanked by a lush, deciduous woodland hillside to the east and marshy, cattle-trampled fields below at the river spill to the west.

It was late afternoon on a hot, close day, the air edged with the heavy, fulminous threat of storms. The sky was dark overhead, but the corn was bright and golden in the meadows, and pollen balls blew in the breeze like thistle-fibres. Grain-crakes whooped in the corn stands, and small warblers of the most intense blue darted across the hedges.

Gabon lowered the limo to rest in a lane behind the village kirk, a pale, Low Gothic temple in need of upkeep. A noble statue of the Emperor Immaculate stood in the overgrown graveyard, a roost for wood doves. I buckled on my sword and covered it with a long leather cloak. Gabon locked the car.

‘Stay with me,’ I told Alizebeth, and then turned to Gabon. ‘Shadow us.’ ‘Yes, sir.’

We walked down the lane towards the fair.

Even from a distance, we could hear the noise and feel the energy. The arrival of the fair had brought the folk of Brudmarten and the neighbouring hamlets out in force. Pipe organs were trilling and wheezing in the dank air, and there was the pop and whizz of firecrackers. I could hear laughter, the clatter of rides, the ringing of score bells, children screaming, rowdy men carousing, pistons hissing. The smell of warm ale wafted from the tavern tent.

The gate in the meadow’s hedge had been turned into an entranceway, arched with a gaudy, hand-painted sign that declared Sunsable’s Miraculous Fair of Fairs open. A white-eyed twist at the gateway took our coins for admission.

Inside, on the meadow, all manner of bright, vulgar sights greeted us. The carousel, lit up with gas-lamps. The ring-toss. The neat, pink box-tent of the clairvoyant. The churning hoop of the whirligig, spilling out the squeals of children. The colourful shouts of the freak show barker. The burnt-sugar smell of floss makers. The clang of test-your-strength machines.

For a penny, you could ride the shoulders of a Battle Titan – actually an agricultural servitor armoured with painted sections of rusty silage hopper. For another penny, you could shoot greenskins in the las-gallery, or touch the Real and Completely Genuine shin bone of Macharius, or dunk for ploins. For tuppence, you could gaze into the Eye of Terror and have your heroism judged by a hooded man with a stutter who claimed to be an ex-Space Marine. The Eye of Terror in this case was a pit dug in the ground and filled with chemical lamps and coloured glass filters.

Nearby, a small donation allowed you to watch an oiled man struggle free from chains, or a burning sack, or a tin bathtub full of broken glass, or a set of stocks.

‘Just a penny, sir, just a penny!’ howled a man on stilts with a harlequined face as he capered past me. ‘For the young lady!’

I decided not to ask what my penny might buy.

‘I want to go look at the freak show,’ Alizebeth told me.

‘Save your money... it’s all around us,’ I growled.

We pushed on. Coloured balloons drifted away over the field into the encroaching darkness of the thunderhead. Corn crickets rasped furiously in the trampled stalks all around us. Drunken, painted faces swam at us, some lacking teeth, some with glittering augmetic eyes.

‘Over there,’ I whispered to Alizebeth.

Past the brazier stand of a woman selling paper cones of sugared nuts, and a large handcart stacked with wire cages full of songbirds, was a small booth tent of heavy red material erected at the side of a brightly painted trailer. A wooden panel raised on bunting–wrapped posts announced ‘Hololiths! Most Lifelike! Most Agreeable!’ below which a smaller notice said ‘A most delightful gift, or a souvenir of the day, captured by the magic art of a master hololithographer.’ A frail old man with tufted white hair and small spectacles was sitting outside the booth on a folding canvas chair, eating a meat pie that was so hot he had to keep blowing on it.

‘Why don’t you go and engage his interest?’ I suggested.

Alizebeth left my side, pushed through the noisy crowd and stopped by his booth. A sheet of flakboard had been erected beside the booth’s entrance, and on it were numerous hololithic pictures mounted for display: some miniatures, some landscapes, some family groups. Alizebeth studied them with feigned interest. The old man immediately leapt up off his chair, stowed the half-eaten pie behind the board and brushed the crumbs off his robes. I moved to one side, staying in the crowd, watching. I paused to examine the caged birds, though in fact I was looking through their cages at the booth tent.

The old man approached Bequin courteously.

‘Madam, good afternoon! I see your attention has been arrested by my display of work. Are they not fairly framed and well-composed?’

‘Indeed,’ she said.

‘You have a good eye, madam,’ he said, ‘for so often in these country fairs the work of the hololithographer is substandard. The composition is frequently poor and the plate quality fades with time. Not so with your humble servant. I have plied this trade of portraiture for thirty years and I fancy I have the skill for it. You see this print here? The lakeshore at Entreve?’

‘It is a pleasing scene.’

‘You are very kind, madam. It is handcoloured, like many of my frames. But this very print was made in the summer of... 329, if my memory serves. And you’ll appreciate, there is no fading, no loss of clarity, no discolouration.’

‘It has preserved itself well.’

‘It has,’ he agreed, merrily. ‘I have patented my own techniques, and I prepare the chemical compounds for the plates by hand, in my modest studio adjoining.’ He gestured to his trailer. ‘That is how I can maintain the quality and the perfect grade of the hololiths, and reproduce and print them to order with no marked loss of standard from original to duplicate. My reputation rests upon it. Up and down the byways of the land, the name Bakunin is a watchword for quality portraiture.’

Alizebeth smiled. ‘It’s most impressive, Master Bakunin. And how much...?’

‘Aha!’ he grinned. ‘I thought you might be tempted, madam, and may I say it would be a crime for your beauty to remain unrecorded! My services are most affordable.’

I moved around further, edging my way to the side of his booth until he and Alizebeth were out of sight behind the awning. I could hear him still making his pitch to her.

On the side of the trailer, further bold statements and enticements were painted in a flourishing script. A large sign read ‘Portraits two crowns, group scenes three crowns, gilded miniatures a half-crown only, offering many a striking and famous backcloth for a crown additional.’

I wandered behind the trailer. It was parked at the edge of the fairground, near to a copse of fintle and yew that screened the meadow from pastures beyond the ditch. It was damp and shaded here, small animals rustling in the thickets. I tried to look in at one small window, but it was shuttered. I touched the side of the trailer, and felt Barbarisater twitch against my hip. There was a door near the far end of the trailer. I tried it, but it was locked.

‘What’s your business?’ growled a voice.

Three burly fairground wranglers had approached along the copse-side of the booths. They had been smoking lho-sticks behind their trailer on a break.

‘Not yours,’ I assured them.

‘You had best be leaving Master Bakunin’s trailer alone,’ one said. All three were built like wrestlers, their bared arms stained with crude tattoos.

I had no time for this.

‘Go away now,’ I said, pitching my will through my voice. They all blinked, not quite sure what had happened to their minds, and then simply walked away as if I wasn’t there.

I returned my attention to the door, and quickly forced the lock with my multi-key. To my surprise, the thin wooden door still refused to open. I wondered if it was bolted from inside, but as I put more weight into it, it did shift a little, enough to prove there was nothing physical holding it. Then it banged shut as if drawn by immense suction.

My pulse began to race. I could feel the sour tang of warpcraft in the air, and Barbarisater was vibrating in its scabbard. It was time to dispense with subtleties.

I paced around to the front of the booth, but there was no longer any sign of Bequin or the old man. Stooping, I went in under the entrance flap. An inner drop curtain of black cloth stopped exterior light from entering the tent.

I pushed that aside.

‘I will be with you shortly, sir,’ Bakunin called, ‘if you would give me a moment.’

‘I’m not a customer,’ I said. I looked around. The tent was quite small, and lit by the greenish glow of gas mantles that ran, I supposed, off the trailer supply. Alizebeth was sitting at the far side on a ladderback chair with a dropcloth of cream felt behind her. Bakunin was facing her, carefully adjusting his hololithic camera, a brass-and-teak machine mounted on a wooden tripod. He looked around at me curiously, his hands still polishing a brass-rimmed lens. Alizebeth rose from her seat.

‘Gregor?’ she asked.

‘The good lady is just sitting for a portrait, sir. It’s all very civilised.’ Bakunin peered at me, unsure what to make of me. He smiled and offered his hand. ‘I am Bakunin, artist and hololithographer.’

‘I am Eisenhorn, Imperial inquisitor.’

‘Oh,’ he said and took a step backwards. ‘I... I...’

‘You’re wondering why a servant of the ordos has just walked into your booth,’ I finished for him. Bakunin’s mind was like an open book. There was, I saw at once, no guile there, except for the natural money-making trickery of a fairground rogue. Whatever else he was, Bakunin was no heretic.

‘You took a portrait of Lord Froigre at the fete held on his lands just the other day?’ I said, thinking of the picture on the harpsichord back at the hall.

‘I did,’ he said. ‘His lordship was pleased. I made no charge for the work, sir. It was a gift to thank his lordship for his hospitality. I thought perhaps some of his worthy friends might see the work and want the like for themselves, I...’

He doesn’t know, I thought. He has no clue what this is about. He’s trying to work out how he might have drawn this investigation to himself.

‘Lord Froigre is dead,’ I told him.

He went pale. ‘No, that’s… that’s...’

‘Master Bakunin... do you know if any other of your previous subjects have died? Died soon after your work was complete?’

‘I don’t, I’m sure. Sir, what are you implying?’

‘I have a list of names,’ I said, unclipping my data-slate. ‘Do you keep records of your work?’

‘I keep them all, all the exposed plates, in case copies or replacements are needed. I have full catalogues of all pictures.’

I showed him the slate. ‘Do you recognise any of these names?’

His hands were shaking. He said, ‘I’ll have to check them against my catalogue,’ but I knew for a fact he’d recognised some of them at once.

‘Let’s do that together,’ I said. Alizebeth followed us as we went through the back of the tent into the trailer. It was a dark, confined space, and Bakunin kept apologising. Every scrap of surface, even the untidy flat of his little cot bed, was piled with spares and partly disassembled cameras. There was a musty, chemical stink, mixed with the scent of Penshel seeds. Bakunin’s pipe lay in a small bowl. He reached into a crate under the cot and pulled out several dog-eared record books.

‘Let me see now,’ he began.

There was a door at the end of the little room.

‘What’s through there?’

‘My dark room, along with the file racks for the exposed plates.’

‘It has a door to the outside?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Locked?’

‘No...’

‘You have an assistant then, someone you ordered to hold the door shut?’

‘I have no assistant...’ he said, puzzled.

‘Open this door,’ I told him. He put down the books and went to the communicating door. Just from his body language, I could tell he had been expecting it to open easily.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘It’s never jammed before.’

‘Stand back,’ I said, and drew Barbarisater. The exposed blade filled the little trailer with ozone, and Bakunin yelped.

I put the blade through the door with one good swing, and ripped it open. There was a loud bang of atmospheric decompression, and foetid air swept over us. A dark, smoky haze drifted out.

‘Emperor of Mankind, what is that?’

‘Warpcraft,’ I said. ‘You say you mix your own oxides and solutions?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where do you get your supplies from?’

‘Everywhere, here and there, sometimes from apothecaries, or market traders or...’

Anywhere. Bakunin had experimented with all manner of compounds over the years to create the best, most effective plates for his camera. He’d never been fussy about where the active ingredients came from. Something in his workshop, something in his rack of flasks and bottles, was tainted.

I took a step towards the darkroom. In the half-light, things were flickering, half-formed and pale. The baleful energies lurking in Bakunin’s workshop could sense I was a threat, and were trying to protect themselves by sealing the doors tight to keep me out.

I crossed the threshold into the darkroom. Alizebeth’s cry of warning was lost in the shrieking of tormented air that suddenly swirled around me. Glass bottles and flasks of mineral tincture vibrated wildly in metal racks above Bakunin’s work bench. Jars of liquid chemicals and unguent oils shattered and sprayed their contents into the air. The little gas-jet burner flared and ignited, its rubber tube thrashing like a snake. Glass plates, each a square the size of a data-slate, and each sleeved in a folder of tan card, were jiggling and working themselves out of the wooden racks on the far side of the blacked-out room. There were thousands of them, each one the master exposure of one of Bakunin’s hololiths. The first yanked clear of the shelf as if tugged by a sucking force, and I expected it to shatter on the floor, but it floated in the air. Quickly, others followed suit. Light from sources I couldn’t locate played in the air, casting specks and flashes of colour all around. The air itself became dark brown, like tobacco.

I raised my sword. A negative plate flew at my head, and I struck at it. Shards of glass flew in all directions. Another came at me, and I smashed that too. More flew from the shelves like a spray of playing cards, whipping through the air towards me. I made a series of quick uwe sar and ulsar parries, bursting the glass squares as they struck in. I missed one, and it sliced my cheek with its edge before hitting the wall behind me like a throwing knife.

‘Get him out of here!’ I yelled to Alizebeth. The trailer was shaking. Outside there was a crash of thunder, and rain started to hammer on the low roof. The hurtling plates were driving me back, and Barbarisater had become a blur in my hands as it struck out to intercept them all.

Then the ghosts came. Serious men in formal robes. Gentlewomen in long gowns. Solemn children with pale faces. A laughing innkeeper with blotchy cheeks. Two farmhands, with their arms around each other’s shoulders. More, still more, shimmering in the dirty air, made of smoke, their skins white, their clothes sepia, their expressions frozen at the moment they had been caught by the camera. They clawed and tugged at me with fingers of ice, pummelled me with psychokinetic fists. Some passed through me like wraiths, chilling my marrow. The malevolence hiding in that little trailer was conjuring up all the images Bakunin had immortalised in his career, ripping them off the negative plates and giving them form.

I staggered back, tears appearing in my cloak. Their touch was as sharp as the edges of the glass plates. Their hollow screaming filled my ears. Then, with a sickening lurch, the world itself distorted and changed. The trailer was gone. For a moment I was standing on a sepia shoreline, then I was an uninvited guest at a country wedding. My sword hacking and flashing, I stumbled on into a baptism, then a colourised view of the Atenate Mountains, then a feast in a guild hall. The ghosts surged at me, frozen hands clawing. The innkeeper with the blotchy cheeks got his icy fists around my throat, though his face was still open in laughter. I chopped Barbarisater through him, and he billowed like smoke. A sad-faced housemaid pulled at my arm, and a fisherman struck at me with his boat hook.

I began to recite the Litany of Salvation, yelling it into the leering faces that beset me. A few crumpled and melted like cellulose exposed to flame. I heard gunshots. Gabon was to my right, firing his weapon. He was standing on the pier at Dorsay at sunset, in the middle of an inter-village game of knockball, and a harvest festival, all at the same time. The conflicting scenes blurred and merged around him. A bride and her groom, along with five mourners from a funeral and a retiring Arbites constable in full medals, were attacking him.

‘Get back!’ I yelled. Barbarisater was glowing white-hot. Thunder crashed again, shaking the earth. Gabon shrieked as the bride’s fingers ripped through his face, and as he stumbled backwards, whizzing glass plates chopped into him like axe heads.

His blood was in the air, like rain. It flooded into the ghosts and stained their sepia tones crimson and their pale flesh pink. I felt fingers like knives draw across the flesh of my arms and back. There were too many of them. I couldn’t trust my eyes. According to them, I was standing on a riverbank, and also the front steps of an Administratum building.

The locations overlaid each other impossibly, and neither was real.

I leapt, and lashed out with my blade. I hit something, tore through and immediately found myself rolling on the rain-sodden turf behind the trailer.

Lightning split the darkness overhead, and the rain was torrential. The storm and the bizarre activity around Bakunin’s booth had sent the commonfolk fleeing from the meadow. The trailer was still vibrating and shaking, and oily brown smoke was gushing from the hole in the side wall I’d cut to break my way out. Inside, lights crackled and flashed, and the phantom screaming continued. The warptaint was berserk.

Bakunin appeared, looking desperate, with Alizebeth close behind him. He put his hands to his mouth in shock at the sight of me torn and bloodied.

‘Where is it?’ I snarled.

‘Third shelf up, above the workbench,’ he stammered. ‘The green bottle. I needed tincture of mercury, years ago, years ago, and an old woman in one of the villages gave it to me and said it would do as well. I use it all the time now. The emulsions it mixes are perfect. My work has never been better.’

He looked down at the grass, shaking and horrified.

‘I should have realised,’ he muttered. ‘I should have realised. No matter how much I used, the bottle never emptied.’

‘Third shelf up?’ I confirmed.

‘I’ll show you,’ he said, and sprang to the trailer, clambering in through the hole I had smashed.

‘Bakunin! No!’

I followed him inside, tumbling back into the jumble of landscapes and the maelstrom of screaming ghosts. Just for a moment, a brief moment, I saw Aen Froigre amongst them.

Then I was falling through another wedding, a hunting scene, a stockman’s meeting, a farrier’s smithy, the castle of Elempite by moonlight, a cattle market, a–

I heard Bakunin scream.

I deflected three more deadly hololith plates, and slashed through the thicket of howling ghosts. Spectral, as if it wasn’t there, I saw the workbench and the shelves. The green bottle, glowing internally with jade fire. I raised Barbarisater and smashed the bottle with the edge of the shivering blade.

The explosion shredded the inner partition wall and lurched the trailer onto its side. Dazed, I lay on the splintered wall, sprawled amongst the debris of glass and wood.

The screaming stopped.

Someone had called the local Arbites. They moved through the crowds of onlookers as the last of the rain fell and the skies began to clear.

I showed them my credentials, and told them to keep the crowd back while I finished my work. The trailer was already burning, and Alizebeth and I threw the last few hololith prints into the flames.

The pictures were fading now. Superimposed on each one, every portrait, every landscape, every miniature, was a ghost exposure. An after-image.

Bakunin, screaming his last scream forever.

THE STRANGE DEMISE
OF TITUS ENDOR

The city was a hollow, failing place that was trying to turn its fortunes around, so it was apt that Titus Endor should wash up there. He’d long since lost the lustre that had made him one of the ordo’s rising stars. Like a counterfeit coin, his value had been exposed as short weight. None of it had been his fault, just circumstances.

Titus Endor took another drink, and reflected that life could be worse.

It had seemed to have been winter for two or three years. Snow fell all the time, but the city streets were so warm and busy, nothing lay for long. Slush filled the gutters, and the edges of the kerbs were crusted with polished deposits of old grey ice. Tiny snowflakes freighted the air, caught in the streetlights. They drifted like random thoughts, or disconnected clues.

The city’s name was Marisberg. Or perhaps it was Chericoberg, or Zsammstadd? They were all alike, the brute towns clinging to the oily edge of Karoscura’s western continent. The drifting clues had dragged him from one conurbation to the next, from one drab residentiary to another, and they all blurred into one: the same streets, the same sallow faces in the street lights, the same bars and dining halls, the same smell of wet rockcrete, the same snow. He walked alone, after hours, ate alone in eating rooms where the other tables were stacked with chairs, made calls and asked questions, and reviewed the notes he’d scribbled in his copy books.

There were a lot of copy books. He disliked data-slates, and never threw his papers away. They formed the bulk of his luggage. He always made sure he had a spare crown or two to tip the next poor concierge confronted with the task of lugging his possessions from the street to a newly rented room.

Gonrad Maliko had been a professor of ethnic diversity at Sarum, specialising in taboos and stratified eating. Endor had a potted biography of him written out in one of the copy books. In another, a green-covered book marked 435, were the case notes of Maliko’s crime, a shameless affront on Eustis Majoris involving eleven sub-adult males.

Endor had almost snared Maliko in the arctic city of Cazzad, but the timing had been out, and the tip-off too vague. None of it had been his fault, just circumstances.

Titus Endor had inherited a fondness for symphonic music from his first master, the late Hapshant. Hapshant had been a real character. Installed at a bar, in the late evening, a glass in his hand, Endor would riff tirelessly about Hapshant. ‘Believe you me, a real character,’ he would say to his conversation partner, usually the barman, or any solitary drinker with a spare seat beside him. ‘Mad as a fiddle, in the end,’ Endor always added, tapping his brow, ‘worms in the head, you see.’

Endor remembered the days, a long time ago, when he would patiently wind up the old voxcordian Hapshant took with him wherever he went, to play some old wax disc of crackling symphonic music to help his master think. Endor had been Hapshant’s pupil, Hapshant’s brightest pupil. As an interrogator, he had served Hapshant right to the end of the great man’s life. There had been two of them, actually, two interrogators, Titus and his friend Gregor. Tight, they’d been, best friends in service and out. Titus, though, had always been the one with a luminous future, because Gregor was too serious and charmless. They had both become inquisitors, and stayed friends. Until, that is, an unfortunate business some years before, a misunderstanding that Gregor had not seen fit to overlook. None of it had been Endor’s fault, just circumstances.

His fondness for the classical repertoire had come from Hapshant. Attending the performances at Marisberg’s Theatricala was therefore not a drudge for Titus Endor. He would arrive at the great, gilded palace, its high windows lit by a thousand yellow globes, brush the snow off his shoulders, and take a drink in the bar before the start of the performance. The grandees would come and go, in their frock coats and silk scarves, their gowns and tiaras, and he’d watch them professionally. Sometimes his copy book would come out of his coat pocket, and he’d scribble a note or two.

The auditorium was painted crimson, with scarlet upholstery and gold woodwork. When the house lights came down, it was like being seated in the ventricle of a heart, a red cavity pumping with sound. He sat in the stalls, never in the same seat. His folded programme and his rented opera glasses lay in his lap.

Maliko’s contact had the use of a private box, to the left of the stage. Endor watched it, night after night, seeing through his glasses the faint brass gleam of the inhabitant’s own opera glasses in the dark balcony as they caught the stage light.

He identified the box: number 435. No matter how early he rose from his seat and went to the street door, he never managed to catch the occupants of 435 leaving the Theatricala. This rankled with him, though it was never his fault, just circumstances.

Liebstrum, his interrogator, had been missing for several days. Endor had sent Liebstrum to the palace of records in Zsammstadd to collate material on Maliko and his associates. The man was overdue, probably padding out his task so that he could waste time in the stews of Zsammstadd, on expenses. Endor had thought Liebstrum a promising candidate when he’d first met him, but lately he’d begun to fancy that Liebstrum was an idler, with no appetite for the hard work the ordo demanded. He wondered if he’d ever find himself signing the paperwork approving Liebstrum’s advancement to full rosette. He doubted it.

The orchestra began the overture, a great swirl of busy strings and strident horns. Zoramer’s Oration, one of Hapshant’s favourite works. Endor settled back, and glanced from time to time at the private box, noting the occasional flash and glimmer of raised opera glasses, the only hint of habitation.

His head ached. The volume of the music didn’t help. His head had ached a lot recently, and Endor put that down to the damnable climate he had been forced to endure in the prosecution of the Maliko case.

The stage was bathed in a limed light from directional lamps. As the red curtains spurred back, the dancers came out, performing in front of a hololithic drop of mountains and coppiced woods, in which dwelt a ruined temple or two, halcyon and timeless.

The woodwind section woke up with vigour, and the gauzy dancers swirled, soft and white as snow flakes. One took his attention immediately. Slender, she soared, faultless in her footwork, her arms expressive and immaculate. Her hair was drawn back tightly in a bun, and her face was as implacable as a death mask, powdered white like ivory, with cheek bones that aspired to the perfection of mathematical symmetry.

Endor moved his glasses away from her powerful, springing thighs, and watched the private box. Light on brass. Other eyes were watching her too.

After the performance, he took himself to a bar on Zeik Street, a bright, sparkling hall of mirrors and crystal chandeliers. It was bustling with patrons from the Theatricala.

‘Your pleasure, master?’ asked the uniformed barman.

‘Grain joiliq, with shaved ice, and a sliver of citrus,’ Endor requested. It had been his favourite tipple since the early days, since that place off Zansiple Street where he and Gregor had gone to wash away the day’s efforts. “The Thirsty Eagle”. Yes, that was it, “The Thirsty Eagle”. Ah, how the memories eroded.

His drink arrived, served on a paper mat. The joiliq was substandard, and too warm. The ice had melted prematurely, and left the citrus wind adrift in a disappointing floe.

He drank it anyway, and ordered another. His headache had eased.

The room was full of loud voices and busy discussion. He thought about calling Liebstrum, but didn’t want to endure the impotence of another recorded message.

He ordered a third drink, and sat back on his stool to survey the room. Almost everyone was male, dressed in dapper evening wear. There was something rambunctious and fraternal about the gathering, like a coterie of men drawn together in some exclusive club. They roared at one another’s jokes, and slapped one another’s backs. The few women present were wives or courtesans, and acted like magnets, pulling crowds of attentive males in around them.

Karoscura needs women, he had noted in his copy book. He had underlined it, and given the note two exclamation points. Like many colony worlds building their economies on mineral wealth, Karoscura had advertised for specialist workers, promising to pay travel costs and set up expenses, in order to attract a professional labour force. Men had flooded in from all parts of the sector, drawn by the attractive salary dividends. The womenfolk of Karoscura had been eclipsed. It was reckoned that males now outnumbered females ten to one in the cities of the oily coast.

Endor missed female company. He’d never had any trouble in that department. In the past, his charisma, his looks and his professional status had all combined to win him the attention of any woman that took his eye. Karoscura was like a siege. There weren’t enough supplies to go around.

He went back to his lodgings. Liebstrum was not there, and hadn’t called. It seemed to Endor that his piles of copy books had been disturbed, and rearranged. He started to sort through them. Had someone been in his room?

He woke late, bathed and shaved. He saw his reflection in the mirror. We all grow older, he told himself. His face seemed drawn and lined, and there was a sickly pallor to it. Too much winter light, Titus Endor told himself.

His hair had been grey for a while now. He tied it back, out of convenience. There were distinguished scars on his face, the footnotes of a lifetime of battles. The biggest scar was on his leg, out of sight. Endor still wore the jagged saurapt tooth on a black cord around his neck. Gregor had dug it out of him, just after Endor had driven the beast off. Brontotaph, that had been the place, Brontotaph. How long ago now?

They’d been good friends, the best, close like brothers, until the unfortunate business some years before, a misunderstanding that Gregor had not seen fit to overlook. None of it had been Endor’s fault, just circumstances.

It was sad. Endor missed his old friend. He wondered what had become of Gregor. Nothing much, he doubted, Gregor had never promised to anything.

Looking in the mirror, Endor toyed with the tooth. According to the lore on Brontotaph, he was damned. Even after death, a saurapt continued to stalk its prey, so the legend went, especially a prey item that had escaped or evaded its jaws. The spirit of the saurapt was out there, tracking him. One day it would find him at last, and strike, and balance the books.

Titus Endor laughed out loud. He saw himself laughing back at him. Plenty of ghosts stalked him, and a bestial reptilian predator was the least of them.

An inquisitor had to be rational about such things.

He wondered where Liebstrum was.

The tooth hung around his neck like a penance.

Titus Endor paid a man to let him into the Theatricala during the day. He prowled the upper galleries, looking for the door to box 435. There was no box 435. The gallery halls were dressed in red velvet carpet and scarlet wallpaper, like aortal tubes. The air smelled of stale lho-sticks. There was a 434 and a 436. His lingering fingers traced the soft red wall, hunting for a secret or concealed door.

Liebstrum had not returned. Annoyed, his mood made worse by a nagging headache, Endor sent a damning report via courier to the ordos. In his lodgings, a glass of joiliq in his hand, he leafed back through his copy books, trying to build some kind of pattern.

Box 435. Gonrad Maliko. The reflected flash of opera glasses in the shadows. The girl. The girl, the slender dancer.

He thought about Gregor from time to time. Endor had always been the bright one, handsome, cunning, bound for glory. Gregor had been a dutiful type, a hard worker, stolid and solid.

‘I wonder where you are now, my old friend?’ Endor asked the empty room. ‘I was always Hapshant’s favourite, and look at the career I’ve built. What have you ever done?’

The unfortunate business still nagged at him. Endor had been put in a tough position, a damn tough position. Several of his prior cases had been placed in review. Details had been distorted and accusations trumped up, all of it so petty-minded and political. He’d had no choice, in the end. When the Ordo Malleus had suggested his transfer, he’d taken it. They’d told him Gregor had been up to no good, and that if Endor helped to set his old friend back on the straight and narrow, the case reviews would be dropped. Endor hadn’t been spying. He had just been keeping an eye on his old friend. None of it had been his fault, just circumstances.

He went to the next show at the Theatricala, and then to a club, and then became mixed up in a group of Navy noncoms on shore leave. He’d followed them to the next bar, an off-street den, a dance parlour. There were women there, in an abundance at odds with the global statistics, women a man could dance with.

The dance was called the zendov, and it was as erotic as it was formal. The dance had evolved, Endor was told, because of the imbalance of men and women, a street dance of the lower classes originally popular in bordellos. Zendov allowed a man the opportunity of spending five or ten minutes with a woman, intimately. Zendov clubs were the most popular dives on Karoscura.

He took another few drinks, and then he saw her, the girl, the slender dancer. She was standing at the mirror-plated bar, smoking a lho-stick and contemplating her dance card. He hadn’t recognised her at first, because she was wearing a leopardskin cloche and cape, and a gold dress, and had changed her makeup from the fierce white of the ballet. But her posture took his eye, the balance of her legs, the confidence in the set of her head, and he realised who he was looking at.

He introduced himself, and offered to buy her a drink. She regarded him distantly, and then asked his name. Her accent was thick.

‘Titus,’ he replied.

She marked it on her card. ‘The fifth tune from now, Master Titus,’ she said, adding, ‘amasec on ice.’ Then she walked away, and took the embrace of a noncom for the next dance.

He was perplexed, until he saw the way of it. Most of the women in the bar were dancers from the Theatricala. They supplemented their wages by partner-dancing at the zendov bars, efficiently exploiting Karoscura’s paucity of female companionship. No wonder the clubs were popular. No wonder the clubs paid the girls well for after-hours dancing. They brought the men in, men so hungry for a five-minute intimacy with a woman while the music played, they’d stay all night, waiting their turn, and drink well in the meantime.

When his turn came, she found him at the bar.

‘Master Titus?’

‘What’s your name?’ he asked as she led him onto the dance floor.

She seemed surprised that he should care.

‘Mira,’ she replied.

The music began. Endor had watched the dancers closely, and had learned the steps. His mind worked that way. He took her in a close hold, and turned her about the floor, between other dancing couples. Glittering glow-globes rotated above them, casting down a blizzard of light like snowflakes.

She was close to him, taut, radiating heat. He felt how hard and sinewy her body was, how rigid. She was tiny, but all muscle. She smelled of cologne, but it did not mask the heat of her, or the residue of old ballet makeup, hastily removed, or the slight odour of sweat. She had come straight from the Theatricala, probably changing in a backroom in a hurry.

Sweat, hard limbs, the stale aroma of lho-sticks. He found it intoxicating. Pulled close to her, he noticed she had an old scar along the nape of her neck, just below the hairline.

The tune ended.

‘Thank you, Mira,’ he bowed. ‘Your amasec awaits at the bar.’

‘My card is full. I will come over later.’

He looked disappointed.

‘Where did you learn to dance?’ she asked.

‘Tonight. Here.’

She scowled. ‘I don’t like liars. No one learns to zendov in an evening.’

‘I’m not lying. I watched and learned.’

She narrowed her eyes. They were hard eyes, in a hard face.

‘You’re not very good,’ she said, ‘but you know the steps. Perfectly, in fact. You’re too rigid, though. Your shoulders are too tight.’

He bowed again. ‘I’ll remember that. Perhaps you might educate me in the finer points of the dance?’

‘Sorry, my card is full.’

‘No room, not even at the end of the night?’

The music had begun again. A Navy officer was waiting for her, impatient anger in his face.

‘Amasec,’ she said. ‘Perhaps, at the end of the night.’

In the zendov clubs, the end of the night meant dawn. The queues of men danced the girls into exhaustion. Heading from the bar to find the washroom, Endor saw three or four shoeless girls in a back hall, smoking lho-sticks and dabbing at bleeding heels and swollen toes.

He went out into the snow, and searched for a public vox-station. He called Liebstrum’s number, and got the message service.

‘Where are you?’ he shouted. ‘Where are you?’

Two glasses sat on the bar. Joiliq in one, diluted with slowly melting ice, and amasec in the other. It was four-thirty.

‘Master Titan?’

‘Titus,’ he corrected, looking around. What he saw made him forget the throbbing in his temples. ‘My name is Titus.’

The girl nodded. ‘Sorry. This for me?’

He smiled. She took up the amasec and sipped.

‘A last dance, then, yes?’ she asked.

‘I’ve been waiting.’

There was a look in her eyes that told him how much she despised the men who waited to dance with her.

She led him to the floor. Her body was as hard as before, but now she was cold. There was no heat in her. The fragrance of lho-smoke and sweat had dulled to a thin, unhealthy smell.

‘Loosen your shoulders,’ she said, as the music began. ‘Turn your head. No, too much. Turn it like this. And swing out. Yes. And back and back.’

‘Am I getting it?’ he asked. He felt like he was dancing with a corpse.

‘Your footwork is fine. Excellent, actually. Your back is still a little stiff. Turn out, turn out, that’s it.’

‘You’re a good teacher.’

‘I do what I’m paid to do, sir.’

‘You’re tired.’

‘Every day is a long day,’ she whispered, her head against his chest. She looked up at him sharply. ‘Please don’t tell the bosses I said that. They’ll dock my pay.’

‘I won’t,’ he smiled, rotating her neatly. ‘I know how long your day’s been. I was at the Theatricala. You are a fine dancer.’

‘This pays better than the classical shit,’ she said. She stared up at him as they spun and re-addressed. ‘Have you been following me?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I just came here and saw you.’

‘And learned the zendov.’

He chuckled. ‘Something like that. Men must follow women all the time on this world. There are so few of you.’

‘It does become a problem,’ she admitted.

‘So they follow you? Watch you?’

‘I suppose they do,’ said Mira.

‘Who watches you?’ he asked.

‘You do,’ she said, ‘and everyone else.’

They swung and re-addressed, then promenaded again.

‘How did you get the scar?’ he asked.

She flinched. ‘I hate it when men notice that.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Will you tell me how you got it?’

‘I got it years ago. That’s all I want to say about it.’

He nodded, spinning her. ‘I’m sorry I asked. We all have our scars.’

‘Isn’t that the truth?’ she agreed.

The number ended. He stepped back, and looked at her.

‘Please, please don’t ask me for another,’ she said quietly.

‘A last drink, then?’

‘I’m dead on my feet, Master Titus.’

‘Might I be first on your card tomorrow, then?’

‘It doesn’t work that way. Come along tomorrow, and we’ll dance again.’

She walked away. The band was packing up. Endor went to the bar, where the barman was washing the last of the glasses.

‘Grain joiliq, with shaved ice, and a sliver of citrus,’ Endor requested.

The barman sighed, and fixed the drink. When Endor looked around, the girl had vanished.

It was light when he got back to his residentiary. Snow was fluttering down out of a sky that was white and opaque. He tossed his copy book onto the desk, took off his jacket and fell down on his bed.

He dreamt of Hapshant. There were worms coming out of his tear ducts. Endor tried to wipe them away. Gregor shouted at him, telling him he was a fool. Hapshant went into spasms, his heels kicking on the hardwood floor.

The knocking persisted. It was suddenly late in the afternoon. Endor sat up, fully clothed. The knocking came again, not Hapshant’s heels at all.

He went to the door, and opened it.

Liebstrum stared at him.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Well, hello to you too,’ replied Endor.

Liebstrum pushed past him into the room. ‘Throne of Terra, Titus. Why? Why do you keep doing this?’

‘Doing what, exactly?’

‘Calling me. Calling me with these messages and–’

‘Where have you been?’ Endor asked.

Liebstrum turned and looked at him. ‘You’ve forgotten again, haven’t you?’

‘Forgotten what? Interrogator, I believe you have been singularly derelict in your duties these last few weeks. I’m afraid I’ve been forced to send a report of admonition to the ordos and–’

‘Not again. Again with this,’ Liebstrum sighed.

‘Again with what, interrogator?’

Liebstrum pulled out his rosette. ‘It’s inquisitor, Titus. Inquisitor.’

‘Since when?’

‘Four years ago, on Hesperus. You elected me yourself. Don’t you remember?’

Endor frowned. ‘No, I don’t.’

Liebstrum sat down on the bed. ‘Throne, Titus, you have to stop doing this to me.’

‘I don’t follow.’

Liebstrum looked up at him sadly. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Hunting Gonrad Maliko. You know that. Keep up.’

‘We captured Gonrad Maliko five years ago. He’s serving life in the penal colony on Izzakos. Don’t you remember?’

Endor paused. He wandered over to his desk, and poured the last dregs of a bottle of joiliq into a dirty glass. ‘No, no, I don’t remember that. Not at all.’

‘Oh, Titus,’ Liebstrum muttered.

‘Maliko is loose. He’s here, and he’s loose. I have a lead, a girl in the Theatricala, and box four-three-five–’

‘Stop it! Stop it now!’

‘Liebstrum?’

Liebstrum rose from the bed, and approached Endor.

‘Show me your rosette,’ he said.

Endor took a swig of his drink, and pulled his wallet out of his pocket.

‘Look. Do you see, Titus?’ Liebstrum asked, opening the leather wallet. ‘There’s no rosette in there. You were disavowed, three years ago. They took your warrant away. You’re not an inquisitor any more.’

‘Of course I am,’ said Titus Endor, ignoring the bald patch in the wallet where his rosette had once been sewn in. ‘I’m operating under Special Circumstances.’

Liebstrum shook his head sadly. ‘Titus, I’ve tried to help you, Throne knows, but you’ve got to stop calling me. You’ve got to stop pretending.’

‘Pretending? How dare you!’

Liebstrum walked towards the door. ‘This is the last time I come running, you understand? The very last time.’

‘No, I don’t understand. I am affronted by your manner, interrogator. Maliko is still out there.’

Liebstrum turned to look back one last time. ‘No, Titus, he really isn’t.’

Endor went to the park in the last of the afternoon. Black trees and blacker ironwork benches stood up out of a skim of wet snow. He wondered how Maliko had got to Liebstrum. What did he have on him? He sat on a bench, and began to draft a report in his copy book, a report exposing Liebstrum’s connections to the criminal, and recommending his immediate censure and suspension. But the bench was cold and damp, and it soaked his clothes, and gave him a headache, so he walked to a local cafe, and ordered a pot of chocolate and a thimble of amasec.

The light was going out of the sky. As the snow fell, it almost seemed as if the pale sky was shedding in little white flakes, leaving a dark undercoat behind.

Endor went back to the zendov club early, before the Theatricala turned out, and waited for the girl, but she never showed. He hung around until it was quite late, and then started asking questions. The other dancers, the girls, were reticent. They’d learned that you didn’t give out personal details to men who loitered at the clubs.

Finally, Endor snagged a junior barman who, for rather too many crowns, said he was prepared to slip into the manager’s office and take a look at the girl’s contact address in the club ledger.

Endor met him out the back of the dance club just after one in the morning, and exchanged the cash for a slip of paper.

Mira Zaleed, 870 Arbogan.

He considered leaving it until the morning, but he was restless, so he bought a quart of amasec at a tavern on Oroshbyli Street, and rode the maglev to Corso Saint Helk in the north of the city. From the station, it was a long walk up the rockcrete walkways to the hab blocks: Solingen, Zarbos, Arbogan.

The stairwells were unlit, and choked with trash. A domestic quarrel was raging on the fifth floor, and the residents of other habs were yelling out protests at the noise. Just before he located 870, it occurred to him that 870 was twice 435.

Titus Endor stood in the gloomy hallway, listening to the racket of someone else’s private life disintegrating, and wondered if the numbers were significant. Numbers could be dangerous. A life of study and an eventful career had shown him that. Certain numbers, usually abstract mathematical constructs, possessed power. He’d heard of several cases where cogitators had been corrupted by warped numbers, and he’d been party to another case, years ago, when some old fool had mistakenly believed he’d uncovered the Number of Ruin. He and Gregor had handled it, and it had come to nothing, but they’d taken it seriously. He couldn’t remember the old fool’s name now, some dusty scribe, but he remembered the case. They’d been interrogators then, him and Gregor, just starting out. They’d been friends.

An age ago, in another life.

His mind had wandered. He blinked, and wondered how long he’d been standing in the dim passageway outside 870 Arbogan. The domestic had ended, and the night was still. From somewhere, he heard the frail sound of zendov music, playing on an old voxcordian.

He decided to steady his nerves with a sip of the quart of amasec, and discovered that the bottle was half-empty already.

He knocked on the door.

There was no answer. Someone in a neighbouring flat cried out, the half-awake mew of the nightmared.

He knocked again.

‘Mira Zaleed?’ he called.

The door was baffled shempwood in an iron frame, with double dead-bolts and a triple-tumbler, Blaum et Cie safety lock. The lock had been retrofitted into the door, an expensive piece of kit for such a low-rent hab. He rummaged in his trouser pocket, and found his anykey. The slim blade extended from the grip, slipped into the lock, and muttered as it explored the permutations.

He waited. One murmur more, and the anykey turned. The lock sprung with a clatter of rotating drums, and the deadbolts unlatched.

He put the anykey back in his pocket and pushed the door open with his toe.

‘Mira?’

The squalid apartment was cold and dark. The windows of the main room, overlooking the hab’s cinderblock courtyard, had been left open, and snow damp had blown in like wet breath. The drapes were lank and partly stiff with frost. He snapped on a pair of latex gloves, and clicked the light switch. An overhead light bar woke up, lazy and slow. Frizzy purple mould had colonised the cups and plates left on the little dining table. A chair had been overturned on the bare floor. On the wall, faded picts of laughing friends and solemn family gatherings jostled with playbills and programmes from Theatricalas from half a dozen worlds like Gudrun, Eustis Majoris, Brontotaph and Ligeria.

The bedroom was vacant. A single bed, crumpled with use, had been pushed against the wall, and yellow markings, made in chalk, had been scribed on the exposed floor space. The marks were arrows, circling and crossing, and numbers. 4, 3, 5 and then an 8, a 7, a 0. To the left, 87, the digits stacked as a column. 5, Endor thought, went into 435 87 times.

He stepped over the marks, and took out his little chrome picter. He took four or five shots of the markings.

He felt cold on his back, a shiver. In the little closet, packed tight, were dozens of dance costumes, all gauze and lace. They smelled, very faintly, of sweat and lho-smoke. He reached in, and rifled through shoes and hats at the back of the closet space. His hand closed on something: a book.

He drew it out.

It was an unauthorised edition of Stratified Eating Customs In The Halo Star Sub-Races, by Soloman Tarsh. Tarsh was a pen name Maliko had used to publish his most scandalous theories. Endor smiled. Like the tumbling mechanism of a Blaum et Cie safety lock, things were falling into place. He bagged the book in a plastek evidence sheath, and put it in his pocket. Then, he rootled some more, and found a string of cultured pearls, a small jewellery box, and a fetish made of bent wire and feathers.

He bagged them all.

The kitchen was a dank mess of grime and grease, stacked with culture-bearing crockery. He went to the bathroom.

Violent death marked the small, tiled room. Blood had extravagantly stippled the walls and dried into black scabs, and it had pooled in the enamel tub, separating into dark sediment and glassy surface plasma. From the spray travel and the splash vectors, Endor approximated a frenzied attack, multiple stabs with a short, double-edged blade. There was no shower curtain, and the rings on the rail were broken and buckled. The perp wrapped the body in the curtain, he deduced.

‘Are you dead, Mira?’ he asked out loud. It was unlikely. The kill scene was a week old, and he’d danced with her just the night before.

‘Who’s in there?’ a voice called. Endor stiffened. ‘Come on out, unless it’s you, Mira.’

The voice was sixty years old, and carrying twenty or thirty kilos too much weight. Endor unclipped his shoulder holster so his weapon was in grab range, and came out of the bathroom. A torch beam shone in his face.

‘This had better be good,’ said the sixty-year-old, overweight voice.

‘Get the light out of my eyes, please,’ said Endor.

The beam swung away, revealing a fat old man aiming a combat shotgun. The barrels of the weapon were pointing directly at Endor. The old man was wearing pyjama bottoms and unlaced, scuffed army boots. His belly stretched his stained vest. Old Guard insignia, the stitching worn, decorated his fatigue jacket.

‘Who are you?’ Endor asked.

‘This says I get to ask the questions,’ the old man replied, settling his shotgun. ‘Who are you?’

‘A friend of Mira’s.’

The old man snorted. ‘That’s what they all say. They don’t all get in, though.’

‘She gave me a key.’

‘Why would she do that?’ the old man asked.

‘We’re friends,’ said Endor.

‘Round and round we go,’ said the old man. ‘Give me a good reason not to blast your lungs out through your spine.’

Endor nodded. ‘I’m going to reach into my jacket, all right? I’m going to show you my credentials.’

‘Slow as you like,’ the old man replied.

Endor reached into his coat, forced himself to ignore the invitation of his gun, and flipped out his wallet.

‘Titus Endor, Ordo Malleus. I’m an inquisitor operating under Special Circumstances.’

The old man’s eyes widened. He lifted the shotgun away from Endor.

‘I beg your forgiveness, sir!’ he stammered.

Endor flipped the wallet away.

‘It’s no trouble. You are?’

‘Nute Jerimo, from eight-six-eight, just down the hall. I…’ the old man cleared his throat, ‘… I’m kind of the unofficial super on this floor. The residents like me to keep an eye on things, keep the place safe, you understand?’

‘You’re ex-mil?’

‘Karoscura Seventh, and proud of it. Mustered out eighteen years ago.’

‘You got a licence for that riotgun, Jerimo?’ Endor asked.

The old man shrugged.

‘It kind of followed me home from the wars, sir,’ he replied.

‘You keep the peace here, and watch over your neighbours. I’m not going to report you,’ said Endor.

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Tell me about Mira.’

Jerimo shook his head. ‘Lovely girl, she is. A dancer. Moved in nine months back, keeps herself to herself. Always polite. Last spring, on my wife’s birthday, she gave us tickets to a performance at the Theatricala. A present, you see? What a night! I’d never have been able to treat my wife so well, not on my pension.’

‘She’s a good girl.’

‘She is that. Is she in trouble, sir? Is Mira in some sort of trouble?’

‘That’s what I’m trying to find out,’ Endor replied. ‘When did you last see her?’

The old man thought about that. ‘A week ago, maybe nine days. It was early. She was just coming in when I was going out to tend the boiler. It won’t fire the heating for this block unless someone cranks it, and so me, being me, goes downstairs and–’

‘She was just coming in?’

‘She always comes in late, sometimes with gentleman callers. Dawn or after.’

‘That was the last time you saw her?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Jerimo replied.

‘Go home, go to bed,’ said Endor. ‘I’ll lock up here.’

The old man shuffled off, taking his shotgun with him.

Endor took a last look around the apartment, and switched off the light.

He could smell Maliko.

Back in his room in the residentiary, in the small hours, Endor poured himself the last of the amasec. Sipping, he took the items he’d retrieved from Mira’s hab, and laid them out on his desk. The book, the fetish, the jewellery box, the pearls.

He unbagged the jewellery box, and opened it with his anykey. The trays inside were dusty and empty. The only thing in it was a pendant, a gold chain fastened to a small, curved tooth. Titus Endor fingered the jagged tooth that hung around his neck.

Then he printed out the picts he’d taken of the markings on the floor, and studied them.

When he woke up, the prints were scattered across his chest.

He had slept badly. A recurring dream of death had stalked him. A supple ballet dancer with worms coming out of her eyes. A lizard carnivore, snuffling through the dark.

‘Wake up,’ he told himself.

He felt vile. He washed and dressed, and went to a dining house that was fifteen minutes away from the end of breakfast service. He ordered caffeine, poached eggs, black bread and a slice of the local sausage. He took the book out of his pocket, and flipped through it as he waited for his order to arrive.

Stratified Eating Customs In The Halo Star Sub-Races, by Soloman Tarsh. It had been vanity-printed on low-quality paper. Someone had annotated the well-thumbed pages. Passages were underlined, and notes dotted the margins. Why would a dancer like Mira Zaleed own a copy of a specialist tract like this?

One section of the book had been especially heavily annotated. It was titled ‘The Eaters and the Eaten’, and it dealt with primitive customs relating to human communities and their local predators. Some hunter clans in the wilderness worlds of the Halo Stars ritually ate the flesh of apex predators in the belief that this would both proof them against predation and invest them with the traits of the killer creatures. On Salique, tribesmen drank the blood of local crocodilians so as to share their cunning. On Gudrun, in ages past, the powdered teeth and genitals of the giant carnodon were believed to imbue the ingester with feral potency. It was a recurring theme. Wherever man inhabited a world where he was in competition with a significant apex predator, rituals of devouring evolved. Eat what would otherwise eat you, and you would be magically protected. Hunt and consume what you fear will hunt and consume you, and you would be proofed against its fanged jaws.

This was nothing new to Titus Endor. His painful experiences on Brontotaph as an interrogator had taught him much about these curious beliefs. After his clash with the saurapt, an encounter he’d never care to repeat, the local tribes had treated him with the utmost respect. He had been ‘in the jaws’ and he had survived. This made him special in their eyes, as if some curious supernatural relationship had been forged between man and predator. They were bound together, both eaters, both eaten. The tribesmen had urged Endor to hunt down the saurapt, kill it and ingest its flesh, so as to become master of the compact.

Endor had laughed this off and refused. The old superstitions were ridiculous. ‘But the saurapt will now stalk you forever,’ the tribesmen had warned, ‘to the end of your days, when it will claim you at last and finish its bite.’

Finish its bite. Quite a phrase. It had made Hapshant laugh. Endor had relished the notion of a predator’s bite that took years, decades perhaps, to close entirely.

Many notes, most of them hard to decipher, appended the passages dealing with such traditions. Brontotaph was mentioned. Certain charms and prophylactic rituals were described, whereby sacrifices could be made to ward off the stalking killer. Fresh blood and surrogate victims could be offered up to stall the attentions of invisible beasts.

Endor wondered about the tooth he’d found in Mira Zaleed’s jewellery box.

‘Are you Endor?’

Titus looked up from his eggs. It took him a moment to recognise the barman from the zendov club.

‘What can I do for you?’ he asked.

‘May I?’ the barman asked, indicating the other chair.

‘Please.’

The barman sat down. He was in casual clothes, a white shirt under a striped coat. Endor imagined the man’s formal wear was being pressed somewhere in a backstreet laundry.

‘Master Endor,’ the barman began, ‘Mira wants you to know that–’

Endor held up his fork. ‘I don’t talk to men unless I know their names. Especially over breakfast.’

The barman cleared his throat and looked uncomfortable.

‘My name is Jeg Stannis, sir,’ he said.

‘And I’m Titus Endor. See, that wasn’t so hard. You were saying?’

‘Mira wants you to know that you can’t follow her any more.’

‘Does she?’

‘You went to her hab last night.’

‘Maybe I did.’

‘She knows you were there.’

‘And where is she?’

Stannis shrugged. ‘She wants to stay well away from you. She asked me to come and deliver this message, as a favour to her.’

‘I’ll go where I like, Master Stannis.’

‘The club has rules, sir,’ Stannis said. ‘The girls have to be protected from–’

‘From what?’

‘Predators,’ said Stannis.

Endor bit the corner off a slice of black bread. ‘I’m no predator, I assure you.’

‘You went to her home, uninvited, and let yourself in.’

Endor sighed.

‘The club has rules,’ the barman repeated. ‘Fraternisation with guests is strictly–’

‘It happens all the time, Master Stannis,’ said Endor. ‘Please, we’re both adults. Most of the dancers at your club are already supplementing their income from day jobs and Theatricala work. Let’s not be naive. They add to their wages in other ways too. Women are a rare commodity on Karoscura.’

The barman’s face darkened. ‘Leave her alone.’

‘Or what?’ Endor smiled.

‘Or things will go badly for you.’

Endor nodded. ‘We’ll see. Tell me this, Master Stannis…’ He pulled a pict from his coat and set it on the white cloth. ‘What does this mean?’

Stannis looked down at the print. It was a shot of the yellow chalk marks on the floor of Mira Zaleed’s bedroom.

‘They’re practice marks,’ he said. ‘Dance steps. The girls often draw out the turns and steps.’

Endor picked up the print and looked at it. ‘Are they really? I’m not convinced. The numbers–’

‘Beat counts.’

‘Who did she kill in her bathroom, Master Stannis?’

The barman got up. ‘Kill? I think there must be something wrong with your head, mister. You leave her alone, you hear me?’

‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Endor nodded.

After breakfast, Endor stopped at a street bar on Kalyope and took an amasec against the cold. Sleet was coming down, brittle and wet. He read some more of the book. Maliko, Throne damn him, had a way with words.

Endor looked up. Across the street, through the veil of sleet, he saw a man watching him, a tall, thin man, dressed in sober black, with a high black hat.

Endor looked away to pay the bill. When he got up, the thin man in the tall black hat had vanished.

‘How much?’ Endor asked.

‘Four crowns,’ the adept replied.

‘To turn it around by tonight?’

‘Twenty crowns,’ the adept replied.

Endor showed him his rosette, but the adept didn’t seem all that impressed.

‘Twenty crowns,’ he repeated.

Endor paid him the money, and handed him Mira’s tooth. ‘Typed, by tonight, no excuses.’

The adept nodded.

Endor left the backstreet alchemist’s, and trudged up into the cold. The sleet had stiffened into snow, and it was belting along the thoroughfare in waves. He pulled up the collar of his coat, and walked into it, head down.

His route took him back past the Theatricala, unlit and drab in the daylight. He went in. Cleaners were mopping the marble floors, and turning out the waste bins.

‘We’re closed,’ a man said, coming forward to meet Endor. ‘The box office opens at six.’

Endor looked the man up and down.

‘My name is Endor, and I’m an inquisitor of the Holy Ordos,’ he said. He didn’t bother with his badge this time. It seemed to have lost its impact.

‘My pardon, sir,’ the man said.

‘Do I know you?’ asked Endor.

‘I don’t think so, sir.’

The man was tall and skinny.

‘Do you own a very tall black hat?’ Endor asked.

‘No, I don’t, sir.’

‘You have a dancer here, by the name of Mira Zaleed. I would like to inspect her dressing room.’

‘We don’t do that, sir,’ said the man.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ smiled Endor. ‘I thought I’d explained that I was an inquisitor.’

‘This is where they all change,’ the man said. Endor stepped into the room, and turned on the light. The man waited by the door.

The room was long and low, flanked with grubby mirrors. Piles of dirty laundry heaped the baskets behind the door. Floaty white dresses hung on a rail. On the work surfaces, pins and reels of thread and thimbles lay beside pots of greasepaint and waxy sticks of rouge and base white. The room stank of greasy makeup, sweat and smoke.

‘Her station?’ asked Endor.

‘I have no idea, inquisitor,’ the man said.

‘None at all?’

‘Maybe to the left there, third mirror along. It’s very busy in here at night.’

Endor sat down in the seat indicated, and looked at himself in the smeared mirror. He was overpowered by the smell of stale perfume. Spent lho-sticks choked a glass near his left hand. The words ‘Good luck Mira XXX Lilo’ were written in lip rouge in the lower right-hand corner of the mirror.

Endor opened the small drawer under the mirror. It was full of blood. He shut it again, hastily, trying not to slosh anything out onto his lap.

‘Could I have a moment?’ he asked.

‘I’m not really allowed–’ the man began.

‘Inquisitor, inquisitor,’ Endor snarled.

‘I’ll be outside,’ the man said, and closed the door behind him.

Gently, Endor slid the drawer open again. It wasn’t full of blood at all. It was full of dark rose petals. He laughed at himself. The rose petals were as black and red as the halls of the Theatricala. He dipped his hand in and slid it around. The petals were as soft and cold as snow flakes or random clues.

He took out the knife. It was double-sided and stained. He sniffed it. Blood. From the bathroom in 870 Arbogan, no doubt. He leant back into the seat, and took out the pict. Dance steps? Practice marks? Surely nothing so innocent.

Endor decided he had to get Liebstrum working on the Number of Ruin. He needed proper information. The Number of Ruin wasn’t something one took lightly. There had been a case, years back, an old fool…

Endor wondered where Liebstrum was. He hadn’t seen his interrogator in days.

He put his hand back into the petals, and found a card, a business card. On one side, it read ‘Cloten and Sons, Funerary Needs and Final Rituals’. There was a vox number and a street address.

On the other side, handwritten, was ‘Master Titus, you need to conclude your business with these men. Order number 87.’ 435, Endor thought, was divisible by 87 five times.

‘Hello?’ Endor called out.

The man poked his head around the dressing room door. ‘Sir?’

‘What are the chances of a man getting a drink?’ Endor asked.

Cloten and Sons occupied a grim ouslite building at the end of Limnal Street. Polished long-bodied hearses sat in the snowy yard. A brass bell tinkled as Endor went in.

‘Can I be of assistance to you, sir?’ asked a young, pudgy man in mourning weeds.

‘No, you can’t,’ Endor replied, ‘but he can.’ He pointed at the tall, slender man at the back of the musty little shop, a place of dark velvet drapes and samphorwood.

‘Master Cloten?’ the young man called. ‘For you, sir.’

Master Cloten walked over to Endor. He was no longer wearing the tall back hat, but he was unmistakeable. His face was hard and pale and sinewy, the face a man wore when he had spent his life dealing with grief.

‘How may I help you, sir?’ he asked.

‘Order number 87,’ Endor replied.

The man went to his heavy ledger, and heaved it open, but Endor knew he already knew the details.

‘Ah, indeed. Already fully paid. A nalwood coffin, and a confirmed site in the municipal yard. Headstone already inscribed. Eighteen paid mourners. We have two of our most saddest-faced boys ready, sir, a horse-drawn carriage. Full wreathes. Two hymns already chosen and applied. The choir of the Theatricala will attend and sing them. Well, everything looks in order.’

‘Good,’ said Endor, ‘and it’s all paid for?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I saw you in the street this morning,’ said Endor.

‘Quite probably, sir,’ the slender man agreed. ‘Death visits all the time. It stalks us, so to say.’

‘I’ve heard that,’ Endor smiled.

‘And it’s never subtle,’ the slender man said. ‘It strikes where it wants. Such is the way of the cosmos.’

‘Indeed. Well, the ceremony seems well catered, and I am thankful for that. I knew him well.’ Endor looked at the slender man for a reaction. None came. ‘A splendid send-off. These are the hymns?’

‘They are.’

Endor studied the sheets. ‘I had wanted to make a contribution towards costs,’ he said. ‘As I told you, I knew him well.’

‘Mistress Zaleed has already paid for everything,’ the slender man said.

‘Has she? Has she?’ Endor murmured. ‘May I see the inscription?’

The slender man passed him a pict of the headstone.

‘Such a lamentable loss,’ the slender man said. ‘To be killed by a monster like that. Throne, I didn’t know there were any predators left on Karoscura, not like that. Imagine.’

‘Indeed,’ said Endor.

He looked at the pict. His own name was on the headstone.

The backstreet alchemist’s had shut up for the night. In the swirling snow, he hammered on the door until the adept unlocked it.

‘Tonight!’ Endor spat. ‘Tonight, you said!’

‘You’re late,’ the adept replied.

‘Just tell me what you found,’ Endor snapped. He felt peculiar, and in no mood for nonsense.

‘I ground it down. It’s a saurapt tooth, just as you thought, from Brontotaph.’

Endor joined the queue at the doors of the Theatricala. The overture was pumping out already, the windows glowing with gold light.

‘Anywhere in the circle,’ he told the girl in the box office, pushing crowns at her as he waited for his ticket.

‘Are you all right, sir?’ she asked.

‘I’m fine,’ he replied.

He hired glasses, bought a programme and a glass of joiliq, and hurried to his seat.

The ruddy auditorium pulsed like a box of flesh, red and dark, pumping with movement. He took his seat after a few thank yous and excuse mes.

He swung his glasses up. Yes, there in 435, the glint of opera glasses. I have you now, Maliko, he thought.

The overture ended. The curtains drew back, and the dancers mounted the stage. There she was, perfect and poised. Where had she been hiding?

Endor’s body started to twist and turn, dancing the zendov in his seat.

‘Will you stop that?’ complained the woman beside him.

‘Sorry,’ said Endor, sitting still and sipping his drink.

He looked up at the box, and saw the glint of brass and glass again. 435. 435.

Of course, there was no box 435.

Liebstrum sat down beside him.

‘Ah, there you are,’ Endor smiled. ‘Just in time.’

Liebstrum looked at him strangely.

‘I’ve been calling you, you know?’ said Endor.

‘I know,’ Liebstrum sighed.

‘Where have you been?’

‘Busy. Look, sir–’

‘Oh, hush! You can’t talk through this. It’s beautiful. Watch them dance. Watch her.’

‘Sir, I… sir… the ordos sent me, sir,’ said Liebstrum. ‘I was concerned, sir. Your calls, and everything. I had them run some tests on your last routine clinical. They wanted you to know. I’m so sorry, I would never wish this on you, sir.’

‘Wish what? For Throne’s sake, watch her!’ Endor craned forwards, and looked through his opera glasses. They caught the light.

‘Sir?’

‘What?’

‘Sir, the worms, sir, the cerebral worms. They think you may have been infected years ago, perhaps by Hapshant.’

‘He was a real character.’

‘Sir, your mind is being eaten up. Dementia, sir.’

‘Don’t be silly, Liebstrum. By the way, where the hell have you been?’

‘Sir, I think it would be best if you came with me now. I have summoned doctors. They can make your last weeks comfortable.’

Endor lowered his opera glasses.

‘Is this some kind of trick?’ he asked.

‘No, sir,’ replied Liebstrum.

‘Listen to me, Liebstrum, she’s got me. It was very canny of her. There’s a saurapt stalking her too.’

‘A what, sir?’

‘A saurapt. She fended it off, made the rituals. She transplanted her curse onto me, you see?’

‘No, not really, sir.’

‘Oh yes you do!’ cried Endor. He reached for his glass, but it was empty. ‘I smelt the same, don’t you see? I was already a target. She performed the rituals and switched her predator after me. I’m her blood sacrifice. I suppose it was easy, given that I’d already got the curse on me.’

‘Sir, the doctors are waiting. They will look after you.’

‘Liebstrum? Liebstrum?’ Endor called. He dropped his opera glasses. Liebstrum had vanished. Below him, the performance was continuing. He was in a box. He turned around, and saw the number on the door.

435.

But there was no box 435.

He felt peculiar. His head ached worse than ever. He wanted a drink, something to dull the pain. Grain joiliq, with shaved ice, and a sliver of citrus. His hands were numb. Where was Liebstrum? Hadn’t he just been talking to Liebstrum?

The performance ended with a flourish, and the Theatricala exploded with applause.

It was all over now. Endor smiled. He realised it wasn’t his fault. Just circumstances.

Out of the red darkness behind him, something loomed and finished its bite.

THE CURIOSITY

He was, it is fair to say, already weary of Gershom when the curiosity came to light. Seven years is a long time in any man’s career, seven years living and working in grubby tenements, backwater hostels and frontier habs all over the planet. Long enough to feel like a native, and certainly to look like one, although he had been born forty-two years and many million AU distant. The patched worsted suit with shiny, calloused elbows, the slate-grey weathercoat, fingerless leather gloves, wire-framed spectacles, the skin of his face etiolated from too many short, wintry days, his thin hair unnaturally black from a biweekly chemical treatment that he purchased and applied himself.

This insipid and forlorn figure stared at his reflection in the smoked glass screen of the demograph booth.

‘Present papers. State name and occupation,’ the indistinct form behind the screen said. As he spoke, the words appeared in glowing, block-capital holos on the glass.

He put his crumpled documents into the metal drawer below the screen and it gobbled them away with an un-oiled clatter. Hunching low, he aimed his mouth helpfully at the vox-grille, and said, ‘Valentin Drusher, magos biologis.’

‘Purpose of travel?’ the voice said, subtitled as before.

‘I am a magos biologis, as I said. You’ll see I have a permit for travel to Outer Udar stamped by the office of the Lord Governor. He is my patron.’

The shape behind the tinted glass panel paused, and then the legend ‘please wait’ appeared on the screen. Doing as he was told, Drusher stood back, rubbing his hands together briskly to chafe warmth into them. It was a miserably early morning in the last few days of autumn and the terminal was vacant. Outside, it was not yet light; the sky was a patchy blue, the colour of a Tarkoni tarkonil’s winter plumage, and the orange glare of sodium lamps reflected in the puddles on the rain-slicked concourse. Drusher studied the reflections, and they reminded him of the fluorescent banding on the abdomen of the southern latitude glowmoth, Lumenis gershomi.

The air held the bitter foretaste of another hard Gershom winter closing in. He consoled himself with the thought that he would be long gone before winter came. Just a few more days to tidy up this annoying loose end, and then he would be done at last.

The drawer slot clacked open again, his refolded papers laid inside.

‘Proceed,’ said the voice.

Drusher retrieved his papers, gathered up his bags and equipment cases, and walked into the boarding yard to find himself a seat on the interprovince coach.

It wasn’t hard. The vehicle, a converted military gref-carrier from the Peninsula, was all but empty. An old woman in a purple shawl sat alone, fingering rosary beads as she read from a dog-eared devotional chapbook. A young mother, hard-faced and tired, occupied another bench seat, her two small children gathered up in her skirts. A rough-faced agri-worker in leather overalls nodded, half-asleep, one arm protectively around the baskets of live, clucking poultry he shared his seat with. His hound, lean and grinning, prowled the aisle. Two young men, identical twins, sat side by side, motionlessly intent. Drusher set himself down near the front of the cabin, far away from anyone else. He shooed the dog away when it came sniffing at his bags.

A hooter sounded, waking the agri-worker briefly. The coach’s big, caged props began to turn and beat, and the patched rubber skirts of the bulky ground-effect vehicle began to swell out. Drusher felt them drunkenly rise up. One of the little children laughed out in glee at the bobbing motion as the vehicle picked up speed.

Then they were out of the city terminal and roaring up to the state highway, fuming spray into the gloomy dawn.

Outer Udar, the most western and – many said – the most heathen of Gershom’s provinces, lay far beyond the Tartred Mountains, forty hours away. For the first hour or two, he worked on his notes, refining technical descriptions on his data-slate. Such polish was simply cosmetic. He’d been over it a hundred times, and the taxonomy would have been published as complete by now. Complete but for the curiosity.

He put his slate aside, and took the crumpled voxgram from his pocket, hoping yet again that it was a mistake.

Seven years! Seven damn years of rigorous work. To miss a sub-form of tick-fly, a variant weevil, even a divergent rodentae, well that would just be the way of things. Even, he considered, some class of grazer, if it was localised and sufficiently shy in its habits.

But an apex predator? Surely, surely not. Any systematic taxonomy identified all apex predators in the initial phase of preparation by dint of the fact they were the most obvious of any world’s creatures.

No, it was a mistake. The curiosity in Outer Udar was an error. He’d stake his reputation on that.

The rolling motion of the gref-coach began to lull him. He fell asleep, dreaming of the characterising mouthparts of filter snakes, the distinguishing feather-palps of lowland locustae, and the bold, striated beaks of peninsula huskpeckers.

He woke to the sound of infant laughter. The coach was stationary, and sleet was dashing against the grey windows. Blinking, he sat up, and repositioned his dislodged spectacles on his nose. At his feet, the two children had his sketchbooks laid open and were giggling as they surveyed the hand-painted images of beasts and fowls.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘please be careful with those.’

The children looked up at him.

‘Zoo books,’ said one.

‘Yes,’ he replied, taking the sketchbooks away from their grubby hands and closing them.

‘Why have you got zoo books?’

‘I make zoo books,’ he said.

They thought about this. Their simple grasp of professional careers did not reach so far. One nudged the other.

‘Are you going to put the beast in your zoo books?’ the nudged one asked.

‘The beast?’ he asked. ‘Which beast?’

‘The hill beast. It has teeth.’

‘Great large teeth.’

‘It eats men up.’

‘And swine.’

‘And swine. With its great large teeth. It has no eyes.’

‘Come away!’ their mother called, and the two children scurried back down the aisle to her.

Drusher looked around the cabin. It was just as he had last seen it. The agri-worker continued to snooze; the old woman was still reading. The only change was the twins, who now sat facing one another, like a mirror.

The cabin door thumped open and flakes of sleet billowed in around several newcomers. A black-robed demograph servitor, its face a cluster of slack tubes beneath augmetic compound eyes. A short-haired woman in a leather bodyglove and fur coat, carrying a brown paper parcel. Another agri-worker, his face chilblained, fighting to keep his long-haired terrier from snapping at the roaming hound. A matronly progenium school teacher in a long grey dress. The short-haired woman helped the matron with her luggage.

‘Leofrik! This is Leofrik!’ the servitor called as he walked the cabin. ‘Present your papers!’

Each voyager offered up his or her documents for the servitor to scan. Gershom was very particular about its indigents, the side effect of being so close to a warzone. The Departmento Demographicae maintained a vigilant watch on the planet’s human traffic.

The servitor, waste spittle drooling from its mouth tubes, took a long time studying Drusher’s papers.

‘Magos biologis?’

‘Yes.’

‘Reason for travel?’

‘I went through all this at the terminal this morning.’

‘Reason for travel?’

Drusher sighed. ‘Seven years ago, I was commissioned by the Lord Governor of Gershom to draw up a comprehensive taxonomy of the planet’s fauna. It is all but complete. However, a curiosity has appeared in Outer Udar and I am travelling there to examine it.’

Drusher wanted to go on, to talk about the extended deadlines he had been forced to request, the increasingly reluctant project funding that had obliged him to take the overland coach instead of a chartered flier, the preposterous idea that he might have missed an apex predator.

The demograph servitor wasn’t interested. It handed the papers back to Drusher and stalked away.

In the meantime, the short-haired woman had taken the seat opposite him. She smiled at Drusher. Her face was lean and sturdy, with a tiny scar zagging up from the left-hand corner of her lip. Her eyes were dazzling amber, like photoluminescent cells.

Drusher looked away.

‘Magos biologis?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘I couldn’t help overhearing.’

‘Apparently.’

The servitor had dismounted. With a lurch like sea-swell, the gref-carrier rose and got underway again.

‘I was told you were coming,’ she said.

‘What?’

The woman reached into her fur coat – highland fox, if he wasn’t mistaken – and produced a wallet, which she flipped open to reveal the golden badge inside.

‘Germaine Macks, province Arbites.’

‘You were expecting me, officer?’

‘A squirt from the governor’s office. An expert on his way. I’m thrilled, of course. It’s about time. So, what’s the plan?’

‘Plan?’

‘Your m.o.?’

Drusher shrugged. ‘I suppose I’ll examine habitat, look for spores, collate cases and get a decent pict or two if I can.’ His voice trailed off. In seven years, no official had ever taken such interest in his work.

‘And how do you plan to kill it?’ she asked.

‘Kill it?’ he echoed.

‘Yes,’ she said, chuckling, as if party to some joke. ‘That being the point.’

‘I don’t intend to kill it. I don’t take samples. Just descriptive records, for the taxonomy.’ He patted his sketchbooks.

‘But you have to kill it,’ she said, earnestly. ‘I mean, if you don’t, who the hell will?’

By the firelight of the great hearth, Baron Karne went on expansively for several minutes.

‘The Lord Governor is a personal friend, a childhood friend, and when he makes it known that a scholar such as yourself is coming to my part of the world, I take pains to make that scholar welcome. Ask, and it will be given, magos. Any service, any requirement. I am happy to provide.’

‘Th–thank you, baron,’ Drusher said uneasily. He looked around the room. Trophy heads, crested with vast antlers and grimacing their fangs, haunted the shadowy walls. A winter storm battered at the leaded windows. Outer Udar was colder than he had dared imagine.

‘I wonder if there might have been a mistake,’ Drusher ventured.

‘How is that?’

‘Sir, I am a taxonomist. A scholar. My expertise is in the cataloguing of fauna-forms. The Lord Governor – your childhood friend, as you say – commissioned me to compile a concordance of Gershom’s animal life. I’ve come here because... well, there seems to be a curiosity out here I may have missed. A predator. I’m here to identify it for the taxonomy. Not to kill it. I’m no hunter.’

‘You’re not?’

‘Not at all, sir. I sketch and examine and catalogue.’

The baron bowed his head. ‘Dear me... Really?’

‘I’m truly sorry, sir.’

He looked over at the door into the dining room. It was ajar, and light slanted through the gap.

‘What will I tell them?’ the baron said.

Drusher felt desperately out of his depth. ‘If you have guests – I mean, to save face – I could play along, I suppose.’

Around the long candlelit table were nineteen local lairds and their ladies, the rotund Bishop of Udar and his secretary, and a square-jawed man with sandy-white hair and piercing eyes. His name was Skoh. Drusher wasn’t entirely sure who Skoh was. In fact, he wasn’t entirely sure of anything any more. The baron introduced him as ‘that expert from the city I’ve been promising’.

‘You are a famous hunter, then?’ the bishop asked Drusher.

‘Not famous, your holiness. I have some expertise in the line of animals.’

‘Good, good. So claims Skoh here, but in three months, what?’

‘It is a difficult beast, your honour,’ Skoh said softly. ‘I’d welcome some expert advice. What weapon do you favour, magos? Hollowpoint or shot? Do you bait? Do you use blinds?’

‘I… um… favour multiple means, sir. Whatever suits.’

‘Aren’t you terribly afraid?’ asked one of the ladies.

‘One must never underestimate the quarry, lady,’ Drusher said, hoping it conveyed an appropriate sense of duty and caution.

‘They say it has no eyes. How does it find its prey?’ asked the bishop.

‘By scent,’ Drusher replied emphatically.

‘Not so,’ snapped Skoh. ‘My hunters have been using sealed body sleeves. Not one sniff of pheromone escapes those suits. And still it finds them.’

‘It is,’ said Drusher, ‘a difficult beast. When was it last seen?’

‘The thirteenth,’ said the baron, ‘Up in the ridgeway, having taken a parlour maid from the yard at Laird Connok’s manse. My men scoured the woods for it, to no avail. Before that, the swineherd killed at Karla. The waterman at Sont’s Crossroads. The two boys out late by Laer’s Mere.’

‘You forget,’ said one of the lairds, ‘my potman, just before the killings at the Mere.’

The baron nodded. ‘My apologies.’

‘The beast is a blight on our land,’ said the bishop. ‘I say to you all, a speck of Chaos. We must rally round the holy aquila and renounce the darkness. This thing has come to test our faith.’

Assenting murmurs grumbled around the table.

‘Are you a religious man, magos?’ the bishop asked.

‘Most certainly, your holiness.’

‘You must come to worship at my temple tomorrow. I would like to bless you before you begin your bloody work.’

‘Thank you, your holiness,’ Drusher said.

The outer door burst open, scudding all the candle flames, and a servant hurried in to whisper in the baron’s ear. Baron Karne nodded, and the servant hurried out again. A moment later, Arbites Officer Macks was standing in the doorway, dripping wet, a riotgun over one arm. Her badge was now pinned to the lapel of her leather bodysuit.

She looked around the room, pausing as she met Drusher’s eyes.

‘Deputy,’ said the baron, rising from his seat. ‘To what do we owe this interruption?’

‘Another death, lord,’ she said. ‘Out by the coops.’

The acreage to the north of Baron Karne’s draughty keep was a low swathe of marshy ground given over to poultry farming. Through the sleeting rain, thanks to the light of the bobbing lamps, Drusher could make out row upon row of coop-sheds constructed from maritime ply and wire. There was a strong smell of mud and bird lime.

Drusher followed the baron and Officer Macks down boarded paths fringed by gorse hedges. With them came three of the baron’s huscarls, lanterns swinging from the tines of their billhooks. The weather was dreadful. Icy rain stung Drusher’s cheeks numb, and, as he pulled his old weathercoat tighter around him, he longed for a hat and a warm fox-fur jacket like the one Macks wore.

There was an odd wobbling noise just audible over the drumming of the rain. Drusher realised it was the agitated clucking of thousands of poultry birds.

They reached the coops, and trudged up a metal-mesh walkway between the first two shed rows. The bird-dung stink was stronger now, musty and stale despite the rain. Teased clumps of white feathers clogged the cage wire. Macks said something to the baron, and pointed. A flashlight beam moved around up ahead. It was one of Macks’ junior Arbites, a young man by the name of Lussin, according to his quilted jacket’s nametag. He looked agitated, and extremely glad to see company at last.

The frame door to one of the coop sheds was open; Macks shone her light inside. Drusher caught a glimpse of feathers and some kind of metal cylinder lying on the floor.

He followed Macks and the baron into the coop.

Drusher had never seen a dead body before, except for that of his Uncle Rudiger, who had died when Drusher was a boy. The family had visited his body in the chapel of rest to pay their respects, and Uncle Rudiger had looked normal. Asleep. Drusher, with a child’s naiveté, had quite expected his uncle to jump up and laugh in their faces. Uncle Rudiger had been a great one for practical jokes.

The body in the poultry coop wasn’t about to jump up or do anything. It was face down, thankfully, its limbs draped in a contorted, awkward way that wasn’t a practical joke.

This was one of the baron’s farm staff, apparently, a yeoman called Kalken. He’d been doing the night feed, and the metal cylinder Drusher had seen was Kalken’s grain-hopper, lying where he’d dropped it in a pile of spilt maize.

Macks knelt by the body. She looked up at Drusher, and made a little jerk with her head that indicated he might want to go outside again. Drusher stuck his hands in his coat pockets resolutely and stayed put. With a shrug, Macks turned the body over.

‘Are you all right?’ Macks said.

‘What?’

‘Are you all right?’

Drusher opened his eyes. He couldn’t remember leaving the coop, but he was outside in the rain again, leaning against the barn opposite, his hands clenched in the wire mesh so tight he’d drawn blood.

‘Magos?’

‘Y-yes,’ he stammered. ‘I’m fine.’ He thought it likely that he’d never forget what he’d just seen. The awful flop of the rolling body. The way a good deal of it had remained behind on the muddy floor.

‘Take a few deep breaths,’ she said.

‘I really am fine.’

‘You look pale.’

‘I’m always pale.’

She shrugged.

‘You might as well stay here,’ she added, though Drusher felt she’d said it less out of concern for his nerves and more because she knew he wasn’t particularly useful. ‘I’m going to make some notes in situ.’

‘There were bites,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Macks replied. ‘At least, I think so.’

‘Measure them. And examine the bite radius for foreign matter. Tooth fragments that might have lodged in the bone. That sort of thing.’

‘Right,’ she said and turned away.

‘Where did it get in?’ he called after her.

‘What?’

‘Where did it get in? Was the cage door open?’

‘No. He’d fastened it behind him when we found him.’

‘Can I borrow a flashlight?’

Macks got a lamp-pack from Lussin and gave it to Drusher. Then she went back into the coop with the baron to begin her grisly inspection properly.

Drusher began to walk away down the length of the coop run, shining his torch in through the cages on either side.

‘Don’t roam too far, sir!’ one of the huscarls called after him.

Drusher didn’t answer. He wanted to roam as far as he could. The thought of being anywhere near that bloody, dismembered mess made him shiver. He was sweating despite the winter gale.

Ten metres down, near the end of the row, he found the wire cage roof of one of the coops had been torn wide open. Drusher played the torch around. He was near the end fence of the poultry compound, a three-metre timber pale topped with a barbed and electrified string of wires. He could see no hole in the fence or damage to the deterrent wires. Had the beast cleared the wall itself? Quite a leap. There was no sign of spore in the thick mud at his feet. The rain was washing it into soup.

He let himself into the ruptured stoop and examined the torn wire roof. With the rain splashing off his face, he reached up and yanked part of it down, studying the broken ends with his lamp closely.

It wasn’t torn. It was cut, cleanly, the tough wire strands simply severed. What could do that? Certainly not teeth, not even teeth that could take the front off a man’s face and body. A power blade, perhaps, but that would leave signs of oxidation and heat-fatigue.

As far as he knew – and there was no man on Gershom better qualified – there wasn’t an animal on the planet that could leap a three-metre security fence and slice open reinforced agricultural mesh.

Drusher took out the compact digital picter he always carried, and took a few snaps of the wire for reference. It came through this cage roof, he thought. Probably landed on it, in point of fact, coming over the fence, cut its way in... and then what?

He looked around. The covered timber coop-end of the shed was dark and unforth-coming.

It suddenly occurred to him that whatever it was might still be there.

He felt terror and stupidity in roughly equal measures. He’d been so anxious to get away from that terrible corpse and prove he was good for something, the blindingly obvious had passed him by.

It was still here. It was still right here in the shadows of the coop-box. Once the idea had entered his brain it became unshakeable fact. It really was there, just out of sight in the gloom, breathing low, gazing at him without eyes, coiling to pounce.

He backed towards the cage door, fumbling for the latch. He could hear it moving now, the rustle of straw, the crunch of dried lime on the box’s wooden floor.

Dear God-Emperor, he was going to–

‘Drusher? Golden Throne! I nearly blasted you!’ Macks emerged from the coop-box, straw sticking to her wet hair. She lowered her riotgun.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked

‘I was... looking for... traces...’ he said, trying to slow his thrashing pulse. He gestured up at the torn cage roof.

‘You’ll love this then,’ she said, and led him into the stinking darkness of the coop-box. The floor was littered with dead poultry, feathers glued to the wallboards with blood. The smell of offal was overpowering, and made him gag.

Macks shone her flashlight at the end wall, and showed him the splintered hole in the timbers.

‘It came in and went right down through the row of coops, smashing through each dividing wall until it found Kalken,’ she said. She’d come back along that route to find Drusher. The holes were easily big enough for her to get through.

‘Killed everything in its path,’ she said. ‘Hundreds of roosting birds.’

‘But it didn’t eat anything,’ he observed, struggling to overcome his nausea. ‘It slashed or bit its way through, but there’s no sign of feeding.’

‘That’s important why?’ she asked.

He shrugged. He took shots of the splintered holes with his picter, and then got her to hold the light steady while he measured the dimensions of each hole with his las-surveyor.

‘Have you told anyone?’ he asked her.

‘Told anyone what?’

‘The truth about me? About what I am?’

She shook her head. ‘I didn’t see any point.’

‘The baron knows,’ he told her.

‘Right.’

There was movement outside, and he followed her out of the stoop. Skoh was coming down the walkway through the rain. He’d changed into a foul-weather suit, and was hefting what looked like an autolaser, though Drusher was no expert on weapons. It had a big, chrome drum-barrel, and was so heavy it was supported by a gyro harness strapped around his torso. An auspex target-lens covered his right eye like a patch.

‘You’ve seen the body?’ she asked him.

‘Yes. My men are sweeping the wood behind the fence.’

‘It came right through here,’ she said, indicating the run of coops.

Skoh nodded and looked at Drusher, as if expecting some expert insight from him. When none came, Skoh left them without a word, and continued on down the path.

‘Who is he?’ Drusher asked.

‘Fernal Skoh? He’s a freelance hunter. Game specialist. The community hired him and his men when it became clear I wasn’t up to the job.’ There was rich contempt in her voice.

‘The bishop doesn’t think much of him,’ Drusher said.

Macks grinned. ‘The bishop doesn’t think much of anyone. Skoh hasn’t had much success so far, despite his flashy rep. Besides, the bishop has his own man on the job.’

‘His own man?’

‘Gundax. You’ll meet him before long. He’s the bishop’s bodyguard. Tough piece of work.’

‘Doesn’t the bishop think Skoh can get the job done?’

‘I don’t think anybody does any more. The baron’s threatening to withhold Skoh’s fee. Anyway, Skoh’s not the bishop’s sort.’

‘What?’

‘Skoh’s ungodly, according to his holiness. His background is in bloodsports. The Imperial Pits on Thustathrax.’

Drusher’s repose was fractured by lurid dreams of bodies that left steaming parts behind when they rolled over. In the small hours, he gave up on rest, and got out of bed.

He’d been given a room on an upper floor of the keep. It was terribly cold, and the wind and rain rattled the poorly fitted shutters. Drusher got dressed, activated a glow-globe, and stoked some life into the portable heater. He spread out his equipment and notebooks on the table, by the light of the globe, and distracted himself with study.

There wasn’t a land predator in Gershom that even approximately fit the evidence. Prairie wolves from the western continent, Lupus cygnadae gershomi, were rapacious enough, but their pack mentality meant they were unlikely to be lone killers. The great mottled felid of the peninsula taiga, sadly almost extinct, had the bulk and power, and could have cleared the fence, but neither it nor a prairie wolf could have cut wire like that. And either would have fed.

Besides, Macks had given him her scribbled findings. There was no foreign matter in the poor yeoman’s wounds, but she’d made an estimation of the bite radius. Fifty-three centimetres. Fifty-three!

No wolf came close. The biggest radius Drusher had measured for a felid was thirty-seven, and that had been from a skull in the Peninsula Museum. All the biggest cats were long dead now.

The only thing that came close was Gnathocorda maximus, the vast, deep ocean fish. But this was Outer Udar. There were no wolves here, no forest cats, and certainly no sharks on the loose.

He looked at the picts he’d made of the holes in the coop walls. It was hard to define from the splinter damage, but it looked like each gap had been ripped open by a double blow, each point descending diagonally from the upper corners. Like a man slicing an X with two swords.

And what was all this talk about it having no eyes?

Lyam Gundax’s eyes were dark and set close together. He was a tall, massively muscled man with a forked beard and braided black hair. Drusher could smell his body-sweat, a scent like that of an animal.

‘Who are you and what do you want?’

It was early in the day. The rains had slowed to a drizzle, and the land was dark under a grey sky. Outer Udar was a wide skirt of rocky uplands and black forests around the dismal horizon.

Drusher had come to the cathedral only to find his way into the nave blocked by the big, fur-clad Gundax. The bishop’s man was decorated with bead necklaces and wriststraps, heavy with polished stones, charms, Imperial symbols and animal teeth.

‘Gundax! Come away!’ the bishop called out, as if calling off a dog. He wobbled into view as Gundax stepped back.

‘Drusher, my dear child,’ the bishop greeted him. ‘Pay no attention to my rogue here. This is the magos biologis I told you about,’ he told Gundax.

Gundax nodded curtly, his leather smock creaking. His charm beads clattered against each other.

‘Walk with me,’ the bishop told Drusher.

They plodded side by side down the nave. Drusher made a few admiring remarks about the temple’s towering architecture and glorious stained glass work.

‘This is a hard parish,’ said the bishop. ‘Hard and hardy on the edge of beyond. Of course, I’m not complaining. I serve the God-Emperor in whatever capacity He calls on me to perform. And here is as good as anywhere.’

‘The Emperor protects,’ Drusher said.

‘He doesn’t seem to be doing that so much here these days,’ said the bishop. ‘It weakens the faith. I have a tough enough time instilling virtue and belief into the weather-beaten folk of this blasted land, and this beast... It saps every ounce of fibre.’

‘It must be difficult, your holiness.’

‘Life is difficult. We rise to our tests. But, my dear magos, I fear for the spiritual life of this community almost as much as I fear for its flesh and blood. This thing... this beast... it is not an animal. It is a test of faith. An emissary of Chaos. For it to roam here, unchecked also shows that disbelief may roam here likewise. In every sermon I preach, I declaim as much. The beast is a sign that we have fallen away and allowed taint into our souls. To kill it, to cast it out, we must first reaffirm our faith in the Golden Throne.’

‘You make it sound simple, your holiness.’

‘It is not, of course! But this beast may be a blessing in disguise. Ultimately, I mean. If it makes us renew our belief and our trust in the absolute sanctity of the aquila, then I will offer thanks for it in time. Only in true adversity may a congregation find its focus.’

‘I commend your zeal, bishop.’

‘So... do you have any leads? Any expert insight?’

‘Not yet, your holiness.’

‘Ah well, early days. Come, let me bless you and your work.’

‘Your holiness? One thing?’

‘Yes, magos?’ said the bishop brightly, halting in his tracks.

‘You said the beast has no eyes. In fact, that seems to be the popular conviction.’ Drusher paused, remembering the words of the child on the coach.

‘No eyes, indeed! No eyes, that’s what they say.’

‘Who, your holiness?’

The bishop paused. ‘Why, the folk of Outer Udar. It is what they know of it.’

‘I was of the understanding that no one had actually seen this thing. Seen it and survived, I mean.’

The bishop shrugged. ‘Really?’

‘I know of no eye-witness. No one can offer any sort of description. No one knows the form or size of this thing. Of course, we can make guesses. We know it has teeth from the wounds it delivers, and from that I can estimate the size of the mouth. We know it is small enough to pass through a man-sized hole. And, I fancy, it has shearing claws or talons of some considerable size. But other than that, there is no certainty of its form or nature. And yet... everyone seems certain it has no eyes. Why is that, do you think?’

‘Tattle,’ smiled the bishop. ‘Tavern talk, fireside yap. You know how people invent things, especially if they know nothing and they’re afraid. I’m sure it has eyes.’

‘I see,’ said Drusher.

‘Now, come and receive my blessing.’

Drusher endured the short blessing ritual. He didn’t feel any better for it.

‘I would appreciate your collaboration, magos,’ said Fernal Skoh. Drusher raised his eyebrows and hesitated, then let the hunter into his chambers. It was late afternoon, and an ice-wind was rising in the north.

Skoh, dressed in a leather body-glove reinforced with mail links and segments of plasteel armour plate, entered Drusher’s quarters in the keep and looked around.

Drusher closed the door after him.

‘A drink?’ he offered.

‘Thank you, yes.’

Drusher poured two glasses of amasec from the flask in his luggage. Skoh was wandering the room. He paused at the table, and looked down at Drusher’s spread-out mass of notebooks, data-slates and jottings. Skoh carefully leafed through one of the sketch books, studying each water colour illustration.

Drusher brought him his drink.

‘This is fine work,’ said Skoh, making an admiring gesture towards the sketches. ‘Truly you have a good hand and a great eye. That grazer there. Just so.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re no hunter though, are you, Drusher?’

The question took Drusher aback.

‘No,’ he admitted.

‘That’s fine,’ said Skoh, sipping his drink. ‘I didn’t think so. You’re just one more fool caught up in this mess.’

‘I hear you worked the Imperial Pits.’

Skoh looked at Drusher cautiously. ‘Who’s been talking?’

‘Deputy Macks.’

Skoh nodded. ‘Well, it’s true. Twenty-five years I worked for the arena on Thustathrax as a procurer.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I was paid to travel the wilder worlds of the Imperium trapping and collecting animal specimens to fight in the arena. The odder, the more savage, the better. It brought the crowds in if we had something... unusual.’

‘Something like this beast?’

Skoh didn’t reply.

‘It must have been interesting work. Dangerous work. That’s why the bishop doesn’t like you, isn’t it?’

Skoh managed a small smile. ‘The arenas of the Imperial Pits are ungodly, according to his holiness. I was employed by a secular entertainment industry that revelled in bloodletting and carnage. I am, to him, the lowest of the low. And an outsider to boot.’

‘What did you want, Skoh?’ Drusher asked.

‘The baron tells me my fee will be forfeit if I fail to make a kill soon. I have wages to pay, overheads to consider. This job has dragged on. I can kill this beast, Drusher, but I can’t find it. I think you can. Help me, and I’ll pay you a dividend of my earnings.’

‘I’m not interested in money,’ said Drusher, sipping his amasec.

‘You’re not?’

‘I’m interested in two things. An end to this slaughter and a personal closure. I was hired to produce a complete taxonomy of this planet’s fauna. Now, at the eleventh hour, I seem to have a new apex predator on my hands. If that’s so, it will throw my entire work into disarray. Seven years’ work, you understand?’

‘You think this is an apex predator that you’ve missed?’

‘No,’ said Drusher. ‘Not even slightly. There’d be records, previous incidents. This is either a known predator gone rogue and acting abnormally or…’

‘Or?’

‘It’s an exotic.’

Skoh nodded. ‘You’ve been here a day and you’re that certain?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you have supporting evidence?’

‘It doesn’t match anything I’ve turned up in seven years. And it doesn’t feed. There is no sign of appetite or predation. It simply kills and kills and kills again. That’s the behaviour of a rogue animal, a carnivore that’s no longer killing due to hunger. And it’s the behaviour of a creature alien to this world. May I ask you a couple of questions?’

Skoh set his empty glass down on the table. ‘By all means.’

‘Why do they say it has no eyes? Where did that rumour come from?’

‘All I know about that is that the lack of eyes is a regular feature of the bishop’s hellfire sermons. I presumed it was hyperbolic invention on his part, which has fallen into common rumour.’

‘My other question is this – you know what it is, don’t you?’

Skoh looked at him. His eyes pierced right through Drusher.

‘No,’ he said.

By dawn the next day, there had been another death. A swine herder out beyond the crossroads had been killed in the night, and twenty of his saddlebacks along with him. Drusher went out into the sparse woodland with Skoh, Macks, Lussin and two of Skoh’s huntsmen.

The air was cold and ice-fog wrapped the hillside. It was ten below. At the swine farm, the bodies of hogs and hogherd alike had frozen into the mud of the pens, their copious blood making ruby-like crystals.

In the steep thorn scrub above the swine farm, Drusher stopped the group and handed out the cartridges he’d prepared the night before.

‘Load them into your shotguns,’ he said. ‘They won’t have much range, I’m afraid.’

Macks and Lussin had Arbites-issue riotguns. Skoh had made sure his men had brought short action pump-shots along with their heavy ordnance. Both huntsmen, like Skoh, were weighed down with torso rigs supporting massive autolasers.

‘What are these?’ Lussin asked.

Drusher broke a cartridge open to show them. Little chrome pellets were packed inside in a sticky fluid suspension.

‘Trackers,’ he said. ‘Miniature tracker units. They have a two thousand-kilometre range. I usually use them for ringing birds. In fact I plotted the migration patterns of the lesser beakspot and the frigate gull Tachybaptus maritimus over a three-year period using just these very–’

‘I’m sure you did a great job,’ snapped Macks. ‘But can we get on?’

Drusher nodded. ‘I’ve packed them in contact adhesive. If you see anything – anything – then you mark it.’

They made their way up the thorny scarp, and entered a stretch of black-birch woodland. Thanks to the fog, the world had become a shrunken, myopic place. Unaided visibility was twenty metres. Stark and twisted black trees hemmed them in, gradually receding into the white vapour. The earth was hard, and groundcover leaves were brittle with frost. The obscured sun backlit the fog, turning the sky into a glowing white haze. Skoh spread the group into a wide line, but still close enough for every person to be visible at least to his immediate neighbour. Drusher stayed with Macks. There was an uncanny stillness, broken only by the sounds of their breathing and movement.

Drusher was bone-cold. Macks, wearing a quilted Arbites jacket, had lent him her fox-fur jacket, which he wore over his own weathercoat. His breath clouded the air.

‘Do you have a weapon?’ she asked.

He shook his head.

She slid a short-pattern autopistol out of an underarm rig, checked the load, and handed it to him grip first.

He looked at it uncertainly, as if it were some new specimen for collation. It had a brushed-matt finish and a black, rubberised grip.

‘The safety’s here, beside the trigger guard. If you have to fire it, hold it with both hands, and aim low because the kick lifts it.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been a great one for guns.’

‘I’d feel better if you had something.’

‘You wouldn’t feel better if I shot you by accident, which is likely if you let me loose with something like that.’

She shrugged and put it away again.

‘Your funeral,’ she said.

‘I do hope not.’

They walked on another kilometre or two. Skoh and his hired hands had auspex units taped to their forearms, scanning for movement.

‘What was the time of death, do you reckon?’ Drusher asked.

Macks pursed her lips. ‘Four, four-thirty? The bodies had a residual core temperature.’

‘So three or four hours ago?’

The chance of anything still being around seemed very slim to Drusher. Given the Beast’s hit-and-run habits, it would be long gone by now. But the cold offered possibilities. It had set the soil hard and solid. Tracks might remain. Drusher kept his eyes on the ground.

They went across open fields, thick with rime, and along the basin of a wooded dell where the fallen leaves had frozen into a slippery mat. The fog was actually beginning to disperse, but down in the hollow it was as thick as smoke. Butcher birds, jet-black and armed with shiny hook-beaks, cawed, clacked and circled in the treetops.

Drusher suddenly heard an extraordinary noise. It sounded like an industrial riveter or a steam-powered loom. A puffing, pneumatic sputter interlaced with high-pitch squeals.

Macks started to run. Her vox-link crackled into life.

‘What is it?’ Drusher called, hurrying after her.

He heard the noise again, and made more sense of it. One of Skoh’s men had opened fire with his autolaser.

He scrambled through the frosty ground-brush, trying to keep up with Macks’ jogging as she slipped in and out of sight between the tree trunks. Twice, he went over on the frozen rug of leaves, scraping his palms.

‘Macks! What’s going on?’

More shooting. A second weapon joining the first. Stacatto puff-zwip-puff-zwip.

Then the dreadful, plangent boom of a shotgun.

Drusher almost ran into Macks. She had stopped in her tracks.

Ahead of them, in a narrow clearing between leafless tindletrees, Skoh lay on his back. It looked like his chest and groin was on fire, but Drusher realised it wasn’t smoke. It was steam, wafting up from wretched wounds that had all but eviscerated him. His heavy weapon and part of its gimbal-rig had been torn off and were lying on the other side of the clearing. Huge clouts of fused earth had been torn out of the ground and two small trees severed completely from the fury of his shooting.

‘Throne of Terra...’ Macks stammered.

Drusher felt oddly dislocated, as if it wasn’t actually happening. They walked together, slowly, towards the body of the hunter. He still had his pump-shot clamped in his hand. The end of the barrel was missing.

Macks suddenly swung left, her riotgun aimed. One of Skoh’s men stood on the other side of the clearing, half-hidden by a tree and only now visible to them. He wasn’t actually standing. His body was lodged upright by the tree itself. His head was bowed onto his chest, the angle of the tilt far, far greater than any spine should allow. Macks approached him tentatively, and reached out a hand. When she touched him, he sagged sideways and his head flopped further. Drusher saw that only the merest shred of skin kept it attached to the rest of the body.

Drusher was overcome with heaving retches, and he wobbled over to the thickets to throw up. Lussin and the other huntsman stumbled into the clearing while he was emptying his stomach.

‘Did you see anything?’ Macks barked at the other men.

‘I just heard the shooting,’ Lussin moaned. He couldn’t take his eyes from Skoh’s awfully exposed entrails.

‘That’s it, then,’ said the hunter. He leaned back against a tree trunk, and clutched his head in his hands. ‘Damn, that’s it then.’

‘It’s got to be close! Come on!’ Macks snapped.

‘And do what?’ the hunter asked. ‘Two of them, with auto-lasers, and they didn’t kill it.’ He nodded to Skoh’s body. ‘That’s my paycheque gone. All my dividends.’

‘Is that all you care about?’ Lussin asked.

‘No,’ said the hunter, ‘I care about living too.’ He took out a lho-stick, lit it, and sucked hard. ‘I told Skoh we’d wasted our time here. Stayed too long. He wouldn’t admit it. He said he couldn’t afford to cut our losses and leave. Screw it. Screw him.’

The hunter straightened up and dragged on his lho-stick again.

‘Good luck,’ he said and began to walk away.

‘Where the hell are you going?’ Macks demanded.

‘Where we should have gone weeks ago. As far away as possible.’

‘Come back!’ cried Lussin.

The hunter shook his head, and wandered away into the fog. Drusher never saw him again.

‘What do we do?’ Lussin asked Macks. She was prowling up and down, fists clenched. She growled something.

‘One of them got a round off, with a shotgun,’ Drusher said. His voice was hoarse from vomiting, and his mouth tasted foul.

‘You sure?’ Macks snapped.

‘I heard a shotgun,’ Drusher said.

‘I didn’t,’ said Macks.

‘I think I did... maybe…’ Lussin murmured softly, rubbing his eyes.

‘Get an auspex!’ Macks ordered. Drusher wasn’t sure who she was speaking to, but Lussin didn’t move. Reluctantly, Drusher approached Skoh’s body, trying not to look directly at it. He crouched down and started to peel away the tape that secured the compact scanner to Skoh’s left gauntlet.

Skoh opened his eyes and exhaled steam. Drusher screamed, and would have leapt back if the hunter’s left hand hadn’t grabbed his wrist.

‘Drusher...’

‘Oh no... oh no…’

The hand pulled him closer. He could smell the hot, metallic stink of blood.

‘Saw it…’

‘What?’

‘I... saw... it…’ Thin, watery blood leaked from Skoh’s mouth, and his breathing was ragged. His eyes were dull and filmy.

‘What did you see?’ asked Drusher.

‘You... were... right, Drusher... I... I did... know what... it was... suspected... didn’t want... didn’t want to say... cause a panic... and anyway... couldn’t be true... not here... couldn’t be here...’

‘What did you see?’ Drusher repeated.

‘All the things... I’ve tracked... tracked and caught in... in my life... for the Pits... you know I worked for the Pits...?’

‘Yes.’

‘Never seen one... before... but been told... about them... you don’t mess with... don’t mess with them... don’t care what the... the Pits would pay for one.’

‘What was it, Skoh?’

‘The Great... Great Devourer...’

‘Skoh?’

The hunter tried to turn his head to look at Drusher. A torrent of black blood gushed from his mouth and nostrils, and his eyes went blank.

Drusher tore the auspex from the dead man’s forearm, and got to his feet.

‘What did he say?’ Macks asked.

‘He was raving,’ said Drusher. ‘The pain had taken his senses away.’

He swept the auspex around, and tried to adjust its depth of field. He was getting a lot of nearby bounce from the trackers that had gone wide, and pelted the ferns and tree boles.

Two contacts showed at a greater range. Two of the glue-dipped teleplugs anchored to the hide of something moving north-west, just a kilometre and a half away.

‘Got anything?’

‘Yes. Come on.’

Macks was clearly considering taking one of the heavy auto-las weapons from the corpses, but that would mean touching them.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Lead on.’

‘Macks?’

‘Yes?’

‘Maybe I should borrow that handgun after all,’ Drusher said.

They hurried through the frozen woodland, following the steady returns of the auspex. The fog was burning off, and the heavy red sun was glowering down, casting a rosy tint across the iced wilderness.

When they paused for a moment to catch their breaths, Macks looked at the magos.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘I was just thinking...’

‘Thinking what?’

‘Skoh was looking for this thing for months. State of the art track-ware, qualified help. Not a sign. And then, today...’

‘He got unlucky. Damn, we all got unlucky.’

‘No,’ said Drusher. ‘If you were the beast... wouldn’t today be a good day to turn and take him out? It was his last serious try. He’s coming out with a magos biologis at his side, changing tactics. Using taggers.’

‘What are you saying, Drusher?’

Drusher shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s... convenient, I suppose. This thing is quick and sly enough to do its evil work and stay right out of harm’s way. By the time a killing is discovered, it’s long gone. Today, we had the best chance yet of catching it. And what does it do? It changes its habits entirely and turns on us.’

‘So?’ asked Lussin.

‘Almost like it knew. Almost like it was concerned that a magos biologis and an experienced tracker might have enough skill between them to pose a realistic threat.’

‘It’s just an animal. What did you call it? An apex predator.’

‘Maybe. But it’s what a man would do. A fugitive who’s evaded capture this long, but hears that the search for him has stepped up. He might decide the time was right to turn and fight.’

‘You talk like you know what this thing is, Drusher,’ said Macks.

‘I don’t. It doesn’t fit into any taxonomy I’ve studied. It doesn’t fit into any Imperial taxonomy either. Except maybe classified ones.’

‘What?’

‘Come on.’

Drusher stood up and hurried on through the copse.

The air-mill had been derelict for fifty years. Its weather boards had fallen away and the sails of its wind-rotor were flaking. The district had processed its flour here, before the cheaper mass-production plant had opened in Udar Town half a century ago.

Drusher, Macks and Lussin edged through the chokes of weed brush towards the rear of the ruin. The tracker tags had been stationary for half an hour.

Macks pushed the lap-frame door open with the snout of her riotgun. They slid inside. The interior space was a dingy cone of timber and beamed floors. The mill-gear ran down through the tower’s spine like the gears of a gigantic clock.

It smelled of mildew and rotting flour-dust. Drusher took out the pistol. He pointed upwards. Lussin, riotgun gripped tightly, edged up the open-framed steps to the second level.

Drusher heard something. A slither. A scurry.

He hung back against the wall. There was something up with the auspex. An interference pattern that was making the screen jump. As if an outside signal was chopping the scanner’s returns.

Macks circled wide, gun raised to aim at the roof. Lussin reached the head of the stairs and switched around, sweeping with his gun. Drusher tried to get the auspex to clear.

Lussin screamed, and his gun went off. There was a heavy, splintering sound as he fell backwards down the steps, his weapon discharging a second time.

He was dead. The front of his skull was peeled off, and blood squirted into the air.

Macks howled, and fired her riotgun into the ceiling, pumping the grip and blasting the rotten floorboards in a blizzard of wood splinters with each successive shot. Every muzzle-flash lit the mill room for a millisecond

Exploding wood away before it, the Beast smashed through the deck and came down at them.

It was a blur. Just a blur, moving faster than anything had a right to. Macks’ riotgun boomed again. The creature moved like smoke in a draught. Drusher had a fleeting glimpse of deep purple body plates, a snapping tail of gristly bone, forearm claws like harvest scythes. Macks screamed.

Drusher dropped the auspex, and fired his pistol.

The recoil almost broke his wrist. He yelped in pain and frustration, stung hard by the kick. Use both hands, she’d told him.

It turned from Macks, chittering, and bounded across the floor right at him.

It was beautiful. Perfect. An organic engine designed for one sole task: murder. The muscular power of the body, the counterweight tail; the scythe limbs, like a pair of swords. The inhuman hatred.

It had no eyes, at least none that he could see.

Hold the gun with both hands and aim low. That’s what she’d said. Because of the kick.

Drusher fired. The recoil slammed up his arms. If he’d hit anything, it wasn’t obvious. He fired again.

The Beast opened its mouth. Fifty-three centimetres of bite radius, teeth like thorns. The blade-limbs jerking back to kill him.

He fired again. And again. He saw at least one round flick away, deflected by the Beast’s bio-armour.

It was right on him.

And then it was thrown sideways against the wall.

It dropped, writhed, and rose again.

Drusher shot it in the head.

It lunged at him. A riotgun roared and blew it back. Bleeding from the forehead, Macks stepped up and fired blast after blast. She fired until the gun was empty, then took the pistol out of Drusher’s hands and emptied that into it too.

Ichor covered the walls. Frothy goo dribbled out of the Beast’s fractured bone armour.

‘What is it?’ Macks asked.

‘I believe,’ Drusher replied, ‘it’s called a hormagaunt.’

But Macks had passed out.

It took the better part of an hour for the relief team of Arbites to reach them from Udar Town. Drusher had made Macks comfortable by then, and dressed her wounds.

Pistol in hand, he’d carefully examined the beast. The goad-control was easy to find, implanted in the back of the eyeless head.

When Macks came round again, he showed her.

‘You need to deal with this.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘It means this abomination was brought here deliberately. It means that someone was controlling it, directing it in a rudimentary fashion.’

‘Really? Like who?’

‘I’d start by asking the bishop some questions, and his pet heavy, Gundax. I could be wrong, of course, because it’s not my field, but I think the bishop has a lot to gain from something that puts the fear of the God-Emperor into his flock. It steels the faith of a congregation to have something real to rally against.’

‘He did this on purpose?’

‘It’s just a theory. Someone did.’

Macks was quiet for a while. He could guess what she was thinking. There would be an investigation and an inquest. The Inquisition may have to be involved. Every aspect of life in the province would be scrutinised and pulled apart. It could take months. Drusher knew it meant he wouldn’t be leaving Outer Udar any time soon. As a chief witness, he’d be required to stay.

Outside, it had begun to sleet again.

‘You must be happy at least,’ murmured Macks. ‘That work of yours, your great taxonomy. It’s all done. You’ve finished.’

‘It was done before I even got here,’ said Drusher dryly. He nodded at the body of the beast. He’d covered it with a piece of sacking so he didn’t have to look at it any more. ‘That wasn’t part of my job. Just a curiosity.’

‘Oh well,’ she replied with a sigh.

He went to the mill door, and gazed out into the sleeting wilds. Ice pricked at his face. Gershom would be keeping him in its chilly grip a while longer yet.

‘Could I keep this jacket a little longer?’ he asked Macks, indicating the fur coat she’d lent him. ‘It’s going to be a cold winter.’

PLAYING PATIENCE

I

West of Urbitane, the slum-tracts begin, and one descends into a ragged wilderness of dispiriting ruins where the only signs of life are the armoured manses of the narcobarons, projecting like metal blisters above the endless rubble. This is a destitute realm, a great and shameful urban waste, stalked by the Pennyrakers and the Dolors and a myriad other gangs, where Imperial authority has only the most tenuous grip.

A foetid wind blows through the slum-tracts, exhaled like bad breath from the sumps and stacks of the massive city. This miasmal air whines through the rotting habitats and moans in the shadows.

And those shadows are permanent, for the flanks of Urbitane rise behind the tracts, eclipsing all daylight. Flecked with a billion lamps, the rockcrete stacks of the sweating hive city ascend into the roiling clouds like the angular shoulders of some behemoth emerging from chthonic depths, and soar as a sheer cliff above the slums that litter the lightless ground at its foot.

Sub-orbitals cross the murky sky, their trace-lights blinking like cursors on a dark screen. Occasionally, the slums tremble as a bulk-lifter passes particularly low overhead on its final approach into the canyons of the hive, the bass rumble of its engines shivering the air.

Where, in the west, the hive stacks come tumbling down to meet the slums, shelving like giant staircases in bad repair, there is a patched stonework tower that houses the Kindred Youth Scholam. It is a meagre place, supported by charitable works, teetering on the brink between city and slum. Humble, crumbling, it faces west, its many window-slits barred, for the safety of the pupils.

At the start of of the year 396 Imperial, there were, among the scholam’s many inhabitants, three sisters called Prudence, Providence and Patience.

The night I arrived on Sameter, the rigorists had locked Patience in the scholam’s oubliette.

II

Sameter is a dismal place, and its morose air matched our mood. A slovenly, declining agrochemical world in the heartlands of the Helican subsector, it had seen better days.

So had we. My companions and I were weary and dejected. Pain clung to us like a shroud, so tightly none of us could express our grief. It had been that way for six months, since Majeskus. The only thing that kept us together and moved us along was a basic desire for revenge.

We had been forced to make the voyage to Sameter aboard a privately hired transport. The Hinterlight was dry-docked for repairs half a subsector away, and its mistress, Cynia Preest, had pledged to rejoin us as soon as the work was done. But I knew she was rueing the day she had ever agreed to assist my mission. When I had last spoken with her, she had confided, bitterly, that another incident like Majeskus would surely make her break her compact with me and return to the life of a merchant rogue in the Grand Banks.

She blamed me. They all blamed me, and they were damn well right. I had underestimated Molotch. I had given him the opening. My blind confidence had led to the disaster. Throne, what a fool I had been! Molotch was the sort of enemy one should never underestimate. He was Cognitae, perhaps the brightest and best to emerge from that infernal institution, which took genius as a basic prerequisite.

Our lander skimmed down through the filthy air above the Urbitane isthmus, bumping in the crosswind chop, and cycled in towards one of the hive’s private landing gantries on the north side of the city. As the breaking jets fired, sudden, intense gravity hung upon us. Even inside my suspensor field, I felt its weight. I had linked one of my chair’s data cables to the lander’s systems, and so saw everything that the shuttered cabin denied my friends. The looming piles of the hive, the shelf-like stacks, each one kilometres wide, the bristling lights, the smog. Hive towers rose up, as vast and impassive as tombstones, etched with lit windows. Chimneys exhaled skeins of black smoke. The lower airways buzzed with small fliers and ornithopters, like gnats swarming up on a summer evening. There, the spires of the Ecclesiarch Basilica, gilded like a crown; beyond, the huge glass roofs of the Northern Commercia, so high that the clouds of a microclimate weather system had formed beneath their vault. There, the Inner Consul, the radiating rings of the transit system, the wrought-iron pavilions of the Agriculture Guild.

We touched down at sunset. Great, shimmering doughnuts of gas-flame were issuing from the promethium refineries along the isthmus, bellying up like small, fireball suns against the curdled brown undercast. The private landing gantry was high up in the twisted mass of the inner hive-towers. Leased by the local ordos to provide convenient access to the city, it was a creaking metal platform trembled by the wind shear. Even so, exhaust vapour from our dented, scabby lander pooled in an acrid haze inside the rusting safety basket of the pad. The lander, a gross-utility vehicle three hundred years old, reclined on its pneumatic landing claws like a tailless lizard. It had been painted red, a long time ago, but the colour was only a memory now. Steam hissed from the rapidly cooling hydraulics, and a disturbing quantity of lubricant and system fluid gushed out of its underside from joints and cracks and fissures.

Without asking, Kara Swole took hold of my chair’s handle, and pushed me out down the open ramp. I could have done it myself, but I sensed that Kara, like all of them, wanted something to do, just to keep busy. Harlon Nayl followed us out, and walked to the edge of the safety cage to stare out into the foggy depths of the hive.

Carl Thonius lingered in the hatchway, paying the pilot his fee and tip, and making arrangements for future services. Harlon and Kara were both dressed in bodygloves and heavy jackets, but Carl Thonius was, as ever, clad in exquisite, fashionable garments: buckled wedge shoes, black velvet pantaloons, a tailored jacket of grey damask tight around his thin ribs, a high collar tied with a silk bow and set with a golden pin. He was twenty-four years old, blond-haired, rather plain of face, but striking in his poise and manners.

I had thought him too much of a dandy when the ordos first submitted him as a possible interrogator, but had quickly realised that behind the foppish, mannered exterior lay a quite brilliant analytical mind. His rank marked him out amongst my retainers. The others – Nayl and Kara, for example – were individuals I hired because of their skills and talents. But Carl was an inquisitor in training. One day, he would aspire to the office and signet of the sublime ordos. His service to me, as interrogator, was his apprenticeship, and every inquisitor took on at least one interrogator, training them for the duty ahead. I had been Gregor Eisenhorn’s interrogator, and had learned an immeasurable amount from that great man. I had no doubt that, in a few years, Carl Thonius would be well on his way to that distinguished rank.

Of course, for reasons I could not have ever imagined, that would not be the case. Hindsight is a worthless toy.

Wystan Frauka emerged from the lander, lighting his latest lho-stick from the stub of the last. He had his limiter turned on, of course, and it would remain on until I told him otherwise. He looked bored, as usual, detached. He wandered over to where a servitor was unloading our luggage from the lander’s aft belly-hatch and looked for his belongings.

Harlon remained at the edge of the safety cage, deep in thought. A heavyset man, thick with corded muscle, his head shaved, he had a dominating presence. Born on Loki, he’d been a bounty hunter for many years before gaining employment with my mentor Eisenhorn because of his skills. I had inherited him, so to speak. There was no man I would rather have at my side in a fight. But I wondered if Harlon Nayl was at my side any more. Not since… the event. I’d heard him talk about ‘going back to the old game’, his defeated tone the same as Cynia Preest’s. If it came down to it, I would let him go.

But I would miss him.

Kara Swole trundled me over to the gantry edge until we were facing the safety basket too. We stared out across the city.

‘See anything you like?’ she asked. She was trying to be light and funny, but I could taste the pain in her voice.

‘We’ll find something here, I promise,’ I said, my voice synthesised, expressionless, through the mechanical vox-ponder built into my support chair. I hadn’t mind-talked to any of them for a long time, not since Majeskus, probably. I despised the voxponder’s menacing flatness, but telepathy seemed too intimate, too intrusive at a time when thoughts were raw and private.

‘We’ll find something here,’ I repeated. ‘Something worth finding.’

Kara managed a smile. It was the first I had seen her shape for months,and it warmed me briefly. She was trying. Kara Swole was a short, voluptuous redhead whose rounded build quite belied her acrobatic abilities. Like Harlon, I had inherited her from Eisenhorn. She was a true servant of the ordos, as hard as stone when she needed to be, but she possessed a gentleness as appealing and soft as her curves. For all her dexterity, her stealth, her confidence with weapons, I think it was that gentleness that I most valued her for.

Molotch had faded into the void after his crimes above Majeskus, leaving no trace. Sameter, benighted planet, offered us the vestige of a clue. Three of Molotch’s hired guns, three of the men we had slain in the battle on the Hinterlight, had proved, under forensic examination, to have come from Sameter. From this very place, Urbitane, the planet’s second city.

We would find their origins and their connections, and follow them through every tenuous twitch and turn, until we had Molotch’s scent again.

And then…

Carl had finished his transactions with the lander pilot. As I turned, I saw the pilot looking at me, staring at me the same way he and the other crew members had stared since they had first seen me come aboard. I didn’t have to reach out with my mind to understand his curiosity.

The wounds of Chaos had left me a mangled wreck, a disembodied soul locked forever within a grav-suspended, armoured support chair. I had no physical identity anymore. I was just a lump of floating metal, a mechanical container, inside which a fragment of organic material remained, kept vital and pulsing by complex bio-systems. I knew the very sight of me scared people, people like the pilot and the rest of his crew. I had no face to read, and people do so like a face.

I missed my face. I missed my limbs. Destiny had left me one virtue, my mind. Powerfully, alarmingly psychic, my mind was my one saving grace. It allowed me to carry on my work. It allowed me to transcend my pitiful state as a cripple in a metal box.

Molotch had a face. A handsome visor of flesh that was, in its way, as impassive as my sleek, matt-finished metal. The only expression it ever conveyed was a delight in cruelty. I would take great pleasure in burning it off his shattered skull.

‘Do we have the names and physiologues?’ I asked.

‘Nayl’s got them,’ Kara replied.

‘Harlon?’

He turned and walked over to join us, pulling a data-slate from the hip-pocket of his long, mesh-weave coat.

He flipped it on.

‘Victor Zhan. Noble Soto. Goodman Frell. Biogs, traces, taints and histories. All present and correct.’

‘Let’s do what we came here to do,’ I said.

III

Oubliette. A place where things or persons are put so that they may be forgotten about. Or, as Patience preferred to think, a place where one might sit awhile and forget.

The scholam’s oubliette was a cavity under the lower hall, fitted with a bolted hatch. There was no light, and vermin scuttled around in the wet shadows. It was the punishment place, the area where those pupils who had committed the worst infractions were sent by the rigorists. But it was also one of the few places in the Kindred Youth Scholam where a pupil could enjoy some kind of privacy.

According to its register, the scholam was home to nine hundred and seventy-six young people, most of them slum orphans. There were thirty-two tutors, all privately employed, and another forty servants and ancillary staff, including a dozen men, all ex-Guard, known as the rigorists, whose duties were security and discipline.

Life in the scholam was austere. The old tower, built centuries earlier for some purpose no one could now remember, was chilly and damp. The tower itself clung for support to the side of a neighbouring stack, like a climbing plant against a wall. The floors of its many storeys were cold ouslite dressed with rush-fibre, the walls lime-washed and prone to trickles of condensation. A murmur from the lower levels reminded the inhabitants that there was a furnace plant working down there, but it was the only clue, for no heat ever issued from the thumping pipework or the corroded radiators.

The regime was strict. An early rise, prayers, and an hour of ritual examination before breakfast, which was taken at sunrise. The morning was spent performing the many chores of the scholam – scrubbing floors, washing laundry, helping in the kitchen – and the afternoon was filled with academic classes. After supper, more prayers, ablutions in the freezing wash-house, and then two hours of liturgical study by lamplight.

Occasionally, trusted older pupils were allowed to accompany tutors out of the tower on trips into the nearby regions of the hive, to help carry purchased food stocks, fabrics, ink, oil and all the other sundry materials necessary to keep the scholam running. They were a distinctive sight in the busy streets of the western stacks: a grim, robed tutor leading a silent, obedient train of uniformed scholars, each one laden down by bundles, bales, bags and cartons. Every pupil wore a uniform, a unisex design in drab grey with the initials of the scholam stitched onto the back.

Few pupils ever complained about the slender comfort of their lives, because almost all of them had volunteered for it. Strict it might be, but life in the Kindred Youth Scholam was preferable to the alternative outside in the tracts. Existence in the wastelands west of the hive offered a lean choice: scavenge like an animal, or bond into a gang. Either way, life expectancy was miserably low. Municipally sponsored scholams, offering a bed, food and a basic education that emphasised the values of the Throne, represented an escape route. Reasonably healthy, lice-free, qualified youngsters could leave such institutions with a real prospect of securing an apprenticeship to one of the hive guilds, a journeyship, or at least a decent indenture.

Patience had been at the scholam for twelve years, which meant she was twenty-two or twenty-three years old and by far the oldest pupil registered at that time. Most pupils left the care of the charity around their majority, when their age gave them a legal identity in the eyes of the guilds. But Patience had stayed on because of her sisters. Twins, Providence and Prudence were fifteen, and Patience had promised them she would stay and look after them until they turned eighteen. It was a promise she’d made to her sisters, and to her dying mother, the day their mother had brought the three of them to the scholam and asked the tutors to take them in.

Patience was not her birth name, no more than Prudence’s was Prudence or Providence’s Providence. They were scholam names, given to each pupil at their induction, symbolic of the fresh start they were making.

Except for Patience, few pupils were made to suffer the oubliette. She had now been in there nineteen times.

On this occasion, she was in for breaking the nose of Tutor Abelard. She’d punched the odious creep for criticising her work in the laundry. The crack of cartilage and the puff of blood had been very satisfying.

Cooling down, in the dark, Patience recognised that it had been foolish to strike the tutor. Just another mark against her record. For this, she was missing the graduation supper taking place in the vaults many floors up. There was an event like it every few months, when distinguished men of consequence – guild masters, merchants, manufactory directors and mill owners – came to the scholam to meet and examine the older pupils, making selections from the best and contracting apprenticeships. By morning, Patience knew, many of her long-term friends would have left the scholam forever to begin new lives in the teeming stacks of Urbitane. The fact was, she’d been there too long. She was too old to be contained by the scholam, even by the hardline rigorists, and that was why she kept running into trouble. If it hadn’t been for her promise, and her two, beloved sisters, she’d have been apprenticed to a hive mill long since. Something bristly and locomoting on more than four legs scuttled across her bare hand. With a twitch of her gift, she hurled it away into the darkness.

Her gift. Only she had it. Her sisters showed no sign of it. Patience never used her gift in front of the tutors, and she was fairly certain they knew nothing about it.

It was a mind thing. She could move things by thinking about them. She’d discovered she could do it the day her mother left them at the scholam gates. Patience had been practising ever since.

In the dark of the black stone cell, Patience tried to picture her mother’s face, but couldn’t. She could remember a warm smell, slightly unwashed but reassuring, a strong embrace, a hacking cough that presaged mortality.

The face, though, the face…

It had been a long time. Unable to form the image in her head, Patience turned her mind to something else. Her name. Not Patience. Her real name. The tutors had tried to rid her of it, forcing her to change her identity, but she still hung on to it. It was the one private piece of her that nothing and no one could ever steal. Her true name.

It kept her alive. The very thought of it kept her going.

The irony was, she could leave the oubliette whenever she chose. A simple flick of her gift would throw back the bolt and allow her to lift the trapdoor. But that would give her away, convince the tutors she was abnormal.

Patience reined her mind in and sat still in the darkness. Someone was coming. Coming to let her out.

IV

Harlon Nayl’s eyes didn’t so much as blink as the fist came at him. His left hand went out, tilting inwards, captured the man’s arm neatly around the inside of the wrist, and wrenched it right around through two hundred degrees. A bone may have snapped, but if it did, the sound was masked by the man’s strangled squeal, a noise which ended suddenly as Nayl’s other hand connected with his face.

The man – a thickset lhotas-eater with a mucus problem – shivered the deck as he hit it. Nayl kept hold of his wrist, pulling the man’s arm straight and tight while he stood firmly on his armpit. This position allowed for significant leverage, and Nayl made use of it. Harlon was in a take-no-prisoners mood, I sensed, which was hardly useful given our objective.

A little leverage and rotation. A ghastly scream, vocalised through a face spattered with blood.

‘What do you reckon?’ asked Nayl, twisting a little more and increasing the pitch. ‘Do you think I can get top C out of him?’

‘Should I care?’ replied Morpal Who Moves with mannered disinterest. ‘You can twist Manx’s arm right off and beat him around the head with it, he still won’t tell you what you want. He’s a lho-brow. He knows nothing.’

Nayl smiled, twisted, got another shriek. ‘Of course he is. I worked that much out from his scintillating conversation. But one of you does. One of you knows the answer I want. Sooner or later his screams will aggravate you so much you’ll tell me.’

Morpal Who Moves had a face like a crushed walnut. He sat back in his satin-upholstered buoy-chair and fiddled with a golden rind-shriver, a delicate tool that glittered between his bony fingers. He was weighing up what to say. I could read the alternatives in his forebrain like the label on a jar.

‘This is not good for business–’

‘Sir, this is my place of business, and I don’t take kindly to–’

‘Throne of Earth, who the frig d’you think you are–’

Morpal’s place was a four-hectare loading dock of iron, stock-brick and timber hinged out over the vast canyon gulf of the West Descent, an aerial thoroughfare formed by the gap between two of the hive’s most colossal stacks. Beneath the reinforced platform and the gothic buttresses that supported it, space dropped away for almost a vertical kilometre to the base of the stacks. Ostensibly, this was a ledge where cargo-flitters and load-transporters – and many thousands of these craft plied the airways of the West Descent – could drop in for repairs, fuel, or whatever else the pilots needed. But Morpal was a fence and racketeer, and the transience of the dock’s traffic gave him ample opportunity to steal, replace, backhand, smuggle and otherwise run his lucrative trade. More than twenty men stood in a loose group around Harlon. Most were stevedores and dock labourers in Morpal’s employ. The others were flit-pilots, gig-men, hoy-drivers and riggers who’d stopped in for caffeine, fuel and a game of cards, many of them regulars who were into Morpal for more than a year’s salary each.

All this and more was visible from their collective thoughts, which swirled around the loading dock like a fog. I was five kilometres away, in a room in a low-rent hotel. But it was all clear enough. I knew what Mingus Futir had eaten for breakfast, what Fancyman D’cree had stolen the night before, the lie Gert Gerity had told his wife. I knew all about the thing Erik Klass didn’t want to tell Morpal.

Wystan Frauka sat beside me, smoking a lho-stick, his limiter activated. He was reading a tremendously tedious erotic novel on his slate.

Surface was easy. Deep mind was harder. Morpal Who Moves and his cronies were well-used to concealing their secrets.

That was why Harlon had gone in first.

Morpal finally arrived at a decision. He had determined, I sensed, to take the moral high ground.

‘This is not how things are done on my platform,’ he told Harlon. ‘This is a respectable establishment.’

‘Yeah, right,’ snorted Nayl. ‘One last time. What can you tell me about Victor Zhan? He worked here once, before he went off-planet. I know he worked here, because I had the records checked out. So tell me about Victor.’

‘Victor Zahn hasn’t been around in five years,’ Morpal said.

‘Tell me about him anyway,’ Nayl snapped.

‘I really don’t see any reason to do that.’

‘I’ll show you one.’ Nayl reached his free hand into his hip pocket, took something out and threw it down onto the cup-ringed, grimy tabletop. His badge of authority. The signet crest of the Inquisition.

Immediately, all the men took a step back, alarmed. I felt Morpal’s mind start in dismay. This was the kind of trouble no one wanted.

Unless…

‘Damn it,’ I said.

Frauka looked up from the midst of his book’s latest loveless tryst. ‘What’s up?’

‘Morpal Who Moves is about to make a miscalculation.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Frauka, and turned back to his novel.

Morpal had run the dock for forty-six years. For all his misdeeds and misdemeanours, some of them serious, he’d never run foul of the law, apart from the odd fine or reprimand. He actually thought he could deal with this and get away with it.

+Harlon. Morpal’s signal will be a double finger-click. Your immediate threat is the grey-haired gig-man to your left, who has a dart-knife. To his right, in the leather apron, the rigger has a pivot-gun, but he will not be able to draw it as fast. The flit-pilot in green wants to prove himself to Morpal, and he won’t hesitate. His friend, the one with the obscura-tinted eyes, is less confident, but he has a boomgun in his cab.+

‘Well?’ Harlon Nayl asked.

Morpal Who Moves clicked both middle fingers.

I flinched at the sudden flare of adrenaline and aggression. A great part of it came from Nayl.

The rigger in the leather apron had drawn his pivot-gun, but Nayl had already stoved the table in with the face of the grey-haired gig-man and relieved him of his dart-knife. Nayl threw himself around as the pilot in green lunged forwards, and slam-kicked him in the throat. The pilot went down, choking, his larynx crushed, as the pivot-gun finally boomed. The home-made round whipped high over Nayl’s head as he rolled and triggered the dart-knife. The spring-propelled blade speared the rigger through the centre of his leather apron, and he fell over on his back, clawing at his belly. Others ploughed in, one striking Nayl in the ribs with an eight wrench. ‘Ow!’ Nayl grunted, and laid the man out. The obscura fiend was running across the platform towards his hoy. Nayl threw another man aside, and grabbed the edges of Morpal’s buoy-chair. The Mover yelled in dismay as Nayl slung the frictionless chair sideways. It sped across the platform like a quoit, knocking two of the stevedores over, and slammed hard against the dock’s restraining rail. The serious impact dazed Morpal. He slumped forwards.

Nayl backfisted a man in the nose, and then punched out another who was trying to flee anyway. Two front teeth flew into the air. The obscura fiend had his hoy’s door open, reaching in.

A stevedore with a hatchet swung at Nayl, forcing him to jump back. Nayl blocked the next swing with his forearm, fractured the man’s sternum with a jab, and threw him with a crash into the nearby row of porcelain samovars.

The obscura addict turned from his cab and racked the grip of his boomgun. He brought it up to fire.

Nayl slid the Hecuter 10 from his bodyglove, and calmly shot him through the head at fifteen metres.

Blood splashed up the rusted fender of the hoy. The man cannoned backwards, dropping the boomgun from dead fingers.

The rest of them scattered.

Kara ran onto the platform, her weapon raised. It had taken her just thirty seconds to move out of cover at my command to back up Nayl, but the fight was already done.

‘Don’t leave any for me, then,’ she complained.

‘You should have been here,’ Nayl said. He walked over to the rig, and picked up the fallen boomgun, examining it.

‘Nice,’ he said.

+Harlon…+

Nayl looked over at Morpal, who was just coming round, the back of his buoy-chair rammed against the platform’s rail. He saw Nayl, saw him aiming the weapon…

+Harlon! No!+

But Nayl’s blood was up. The need for vengeance, suppressed for so long, was finally finding an outlet.

Nayl fired. Morpal had ducked. The shot exploded the seat-back above him, and the rail behind. The force of the impact drove the buoy-chair backwards.

Intact, unscathed, but still sitting in his chair, Morpal Who Moves went backwards, toppled, and fell into the inter-stack gulf.

‘Well, damn,’ Nayl hissed.

+For Throne’s sake, Nayl! I told you not to–+

Thonius had just walked into the hotel room behind me.

‘Good book?’ he asked Frauka.

‘Saucy,’ Frauka replied, not looking up.

+Nayl’s just ruined our lead.+

‘Never mind,’ Thonius grinned, a smug satisfaction on his face. ‘It was pointless anyway. I’ve found a much better one.’

V

She knew for certain it was Rigorist Knill even before he opened the oubliette hatch. Just part of her gift, the same thing that allowed her to win at cards or guess which hand a coin was in.

‘Come, you,’ he said. A glow-globe coded to Knill’s bio-trace bobbed at his shoulder, and cast its cheap yellow light into the cell.

Patience got up and stepped out into the hallway, making a big show of dusting down her garments.

‘They’ll be dirtier yet,’ Knill remarked, closing the heavy, black iron door. ‘The dinner’s over, and the Prefect wants the pots doing.’ Knill chuckled and pushed her down the hallway. The glow-globe followed obediently.

There was little to like about Rigorist Knill. In his days as an Imperial Guardsman, he had been big and powerful, but age and a lack of exercise had sunk his muscles into slabby fat, hunching him over. His teeth were black pegs, and a scarred, concave section of his skull explained both the end of his soldiering career and his simpleton’s nature. Knill was proud of his past, and still wore his medal on his chest. He liked to regale the pupils with accounts of the glorious actions he had seen, and got angry when they mocked him and pointed out inconsistencies in his stories. But he wasn’t the worst by a long way. Skinny Rigorist Souzerin had such a short temper and love of the flail that the pupils believed he had once been a commissar. Rigorist Ocwell was rather too fond of the younger girls. And then there was Rigorist Ide, of course.

‘So I’m to wash pots?’ Patience asked.

‘Get on,’ Knill grumbled, and gave her a cuff. Like all the rigorists, Knill wore a knotted leather flail and a longer wooden baton suspended from his wide leather belt. The flail was for minor punishments, the baton a more serious disciplinary tool. Knill, who trusted his fists, seldom used either. Many of Prefect Cyrus’ long morning sermons revolved around the symbology of the rigorists’ twin instruments, likening them to the paired heads of the holy aquila, voices of different pitch and measure through which the dogmas of the Golden Throne might be communicated in complementary ways. In the Kindred Youth Scholam, most lessons seemed to require some corporal component.

They ascended the draughty stone stairs, and passed through the unlit lesson halls of the seventh remove. The narrow hallways between classrooms were formed by partly glazed wooden partitions. The glass in the frames was stained the colour of tobacco by the passage of the years.

Then Knill unlocked the door to the next ascent.

‘I thought I was wanted for scullion duties,’ Patience said.

‘The Prefect would clap eyes on you first,’ replied Knill, and jerked his head upwards.

Patience sighed, and began to trudge up the winding stairs ahead of Knill’s light. She knew what that meant. A quiz from the Prefect on the error of her ways. If she was lucky, she’d get away with an apology to Tutor Abelard, and a few Lachrymose Mea in the chapel under the Prefect’s instruction before she spent the night in the potroom, freezing her hands in the greasy sop-tubs.

If she was unlucky, there would be Souzerin and his flail. Or Ide.

It took them over twenty minutes to climb the meandering tower to the upper vaults. In the main chamber there, servants and a few chosen pupils were clearing the last dregs of the feast. The air was still warm, and scented with rich cooking smells. Prefect Cyrus did not stint when important visitors came to the scholam. He even provided wine and amasec, and did not complain when manufactory directors lit up pipes and lho-sticks. Patience could smell the spicy smoke lingering in the long room. Two young pupils from the sixth remove were team-folding the white cloths from the feast tables. A tutor, Runciman, was supervising them, and explaining the geometry of the correct fold-angles.

‘Wait,’ Knill told her, and left her in the doorway. He shambled off down the length of the long, beamed hall, his light tagging along after him like a willowisp. Patience waited, edgy, arms folded. Three young children ran out past her, their arms full of candlesticks, napkin rings threaded around their tiny wrists. One glanced up at her, eyes wide.

Knill reached the far end of the room. Prefect Cyrus was sitting at the high table still, a swell-glass in his hand, talking quietly with a stranger in a dark red robe. One of the night’s visitors, a guilder or a mill owner perhaps. Clearly a man of wealth and breeding, well-groomed. He was listening to the Prefect intently, sipping something from a tall crystal beaker. To his left, apart from the conversation, sat another man, another stranger. This man was short, but powerfully made, his cropped hair ginger in the lamplight, his bodyglove traced with silver. He was smoking a lho-stick, and gazing with half-interest at the ancient, flaking murals on the chamber walls. From her vantage point, Patience could see that the ginger-haired man wore an empty holster on his hip. Prefect Cyrus did not permit firearms inside the scholam, but that holster suggested the ginger-haired man was a bodyguard, a paid protector. The man in red was evidently even more important than she had first suspected, if he could afford his own muscle.

Then Patience saw Ide. The rigorist was standing at the far end of the chamber, waiting. He was staring right at her. She shuddered. Tall, strong, Ide was a brute. His eyes were always half-open, and he wore his white-blond hair in a long, shaggy mane, secured at the nape by a silver buckle. Ide was the only rigorist who never bragged about his Guard days. Patience had a nasty idea why.

Knill spoke briefly to the Prefect, who excused himself to the man in red, and walked down to the centre of the hall, Knill at his heels. The Prefect gestured that Patience should come join him. She approached obediently, until they were face-to-face.

Prefect Cyrus was anything between forty and four hundred. Slim and well made, he had undergone many programmes of juvenat work, making his flesh over-tight and his skin hideously smooth and pink. His eyes were violet and, Patience believed, deliberately sculpted by the augchemists to appear kind and fatherly. His blue robes were perfectly pressed and starched. When he smiled, his implanted teeth were as white as ice.

He was smiling now.

‘Patience,’ he whispered. She could smell the oil of cloves he wore to scent his body.

‘My Prefect,’ she answered with effort.

‘You flinch. Why do you flinch?’

She could not say it was because Rigorist Ide had just taken the first few steps on his way to join them. ‘I broke the rules, and committed an affront to the person of Tutor Abelard. I flinch as I await my punishment.’

‘Patience,’ the Prefect said. ‘Your punishment is over. You’ve been set in the oubliette, have you not?’ He looked around at Knill. ‘She has been in the oubliette all night, hasn’t she, Knill?’

‘That is so, Prefect,’ replied Knill with a nod.

‘All done, then. No need to flinch.’

‘Then why am I here?’ Patience asked.

‘I have good news,’ the prefect said, ‘and I wanted to share it with you as soon as possible. Good, good news, that I’m sure will lift your heart as surely as it has lifted mine.’

‘What is it?’

‘Patience, places have been secured this night for your dear sisters. Serving in the hall this evening, they so won the admiration of a merchant lord, one of our guests, he offered them indenture on the spot.’

Patience blinked. ‘My sisters?’

‘Have taken wing at last, Patience. Their particulars are all signed and contracted. Their new life has already begun.’

‘No. That’s not right,’ Patience said sharply. ‘They’re too young. They haven’t yet reached maturity. I won’t allow it.’

‘It is already done,’ the Prefect said, his face showing no sign of annoyance.

‘Then undo it,’ Patience said. ‘Right now! Undo it! I should’ve been consulted! They are in my charge!’

‘Patience, you were detained in the oubliette, for your own wrongdoings. I decided the matter. Your sisters are long departed, and I trust you will wish them well in your prayers this night.’

‘No!’ she shouted.

‘Shut your hole!’ warned Knill, stepping forwards, his light bobbing after him.

‘No need for that, Knill,’ said Cyrus. The Prefect gazed at Patience. ‘I am rather surprised by your response, Patience. I had thought you would be pleased.’

She glowered at him. ‘You cheated me. You knew I wasn’t around to object. This is wrong! They are too young–’

‘I tire of this, Patience. There is no rule or law that says girls of your sisters’ age may not be contracted. Such an agreement is in my power.’

‘It isn’t! You can only authorise a contract of employ in the case of an orphan lacking the appropriate blood-kin! That’s the law! I’ve only stayed here this long to supervise their well-being! You bastard!’

‘Take her away, Knill,’ said the Prefect.

‘Don’t even think about it, Knill,’ Patience warned. ‘I want his name, Cyrus. The name of this man who has taken my sisters.’

‘Oh, and for what good?’

‘I am of majority. I can leave this stinking tower whenever I choose. Give me the name… now! I will find him and secure the release of my sisters!’

Prefect Cyrus turned to Knill. ‘Another period in the oubliette, I feel.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Patience, backing away. ‘You can’t touch me now. Not now. I’ve stuck by the scholam’s frigging rules this long, one way or another, for the good of my sisters, but you have no hold on me! I am an adult, with the rights of an adult! Go frig yourself, Cyrus, I’m leaving!’

‘Double the period for that vile language!’ Cyrus barked.

‘Double this, stink-breath!’ Patience cried, making a gesture one of the pot-boys had taught her.

Knill lunged at her, arms wide. She ducked sideways, putting a little of her gift into the kick she slammed at the old soldier’s belly. Knill lurched away and crashed into a table, knocking pewterware onto the floor, anxiously steadying himself against the table’s edge in surprise.

Somehow, Ide had got behind her. The blow from his baton, swung two-handed, caught her across the back of the skull and dropped her to her hands and knees. Patience blacked out for a brief moment, and blood streamed down her nose onto the flagstones. She felt Ide’s big hand crush her left shoulder as it grabbed her.

‘Never did live up to your name,’ she heard Ide murmur.

Her name. Her name. Not Patience. The one little piece of her life she still owned entirely.

Ide was swinging the baton down again to smack her shoulders. She froze his hand. Ide gasped, sweating, terrified, as an invisible force slowly pulled his powerful arm back and drew the baton away from her. She let it smash Ide in the face.

He staggered back with an anguished cry, blood spurting from his mangled nose. Then she was on her feet, flicking her head back hard so that the blood from her nose spattered out in a shower. Knill was coming for her. So was the Prefect. Someone was crying an alarm.

Patience looked at Knill, and he flew backwards through the air, slamming into the table again so hard it went over with him. She looked at Cyrus, and snarled as she simultaneously burst all the blood-vessels in his face. He fell down on his knees, whimpering.

‘You bastards!’ she was screaming. ‘My sisters, you bastards!’

Ide swung at her again. He was crazy-mad now, trying to kill her. Patience held out a hand, and Ide went sprawling over on his back… and continued to slide down the length of the hallway until his skull crashed into the stone doorpost.

Rigorist Souzerin had appeared from somewhere, his flail raised as he ran at her. Knill was clambering to his feet.

Patience ducked Souzerin’s first slash, then hurled him backwards a few steps with a twitch of her mind. She was getting tired now. Knill thundered forwards.

‘I’ll take that,’ Patience said, and ripped the medal from Knill’s tunic with a mental flick. She slapped her outspread palms against Knill’s dented skull and blasted him away into the murals. The ancient plasterwork cracked under the heavy impact, and Knill fell limp onto the floor. Souzerin came in again. Knill’s medal was still hanging in the air.

Patience whipped it around and buried it in Souzerin’s cheek. He fell down with a wail of pain, blood pouring from the long gouge.

‘I’ve seen enough,’ said the man in the red robe.

The ginger-haired man rose to his feet and turned off his limiter.

Patience shrieked as her gift went away completely. It was as if her strength had been shut off. A hard vacuum formed and popped in her soul. She had never met an untouchable before.

Staggering, she turned. The ginger-haired man came towards her, his hands open and loose.

‘Let’s go, darling,’ he said.

She threw a punch at him. She felt so weak.

He caught it, and hit her in the face.

The blow seemed effortless, but she fell hard, barely conscious. The ginger-haired man leaned over and pinched a nerve point that left her paralysed.

Blind, helpless, she heard Prefect Cyrus being helped back onto his feet.

‘You were right, Cyrus,’ she heard the man in red say. ‘An excellent subject. An unformed telekine. The gamers will pay well for this. I have no objection to meeting your price of ten thousand.’

‘Agreed, Loketter,’ the Prefect sniffed. ‘Just… just get her out of my sight.’

VI

Carl Thonius was patently pleased with himself. ‘Consider the names again. Victor Zhan. Noble Soto. Goodman Frell. The forenames are all names, yes, but they’re also all simple, virtuous. The sort of solid, strong, aspirational names a highborn master, for example, might give to his slaves.’

‘These men were slaves?’ Kara asked.

‘Not exactly,’ said Carl. ‘But I think they’re all given names. Not birth names.’

Carl had a particular talent in the use of cogitators and logic engines. Since our arrival, he had spent many hours in the census archives of Urbitane. ‘I’ve been tracing the file records of all three men. It’s laborious work, and the records are, no tittering at the back, incomplete. The names are officially logged and genuine, but they are not connected to any local bloodlines. Soto, Zhan and Frell are all common names here on Sameter, but there is no link between any of these men and any family or families carrying those names. In other words, I believe they chose the surnames themselves. They chose common local surnames.’

‘Fake identities,’ Nayl shrugged. ‘Not much of a lead then.’

‘Says the man who pushed our last decent lead off a kilometre-high ledge,’ Carl mocked. Nayl gave him a threatening look, and the interrogator shrugged.

‘No, not fake identities. The evidence points to the fact that all three men were orphans, probably from the slums. They were raised in a poorhouse or maybe a charitable institution, where they were given their virtuous forenames. On leaving the poorhouse, as young adults, they were obliged to choose and adopt surnames so that they could be registered on the citizenry roll and be legally recognised.’

‘Odd that he employed three men with the same background,’ Kara said. She could not bring herself to utter Molotch’s name.

‘Curious indeed,’ I agreed. ‘Carl, I don’t suppose you managed to identify the institutions that raised them?’

‘Throne, you don’t want much do you?’ Carl laughed. He beamed, like a conjuror showing off a sleight-of-hand marvel. ‘Of course I did. And they all came from the same one. A darling little place called the Kindred Youth Scholam.’

Nayl left the hotel room almost immediately, and headed off to scare up some transport for us. For the first time in months, I felt my team moving with a sense of focus, so refreshingly different from the blunt-edged vengeance that had spurred them since Majeskus. Carl deserved praise. He had diligently uncovered a trail that gave us refined purpose once again.

We had been so squarely and murderously outplayed by the heretic Zygmunt Molotch. I had been pursuing him for a long time, but at Majeskus, he stopped running and turned to face me.

The ensuing clash, most of which took place aboard my chartered starship, the Hinterlight, left over half the crew dead. Among them, trapped by Molotch’s malicious evil, were three of my oldest, most trusted retainers: Will Tallowhand, Norah Santjack and Eleena Koi. Badged with their blood, triumphant, the bastard Molotch had escaped.

I had lost friends before. We all had. Serving the ordos of the Holy Inquisition was a dangerous and often violent calling. I myself, more than most, can vouch for the cost to life and limb.

But Majeskus was a particularly searing blow. Molotch’s assault had been ingeniously vicious and astoundingly callous, even by the standards of such vermin. It was as if he had a special genius for spite. I had vowed not to rest until I had found him again and exacted retribution in full.

In truth, when I came to Sameter, I do not think I was an Imperial inquisitor at all. I am not ashamed to admit that for a brief while, my duty to the God-Emperor had retreated somewhat, replaced by a more personal fire. I was Gideon Ravenor, burning to avenge his friends.

The same, I knew, was true of my four companions. Harlon and Kara had known Eleena Koi since their days together in the employ of my former master Eisenhorn. Harlon had also formed a particular bond of friendship with the mercurial Will Tallowhand. In Norah Santjack, Thonius had enjoyed the stimulating company of a mind as quick and clever as his own. There would be no more devilish games of regicide, no more late-night debates on the respective merits of the later Helican poets. And Thonius was yet young. These were the first comrades he had lost in the line of duty.

Even Wystan Frauka was in mourning. Louche and taciturn, Frauka was an unloved, unlovely man who made no friends because of his untouchable curse. But Eleena Koi had been an untouchable too, one of nature’s rare psychic blanks and the last of Eisenhorn’s Distaff.

There had been a relationship there, one neither of them ever chose to disclose, presumably a mutual need created by their shared status as outsiders, pariahs. He missed her. In the weeks after Majeskus, he said less than usual, and smoked all the time, gazing into distances and shadows.

Aboard the hired transport – a small, grey cargo-gig with whistling fan-cell engines – we moved west through the hive city. Carl linked his data-slate to my chair’s input, and I reviewed his information concerning the scholam.

It had been running for many years, ostensibly a worthy charity school struggling to provide housing and basic levels of education for the most neglected section of Urbitane’s demographic. There were millions, nay billions, of institutions like it all across the Imperium, wherever hives rose and gross poverty loomed. Many were run by the Ecclesiarchy, or tied to some scheme of work by the Departmento Munitorum or the Imperial Guard itself. Some were missionary endeavours established by zealous social reformers, some political initiatives, some just good, four-square community efforts to assist the downtrodden and underprivileged.

And some were none of those things. Carl and I inspected the records of the Kindred Youth Scholam carefully. On the surface, it was respectable enough. Its register audits were a matter of public record, and it applied for and received the right grants and welfare support annually, which meant that the Administratum subjected it to regular inspection. It was approved by the Munitorum, and held all the appropriate stamps and marques of a legitimate charitable institution. It had an impressive portfolio of recommendations and references from many of Urbitane’s worthies and nobles. It had even won several rosettes of distinction from the Missionaria.

But scratch any surface…

‘You’ll like this,’ said Carl. ‘The Prefect, he’s one Berto Cyrus. His official file is spotless and perfectly in order. But I think it’s a graft.’

A graft. A legitimate dossier that has been expertly designed to overfit previous records and eclipse them. Done well – and this had been done brilliantly – a graft would be more than adequate to bypass the Administratum. But we servants of the Holy Ordos had greater and more refined tools of scrutiny to bring to bear. Carl showed me the loose ends and rough edges that had been tucked away to conceal the basic deception, the long, tortuous strands of inconsistency that no one but the Inquisition would ever think to check, for the effort would be too labour-intensive. That was ever the failing of the Imperium’s monumental Administratum. Overseeing hives the size of Urbitane, even an efficient and ordered division of the Administratum could only hope to keep up with day-to-day processing. There was no time for deeper insight. If one wanted to hide something from the Imperial Administratum, one simply had to place it at the end of a long line of diversions and feints, so far removed from basic inspections that no Administry clerk would ever notice it.

‘He’s older than he pretends to be,’ said Carl. ‘Far older. Here’s the give away. Three digits different in his twelve-digit citizenry numeric, but changed here, at birth-registry date, where no one would ever go back to look. Berto Cyrus was actually a stillborn infant. The Prefect took over the identity.’

‘Which makes him?’

‘Which makes him eighty-eight years older than his record states. And therefore makes him, in fact, Ludovic Kyro, a Cognitae-schooled heretic wanted on five worlds.’

‘Cognitae? Throne of Earth!’

‘I said you’d like it,’ Carl smiled, ‘and here’s the other thing. Its implications are not very pleasant.’

‘Go on.’

‘Given the scholam’s throughput of pupils over the years, very, very few are still evident in the city records.’

‘They’ve disappeared?’

‘That’s too strong a word. Not accounted for would be a better term. The ex-pupils have dropped off the record after their time at the scholam, so there’s no reason anyone scrutinising the school’s register in an official capacity should question it. Pupils leave, sign up indentures, contracts, hold-employs, but then these documents lead nowhere.’

‘From which you deduce what?’ I asked, though I could see Carl had the answer ready in the front of his mind.

‘The scholam is a front. It’s… laundering children and young adults. Raising them, training them, nurturing them, and then moving them as a commodity into other hands. The fact that the pupils are known only by their scholam names means that they can be slipped away unnoticed. It’s quite brilliant.’

‘Because they take in anonymous children, give them new identities to provide them with legal status, and then sell them on under cover of perfectly correct and perfectly untraceable paperwork?’

‘Just so,’ said Carl.

‘What do they do with them?’ I wondered.

‘Whatever they like, would be my guess,’ said Wystan, glancing up from his tawdry book. I hadn’t even realised he’d been listening. ‘Those three we’re tracking, they ended up as hired guns, probably because they were handy in that regard. Strong guys get muscle work. Pretty girls…’

‘Whatever else we do,’ I said, ‘we’re closing that place down.’

VII

The cell was a metal box and smelled of piss. The ginger-haired man opened the hatch and dragged Patience out. She tried to resist, but her limbs were weak and her mind muddy. The ginger-haired man still had his limiter off.

His name was DaRolle, that much she had learned, and he worked for a man called Loketter.

‘On your feet, darling,’ DaRolle said. ‘They’re waiting for you.’ He prodded her along the dim hallway. Patience didn’t know where she was, but she knew it was at least a day since she had been taken from the scholam by these men.

‘It’s Patience, right?’ the ginger-haired man said. ‘Your trophy name?’

‘My what?’

‘Trophy name. The scholam gives you all trophy names, ready for the game. And yours is Patience, isn’t it?’

‘Where are my sisters?’ she asked.

‘Forget you ever had any.’

Loketter, the man in red, was waiting for them in a richly appointed salon at the end of the hallway. There were other men with him, all distinguished older males just like him, sitting around on couches and buoy-chairs, smoking lho and sipping amasec. Patience had seen their type so many times before at graduation suppers. Men of wealth and status – mill owners and merchants, shipmasters and guilders – and Patience had dreamed of the day when one of them would select her for service, employment, a future.

How hollow that seemed now. For all their grooming, for all their fine clothes and fancy manners, these men were predators. The scholam which she had trusted for so long had simply been their feeding ground.

‘Here she is,’ smiled Loketter. The men applauded lazily.

‘Still in her scholam clothes,’ a fat man in green said with relish. ‘A nice touch, Loketter.’

‘I know you like them fresh, Boroth. Her name is Patience, and she is a telekine. I’m not sure if she realises she is a telekine, actually. Do you, my dear? Do you know what you are?’

Loketter addressed the last part of his question at her. Patience flushed.

‘I know what I am,’ she said.

‘And what is that?’

‘Trapped amongst a bunch of perverts,’ she said.

The men laughed.

‘Oh, such spirit!’ said Boroth.

‘And pretty green eyes too!’ said another man, swathed in orange furs.

‘The wager is seven thousand crowns per half hour of survival,’ Loketter announced.

‘Very high,’ said the man in furs. ‘What is the area, and the jeopardy?’

‘Low Tenalt,’ replied Loketter, and several of the men laughed.

‘Low Tenalt,’ Loketter repeated. ‘And the jeopardy is the Dolors. Although, if she’s nimble, she might make it to Pennyraker territory, in which case the wager increases by another hundred and fifty.’

‘How many pawns?’ asked a tall, bearded man in a selpic blue doublet. ‘Standard rules, Vevian. One per player. Open choice. Body weapons only, although I’ll allow a gun per pawn for jeopardy work. Guns are not to be used for taking the quarry, as I have no need to remind you. Gunshot death or disintegration voids the game and the pot goes to the house.’

‘Observation?’ asked a thin man in grey robes.

‘Servo-skull picter, as standard. House will supply eight. You’ll each be allowed two of your own.’

‘Will she be armed?’ Boroth asked.

‘I don’t know. Would you care to choose a weapon?’ Loketter asked Patience.

‘What is the game?’ she replied. More laughter.

‘Life, of course,’ Loketter said. ‘A weapon, Patience? DaRolle, show her.’

The ginger-haired man walked over to a varnished hardwood case set on a side table, opened it, and revealed the numerous polished blades and exotic killing devices laid out on the velvet cushion.

‘Choose, darling,’ he said.

Patience shook her head. ‘I’m not a fighter. Not a killer.’

‘Darling, if you’re going to live for even ten minutes, you’ll have to be both.’

‘I refuse,’ said Patience. ‘Frig you very much, “darling”.’

DaRolle tutted and closed the case.

‘Unarmed?’ Boroth said. ‘I’ll take the wager, Loketter. In fact, I’ll double you.’

‘Fourteen taken and offered,’ Loketter announced. ‘Taken,’ said a man in pink suede.

‘I’m in,’ said the bearded man Loketter had called Vevian.

Four of the others agreed too, opening money belts and casket bands, and tossing piles of cash on the low, dished table at Loketter’s feet. In ten seconds there was a thousand times more money in that baize bowl than Patience had ever even imagined.

‘Begin,’ Loketter said, rising to his feet. ‘Pawns to the outer door for inspection and preparation. Drones will be scanned prior to release. I know your tricks, Boroth.’

Boroth chuckled and waved a pudgy hand.

‘The game will commence in thirty minutes.’ Loketter walked over to face Patience. ‘I have great faith in your abilities, Patience. Don’t let me down. Don’t lose me money.’

She spat in his face.

Loketter smiled. ‘That’s exactly what I was looking for. DaRolle?’

The ginger-haired man grabbed Patience by the arms and marched her out of the room. They went down a maze of long, brass tunnels and finally up some iron steps into what seemed like a loading dock or an air-gate.

‘Go stand by the doors, darling,’ he said.

‘What happens now?’ Patience asked.

‘Now you run for your life until they get you,’ DaRolle said.

Patience put her hands against the rusted hatchway, and then pulled them away as the hatch rumbled open.

She didn’t know what to expect when she looked out. Beyond the hatchway, the shadowy wastes of the slum-tracts stretched away into the distance.

‘I won’t go out there,’ she growled.

DaRolle came up behind her and shoved her outside. Patience fell into the dirt.

‘Word of advice,’ called the ginger-haired man. ‘If you want it, anyway. Watch for the Dolors. They use the shadow. Don’t trust black.’

‘I don’t t–’ Patience began.

But the hatch slammed shut.

Patience got to her feet. Gloom surrounded her. A hot, stinking wind blew in through the nearby ruins, smelling of garbage and city rot.

Somewhere, something whooped gleefully in the darkness. A lifter rumbled overhead, its lights flashing. When she turned, she saw the immensity of the hive filling the sky behind her like a cliff, extending up as far as she could see.

She started to run.

VIII

There was something wrong with Prefect Cyrus’ face: a blush of burst blood vessels that even careful treatment with a medicae’s dermowand had failed to conceal. He was trying to be civil, and was clearly impressed by his visitor’s apparel, but he was also put out.

‘This is irregular, I’m afraid,’ he fussed as he led them into a waiting room where Imperial teachings were writ in gold leaf on the darkwood panels. ‘There are appointed times for inspection, and also for apprenticeship dealings. Take a seat, won’t you?’

‘I apologise for the difficulties I’m causing,’ Carl replied. ‘But time is rather pressing, and you came highly recommended.’

‘I see,’ said Cyrus.

‘And I have… resources to make it worth your while.’

‘Indeed,’ smiled Cyrus. ‘And your name is?’

‘I’d prefer not to deal in names,’ Carl smiled.

‘Then perhaps I should show you out, sir. This is a respectable academy.’

Sitting cross-legged on the old couch, his fur-trimmed mantle turned back over his shoulder to expose the crimson falchapetta lining, Carl Thonius beckoned with one gloved hand to Kara, who stood waiting in the doorway. Kara was robed and cowled like some dumb servitor, and carried a heavy casket. As she approached, Carl leaned over and flipped the casket lid open.

‘Lutillium. Twenty ingots, each of a weight of one-eighth. I’ll leave it to you to calculate the market price, Prefect.’

Cyrus licked his lips slightly. ‘I, ah… What is it you want, sir?’

‘Two boys, two girls. No younger than eleven, no older than thirteen. Healthy. Fit. Comely. Clean.’

‘This is, ah…’

‘I’m sorry, I’m being very direct,’ said Carl. ‘I should have said this before. This is a matter of the most pleasant fraternal confidence.’

‘I see,’ said Cyrus. Carl had just used one of the Cognitae’s private recognition codes, by which one graduate knew another. ‘I’ll just see what’s taking those refreshments so long to arrive.’

The Prefect bustled out of the room and hurried down a gloomy hallway to where Ide was waiting.

‘Bring the others in,’ Cyrus whispered to him. ‘Do it quickly. If this is on the level, we look to earn well. But I have a feeling.’

Ide nodded.

In the waiting room, Carl sat back and winked at Kara.

+The Prefect’s suspicious.+

‘Really?’ Carl said softly. ‘And I thought I was bringing such veracity to the part.’

+Get ready. Nayl?+

Harlon Nayl grunted as he drove another crampon into the crumbling outer brick of the tower’s side, and played out his line to bring him closer to a ninth-floor window. A terrible updraught from the stack-chasm below tugged at his clothing.

‘Ready enough,’ he replied.

+Harlon’s in position. Carl? You can do the honours.+

‘Thank you, sir,’ he whispered. ‘It’ll be a pleasure.’

Cyrus came back into the room, smiling broadly. ‘Caffeine and cusp cake is just on its way. The cake is very fine, very gingery.’

‘I can’t wait,’ Carl said.

+They’re closing in. Four now arriving at the west door. Three on the stairs behind Kara. Two more approaching from the floor above. All ex-Guard. Armed with batons. And I read at least one firearm.+

Carl rose to his feet. ‘Oh, Prefect? There is one other thing I did want to say.’

‘And that is?’ asked Cyrus.

Carl smiled his toothiest smile. ‘In the name of the Holy Inquisition, you motherless wretch, surrender now.’

Cyrus gasped and began to back away.

‘Ide! Ide!’ he screamed.

Kara hurled the casket, and it slammed into Cyrus’ midsection, felling him hard. He grunted in pain, and several of the heavy ingots scattered across the floor.

+Move!+

Kara threw off her drab robe, and flew forwards as the first rigorist came in through the doorway. Guns were forbidden in the scholam, but that didn’t prevent this man from carrying one. Weapon scanners around the entry gate screened visitors for firearms. But lutillium, apart from its monetary worth, had value as a substance opaque to scanners.

Rigorist Ide raised his handgun as he came in. Kara, on her knees, reached into the fallen casket and produced the Tronsvasse compact hidden between the layers of ingots.

‘Surprise,’ she said, and buried a caseless round in his forehead. The rear part of Ide’s skull burst like a squeezed pimple, and he fell on his back.

She got up, shot the sprawled Cyrus once through the back of the thigh to make sure he wasn’t going anywhere, and swung to face the door. The next two rigorists burst in on Ide’s heels, batons raised, and she shot out their knees. Thonius winced and covered his ears.

In the hall outside, the other rigorists backed in terror from the sound of gunfire. Then a shaped charge blew out the casement behind them in a blizzard of glass and leading, and Harlon Nayl swung into the hallway. He had a large automatic pistol in his left fist.

‘Any takers?’ he asked.

One ran, and Nayl shot him through the heel. The others sank to their knees, hands to their heads.

‘Good lads,’ Nayl said. He took a neural disruptor from his belt in his right hand and walked over to them, cracking each one comatose with a fierce zap from the blunt device.

In the waiting room, the air threaded with gun-smoke, Kara turned to face the opposite doors as other alerted rigorists crashed in from the stairs. Knill led them, and didn’t even blink at the sight of the small woman with the handgun. He flew at her.

‘Ninker!’ she complained, and shot him. The round penetrated his torso and didn’t slow him. He crashed into her and knocked her flat.

Souzerin and another rigorist named Fewik were right behind Knill. Fewik knocked Carl over with a blow from his baton, and Souzerin raised the battered bolt pistol that he’d carried since his days in the Commissariat. He fired at Kara, but managed only to blow off Knill’s left foot and his left arm at the elbow.

Nayl appeared at the opposite door, and yelled a warning that Souzerin answered by lifting his aim and blasting at the doorway. Brick chips and wooden splinters exploded from the jamb. Kara reached out from under Knill’s dead weight, and shot Souzerin up through the chin. The rigorist left the ground for a moment, then crashed back down dead. Nayl reappeared, and put a round through Fewik’s back as he turned to flee.

Nayl helped Kara out from under the half-dead brute.

‘Nobody help me up then,’ Carl complained.

Panic had seized the scholam. I could feel it, breathe it. Hundreds of children and young adults, terrified by the explosions and gunshots.

And a deeper panic, a deeper dread, that emanated from the minds of the rigorists and tutors.

I hovered towards the main gate, Wystan at my side, and ripped the ancient doors off their hinges with a brisk nudge of my mind. Inside the entrance way, half a dozen tutors and rigorists were running towards us, hoping for a speedy exit.

+I am Inquisitor Ravenor of the Holy Ordos! Remain where you are!+ I don’t think they understood the manner of the command, though several involuntarily defecated in fear as the telepathic burst hit them. All they saw was a lone man approaching beside a strange, covered chair.

+Now!+

My psi-wave threw them all backwards violently, like the pressure blast of a hurricane. Windows shattered. They tumbled over, robes shredding, flying like dolls or desperately trying to grip onto the floor.

Wystan lit a lho-stick.

‘What I like about you,’ he said, ‘is that you don’t muck around.’

‘Thank you.’

I had switched to voxponder and now I activated my built in voxcaster. ‘This is Ravenor to Magistratum Fairwing. Your officers may now move in and secure the building as instructed.’

‘Yes, inquisitor.’

‘Do not harm any of the children.’

IX

I had expected to find many things within the scholam: evidence of abuse and cruelty certainly, damaged souls, perhaps even answers, if I was lucky.

I had not expected to find traces of psyker activity. ‘What’s the matter?’ Kara asked me.

+I’m not sure.+

We moved down the long hallways, past the frightened faces of pupils herded along by the Magistratum officers, past whimpering tutors spread against the old walls as they were patted down for concealed weapons. The traces were slight, ephemeral, fading, like strands of gossamer clinging to the brickwork. But they were there.

+There was a psyker here.+ Kara stiffened.

+Relax. He… no, I believe it was a she. She’s not here anymore. But she was here for a long time and she left only recently.+

‘When you say a long time, you mean?’

+Years.+

‘And when you say recently…?’

+Days, maybe less.+

We explored the tower. For Kara, this was a curious process. She could not see or feel, taste or smell the traces that were so evident to me. She just followed me around, one empty room after another. I could sense her boredom and her frustration. She wanted to be with the others, active, rounding up the last of the scholam’s inhabitants.

‘Sorry. This must be tedious for you,’ I said.

‘It’s fine,’ she replied. ‘Take your time. I can be patient. Patience is a virtue.’

‘Indeed.’

We entered a large dining hall in the upper reaches of the tower. The traces were strongest and freshest there.

‘Telekine,’ I said. ‘I’m in no doubt. A telekine, raw but potentially strong.’

‘We have to find her,’ Kara said. ‘If this damn place really was grooming subjects for the Cognitae, she could be a lead. A direct connection to a Cognitae procurer.’

Kara was right. Among their many crimes, the Cognitae prided themselves on recruiting and retaining unlicensed psykers for their own purposes.

‘Go and find Carl for me, Kara,’ I requested. ‘I want to get him working on discovering who this psyker was and where she might have gone.’

‘Because of the Cognitae link,’ she nodded.

‘Yes, because of that,’ I replied. ‘But even if no link exists, we still have to find her. An unsanctioned psyker, loose on Sameter. That cannot be permitted. We must track her down. And dispose of her.’

X

‘I’m sorry,’ Carl Thonius said. ‘Sir, I’m very sorry.’

The device was very small, no larger than a hearing aid implant.

‘I should have searched him right there, but with all the shooting and screaming.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Carl,’ I said.

‘I think I will, sir. Everything’s blanked.’

The device was a trigger switch, coded to Cyrus’ thumb print. An advanced piece of tech. Down on the floor, helpless from the wound Kara had delivered to his leg, Cyrus had plucked this device from his pocket and activated it. And the scholam’s entire data archive had been erased.

‘Can you recover anything?’ I asked.

‘It’s a fairly comprehensive wipe. I might be able to recode the last few days’ worth of material. The stuff most recently processed might still exist in the codification buffer.’

‘Do what you can,’ I advised. Privately, I was annoyed with his lapse. But we had, with the assistance of local law-enforcement, rounded up dozens of tutors and scholam elders, including Cyrus himself. And who could say what the poor pupils themselves might be able to tell us?

Besides, it was hardly surprising. Carl was so poor in circumstances of violence. I don’t believe he had ever fired a shot in anger, though he performed well enough in weapons drill.

‘I’ll get to work, sir,’ Carl said. ‘I’m so very sorry–’

‘So you bloody should be,’ Nayl snorted.

‘Enough, Harlon!’ I rebuked. ‘Carl is my interrogator and you will address him with respect.’

‘I’ll do that,’ Nayl replied, ‘when he earns it.’

‘Do what you can, Carl,’ I said. ‘But remember, your priority is to find out all there is to know about the unsanctioned psyker they had here. Who she was, where she went. She has to be found and dealt with, quickly.’

‘Yes, sir.’

As Carl moved away, the senior magistratum approached. His enforcement officers, clad in black and silver, were still clearing the scholam, floor by floor. I could sense his unease. He was an experienced criminologist, but he’d never had his entire station house requisitioned to assist the Inquisition before. He was terrified of screwing up. He was terrified of me.

‘Problems?’ I asked.

‘A few scuffles, sir. You’d rather taken the wind out of their sails.’

‘I want all the children to be given medical checks, and then safehoused until statements can be taken from them all. Inform the Administratum that welfare assistance will be required, but not yet. No one is to be rehoused or re-homed unless they’ve been examined. Why do you frown?’

The Magistratum started a little.

‘There are over nine hundred children, sir…’ he began.

‘Improvise. Ask the local temples for alms and shelter.’

‘Yes, sir. May I ask… is this an abuse case, sir?’

‘Indirectly. I can’t say more. The staff I’ll interview here, now. I’ll need some of your men to assist in guarding them while the interrogations are underway. Once I’m done, I will file charges, and you can begin to process them.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’ll start with the Prefect.’

A Magistratum first-aider had patched Cyrus’ leg wound, and they’d shackled him to a chair in one of the refectories. He was in pain, and very frightened, which would make it easier to extract information.

Cyrus stared at me as I rolled in to face him. Nayl followed me in, but sat his ominous bulk down at the far end of the long table from Cyrus, a threat waiting to happen.

‘I… I have rights,’ Cyrus began. ‘In the eyes of Imperial Law, I have–’

‘Nothing. You are a prisoner of the Inquisition. Do not ask for or expect anything.’

‘Then I’ll tell you nothing.’

‘Again, you are mistaken. You will tell me everything I ask you to tell me. Harlon?’

From the far end of the table, Nayl began to speak. ‘His name is Ludovic Kyro, Cognitae-trained, wanted on five worlds for counts of heresy and sedition…’

Cyrus closed his eyes as the words came out. We already knew his true identity. What else did we have?

‘Tell me about Victor Zahn.’

Cyrus frowned. ‘I don’t know a Victor Zahn…’ I was watching his mind. It wasn’t the truth, but it wasn’t an outright lie either. Cyrus didn’t immediately recognise the name.

+Tell me about Victor Zahn.+

Cyrus blinked as the telepathy slapped him. My interrogative was accompanied by an image of Zahn’s corpse in the Hinterlight’s morgue, which I dropped into his mind like a slide into a magic lantern.

‘Oh Throne!’ he murmured.

‘You know him, then?’

‘He was a pupil here, years ago.’

+And Goodman Frell? And Noble Soto?+

Two more graphic images.

‘Oh, Holy! They were pupils too. This was years ago. Five or more.’

‘And you groomed them,’ said Nayl. ‘You and your staff. Groomed them like you groom all the poor strays who wind up here. Sold them on.’

‘No, this is a respectable place and–’

‘So respectable,’ I said, ‘that you wipe all your records so we can’t see them.’

Cyrus bit his lip.

‘Zahn. Frell. Soto. Who did you sell them to?’

‘T-to a merchant, as I remember.’

Lie. Bald and heavy. And well formed, not just vocally, but mentally too. A layer of mendacity cloaked Cyrus’ thoughts, like a cake of dried mud. A mind-trick, one of the many taught by the Cognitae. I had been expecting as much. For all his fear, Cyrus was still a product of that heretical institution, and therefore had to be unlocked with precision.

If I’d just burst into his mind telepathically from the outset, I might have damaged or destroyed many of his locked engrams. But now I had a solid lie out of him, and that lie revealed the way his mind-shields worked: their focus, their strengths, their inclination.

‘Who did you sell them to?’

‘I told you, a merchant. A free trader.’

+Who?+

He squealed as the psi-jab rattled his mind. He was utterly unprepared for the sharpness of it.

‘That was a demonstration of how things will be if you resist,’ I said. ‘Now I’m going to ask the question once more…’

XI

Patience heard the buzzing, not with her ears but with her mind, and slid into cover behind a crumbling rockcrete wall. Moments later, a varnished human skull hovered past through the gloom. Tech implants decorated the back of its cranium, and lights shone in its hollow orbits. A sensor drone, sweeping for her. She’d heard the bastards talking about them before her release. This was the first physical proof that men were actually after her.

Men. Hunters. Killers.

The skull hovered on the spot for a moment, circled once, and then sped away into the shadows. Patience stayed low. After another minute, a second drone – this one built around the skull of a dog or cat – skimmed past and made off in another direction.

She slowed her breathing, and deliberately encouraged her mind to do the sort of tricks that usually happened unbidden. She reached out. She could feel the area around her in a radius of ten metres, forty, sixty. The shape of the geography: the sloping trench to her left, the broken columns ahead, the line of burned-out habs to her right. Behind her, the sewer outfall pouring sludge into a cracked storm drain. She sensed bright sparks of mental energy, but they were just rats scuttling in the ruins.

Then she sensed one that wasn’t.

This spark was bigger, human, very controlled and intense. Right ahead, beyond the columns, moving forward.

Moving slowly so as not to dislodge any loose stones, she turned and began to creep away around the storm-drain chute towards a jumble of plasteel ruins. Her left toe kicked a rock, and it rolled away off the drain’s edge and started to fall. Patience caught it neatly with her mind and lifted it up into the silence of her hand.

The brief delay had been to her advantage. Now she sensed three or four human mind-traces in the ruins ahead of her. Not focused like the other one, feral. In the shadows.

Don’t trust the black, that’s what DaRolle had said to her. Trouble was, could she trust DaRolle’s advice?

She crouched low, and stayed there until she could see them. Ragged human shapes, barely visible, moving like animals through the ruins. Gangers, members of the notorious Dolor clan. She could see three, but was sure there were more. The hunter was closing from the right, now almost at the rockcrete wall.

Patience lifted the rock in her hand and threw it, sending it far further than her arm alone could have managed. It landed in the trench with a loud clatter.

The hunter turned and made for it immediately. She got a glimpse of a man in an armoured jack and high boots scurrying towards the lip of the trench.

Then the Dolors saw him too.

A pivot-gun roared, and the hunter was knocked off his feet. The gangers rushed forwards at once, baying and yelling, crude blade weapons flashing in their dirty hands.

The hunter’s jack had stopped the worst of the ball round. He leapt back up, and shot the closest Dolor through the neck with his handgun. The savage figure spasmed and went down thrashing. Then the others cannoned into the hunter, and they all went over into the trench.

Patience started to run. She heard another shot behind her. A scream.

She scrambled over a rusted length of vent-ducting, and dropped into the cavity of a roofless hab…

…where a man was waiting for her.

Patience gasped. There had been no spark off him at all. Either he was shielded, or his mind just did not register to her gift like regular human minds.

He was tall and thin, clothed head to foot in a matt-black, skin-tight bodysuit. Only his eyes were visible through a slit in the tight mask, but she saw the way the fabric beneath them stretched to betray the smile that had just crossed his face. He held a long, slender spike-knife in each hand.

Patience stretched out with her mind, hoping to push him away, but the tendrils of her gift slipped off his black suit, unable to purchase. He lunged at her, the twin blades extended, and she was forced to dive sideways, grazing her palms and knees on the rough ground. She started to roll, but he was on her at once, the tip of one blade slicing through the flesh of her left shoulder.

Patience cried out, but the pain gave her strength. She kicked out, and as the man jumped back, she flipped onto her feet. She backed as he circled again. She could hear him chuckle, feel the blood running down her arm.

He lunged again, leading with his right-hand blade. She ducked it, and came out under his arm, but the other blade raked across the back of her right hand as she tried to fend him off. She punched at him. He struck her in the side of the head with the ball of his right hand, and knocked her onto the ground.

There was a rushing sound in her head. She thought of her sisters, and the mother she could no longer picture. In desperation, she lashed out with her gift, but the killer’s black skin-suit again rendered him proof against her power. It was too slippery. She couldn’t get hold of anything except–

The man stumbled backwards in surprise as the knives flew out of his hands. He might have been armoured against a telekine, head to toe, but his blades were good, old-fashioned solid objects.

Patience pulled them both in until they were slowly orbiting her body as she rose. It would be the matter of a moment to toss them both away out of the hunter’s reach.

But she had a much better idea.

With a bark of effort, she drove them point-first towards his eye-slit and nailed his skull against the back wall of the hab.

XII

Carl Thonius knocked on the refectory door and waited for a response. From inside, the oddly modulated screams and yelps of Prefect Cyrus shivered the air. As he waited, Carl glanced around at the four Magistratum troopers guarding the hallway. They were clearly unnerved by the strange sounds of human pain echoing from the refectory. Carl smiled breezily, but got no response. He knocked again.

The screams ebbed for a moment, and the door flew open. Nayl peered out.

‘What?’ he spat.

‘I need a word, dear fellow. With the boss.’

‘Don’t “dear fellow” me, frig-face. Is this important? He’s busy!’

‘Well,’ Carl stammered. He was always edgy when he had to deal with the big ex-bounty hunter. ‘It is, sort of.’

Nayl sneered. ‘Sort of doesn’t cut it.’ He slammed the door in Carl’s face.

Carl cursed and knocked again. Nayl threw the door back open.

‘Don’t do that,’ Carl snapped. ‘Don’t treat me like that–’

‘Oh, go away you frig-wipe…’

Carl looked Nayl in the eyes. ‘Know your place, Nayl. You may not like me, but I am his interrogator. I want to see him now.’

Nayl looked Thonius up and down.

‘Balls after all,’ he said, grudgingly. ‘All right.’

Carl walked into the room. Cyrus was slumped forwards in his chains, wheezing, blood leaking from his tear ducts. Kara sat on a chair just inside the door, her face grim.

‘Carl?’ I said softly. ‘This isn’t really the time for an interruption.’

‘Sir, I’ve been trying to recover the lost data. The erased data. There’s really not much to get back, I’m afraid. I doubt we’ll ever find out what happened to most of the poor children laundered through this place.’

‘Your incompetence could have waited,’ Nayl said.

‘Stop ragging on him, Nayl,’ Kara hissed.

Carl shot Nayl a dark look. I could tell there was something more.

‘I told you I might be able to recode the last few days’ worth of material. Uh, recently processed material still existing in the codification buffer.’

‘Yes, Carl.’

He cleared his throat. ‘There was one item there. A record of a transaction made two nights ago. An older female pupil named Patience. Groomed by these bastards partly because of her spirit, and mostly because she was a latent telekine.’

I swung around to face him. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘A telekine?’

He nodded. ‘The recoding is pretty clear. I think she was the psyker you were looking for.’

‘Did you say her name was Patience?’ Kara asked quietly.

‘Yes, why?’ Carl replied. She shrugged. She was holding something back.

‘Kara?’ I nudged.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Just, when you were looking around, for traces of her, you thought I was bored and I said–’

‘Patience is a virtue,’ I finished.

Kara nodded. ‘Yeah, Patience is a virtue. Spooky.’

‘Coincidence,’ Nayl muttered.

‘Believe me, Harlon,’ I said, ‘in the length and breadth of this great Imperium of Man, there is no such thing as coincidence. Not where psyk is involved.’

‘Duly noted,’ he replied, not caring or believing.

‘Where did this Patience go, Carl?’ I asked.

‘She was sold for ten thousand to a narcobaron cartel that purchased her for use in a game they like to play.’

‘A game?’ I asked.

‘The record implies this is not the first subject the scholam has sold to the cartel for this purpose. I say game, it’s more sport. They release the purchased child into the slum-tracts and then… then they gamble on how long he or she will survive. Once they send their hunters out.’

‘So what?’ asked Nayl. ‘They’ll clean up our little psyk-witch loose end without us having to break a sweat.’

‘If the records are true,’ I warned. ‘Consider this. There might be a game. There might be a narcobaron with a taste for barbaric gladiatorial sport. On the other hand, all those things might be a substitution code to conceal an act of purchase to a Cognitae procurer.’

‘I actually don’t know which would be worse,’ Kara said.

I turned back to Cyrus. He whined as my mind re-entered his. He was still weak and reeling from our initial session, and by rights I should have left him a while to be sure of getting accurate responses. But there was no time. An unsanctioned menace was loose somewhere, or already leaving the planet under close watch.

I tried a few key phrases – ‘the psyker’, ‘the telekine’, ‘Patience’ – pushing them at his mind in the way a child rams shaped blocks at a box, hoping to find the right hole to fit. He responded with various recurring words: Loketter, the game, trophy worth…

I wasn’t sure how hard to push. I wasn’t sure if I was slamming him back against the limits of truth, where there is nowhere left for sanity to go, or simply meeting some form of substitution. Substitution was another standard Cognitae mind ploy. Anticipating psychic interrogation, the brotherhood mnemonically learned to replace the details of true memories with engrammatic euphemisms. Narcobaron, for example, could stand for procurer. Game might stand for purpose. It was a simple but almost unbreakable deceit. Well schooled, a Cognitae brother could mask memories with metaphors. He could not be caught in a lie, because he wasn’t lying. The truth had been erased and replaced with other facts. Using such techniques, a member of the brotherhood might withstand the most serious psyk-scrutiny, because the truth was no longer there to uncover.

‘He’s giving me nothing,’ I cursed, turning away. ‘Unless it is the truth. Do you have an active lead, Carl?’

Thonius nodded.

Kara got to her feet.

‘Let’s go and find her,’ she said. ‘If the story’s real, I mean if there is this frigging barbaric game actually going on, there’s a girl out there who really, really needs help right now.’

‘Throne! Let her die!’ Nayl barked. ‘Frigging psyker! What? What?’ Kara and Thonius were already heading for the door.

‘One life, Harlon,’ I said as I slid past him. ‘I learned many things from Eisenhorn, but ruthlessness was not one of them. Thousands may die, millions even, unless Molotch is found and brought to justice. But any count of a million starts with one, and to ignore one life when there is still a chance of saving it, well, one might as well give up on the other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine as well.’

‘Whatever,’ said Nayl.

‘Thank you for your vote of confidence,’ I said. ‘Kara, inform the Mag- istratum that these interviews are suspended until we return.’

XIII

The armoured manse did indeed belong to the man named Loketter, and nineteen counts of narco-traffic were outstanding on his name. The manse was a brass mushroom that dominated a long slope of rubble scree above the shadowland of the slum-tracts. Down here, with the monolithic bulk of Urbitane behind us, the immensity of the urban squalor and ruin was shocking to see.

The manse was ferro-armoured, and shielded, but our scanners lit with the buzz of electromag activity inside.

‘Signals!’ Kara reported. ‘They’re running drones out into the slum.’

‘Can you track them?’ I asked.

‘Working…’ She adjusted some dials. ‘I’ve got a lock on nine. Covering a hex-grid twelve by ten. Map comparison… Throne, these archives are so old! Here we go. An area known as Low Tenalt.’

‘Details?’

‘Serious slum-land,’ Carl said, speed-viewing the data on his codifier. ‘Basically wreckage. High probability of gang activity. Territorially, the gangs are the Dolors and, to the west, the ruin-burbs are run by the so-called Pennyrakers. Magistratum advice is to avoid this area.’

‘Really?’

Carl shrugged. ‘Magistratum advice is a blanket “avoid the slum-tracts”, so what the hey?’

‘How far?’ I asked.

At the helm of the cargo-gig, Nayl consulted the gyro-nav built into the stick. ‘Eight spans to the Low Tenalt area from here, on boost.’

‘Do it,’ I said.

‘You don’t want to level this manse first?’ Nayl asked.

‘They can wait. This girl can’t.’

Nayl nodded reluctantly, and hit the boosters. He wasn’t in this like the rest of us were. Running low, like a pond-fly skating the surface, we zipped through the ruined landscape, skipping rubble heaps, ducking under shattered transit bridges, running fast and low along the brick-waste gouges that had once been hab-streets.

Everything was a grey gloom, caught in the immense shadow of the city. Such ruin, such endless ruin…

‘Coming up, point three,’ reported Nayl, hauling on the stick. The engines whined shrill. ‘Two… one… setting down.’

The gig thumped and slithered as it settled on the loose brick.

Carl, Nayl and Kara were already up, arming weapons.

‘Sit down, Carl,’ I said. ‘I need you to run scope from here.’

‘Oh,’ he said.

‘I want full scanner input,’ I said as I hovered towards the opening hatch behind Kara and Harlon. ‘Wystan can watch your back.’

‘You’re going yourself?’ Wystan asked, surprised. It was one of the few times I’d ever heard emotion in his voice.

‘Yes,’ I said.

Kara and Harlon looked at me.

‘Yes, I’m coming with you,’ I said. ‘Have you got a problem with that?’

‘It’s just–’ Kara began.

‘You don’t usually…’ Nayl finished.

‘This isn’t usually,’ I said, and powered out past them into the chilly gloom.

Nayl leapt out after me, his Urdeshi-made assault gun cinched high around his broad frame. Kara paused and looked back at Wystan and Thonius.

‘Lock the door,’ she grinned. ‘And don’t open it unless you know it’s us. Even then, keep your powder dry.’

She jumped out, raised her Manumet 90 riotgun, and ran to join us.

Carl swallowed. Wystan Frauka got up, and locked the hatch shut. He looked at Carl, lit yet another lho-stick and patted the handgun tucked into his belt.

‘I got your back, Carly,’ he said.

‘Great,’ said Thonius. He turned to regard the sweeping screens of the scanner, and adjusted his vox-mic.

‘Getting this?’ he called.

‘Loud and obnoxiously clear,’ Nayl crackled back.

‘A ha ha. Funny. Not. Move west, two hundred metres, then head north along the axis of the old fuel store. The drones seem to be gathering there.’

‘Thank you, Carl,’ I responded.

We moved through the wasteland. It was one of the few times my state allowed me speedier and quieter access than my able-bodied friends. Nayl and Kara followed, clambering over the dunes of rubble.

‘See anything you like?’ Kara said.

‘I don’t frigging believe we’re doing this,’ Nayl grumbled.

‘Move left. Left!’ Carl’s voice rasped over the vox. ‘I’ve got drones moving now. Gunshots.’

‘I heard them,’ Nayl said, and started away to the left.

‘Flank him wide, Kara,’ I said, and she moved away in the opposite direction.

‘Throne,’ I heard Carl say. ‘I think we were right. I think this is some kind of frigging game.’

I propelled myself forwards. Both Kara and Harlon were out of sight now, though I could sense them just fifty metres away, each side of me. The twisted ruins of the tracts rose up on left and right. I tasted lifesigns.

‘Hello?’ I transponded.

The Dolors appeared out of the gloom. Ragged, emaciated, filthy, feral. There were twenty of them.

Blackened teeth bared in wild grins. They raised their cudgels and spears and charged.

‘Your mistake,’ I said.

XIV

The barons were laughing. Most of them were drunk, or out of their heads on lhotas and obscura.

DaRolle looked up from the drone relay.

‘Have we got the bitch yet?’ Boroth demanded.

‘You wish,’ DaRolle said. He walked across the lounge and crouched down beside Loketter.

‘What?’ asked the man in red.

‘New players just entered the game,’ DaRolle said.

Loketter sat up. ‘Show me.’

DaRolle held out his data-slate. ‘Three on the ground. A gig too, grounded there.’

‘What the hell is this?’

‘Problem, Loketter?’ asked Vevian.

Loketter rose and smiled. ‘Not a problem, but a bonus element to our game today. Look at your scans. See? Newcomers.’

‘Who the frig are they?’ Gandinsky blurted.

‘Interlopers,’ Loketter said. ‘House will pay two thousand for each one killed. Firearms permitted.’

The intoxicated crowd applauded this energetically.

Loketter looked at DaRolle.

‘The ones on the ground I can get these fools to mess with,’ he whispered. ‘You go and fry up this gig.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. Find out who these fools are. Then burn it and every one on it.’ DaRolle nodded.

‘Pleasure,’ he said.

XV

Patience was still running. The Dolors, invisible in the shadows but everywhere now, were jeering and caterwauling, their strangled cries echoing around the ragged walls and shattered windows.

They were calling out to her, taunting her, abusing her with obscene words and suggestions, many of which, thankfully, were so choked by the gang-argot they made no sense.

Occasionally, stones or pieces of trash came flying out of the darkness at her, and she deflected all those she could. Some found her, especially the stinging stone bullets launched from catapults and slings.

Her instinct was to head back towards the colossal city, but no matter how much ground she managed to cover, it seemed not to get any closer. Its sheer scale made the distance hard to judge. It was probably kilometres away still.

She reached the ruins of a manufactory, its ply-steel roof collapsed. Seas of garbage and rubble spread out from its eastern side, and she began to pick her way across the weed-choked waste. Behind her, she could hear the gangers scurrying through the manufactory ruins. A few missiles flew out after her.

A figure suddenly appeared ahead of her, across the sea of trash. A small male, or perhaps a female, who’d been in cover behind the remains of a yard wall, hidden by a chameleon cloak. Glancing up, Patience cursed as she saw a hunter drone that had obviously been shadowing her for several minutes.

Patience changed course, and began to run away from the figure. She ran wide across the overgrown trash. The figure started to follow, trying to cut her off, running hard, but neither made particularly good going. The trash and rubble was so uneven, so treacherous. Patience kept tripping, stumbling, turning her ankles.

As soon as the hunter appeared, the jeering from the invisible Dolors grew more ferocious. Catapult missiles and even the occasional arrow whipped out from the manufactory at the hunter.

The hunter – and it was clearly a female – stopped in her tracks, and produced an autopistol. She slammed in a clip and fired three times at the manufactory.

The shells must have been high-ex, because each impact went up like a grenade. Sections of the manufactory ruin blew in, and the Dolors went very quiet suddenly.

Patience was still running. The hunter put the gun away and resumed the chase.

A second drone zoomed into view suddenly, circled Patience once and then headed for the hunter. The woman stopped again, looking around frantically as she reached for her sidearm. Patience half-heard her shout a question into her vox-set.

There was a loud crack, a peripheral flash of light, and the female hunter jolted suddenly as a las-round went clean through her torso. She crumpled without a sound.

Her killer appeared, directly ahead of Patience. She skidded to a halt. He was big, and wore segmented plating over a coat of green hide. A glowing augmetic implant covered one eye. He had a lascarbine in his hands. He stared at Patience for a moment, then put the carbine away in the leather boot over his shoulders. Then he drew a large dagger with a twisted black blade, and took a step towards her.

‘Make it easy now, and I promise you won’t feel nothing,’ he said. Patience was breathing hard from the running. It made it easier somehow to summon up her gift. The man thought the first couple of stones that came flying at him were from the gangers, but then more came, and more, larger rocks, pieces of trash, chunks of garbage. Debris started showering off the ground all around her, whipping at him.

He cried out, shielding his face with his hands, and backed away. She heard him cry again, in pain, as a greasy lump of broken-off machinery hit him in the chest. He staggered, trying to fend the blizzard away. Then a piece of cinder block caromed off the side of his head, and he fell to his knees, holding his head. Two more large rocks struck his face and forehead, and he slumped over entirely.

Patience sighed, and the rain of trash subsided, pieces bouncing off the ground as they landed. Silence.

She gave the body one last look, and started to run again. Behind her, in the manufactory, and all along the outer fence line, the invisible gangers started to whoop and holler again.

XVI

I had just seen off a second assault by the slum-gangers when I felt the telekinetic burst. Fierce, unfocused, not too far away.

‘Turn west,’ I voxed.

‘Understood,’ Kara responded.

‘I read that,’ said Nayl. ‘I just heard bolter fire from that direction too.’

I slid through the ruins, my mind wide open. There were psi-traces all around me, at least a dozen as close as fifty metres. Most were the feral impulses of the hidden Dolors. But there. One other. Harder.

Two las-rounds struck the front of my chair and fizzled off harmlessly. I found the hunter as he was about to fire again, and picked him up. He yelled in fear as he left the ground, dragged into the air ten metres, twenty. Then I let him go.

I didn’t even bother to watch him land. The sharp light of his mind went out abruptly.

‘I heard shots,’ Kara voxed. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine,’ I replied. ‘Kara, it is a game. An obscene hunting game. We have to find this girl, whatever she is, before they do.’

‘Understood. Absolutely.’

Kara was about a third of a kilometre away to my right.

‘I’ve got a drone active in your vicinity,’ Carl told her over the link.

Kara acknowledged, and glanced around. That was when the two hunters, twins clad in silver-grey skin sleeves, pounced. One pinned her arms from behind, the other came at her with a chainfist. She rolled her body back, using the man pinning her as a back-brace, and bicycle-kicked the other in the face. He went over in the rubble, rolling.

But the man pinning Kara from behind rammed forwards and headbutted her in the back of the skull.

+Kara!+

Even at that distance, I felt her pain, and sensed that she had blacked out. They’d have her gutted before she could come round.

I knew I had no choice. I had to ware her. It wasn’t something she – or anyone else I knew – enjoyed, but it was necessary. Besides, we had trained for this. Kara Swole was a particularly receptive candidate.

The wraithbone pendant around her neck lit up with psychic energy. Kara’s body suddenly animated again, but it was me moving her. I had taken her physical form over, put it on like a suit of clothes.

Blank-eyed, Kara’s body twisted hard and broke the pinning hold. She tore clear, landed well, and swept out the legs of the hunter with the chainfist so he went over on his backside.

Then she turned, raising a forearm block against the other’s attack, following the block with two rapid jabs to his face and a side-stamp that caught and dislocated his right knee.

He howled in pain. Kara/I grabbed his flailing arms and swung him bodily around right into his partner, who was returning to the fight for the second time.

The partner’s forward-thrust chainfist, which had been sweeping at Kara/me met the ribs of his fellow hunter instead. The whirring bite-blades of the gauntlet weapon punched clean through the man’s side in a shocking welter of blood and torn tissue. He screamed as he died, his whole body quivering in time to the rending vibrations of the glove’s cycling blades.

His partner and accidental killer screamed too: in outrage and horror at what he had just done. He wrenched the glove out, but it was too late. His twin, a huge and awful excavation yawning in the side of his torso, stopped quivering, and dropped. A film of blood covered everything in a five-metre radius.

Berserk, the remaining hunter hurled himself at Kara/me. We leapt, boosted by a touch of telekinesis, and executed a perfect somersault over his head.

He swung around. But by then Kara/I had grabbed up her fallen riotgun. Her puppet hand racked the slide. A single, booming shot blew the hunter backwards eight metres.

We heard a sound behind us, and turned, bringing the pumpgun up. ‘Steady!’ Nayl warned.

‘What are you doing here?’ Kara/I demanded.

‘You were in trouble, Kara!’ he said. ‘I heard it over the vox. I came as fast as I could.’

‘What about the girl? What about the girl we’re looking for?’

Nayl shrugged. ‘Kara?’

‘No, it’s me, dammit!’ I said with Kara’s voice. ‘Catch her for Throne’s sake, I’m coming out.’

Nayl hurried forwards, and took Kara’s limp form into his arms as I ceased waring her. She was semiconscious, and the trauma of being a ware subject would leave her disorientated and sick for a good while.

+Guard her, Harlon. In fact, get her back to the transport.+

‘Where are you going?’ he asked the empty air.

+To find the girl.+

XVII

Closed back into the womb-like nowhere of my support chair, I impelled it forwards again, trying to reacquire the raw psychic-pulse I’d felt before. I felt edgy. Having to ware someone was a curious thing to deal with, and the feelings always left me conflicted. I was aware that the subject loathed the sensation, and it was also most usually done in moments of extremis, involving violence and furious levels of adrenaline. But for me it was a brief delicious escape, a cruel reminder of what I had lost. I despised myself for deriving pleasure from such painful, demeaning moments.

+Carl?+

‘Yes, sir?’

+Do you have a fix on me?+

‘Yes, sir. I’ve got two more drone tracks about half a kilometre ahead, converging. Please hurry, sir.’

+I’m hurrying.+

Back in the gig, Carl looked up from his scanner displays, fidgeting with his cuffs nervously. He looked at Wystan, who was reading his data-slate again.

‘Don’t you care?’ Carl asked.

The untouchable nodded at his book. ‘It’s just getting interesting.’

Outside, DaRolle scurried forward, keeping low behind a half-fallen wall. He checked the area, unshipped his laspistol, and deactivated his limiter.

Then he began to run, head down, towards the parked transport.

XVIII

Her breathing was coming in short, sharp bursts. Patience had run as hard and as fast as she could. There was at least one person very close to her now, but the psychic-trace was faint and hard to place. She was worn out, exhausted, and her gift was weak from over-use.

She clambered down into a cavity behind a ruined pumping station, crawling into a cave formed by the overhang of the fallen roof. She curled up against the back wall, her arms around her knees. Outside, the Dolors were still jeering and shouting, but it was more distant now. She’d gone as far as she could. Now it was just a matter of waiting.

Waiting for the end.

+Patience.+

She started, and looked around, not daring to speak.

+Patience. Stay calm. Stay where you are. I’m coming to help you. I want to help you.+

‘Where are you?’ she hissed in fear.

+Don’t speak. They’ll hear you. Think your answers.+

‘What do you mean? Where the frig are you?’

+Don’t be scared. Try not to speak aloud. They’ll hear you.+

‘This is another trick. You’re one of them! One of the frigging hunters!’

+No. Patience, my name is Gideon. I swear by the God-Emperor Himself I mean you no harm. I’m trying to help you. You’re hearing me because I am speaking directly to your mind, psychically.+

‘You lie!’

+Try me. Think of something I couldn’t know.+

Patience closed her eyes and moaned softly.

+Prudence. And Providence.+

She gasped.

+Your sisters. You’re worried about them. They were taken… wait… Yes, they were taken from the scholam. Without your consent.+

‘Just kill me, you bastard, or leave me alone!’

+Please, Patience, don’t speak. They’ll hear you.+

I was moving fast now. The jagged ruins of the slum-tracts slid by me on either side. Rocks and catapult bullets occasionally clattered off my chair’s armour. Where was she? Where was she?

+Patience? Can you still hear me?+

‘Leave me alone!’ she sobbed, crawling deeper into the damp cavity. ‘I can’t do this! I can’t do this any more!’

+Yes, you can! Just keep it together! Focus! Focus on something!+

Patience twisted in panic, clawing at the sides of her head. I was scaring her. My voice. Something about my voice. Not just the fact that it was coming, disembodied, into her mind. Something else.

What?

As I steered my chair out across a long sea of trash and debris, I gently peered into her mind, into the panic and turmoil. Into the fear.

I saw it. It was my voice itself. I sounded like a middle-aged, well-educated male. Reasonable, polite, refined. Exactly the sort of man who had betrayed her for her entire life, her fellow pupils, her sisters. I saw she had formed a picture of me already. It was part Cyrus, part Ide, part Loketter, part some ginger-haired man. It was all of these, blended into one monster.

Immediately, I switched the focus of my telepathy.

+Kara?+

I found her at once, bleary and sick. Nayl was helping her along a rubble ledge back towards the gig.

‘What?’ she asked.

+I’m sorry, Kara, but I need to ware you again.+

‘Throne, no!’ she whimpered.

‘She’s had enough, boss,’ Nayl said.

+It’s important. Really important. I need her voice.+

Kara looked at Nayl and nodded wearily. He caught her as her wraithbone pendant flashed, and she fell.

I left her body limp in Nayl’s arms, and put on her personality like a skin-suit. My psychic-voice became Kara Swole’s soft, reassuring tones.

+Patience?+

‘What? What?’

+Patience, my name is Kara. My good friend Gideon has asked me to talk to you. Time is very short, Patience, and you need to listen to me if you want to stay alive. Trust Gideon. Do exactly as I say.+

I could feel the girl giving way to panic.

+Patience, focus! Hold on! There must be something you can hold on to! Something you can hold on to so you can keep going! Your sisters, maybe? Your mother? Patience?+

She had found it at last. It was something so small and dark and hard in her mind that even my telepathy could not unlock it. She held on to it, tight, tight, as the dark closed in.

Her panic waned. Her breathing slowed. I was close now. I could reach her.

Patience opened her eyes. A skull, eyes bright, hovered at arm’s reach in front of her, gazing at her. A drone.

I was too late. She had made too much noise.

The hunters had found her.

XIX

‘Throne!’ cried Carl, leaning back from his auspex station in alarm. ‘What the hell did you do?’

‘I might have broken wind,’ admitted Wystan Frauka. ‘Sorry.’ He turned back to his book.

‘Check your limiter, dear boy,’ Thonius demanded.

‘Why?’

‘Why? I was just listening in, and Ravenor suddenly went offline!’

‘The vox?’

‘The vox is still live! I mean his telepathic link just scrambled! Was that you?’

Wystan Frauka frowned and put down his data-slate. He checked his device. ‘No, it’s on. I’m blocked.’

‘Then what?’

‘Relax, Carly. I’ll take a look.’

‘Please–’ Carl began.

Frauka patted the handgun in his belt again. ‘I told you, I’ve got your back.’

‘No, it’s just… could you not call me “Carly”?’

Frauka frowned. ‘All right. What about “Thony” then?’

‘No!’

Frauka held up his hands. ‘All right. Throne! I was just being pally. The boss said I was too aloof. Too aloof, can you believe it? He suggested I should try being more friendly. He said it would help with team building, and–’

‘Frigging hell, Frauka!’

‘What? Emperor’s tits, you guys are so uptight! I’ll go look! I’ll go look! I got your back, remember?’

Frauka turned. DaRolle’s laspistol was aimed directly at his face. The ginger-haired killer grinned.

‘On a side note,’ Frauka said, ‘it would have been nice if you’d got my back too, Carly.’

XX

‘Out!’ said the hunter in grey-scale armour. He gestured with his double-bladed harn knife. Patience got up, and slowly came out of the pumping station cavity. The hunter’s drone circled her, purring softly.

‘Gonna fight?’ he asked. She shook her head.

‘Good girl. Step out here.’ She came out.

The hunter keyed his vox-link. ‘This is Greyde. I’ve got her. Game’s done. Tell Loketter that my master Vevian will want his winnings in small bills, so he can pay me off nice and handsome.’

The hunter looked at Patience. ‘Why are you smiling?’

‘No reason.’

He settled his grip on the alien blade. ‘Sure you’re not thinking of trying something dumb? I’d hate that. It’d make me take a lot longer with you.’

‘I won’t fight,’ Patience said.

‘Good.’

‘Because Kara told me I didn’t have to any more.’

‘Who? Who’s Kara?’

‘The girl who told me her friend was coming. She told me to have patience, because patience is a virtue.’

The hunter, Greyde, looked around edgily. ‘No one here but us, girl. No sign of any friend of yours.’

Patience shrugged. ‘He’s coming.’

A wind picked up, stirring the dust and the grit around them, billowing the filth up in swirling clouds. Like an exhalation from the sumps of the towering city.

Except it wasn’t.

Larger pieces of trash lifted and fluttered through the air. Pebbles rolled on the ground. It was like a hurricane was gathering over the slums.

No hurricane.

Alarmed, Greyde grabbed the girl, viced her neck with one powerful arm, and raised the harn blade to deliver the kill-stab.

+Kuming Greyde. I know you. I know everything about you. I know the nine counts of murder that you are wanted for, and the fifty-seven other killings you have on your clammy soul. I know you killed your own father. I know you understand only hard cash and killing.+

‘What? What?’ the hunter wailed in terror as the tempest of wind engulfed him and his prey.

+I don’t carry cash. No pockets. I guess it’s going to be killing then.+

I turned on my chair’s stablights, so I became visible as I ploughed in through the tumult of dirt and dust. The hunter screamed, but the dust choked him. Gagging, he threw Patience aside, and drew his Etva c.II plasma cannon, a pistol-sized weapon more than capable of burning clean through my armoured chair.

Staggering, half-blinded, he aimed it at me.

With a simple tap of my mind, I fired my chair’s psycannon. The hunter’s corpse slammed back through the wall of the pumping station. Even before it had hit the wall, every bone in that body had been pulped by concussive force, every organ exploded.

The wind dropped. Grit pattered off the sealed body of my chair.

+Patience?+

She got up. I wasn’t using Kara Swole’s voice any more.

+Are you all right?+

She nodded. She was singularly beautiful, despite the dirt caking her and the tears in her clothing. Tall, slender, black-haired, her eyes a piercing green.

‘Are you Kara’s friend?’ she asked.

+Yes.+

‘Are you Gideon?’

+Yes.+

She stepped forward and placed her right hand flat on the warm canopy of my support chair. ‘Good. You don’t look anything like I imagined.’

XXI

‘So, we’re dead? Yeah, of course we are,’ Frauka said softly.

‘You’d be dead already,’ replied DaRolle. ‘I just wanted to find out which bastard was running you. Who is it? Finxster? Rotash? That’d be right. Rotash always wants a slice of the boss’ gameplay.’

‘Neither, actually,’ Frauka smiled.

‘Frauka…’ Carl began, terrified. He’d backed away as far as the gig’s scan-console would allow, and even then knew there was no hope. This killer had them both cold. Carl wondered where he’d left his weapon. The answer – ‘in the cabin lockers’ – did not cheer him up.

‘Who, then?’

‘You won’t know him. His name’s Ravenor.’

DaRolle sniffed.

‘Never heard of the frig.’

‘Untouchable?’ Frauka asked, casually indicating the limiter around DaRolle’s throat.

‘Uh huh. You too?’

Frauka smiled. ‘Made that way, so help me. Still, the pay’s decent. Always someone who needs a good blunter, right?’

‘I hear that,’ DaRolle grinned.

‘Oh well,’ Frauka sighed. ‘Do me a favour, okay? Make it clean and quick. Back of the head, no warning.’

‘Sure.’

‘I mean, one blunter doing a favour for another? We gotta stick together, right, even if we are working for rival crews?’

‘No problem,’ said DaRolle.

‘All right,’ Frauka said, and turned his back. ‘Any time you like.’ DaRolle aimed his pistol again.

‘I don’t suppose…’ Frauka began. Then he shook his head. ‘No, I’m taking the piss now.’

‘What?’ asked DaRolle.

‘Yeah, what?’ Carl squeaked in frozen terror.

‘One last stick? For a condemned man?’

DaRolle shrugged. ‘Go on.’

Frauka took out his lack, set a lho-stick to his lips and lit it with his igniter. He breathed in the smoke and smiled. ‘Oh, tastes good. Real mellow. Want one?’

‘No,’ said DaRolle.

‘Real smooth,’ said Frauka, inhaling a long drag. ‘These things’ll kill you, you know.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ DaRolle smiled.

‘I don’t frigging believe this!’ Carl whined.

‘Hey,’ said Frauka, glancing over his shoulder. ‘Why don’t you do him now while I’m smoking this baby? Save time. I never did like him.’

‘Oh Throne!’ Carl cried out and fell into a foetal position under the console.

‘Frig, what a baby!’ DaRolle laughed.

‘Tell me about it,’ Frauka said. He stubbed out his smoke. ‘All right, ready.’ He held up the squashed butt. ‘Know what that was, my friend?’

‘Don’t tell me,’ smirked DaRolle. ‘Best smoke of your life?’

‘No,’ said Frauka quietly. ‘It was delaying tactics.’

DaRolle swung around. The hulking shape of Harlon Nayl filled the hatch behind him. Nayl’s Hecuter 10 boomed once.

‘Everyone alive?’ Nayl asked, stepping in over the twisted body of the ginger-haired man.

‘Saw you approaching on the scanners,’ Frauka said. ‘Thought I’d keep him talking.’

Carl Thonius got to his feet, shivering with anger and fright.

‘You’re unbelievable, Frauka,’ he hissed.

‘Thank you, Carl,’ Frauka smiled, and sat down with his book again. ‘See? Now you’re team building too.’

XXII

I led the girl back to the gig, where the others were waiting.

‘Hello, Patience, I’m Kara,’ Kara said.

‘Good to know you,’ Patience replied.

By the time we raided Loketter’s manse, backed up by a full squad of Magistratum troopers, the narcobaron and his cronies had cleared out. There are warrants out for all of them. I understand Loketter is still on the run.

We returned to the Kindred Youth Scholam, and resumed the interrogations. It took several weeks, but by the end of it, I’d wrung some precious facts out of Cyrus and his staff.

There wasn’t much. No, that’s a lie. There was enough to ensure that Cyrus would face further interrogation at the Inquisition facility on Thracian Primaris, and enough to make sure the scholam’s tutors and rigorists would remain incarcerated in the penitentiaries of Urbitane for the rest of their natural lives.

And a lead. Not much, but a start. From Cyrus, just before his mind finally snapped, I learned that Molotch was heading for the outworlds. Sleef, perhaps. Maybe even deeper than that. I instructed Nayl and Kara to provision for what could be a long, dangerous pursuit.

The day before we were due to leave Sameter, I met with Carl in one of the scholam’s old, faded classrooms. Most of the staff had been shipped out by then, in Magistratum custody.

‘Did you trace what I wanted?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘It’s very little. With the records wiped–’

‘What have you got?’

‘Pupils Prudence and Providence were sold to a free trader who called himself Vinquies. The name was false, of course. No other records remain, and the name doesn’t match any excise log I can get from Sameter Out Traffic.’

‘The man himself?’

‘There was a picture in Cyrus’ mind, and in the minds of several of the other tutors present at the supper, but they’re not reliable. I’ve fed them through both the local Magistratum files and the officio itself. Nothing.’

‘So… so, they’re lost?’

Carl nodded sadly. ‘I suppose, if we dedicated the rest of our careers to trying to find them, we might turn up some clue. But in all reality, they’re long gone.’

‘I’ll tell her,’ I said, and slid out of the room.

Patience was in the oubliette. By choice. The hatch was open. She sat inside, in the semi-dark, sliding her hands over the stones. She was still wearing her torn and filthy uniform. She’d refused to take it off.

‘Patience?’

She stared out at me. ‘You can’t find them, can you?’

I thought for a moment, and decided it was better to lie. Better a lie now than a lifetime of hopeless yearning.

‘Yes, Patience, I found them.’

‘They’re dead, aren’t they?’

‘Yes.’

She coiled up, and I felt her hold on to that small black nugget in her mind again.

+Patience.+

‘Yes, Gideon?’

+I’m sorry. I truly am. We have to leave soon. I’d like you to come with us.+

‘With you? Why?’

+I’ll be honest. I can’t leave you here. You know about your gift? What it means?+

‘Yes.’

+You’re a psyker. A telekine. You can’t be allowed to remain in public. But I can look after you. I can train you. You could come to serve the God-Emperor of Mankind at my side. Would you like that?+

‘Better than an apprenticeship to a mill,’ she said. ‘Will Kara be there?’

+Yes, Patience.+

‘All right then,’ she said, and stepped out of the oubliette to join me.

+If you follow me, it will be hard at times. I will demand a lot of you. I will need to know everything about you. What do you think to that?+

‘That’s fine, Gideon.’

+I’ll be asking you questions, probing you, training your gift, unwrapping who you are.+

‘I understand.’

+Do you? Here’s a test question, the sort of thing I’ll be asking you. What was it that you held on to? When the hunters were closing. I felt it as a dark secret part of you, something you wouldn’t let go.+

‘It was my name, Gideon,’ she said. ‘My true name, my real name. It was always the single thing my mother gave me that I didn’t ever give away to the bastards in this place.’

+I see. That makes sense. Good, thank you for being so honest.+

‘Gideon, do you want me to tell you my real name? I will, if you want.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, not now, not ever. I want you to hold on to it. It’s your secret. Keep it safe and it will keep you sane. It’ll remind you what you’ve come through. Promise me you’ll keep it safe.’

+I will.+

‘Patience is a fine name. I’ll call you that.’

‘All right,’ she replied, and started to walk down the hallway at my side.

‘I’ll need a surname, though,’ she said at length.

‘Choose one,’ I replied.

She looked down at the monogram embroidered on her ragged scholam-issue clothes.

‘Kys?’ she suggested. ‘I’ll be Patience Kys.’

THORN WISHES TALON

The past never lets us go. It is persistent and unalterable.

The future, however, is aloof, a stranger. It stands with its back to us, mute and private, refusing to communicate what it knows or what it sees.

Except to some. On Nova Durma, deep in the leech-infested forests of the Eastern Telgs, there is a particular grotto into which the light of the rising daystar falls once every thirty-eight days. There, by means of some secret ministry and ritual craft that I have no ready wish to understand, the blistered seers of the Divine Fratery coax the reluctant future around until they can see its face in their silver mirrors, and hear its hushed, unwilling voice.

It is my fervent hope that what it has to say to them is a lie.

That night, the waste-world called Malinter had six visitors. They left their transport, dark and hook-winged, on a marshy flood plain, slightly bowed over to starboard where the landing claws had sunk into the ooze. They proceeded west, on foot.

A storm was coming, and it was not entirely natural. They walked through streamers of white fog, crossing outcrops of green quartz, lakes of moss and dank watercourses choked with florid lichens. The sky shone like filthy, tinted glass. In the distance, a pustular range of hills began to vanish in the rain-blur of the encroaching elements. Lightning flashed, like sparks off flint, or remote laser fire.

They had been on the surface for an hour, and had just sighted the tower, when the first attempt was made to kill them.

There was a rattle, almost indistinguishable from the doom-roll of the approaching thunder, and bullets whipped up spray from the mud at the feet of the tallest visitor.

His name was Harlon Nayl. His tall, broad physique was wrapped in a black-mesh bodyglove. His head was shaved apart from a simple goatee. He raised the heavy Hecuter pistol he had been carrying in his right fist, and made a return of fire into the gathering dark.

In answer, several more unseen hostiles opened up. The visitors scattered for cover.

‘Were you expecting this?’ Nayl asked as he crouched behind a quartz boulder and snapped shots off over it.

+I didn’t know what to expect.+

The answer came telepathically from Nayl’s master, and seemed far from reassuring.

‘How many?’ Nayl called out.

Twenty metres away from him, another big man called Zeph Mathuin shouted back from cover. ‘Six!’ echoed his estimation. Mathuin was as imposing as Nayl, but his skin was dark, the colour of varnished hardwood. His black hair was plaited into strands, and beaded. Both men had been bounty hunters in their time. Neither followed that profession any longer.

‘Make it seven,’ contradicted Kara Swole as she wriggled up beside Nayl, keeping her head low. She was a short, compact woman with cropped red hair. Her voluptuous figure was currently concealed beneath a long black leather duster with a fringe of larisel fur around the neck.

‘Seven?’ queried Nayl, as whining hard-round smacked into the far side of the rock.

‘Six!’ Mathuin called again.

Kara Swole had been a dancer-acrobat before she’d joined the band, and ordinarily she would defer to the combat experience of the two ex-hunters. But she had an ear for these things.

‘Listen!’ she said. ‘Three autorifles,’ she identified, counting off on her fingers. ‘Two lasguns, a pistol, and that…’ she drew Nayl’s attention to a distinctive plunk! plunk! ‘That’s a stubber.’

Nayl nodded and smiled.

‘Six!’ Mathuin insisted.

+Kara is correct. There are seven. Now can we deal with them, please?+

Their master’s mind-voice seemed unusually terse and impatient. Not a good sign. One of several not good signs that had already distinguished this night.

The two other members of the team sheltered against a gravel shelf some distance to Nayl’s left. Their names were Patience Kys and Carl Thonius. A slight, fussy, well-bred young man, Thonius held the rank of interrogator, and was technically the master’s second-in-command. He had drawn a compact pistol from inside his beautifully tailored coat, but was too busy complaining about the weather, the mud, and the prospect of death by gunshot wounds to use it.

Patience Kys suggested he might like to shut up. She was a slender, pale woman, dressed in high boots of black leather, a bell skirt of grey silk and an embroidered black leather shirt. Her hair was pinned up in a chignon with silver clasps.

She scanned the view ahead, and located one of the hostiles firing from the cover of some quartz rocks.

‘Ready?’ she yelled over at Nayl.

‘Pop ’em up!’ he replied.

Kys was telekinetic. She focused her trained mind, and exerted a little pressure. The quartz rocks scattered apart across the slime, revealing a rather surprised man holding an autorifle.

His surprise lasted about two seconds until a single shot from Nayl hit him in the brow and tumbled him leadenly onto his back.

With a spiteful grin, Kys reached out again and dragged another of the hostiles out into the open with her mind. The man yelled out, scared and uncomprehending. His heels churned in the ooze, and he flailed his arms, fighting the invisible force that yanked him by the scruff of the neck.

There was a blurt of noise like an industrial hammer-drill, and the man ceased to be, shredded into pieces by heavy fire.

Mathuin had shot him. His left hand was a burnished-chrome augmetic, and he had locked it into the governing socket of the lethal rotator cannon that he was wearing strapped around his torso. The multi-barrels whirred and cycled, venting vapour.

The firing ceased.

+They have fled for now. They will return, I have no doubt.+

The master of the team moved among them. To the uninformed, Inquisitor Gideon Ravenor appeared to be a machine rather than a man. He was a box, a smoothly angled wedge of armoured metal with a glossy, polished finish from which even the approaching lightning seemed unwilling to reflect. This was his force chair, his life-support system, totally enclosed and self-sufficient. The chair’s anti-gravity discs spun hypnotically as he advanced.

Inside that enclosing chair, one of the Imperium’s most brilliant inquisitors – and most articulate theorists – lay trapped forever. Years before, at the start of a glittering career in the service of the ordos, Gideon Ravenor had been struck down during a heretical attack, his fair and strong body burned and fused away into a miserable residue of useless flesh. Only his mind had survived

But such a mind! Sharp, incisive, poetic, just… and powerful too. Kys had not met a psi-capable remotely strong enough to master Gideon Ravenor.

They were sworn to him, the five of them. Nayl, Thonius, Swole, Mathuin and Kys. Sworn and true. They would follow him to the ends of the known stars, if needs be.

Even when he chose not to tell them where they were going.

The Divine Fratery practises a barbaric initiation process of voluntary blinding. Sight, as one might expect, is considered their fundamental skill, but not sight as we might understand it. Novices sacrifice one of their eyes as proof of their intent, and have that missing eye replaced by a simple augmetic to maintain everyday function. The one remaining organic eye is then trained and developed, using ritual, alchemic and sorcerous processes.

An initiated member of the Fratery may therefore be identified by his single augmetic eye, and by the patch of purple velvet that covers his remaining real eye at all times except for circumstances of cult ceremony. A novitiate, self-blinded in one socket, must work to fashion his own silver mirror before he is allowed his augmetic, or indeed any medical or sterilising treatment. He must cut and hammer his dish of silver, and then work it with abrasive wadding until it is a perfect reflector to a finesse of .0088 optical purity. Many die of septicaemia or other wound-related infections before they accomplish this. Others, surviving the initial infections, spend many months or even years finishing the task. Thus, members of the cult may additionally be identified by blistering of the skin, tissue abnormalities, and even significant necrotising scarring incurred during the long months of silver-working.

It is also my experience that few Fratery members have codable or matchable fingerprints. Years of scrupulous endeavour with abrasive wadding wear away hands as well as silver.

Overhead, the sky flashed and vibrated. Kara could hear the thunder, and felt the drizzle in the wind. Fog-vapour smirched out the distance.

With the toe of her boot, she gingerly rolled over the body of the man Nayl had shot. He was dressed in cheap, worn foul-weather clothes made of woven plastek fibre and leather. He had one augmetic eye, crude and badly sutured into the socket, and a velvet patch over the other.

‘Anyone we know?’ asked Nayl, coming up behind her.

Unlike the others, Nayl and Kara had not been recruited for ordo service by Ravenor himself. They had originally owed loyalty to Ravenor’s mentor, Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn. Somewhere along the line, a decade or more past, they had become Ravenor’s. Kara often thought of Eisenhorn. Stern, fierce, so much harder to bear than Ravenor, Eisenhorn had nevertheless been a good man to follow. And she owed him. But for Gregor Eisenhorn, she would still be a dancer-acrobat in the circuses of Bonaventure.

She often wondered what had become of her former master. She’d last seen him back in ’87, during the mission to 5213X. He’d been a wreck of a man by then, supported only by his burning will and fundamental augmetics. Some had said he’d crossed a line and become a radical. Kara didn’t believe that. Eisenhorn had always been so… hard line. She thought of him fondly, as she did the others from that time. Alizabeth Bequin, God-Emperor rest her, dear Aemos, Medea Betancore and Fischig.

They had known some times together. Great times, bad times. But this was her place now.

‘Face doesn’t ring any bells,’ she said. She reached down and lifted the eye patch, just out of curiosity. A real eye, wide and glazed, lay beneath.

‘What the hell is that about?’ Nayl wondered.

Kara reached up and slicked the short, red strands of her rain-wet hair back across her head. She looked across at Mathuin and Thonius beside the other body. Thonius was, as ever, elegantly dressed, and as he crouched in the mud, he fussed about his shoes.

Thonius was Ravenor’s pupil, which supposed that one day Thonius was to be promoted to full inquisitor. Ravenor had been Eisenhorn’s interrogator. Kara wondered sometimes if Carl had anything like the same stuff.

‘If you’d left him a little more intact, we might have made a decent examination,’ Thonius complained.

‘This is a rotator cannon,’ Mathuin said bluntly. ‘It doesn’t do intact.’

Thonius prodded the grisly remains with a stick. ‘Well, I think we’ve got an augmetic eye here too. And what’s either an eyepatch or a very unsatisfactory posing thong.’

Thonius’ caustic wit usually drew smiles from the band, but not this night. No one was in the mood for laughs. Ravenor, generally so forthcoming with his team, had told them virtually nothing about the reasons for coming to Malinter. As far as anyone knew, he’d simply diverted them to this remote waste-world after receiving some private communiqué.

Most alarmingly of all, he’d chosen to join them on the surface. Ravenor usually ran his team telepathically from a distance via the wraithbone markers they all wore. He only came along in person when the stakes were high.

+Let’s move on,+ Ravenor said.

The grotto in the Eastern Telgs is deep in the smoking darkness of the forests. The glades are silent except for insect chitter, and wreathed with vapour and steam. There are biting centipedes everywhere, some as long as a man’s finger, others as long as a man’s leg. The air stinks of mildew.

Once every thirty-eight days, the rising star comes up at such an angle it forces its pale and famished light in through a natural hole in the rock face outside the grotto. The beams streak in down an eighty degree angle to the azimuth, and strike the still freshwater of the pool in the grotto’s base, lighting the milky water like a flame behind muslin.

Brethren of the Fratery cower around the pool – after days of ritual starvation and self-flagellation – and attempt to interrupt the falling beams with their silver mirrors. At such times, I have observed, they remove the purple velvet patches from their real eyes, and place them over their augmetics.

Their flashing mirrors reflect many colours of light. Having ingested lho seeds and other natural hallucinogenics, they glare into their mirrors, and begin to gabble incoherently.

Voxographic units, run on battery leads, are set around the grotto to record their ramblings. As the light fades again, the masters of the Fratery play back the voxcorders, and tease out the future truths – or lies – that they have been told.

The tower, as they approached it, was far larger than they had first imagined. The main structure, splintered and ruined, rose a full half kilometre into the dark, bruised sky, like an accusing finger. At the base, like the bole of an ancient tree, it thickened, and spread into great piers and buttresses that anchored it into the headland. Crumbling stone bridge spans linked the rocky shelf to the nearest piers.

There was no way of defining its origin or age, nor the hands – human or otherwise – that had constructed it. Even its purpose was in doubt. According to the scans, it was the only artificial structure on Malinter. Older star maps referred to it simply by means of a symbol that indicated ruin (antique/xenos).

As they picked their way through ancient screes of rubble and broken masonry towards the nearest span, the rain began to lash down, pattering on the mud and driving off the raised stonework. The rising wind began to shiver the glossy black ivy and climbing vines clinging in thick mats to the lower walls.

‘This message. It told you to come here?’ Nayl asked.

+What message?+

Nayl frowned and looked at the floating chair. ‘The message you got.’

+I never said anything about a message.+

‘Oh, come on! Fair play!’ Nayl growled. ‘Why won’t you tell us what we’re getting into here?

+Harlon.+ Ravenor’s voice sliced into Nayl’s mind, and he winced slightly. Ravenor’s telepathy was sometimes painfully sharp when he was troubled or preoccupied. Nayl realised that Ravenor’s thought-voice was directed at him alone, a private word the others couldn’t hear.

+Trust me, old friend. I dare tell you nothing until I’m sure of what we’re dealing with. If it turns out to be a trick, you could be biased by misinformation.+

‘I’m no amateur,’ Nayl countered. The others looked at him, hearing only his side of the conversation.

+I know, but you’re a loyal man. Loyalty sometimes blinds us. Trust me on this.+

‘What in the name of the Golden Throne was that?’ Thonius said abruptly. They’d all heard it. Ravenor and Kys had felt it.

High in the ruined summit of the tower, something had screamed. Loud, hideous, inhuman, drawn out. More screams, from other non-human voices, answered it. Each resounded both acoustically and psychically. The air temperature dropped sharply. Sheens of ice crackled into view, caking the upper sweep of the walls.

They moved on a few metres. The keening wails grew louder, whooping and circling within the high walls, as if screaming avian things were flying around inside. As lightning accompanies thunder, so each scream was accompanied by a sympathetic flash of light. The psychic shrieks seemed to draw the storm down, until a halo of flashing, jagged light coruscated in the sky above the tower. Corposant danced along the walls like white, fluorescent balls.

Kys, her psi-sensitive mind feeling it worse than the rest, paused to wipe fresh blood off her lip with the back of her gwel-skin glove. Her nose was bleeding.

As she did so, the hostiles began trying to kill them again.

The Divine Fratery, may the ordos condemn their sick souls, seek to chart the future. All possible futures, in fact. With their mirrors and their abominably practised eyes, they identify events to come, and take special interest in those events that are ill-favoured. Disasters, plagues, invasions, collapses of governments, heresies, famines, defeats in battle. Doom, in any guise.

The masters of the Fratery then disseminate the details of their oracles to the lower orders of their cult. By my estimation, the Fratery numbers several thousand, many of them apparently upstanding Imperial citizens, spread through hundreds of worlds in the subsectors Antimar, Helican, Angelus and Ophidian. Once a ‘prospect’ as they call them has been identified, certain portions of the ‘cult membership’ are charged with doing everything they can to ensure that it comes to pass, preferably in the worst and most damaging way possible. If a plague is foreseen, then cult members will deliberately break quarantine orders to ensure that the outbreak spreads. If the prospect is a famine, they will plant incendiary bombs or bio-toxins in the Munitorum grain stores of the threatened world. A heretic emerges? They will protect him and publish his foul lies abroad. An invasion approaches? They are the fifth column that will destroy the defenders from within.

They seek doom. They seek to undermine the fabric of our Imperium, the culture of man, and cause it to founder and fall. They seek galactic apocalypse, an age of darkness and fire, wherein their unholy masters, the Ruinous Powers, can rise up and take governance of all.

Five times now I have thwarted their efforts. They hate me, and wish me dead. Now I seek to derail their efforts a sixth time, here, tonight, on Malinter. I have journeyed far out of my way, pursued by their murder-bands, to carry a warning.

For I have seen their latest prospect with my own eyes. And it is a terrible thing.

Laser fire scorched across the mossy span of the bridge arch, sizzling in the rain. Some of it came from the ruin ahead, some from the crags behind them. Stonework shattered and split. Las-bolts and hard-rounds snapped and stung away from the age-polished cobbles.

‘Go!’ yelled Nayl, turning back towards the crags and firing his weapon in a two-handed brace. At his side, Kara Swole kicked her assault weapon into life. It bucked like a living thing, spitting spent casings out in a sideways flurry.

They backed across the bridge as the others ran ahead. Mathuin and Kys led the way, into the gunfire coming out of the dim archways and terraces ahead. Mathuin’s rotator cannon squealed, and flames danced around the spinning barrels. Stone debris and shorn ivy fluttered off the wounded walls. Kys saw a man, almost severed at the waist, drop from an archway into the lightless gulf below the bridge.

Ravenor and Thonius came up behind them. Thonius was still gazing up at the screamlight tearing and dancing around the tower overhead. He had one hand raised, as if to protect his face from the bullets and laser fire whipping around him.

+Concentrate!+

‘Yes, yes… of course…’ Thonius replied.

Mathuin ran under the first arch into the gloom of the tower chambers. His augmetic eyes, little coals of red hard-light, gleaming inside his lids, immediately adjusted to the light conditions, and revealed to him the things hidden in the shadows. He pivoted left, and mowed down four hostiles with a sustained belch of cannon fire. More shot at him.

Kys ran in beside him. She had a laspistol harnessed at her waist, but she hadn’t drawn it. She extended the heels of her palms, and four kineblades slipped out of the sheaths built into the forearms of her shirt. Each was thin, razor-sharp, twelve centimetres long, and lacked handles. She controlled them with her mind, orbiting them around her body in wide, buzzing circuits, in a figure of eight, like some lethal human orrery.

A hostile opened fire directly at her with an autopistol, cracking off four shots. Without flinching, she faced them, circling a pair of the blades so they intercepted and deflected the first two shots. The second two she bent wide with her mind, so that they sailed off harmlessly like swatted flies.

Before he could fire again, Kys pinned the hostile to the stone wall with the third kineblade.

Mathuin was firing again.

‘You all right there, Kys?’ he yelled over the cannon’s roar.

‘Fine.’ She smiled. She was in her element. Dealing death in the name of the Emperor, punishing His enemies, was all she lived for. She was a secretive being. Patience Kys was not her real name, and none of the band knew what she’d been baptised. She’d been born on Sameter, in the Helican sub, and had grown to womanhood on that filthy, brow-beaten world. Things had happened to her there, things that had changed her and made her Patience Kys, the telekine killer. She never spoke of it. The simple fact was she had faced and beaten a miserable death, and now she was paying death back, in the God-Emperor’s name, with souls more deserving of annihilation.

With a jerk of her mind, she tugged the kineblade out of the pinned corpse and flew it back to join the others. They whistled as they spun, deflecting more gunfire away from her. Five more hostiles lay ahead, concealed behind mouldering pillars. With a nasal grunt, she sped the kineblades away from her. They shot like guided missiles down the terraceway, arcing around obstacles, whipping around the pillars. Four of the hostiles fell, slashed open by the hurtling blades.

The fifth she yanked out of cover with her telekinesis, and shot. Now, at last, the gun was in her hands.

Inexorable as a planet moving along its given path, Ravenor floated into the gloom, passing between Kys and Mathuin as the ex-bounty hunter hosed further mayhem at the last of the hostiles on his side. Thonius ran up alongside him.

‘What now?’ the interrogator asked hopefully. ‘At least we’re out of that ghastly rain.’

Screamlight echoed and flashed through the tower from far above, reverberating the structure to its core. Kys shuddered involuntarily. Her nose was bleeding again.

+Carl? Zeph?+

Ravenor’s mind-voice was quiet, as if he too was suffering the side effects of the psychic screams. +Rearguard, please. Make sure Kara and Harlon make it in alive.+

‘But–’ Thonius complained. Mathuin was already running back to the archway.

+Do as I say, Carl!+

‘Yes, inquisitor,’ replied Thonius. He turned and hurried after Mathuin.

+With me, please, Patience.+

Kys had just retrieved her kineblades. She held out her arms to let them slide back into her cuff-sheaths. The concentrated activity had drained her telekinetic strength, and the terrible screamlight from above had sapped her badly.

+Are you up to this?+

Kys raised her laspistol.

‘I was born up for this, Gideon,’ she grinned.

The prospect is, as most are, vague. There are no specifics. However, it is regarded as a one hundred per cent certainty by the masters of the Fratery that a daemonic abomination is about to be manifested into the material universe. This, they predict, will come to pass between the years 400 and 403.M41. Emperor protect us, it may have already happened.

There are some details. The crucial event that triggers the manifestation will happen on Eustis Majoris, the overcrowded and dirty capital world of the Angelus subsector, within those aforementioned dates. It may, at the time, seem a minor event, but its consequences will be vast. Hundreds may die. Thousands… mayhap millions, if it is not stopped.

The daemon will take human form, and walk the worlds of the Imperium undetected. It has a name. Phonetically ‘SLIITE’ or perhaps Slyte or Slight.

It must be stopped. Its birth must be prevented.

All I have done in my long career in service of the ordos, all I have achieved… will be as nothing if this daemon comes into being.

‘It’s getting a little uncomfortable out here,’ Nayl remarked. A las-shot had just scored across the flesh of his upper arm, but he didn’t even wince.

‘Agreed,’ said Kara, ejecting another spent clip onto the cobbles of the span, and slamming in a fresh one.

They’d been backing away steadily under fire, and now the archway was tantalisingly close.

They ducked their heads instinctively as heavy fire ripped out of the archway behind them, and peppered the landwards-end of the bridge span. Mathuin was covering them at last.

They turned, and ran into cover, bullets and las-fire chasing their heels.

Inside the archway, Thonius was waving them on. Mathuin’s cannon ground dry, and he paused to pop out the ammo drum and slap in a fresh one from the heavy pouches around his waist.

Nayl bent in the shadows, and reloaded his pistol quickly, expertly. He looked up, and stared out into the torrential rain. In the dark of the storm and the swiftly falling night, he counted at least nine muzzle flashes barking their way.

‘How many?’ he asked.

This time, Mathuin didn’t answer. He turned his stony, hard-light gaze towards Kara and raised an eyebrow.

‘Fifteen,’ she said at once.

‘Fifteen,’ mused Nayl. ‘That’s five each.’

‘Hey!’ said Thonius. ‘There are four of us here!’

‘I know,’ Nayl grinned. ‘But it’s still five each. Unless you intend to surprise us.’

‘You little bastard,’ snapped Thonius. He raised his weapon, and pinked off several shots at the enemy across the span.

‘Hmmm…’ said Nayl. ‘Still fifteen.’

+Kara. Can you join us?+

‘On my way, boss,’ said Kara Swole. She grinned at Nayl. ‘Can you deal here? I mean, now it’s seven and a half each.’

‘Get on,’ Nayl said. He started firing. Kara dashed off into the darkness behind them.

Thonius blasted away again. They all saw a hostile on the far side of bridge, through the rain, tumble and pitch off the crag.

‘There!’ Thonius said triumphantly.

‘Seven each then,’ Mathuin remarked to Nayl.

The Divine Fratery, as I have learned, find it particularly easy to identify in their prospects others who have dabbled in farseeing and clairvoyance. It is as if such individuals somehow illuminate their life courses by toying with the future. The bright track of one has attracted their particular attention. It is through him, and the men and women around him, that the prospect of the manifestation has come to light.

He will cause it. Him, or one of those close to him.

That is why I have taken it upon myself to warn him.

For he is my friend. My pupil. My interrogator.

Kys hadn’t seen or even sensed the cultists behind the next archway. Ravenor, gliding forwards without hesitation, pulped all four of them with his chair’s built-in psycannons.

Kys followed him, striding through lakes of leaking blood and mashed tissue. She was worn out. The constant screams were getting to her.

They heard footfalls behind them. Kara Swole ran into view. Kys lowered her weapon.

‘You called for me?’

+Indeed I did, Kara. I can’t get up there.+

Kara looked up into the gloomy rafters and beams above them.

‘No problem.’ She took off her coat. Beneath it, she was dressed in a simple matt-green bodyglove.

‘Hey, Kar. Luck,’ called Kys.

Kara smiled.

She limbered up for a moment, and then leapt up into the rafters, gripping the mouldering wood, and gaining momentum.

Rapidly, all her acrobat skills coming back to her, she ascended, hand over hand, leaping from beam to beam, defying the dreadful gulf beneath her.

She was getting increasingly close to the flitting source of the screamlight. Her pulse raced. Grunting, she somersaulted again, and landed on her feet on a crossmember.

Kara stood for a moment, feeling the streaming rain slick down over her from the tower’s exposed roof. She stuck out her hands for balance, the assault weapon tightly cinched under her bosom.

There was a light above her, shining out from a stairless doorway in the shell of the tower. Faint artificial light, illuminating the millions of raindrops as they hurtled down the empty tower shaft towards her.

‘Seeing this?’ she asked.

+Yes, Kara.+

‘What you expected?’

+I have no idea.+

‘Here goes,’ she said, and jumped into space, into rainfall, into air. A hesitation, on the brink, dark depths below her. Then she seized a rotting timber beam, and swung, her fingers biting deep into the damp, flaking wood.

She pivoted in the air, and flew up into the doorway, feet first.

She landed firmly, balanced, arms wide.

A figure stood before her in the ruined tower room, illuminated by a single hovering glow-globe.

‘Hello, Kara,’ the figure said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

She gasped. ‘Oh God-Emperor… my master…’

The man was tall, shrouded in a dark leather coat that did not quite conceal the crude augmetics supporting his frame. His head was bald, his eyes dark-rimmed. He leaned heavily on a metal staff.

Rainwater streaming off him, Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn gazed at her.

Down at the archway, Thonius recoiled in horror.

‘I think we have a problem,’ he said.

‘Don’t be such a pussy,’ Nayl said.

‘Actually, I think he might be right,’ said Mathuin. ‘That’s not good, is it?’

Nayl craned his neck to look. Something blocky and heavy was striding towards them over the bridge span. It was metal and solid, machined striding limbs hissing steam from piston bearings. Its arms were folded against the sides of its torso like the wings of a flightless bird. Those arms, each one a heavy lascannon, began to cough and spit. Massive hydraulic absorbers soaked up the recoil.

The archway collapsed in a shower of exploding masonry. Nayl, Thonius and Mathuin fled into the cover of the gallery behind.

‘Emperor save me,’ Nayl exclaimed. ‘They’ve got a bloody Dreadnought!’

Rainwater dripped off Eisenhorn’s nose.

‘Gideon? Is he with you, Kara?’ he asked.

‘Yes, he is,’ she stammered. ‘Throne, it’s good to see you.’

‘And you, my dear. But it’s important I speak to Gideon.’

Kara nodded.

‘Ware me,’ she said.

Far below, Ravenor heard her. Kara Swole stiffened, her eyes clouding. The wraithbone pendant at her throat glowed with a dull, ethereal light.

She wasn’t Kara Swole any more. Her body was possessed by the mind of Gideon Ravenor.

‘Hello, Gregor,’ Kara’s mouth said.

‘Gideon. Well met. I was worried you wouldn’t come.’

‘And ignore a summons from my mentor? Phrased in Glossia? “Thorn wishes Talon…” I was hardly going to ignore that.’

‘I thought you would appreciate a taste of the old, private code,’ said Eisenhorn. His frozen face failed to show the smile he was feeling.

‘How could I forget it, Thorn? You drummed it into me.’

Eisenhorn nodded. ‘Much effort getting here?’

Kara’s lips conveyed Ravenor’s words. ‘Some. An effort made to kill us. Nayl is holding them off at the gateway to the tower.’

‘Old Harlon, eh?’ Eisenhorn said. ‘Ever dependable. You’ve got a good man there, Gideon. A fine man. Give him my respects. And Kara too, best there is.’

‘I know, Gregor.’ A strangely intense expression that wasn’t her own appeared on Kara’s face. ‘I think it’s time you told me why you brought me here.’

‘Yes, it is. But in person, I think. That would be best. That way you can stop subjecting Kara to that effort of puppeting. And we can be more private. I’ll come down to you.’

‘How? There are no stairs.’

‘The same way I got up here,’ Eisenhorn said. He looked upwards, into the rain hosing down through the broken roof.

‘Cherubael?’ he whispered.

Something nightmarish in the strobing screamlight answered him.

Its pitted steel hull glossy with rain, the Dreadnought strode through the shattered archway. The booming storm threw its hulking shadow a hundred jagging directions at once with its lightning. Its massive cannon pods pumped pneumatically as they retched out streams of las-bolts. The weapons made sharp, barking squeals as they discharged, a repeating note louder than the storm.

Behind it, three dozen armed brethren of the Divine Fratery charged across the bridge span.

Stone split and fractured under the bombardment. Pillars that had stood for aeons teetered and collapsed like felled trees, spraying stone shards across the terrace flooring.

Nayl, Mathuin and Thonius retreated into the empty inner chambers of the ruined tower. Even Mathuin’s rotator couldn’t so much as dent the Dreadnought’s armour casing.

‘Someone really, really wants us dead,’ Thonius said.

‘Us… or the person we came here to meet,’ Nayl countered. They hurried down a dim colonnade, and Nayl shoved both his comrades into the cover of a side arcade as cannon fire – bright as sunbursts – sizzled down the chamber.

‘Golden Throne! There’s got to be something we can try!’ Nayl said.

Mathuin reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out three close-focus frag grenades. He held them like a market-seller would hold apples or ploins. It was just like Mathuin to bring a pocket full of explosives. He never felt properly dressed unless he was armed to the back teeth.

‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a mini-nuke in the other pocket?’ asked Thonius.

‘My other suit’s at the cleaners,’ Mathuin replied.

‘They’ll have to do,’ said Nayl. ‘We’ll go with what we’ve got.’ He looked around. They could hear the heavy clanking footfalls of the Dreadnought bearing down on them, the hiss of its hydraulic pistons, the whirr of its motivators.

‘They may not even crack the thing’s plating,’ Mathuin remarked. As well as a supply of ridiculous ordnance, Zeph Mathuin could always be relied on for copious pessimism.

‘We’ll have to get them close,’ said Thonius.

‘We?’ said Nayl. He’d already taken one of the grenades, and was weighing it up like a ball.

‘Yes, Mr Nayl. We.’ Thonius took another of the grenades, holding it between finger and thumb as if it were a potentially venomous insect. He really wasn’t comfortable with the physicality of fighting. Thonius could hack cogitators and archive stacks faster than any of them, and could rewrite codes that any of the rest didn’t even understand. He was Ravenor’s interrogator because of his considerable intellect, not his killing talents. That’s why Ravenor employed the likes of Nayl and Mathuin.

‘Three of us, three bombs,’ Thonius stated. ‘We’re all in this together. I’m not going to be pulped by that thing without having a go at stopping it myself.’

Nayl looked dubiously at Mathuin.

‘It’s not up for debate, you vulgarians,’ Thonius said snottily. ‘Don’t make me remind you I’m technically in charge here.’

‘Oh, that would explain why we’re technically nose deep in crap,’ Nayl said.

A thick section of stone wall blew in nearby, hammered to fragments by withering cannon fire. The massive weight of the Dreadnought crushed heat-brittled stone to dust as it stomped through the gap.

The trio began to run again, down the next terrace, trying to put some distance between them and the killing machine.

‘Get ahead!’ Mathuin said. ‘I’ll take the first pop.’ Nayl nodded and grabbed hold of Thonius, who was still puzzling over his grenade, figuring out how to adjust the knurled dial to set the timer. Nayl got the interrogator into cover.

Thonius straightened his sleeves.

‘If you’ve pulled my coat out of shape, Nayl…’ he began.

Nayl glared at him.

Behind them, in the open, Mathuin primed his grenade, and turned. As the Dreadnought hove into view, he hurled the small, black charge.

Kara rejoined Ravenor and Kys like an ape, swinging down through the rafters, and leaping the last few metres.

Eisenhorn descended after her. He was being carried by a grotesque figure, a human shape twisted and distended by arcane forces. The thing glowed with an eldritch inner light. Its bare limbs and torso were covered with runes and sigils. Chains dragged from its ankles.

It set Eisenhorn’s heavy, cumbersome form down on the flagstones.

‘Thank you, Cherubael,’ he said.

The thing, its head lolling brokenly, exposed its teeth in a dreadful smile. ‘That’s all? I can go back now?’ it said. Its voice was like sandpaper on glass. ‘There are many more phantoms up there to burn.’

‘Go ahead,’ Eisenhorn said.

The dreadful daemonhost zoomed back aloft into the rain-swept heights of the ruin. At once, the ghastly screaming began again. Light pulsed and flashed.

Eisenhorn faced Ravenor’s chair. ‘The Fratery has unleashed everything they have tonight to stop me. To stop me talking to you. Daemonhosts of their own. Cherubael has been battling them. I think he’s enjoying it.

‘He?’ said Ravenor via his chair’s voxponder. ‘Last we met, you called that thing “it”, my master.’

Eisenhorn shrugged. His augmetics sighed with the gesture. ‘We have reached an understanding. Does that shock you, Gideon?’

‘Nothing shocks me any more,’ said Ravenor.

‘Good,’ said Eisenhorn. He looked at Kara and Kys.

‘We need a moment, Kara. If you and your friend wouldn’t mind.’

‘Patience Kys,’ Kys said, stern and hard.

‘I know who you are,’ said Eisenhorn, and turned away with Ravenor. In a low voice, he began to tell his ex-pupil all he knew about the Divine Fratery.

‘Kar… that’s Eisenhorn?’ Kys whispered to Kara as they watched the figures withdraw.

‘Yes,’ replied Kara. She was still rather stunned by the meeting, and Ravenor’s brief waring had left her tired.

‘Everything you and Harlon have said about him… I expected…’

‘What?’

‘Something more intimidating. He’s just a broken old man. And I can’t think why he consorts with a Chaos-filth thing like that host-form.’

Kara shrugged. ‘I don’t know about the daemonhost. He fought it and hated it for so long, and then… I dunno. Maybe he’s become the radical they say. But you’re wrong about him being a broken old man. Well, he’s broken and he’s old… but I’d rather go up against Ravenor unarmed than ever cross Gregor Eisenhorn.’

Mathuin’s grenade exploded. The aim had been good, but the device had bounced oddly at the last moment, and had gone off beneath the striding Dreadnought. The machine paced on through the ball of fire, untroubled.

Mathuin dived for cover as the cannons began pumping again.

‘Crap… My turn, I suppose,’ said Nayl. He clicked the setter to four seconds, thumbed the igniter, and ran into the hallway, bowling the grenade underarm.

Then he threw himself into shelter.

The grenade bounced once, lifted with the spin Nayl had put on it, and smacked bluntly against the front shell of the Dreadnought.

It was just rebounding when it detonated.

The Dreadnought vanished in a sheet of flame that boiled down the hallway, compressed and driven by the walls and roof.

As it cleared, Thonius saw the Dreadnought. Its front was scorched, but it was far, far from dead.

‘Damn. Just me then,’ he said.

‘You’ve dabbled in farseeing,’ Eisenhorn said. ‘I know that. Your time spent with the eldar drew you in that direction.’

‘I won’t deny it,’ Ravenor replied.

‘That makes you bright to the Fratery,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘It illuminates you in the interwoven pathways of the future. That’s why they located you in their prospects.’

Ravenor was quiet for a moment. ‘And you’ve come all this way, risked all this danger… to warn me?’

‘Of course.’

‘I’m flattered.’

‘Don’t be, Gideon. You’d do the same for me.’

‘I’m sure I would. But what you’re telling me is… crazy.’

Eisenhorn bowed his head, and ran the fingers of his right hand up and down the cold grip of his runestaff.

‘Of course it sounds crazy,’ he said. ‘But it’s true. I ask you this… if you don’t believe me, why are these cultist fools trying so hard to prevent our meeting here tonight? They know it’s true. They want you denied of this warning.’

‘That I will trigger this manifestation? This daemon-birth?’

‘You, or one close to you. The trigger point is something that happens on Eustis Majoris.’

Within his force chair, Ravenor was numb. ‘I won’t lie, Gregor. My current investigations focus on that world. I was en route to Eustis Majoris when I diverted to meet you here. But I have no knowledge of this Slight. It hasn’t figured in any of my research. I can’t believe that something I will do… or something one of my band will do… will–’

‘Gideon, I can’t believe my only ally these days is a daemonhost. Fate surprises us all.’

‘So what should I do, now you’ve warned me? Abandon my investigations on Eustis? Shy away from that world in the hope that by avoiding it I can also avoid this prophecy?’

Eisenhorn’s face was in shadow. ‘Maybe you should.’

‘No,’ said Ravenor. ‘What I should be is careful. Careful in my own actions, careful to oversee the actions of my team. If there is truth in the Fratery’s prophecy, it is surely bound up in the dire conspiracy I am just now uncovering on Eustis Majoris. But I must prosecute that case. I would be failing in the duty you charged me with if I didn’t. After all, the future is not set. We make it, don’t we?’

‘I think we do. I hope we do.’

‘Gregor, when have either of us shirked from serving the Throne just because we’re afraid things might go bad? We are inquisitors, we seek. We do not hide.’

Eisenhorn raised his head, and let the falling rain drops patter off his upraised palm. ‘Gideon, I came to warn you, nothing else. I never expected you to change your course. Now, at least, you’re aware of a “might be”. You can be ready for it. That’s all I wanted.’

Far behind them, the sound of rapid cannon-fire and dull explosions echoed through the tower.

‘I think the time for conversation is over,’ said Eisenhorn.

Thonius’ pockets were not full of munitions and ordnance like Mathuin’s, but he reached into them anyway. In one, a mini-cogitator, in another, two data-slates. In a third, a clasped leather case in which he had wrapped his tools: files, data-pins, fine brushes, tubes of lubricant, a vial of adhesive, pliers and tweezers. All the bric-a-brac that aided him in conquering and tinkering with cogitators and codifiers.

‘Carl! Get into cover!’ Nayl was yelling.

Thonius slid out the vial of adhesive, and wiped the drooling nozzle down the side of the grenade ball, waiting a moment for it to get contact-tacky.

Then, taking a deep breath, he leapt out of cover into the face of the Dreadnought, and lobbed the grenade. It hit the front casing, and adhered there, stuck fast.

Mathuin threw himself out of cover, and tackled Thonius, bringing him down behind a pillar.

The grenade exploded.

‘You see?’ said Thonius. ‘You see how thinking works?’

But the Dreadnought wasn’t finished. The blast had split its belly plates, but it was still moving, still striding, still firing.

Thonius shrugged. ‘All right… we’re dead.’

The Dreadnought suddenly stopped blasting. It faltered. A chill swept over the chamber.

Ravenor’s chair slid into view, heading towards the killer machine. With the force of his mind, he had momentarily jammed its weapons.

Sudden frost coated the walls, Ravenor’s chair and the Dreadnought. The machine tried to move. Cycling mechanisms shuddered as it attempted to clear its guns.

A tall figure strode past Ravenor, heading for the Dreadnought. It held a runestaff in one hand and a drawn sword in the other. Its robes fluttered out behind it, stiff with ice.

‘Holy Terra!’ exclaimed Nayl. ‘Eisenhorn?’

A second before Ravenor’s mental grip failed, a second before the cannons resumed their murderous work, Eisenhorn swung the sword – Barbarisater – and cleft the Dreadnought in two. The sword-blade ripped along the fissure Thonius’ cunning grenade had put in it.

Eisenhorn turned aside, and shielded his face as the Dreadnought combusted.

He looked back at them all, terrible and majestic, backlit by flames.

‘Shall we?’ he said.

With their Dreadnought gone, the remainder of the Fratery force fled. The warband and the two inquisitors slaughtered many as they made their escape into the storm.

Tugging one of her kineblades out of a body with her mind, Kys watched Eisenhorn ripping his way through the faltering hostiles around them.

‘Now I see what you mean,’ she said to Kara Swole.

‘I’m done here,’ Gregor Eisenhorn said. He looked back across the bridge span to the tower. Screamlight was still dancing around the summit. ‘Cherubael needs my help now. I should go and see how he’s doing.’

‘I will be vigilant,’ Ravenor said.

Eisenhorn knelt, and pressed his gnarled hands flat against the side of the chair.

‘The Emperor go with you. I’ve said my piece. It’s up to you now, Gideon.’

Eisenhorn rose and looked at the others. ‘Mamzel Kys. Interrogator. Mr Mathuin. A pleasure meeting you.’ He nodded to each of them. ‘Kara?’

She smiled. ‘Gregor.’

‘Never a hardship seeing you. Look after Gideon for me.’

‘I will.’

Eisenhorn looked at Harlon Nayl, and held out a hand. Nayl clasped it with both of his.

‘Harlon. Like old times.’

‘Emperor protect you, Gregor.’

‘I hope so,’ Eisenhorn said, and walked away, back across the bridge span towards the tower where the screamlight still flashed and sparked. They knew they would not see him again.

Unless the future was not as set as it seemed.

Malinter fell away below them, vast and silent. Nayl piloted the transport into low orbit, flashing out signals to their ship.

Once the nav was set and automatics had taken over, he turned his chair on its pivot, and looked at Ravenor.

‘He wasn’t the same,’ he said.

+How do you mean?+

‘He seemed so sane. I thought he was mad.’

+Yes. I thought that too. It’s hard to know whether I should believe him.+

‘About what?’

+About the dangers ahead, Harlon. The risks we may take.+

‘So… what do we do?’

+We carry on. We do our best. We serve the Emperor of Mankind. If what Gregor said comes to pass, we deal with it. Unless you have a better idea.’

‘Not a one,’ replied Nayl, turning back to study the controls.

+Good,+ sent Ravenor, and wheeled his chair around, returning to the cabin space behind where the others were gathered.

Nayl sighed, and looked ahead at the turning starfields.

The future lay ahead, its back to them, saying nothing.

GARDENS OF TYCHO

The nature of Master Dellac’s line of business had never come up in conversation, and Valentin Drusher was in no position to ask impertinent questions. Certainly, Master Dellac was a successful man, one of the most conspicuously wealthy citizens on that dusty stretch of the Bone Coast. Drusher had an idea or two, but decided it was probably safer not to know. He just did what he was told. Two visits a week, after hours, to Master Dellac’s mansion up in the hills, providing his specialist services on a private basis, in return for an agreed wage. And no questions asked, either way.

Sometimes, Master Dellac would supplement Drusher’s payment with a gift: a smoked ham, a packet of expensive, dainty biscuits, perhaps even a bottle of imported wine. Drusher knew he could get good prices selling these items on later, but he always kept them for himself. It wasn’t that he was greedy, or some kind of epicure (although, Throne knows, it had been a long, long time since Valentin Drusher had known any luxury in his life). It was simply because there was a line Drusher wasn’t prepared to cross. So many aspects of his life, his respectability, and his good character, had been eroded over the years, he held on tight to those he still had.

Besides, he was a meek man, and he was too afraid of getting caught.

Late one Lauday evening, Drusher was making the return journey from Dellac’s house to Kaloster. Drusher went to and from the mansion on foot, a solid journey of an hour each way. Dellac never offered him transport, even though he had a driver. Drusher tried to consider the biweekly trips the sort of decent exercise a man of his age ought to be getting, but by the time he returned to his habitat on Amon Street, he was always weary.

The sun had gone, leaving the sky over the small coastal town stained like pink marble. A night wind was picking up, sifting white dust from the dunes across the town road, and Kaloster itself seemed shuttered and dark.

There was no nightlife, no remission from the frugal, small-town quiet. But in addition to the payment in his coat pocket, Drusher carried a piece of good brisket in his satchel. He would eat well for the next few nights at least.

Amon Street was a tenement slope running down from Aquila Square to the rusty wharfs and the condemned fishworks. The buildings were drab brown with age and neglect, and their roofs were in need of repair. The air in the street stank because of the lime burners just across the way. Drusher rented rooms on the fourth floor of number seventy.

A large black transporter with big chrome headlamps was parked just down the street. Drusher noticed it as he was fumbling for his key, but paid it little heed. He went up the narrow wooden staircase to his door.

It was only when he stepped into his little room, he realised someone was already there.

The man was robust and rather ugly. Heavy-browed with a shock of thick, dark hair and a shapeless, asymmetric face, he wore a thick, high-buttoned suit of black serge and a heavy leather stormcoat, also black. He was seated, casually, on the wooden pole-back chair behind the door, waiting.

‘What are you–’ Drusher began, his voice coming out thin and reedy.

‘You Drusher?’ the man asked.

‘Yes. Why? What are you doing here? This is my–’

‘Valentin Drusher?’ the man pressed, glancing at a small data-slate in his left hand. ‘Magos biologis? Says here you’re forty-seven. Is that right? You look older.’

‘I am Valentin Drusher,’ Drusher replied, too scared to be offended. ‘What is this about? Who are you?’

‘Sit down, magos. Over there, please. Put your satchel on the table.’

Drusher did as he was told. His pulse was thumping, and his skin had become clammy. He had an awful feeling he knew what this was about.

‘I’m Falken,’ the man said, and briefly flashed an identity warrant at him. Drusher swallowed as he glimpsed the silver seal of the Magistratum, attached to which was a small orange ribbon that denoted the Martial Order Division. ‘How long have you been here on Gershom?’

‘Ah, fourteen years. Fourteen years this winter.’

‘And here in Kaloster?’

‘Just eighteen months.’

The man looked at his data-slate again. ‘According to Central Records, you are employed by the Administratum to teach Natural History at the local scholam.’

‘That’s correct. My papers are in order.’

‘But you’re a magos biologis, not a teacher.’

‘Employment prospects on this world are not great for a man of my calling. I take what work I can. The teaching stipend offered by the Administratum keeps a roof over my head.’

The man pursed his lips. ‘If the employment prospects for your kind are thin on the ground, magos, it begs the question why you came to Gershom in the first place. Let alone why you chose to stay here for fourteen years.’

Despite his fear, Drusher felt piqued. This was the old injustice again, back to haunt him. ‘When I came to this world, sir, I was gainfully employed. The Lord Governor himself was my patron. He commissioned me to produce a complete taxonomy of the planet’s fauna. The work took seven years, but at the end of it, complications arose…’

‘Complications?’

‘A legal matter. I was forced to stay on for another two years, as a witness. All the money I had earned from the commission ran out. By the time the case was settled, I could no longer afford passage to another world. I have been here ever since, making a living as best I can.’

The man, Falken, didn’t seem very interested. In Drusher’s experience, no one ever was. On a downtrodden outworld like Gershom, everyone had their own sob story.

‘You keep glancing at your satchel, magos,’ Falken remarked suddenly. ‘Why is that?’

Drusher swallowed hard again. He had never been any good at lying.

‘Sir,’ he said quietly, ‘could you tell me… I mean, would things go better for me if I made a full confession now?’

Falken blinked, as if surprised, then smiled.

‘That’s a good idea,’ he said, sitting down to face Drusher across the low table where the satchel sat. ‘Why don’t you do just that?’

‘I’m not proud of this,’ said Drusher. ‘I mean, it was stupid. I knew the Magistratum would find out eventually. It’s just… things have been so tight.’

‘Go on.’

‘The Administratum pays me a stipend for my services, along with certain ration benefits as per the Martial Order. This is of course contingent on me not… on me not supplementing my earnings.’

Naturally,’ nodded Falken. ‘If you break the terms, there is a penalty. It can be severe.’

Drusher sighed, and showed Falken the contents of his satchel. ‘There is a man, a local businessman, who employs me, two evenings a week. It is a private arrangement. He pays me in cash, no questions asked.’

‘How much?’

‘Two crowns per evening. He has a daughter. For her, he retains my services…’

Falken looked at the things Drusher was showing him.

‘You do this with his daughter?’

‘Yes. Sometimes he watches.’

Falken got up. ‘I see. This is a pretty picture, isn’t it?’ For some reason, Falken seemed to be stifling a smile, as if something amused him terribly.

‘Am I in serious trouble?’ Drusher asked.

‘You’ll have to come with me,’ Falken said. ‘To Tycho.’

‘To Tycho?’

‘The Marshal wants to speak with you.’

‘Oh Throne!’ Drusher gasped. ‘I thought perhaps a fine…’

‘Pack your things, magos. All of them. I’ll give you five minutes.’

Drusher had very few belongings. They fitted into two small bags. Falken didn’t offer to carry either of them down to the transporter.

It was dark now, fully night. When the transporter’s engine turned over, the glare of the headlights filled the depths of Amon Street.

Drusher sat up front, beside the Magistratum officer. They drove up through the town, onto the coast highway, and turned south.

The cities of the Southern Peninsula, Tycho amongst them, had been the arena of a savage civil war that had raged for over ten years. The popular separatist movement had finally been defeated by government forces two years earlier, but by then the war had critically weakened Gershom’s already-ailing economy. Strict, Imperial martial order had been imposed throughout the Peninsula and right up through the Bone Coast into the Eastern Provinces.

The civil war had stained the air with smoke, and poisoned the coastal waters, killing off the fishing industry. The cities of the Peninsula were urban ruins where the Martial Order Division worked to re-establish Imperium law and support the impoverished civilian population.

Falken drove for two hours without speaking. The vox-set under his dashboard, turned down, crackled with Magistratum traffic as if it were talking in its sleep. Drusher stared out of the window at the darkness and the occasional black ruin that loomed out of it. This was it, he felt. Gershom was his nemesis. It had lured him in, a bright young man with an equally bright future before him, and it had trapped him like a fettle fly in amber. It had drained him dry, throttled his spirit, made him destitute.

And now this, after all his efforts to earn a crust to live, let alone a ticket off-world, it was going to destroy him. Disgrace. Shame. Perhaps a custodial sentence.

‘I don’t deserve this,’ he murmured.

‘What’s that?’ asked Falken at the wheel.

‘Nothing.’

They began to pass through armoured roadblocks where Magistratum troopers wearing the orange ribbon of the Martial Order Division waved Falken through. They were entering the Peninsula proper, the real warzone. Ghost cities, tumbled and forlorn, drifted past, lit by searchlights and military beacons. The dark landscape outside the transporter became a phosphorescent waste of fragile walls and empty habs.

Tycho was the principal city of the Peninsula region, and when they drove in through its empty streets, four hours after leaving Kaloster, Drusher saw a miserable calamity of twisted girders, piled rubble and smoke-blackened buildings. His face, half-lit by the luminous dials of the dashboard, reflected back to him off the window, superimposed on the ruins. Pale, thin, bespectacled, the hair thin and grey. Drusher wasn’t sure if he resembled the wastes of Tycho, or if they resembled him.

They pulled up outside a mouldering ouslite monolith in the city centre.

‘Leave your bags,’ Falken said, getting out. ‘I’ll have them brought in.’

Drusher followed him in through the towering entrance. Magistratum officers hurried to and fro in the echoing atrium, and limp Imperial flags hung from the roof. There was a smell of counterseptic.

‘This way,’ Falken said.

He led Drusher to a room on the fifth floor. The elevators were out, and they had to use the stairs. Falken made him wait outside the heavy double doors.

The hallway was cold, and night air seeped in through the cracked windowpanes at the far end. Drusher paced up and down. He could hear the rattle and clack of cogitators in nearby rooms, and an occasional shout from down below. Then he heard laughter from behind the double doors.

Falken emerged. He was still chuckling.

‘You can go in now,’ he said.

Drusher walked in, the doors closing behind him. The office was large and grim, a single metal desk planted on a threadbare rug. Half a dozen wire-basket carts heavily laden with dog-eared dossiers and files. A cogitator, whirring to itself. Faded spaces on the walls where pictures had once hung.

‘Throne. I wouldn’t have recognised you, magos,’ said a voice.

She was standing by the deep windows, silhouetted against the night-time city outside. He knew the voice at once.

‘Macks?’

Germaine Macks stepped forwards to meet him, a smile on her lips. Her hair was still short, her face still lean, the old, tiny zigzag scar above the left-hand side of her mouth still visible. The other, newer scar on her forehead was half-hidden under her fringe.

‘Hello, Valentin,’ she said. ‘What’s it been now? Five years? More?’

He nodded. ‘Deputy Macks…’

She shook her head. ‘It’s Magistratum Marshal Macks now. Chief of Martial Order, Tycho city.’

He stiffened. ‘Mamzel, I can explain everything. I hope the fact that you know me of old might mitigate the–’

‘Falken was playing with you, magos.’

‘Excuse me, what?’

Macks sat down behind her desk. ‘I sent Falken up the coast to get you. Throne knows why you started confessing things to him. Guilty conscience, Valentin?’

‘I…’ Drusher stammered.

‘Falken was beside himself. He told me he didn’t think he could keep a straight face on the journey down here. Did you think you were in trouble?’

‘He… that is… I…’

‘Teaching the daughter of some small-time racketeer the art of watercolour painting? To supplement the pittance Admin pays you? Come on, Valentin! I’d hardly spare a chief investigator to go all that way to bring you in. You criminal mastermind, you.’

Drusher felt a little giddy.

‘May I sit down?’ he asked.

She nodded, still chuckling, and reached into a desk drawer for a bottle of amasec and two shot glasses.

‘Get this inside you, you filthy recidivist,’ she grinned, handing one glass to him.

‘I really don’t understand what’s going on…’ Drusher said.

‘Neither do I,’ she said. ‘That’s why I want some help. Some expert help. I said you weren’t in trouble, and I was lying. You’re not in personal trouble, but there is trouble here. And I’m about to drop you right in it.’

‘Oh,’ he said.

‘Drink up,’ Macks said. ‘You’ll need it where we’re going.’

‘In your expert opinion,’ she said, ‘what did that?’

Drusher took a long, slow look, then excused himself. Coming up, the amasec was a lot hotter and more acid than it had felt going down.

‘All right?’ she said.

He wiped his mouth, and nodded reluctantly. Macks took a little pot out of her uniform pocket, and smeared what looked like grease under her nose. She reached out and did the same to Drusher. The fierce camphor smell of osscil filled his sinuses.

‘Should have done that before I took you in,’ Macks apologised. ‘Old medicae mortus trick. It masks the stench of decay.’

She led him back into the morgue. The place was chilly, and tiled with mauve enamel squares. There were brass plugholes every few metres across the floor, and in the distance, Drusher could hear water pattering from a leaky scrub-hose. High-gain glow-strips, sharp and white, filled the chamber with a light like frost.

The cadaver lay on a steel gurney beside an autopsy unit. Other shapes, tagged and covered in red sheets, lurked nearby on other trolleys.

‘All right to take another look?’ Macks asked.

Drusher nodded.

She folded the red shroud back.

The man was naked, his body as white and swollen as cooked seafood. His hands, feet and genitals seemed shrivelled with cold, and the fingernails stood proud and dark. The hairs on his chest and pubis were black and looked like insect legs.

He must have been about one-eighty in life, Drusher figured, fighting back another wave of nausea. Heavyset. Bruises of lividity marked his lumbar region, and there were other darker blue bruises around his ribs.

The front of his face, and most of his throat, had been bitten away. Parts of the skull structure had gone, along with the soft tissue. Cleanly severed, like industrial shears had…

Drusher gagged, and looked aside.

‘Animal, right?’ Macks said.

Drusher mumbled something.

‘Was that a yes?’

‘It would appear to be a bite,’ Drusher said, his voice very tiny. ‘Very deep and strong. And then… the suggestion of some feeding. Around the face and neck.’

‘Animal, right?’ she repeated.

‘I suppose. Nothing human could have… bitten like that.’

‘I measured the bite radius. Just like you taught me. Remember, in Outer Udar? I measured it.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Twenty centimetres. And I checked too. No tooth fragments. This was clean. I mean, it just bit his face right off.’

Drusher turned slowly. ‘Macks? What am I doing here?’

‘Helping my investigation,’ she said. ‘I thought we’d covered that. I’m in charge in this neck of the woods, with plenty enough problems to contend with, I can tell you… and then this crap happens. I look for an expert, and lo and behold I find Magos Biologis Valentin Drusher, my old pal, working as a teacher in Kaloster. So I thought, Macks, that’s perfect. We worked together so well before, and this clearly needs a biologis expert.’

‘That’s great…’

‘Valentin, cheer up. There’s money in this. I’ll bill your hours out to the Magistratum, and you’ll get three times what the Administratum was paying you. Expert witness and all.’

‘You’re running the Martial Order programme here in Tycho, and you pull strings like that to get me to consider one case?’

‘No,’ said Macks. ‘I should have explained that too, I guess. This isn’t the only victim.’

‘How many others?’ he asked.

Macks made a vague gesture that encompassed all the other gurneys in the chamber. Twenty-five, thirty, maybe more.

‘You’re joking?’

‘I wish I was. Something is chomping its way through the population.’

Drusher steeled himself, and turned back to the exposed corpse, switching his standard glasses for his reading pair. ‘A fluorescing lamp, please. And a close glass.’

She handed him the glass from the autopsy cart, and held the lamp up, bathing the dead man’s devastated skull with blue light.

Drusher picked up a steel probe, and gently excised the lip of one of the revealed bone edges. He fought to keep his gorge down.

‘No tooth fragments.’

‘I told you.’

‘I mean nothing,’ he said. ‘Not even the bacillus residue one would expect from the wound mark of a predator. This wasn’t an animal. It’s not a bite.’

‘What?’

‘It’s too clean. I’d say you were looking for a man with a chainsword.’

Macks shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Why no?’

‘Because if there was a maniac with a chainsword running around downtown Tycho, I’d know about it. This is animal, Valentin.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ he asked.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you.’

The headlamps of her transporter picked out the sign over the wrought-iron gateway.

The Gardens of Tycho.

‘Well-stocked before the civil war,’ she said, pulling on the wheel. ‘The biggest xenozoological exhibit on the planet. The local governor had a thing about exotic animals.’

‘And?’

‘And, Valentin, it was bombed during the war. Some animals were killed, but many more escaped. I think something from here is roaming the ruins of Tycho, hungry, neglected, killing people.’

‘And that’s why…’ he began.

‘That’s why I need a magos biologis,’ she finished.

They pulled up and got out. The gardens were dark and quiet. It was still two hours before dawn. There was an awful damp reek in the air, emanating from the empty cages and the dank rockcrete pens.

Macks had given Drusher a stablight, and carried one of her own. They walked together, their footsteps gritty and crisp on the ground, playing the beams around.

The Gardens of Tycho had not been a sophisticated collection. Drusher remembered the spectacular xeno-fauna halls of Thracian Primaris that he had visited as a young man. There, the pens and enclosures had been encoded to create perfect habitats for the precious specimens, often with their own atmospheres, their own gravities even.

Such expertise – and the money to realise it – had not been available on Tycho. These were simple cages and, in places, armoured holding tanks, where exotic creatures from the far-flung corners of the Imperium had lived out their days on Gershom in miserable confinement.

Drusher knew exactly how they felt.

‘If it’s been caged like this, Macks, it will perhaps have become psychotic,’ he said.

‘The animal?’

‘The animal. It’s common in poor conditions such as these. Animals held in crude cages often develop behavioural problems. They become unpredictable. Violent.’

‘But if it’s a predator anyway…’ she began.

‘Even predators have patterns. The need to hunt, to breed, to territorialise. Limit those things, and you break the pattern.’

‘That’s important why?’ she asked.

‘If this animal is a carnivore, and I would suspect as much, it isn’t feeding on its kills. Well, only minimally. It is killing simply to kill.’

‘Like the hill beast?’ she murmured, thinking back to that haunted winter in Outer Udar.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That beast was different. Killing was its behaviour. Here we have an aberration.’

As they walked further, Drusher began to see the awful damage done in the course of the war. Bomb-shattered pens, mounds of rubble, plasteel cages shorn from their mounting blocks.

And bones.

There were corpses in the intact pens too. Limp sacks of dried flesh, scattered vertebrae, the lingering stench of dung and decay. A row of wire domes that had once held rare birds was littered with bright feathers. Tufts of down caked the wire mesh, evidence of frantic, starving attempts to be free. They reminded Drusher of Baron Karne’s poultry coops.

‘We thought everything had died,’ Macks said. ‘The stink when we first came down here. I mean, nothing had been fed or cleaned out in months. Everything in a sealed cage was dead, except some kind of emaciated dromedary horse, which had been living off its own fat deposits, and even that died a few days after we freed it. And everything in the bombed cages we figured was wiped out, although there are some finch-monkeys loose in the Lower Bowery, freaking little things, and Falken swears he saw a grazer on Lemand Street one night, though I say he was drunk.’

‘So if something’s loose, it came from the bomb-damaged cages?’ Drusher said.

She shrugged. ‘Unless some well-intentioned citizen came along during the war, and let something out and then locked the cage again. Some of them seem to be empty, though the collection’s manifest doesn’t say if they were just unstocked pens. It’s years out of date.’

‘You have a manifest?’

Macks nodded and produced a data-slate from her coat. ‘I’ve highlighted any item that was caged in the bombed area, and also anything connected to an empty cage. Throne, Valentin, I haven’t the first clue what half of them are. So glad to have an expert on board.’

He started to look at the list. ‘So it could be anything highlighted, or anything at all, given the fact that the stock might have been changed or rotated after this list was made?’

She was about to reply when her vox-link chimed. The sharp little note made Drusher jump. Macks took the call.

‘We have to go,’ she said, turning to head back to the exit. ‘I’ve been called in. Some drunken idiots brawling in a tavern after curfew.’

‘Do I have to come?’ he said.

She turned back and shone her stablight in his face. ‘No. Why, would you like to stay here?’

Drusher glanced around.

‘Not really,’ he said.

They drove through streets that were deserted but for burned-out vehicles and the occasional Magistratum transport rushing off on a response. He sat in the passenger seat, studying the slate, rocked by the jolts of the uneven roadway. Relief was beginning to seep into him, relief that he wasn’t bound for disgrace and a custodial sentence after all. A little part of him hated Falken for his trick, but a greater part despised himself for being so foolish. Gershom wasn’t his nemesis. Valentin Drusher was his own worst enemy, and his ruined life was testament to the way he had studiously taken every wrong turn destiny had ever offered him.

‘Your hair’s gone grey,’ Macks said, her eyes on the road.

He looked up. ‘I stopped dying it.’

‘You dyed your hair?’ she asked.

He didn’t reply.

‘So you’ve matured out of that vanity, then, Valentin?’ she smirked.

‘No. I just couldn’t afford the treatment any more.’

She laughed, but he was sure he detected some sympathy in her tone.

‘I like it,’ she said after a while. ‘It’s distinguished.’

‘You haven’t changed at all,’ he said.

She pulled the vehicle to a halt outside a battered townhouse where Magistratum officers were attempting to restrain nine or ten brawling men. There was blood on the pavement, and the air was lit by the blinking lamps of the armoured patrol vehicles.

Macks got out.

‘Stay here,’ she said. She peered back at him through the open door. ‘So, is that a good thing?’

‘What?’ he asked.

‘The fact that I haven’t changed?’

‘I never thought you needed much improvement,’ he replied, immediately appalled that he’d made such a bold remark out loud.

Macks laughed, then slammed the door.

In the sealed quiet of the transporter, Drusher watched for a while as she waded in with her riot baton, and brought order to the scene. Then he turned his attention back to the data-slate.

Time passed.

The driver’s door opened, and the transporter rocked on its springs as she clambered back in.

‘I think we’re looking for a carnodon,’ he said.

‘Yeah?’ she said, gunning the engine and throwing the vehicle forwards in rapid acceleration.

‘Yes. I mean, working from the details here. I could be wrong if the specimens were changed after this list was made up, but it’s a simple process of elimination.’

‘Is it?’ she asked, throwing them around a street corner so fast the tyres squealed.

‘There were only four predators listed in the bombed-out pens. Discount the Mirepoix treecreeper because it’s an injector, not a biter.’

‘A what?’

‘It injects its prey with a long proboscis, and dissolves the internal organs, sucking them out.’

‘Enough.’

‘I mean, it doesn’t have a mouth.’

‘All right, all right.’

‘So, no bite wounds.’

‘Right.’

‘Right, so the saurapt from Brontotaph is off the list as well.’

Macks changed down, and raced them along another empty boulevard. ‘Because?’

‘Because it’s the size of a hab block. Falken wouldn’t have had to be drunk to spot it already.’

She grinned.

‘And the pouncer here, from Lamsarotte, we can cross that off too. It’s a felid, but far too slight to cause the wounds you showed me. Besides, I doubt it would have lasted long in this climate outside a heated pen.’

‘So we’re left with the, what did you call it?’ she asked.

‘Carnodon. From Gudrun. Throne, there shouldn’t have been one in captivity here. They’re virtually extinct, and listed on the Administratum’s prohibition order. It’s a felid too, but big, and from temperate habitats.’

‘How big?’

‘Five or six metres, maybe eight hundred kilos. Quite capable of biting off a man’s face.’

‘So, magos biologis, how do we catch a carnodon?’ she asked, heaving on the wheel.

Drusher looked up.

‘We’re… we’re going rather fast, Macks,’ he said. ‘Another call?’

‘Yes,’ she replied.

‘Another breach of curfew?’ he asked.

Macks shook her head. ‘Question stands, Valentin. How do we catch a carnodon?’

The habs were clustered together at the northern extremity of the town, gathered in tight, conspiratorial knots. Acres of wasteland surrounded each stack, littered with the flotsam of war and poverty. Much of the intense fighting during the civil war had taken place in this shell-damaged suburb.

Macks slowed the transporter, and guided it between piles of shattered bricks. They were approaching one of the most ramshackle towers. Ahead, the lamps picked out a pair of Magistratum transporters, parked near the stack’s loading dock. A heavy morgue carrier was pulled up beside them, its rear hatch gaping.

‘Come on,’ Macks said.

Drusher got out into the cold, pre-dawn air. The rectangular habs stood stark against a sky slowly paling into a gold sheen. He smelled the sweet rot of garbage, and the unpleasant odour of wet rockcrete.

‘Bring your stablight,’ she said, making off across the rough ground to the group of Magistratum officers waiting by the stack entrance. She spoke to a couple of them, then signalled Drusher to follow her.

They entered the wide doorway, and began to climb the crude stairwell.

‘They’ve held off so you can get the first look at the scene,’ she said.

Drusher took a deep breath. They climbed to the fifth floor.

‘Hurry up,’ she called back to him.

‘Hang on,’ he said. Drusher stooped to examine the rough wall, touching a dark patch among the lichen with his fingertips, and then sniffing them.

‘You’ll catch something,’ Macks said, coming back down the stairs to join him.

‘I thought that’s why you hired me,’ he said. ‘Smell this. Ammonia, very strong. Other natural chemicals, pheromones. This is a territorial mark. The animal spranted here.’

‘What?’

‘It scent-marked the wall with urine.’

‘And you wanted me to sniff it?’

Drusher looked up at her. ‘It’s textbook felid behaviour. The stain suggests quantity, so we’re looking at something large.’

‘Carnodon?’

‘It fits.’

‘See if this fits too,’ she said.

The derelict hab stack had become home for vagrants, and it was rare for these dispossessed souls to have any contact with the Magistratum. But one of them had been scared enough to raise the alarm, having heard a commotion on the fifth floor.

The stack apartment was a four-room affair, a kitchen-diner, a bed vault, a lounge and a washroom cubicle. The place stank of mildew.

And another smell Drusher hadn’t encountered since Outer Udar.

Blood.

The Magistratum crew had set up pole lamps to mark the scene, and it had been picted and recorded.

‘Watch your step,’ Macks said.

As they went in, the smell became more intense. The corpse was in the lounge area. Even Macks, hardened to the uglier aspects of life, had to turn aside for a moment.

The body was that of an older female. The legs, swathed in filthy hose and support stockings, were intact. The torso had been stripped down to the bones, and these had been broken open so that something feeding could get at the soft organs. There was no head, no arms.

‘They tell me the head’s in there,’ Macks said, indicating the kitchen area.

Drusher peered in through the doorway, glimpsing a brown, cracked object that looked like a broken earthenware pot. Except that it still had a residue of grey hair.

‘What’s this?’ Macks called. In the bedroom, her torch beam was illuminating a brown, fractured stick.

‘Arm bone,’ said Drusher. ‘Broken open to get at the marrow.’ He was remarkably composed. This was perhaps the most horrific sight that had ever greeted his eyes, but a professional detachment was masking his revulsion. The magos biologis in him was fascinated by the killing.

‘I think she was already dead,’ he said. ‘This is scavenging. A decent post-mortem will be able to confirm it. The feeder was big, but it took its time. Leisurely feeding, reducing the cadaver piece by piece, going for the most nutritional areas first. There was no struggle, no kill, although the carnodon probably made quite a bit of noise as it rendered down the carcass.’

‘Carnodon?’ she said. ‘You’re sure?’

‘I’d stake my professional credentials on it,’ he replied. ‘For what that’s worth.’

‘All right.’ Macks breathed heavily. ‘Can we get them in to clear this?’

‘Yes,’ Drusher said.

‘And can you work up something? I don’t know – a library pict, maybe one of your dandy watercolour sketches, so we know what we’re looking for?’

‘Glad to,’ he replied.

‘Good,’ Macks said. ‘ You look like you need sleep.’

He shrugged. ‘Where is the Magistratum putting me up?’ he asked.

Macks replied, ‘We’ll find somewhere.’

Somewhere turned out to be a torn couch in the empty room next door to Macks’ office. It appeared from the stale bedclothes that someone else had been sleeping there on a regular basis. Drusher was too tired to complain. Besides, as far as his relationship with the planet Gershom went, this was pretty much par for the course.

He fell asleep within minutes of lying down.

He woke with a start, and found he’d only been sleeping for a couple of hours. It was barely dawn. As was often the case, rest had freed up his mind, and there was now an idea buzzing around in it so busily it had woken him. He felt strangely energised. After years of tedious dead-end employment, he was finally calling on his primary area of expertise again, using old skills that he had begun to believe had long since atrophied. He almost felt like a magos biologis.

Drusher got up, tucked in his shirt, and put on his shoes. The building was quiet and dead. He went into the hallway, and tapped on the door of Macks’ office. When he got no reply, he let himself in, and started to rummage among the dossiers piled on the wire carts.

He heard a metallic click behind him, and turned. Macks, her hair tousled, stood behind the desk. The sidearm she had aimed at him was slowly lowering.

‘It’s you,’ she grunted, her eyes puffy with sleep.

‘Throne!’ he said. ‘Where were you?’

Rubbing her face, she gestured at the floor behind the desk, where Drusher could now see a few seat cushions and a crumpled blanket.

‘You were sleeping on the floor under your desk?’ he said.

She cleared her throat, and holstered the sidearm in her belt pouch. She looked pissed off and weary.

‘Well, you got my bed, didn’t you?’ she snapped.

‘Oh,’ he said.

Macks picked up her boots and shuffled across to the office door. She leaned out and yelled, ‘Watch officer! Two caffeines before I shoot someone!’ Then she sat down on the rug, and started to pull on her footwear.

‘What time is it?’ she asked Drusher grumpily.

‘Early yet. I’m sorry.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘I wanted to check the autopsy files. From the victims. There was something I wanted to look at.’

‘That pile there,’ Macks said. ‘No, the other end.’

Drusher started to look through the files, wincing at some of the more grisly picts he encountered. Macks left the room, presumably to kill whoever it was that was being slow with the caffeine.

When she returned, he’d spread a dozen of the dossiers out on the rug, and was making notes with a slate and stylus he’d borrowed from her desk.

‘Macks,’ he began. ‘There’s something here that–’

‘Get your jacket,’ she said.

In daylight (though daylight was a loose term), Tycho didn’t look any better. From the side window of the speeding transporter, Drusher could now starkly see what had been merely spectral ruins the night before. There had been a melancholy air to the place in the darkness. Now everything was blunt and crass: the scars of fire, the pitting of assault weapons, the water-filled cavities of craters, the shock-fractures on slabs of rockcrete. Weeds fumed the city ruins, thick and unlovely, reclaiming the wasteground between tenements and stacks. The Gardens of Tycho were everywhere now, Drusher thought. The wild was reclaiming the city.

They drove in convoy with two other Magistratum vehicles, rattling down the empty thoroughfares.

‘Fresh kill,’ was all Macks would say. ‘In the Commission of Works.’

Falken was already on site, with four armed troopers in tow. Drusher wouldn’t have been able to tell that the building before him was the Commission of Works. Penetrator shells had caved in the facade, and chewed curiously geometric shapes out of the roof. The rear of the building was a dark cave-system of intact rooms.

‘In here,’ said Falken, shouldering his riotgun, and leading them into the mangled ruins. ‘Routine sweep picked it up about thirty minutes ago.’

They clambered over fallen beams, disturbing the thick white dust. The body lay in a nest of broken floorboards.

‘Civilian volunteer,’ Falken said. ‘He was on a registered night watch here. He had a weapon, but it doesn’t seem like he got the chance to use it.’

The man lay on his side, facing them as they approached with a face that was no longer there. Something had severed his skull laterally in a line from the point of the chin to the apex of the skull. It looked to Drusher like an anatomical crosscut pict from a surgery text manual.

Drusher knelt down beside the body. The linear precision of the bite was baffling.

‘Did you sweep?’ Macks was asking Falken.

‘A brief look. Rimbaud thinks he heard something.’

Macks looked at the trooper. ‘Really?’

‘Up at back, ma’am,’ Rimbaud said. ‘There was definitely something moving around. I think it’s still here.’

‘Is that likely?’ Macks asked Drusher.

He shrugged. ‘If it was disturbed before it could feed… I suppose so.’

‘Let’s go,’ she ordered. She and Falken moved ahead, weapons lowered. ‘Valentin, you’re up,’ she called back. ‘Stick with Edvin. The rest of you cover the front. Rimbaud, show us where.’

They moved into the dark, crumbling hulk of the ruin, every footstep kicking up dust. Falken, Rimbaud and Macks made their way up a staircase that was hanging off the remains of a supporting wall. Edging forwards with the trooper named Edvin, Drusher could hear the others walking around on the floor above, creaking the distressed floor, sifting dust down at them in hourglass trickles. Drusher could also hear Edvin’s vox, turned low.

‘To your left now.’ That was Falken.

‘Don’t get too far ahead,’ Macks replied.

‘Something! No, false alarm.’

Edvin glanced nervously at Drusher.

‘All right there, sir?’ he asked.

Drusher nodded.

‘Some kind of cat?’ the trooper asked.

‘Some kind,’ Drusher replied. He was becoming very aware of the beat of his own heart.

When it happened, it happened with such ferocity and speed, Drusher barely had time to react. There was a fantastic, booming detonation – in hindsight, presumably Falken’s riotgun discharging – swiftly followed by a series of pistol shots on auto. At the same time, the vox went mad with strangulated calls. The floor above Drusher shook with a violent frenzy. There was an impact, a crash. A scream. Two more blasts from a riotgun.

‘What the Throne–’ Edvin began, raising his weapon, and looking up.

The floor above them caved in. Drusher and Edvin were knocked flat, and almost buried in a cascade of broken joists, planks and falling bricks. Mortar dust filled the atmosphere like a fog, choking and stifling. Another gunshot.

Drusher struggled to his feet, pushing the broken floorboards off his legs. He could barely breathe. Edvin was on his face, unconscious. Something heavy had come straight down through the floor, and landed on him, half-crushing him.

Drusher blinked.

‘No!’ he cried.

The something heavy was the body of a Magistratum trooper, faceless, blood jetting forcibly from severed arteries. The blood sprayed up the walls, gleaming like rubies in the dust.

‘Macks!’ he cried. ‘Macks!’

He tried to reach her, though he knew it was far too late. Then something else came down through the hole in the floor. Something fast and dark and feral. It was the animal, the killer, trying to find an escape route.

It slammed Drusher over hard with one flailing limb, and he crashed into a plasterboard wall that shattered like old marzipan icing.

For a moment, just a fleeting second before he passed out, he glimpsed it. The shape.

The shape.

He came round staring up at Falken’s face.

‘He’s all right.’ Falken spat and turned away, wiping dust off his face.

Drusher sat up fast, his head pounding. ‘Macks? Macks?’

‘What?’ she asked.

Drusher saw her, crouching in the rubble in front of him. Falken was getting the dazed Edvin back on his feet.

‘Macks?’

She was leaning over the body. Drusher got up, and could see now the mutilated corpse was Rimbaud.

‘It got away,’ Macks murmured. ‘It got Rimbaud, and then it got away.’ Falken was shouting for the other troopers to sweep the rear of the building.

‘What happened?’ Drusher asked.

‘I didn’t see it,’ Macks said. ‘Falken saw something move, and fired. Then it all went to hell.’

‘It came down this way. After it had…’ Drusher paused. ‘It followed Rimbaud’s body down.’

‘You see it?’

‘I didn’t get a proper look,’ Drusher said.

Macks cursed, and walked away. Drusher crouched down beside the trooper’s body, and turned it slightly so he could look at the wound. The same clean, ghastly cut right across the face. But this time, a second one, abortive, made behind the line of the excising blow, as if the predator had been in a frenzy – alarmed, perhaps – and had made a first hasty strike before following it up. Even so the first strike, deep and into the side of the neck and head, would have killed Rimbaud outright.

But even in haste, so clean. So straight.

‘A cat? A cat did that?’ Drusher looked around. Edvin, blood dribbling from a cut above his left eye, was staring at his friend’s body.

‘That’s what the experts say,’ Drusher replied.

They drove back to the Magistratum HQ in silence. The sweep had picked up nothing. The killer had melted into the ruins beyond the Commission of Works as fast as frost in summertime.

‘You thought it was me, didn’t you?’ Macks asked finally.

‘What?’

‘The body. I heard you cry out. You thought it had got me.’

Drusher nodded. He felt they might be about to have a moment, something honest that approximated intimacy. He was prepared to admit how much he would care if anything happened to her.

‘If you can’t tell the difference between me and a hairy-arsed male trooper,’ she said, ‘I’m not holding out much hope for your observational expertise.’

He looked over at her. ‘Screw you too, Macks.’

She left him alone in her office, and let him get on with sorting the dossiers. A staffer brought him a cup of something over-brewed and over-sweetened late in the afternoon. By then, he was pinning things to the walls, and had switched to paper to make his notes. He accessed Macks’ cogitator, and called up some city-plan maps.

Macks came back just as it was getting dark outside.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he said. ‘There’s something I need to show you.’

She seemed cheerful, upbeat.

‘Something I have to show you first,’ she said.

Macks led him down to the morgue. A crowd of officers and uniformed staffers had gathered, and there was almost a party atmosphere. Falken was passing round bottles of contraband amasec, so everyone could take a slug.

‘Here he is!’ Falken cried. ‘Magos Biologis Dresher!’

There was some clapping.

‘Drusher,’ Drusher said.

‘Whatever,’ Falken said, putting his arm around Drusher’s shoulders. ‘Couldn’t have done it without you, friend! Really, you were on the money! Eh? What do think? Is this a… a…’

‘Carnodon,’ Drusher said, painfully aware of how big Falken was beside him, squeezing him in the hug.

The felid had been laid across four gurneys, heavy and limp in death. Its tusked snout seemed to grimace, as if it, like Drusher, wished it was somewhere else. Small, dark punctures in its belly showed where Falken had shot it.

‘May I?’ Drusher asked, and Falken let him go over and examine the beast. The crowd turned back to toasting and laughing.

It had once been a wonderful thing, master of its world, afraid of nothing. An apex predator. Drusher smiled sadly as he thought of the phrase. A big specimen too, maybe five and a half metres body length, nine hundred kilos healthy body weight. But at the time of its miserable, hunted death, it had been less than six hundred kilos, emaciated, its ribs poking out like tent braces. It was old too, post-mature. The coat was raddled by sarcoptic mange and laden with lice, fungus and parasites. Drusher ran his hand along its flank anyway. So knotted, gristly, starved. He peeled back the black lips and examined the dentition.

‘Where did you get it?’ he called out to Falken.

‘In the cellars under the Lexicon,’ Falken said, coming over. ‘We got a heads-up. We’d circulated your picture, you see. Thanks for that. I went in, saw it, and boom-boom.’

Drusher nodded.

‘Truth be told,’ Falken said, dropping his voice, ‘it didn’t put up much of a fight. But I wasn’t taking any chances.’

‘I understand.’

Falken turned back to the crowd.

‘For Onnie Rimbaud, poor bastard!’ he cried. ‘This one’s for you, son!’

Falken offered the nearest bottle to Drusher. Drusher shook his head.

‘Thanks for your help, Dresher,’ Falken said.

‘Drusher.’

Macks came over.

‘I want to thank you on behalf of the division, Valentin,’ she said. ‘You got us our result. I’ll bill the Administratum for a whole week, fair enough? Go get your things together. Someone will drive you home this evening.’

Drusher nodded.

‘I have a transporter waiting,’ Macks said. Drusher’s bags were in a neat stack beside the office door. He was closing the last of the dossiers, and sliding them back onto her carts.

‘Right,’ he said.

‘Well, it’s been good to have you on board. Thanks. Like old times, right?’

‘Like Outer Udar, Macks? I get the distinct impression you remember that more fondly than I do.’

‘Things’ll work out, Valentin,’ she said.

‘Before I go,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to look at something.’

‘What?’

‘Let’s put it this way. I’d hate to have you come all the way up the coast to get me again.’

Macks frowned. ‘What are you on about now?’

‘The killer wasn’t – isn’t – that cat.’

Macks wiped her hand across her lips as if encouraging patience. ‘Go on.’

‘I said from the start it wasn’t an animal.’

‘You also told me to look for a carnodon.’

‘Let me show you something,’ Drusher said. He held up a data-slate. The compact screen showed a display of the city, overlaid with rune symbols. ‘I’ve done some collating. See here? I’ve mapped all the sites where the victims were found. Thirty-two bodies.’

‘I did that myself, on an ongoing basis. I saw nothing. No pattern, no discernible spread.’

‘I agree,’ said Drusher. ‘I mean, there’s a certain concentration of kill-sites here, in this crescent, but most of the others are too wayward, too random.’

‘So?’

‘That first body you showed me, in the morgue. So cleanly, so particularly cut. Minimal signs of feeding, if any at all. Just like the body today in the Commission of Works. And Rimbaud.’

‘Right. The face bitten off.’

Drusher nodded. ‘Yes, except I don’t think it was bitten. Remember how clean I said it was? I mean almost sterile. None of the bacterial traces one would expect from an animal bite. Especially not from an old, diseased predator with gums receding from vitamin deficiency. Macks, I could wiggle that poor cat’s teeth out with my fingers.’

Her face had gone hard.

‘Keep going, Valentin,’ she said.

‘The body in the stacks we went to look at. That was the work of the carnodon. It had mauled and eaten the corpse away. I checked the autopsy files. Nine of the cases were just like that. Gnawed. The victims were all either dead already or helpless. Old, infirm. The carnodon had escaped from the zoological gardens, but it was weak and long past its hunting prime. It roamed the city, not preying, but scavenging. That was all it could do any more.’

‘What are you telling me?’ Macks asked quietly.

‘Look at the map again. Here.’ Drusher flipped a switch. ‘Now I’ve taken away the bodies I can attribute to the cat. Cleans it up a bit, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she admitted.

‘The old carnodon was hungry and opportunistic. It had no pattern. It just roamed and fed where it could. What we’re left with is a much more precise zone. Almost territorial. The killings here were like poor Rimbaud – swift, savage, clean. No feeding.’

‘But it’s still an odd crescent-shaped spread. How can we triangulate from that?’

‘Look at the map, Macks. Territory is determined not just by hunter but also by prey. The crescent-shaped dispersal covers an area east of the Commission of Works. There are none to the west because that’s an area interdicted by the Martial Order Division. It doesn’t kill there, Macks, because there’s no one there to kill.’

‘Oh Throne…’ she murmured.

‘And this is the good bit,’ Drusher smiled. ‘Look what happens when I mirror the dispersal, projecting it as if there were quarry in all directions. The crescent becomes…?’

‘A circle.’

‘Right, a circle. There’s your focus. There’s your bloody pattern. That’s its territory. Right there.’

Macks was driving faster than ever. In the back seat sat Edvin and a trooper called Roderin. Both were checking their riotgun loads.

‘You’re sure about this?’ Macks hissed.

‘I’ve very little left to stake on it,’ Drusher replied, ‘my professional credentials being long since used up.’

‘Don’t get smart,’ she warned. ‘You two ready?’ she called over her shoulder.

Edvin and Roderin both replied in the affirmative. Edvin leaned forwards.

‘I thought we’d got this thing, sir,’ he said. ‘I mean, I thought Falken had plugged it.’

‘He got the cat,’ Drusher said. ‘But the cat wasn’t it.’

Macks began to slow down, and it was lucky she did. A second Magistratum transporter swung out in front of them from a side street, and ploughed ahead.

‘Falken,’ Macks whispered.

They pulled up outside the Commission of Works. Falken had two troopers with him, Levy and Mantagne.

‘What the hells is this about?’ Falken asked belligerently. He was still half-drunk from the party in the morgue.

‘We’re onto a lead,’ Macks said. ‘Behave.’

Falken looked at Drusher. ‘I got it, stone dead. Boom-boom. What is this crap now?’

‘Something else,’ Drusher said.

They spread out in a line, entering the weed-choked waste behind the Commission of Works.

‘Macks?’ Drusher called. She came over to him.

‘I’d like a weapon.’

‘In the old days, you–’

‘I’d really like a weapon,’ he repeated.

Macks nodded, and lowered her riotgun in one hand as she pulled the handgun from her holster. She handed it to him.

‘The safety’s by–’

‘I know how they work,’ he snapped.

They pushed on.

‘So, this is all about territory, right?’ she said.

Drusher nodded. ‘You saw the map. We’re entering its territory now. Its hunting ground.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Like I said, you saw the map. The thing is, we’re not talking about animal instinct. Not territory as a predator would understand it. We’re talking about orders.’

‘What? Orders?’

‘What is this place, Macks?’

‘The Commission of Works.’

‘And what’s behind it?’

‘Just rubble, Valentin.’

‘Yeah, but what was it before it was rubble?’

‘It was the main building of the Administratum here in Tycho. Before the tank shells levelled it.’

‘Exactly. The Administratum centre. Dead centre of the spread pattern. During the civil war, something was ordered to guard that vital point, secure it, defend it.’

Macks glared at him. ‘A man?’

Drusher shrugged. ‘Something. Something that’s still doing it. Macks, I glimpsed the killer in the Commission of Works, right after it killed Rimbaud. It was humanoid.’

Spread wide, the line of officers entered the ruins of the Administratum. Some parts of the ruin were two or three storeys tall, held up, crippled and crooked, by the ferrosteel bars stripped through the rockcrete.

There were weeds everywhere, flourishing. Tinsel-barb and frondwort, cabbage speculus and the limp foliage of climbing tracedy. The air was pungent with root-rot, stagnant water, mould.

Drusher slowly circled around. Macks was nearby, riotgun raised. He glanced left and saw Falken bending in under a broken doorway. To his right, Edvin was aiming his weapon at the overhung, plant-swathed walls.

Levy raised his clucking auspex box. ‘Getting something, very weak. It’s coming from the west.’

Falken nodded and disappeared. Macks hurried onwards. Mantagne covered her, glancing nervously up at the blooming foliage. Weapon clenched high, Roderin shuffled through a ruined archway.

‘Getting hot now, getting really hot,’ Levy called, lifting up his auspex, which was burring like a cicada.

‘Throne, it must be right on us!’

Falken’s gun went off. Once. Twice. Then another one echoed it. Macks started forward, running, and Drusher followed. Levy was right behind them. Mantagne rushed around to the other side of the wall.

There was a scream. Two more shots. Three.

Mantagne was dead. He had been sliced open from the scalp to the sternum. Blood was still spitting from his opened body, high into the air.

‘Throne!’ Macks cried, turning around. She heard Falken fire again, then Edvin. ‘Where is it? Where is it?’

Levy almost crashed into her from behind, following his auspex blindly.

‘Right there! There!’

Macks aimed and fired, once, twice, grinding back the slide each time. She put a huge hole in the facing wall.

Shots again, distant, from Falken and Edvin. Macks and Levy followed the sound. Pistol raised, Drusher turned the other way.

This predator was smart. Very smart and very able. It knew all about misdirection. It could out-think any regular human, and then split him open. It understood military tactics because that is what it dealt in. It had been programmed. It had been given orders.

Breathing hard, Drusher edged around another shattered arch, his weapon braced. His pulse was racing, but this felt entirely odd. This wasn’t about his trained skills any more. This wasn’t about an animal, whose habits and behaviours he had been schooled to understand. This was the opposite.

So he did the opposite. Facing any hungry predator, the last thing a magos biologis would want to do is step into the open. But he did so, turning a full circle, his pistol aimed in both hands.

On the rubbled floor before him, he saw Roderin. Roderin was dead, just like the others.

Drusher circled again, weapon tight.

The killer flew at him.

Drusher pulled the trigger and kept it pulled. Eight, nine, ten rounds, the full clip boomed out of Macks’ borrowed sidearm, and hit the killer head-on.

It fell, burst open, broken, puffed pink intestines spilling from its punctured torso. A man, but not a man. A product of the civil war. Augmetically strengthened, augmetically wired, its eyes a black visor, wires stapled into its flesh, its palsied hands curled over to expose the whirring chainblades sewn into its wrists.

The chainblades whined as they came together. Despite the rounds he had put into it, it got back up. And leapt at Drusher’s face.

His gun clicked, dry.

‘Down, Valentin!’

From behind him, Macks fired her riotgun, and the killer’s head burst like a tomato. The impact knocked it sideways. When it landed, its chainblades were still whirring involuntarily.

‘All right?’ she asked Drusher.

He nodded.

‘You were right. As ever.’

‘Glad to be of service.’

‘Seriously,’ she said, leading him out of the ruins as Falken and Edvin fired shot after shot into the killer to make sure it was dead. ‘Seriously, Drusher, I owe you.’

‘A week’s pay, you said. I do what I do.’

He began to walk away, picking his path through the rubble.

‘Valentin, I could put it down as two weeks, no one would know.’

He shrugged. He looked back at her.

‘What about a ticket off this rock?’ he said, with a thin, sad smile.

‘Can’t afford that,’ she said. ‘Sorry. Budgets and all.’

‘I had to ask,’ said Drusher. He sat down on a chunk of bricks.

‘Look,’ said Macks. ‘You’ve seen how stretched things are down here. The Martial Order Division can barely keep up. We can use all the help we can get, particularly sharp, educated minds with a thing for details. What do you think?’

‘How would that work?’ Drusher asked.

Macks shrugged. ‘Not sure. I could probably second your services on a temporary basis using the emergency powers. It’s not much, I know, but…’

Drusher frowned. ‘My teaching post isn’t much, but at least it’s safe.’ He handed her back the pistol.

‘You sure?’ she asked.

‘Whenever I spend any time with you, Macks, it ends up getting exciting,’ he said. ‘Rather too exciting for a man of my disposition.’

‘Hey,’ she replied, as if hurt, ‘I haven’t got you killed so far.’

Drusher smiled. ‘So far.’

Macks nodded.

‘All right,’ she said. She kissed him briefly on the cheek, and turned to walk back to the transporters.

Every wrong turn destiny had ever offered him…

And which was this? Drusher sighed.

‘Macks?’ he called out.

‘Yes?’

‘Would I get my own desk?’

Turning back, she smirked. ‘Valentin, you’ll even get your own couch.’

Drusher got to his feet, and wandered down the path after her.

THE KEELER IMAGE

Medonae the Eater, so called because of his appetites, had declared an auction, and word of this sale brought dealers and speculators from across the subsector, despite the isolation of his home.

An item in the catalogue drew my attention. I sent an agent in advance to confirm the provenance, and when word came back to me that it seemed authentic, I made arrangements to attend the sale in person.

Medonae the Eater dwelt on a war-burned rock called Pallik. Its orbit and revolutions blessed Pallik with a complex and irregular pattern of days and nights, some long, some short, some bright, some dim, which had led to the publication of various thick zodiacs and ephemeris tracts. I was not much bothered with learning the names and durations of the day-night cycle. All I knew was that I should avoid the long and formidable ‘burnday’, a periodic event when all three suns rose together.

Many of those attending the auction arrived by cutter and orbital boat, setting down in the bleak flats of the desert outside the sloping walls of Medonae’s palace. Others came into the local city, Baryt Prime, and then hired caravans to trek out to the palace, six hundred kilometres beyond the city gates. Caravans made the trip almost daily, laden with goods from the city’s produce markets, such was Medonae’s appetite.

I set down on a mesa five kilometres from the palace, and made the way on foot. It was a lowday, when only the second sun made an appearance in the heavens, and then only for a brief interval of six and a half standard hours.

It was cold and dry. Through my glare shields, the sky was a deep, rich blue and the sun a white ball that cast lens flare when I turned my head. Light glinted on the hulls of shuttles and cutters parked on their landing frames on the desert floor. I saw the thin dust plume of a caravan procession fifteen kilometres out.

The palace was of fair size. It was all that remained of a city that had been levelled by war. Portions of it sloped away into the desert sands in litters of rubble, suggesting that a great deal more of the ancient habitation lay below ground or was, at least, buried in the bosom of history.

Sentinels at the gatehouse watched me approach.

‘You come to Medonae?’ asked one, his voice a vox-hiss through his rebreather mask. Both of them were dressed in plate and bodygear that had once been Astra Militarum issue, now repainted in the bright colours of a circus.

‘I do,’ I replied.

‘Your name?’

‘Gregor Eisenhorn,’ I replied. I saw no reason to lie.

‘And your standing?’

I showed them my Inquisitorial rosette.

Neither blanched.

‘Have you come to purge us, sir?’ one of them laughed.

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘Has anyone here denied the sanctity of the Throne?’

‘Not us,’ chuckled the other. ‘We are all obedient to Holy Terra here, all of us.’

‘Then my business is purely to bid and buy,’ I said.

I was admitted.

The entry halls of the palace were busy with visitors. Each one, it seemed, had brought an ample entourage. Medonae’s servitors were conveying trays of food and drink from the kitchens, each new dish announced by a liveried chamberlain who declared the name of the delicacy as though it were another guest at the proceedings. I was offered a flask of water – a ritual gift for any traveller arriving out of the desert – which I took, and a beaker of wine that I did not. Various lots from the forthcoming sale had been set on display throughout the halls so that they could be viewed. I saw prayer-wheels from the Long Graves of Thracian, diadems from the Slave Worlds, a fine bust of Saint Kiodrus still in its satin-lined box, and a good oil of Guilliman, done by Manxis of Eustis Majoris, or so the ticket stated. The composition was well enough, but the brushwork lacked the finesse of Manxis himself. I thought that, most likely, it was a copy or the work of his school.

I was admiring it when a voice at my shoulder said, ‘I know why you’re here.’

I turned.

‘I am Medonae,’ the man said. He was tall, slender, smiling, dressed in a green bodyglove and half-cloak. He wore what might be described as too much jewellery, including a tiara of pearl and crystal.

‘You are Medonae?’

‘I am, in fact, his mouth,’ the man said. His smile was alarmingly broad. ‘He speaks through me, and I conduct his business.’

‘You are his proxy, or an avatar?’ I asked.

‘An avatar,’ he replied. The tiara and the rings, I realised, were part of a more extensive suite of telekine systems that allowed Medonae to puppet the man and operate through him.

‘You are Gregor Eisenhorn,’ he said, ‘of the ordos.’

‘I am.’

‘Your reputation precedes you. There can be only one item in this sale that would attract an individual such as yourself. Would you like to see it?’

He led me to a side chapel. The lowday sun fell pale through the bars of the tall windows. The object stood on a pedestal, protected by light screens. It was a vitreous plate milled in plastek, about a third of a metre square.

‘Magnificent, isn’t it, sir?’ Medonae’s mouth said.

It was the most appalling thing I had ever seen.

‘Exquisite.’

‘I’ll leave you to enjoy it,’ he said.

I wasn’t alone in the room. Several other visitors were viewing the piece. One was a hard-set man with extensive augmetic optics sutured into his skull.

‘Quite a thing,’ he mused.

‘Indeed,’ I replied.

‘Genuine,’ he added. His optics whirred. ‘I can gauge the age of the glass, the plastek sheath. The format of the plate matches the kind she was known to use. A miracle beyond measure that something so fragile could have survived so long, when so much else perished.’

‘Truly,’ I agreed.

‘But even more,’ he went on, ‘the image itself. The composition. She had an extraordinary eye as a remembrancer. I doubt any soul in the Imperium has ever matched her skill at the capture of picts.’

‘This they say of her,’ I said. ‘An exceptional gift. Which is why she was chosen, of course, for the expedition.’

‘To think,’ he sighed, ‘that someone had that kind of superlative talent, beyond any before or since, and yet that is still not the thing she is most famous for.’

He looked at me. His optics clicked and buzzed.

‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Do you think the most incredible thing about it is that it is an original pict, made ten thousand years ago, by the hallowed founder of the Imperial Truth? Or that it is a pict of Horus Lupercal?’

‘I think the most incredible thing about it,’ I replied, ‘is that it is sitting on sale here and not sequestered in a vault on far-off Terra.’

Euphrati Keeler was a remembrancer. In the last years of the Great Crusade, armed with a good eye and a picter, she had been appointed to the 63rd Expeditionary Force, to observe and record the operation of the Luna Wolves. Her work was remarkable. Her fame spread. The Warmaster himself regarded her with favour. In that distant age, the God-Emperor had decreed that the operation of the Imperium should be documented by artists and historians to make a chronicle of the foundation of the Age of Man. Such had been the mindset then: that the great work of engineering a civilisation should be honestly, freely and independently recorded.

That does not sound like the Emperor I know.

Such freedom ended, of course, in the atrocities that followed, in the years of bloodshed we now call the Heresy War. Keeler was present on the ground at the start of it. She was a witness to the first acts of bloodshed. She stood in time at the zero point where history turned a corner, and she did so with a picter in her hand, capturing that transformation.

Her story did not end there. She so easily might have been one of the trillions extinguished in the fires that followed. Her name is not commonly known today… except that it is, as Saint Euphrati. She was blessed with divine grace and gifts, and from her – and those few close to her in those bleak years – the essence of the Imperial Creed was born. She was one of the first saints. From her, and those disciples around her, arose the tenets of the Lectitio Divinitatus, the truth of us all, that the Emperor of Mankind is not a man, but a god. It is through her that the truth was recognised. It was in her that our faith was born.

The man with the optics was called Sejan Karyl. We returned to the main halls and sat together, talking of what we had seen.

‘The pict itself isn’t the prize, you know?’ he said.

‘It is beyond value,’ I said. ‘An image of Lupercal, in life, before he fell. The beauty and strength of his visage speak to the depth of the catastrophe that occurred.’

‘Some might say that none should look upon it, ever,’ he said.

‘Who might say that?’

‘The Inquisition,’ he replied, ‘of which, I hear, you are a part.’

‘I believe it should be seen,’ I said. ‘As a warning – to show how even the greatest perfection can be blackened… To refresh our determination to guard against the dark.’

He shrugged.

‘If,’ he said, ‘it is Horus before he fell.’

‘You think it after?’

‘Would that not be a stranger lesson? If that was his face after Chaos stole him? Chaos hides its nature well.’

‘You say it’s not the prize,’ I said, changing the subject.

‘According to the catalogue,’ he said, ‘it comes with notes. Some frail documents written in her hand, describing the image and the circumstances of its capture.’

‘You’ve seen them?’

Karyl shook his head.

‘They are reserved for the successful buyer alone. But I have heard of their contents.’

I had too, naturally. That was partly why I had come. It was said the notes were revelatory. That they showed, in Keeler’s own, authenticated script, that she considered Horus a man, not a transformed, daemonic being. Further, they related that it had been commonly known at the time that the Emperor denied His divinity. He had formally declared that He was not a god, and sought to suppress the notion that He was. The Lectitio Divinitatus was already growing back then. The notes showed that the Emperor wanted it proscribed and forbidden.

They showed that the Emperor did not believe Himself to be a god. Keeler and her companion saints had created the foundation of Imperial faith against the Emperor’s express wishes.

That was a different kind of heresy, and I wasn’t sure if the heretic was Keeler or, somehow, the Emperor Himself.

‘There’s no way to know the truth,’ I said.

‘The truth is in the writing,’ said Karyl.

‘The danger,’ I corrected him, ‘for truth is arbitrary – it’s what people will do with it. If one, shall we say, stood against the Imperial Truth, one might use a pict and manuscript from such an august and exceptional source as the basis for a new creed.’

‘To undermine the faith and deny the Emperor’s divinity?’

‘It is not reaching to imagine so.’

‘And that, I presume, is why the Inquisition is here… To seize the image and remove that possibility.’

‘I never said why I was here,’ I replied.

‘Not you.’

He nodded gently in the direction of a woman on the far side of the hall. She was talking with other guests.

‘Halanor Kurtecz,’ said Karyl. ‘Ordo Hereticus. So I am told.’

‘If the Ordo Hereticus wanted the Keeler image,’ I replied, ‘they would have stormed the palace, taken it, put all within to the sword, and levelled the site from orbit.’

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Unless they wanted to find out who was interested first, to observe the individuals a relic of this kind brings out of the woodwork.’

He was right. I had thought as much. The sale was private, but it was still bait of the first magnitude. From my seat, I could see at least six persons of interest from the ordo watch-lists: renegades, recidivists and heretics, lured into the open by the mouth-watering promise of a truly blasphemous artefact. If I had been in control of Ordo Hereticus operations, I would have stayed my hand, planted agents in the palace, and waited for the sale. Then, in one stroke, I would have taken possession of the heretical image, and also ended a dozen key enemies of the Imperium, possibly obtaining enough information, via torture and interrogation, to bring down most of the cult networks in the subsector.

In a way, that was why I had come. I didn’t want the Keeler image. I wanted to see it, but I had no desire to own it. It was too dangerous to exist. I had come to see who the offering of it might bring out.

One in particular.

And I was sure I had found her. Karyl, with his sharp, augmetic eyes, had spotted her already. Halanor Kurtecz. She was no inquisitor. Sensor templating and psionic pattern recognition had registered enough positives: disguise, masking, juvenat treatments… They could all hide a lot.

But I was reasonably sure that Halanor Kurtecz was in fact the arch-heretic Lilean Chase.

The Cognitae, the oldest, greatest and most pernicious cult of Chaos in history, was present in the person of their legendary and elusive leader. Only something like the Keeler image of Horus Lupercal had the power to draw her out of hiding.

My long and bloody work was about to be completed.

Half an hour before the start of the sale, I was summoned to see Medonae.

He was in a private chamber. His mouth, all smiles as before, greeted me at the door and led me in.

Medonae the Eater had stopped being a functional human being many years ago. His appetite had got the better of him. His pallid, physical bulk, a pyramid of flesh that weighed over nine tons, was supported in a frame of suspensor pods and lifter bars. He no longer had discernible limbs. Gangs of slaves worked to massage oils into his flesh to keep it supple, a never-ending process, while trains of servitors carried in a ceaseless procession of foodstuffs that were fed to him by hovering cyberdrones high in the framework rigging.

It was hard to make out his actual face: just a small dot near the summit of the mountain of meat.

‘My dear Inquisitor Eisenhorn,’ he said, using his mouth. ‘I wanted a word. I have a feeling that today will not end well. I want your assurance that you will not seek to prosecute me.’

‘You have staged a sale, Medonae,’ I replied. ‘I know of no laws you have broken.’

‘Your assurance, please, sir.’

‘You have it. May I say, Medonae, that if you feel this auction will go badly, you should not have orchestrated it.’

‘I would not have,’ his mouth said, smiling. ‘I worked to arrange a private sale for the image. A private sale. But it was not to be.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. My psychic powers detected a slight tremor. Fear, perhaps, or trepidation. The infinitesimal artificial delay between Medonae’s thought process and its delivery by his mouth avatar gave me a window into his mind.

‘I decided an auction would be best,’ his mouth was saying.

I was forced to arrange this sale against my will, his mind was thinking.

I threw myself to the left.

Las-beams, bright as a sun’s heart, scorched the ground where I had been standing.

Medonae had been coerced into this face-to-face meeting too. I cursed myself for not realising sooner that a man like Medonae the Eater, so ashamed of his physical state that he used an avatar for personal interaction, would never request to see anyone in person.

I rolled hard, incidentally knocking the mouth off his feet. The teeth of the trap were two cyberskulls, sweeping down from the high roofspace, their las kill-systems cycling for a second shot. A beam scored the floor behind me. Another struck the mouth as he rose, cutting him clean through. He dropped again with a gasp, face down, spattering the tiles with the gore and internal organs released by his bisection.

High above, in the rigging, Medonae’s real mouth wailed with pain from the psychic feedback.

I cut loose, unleashing my mind at the grinning cyberskulls that whizzed towards me. One fierce mental jab, and I blew out the auto-control mechanisms, freeing them from the psionic impulse that directed them. One plunged like a meteor into the ground and exploded. The other whistled over my shoulder at high speed, out of control, and smashed against the chamber wall.

Sparks showered down from Medonae the Eater’s rigging. My jab had burned out Medonae’s telekine array too.

Three men burst into the chamber. I recognised them as members of Halanor Kurtecz’s entourage. They were heavyset, powerful, fast.

And psyk-shielded.

I went for my sidearm, but the first was on me. He had a hooked dagger, which I blocked. I rolled backwards, hurling him over me onto the floor. I was back on my feet before he was, and swept his legs out from under him.

Turning, I drew my Tronsvasse handgun, and cut down the other two. The impact of the shots smashed both of them down hard.

The first man landed on my shoulders, his arm around my throat, bending me backwards. Only the wrist of my gun hand was stopping his dagger from plunging into my face. I threw an elbow, but it didn’t connect. The man’s strength was augmetically amplified. He was an engineered killer, a lifeward or a Cognitae murderform.

I have been crippled for decades. My feet, legs and lower back are sheathed in a heavy scaffold of metal calipers to allow me movement. I stamped backwards with one iron-shod boot, and crushed the arch of the killer’s left foot.

He snorted in agony. His grip slackened slightly, and I tried the elbow again.

As he reeled backwards, I swung around and struck him across the head with my Tronsvasse. He fell sideways, his skull cracked, blood squirting from his ear.

Shots tore past me. More members of the Kurtecz crew had rushed into the chamber. They were firing hard-round autopistols and las-snubs.

I fired back as I ran for cover, smashing through a row of startled onlookers: bemused servitors with their trays of fine food who had come to a standstill, order systems shut, and were watching the pandemonium unfold. I knocked two clean over, and they fell, spilling their trays. Ambush fire from my would-be killers ripped into the line, dropping more of the confused slave-units. Plates smashed. Trays of gourmet food crashed to the ground.

My attackers fanned out across the room. My shots – snapped off between the milling, bewildered servitors – were driving Chase’s men into cover on the far side of Medonae’s mass. One of them had holstered his pistol, and was deploying a rotator cannon from the pack on his back.

I ducked.

The raking fire ripped across the floor, chewed through the servitors, and demolished the tiled decoration of the wall. Chips of enamelled ceramics and glass from the ornate windows showered in all directions. I heard the cannon’s motor whining as the gunman changed munitions packs.

Shots screamed in from another angle. This was fire from a hellgun. The shots, placed with indecent accuracy, exploded brackets on the rigging that supported Medonae’s mass.

There was a long, ugly shriek of metal giving way, then the whole nine-ton bulk of Medonae the Eater rolled sideways, hurling servitors and squealing slaves into the air.

Medonae rolled like a landslip, and crushed the killers where they crouched in ambush.

One survived, broke free, and ran. Another hellgun shot detonated his head.

I rose, cautiously. The air smelled of smoke, blood, food and skin oil. Slaves were wailing, weeping, nursing broken limbs.

Harlon Nayl padded into view, his hellgun up to his cheek and ready to fire.

‘All right?’ he asked me.

‘Fine,’ I replied.

Nayl had been my advance agent.

‘I was wondering where you were,’ I said.

‘Keeping out of sight, like you told me,’ he said.

I looked at the tumbled mass of Medonae the Eater. He was alive, helpless, mewling. Slaves were struggling to right him before his own bodyweight compressed his organs into failure. The blood of Chase’s men seeped out from under him.

‘I gave him an assurance,’ I said.

‘I didn’t,’ said Nayl with a grin. He knelt beside his final kill, rolled the body over, and fished something out of the man’s jacket. He showed me.

An Inquisitorial badge. Nayl raised his eyebrows significantly.

‘Cognitae, Harlon,’ I said, ‘posing as Ordo Hereticus.’

He shrugged.

‘We have to find Chase.’

‘You mean Kurtecz?’ he asked.

‘That’s the name she’s using.’

‘It’s really her?’

‘Seems so,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe we’ve finally got this close.’

‘Well, it’s been a jolly journey getting here,’ said Nayl. ‘The fun, the friendship. The journey’s more important than the destination, isn’t that what they say?’

I looked at him.

He sighed.

‘Just trying to lighten the mood,’ he said.

‘Chase will want the Keeler image,’ I said. ‘Come on.’

Death, gunfire and word that the Ordo Hereticus was cutting loose, had caused panic in the palace. Guests and prospective buyers were fleeing with their entourages. Nayl and I pushed through the press of bodies, and made for the side chapel where the image had been put on display.

Sejan Karyl was lifting the Keeler image off its stand. His hands were gloved. An armoured carry-casket lay open at his feet, ready to receive it.

‘Helping yourself?’ I asked. I aimed my Tronsvasse at him.

Karyl smiled ruefully.

‘I think the sale is off,’ he said, ‘and this is something I am anxious to obtain.’

He laid the glass plate gently in the casket, and turned back to the display stand. Under the velvet cushion was a small packet. Keeler’s writings, the real prize.

‘I can’t let you take that,’ I said. ‘Halanor Kurtecz… Have you seen her?’

‘No,’ said Karyl. He was busy with the packet, opening the seal.

‘Leave that,’ I said. ‘Think carefully, Karyl. When did you last see Kurtecz?’

‘She fled, I think,’ he said. He smiled. ‘It’s funny… I never thought I’d be grateful to the Ordo Hereticus, but thanks to them, this is now mine.’

Nayl took a step towards him, his hellgun aimed.

‘My boss said put it down, so put it down. You’ve got some front. There are two guns trained on you and you still think you’re going to walk out of here with that?’

I glanced around. Karyl was confident in something. But what?

‘I should thank you too, I suppose,’ Karyl said to me. ‘But for you, the ordo would not have driven this operation, and Kurtecz–’

‘She isn’t Ordo Hereticus. She isn’t Halanor Kurtecz,’ I said. ‘Her name is Lilean Chase.’

Karyl looked at me. An expression of delight filled his face.

‘Oh,’ he said, laughing. ‘I had thought so highly of you, but now I find you’re a dolt like all the rest. Lilean Chase? You’re so wrong, it’s hysterical.’

He opened the packet and began to read.

‘Delightful,’ he murmured. ‘Keeler is quite explicit. The Emperor is not a god. He disavows any effort to name Him so. You see, here? She states that it was her encounter with daemons in the presence of Horus Lupercal that drove her to extremes of belief. If daemons exist, then to her a god must exist too. The universe could not be so cruel, otherwise. The existence of a god was necessary to counterbalance the horror of the warp. The Lectitio Divinitatus is based on a lie. Imperial faith is based upon fear. The “saint” admits it.’

‘Hand that to me,’ I said. ‘It is a deeply heretical text. It’s going nowhere.’

‘This?’ Karyl smiled, gesturing with the papers. ‘This is just the bonus prize, our reward for being patient today. It will make a nice addition to our library. It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.’

‘You are Cognitae,’ I said.

‘Yes, Gregor. Lilean sends her regards. She had hoped to meet you in person one day, given the years you’ve been searching for her. But she’s busy elsewhere. She sent me to collect this. Your road ends here.’

Nayl raised his hellgun, and aimed it at the man’s head.

‘I don’t think you’re in much of a position to issue threats like that,’ he said.

‘I’m not,’ said Karyl. ‘Today… this sale, it was a sting operation. The Ordo Hereticus learned that Medonae had the image. They knew it would be an irresistible lure to heretic groups. They coerced him into announcing an auction rather than trying to sell it privately. They knew the Cognitae would send an agent to get it.’

He grinned.

‘That’s me, by the way.’

‘Halanor Kurtecz–’ I began.

‘Is an inquisitor,’ he replied. ‘Ordo Hereticus. She’s running this operation. This sale was bait for the prize she’s after.’

‘The Cognitae–’

‘Gods, no! A far greater heretic. The renegade psyker, the diabolus… Gregor Eisenhorn. This was all for your benefit, Gregor. You are the wanted man here. Your ex-masters, the Ordo Hereticus, want you ended.’

From the halls behind me, I heard screams, and the sound of weapons-fire. With Nayl covering Karyl, I went back to the chamber door to look.

Ordo Hereticus kill-teams were sweeping into Medonae’s palace, slaughtering every living thing they could find. They had co-opted Tempestus Scions to do the bloodwork. I saw Inquisitor Kurtecz among the storm troops, ordering them on, relaying messages to find me and detain me at all costs.

I had believed I was setting a trap for Chase and the wretched Cognitae, but in truth it was a trap set for me. I was impressed at the skill and flair with which Kurtecz and her colleagues had lured me out of hiding.

I was horrified to see, now more clearly than ever, how much of an outcast I had become. To the Ordo Hereticus, I was as abominable as the Cognitae.

Today, the Cognitae were but a footnote, and Chase had used her opportunist cunning to lift a great treasure while the ordo and I kept each other busy.

I had been outplayed by both sides: the Cognitae and my former masters.

I felt sick. The ordos were blind if they could not distinguish between me and a threat as malevolent as the Cognitae cult. I had been right to cut my ties and continue my work alone. That knowledge gave me some small comfort.

Harlon cried out. I turned to find him knocked to the ground. Karyl had the sealed carry-casket in his hand, and was aiming a lasgun at Nayl.

Impressive. It took a lot to outsmart Harlon Nayl, especially when he had a gun to your head.

‘I’ll be leaving now, Gregor,’ said Karyl.

I shot at him. My blasts withered in mid-air. Karyl – or whatever his true name was – was a high-function psyker. That’s how he’d floored Nayl, and why he had seemed so confident. He’d hidden the power earlier, but now it was boiling out of him. I took the brunt of it, and it hurled me back into the wall.

I felt several ribs break.

But, at last, someone had underestimated me. I was a high-function psyker too. Karyl had power, but Chase should have sent someone with considerably more. Staying in the dark places had its advantages. People didn’t know what I was truly capable of. Chase did not appreciate who she was dealing with.

My power had been blocked earlier by the Inquisition’s mind-shields. Now it was free, and it was fuelled by my anger and frustration.

I yelled a single word of power.

The force of it, like a flaming shock wave in the air, struck Sejan Karyl, and threw him not just into the chamber’s back wall but through it. Stonework ruptured. A terrible, blinding light shone in through the demolished hole.

I pulled down my glare shields, and helped Nayl to his feet. He pulled on his goggles too, and we drew up the heavy hoods of our coats.

Outside, the desert was too bright to look at. The heat was immense. While we had been inside the palace, lowday had ended, a brief night had flickered past, and burnday had begun.

Karyl lay on his back on a heap of rubble. Every bone in his body was shattered, but he was still alive. Blood from his wounds was cooking off him, and his exposed flesh was frying. He held the packet of Euphrati Keeler’s ancient manuscript in one blackened claw of a hand, but the paper was already burning.

He was trying to put it out, but he was on fire too.

I watched his body burn, the papers with it.

‘Get Medea on the vox,’ I said to Nayl. ‘Tell her to bring the gun-cutter in. We need rapid extraction.’

He nodded, and I heard him speaking Glossia into his vox-headset.

I opened my mind.

+Cherubael? Can you hear me?+

+Of course, Gregor.+

+I need your assistance.+

+My, my, Gregor. Do you need me to come and kill lots and lots of people for you?+

I hesitated. I thought for a moment of the Tempestus Scions and Inquisition teams ploughing through the palace at our heels, just minutes away from finding us.

‘Yes,’ I said, with great reluctance.

+I didn’t quite hear that, Gregor.+

+Yes.+

Nayl and I took the armoured carry-casket, and set off into the burning desert. Medea was en route, less than a minute away.

We got a fair distance clear of the palace, and I turned to look back, in time to see a light come down from the sky that was brighter and more dreadful than the burnday glare of the three suns.

Medonae’s palace began to die with volcanic finality.

I looked away.

From somewhere, I heard a deep, satisfied laugh.

It was probably the daemonhost, delighting in his slaughter, but just for a moment, I thought it had come, echoing, from the casket in my hand.

From the smiling, noble image that Euphrati Keeler had made so long before.

PERIHELION

An hour into the symposium it became clear we weren’t all going to get out alive.

I’d come to watch. To spectate. Covering my identity with the paperwork of an archaeolinguist from Shurfath, the local universitariate, and disguising my face and build with scholar’s robes and a falsehood, I’d come to sit among the academics and the savants in the gallery.

I lie. I hadn’t come to watch. I’d come to see him. It had been a long time since I’d last seen him. Fifty years? A century? I lose count.

Bader Vecum had died. That was the start of it. Bader Vecum, eleventh son of an eleventh son, the last discernible branch of a noble house line that had ruled the island nation of Maelificer for thirty generations, had died. You know the island, I’m sure. In the cold, green northern oceans of Gudrun, in the Helican sub; a place of mild summers and dark winters, of ice-capped peaks and geothermal power, of ancient towns etched into the steep sides of dead volcanoes. To the north of the island, the jagged black walls of the continental shelf can be seen on a clear day, three hundred kilometres away across a forbidding polar sea.

House Vecum had a seat in Gudrun’s Upper Legislature, but it had never been one of the most powerful or influential of Gudrun’s noble families. Over the centuries, Maelificer had been sustained by the export of preserved fish, seabed ores, and by geothermic power, but it had always maintained a reputation as a seat of learning. In those steep, cliff-side towns, there flourished Shurfath Universitariate, two academies of rubrication, six museums, and four distinguished library collections, all thanks to the scholarly enthusiasms of the noble Vecums, amateur philologists all.

Now the last was dead, without issue, of terribly old age, and Maelificer was to be administered by the Vecum’s mainland cousins in House Courel. Bader Vecum’s famous private library was to be broken up and dispersed into the discipline libraries of Shurfath, as well as several mainland scholams.

There had always been talk that House Vecum’s private library contained some items of unusually esoteric merit and, as is often the case with old collections long held in private hands, the Inquisition had appointed an emissary to oversee the disbursement of its contents. One can never be too careful. Even without any malicious intent on the part of its owners, a thousand-year-old collection might have something pernicious festering at the back of a shelf. I have personally seen great tragedies unfold because of the unwitting ownership of the blasphemous.

I have seen a page of faded manuscript kill a world.

We gathered in the empty house, high on the steepest scarps of the island’s peaks. It was the end of autumn, and the first ice was glinting in the harbour, the first dark, deep-ocean gales were building out in the west. Migratory birds mobbed the skies outside the high windows, preparing for departure. Servants hurried from draughty room to draughty room, nursing warmth out of the corroding heating systems that Bader Vecum had allowed to ail alongside his health.

Inquisitor Cyriaque led the symposium. With his interrogator, Voriet, and three savants, he had spent two months sifting the collection. He was now presenting his conclusions to a body of his peers from the ordos, along with an invited audience of academics, for deliberation. Eighteen volumes had already been sequestered without consultation. The Inquisition does not invite opinion on some matters. But there remained one hundred and fifty-one items where a strong argument could be made for careful academic study rather than strict prohibition. Chancellor Manivar of Shurfath was particularly insistent on this possibility.

‘Shurfath’s reputation,’ he said, rising to his feet at the start of the symposium, ‘which I may be so bold as to suggest extends beyond Gudrun and the subsector to the local Imperium Sector range, depends so much upon the quality of our collection. And that collection, at its core, has been the great work of House Vecum, whose broad and admirable curiosity has allowed them to accumulate a vast and irreplaceable archive of books down the ages. While we understand the necessity of restricting some volumes, from time to time, for the social good, we urge the worthy ordos not to sequester the entire catalogue. It is not all contaminated because of one or two unwise inclusions. Please allow as much of the whole as possible to be transferred to the academic files of Shurfath and its fellow institutions at home and abroad.’

I was broadly in agreement with the chancellor’s wishes. I had reviewed the questionable pieces, and there was nothing in them that warranted censorship. Depriving scholars of access to such material blunts our collective knowledge.

But, you may remark, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

I also liked Shurfath. There was something about the cold, hard climate of Maelificer that focused scholarly intent. Some of the most learned members of the sector’s ordos had studied there at one time or another: I myself had spent nine months there, trawling its stacks. That was many, many years previously, when I was attempting to do some background research on a matter that had occupied a colleague of mine during a visit to Elvara Cardinal. Though answers had eluded me (and the man was long since dead), I had come to appreciate Shurfath’s atmosphere and learning.

Inquisitor Cyriaque leant towards the chancellor’s way of thinking too, but he was young, and this was one of his first formal duties. He knew that the eyes of seniors were upon him. He could not afford to seem lenient. He could not afford to appear radical.

There’s a potent word: Radical.

The first volume was brought out for examination and discussion, the first of the one hundred and fifty-one in question. It was going to be a long process. Cyriaque had chosen a small lecture room in the upper levels of the vertical palace, a gloomy, wood-panelled chamber of uninterrupted brown. It had once been used by medicae students for anatomy lessons, and there were tiers of seats around the central stage. The tiered gallery stalls, like a little box theatre, were almost as sheer as the cliffs outside. We leant on the wooden handrails and peered down into the gas-lit arena where Cyriaque’s savants, their hands white-gloved, were laying the first questionable book on a piezo-charged neutralising cloth. Voriet, the interrogator, had placed aversive wards around the lip of the wooden stage. There were guards too: Inquisitorial servants in the stern robes of the ordos, and the more ostentatious men-at-arms of House Vecum.

Cyriaque began his review. The book was a copy of a copy of Unacius’ Readings, one from which the notorious ‘poetry’ had long since been expunged. It was undoubtedly harmless, an unloaded gun. The mezzopict illustrations were, however, charming and rare, and deserved to be held for the benefit of students of the visual arts. The chancellor rose and, once Cyriaque had finished his summary, said as much.

The ordos seniors seemed unmoved. Old Karnot Vesher would be, I knew well, monodominant to the end, hardline, bitter. Adrianne Corwal was harder to read. An elegant, diligent woman, she had her psyber drone hover over the pages as the savants turned them, relaying close-ups to her optic implants. Zaul Gaguach seemed bored. I distinctly heard him twice ask an aide what the palace kitchens were preparing for supper.

And then there was him, of course. Faceless, implacable, as unreadable as a blunt. It is not weakness to confess that I felt a certain emotional response when he moved from the shadows, onto the stage. It had been a very long time, and we had once been very close.

His career had been blighted by the affair of Slyte. His career, and the Kell Mountain region of Sarre Province. Gudrun, and Eustis Majoris too, bore the scars of his work.

I knew full well those modest scars were far preferable to the fatal exit wounds that would have been the consequence of his inaction, but Lord Grandmaster Rorken had been obliged to censure him. In the service of the Throne, and the Holy Ordos, he had been required to operate on a rogue status. He had saved, at a conservative estimate, trillions of lives. Even so, the aftermath had been a terrible mess. In order to continue in service with the Ordos Helican, he had agreed to suspend his active status and fulfil an advisory role in the Inquisition’s headquarters.

A waste. A waste of a huge talent. At least, I had heard, he was writing again.

The Readings were finally passed for collation. His vote swung it, though his aye was the only word he uttered. I was glad to see that a fear of accusations of radicalism, a fear that he was the rogue they had always suspected, did not stay his hand. He knew what was right and what was foolishly wrong, and the mezzopicts belonged in a decent library.

The second work was brought out and introduced by Cyriaque. It was a ‘tarnished’ copy of an M.39 Ennead, where old, block-printing transposition errors had created quasi-blasphemous images of the Emperor.

I had honestly thought we would get all the way to item sixteen – a prayer pamphlet of the Technotic Sect that had a genuinely heretical tone – before there would be any real dissent or argument. That would probably take up the whole of the first day. In one of the scheduled breaks, or perhaps after the evening session, I would steal my chance to talk to him.

But it didn’t go anything like that.

As Cyriaque’s savants turned the pages of the Ennead with their white-gloved hands, one of the House Vecum guardsmen at the back of the room, a tall fellow with a lugubrious expression, shifted uneasily. He was wearing a long green coat, a white sash, and copious gold braid, and his tall silver helm was festooned with the feathers of the oceanic greywing. He was holding a ceremonial poleaxe.

I noticed him twitch for a second time, and thought perhaps he was suffering from indigestion or other gastric discomfort. Then he hoisted the poleaxe and, with a slightly bemused frown, plunged it into the nearest ordos guard.

There was a prodigious quantity of blood. A major artery had been severed, and the force of blood pressure all but hosed the backs of the seniors on the stage.

The mess did not concern me much, nor the sudden commotion, the shouting, the movement, or the production of weapons. The poor house guardsman, already surprised at becoming a killer, was positively astonished to be killed. An outraged Inquisitorial agent drew down and shot him at point-blank range, and he fell backwards, releasing his grip on the haft of the poleaxe, which was still twitching in time with the ebbing arterial pulse.

My concern was the sense I had registered the moment before the killer struck. A tiny pulse of psychic power.

The house guardsman had been a puppet. A mind had used him. It had taken control of his limbs, and forced his action before he’d even had a chance to resist.

That was power. Worse, it was precision.

There is only one thing more dangerous than a human psyker. It is a human psyker expertly trained by the scholastica psykana.

I know. I am one.

The murderer’s executioner, standing over the body with his sidearm drawn, suddenly became the next instrument of the invisible agency. He shivered. Then he turned and started to shoot, wildly, into the galleries and across the stage. One of the savants was cut down, and Cyriaque was hit in the thigh. Guards – both ordos and house – who had rushed forward to help the first butchered victim and restrain his killer scattered.

Karnot Vesher was a psychic. Hurling himself out of his seat, the back of his coat soaked in blood, he yelled a command word at the shooter, who was one of his own retinue. The chilling use of will made me flinch. Vesher was strong, but his practice was clumsy. There was none of the stiletto finesse that had triggered the incident.

The guard with the gun ceased his rampage, impelled by Vesher’s will. He halted, and looked down at the gun he was holding as if its presence in his hand was an utter mystery.

Confusion had dulled everyone’s wits. The guard with the pistol, stunned to inaction by Vesher’s yell, was no longer the problem. The rogue mind had flitted on, leaving one slave for another.

Another House Vecum guard, a captain, had dropped down beside the first victim, attempting in great earnest to ease the fellow’s miserable death. The captain suddenly shivered, and wrenched the offending poleaxe out of the first victim’s torso. He rose, a brimming lake of blood around him on the floor, and ran the brute weapon at Vesher as one might run down a boar.

The captain would have killed the inquisitor cleanly, but for two factors. Vesher used his will again, and screamed a frantic command of prohibition. The captain was too possessed by a superior mind for it to be fully effective, but it did make him hesitate, and his boots, decorated with velvet rosettes and brocade, slipped in the pooling blood.

Instead of impaling Karnot Vesher’s chest, the spike of the poleaxe cracked through the inquisitor’s left hip and pinned him to the wooden frame of the box gallery.

His outraged scream was as considerable as the quantity of blood that he began to leak. Around them, guards of both stripe opened fire, and cut the blameless captain down from several directions.

They were all idiots. The mind had already moved.

The galleries were emptying. Spectators, in great agitation, were fleeing to the comparative safety of the side rooms and the waiting chambers.

I knew it was time to withdraw. The bloodshed on the little galleried stage, which had taken on the ridiculous quality of some gruesome pantomime show, had been just that, a show. The majority of the most powerful and capable people at the symposium were on that stage, and the attack had been designed to occupy them, to confuse them, to create a debacle that would entirely focus the attention of the audience.

Their demise had not been the primary intention, however. If one of the ordos seniors had been the target, why begin with the guard?

I was sure I was the true target.

Somehow, some agency had learned of my presence. I seldom frequented public or populated areas, but someone had found out about this one, rare appearance.

Where had I slipped up? How had I shown myself? For many years, I had lived other lives, covering all trace of myself. Where had I made a mistake? What fragment of truth had I left uncovered?

Was it simply my determination to meet with him here? Had that been my undoing?

Who was to blame? Who had come for me?

I have, I am sorry to reflect, accumulated far too many mortal enemies.

And I share the same Archenemy as the rest of my species.

I left the gallery, and took the small back stairs, a dark flight of wooden steps with a tight turn. I pushed my way past straggling spectators who were making for the exit. Some cried out as I pushed them aside, afraid that death was coming to touch them too.

I was armed with a power knife in a sprung sheath along my left forearm, and a Tronsvasse auto in a flat holster under my coat, but my most dangerous weapon was inside my skull.

I reached a lower hallway under the lecture room. The floors were boarded with gleaming black timber, and dressed with old rugs. The walls were lacquered panels. Dim, ancient faces peered out of ancient oil paint scenes in ancient frames. Refugees from the audience had accumulated in the hallway, huddled savants and frightened scholars. When they saw me, and read my grim sense of purpose, they shrank from me and fled.

My disguise – especially the uncanny ancient technology of the falsehood – was good enough to cover me under regular circumstances. Sitting, walking, standing, I was just another figure of no consequence. But now I was moving with speed, and no amount of borrowed finery and optic deception could cover my bulk and my oh-so-mechanical gait in rapid motion. I was clearly no academic. I was still a tall, broad-shouldered man, and what damage life has done to my solid frame, augmetics have repaired. Servo-assist leg-frames become obvious when one is running, and no one could mistake the martial training evident in my bearing.

Vesher’s brittle screams were still echoing from the lecture room above me. I believe that, by then, they were attempting to unpin his smashed pelvis from the panelling.

I felt the rogue mind flick across me, hunting for me, fixing on my psychic aura. I wrenched the auto from my concealed rig.

Just in time.

Shots came at me down the hallway, hard rounds. They drove into the wood panels like gas-gunned rivets, flecking the air with splinters. The scholars around me broke again, this time caught between my threatening form and the source of the gunfire.

More shots. Two of the scholars were hit as they milled in front of me, and crashed to the floor.

I brought the Tronsvasse up, still moving.

One shooter was half-concealed behind a golden helm and carapace displayed on a pedestal. I fired, missed, but made the attacker duck back into cover.

There was a second, concealed on the other side of the hallway. He was firing a large-calibre pistol. I saw the muzzle flash of the weapon as a bullet hissed past me, and aimed for that.

I think I hit him in the hand or forearm. I heard a yelp.

I used my will, and declared, ‘Show yourselves!’

Though they were both being slaved by the rogue mind, my raw command was enough to make them falter and stumble out of cover for a moment.

Both were ordos guards, black-suited members of Gaguach’s retinue. They were blameless and, like as not, would be free of control again in a moment. But I had not the luxury to show any mercy. Still running, I fired. Two shots, to the left, to the right. Each round struck the middle of a forehead and knocked a man on his back.

I had reached the end of the hallway. The door to a retiring room lay open to my right, and stairs were directly ahead. The scholars had all fled. I could still hear their cries of fright and panic from the staircase. I could still hear Vesher howling at a pain that would blight the rest of his life.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, reloading. ‘Who are you? Where are you?’

+Who are you?+ a mind-voice answered. Cold, crisp. The sort of sharp voice a blade would use if it could speak.

I turned slowly, watching the doors and exits.

‘Who are you?’ I repeated, adding will to the words.

+Who are you? I did not expect you. You were not anticipated. Who are you? Reveal your name.+

The will-force in the send almost made me speak my name aloud, but I bit back. So I wasn’t the intended target after all. I was, in fact, the rogue element. The unexpected player in the game.

+I know you. I can smell your mind. The rogue. The famous pariah. Long years since your rosette carried any authority.+

The mind was strong. I pushed at it, harder, harder still. I knew the psyker was stronger than me, but sometimes strength isn’t everything. I was hoping to outflank it with skill and practiced technique, to wrong-foot it. The mind sounded young, not experienced enough to know every trick an old dog has in his book.

But it was hard to push, because the mind kept moving. There was a flexibility to the psionic pattern that was quite disturbing. It was fluid. It flitted, like a wild bird, from slave to slave, yet it did so with great purpose and accuracy. It was not simply ricocheting from one consciousness to the next.

It was fast. Strong and fast.

I pushed again. It slipped aside, but this time I came away holding some words torn off its elusive subconscious like a handful of grass.

Grael Ochre, the Yellow King.

‘Grael Ochre. Is that your name?’

No answer.

‘Yellow King… of what?’

No answer.

‘Yellow for cowardice? Won’t you reply?’

I pushed again.

‘What is Orpheus, Grael Ochre?’ I asked. ‘Why does that word lurk so brightly in your mind?’

The mind pushed back. Fire cored through the neural links of my augmetics, making me gasp and stagger to the wall for support. All my old wounds – all the artificial neurons spliced in to allow me to control my exo- and endo-augmetics – shrieked with induced pain, the cellular memory of injury and surgical incisions replayed.

Clever, turning old pain against me. Getting me out of his head.

He was gone again. The house was alive with the sounds of shouting, of security teams rushing up and down the tight, wooden staircases. I limped into the retiring room, and pulled the door shut behind me. It was cold in there, unfriendly. No one had bothered heating it for the day. A limpid grey light fell through the tall windows. Drapes and tapestries hung dark like shrouds. There were shelves of books, some ragged furniture.

I needed to sit down. I tried to let go of the pain he’d poured into me. This Grael Ochre, whoever he was – and I was sure a name like that was just another mask, a psydonym – was cruel and exceptionally skilled. I had only stolen the few clues I had by brazen persistence and the fact that he had not expected another psyker to be in play at the symposium.

He had lit me up with old agonies: ghosts of all the wounds and traumas I had ever suffered, and not just the physical ones. I was almost overcome with a sense of loss, of several losses. Remembered grief. I saw faces, briefly, in my mind’s eye. Faces I had not thought of in years. Uber Aemos, my long dead savant. The irrepressible Midas Betancore. Fischig, stubborn to the end. Tobias Maxilla and his gleaming artificial life. Alizebeth Bequin.

He woke them up. Grael Ochre woke them all up, and sent them to torment me for a minute or two until the pain ebbed away.

‘Why are you here?’

I looked around sharply. He was right behind me. Perhaps he had taken shelter in the retiring room too, or perhaps he had been drawn to the flash of my mind. He was a dark shape, a shadow beside the seaward windows. It was as though he didn’t want to be involved in anything.

‘You recognise me?’ I asked.

‘Of course. Even with the falsehood, I had a suspicion. Is this anything to do with you? Today’s little round of murder and puppet-play?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I thought someone might have been taking advantage of me making a public appearance, but that was arrogant. It’s not me they’re after. Does the name Grael Ochre mean anything?’

‘No.’

‘The Yellow King?’

‘No.’

‘I see,’ I said. Was he ignorant, or was he just not playing? Throne knew, he had no reason to trust me. He hadn’t had for years.

I removed the falsehood so he could see my face. My scarred, expressionless face.

‘It is good to see you,’ I said.

His vox-speakers made a noise, perhaps the approximation of a sardonic laugh. I was not seeing him, and he was not seeing me. There was no expression, or even micro-expression, to read on my frozen face, and no nuance to prove that I genuinely was pleased.

And he was just the chair: the armoured, hard-machined, floating shape that stored and supported his helpless organic remains. He was seeing me through optical relays, and speaking via voxponder circuits. The armoured prow of his chair unit was no more readable than my features.

It looked as if he had not maintained the exterior of his chair in a long while. It was scarred and scratched, and the paint was flaking. He had not bothered to keep up its sinister appearance for field work.

Spots of fresh blood dappled one side of the chair’s armour.

‘Why are you here?’ he asked.

‘I came to see you.’

‘We have not seen each other for a very long time, Gregor. I had not expected ever to see you again.’

‘Times change,’ I replied.

‘So do people. Neither of us is what we used to be. Rogues, the pair of us.’

‘You were only rogue by circumstance,’ I said.

‘It cost me my career. And that implies you are not a rogue by circumstance. Are you really the radical they say you are? The diabolus threat that has five sectors looking for you?’

‘What I am is immaterial–’

‘Not so,’ he replied. ‘Even if you are innocent, this isn’t the time or place to prove it. Your reputation is accursed. You should not be here.’

‘I walk where I choose.’

‘Dark places, all of them.’

‘And I am not here to prove my innocence. I am here to see you.’

‘Which is why you should not be here at all,’ he said.

Gunfire echoed down through the house. Upstairs, another attempt was being made to smoke out or kill the psyker assassin.

‘You could stop that. You could crush him,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘You’re the strongest mind on the island.’

‘Once, perhaps.’

‘You won’t use your psy to restore order here?’

‘Others will. Gaguach and Corwal are closing the killer down. Another few minutes.’

‘Neither of them is strong enough.’

‘Together, they’ll do it.’

‘So you don’t use your mind anymore?’ I asked.

‘It was a condition of my pardon. The inquiry lasted fifteen years, Gregor. Molotch made a terrible mess.’

‘Not as terrible as the one he wanted to make. The one you stopped.’

‘I agreed to retire from active duty. I swore to suspend my mind from psychic activity. I merely use the little mind-impulse I need to control the chair and run life support. Nothing else. Nothing active. Not even telepathy.’

‘Why? The greatest mind of your generation.’

‘In a ruined body, with a shattered reputation. My mind and your body, there’s almost one whole person between us. Almost.’

I looked away. Even without the nuance of micro-expression on my part, he could tell he’d offended me.

‘Your skin is thinner these days,’ he said. ‘It was a joke, yet it cut you. You never used to care. Are you so ashamed of the path you’ve taken?’

I holstered my weapon and readjusted my falsehood.

‘I came to see you,’ I said. ‘I know it’s been a long time, but it was for something important. But I can see you’ve changed. There is no point bringing this to you.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’ll get over my disappointment.’

‘We cannot work together,’ he said. ‘We cannot be seen together, or have any association.’

‘Because I am a radical? Diabolus?’

‘Because I was given a choice after Molotch,’ he replied. ‘Retire from active service and refrain from psionics. Or, on behalf of the Holy Ordos, hunt down my old master, the heretic Gregor Eisenhorn.’

I did not know what to say. He had chosen the prison of his chair and the negation of his extraordinary consciousness over me.

‘This thing,’ he said, ‘this psyker that has come hunting in House Vecum today. I think it’s come for me. I made enemies. Molotch, Culzean, and their ilk, they had associates. They belonged to secret orders and clandestine frateries. Their kin want me dead. While I abstain from psionics, there is no satisfaction in killing me. They are goading me. It’s happened before. They are daring me to use my psy again. When I do, I will become a worthy target again. Then they will exact vengeance and kill me. I refuse to play their games and rise to it. This matter here, this Grael Ochre… it will be done soon. Calm will be restored. Go now, Gregor. Go now, before they lock the place down. You cannot be found here, for your own sake and for mine.’

I nodded. I turned.

‘Does the word Orpheus mean anything to you?’ he asked suddenly.

‘No,’ I said.

Another vox noise, the analogue of a sigh.

‘Then good-bye, Gregor,’ he said.

‘It really was good to see you, Gideon,’ I replied.

With a soft whir of suspensor mech, the chair turned to face the seaward windows. Ravenor was no longer looking at me.

‘I hope we never meet again,’ he said. His voxponder was toneless.

Covered by the falsehood, its resolution turned to maximum effect, I left the palace by the back staircase, and exited into the deep, hillside well of covered steps below the ramparts. An hour’s walk, down the steep black stairs that snaked down the windswept cliff, would bring me to the harbour road. From there, I could reach the boat-dock in the shadow of Shurfath Universitariate where my launch was hidden, and quit Maelificer.

Behind me, the sporadic sounds of gunfire continued to disturb the mountain air, and I could still feel a dangerous mind at large.

I hate running from a fight.

As it turns out, I wasn’t.

BLOOD GAMES

He had been circling for ten months. Ten months, and eighteen identities, most of them so authentic they had fooled Unified Biometric Verification. He’d faked out three blind trails to throw them off his scent, one into the Slovakian fiefs, one to Kaspia and the Nord Reaches, and the other a meandering route down through the Tirol to the Dolomite Shrines overlooking the Pit of Venezia. He’d overwintered in Boocuresti Hive, and crossed the Black Sea Basin by cargo spinner during the first week of ice-ebb. At Bilhorod, he had turned back on himself to lose an unwanted tail. He had spent three weeks hiding in a disused manufactory in Mesopotamia, preparing his next move.

Ten months; a little long for a blood game, but then he was playing it out carefully, synchronising his movements with global patterns, following trade routes, inter-provincial traffic and seasonal labour migrations. He was one hundred per cent certain they didn’t have an orbital grid fix for him, and he was fairly confident they didn’t even have an approximate. There’d been no one on his heels since Bilhorod.

He trekked up-country through Baluchistan, mostly on foot, sometimes stealing a lift on transports, and crossed the border into the Imperial Territory three hundred and three days after he had set out.

The top of the world had changed in ten months. An entire peak had disappeared from the blinding skyline, a gap at odds with his memories, nagging like a missing tooth. The high-altitude air smelled of pitch, molten alloys and shaved stone. Primarch Dorn’s warrior-engineers were crafting their poliorcetics, armouring the highest and most robust steeples of the Earth.

The smell of pitch, alloy and stone was the smell of approaching war. Its fragmented notes hung on the bright air of the old Himalazia.

The scenery was so white it scorched his eyes, and he was glad of his glare-goggles. A few degrees below zero, the air was like glass, and the sun like a fusion torch in the blue sky. Perfect snows coated the peaks and the ascents, painfully white, achingly empty.

He had considered the south his best option, Kath Mandau and the towering central Precinct, but as he approached he realised how much things had changed. Security, which had never been less than rigorous, had cinched up as tight as a penitent’s cilice. The coming war had trebled the guards on the gates, quadrupled the gun-nests and automated weapon blisters, and multiplied the biometric sensors a hundredfold.

Vast workcrews of migrant labourers, serving the orders of the Masonic Guilds, had gathered around the Palace: their camps, their workings, their very bodies staining the high snows green and black and red like algae growth.

Security is tighter, but there are millions more faces to watch.

He observed the labour hosts for six days, eschewing his plans for the south and turning north instead, following the high pastures and walking trails over onto the plateau, keeping the toiling hosts in view. Constant streams flowed down the snowy valleys and passes from Kunlun: columns of fresh workers, and convoys of cargo and building materials from the Xizang mines. The columns looked like rivers of slow, dark meltwater, or racing black glaciers. Where the influx streams met the worker armies, temporary cities sprouted in the shadows of the immense walls, habitent towns and canvas metropoli, accommodating the migrants, corralling their pack animals and servitors, seeing to their needs of food and water and medicine. The unloaded materials: timber, pig alloy, mule steel, ores and ballast, stacked up around the camp cities like slag heaps. Hoist cranes and magnificent derricks lifted pallets of materials up over the walls. Horns snorted and echoed around the high valleys.

Sometimes, he just sat and looked at the Palace as if it was the most wonderful thing in creation. It probably wasn’t. There were undoubtedly feats of ancient, inhuman architecture on forgotten, scattered worlds that dwarfed it, or eclipsed it in stupendous scale or awe-inspiring scope. The architecture was not the point. It was the idea of the Palace that made it the most wonderful thing. It was the inner notion, the concept that it made flesh.

The Palace was vast, beautiful, the greatest mountain range on Terra refashioned into a residence and a capital, and now, belatedly, a fortress.

The missing Himalazian peak had been levelled for building materials. The recognition of that feat made him smile. These days, the schemes of man were never modest.

Adopting rags and dirty leg armour, he spent three days labouring with the genestock ogres from Nei Monggol. Nicknamed the migou, they slogged up and down the passes, carrying sheets of zurlite and huge panniers of nephrite and Gyptus pebble. They dug embankments and earthworks with massive shovels made from the blade-bones of giant grox, and formed hammer gangs to rhythmically sink the iron stakes that would support the concertinaed spools of flay-wire.

At night, in the work camps, the massive genestock stoked their over-muscled bodies with qash, a resin derived from the venom of a Gobi Waste nematode. The substance made their veins bulge, and their eyes roll white. It made them speak in tongues.

He watched the effects, and made estimates of dosage and systemic duration.

The genestock were prepared to work with him, but they treated him with general suspicion. He tried to be just another Caucasian broadback, keen to earn a stipend and a bonus from the Masonic Guilds. His papers were in order. When he tried to purchase a little qash, however, they turned sour, fearing him to be a genewhip sent into the camps to keep the workforce clean.

They tried to kill him.

Under the pretence of a quiet sale, three genestock migou drew him apart from the main camp, and led him to a rock pasture where fire stone and cacholong spoil had been heaped up by porter gangs. They unwrapped a cloth roll with slices of brown resin in it to show him. Then one drew a punch-dagger and tried to insert it into his liver.

He sighed – a complication.

He took hold of the migou’s wrist, folded the arm around and broke it against itself with his elbow. The joint went the wrong way, and the arm went so slack, he simply peeled the punch-dagger out of the dead fingers. The genestock uttered no expression of pain. He simply blinked in surprise.

All three of them were titanic creatures, corded and slabby with unnatural, hard-cut muscle definition. It had not occurred to any of them that the Caucasian, though extremely large and well made, would offer them a moment’s problem.

One threw a punch, a blow driven with huge force but desultory effort, as if he was aggrieved that they should be put to such trouble. The punch was designed to finish matters, to put the Caucasian down, his jaw pulped, his head slack on the column of his spine.

The blow did not connect with any part of the Caucasian. Instead, it encountered the punch-dagger, which had suddenly been angled to face it. The impact shaved flesh and muscle away from bone. This produced a pain response. The genestock howled, and tried to gather in his shredded hand and forearm. The Caucasian shut him up by jabbing the punch-dagger into his heavy forehead. It cracked in through the bone like the tip of a rock-breaker’s pick.

The genestock toppled backwards, wearing the grip of the punch-dagger above his eyes like some curious tiara.

The third migou grabbed him from behind in an ursine hug. The genestock with the broken arm tried to claw at his face. It was all tiresome now. He broke free of the embrace with a shrug of his shoulders, turned and drove his right hand into the genestock’s chest. The sternum split. When the Caucasian wrenched his hand out again, it looked as if it was wearing a red glove. Most of the migou’s heart was clenched in his steaming fist.

The genestock with the broken arm, now the only one of the trio left alive, murmured in fear and started to run away across the rock pasture.

He bore the wounded genestock no especial malice, but he couldn’t let him go. With bloody fingers, he bent down, selected a small piece of fire stone, weighed it in his hand and launched it with a snap of his wrist.

It made a pokk! noise as it penetrated the back of the fleeing ogre’s head like a bullet. He fell heavily, and his hefty corpse slithered down the litter of a spoil heap on its face.

He disposed of the three bodies in a fathomless gorge, washed his hands with snow and took the roll of qash resin.

The confluence of workers gathered around the skirts of the Palace had brought, as any great body of humanity always did, lice and vermin and scavengers with it. Rad-wolves had followed the workers down off the plateau, and gathered at night, red eyes in the dark catching the flicker of the campfire rings. Thousands of war hounds patrolled the camp perimeters at night, or lingered on the escarpments before the Palace. The night was regularly interrupted by sudden gales of howling and barking, the growl and shiver of animals mauling one another as the faithful hounds drove off wolves that had become too inquisitive.

In the darkness, it was hard to tell the difference between hounds and wolves.

He had received regular physiological testing his entire life, and he had memorised all the results in forensic detail so as to best judge his limitations.

He cut the qash resin into sample measures, weighing each on a set of fine scales that he’d borrowed from a gem cutter.

The reinforcement of the Annapurna Gate was half done. Every day, the mouth of the huge gate bustled with thousands of labourers, and the towering hoist cranes swung cradles of ceramite plating, rebar and reinforced rockcrete up over the cyclopean arch. It was too intensive a task for the sentries to scan each labourer in and out individually: the labour gangs would snarl up, and the work would run slow. Instead, the entire gate zone was covered by a biometric reader field, projected by slowly rotating vanes in the eaves of the primary arch.

At dawn, he secured himself under the tarps of one of the payloads due to be taken in over the gate by hoist crane. He huddled down between sheets of mule steel and bundles of ironwood.

He had prepared a four-gram dose of qash, an overdose by migou standards. Its efficacy was such, he would be insensible less than a minute after ingesting it.

He waited for two hours until he felt the jolt of the lift crews securing the payload’s chains. He heard the steel cables of the hoist crane whining. He felt the heavy sway as the pallet he was hiding on left the ground.

He swallowed the qash.

Observation had shown him that it took the hoist crane mechanism forty-three seconds to bring a payload up to clearance height, and a further sixty-six seconds to traverse it in over the gate top. Twenty-four seconds into that second time period, the moving payload would enter the biometric reader field.

The qash did its work. He was stiff and dead twelve seconds before he entered the field. The field read nothing except a payload of inert building materials.

He woke. The pallet had set down, and some of the tarps had been pulled back. Riggers and roof-gangers were beginning to unload the mule steel.

His body ached. Most of his muscles were cramping. He focused and performed some purging exercises to throw off the vestiges of the somatic rigour that the qash had induced. Death to most mortal men, near-death to a being like him; a brief, death-like fugue to allow him to slip in through the Palace biometrics.

He slid off the pallet, sore and woozy. Enormous gunboxes and shielded fighting platforms were being constructed around the upper ramparts, and thick dura-plating and adamantium were being bonded to the walls. Workers milled around on scaffolds and gantries, some suspended like mountaineers over the edge of the wall’s sheer drop. The air was filled with noises of hammering and cutting. Powered tools shrilled. Fusion torches buzzed and flickered with arctic blue light.

Phantoms fought behind his eyes, the ghost flares of fusion cutters. There was blood in his throat. He scooped up a box of rivets and a concussion mallet, and blended with the workforce.

He penetrated the outer levels of the Palace. This process took a further three days. He stopped being a masonic labourer and became a shadow, then a footman polishing brasswork, then a lamp-lighter with a spark-pole, and then a doorkeeper, wearing a livery he had purloined from a laundry room and a concealed displacer field to disguise his height and bulk.

He followed hallways that were dressed in diaspore and agate, and descended stairwells planed from solid pieces of onyx. He watched his reflection cross polished marble floors, and his shadow chase along walls carved from quartz and sardonyx. He waited in the ivory gloom of huge processionals while warbands passed by in marching time. He lingered in doorways while almost endless trains of servitors brought past trays of raw meats and hydroponic vegetables for the high table.

He became a footman again, then a carpet beater, then a beadle, and then a messenger man with an attaché box full of blank papers, hunching to disguise his build and height. Every once in a while, he stopped to get his bearings. The Palace was bigger than many cities. Its levels and byways took a lifetime to learn. From the rails of high balconies, he looked down into artificial ravines five hundred storeys deep, filled with lights and teeming with people. Some of the great domes in the Precinct, especially the Hegemon, were so vast, they contained their own miniature weather systems. Microclimate clouds drifted under painted vaults. Rain in the Hegemon was said to be a portent of good fortune.

As far as he knew, it had not rained in the Hegemon for three years.

The Custodes were abroad, watching over the inner reaches of the Precinct, majestic in their ornate golden armour. Their plume crests were crimson, like sprays of arterial blood frozen in the air. The pre-Unity symbol of the lightning bolt was blazoned on their armour. They lurked in the gloomy halls and shadowed cloisters of the Palace, their guardian spears upright, frighteningly vigilant.

They were impassive, silent, and they guarded their secrets solemnly, but in their very presence there was a truth to be unpicked.

He noted their deployment. Two Custodes were watching the Southern Circuit that snaked like silver braid towards the Hegemon. Two more stood at the Jade Bailey, and another three patrolled beneath the fretted ironwork and malachite of the Congressional. A lone Custodes, almost invisible, held position under the waxy emerald leaves of the Qokang Oasis, watching the outfall of the crystal-clear pleasure lake thunder down into the turbine gulf in misty cascades. Four more prowled the upper platforms of the Taxonomic Towers.

There were, however, none on the Northern Circuit, and none on the western limits of the lake, and none near the Investiary. It was so telling. They were like visible moons betraying the position of an invisible planet, bright astral bodies pushed into a certain pattern by the gravitational ministrations of an unseen star. By noting where they were, and where they weren’t, he could determine the location of his prey.

The Hall of Leng seemed most likely. From the disposition of the steadfast Custodes, his prey had to be somewhere in the western hemispheric portion of the Precinct, which meant the Hall of Leng, the House of Weapons, the Great Observatory, or the private apartments adjoining the latter two, but he knew the Hall of Leng was a favourite place. When he wasn’t sequestered in secret toil in the deep, private crypts of the Palace, his prey was known to spend a great deal of time in the Hall, measuring the angles of space and time.

It was said that past and future co-mingled at that site, and had done so since primordial times, before the place had owned the name Leng, before his prey had been born, before a roof had been raised above it, or human eyes had seen it. The Hall of Leng, long-beamed and dark, was simply a domestication of one of the materium’s anomalies, a pulled thread in the fabric of time, a scab on the skin of space.

He had never felt comfortable in the Hall. It was filled with a tangible darkness, which seemed to exhale softly, like the respiration of a slumbering god, but it was a fitting place, and it would serve.

He approached the Hall from the south-west, following an ouslite walkway that had been laid along an avenue of sycamore and silver birch. He no longer wore a guise of any kind, no more fake lamp-lighters or pretender carpet-beaters, no more displacer field to mask his stature. He had unfolded the cobweb-thin falsehood out of its tiny silver box and wrapped himself in it. It felt as cold and light as snowflakes on his shoulders, back and scalp. Light ignored him, as if he no longer merited notice. It bent around him, twisted away, avoided his form and, in avoiding him, robbed him of shadows and colours too.

As inconsequential as a whisper, he walked the avenue of trees, and crossed the lawns behind the Hall. He could smell oblative incense, and hear the gentle creak and moan of the Hall’s unnatural harmonics.

His weapon was ready: a Nei Monggol punch-dagger, sharpened to a refined keenness of edge that no genestock knife grinder could have matched. The blade was laced in catastrophically lethal nematode venom distilled and refined from qash resin.

Enough to slay a demigod? He believed so. Enough to finish a blood game, certainly.

There were no locks. He had memorised the traceries of the quantum alarms, and the lumin sensors simply disdained to read his falsehood. He gripped the blade in his left hand.

The light in the outer portico seemed opaque, as if stained brown by smoke. He padded forwards across black tiles that had been worn dull by centuries of visitors. Pure meltwater dripped into a stone basin beside the inner doors. Above the doorframe, in bas relief, the architrave showed the tribulations of the first pilgrims to visit Leng.

The inner doors were heavy and older than the Palace, framed panels of ancient mountain oak, half a metre thick, worn and handmade, none of the angles quite true. He lifted the black iron latch, and pushed one of the doors open. Air hushed out at him. It smelled of cold stone.

The immense Hall was starlight-dark and midnight-silent. Every now and then, a sound breathed through the black space, a sound that was almost the gust of a Himalazian wind and almost the crush of breakers on an ocean coast, but not in fact either of those things. Small orange sparks danced under the high roof, like fireflies, like ignis fatui.

He watched them, adapting his eyes to darkness. He began to pick up the silver outlines of objects in the hall: columns, ancient statuary, and the assayers and binding apparatus set up by antiquarians of previous epochs and never removed. The devices stood like giant metal insects in the gloom, probe arms raised like mantis limbs, metal wingcases marked with arcane, abstruse symbols for settings and degrees. They were gathering dust.

He slipped between them. Somewhere ahead of him, somewhere close by, a presence lingered. It was distracted, its mind detained by other things. It had not noticed him. It had not even felt him.

He moved around a column, its cold flutes against his back, and set eyes on his prey.

In the centre of the Hall’s broad, open floor, his prey was kneeling, engrossed, turning the pages of a massive leather-bound codex. The codex was open on the stone floor like a spread-eagled bird, its spine a metre and a half long. Beautiful hands slowly turned the pages. They were sculptor’s hands, artisan’s hands.

His prey had his back to him. His prey was wearing a hooded white cloak. It would show the blood.

A common assassin might creep forwards, to steal up on his target stealthily from behind, but this prey was far too dangerous and aware for such timid techniques. Now he was in striking distance, he had no option but to pounce. After ten months, one chance was all he was going to get.

He surged forwards, his arm rising.

Halfway there, with the tip of his punch-dagger just a moment away from the centre of his prey’s broad back, a shadow came the other way to meet him.

Fluid darkness intercepted his blade. The punch-dagger was wrenched aside, and his strike was shorn of its momentum. He turned.

He could barely see his assailant. Another falsehood was defying the light. The attacker drove in at him, a shadow against a shadow. He glimpsed the long, straight blade of a spatha.

He deflected one sword-blow over-hand, and another under-hand, swinging the punch-dagger around. Each impact rang out with a sharp clang of metal on metal. Sparks flew. He backed hastily across the black tiles as the falsehooded swordsman moved against him.

Their blades clashed again. The punch-dagger afforded him no reach. The advantage was entirely with the swordsman. The clatter of metal against metal seemed atrociously sharp in the breathy silence of the Hall.

Despite the nuance of his grip, the spatha flicked the punch-dagger clean out of his hand. It embedded itself, quivering, in a nearby stone column. He went in with his bare hands, banging aside the rising sword blade with the back of his right hand and locking his fingers around the wrist of his attacker’s sword arm. He hooked his foot out to sweep the swordsman’s legs out from under him, but the swordsman leapt the sweeping calf and tried to snatch his wrist free.

He smashed his left hand in, and caught the falsehooded swordsman across the side of the head. There was enough weight in the punch to stagger the man backwards. He blundered into one of the old assaying machines, scraping its metal feet across the stone tiles and buckling one of its insectile legs.

The swordsman recovered his balance, and discovered he was no longer a swordsman. The spatha had been ripped from his hand.

The Caucasian weighed the captured sword in his right hand. He snapped it around, and put the flat of it across his adversary’s cranium, knocking him down.

The Caucasian turned from his fallen foe, the spatha in a low, defensive grip. Two more falsehooded opponents were oozing out of the Hall’s shadows to confront him.

He blocked both their blades at once, and rallied against them in a series of dazzling, turning cuts and thrusts. The percussive clash of swords rang through the gloom. More sparks shot out, bright and brief, as if the three sword blades were made of flint.

He wrong-footed one of his opponents, and clubbed him down to his knees with a blow of his spatha’s pommel. The other swordsman came at him, thrusting his blade, but he turned it aside deftly so that the stroke ran out harmlessly under his arm, and drove the heel of his left hand into the man’s face, cracking him backwards onto the floor.

He started to run as the pair of them struggled to rise again. The game was done. Escape was the only acceptable conclusion remaining to him. He ran for the doors, threw them open and sprinted through the thick gloom of the portico towards the lawns outside the Hall.

They were waiting for him. Five Custodes, fully armoured, their faces hidden by their golden, hawked visors, stood in a semicircle around the mouth of the portico. They had their Guardian spears, those great, gilded hybrids of halberd and firearm, aimed at his chest.

‘Yield!’ one of them ordered.

He raised his stolen sword for the last time.

He was not the first occupant of the cell, and he would not be the last. The stone walls, floor and ceiling of the cell had been painted in a bluish-white gloss, like the skin of a glacier. Fingernails and other sharp edges had scored away the paint over the years, inscribing the walls with scraped frescoes of men and eagles, of armoured giants and lightning bolts, of ancient victories and long shadows. They were simple, elemental marks that reminded him of primordial cave paintings showing hunters and bison.

He added his own.

After a night and a day, the cell door rumbled open. Constantin Valdor entered. The master of the Custodes wore a simple monastic robe of dark brown wool over a black bodyglove. He leaned his huge back against the cell wall, folded his mighty arms and regarded the prisoner on the cot.

‘Trust you, Amon,’ he said. ‘Trust you to get closer than anyone else.’

‘Amon’ was the start of his name, the earliest part of it. The second part was ‘Tauromachian’ and, together, these two words served most circumstances in which his name was used or spoken. He was Amon Tauromachian, Custodes, first circle.

Violent obliteration notwithstanding, Custodes lived long lives, far longer than mortal men, and they accumulated long names in those lifetimes. Following ‘Tauromachian’, which was not a family name but at least one that described the occupation of the bloodline that had provided his gene-source, there came ‘Xigaze’, the site of his organic birth, then ‘Lepron’, the house of his formative study, and then ‘Cairn Hedrossa’, the place where he was first tutored in weapon use. ‘Pyrope’, seventeen words into his nomenclature sequence, remembered his first live combat, deployed on an orbital of that name. So on, and so on, each new piece of his name honouring an action or a life landmark. Each was awarded him formally, by the masters of the first circle. ‘Leng’ would now become part of his name, the latest ultimate part, recognising his feat in the blood game.

A Custodian’s name was engraved inside the chest plate of his gold armour. The name began at the collar, on the right side, just the first element exposed, and then wound like a tight, secret snake around the inside of the plate. For some Custodes like Constantin, the oldest veterans, accumulated names had filled up the linings of their torso plates, and the tails of their snakes now ran out around the bellies of the plates, looping like incised belts through the abdominal decorations. Constantin Valdor’s name was nineteen hundred and thirty-two elements long.

Amon’s Custodes armour and armaments had been stored in the House of Weapons during his absence. As he walked along the Southern Circuit with Constantin to reclaim them, he asked about the progress of other blood games.

‘Zerin?’

‘Apprehended before he had even crossed into the Imperial Territories. He brushed a gene-sniffer in Irkutsk.’

‘Haedo?’

‘Detected by sweeps in the Papuan Deserts four months ago. He made it as far as Cebu City by dust yacht, but we had a scoop team waiting for him.’

Amon nodded. ‘Brokur?’

Constantin smiled. ‘He got into the Hegemon in the guise of a Panpacific delegate before he was spotted. An impressive feat, one that we did not expect to be bettered.’

Amon shrugged. Blood games were a fundamental element of Palace security and a duty of the Custodes. It was a matter of honour for them to play blood games out to the very best of their abilities. Using their ingenuity and comprehensive inside knowledge of the Palace and, indeed, Terra itself, the Custodes volunteered to test and probe Imperial security, to expose any weakness or chink in Terran defences. They would play wolf to test the hounds. At any given time, at least half a dozen Custodes were loose, operating secretly and autonomously, devising and executing methods of penetrating the great Palace.

There would be scrupulous debriefings and extensive interviews, examining Amon’s strategies and dismantling his techniques. Every scrap of information, every morsel of advantage, had to be extracted from the blood game. He had penetrated the Palace. He had got further than anyone else. He had come within striking distance.

‘I wonder if I have caused offence?’ he mentioned to Constantin. ‘I raised my hand against him.’

Constantin shook his head. He was a giant of a man, bigger even than Amon, like one of the over-scaled statues in the Investiary brought to life. ‘He forgives you. Besides, you would not have hurt him.’

‘My blow was blocked.’

‘Even if it hadn’t been, he would have stopped you.’

‘He knew I was there.’

Constantin scratched at his chin. ‘He won’t tell me how long he knew. He wanted to see how long it would take the rest of us to notice you.’

Amon paused before replying. ‘In the past, he has not seen much sense in blood games. He considered them worthless.’

‘That was the past,’ Constantin replied. ‘Things have changed since you were last among us, Amon.’

In the House of Weapons, he and Constantin armoured themselves. Amon felt the old familiarity of the handmade plate sections, the buckles and clasps and the magnetised seams. The weight settled on him reassuringly.

In arming chambers on the lower levels of the House of Weapons, servitors and slaves were ritually plating a squad of proud Astartes of the Imperial Fists, anointing them with oils and whispers as they locked each piece of armour in place. The squad was preparing for a long patrol shift on the southern ramparts.

Such was the custom of most Astartes: the ritual, the gloving, the blessing. They were beings wrought for war, their mindsets particular. Ritual aided their singularity of focus. It refined their purpose.

They were not like Custodes at all. Like cousins, perhaps, like kin from the same bloodline, the Custodes and the Astartes were similar but distinct. The Custodes were the product of an older, formative process, a process, some said, that had been refined and simplified to produce the Astartes en masse. Generally, Custodes were larger and more powerful than Astartes, but the differences were only noticeably significant in a few specific cases. No one would be foolish enough to predict the outcome of a contest between an Astartes and a Custodian.

The greatest differences lay in the mind. Though Custodes shared a familial bond through the circles of their order, it was nothing like the keen brotherhood that cemented the Legions of the Astartes. Custodes were far more solitary beings: sentinels, watchmen, destined to stand forever, alone.

Custodes did not surround themselves with slaves and servitors, aides and handservants. They armoured themselves, alone, pragmatically, without ceremony.

‘Dorn armours the Palace for war,’ Amon said, as more of an observation than a question. Only a Custodes of the first circle would refer to a primarch so bluntly.

‘War is expected.’

‘Now it is expected,’ said Amon. ‘Before, it was not expected, never, not from ourselves.’

Constantin did not reply.

‘How did this happen?’ Amon asked.

‘It is not possible to say,’ replied the master of the Custodes. ‘As one who knew the Warmaster well, I cannot believe it is overweening pride or ambition that has inspired this infamy, nor resentment. I believe–’

‘What?’ asked Amon, buckling his abdominal plates tight.

‘I believe Horus Lupercal is unsound,’ said Constantin. ‘Unsound of mind or of humour. Something has unseated his rational thought, and the good council of those around him.’

‘Are you suggesting Horus Lupercal is mad?’ asked Amon.

‘Perhaps. Mad, or sick, or both. Something has happened to him that cannot be explained by the scheme of the galaxy as we have come to understand it.’ Constantin looked out through the high windows of the House of Weapons, and studied the line of the Western Ramparts, newly reinforced and obese with additional shield plating and gun platforms. ‘We must prepare for the unthinkable. War will come to us, war from within. Sides are drawn, choices made.’

‘You make it sound matter-of-fact,’ Amon said.

‘It is,’ replied Constantin. ‘The Emperor is threatened. We are his protectors. We will stand against the threat. There is nothing else for us to speculate upon, not even the madness of those we once loved.’

Amon nodded. ‘The Palace is becoming a fortress. I approve. Dorn has done superlative work.’

‘It was ever his skill, and the skill of his Astartes. Defence and protection. At this, the Imperial Fists excel.’

‘But we remain the last line,’ said Amon.

‘We do.’

‘This will require more than strong walls and battlements.’

With their crested helmets held under their arms, they walked across the inner courts of the Palace from the House of Weapons to a tower of the Hegemon where the Custodes kept their office of watch.

Custodes had gathered to greet Amon at the entrance of the tower. Heads bowed, they struck the shafts of their Guardian spears against the flagstones, a clattering murmur of welcome and approval.

Haedo stepped forwards, his features hidden by the shadows of his visor. ‘Amon Tauromachian, good that you return,’ he said, clasping Amon’s right hand.

‘You have cut deeper than any of us,’ Emankon said.

They entered the tower through high-arched rooms where the murals were so old and faded they looked like the pencil sketches and cartoons the artist had made in preparation for his work. Information streams from the vast data looms in the sub-levels of the Palace pulsed in the conduits under their feet. Cyber-drones floated under the high vaults, clusters of them moving like shoals of fish, dragged and gusted as if by the wafts of deep marine currents.

The Watchroom was bathed in violet light from the vast overhead hololithic emitters. Data freckled and danced across this smoky dome of light. The comparison/contrast programs running in the central cogitation consoles speared beams of gold and red up into the violet gloom, and roped divergent data elements in lassos of light. The global data sea and the unified biometric verification system were being trawled and panned by the Watchroom’s codifier assembly, and disparate elements were being grouped together, connections made, traces followed. An anti-Unity cell in Baktria had been betrayed by some restricted treatise they had tried to access from a library in Delta Nilus. Pro-Panpacific terrorists had been eradicated in Archangelus, traced by a weapons-buy they had tried to pull off in some backwater Nordafrik shanty. Every day, a billion clues and a million secrets were analysed and examined by the Custodes watch, sifted with acute, painstaking precision through the ever-shifting, fluid levels of Terra’s information sphere.

‘What is the chief matter of the hour?’ Constantin asked.

Every sixty minutes, the Watchroom prioritised a dozen of the most sensitive findings for special attention.

‘Lord Sichar,’ replied the custodian of the watch.

He had not hefted a guardian spear in ten months. He went to the practice chambers in the subterranean levels beneath the tower, and cued up a dozen blade-limbed servitors to oppose him. The spear swung and looped in his hands, his muscles remembering the old skills and training. When the exercise ended, and the servitors were broken and dismembered on the mat around him, he called up fresh units for a second round.

How much of our lives are spent in rehearsal, he considered. The blood games, the training, all of it just pantomime coaching in preparation for the real thing.

Amon hated himself for the tiny thrill of exhilaration that he felt. The real thing was coming. No matter the infamy and outrage of it, the Custodes would at last be called from rehearsal to perform the duty they had been created to perform.

To relish the imminent war was unseemly. As he closed out the second round of practice, Amon focused his mind instead on the case of Lord Sichar.

‘The matter is already under inspection, Amon,’ Constantin had told him.

‘I have been out ten months,’ Amon had replied, ‘I am rusty and idle, and eager for a proper puzzle to divert me. I ask your favour.’

Constantin had nodded. The matter of Lord Sichar had been passed to Amon Tauromachian for review.

Lord Pherom Sichar had always been a person of interest to the Custodes. Hereditary lord of Hy Brasil, the most powerful of all the Sud Merican cantons, Sichar had often been vocal in his criticism of Imperial policies. His dynastic links, through bloodline and marriage, to the Navis Nobilite provided him with a considerable trade empire off Terra. Sichar was reckoned to be one of the fifty most powerful feudal lords of the colonies. Only the most careful political gamesmanship by Malcador the Sigillite had prevented Sichar’s elevation to the Council of Terra. Of greater concern was the fact that Sichar was a direct descendant of Dalmoth Kyn, one of the last tyrants to hold out against the Emperor’s forces in the dying days of the Unification Wars. It was understood that the Emperor tolerated Sichar’s rule of Hy Brasil – and his barracking and sniping in the Hegemon – in order to heal the old wounds left by the Wars of Unification and encourage ethnic settlement. Sichar was a powerful man, and an articulate, outspoken statesman. He often spoke tolerable sense, in Amon’s opinion, and his policies were pragmatic and robust.

His opposition to Imperial directives was not so fierce it required him to be placed under house arrest, like Lady Kalhoon of Lanark, or be removed from office entirely and charged with treason to the Imperial state, like Hans Gargetton, chancellor of the Atlantic Platforms, but Sichar was always to be handled with caution.

After his training session, Amon changed into a simple robe and bodyglove, and went to one of the consultation suites on the floor above the Watchroom, where a strategically stationed Sister of Silence maintained an aura of absolute discretion. He laid out all the key intelligence on the screens of a stochastic processor, and began to assess them using the noetic and retrocognitive techniques taught to all Custodes.

Sichar, already under permanent surveillance by the Custodes Watchroom, had become a security priority thanks to particular scrutiny of his communication patterns.

His off-world holdings were considerable. His greatest possession was Cajetan in 61-Isthmus, a colonial world rich in resources that provided him with a gateway to the lucrative mineral zones of Albedo Crucis. Sichar’s trade worth was so considerable, junior houses and minor grandees of the Sud Merican aristocracy were flocking to him, and strengthening his support base. If a seat fell open on the Council of Terra, it would be hard to deny it to Lord Sichar.

The threads of connection were vague, but their lines could be traced. Sichar was in direct and regular communication, via astropathic link, with the Governor of Cajetan, and the viceroys of Albedo Crucis II and Sempion Magnix. His correspondence with them, all of the clients he had effectively installed, was conducted in a private cipher that the Custodes had not yet broken. It appeared to be a variation of Ansprak Tripattern, one of the few wartime codes used by the anti-unionists that had never been unravelled.

Further threads of connection could be traced, via diplomatic back-channels, to elements of the 1102nd and 45th Imperial Expedition Fleets, and through them to minor colonial holdings, and two service and supply fleets operating out of the Chirog Nebula. Intel suggested that the service fleets, amongst other duties, supplied materiel to the Imperial Army deployed forces on the Butan Group.

There lay the question mark. Five months previously, several sections of the Imperial Army in the Butan Group were rumoured to have declared for the Warmaster. There was a distinct possibility that Lord Sichar, through a lengthy and deliberately complex chain of correspondence, was in communication with the heretics.

Lord Sichar of Hy Brasil, in all likelihood, was trafficking intelligence between Terra and Horus Lupercal.

As it turned, the craft caught the sun across its silver fuselage and shone like a brief star in the mauve reaches of the upper atmosphere. A civilian-pattern Hawkwing, registered to Fancile et Cie, operating out of the Zeon-Ind orbital, it was just another transport coming in along the signal pulse of the Planalto Central traffic beacon.

The flying machine, an orbit-capable bird, wore a burnished metallic skin, and was a wide, elegant shape, like a giant ray or a skate, with broad, triangular wings and a slender dart of a tail. As it skimmed in towards the four high towers of the Planalto Central landing spire, its retarding burners lit with hot jets of green-yellow flame in the lazy evening light, and trailing edge spoilers lifted along the wings like bent feathers. The great towers, dust-brown against the indigo heavens, blinked out powerful white lights from their masts. Two kilometres below, the vast sprawl of urbanised Hy Brasil stretched out, a trillion lights in the dark.

As the Hawkwing adjusted for its final approach, its transponders broadcast its identity packets at the request of Planalto Administratum.

The packets informed Planalto Administratum that the craft was carrying Elod Galt, a senior negotiator for Fancile et Cie, who was visiting Hy Brasil to conduct exploratory talks with representatives of several Albedo mining congloms.

According to Unified Biometric Verification, Elod Galt’s idents were entirely in order.

Not a blood game this time, the real thing.

He would have preferred to work alone, at least to begin with, but there was a role to play. To seem the part, he needed servitors, an astropath and, most likely, a pilot and a lifeguard too. Haedo, in a simple grey bodyglove and slave-mask, doubled in the last two roles. His biometric declared him to be Zuhba, no family name, a genestock migou bought on the Gangetic bodymarket.

As Elod Galt, Amon was obliged to wear sheensilk robes that appeared wet and iridescent, like oil on water, as well as a wolf-pelt mantle, a formless hat with too many brims, and an ornamental sabre of considerable size that was nothing more than an ostentatious, theatrical prop and would be precisely useless in an actual combat situation. Most aggravating of all, he was obliged to wear another displacer field to visibly diminish and disguise his build.

His six attending servitors – one for vox-casting, one for medical duties and food tasting, one for environmental surveying, one for translation, one for recording and rubrication, and one for general service – were fine creations of polished blue steel and were, apparently, exactly the sort of suite of service units that would be expected to accompany a senior industrial negotiator.

A scallop-shell platform carried the Hawkwing down into the landing spire, down a vast flue lit by tracking lights of red and blue that lit in series. Other platforms were raising and lowering aircraft to and from the landing berths. Arriving at the designated berth-level, the platform shivered, halted and then swung sideways, delivering the cooling Hawkwing into the waiting embrace of the berth’s landing cradle. The cradle closed its digits and clamps around the craft like a carnivorous plant grasping an insect, and withdrew it into the steamy alcove of the berth, where grubby servitors, cargo shamblers and deck crewmen were waiting with hoists and blocks, and fuel umbilicals.

Haedo glanced at Amon as the internal cabin lights changed from cold white to a muted yellow standby.

‘Shall we begin?’ he asked.

Amon nodded. He looked over at the vox servitor. ‘Anything from control?’ he asked.

The servitor dipped its head and issued an apologetic tone.

‘Inform me as soon as they connect,’ Amon said.

He put on his hat. Haedo fixed his slave-mask – a screaming cockerel, for some reason of custom and protocol – to his face, and buckled on his sidearm. Interlocks clattered as the craft’s hatches linked to the berth’s air gate, and then the boarding hatch opened.

As he took the pre-arranged meetings with the agents of the mineral congloms, he thought of decomposition, of worms boring into a bloated carcass. His own worms were at work. False cowlings behind the Hawkwing’s afterburners had folded back during berthing, and the sterile compartments within had released sacks of vermicular probes. Sixteen thousand in all, each one an autonomous rope of articulated chrome no bigger than a chopstick. With every passing minute, they were crawling deeper into the fabric of Hy Brasil, spreading wider, chewing their way into data ducts and system trunking, gnawing their way into memory vaults, record banks and datastacks.

Some would be found, some flushed by automated security systems, some would follow dead leads and abort when their power cells failed, but some would feast, and transmit their diet back to him.

He sat in a stateroom panelled with Kirgizian fret-screens, and feigned interest in the boasts of gross tonnage and silicate purity made by the agents of the mineral congloms. He thought about the risks. With Constantin’s permission, they had deployed into Hy Brasil to conduct covert inspection, but they still awaited authority to move, in any open way, against Lord Sichar. If they were discovered, they could claim reasonable cause, but the worms were a breach of their legal parameters. If the burgraves of Hy Brasil discovered that the Custodes had entered their canton without a warrant and riddled their systems with a swarm of probe worms, there would be uproar. It was an egregious violation of Hy Brasilean sovereignty. Even now, unity was a fragile thing, like a sculpture made of glass or ice: beautiful, precise, solid, but so very easy to break. In the shadow of Horus Lupercal’s great and spreading treason, the last thing the Palace needed was a continental uprising on Terra.

‘It is a great risk,’ Haedo had said in transit from the orbital.

‘It is,’ Amon had agreed, ‘but if Pherom Sichar is what we think he is, waiting to act is a far greater risk.’

Servitors brought them refreshments. The fashion in Hy Brasil seemed to be for mannequins finished in varnished dark wood with brass articulation. They looked like naked nursery dolls: dolls with porcelain faces and hands rendered to seem utterly lifelike, yet whose bodies, beneath their clothes, were crude wood with no effort of realism at all. The servitors whirred around the stateroom, offering infusions of mint and green tea.

The stateroom, high in a tower in the Sao Paol division of the Planalto, overlooked the vast and luminous landscape of the Winter Fields. Hy Brasil drew its power from a series of vast reactors buried in the heart of the main conurbation. The reactors required monumental heat-exchange processes to keep them running within safety tolerances, and as a consequence, the surface levels of the reactor district were caked in thick sheet-ice all year round, forming a gigantic frost park thirty kilometres square in the centre of the Planalto that the hive populations used for recreation. From his vantage point, Amon could see the tiny shapes of skaters near the frozen shore, and children on the banks and ice walks with kites and slithering mechanical toys. Further out, in the yellow haze of the open fields, ice yachts skimmed silently under coloured sails, and powered rakers raced one another around the lighted masts of the speed circuit, spraying up wakes of ice spume.

Negotiations resumed. Amon checked his data-slate, which was discreetly monitoring all infeed to his vox servitor. Authority had still not been sent through from the Palace.

The next meeting took place in a monolithic tower on the far side of the Winter Fields. For amusement’s sake, proud of their frozen landscape, the agents of the congloms conveyed Elod Galt to the meeting aboard an ice yacht. Amon tried to look impressed.

Their host was waiting for them on the quay below the tower, a tall man dressed in furs.

‘I am Sichar,’ he announced, bowing to Galt.

Ptolem Sichar was the fourth brother of Lord Sichar, but used the name unqualified for effect. Lord Sichar had installed Ptolem as the chief executive officer of Cajetan Imports, the trade consortium and shipping line he had founded to service his immense mineral resources.

Ptolem Sichar had dark green eyes that suggested to Amon an overuse of sabenweed. Though a large man, with duelling scars proudly displayed on his cheek, he was no threat. His body was soft, and out of the habit of regular exercise. His mind was soft too. A few minutes’ conversation with him assured Amon that Ptolem Sichar was a superficial dolt.

His retinue was otherwise. He was flanked by the usual servitors, and a quartet of houseguards in scaled green armour. They were warriors of Hy Brasil’s military wing, a body known as the Dracos, competent and efficient soldiers. Amon was certain that the Dracos detailed to guard the ruler’s brother would be members of the specialist veteran squads.

Another figure accompanied the brother, a figure in a coal-black velvet coat and jet body plate. Ptolem introduced him as Ibn Norn, and he was one of the infamous and almost extinct Lucifer Blacks. Such was Lord Sichar’s power and wealth, he had provided every member of his blood family with a bodyguard from the ancient and elite Ischian brigade of Lucifers.

Trailed by Haedo in his cockerel mask, and his string of blue-metal servitors, Amon walked with Ptolem Sichar up the quay and into the tower. They spoke of ice sports, of the coming war, of the effect on trade. Amon was aware that the Lucifer Black was studying him closely.

As they stepped onto a grav platform to be lifted up into the upper decks of the tower, Amon realised, with absolute certainty, that Ibn Norn knew he was wearing a displacer field. He had no idea what subtle thing had given it away. The Lucifer Blacks were as famous for their perception and their razor-sharp minds as for their fighting prowess. Ibn Norn knew that Elod Galt was, at the very least, disguising something or, at the very worst, concealing a dangerous lie.

It was too late to disengage. Waiting and hoping for a confirmation from control, Amon began his meeting with Ptolem Sichar. They sat at a mahogany table on a radial platform high in the tower’s skylight levels. Sichar was easily distracted, and Amon encouraged this foible to buy time, leading the man off on discursive ruminations of such random topics as orbital viticulture, gerontological breakthroughs, genethliacal provenances and the wisdom of studying extinct religions to extract viable ethical value systems.

All the while, Amon thought of the probes, squirming through the dark recesses and cybernetic cavities of the Planalto like mealworms. He thought of the views that he and Haedo had seen en route to Hy Brasil: hive cities closing their meteoritic shields; conurbations reigniting field bulwarks and auto defences left over from the last Terran conflicts; oceanic platforms rigging for submarine function and slowly submerging into the protective bosom of the waters. The homeworld was bracing itself for the traitors’ onslaught, an event that would be, perhaps, the single greatest holocaust mankind would ever have to endure. There was too much at stake to disengage.

At a break in the meeting, Amon checked the infeed of his communication servitor. Nothing had been received from control. Using the data-slate, he also ascertained that nothing of any consequence had so far been received from the probes. In particular, no progress had been made elucidating the version of Ansprak Tripattern used in the questionable transmissions.

A bell rang, and Amon assumed it was supposed to signal them back to the table for the next round of discussions. The atmosphere had changed, however. Ptolem Sichar and his staff hung back, in quiet and solemn discussion. Certain data displays on the radial platform had been masked.

Be ready, Amon signalled to Haedo.

‘My lord Galt,’ said one of the Dracos, striding over to attend them. ‘I’m afraid there’s been an incident. We must suspend talks for the day while it is dealt with. My master expressly apologises for the delay.’

‘What manner of incident?’ Amon asked.

‘A breach of data confidence,’ the Draco replied indirectly.

‘How so?’

‘An outrage. An act that impugns this canton’s–’ The Draco cut himself short. ‘Forgive me, I’m not at liberty to discuss it. It is a sovereign matter.’

‘It sounds grave indeed,’ said Elod Galt with apparently genuine concern. ‘Should I arrange to return to my orbital?’

‘No, sir.’

They turned. Ibn Norn, the Lucifer Black, had joined them. ‘Security issues are under review across the Planalto. Transit would be an unnecessary complication, and you would be greatly inconvenienced by delays and searches. We have arranged a suite in this tower where you can relax in comfort until the present circumstances are over.’

Where you can watch us, Amon thought. Elod Galt nodded graciously.

The suite lay on the sixtieth level. Once the escort had departed, Haedo swept the rooms for surveillance devices using scanners concealed in the torso of the food-tasting servitor.

‘I would ask you to respect our integrity measures and refrain from using your vox servitor,’ Ibn Norn had remarked cordially before leaving them. The servitor’s function displays showed that vox channels were being jammed anyway.

Haedo opened the back of the rubrication servitor and initialised the compact cogito-analyser hidden behind the ribs. Using invasive programs so acutely coded that no Hy Brasilean systems would even notice them, Haedo linked the unit to the Planalto’s data-sphere.

‘The probes have been discovered in the memory cores of the Planalto Administratum,’ he reported. ‘There is…’ He scanned the data rapidly. ‘There is a palpable sense of outrage. Security across the Planalto has been raised to level amber six. The canton parliament is calling an emergency session to discuss the incident. There is furious debate in the intelligence communities as to whether the data invasion is the work of a foreign power or industrial espionage.’

‘If Sichar is guilty as charged,’ said Amon, ‘he’ll know the probable cause and the probable origin. How long will it take them to analyse and trace the vermicular probes?’

‘They were sterile and trace-free until they were launched,’ said Haedo, ‘but they would collect specific particulates during transit. A decent forensic examiner should be able to trace them back to our craft in a few hours.’

‘We are already suspected,’ Amon said.

‘Already?’

‘That Lucifer Black knows we’re not what we seem to be. I believe they are just looking for evidential confirmation before they confront us.’

‘And we still have no authority,’ said Haedo.

Amon nodded, slowly.

‘But they don’t know that,’ he said.

Haedo didn’t respond. He was studying the cogito-analyser intently.

‘What is it?’ Amon asked.

‘Parliament has initiated a system-wide purge to flush out and destroy the probes,’ Haedo replied. ‘The order was countersigned by Pherom Sichar, presiding over the parliament. But that’s not it… I’m getting feedback from the probes. Seven of them have penetrated the Planalto’s communication archive, and one has sourced Lord Sichar’s archive log for the last seven months.’

‘Translations?’

Haedo shook his head. ‘No, the code is still a wall to us. But the sender and receiver header codes on each message form are not encrypted. They’re stored in binaric. I’m running the entire list against comparative data. Wait… wait…’

Tight lines of script began to flow up the small screen of the compact device.

‘Four confirmed matches,’ Haedo whispered. ‘Four, you see? Each one is quite clearly the operative reception code for the Vengeful Spirit.’

The Lupercal’s flagship. Amon nodded. ‘That’s just cause. That’s all we need. We move.’

Strike teams summoned from the Palace could be in the heart of the Planalto in less than twenty-five minutes, but Amon judged that course to be counterproductive. An open shooting war would just make matters worse. He and Haedo had to secure the person of Sichar immediately, and then let a systematic investigation pick Sichar’s network of conspirators apart.

He took a trigger unit from the pocket of his robes and pressed it.

‘Brace for apport,’ he said. There was a loud, double-bang of over-stressed air pressure as the site-to-site teleport delivered two heavy, metal caskets into the suite directly from the Hawkwing. They appeared, fuming with vapour, in the centre of the carpet. The overpressure cracked two of the suite’s windows. Alarms, set off by the violent apport and its energy signature, started to pulse.

Haedo and Amon threw open the metal caskets. Inside each one, carefully packed, lay their golden Custodes armour and the disengaged segments of their Guardian spears.

Drill teams of the Draco elite, led by Ibn Norn, burst into the holding suite less than four minutes later. The chambers were empty. A fierce wind blew in through a section of reinforced window that had been entirely cut out.

Ibn Norn glanced at the open, empty apport caskets, and the discarded clothes on the floor beside them. He saw the cockerel mask, the decorative sabre, and the wires of a displacer field hastily torn off.

He crossed to the window, and looked down into the streaming wind. The towers and street scheme of the Planalto spread out below him, far away. In the middle distance, on the shore overlooking the wide and gleaming edges of the Winter Fields, he saw Parliament House.

Ibn Norn activated his grav arrestor and leapt through the window.

Parliament House was a splendid structure built from filaments of silvered steel and pylons of a pale stone that looked like buffed ivory. Bells were ringing, urgently advising the delegates, burgraves and grandees to shelter or seek the protection of their bodyguards. Thousands of Dracos were gathering around the building’s various entrances, especially the broad main steps that led in a magnificent sweep up from the state quays of the Winter Fields.

Haedo and Amon landed on the roof of the largest quay house, disturbing ice powder that had been driven in off the fields. They killed their jump packs and surveyed the scene ahead.

‘We’ve roused them like a colony of angry ants,’ Haedo murmured.

Amon touched his arm and nodded.

A black figure flew in out of the winter sky, rebounded with agile grace off the spire of the gatehouse and landed in the midst of the milling Draco troops on the main steps.

‘Scanners!’ they heard Ibn Norn order. ‘They’re right here! Secure this precinct and find them!’

Haedo and Amon leapt down off the quay house roof and walked towards the steps side by side. Dracos bustled around them, checking handheld monitors or breaking heavier scanning equipment out of carry boxes. Voices were chattering urgently. Gun crews were setting up tripod weapons along the shore to watch the ice fields. Packs of gunships purred low overhead.

The two Custodes calmly walked up the steps through the anxious soldiers. They came within three metres of the Lucifer Black. Norn was barking commands, and trying to organise a perimeter.

They entered Parliament House unopposed. The echoey main chamber was emptying. The grandees of Hy Brasil were filing off the banked seating and flowing towards the exits, under the dutiful watch of armed Dracos.

Lord Sichar was still in his seat, a canopied throne of dark wood that presided over the upper and lower houses. He was a noble-looking man in red and green robes, a little younger than Amon had imagined. Sichar’s own Lucifer Black was waiting to hurry his lord to a place of safety, but Sichar was busy signing some last documents brought to him by delegates and scribes, and conferring urgently with the master of parliamentary protocol.

‘Try not to harm his person,’ Amon instructed Haedo. ‘We need him viable for interview.’

‘We’ll probably have to kill his Lucifer,’ Haedo replied.

‘Agreed, but only if he resists. One clean shot. I don’t want a fight in here.’

Thirty metres from the canopied throne, they threw aside their falsehoods.

‘Sichar of Hy Brasil,’ Amon announced. ‘You are sanctioned by the Legio Custodes as an enemy of Terra. Do not attempt to resist us.’

Sichar, the delegates, the scribes and the master of protocol turned and gazed at them in astonishment. One of the scribes broke and ran for the exit in terror. The twin golden giants in their crested armour exuded nothing but ferocious menace.

The Lucifer Black seemed to reach for his weapon.

‘One excuse,’ Haedo snarled, aiming his spear in the direction of the Lucifer.

Sichar rose to his feet, retaining more composure than the underlings around him. He gazed down from his podium at the two gleaming Custodes.

‘This is inexcusable,’ he began. Despite his defiance, he could not keep a tremor of fear out of his voice. No one faced the might of the Custodes without faltering. ‘This is utterly inexcusable. This dishonours the sovereignty of Hy Brasil. I will demand a full apology from your master when–’

‘He’s your master too,’ declared Amon.

Sichar blinked. ‘I… What?’

‘He’s supposed to be your master too,’ Amon repeated. ‘You will accompany us now and answer to a list of issues that brand you a traitor. Step down from the podium.’

A bright flash of light burst across the main chamber, swiftly followed by another and another. For a second, Amon thought grenades had been detonated, but he revised that idea quickly. The light blooms were teleport flares.

There were suddenly seven figures standing between the Custodes and their target. Six of them were Astartes in full battle armour, instantly recognisable as huscarls of the Imperial Fists. As the teleport flares dissipated, the six legionaries took one step forwards in perfect unison and aimed their boltguns at the Custodes with a clatter.

The seventh figure stood in their midst, tall and mantled in a cloak of gold thread and red velvet. His hair was white and cropped short, and his noble face seemed weathered and tired.

‘My lord,’ said Amon, bowing his head to the primarch.

‘This must stop,’ said Rogal Dorn.

Dorn stepped forwards, through the ranks of his Astartes.

‘Put up your weapons,’ he said gently.

The Imperial Fists smartly raised the boltguns to their shoulders.

‘I meant everyone,’ added Dorn, looking at the Custodes.

Amon and Haedo kept their spears aimed at the canopied throne.

‘My lord, Pherom Sichar is a traitor and spy,’ replied Amon carefully. ‘He is using the networks of his extensive mercantile empire to communicate with the Warmaster and his benighted rebels. We have just cause and evidence enough to hold him and interrogate him. He will come with us.’

‘Or?’ asked Dorn with a soft, almost amused smile.

‘He will come with us, my lord,’ Amon insisted.

Dorn nodded.

‘An object lesson in determination and loyalty, eh, Archamus?’ he said.

‘Indeed, my lord,’ replied the commander of the huscarls.

‘They would fight six Astartes and a primarch in order to accomplish their duty,’ Dorn said.

‘My lord,’ Amon said, ‘please stand aside.’

‘I’m half-tempted to let you attempt to go through me,’ said Dorn. ‘I would, of course, hurt you both.’

‘You would try,’ replied Haedo. ‘My lord,’ he added.

‘Enough,’ said Dorn. ‘Archamus?’

The retinue commander stepped forwards.

‘Lord Sichar of Hy Brasil is a spy,’ he announced, quite matter-of-factly. ‘Lord Sichar of Hy Brasil has been in regular communication with Horus Lupercal, and has exchanged with the traitor a great deal of intelligence.’

‘You admit it?’ asked Amon.

‘He’s our spy,’ said Dorn. The primarch came up to Amon face to face. They were the tallest beings in the room.

‘I am fortifying Terra as best I can for the coming war,’ said Dorn. ‘That means more than walls and shields and gun platforms. That means information. Viable, solid data. Proper intelligence. Lord Sichar is as loyal as you or I, but his reputation as an opponent of Imperial policy made him a credible defector to the traitor’s camp. Horus thinks he has friends on Terra, friends and allies, who will rise up and turn to fight with him when his host arrives.’

‘I see,’ said Amon.

‘Sadly,’ said Dorn, ‘this great fuss may have compromised him. I may have to develop other spies now.’

‘My lord,’ said Amon, ‘we are Custodes. We guard Terra and the Emperor as surely as you. Would it not have made sense to tell us of Lord Sichar’s involvement?’

Dorn exhaled and did not reply.

‘Do you know what a blood game is, my lord?’ asked Haedo.

‘Of course,’ replied Dorn. ‘You hounds play wolves and test the Emperor’s defences for the slightest flaw or vulnerability. I have reviewed many of your reports, and accommodated their findings into my reinforcements.’

‘Then perhaps,’ suggested Amon, ‘we could consider this a blood game? The weakness revealed being that all those who seek to serve and protect the Emperor must work with unified purpose and shared information.’

The raker sped away from the landing quay in a blizzard of ice crystals. It was a powerful, two-seater recreational model, painted cobalt-blue, with an upturned nose and hefty ice-blade. Aft of its stabiliser vanes, its ion engines burned with green fury. It lit off across the Winter Fields, making a sound like a knife being dragged across glass.

Cheth, or whatever his real name was, hadn’t even bothered to unslip the mooring lines. He’d gunned down the two wharfmen on the quay who had come to see what the commotion was about, and then leapt into the raker’s cockpit and slammed the sliding canopy.

Amon crashed down onto the quay just as the raker pulled away. The impact of his huge, armoured bulk cracked several flagstones. The mooring lines, dragged tight, were snapping with pistol-shot cracks. Amon managed to seize one of the lines before it parted, and held on as it broke. Dragged by the line, he was whipped off the edge of the quay and hit the ice on his belly, slithering and ripping along like an unseated rider pulled behind his steed. Ice chips blinded him. The vibration and friction was almost too much to bear. As the raker increased its velocity, Amon felt his armour dent and buckle. He was rolling and bouncing, spinning from side to side on the end of the trailing line. His grip was failing.

Amon let go, and slid clear in a long, wide arc across the ice. He dug in his heavy boots to try and arrest his slide, and as he slowed to a halt, he began to rise.

The raker was accelerating away across the fields. Skaters and ice yachts veered in panic to get out of its headlong path. It ploughed through the flag-lines of a speed-skate course.

Behind him, Amon heard another explosion. Another gout of flame and smoke bellied into the sky from Parliament House.

‘Amon! Amon!’ Haedo’s voice yelled over the vox.

‘Go.’

‘Where are you?’

‘In pursuit. The assassin is heading out across the ice lake. Is the primarch safe?’

‘I have confirmation from the Imperial Fists,’ Haedo replied. ‘Primarch Dorn had left Parliament House before the first bomb.’

‘Lord Sichar?’

‘Dead, along with eight members of the legislature. Amon, stand by. I’m securing a ’thopter. I’ll be en route to you in–’

‘No time,’ Amon replied. He rose and triggered his jump pack. The launch impact threw him high into the air. Climbing, he saw the raker turning ahead of him, below. It was swinging west over the Winter Fields, cutting through a yacht formation.

Lord Sichar had been murdered by his own Lucifer Black, his bodyguard, a man called Gen Cheth. Ibn Norn had introduced him to Amon. Whoever had been wearing the black armoured suit when Amon had nodded to him, his name hadn’t been Gen Cheth. Or, a darker possibility, Gen Cheth hadn’t ever been the man his closest comrades thought he was.

It seemed that the Lupercal had spies of his own. Hounds were wolves and wolves were hounds. Primarch Dorn had been obliged to compromise Lord Sichar’s position as a double-agent for Amon’s benefit. The Lucifer Black had been right there. Horus’s man had been right there. Lord Sichar’s secret had been revealed. Lord Sichar was suddenly a vulnerability to be expunged and an enemy to be punished.

The concussion bomb had seen to that. It had vaporised the centre of the Parliament chamber, and brought down the roof. Haedo and Amon had been thrown backwards through wooden partitions into the consular voting room. Amon had been first on his feet.

The assassin had run. Leaving at least one more bomb behind him, he had fled for the fields. Amon wondered why. Assassins were focused beings. Execution or suicide was the usual conclusion of their efforts. Did this man think he could escape?

Surely not. Then what was he trying to accomplish?

Amon swooped down at the racing craft. Arms across his face, he struck it like a lightning bolt, shearing the canopy clean away. Glass splinters and pieces of window strut billowed away in the rushing wind. Amon tried to hold on. The black-armoured figure struggled to maintain control of the raker one-handed while he fumbled for his weapon. The craft bucked. Amon slid, and ended up clinging to the raker’s upturned nose.

He dug his fingers into the metal skin of the fuselage, making his own handholds, and dragged himself forwards. The assassin had found his weapon. He fired at Amon over the dashboard hump, and a bolt round shrieked past the Custodes’s ear. The raker began to approach maximum velocity. Amon clawed on and reached the torn-open cockpit. The assassin fired again, blasting up at the Custodes looming over him. The bolt punched through Amon’s left shoulder and blood sprayed into the slipstream.

Amon punched down with his right fist. The blow crushed the black metal helmet and pulped the head inside it.

The raker veered wildly as the assassin’s corpse lolled sideways from the controls. Clinging on, Amon tried to reach in to cut the engines.

He saw what was in the pillion seat behind the driver.

Another bomb, the largest and most destructive of all. Now Amon understood. The assassin had been planning suicide all along. He had been planning to finish his work by riding the raker out into the middle of the Winter Fields and detonating the device. The bomb would take out Hy Brasil’s vast reactors, buried under the fields. The reactors would annihilate the Planalto. Terra would understand, with a sick jolt, the wrath and influence of Horus Lupercal.

Almost shaken off by the savage vibration of the uncontrolled raker, Amon could see a light-beat countdown. There was no way of telling how much longer was left on the timer.

In sheer desperation, Amon tore out his trigger unit. There was no time for complex readjustment or re-calibration, no time to punch in an alternate set of coordinates. Amon simply managed to reset the altitude, adding two kilometres. Then he hit the actuator stud and hurled the unit into the cockpit.

He leapt clear. The site-to-site teleport vanished most of the speeding raker before Amon had even hit the ice. He landed with a bone-jarring crunch, and tumbled for thirty or forty metres in a flurry of ice. A stabiliser vane and part of the raker’s tail assembly, severed by the teleport beam’s tight focus, clattered and cartwheeled past him, shedding debris, the cut edges glowing and molten.

On his back, half-conscious, Amon slid in circles and slowly, slowly, came to a halt. He looked up into the mauve Sud Merican sky.

Two kilometres above him, there was a bright flash, followed by a blinding, surging, expanding blossom of white light. Then the noise and the shockwave hit him and stamped him down into the ice.

By the walls of the Palace, in the Himalazian dusk, the loyal hound rose from the ice and shook itself. It was hurt, but most of the blood on its snout and flanks belonged to the wolf it had just driven, braying, into the dark with its throat torn open.

It plodded back towards the gates, limping, and leaving spots of blood on the snow behind it. Its breath steamed in the cold evening air.

Behind it, out in the blackness, more wolves were gathering and coming ever closer.

MISBEGOTTEN

‘Every man casts a shadow, not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit.’

– Emerson, M2

Years later, long after the Triumph of Ullanor, and the great bloodshed of the Heresy, and the darkness of the Fall that ended it, men forgot the hope they had once shared.

It had been a fine thing, a spirit that had invested and fortified every soul, human and post-human alike, as they stepped out from Terra upon the undertaking of reunion. They were torch-bearers, every one of them, carrying hope like a pure flame to illuminate the worlds and stars that had become lost from view in the long shadows of Old Night.

History knows this time as the Great Crusade, but the name was not favoured by the men who led it. The Emperor, who is now a watchful god, spoke to his sons on many occasions, affirming his desire that a better name be found. The word ‘crusade’ implied vengeance and cleansing, a scouring of worlds and a ruthless doom to all enemies. ‘There may be no enemies at all,’ Horus Lupercal had said. ‘Distance and strife have walled the galaxy from us, and the old high routes and shiftways have fallen to disuse and are choked with unstirred dust. We have not passed that way in centuries. We have not been able. True, we bear our arms and strap our harness-plate upon us, ready to deal soundly with enemies arising. But we should not expect them, nor treat all we meet with that potential.’

Wars happened, and deeds of violent compliance driven by necessity. Those are the actions history remembers from that age. But for every world or culture that resisted, or denied the offer of friendship, for every xenos race that baulked and drew arms at the approach of mankind, a hundred worlds rejoiced and hymned their relief to see the expeditionary fleets take high anchor in their skies. The Great Crusade, so called by those who came later, was for the most part bloodless. Though the expeditionary fleets raced out from Terra like the fragments of a nail bomb, they voyaged not to destroy but to locate the lost and scattered branches of the human species, to rebuild and re-light a galactic culture that Strife and Old Night had, together, put asunder.

Men forget that now. They forget the hope that had carried them forward. The wound of the Heresy War acts as monstrous punctuation in the texts of history, making it impossible to recall or even believe the spirit of optimism that had prevailed in the years prior.

Two days before his death, Horus Lupercal is said to have cried out that all hope was gone.

He was not foreseeing the murder that would end the civil war. Those close to him, though there were only a few left by then, believed he was lamenting the age before Ullanor, before Davin, before Isstvan and Calth. The time of uplifted spirit, and a resolve that seemed unbreakable. A glorious and inspiring template for the future that came from dreams of noble majesty, not visions of heresy.

A future that had seemed possible, until it was suddenly not. A future worth dying for, and, certainly, worth living for.

Ullanor had been marked. The greenskin xenos, ‘orks’ in expedition parlance, had risen to be one of the foremost real enemies of the Reunion Project. There was no dealing with them. Their bestial nature brooked no compliance and no negotiation. Plans had been drawn, threats assessed, and Ullanor had been identified as the site where the xenos menace would be met and put down.

The expedition fleets were rearming for deployment. Time was precious. Fleet strategists proposed a window of eight months relative before Ullanor ceased to be a viable fight zone and the xenos campaign would be obliged to shift strategies to a new target world.

Lupercal’s fleet, the 63rd, lingered in the heliopause of the Issinium System, awaiting the return of compliance missions to Kest’s Sun and Velich Tarn. Though eager to make shift, Horus Lupercal would not leave fleet elements behind.

The 63rd had remained on station at the Issinium fringe for twenty months, and in that time had recorded six compliances, all peaceful. First Captain Abaddon had led missions to Kiskayde and Phocis, and obtained glad fealty from the cultures on both worlds. The Ordinators of Kiskayde, indeed, had furnished the expedition with auxiliaries to demonstrate their willingness to support the Imperial cause. Kiskaydin jump-troops in engraved chrome armour lodged in the troop decks of the flagship, drilling in preparation for the xenos compliance, and learning, wide-eyed, the histories of Terra that they had missed out on. Kiskayde was a human colony culture established during the Age of Technology’s stellar exodus; though their accents and habits were strange, they had not forgotten their rites of birth and blood.

Captains Targost and Sedirae had brokered peace with the Fiefworlds at Orlustre. Captain Goshen had negotiated settlement with the wary and mistrustful Motherkind of New Hearth, gently easing their concerns with gifts of high science and assurances of staged integration. Horus Lupercal had commended Lev Goshen for his adroit and sensitive diplomacy.

Lupercal himself had led an embassy to Issinium, and won the free compliance of High Concerns who governed the system. He had feasted with them for nine days, and shown no loss of enthusiasm as the performance of their oral history, which lasted for the entire feast, rolled on and ever on, sing-song.

Signals had come from Kest’s Sun. Captains Loken and Qruze reported that the culture there was long dead. The signals that had drawn the fleet’s attention had been found to be the automatic broadcasts of old telecommunication systems. Some viral plague, long defunct, had taken the ancient colonies during Old Night, and their beacons had been calling for help, pointlessly, for seven centuries. Loken and Qruze had spent a month searching the empty tomb cities for signs of life, or of stasis-held survivors. Now they were en route back to the fleet.

Seven cultures: six new friends and allies returning to the fold, and one lost. A fine result to show for twenty months’ work, with no loss of life, though the Mournival quietly complained for lack of martial practice.

‘Tell them it will come,’ Horus told Maloghurst, his equerry. ‘Ullanor awaits, and Ullanor will give them the test they seem to long for. But tell them too… they should not wish for it. That we can bring our kin together, and no blood spilled, is the way my father would prefer. We are sensible beings, so we have prepared ourselves for war better than any species in the sea of stars. But though we are well made for battle, we always must desire it least of all possible outcomes.’

Velich Tarn was, then, that least of all desired outcomes. Assessed first as an outpost, or a small, starveling survivor stronghold, it had proven non-compliant. Captain Sejanus, favoured of all Lupercal’s commanders, had led the embassy there and met ferocious resistance from the outset. His reports back to the waiting fleet had been brief and matter-of-fact. The environment was poor, and the human enclave there well fortified and armed with what he categorised as ‘bio-mechanoid’ weapons. They had first ignored and then rejected Sejanus’ requests for contact. All hope of compliance had foundered when the Velich Tarn enclave commenced open hostilities. Their population was small – scans revealed only four hundred people – but their mindset was smaller. Velich Tarn would not submit to Imperial authority or even Imperial contact. ‘They are extreme xenophobes,’ Sejanus had written in a communique, clearly with a heavy heart, ‘and refuse to deal with us. Despite their small numbers, they are formidably weaponised. They are determined to resist, and if left alone, I fear they will grow into a significant threat to stability in this zone. With regret, my lord, I request your permission to illuminate them.’

Horus read this missive quietly. Maloghurst and the others present could see from his humour that he was disappointed, and that he empathised deeply with his friend Hastur Sejanus’ reluctance. Too many pockets of human survival had reacted to expedition forces with hate and fear during the course of the Great Reunion, most often the smallest and most isolated. Illumination was a last resort.

Horus granted the request, and sent tidings of consolation and forbearance to Sejanus.

A week later, Sejanus requested that the rest of his Fourth Company strength join him.

His reports were now referring to the opposition as ‘the biomechs’ or the ‘biomech obscenities’, and rating resistance as ‘severe’. He had identified their leader as a man named Fo, and suggested ‘…there is no dealing here, nor option for truce. Illumination must proceed to its most miserable extent, and this blight be erased.’

‘I’m going to Sejanus,’ Horus told Maloghurst.

‘My lord,’ Maloghurst chided softly. ‘Hastur has it in hand, and is reinforced. Qruze and Loken are due back from Kest’s sun in two days. We are ready to make shift to Ullanor.’

‘My brave wolf Hastur struggles with this,’ said Horus. ‘It is a bloody business, the worst dealings we must contend with in this project. Worse than xenos-breed, for this is our own kind turned feral. I will support him. Oh, don’t look at me like that, equerry. This is the last business we must undertake in this zone, and the only one that has proved bloody. I’ll see it done away cleanly at Hastur’s side. I’ll not leave a mess here in this quadrant, nor leave one of my sons to bear the bitter burden alone.’

‘If this is your wish, lord,’ Maloghurst replied, for he knew when even his artfully twisted persuasion would not work.

‘It is,’ said Lupercal. ‘Besides, I have been reading.’

‘Reading, my lord?’

‘Idly. From the old annals. I think I know who this Fo is.’

Even from orbit-descent, Velich Tarn did not look like a place any man would wish to stay for more than a day, let alone the millennia Fo’s people were believed to have sheltered there.

Bone spires of rock rose like lines of fangs from miasmal lowlands and plutonic lakes that were toxic beyond any reason of local enviro-chemistry. Striated clouds raced across the skies, low and dense, thick with pollutants, driven by crosswinds of blast-zone force.

Illumination had gripped a corner of the landscape, the region of the main enclave. Uplands had been fractured by orbital weapons, and kilometres of rubble still glowed as the heat leaked out of it. The broken curtain hills lay under a vast pall of grey smoke that rose like the breath of a supervolcano hours from obliterating itself.

In the scorching twilight beneath the plume, the valley was alight with thousands of snapping, winking, flashing darts of weaponsfire as the entire Fourth Company of the Luna Wolves, along with mechanised support, maintained the grind to break Fo’s enclave open.

Hastur Sejanus, his plate scored and dented, hurried up the dirt track to the landing zone. A Stormbird, its white hull grimed with atmospheric soot, was just settling on the wide mesh pads beyond the lines of empty troop carriers and landing barges. Daggers of blue flame stabbed from its vector jets as it touched down. Sejanus felt the thump of its mass transmitted through the temporary mesh decking.

Sejanus was alone. There hadn’t been time to pull men out of the fighting line to form an honour guard. Lupercal, with characteristically puckish glee, had chosen not to give the Fourth Company captain advance notice of his arrival.

Sejanus strode out across the pad, steam roiling around his feet, the landing masts winking in the yellow light. The Stormbird’s landing jaws were opening. Horus was already on the ramp.

‘My lord,’ Sejanus began.

Horus, in full war-plate, stepped out and embraced his captain.

‘Don’t, Hastur,’ he said.

‘My lord?’

‘I know you, old friend. First, an apology for the lack of due ceremony. Then, some demand for censure for taking so very long to crush this nest of vermin.’

‘I admit, I had both prepared.’

‘Forget them,’ said Horus. ‘Let’s talk inside.’

They crossed to the nearest modular. Inside, air-scrubbers purged the atmosphere lock, and recycle pumps hosed them in decontam spray. They entered the main command module, uncoupling their war-helms.

‘Let me have the room,’ Sejanus commanded.

The officers present saluted and withdrew. They were alone in the low-ceilinged strategy station, unmanned cogitators streaming battlefield data onto their raised glass plates.

‘You came to…?’ Sejanus asked, letting the question trail.

‘Offer support,’ said Horus. He set down his helm, glanced around, and then smiled at the captain. ‘Your reports are candid, but brief, Hastur. I can tell, more by what you don’t say than what you do, that this place plagues you.’

Sejanus shrugged. His face was drawn. Horus had never seen Sejanus so freighted with stress.

‘I have tried to be succinct,’ he replied. ‘This place is a bane. This enemy… inhuman. In the light of the glorious compliances lately achieved, I felt I should spare the bald horror of it. When this is done, it is a thing better forgotten.’

‘The truth is what the truth is, Hastur. I’m not a sensitive soul that needs to be coddled. And even in our worst moments, we may learn things that we may benefit from in later evaluation. You’ve maintained a full battle record?’

‘Of course. We could have reviewed it together at some later date. Lord, this war is all but won. My spearhead squads are just hours away from taking the enclave heart.’

‘How many have you lost, Hastur?’

Sejanus paused.

‘Sixteen men dead,’ he said. ‘Another thirty wounded to such extent that augmetic repair will be required. Usually limb loss. I am ashamed of these loss statistics.’

‘Because you are a full company of the Imperium’s finest Legion, and you face just four hundred souls?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Fo’s people must be something indeed. That’s an unprecedented proportional hit-rate.’

‘It is,’ said Sejanus, ‘which is why I have kept it to myself for now. But Fo’s people… are not people. Four hundred life signs is misleading. I believe there are less than thirty actual humans present on this world. Perhaps none at all. Our systems interpreted multiple and blended life readings and came up with a figure of four hundred. But each one could mean… a dozen… a thousand…’

‘A dozen or a thousand what?’

Sejanus crossed to one of the primary cogitators, entered his code and pulled up pict-capture from the combat archives. Sliding with his fingertip, he began to lay the images out across the glass screen, as a man might spread paper pictures on a table.

‘Wait, wait, what am I looking at?’ asked Horus. ‘What is this?’

He touched the screen. A yellow rune highlighted one image and enlarged it, bringing it to the fore. A blur, motion-stabilised. Steel teeth, like human incisors, arranged in a grinding circle like the head of a mining rock-drill. A snout of cream bone armour. Massive jaw-muscles exteriorised, reinforced with hydraulic baffles, sheathed in the folds of a throat that bellied like a serpent.

‘Bio-mech,’ replied Sejanus. ‘Bio-mechanical constructs. Engineered to kill. Some as small as a man’s hand, others larger than a drop-ship.’

‘Engineered?’

‘Gene-edited. Spliced, reworked from human stock.’

Horus pulled more images to the front and stared at them. Each one showed a new horror, as if he were flicking through a pict-book of a madman’s nightmares.

‘Everything you see is human,’ said Sejanus.

‘There’s barely anything I recognise as remotely human,’ said Horus quietly.

‘Quite. But bio-scans are precise. Everything coming at us is genetically human. Woven from this colony’s original human stock. Some combine the genes of more than one source individual. Multiple others are worked from a single origin gene-donor. All are reinforced and weaponised with cybernetics.’

‘Hence the misleading life scans?’

Sejanus nodded. ‘We’re facing thousands of individual bio-mech hostiles. Potentially, over a hundred thousand. Every single one of them is capable of killing a fully armed legionary. But they are all derived from the same four hundred human originals.’

He looked at Horus. ‘My wolves have given them names, lord. I have tried to discourage it. Cyberzerkers. Biomecannibals. Misbegots. They are feral horrors. The least of them make the greenskins seem mild. The worst is… there is no sane reason for any of them.’

‘Sane reason?’

‘I mean, lord… in the sense of design. They’re just like nightmares. Nightmares of flesh, made flesh. Some are so clumsy and grotesque they seem to serve no other purpose than to disgust.’

Sejanus summoned up more images. A pallid thing like a starfish, the limbs human arms, a beaked mouth at the centre. A thorned snake as thick as a tree trunk, formed from translucent intestine. Something made entirely of weeping eyes. Here, four thick, human legs bearing a sack that opened in a gaping orifice that was a mouth within a mouth within a mouth. Glistening things covered in blisters and horns. Pulsing things festooned with barbs. Things made of interlocked hands that cupped drooling mouths and glaring pupils. Things sheathed in fingernail horn, their exposed flanks stippled with coarse black hairs and open sores.

‘These are the constructs Fo has made,’ said Sejanus.

Horus glanced at him. ‘In the Dark Age,’ he said, ‘before Old Night fell, there was a man called Fo. Basilio Fo. A bio-engineer. A self-proclaimed Worker of Obscenity. The data is very incomplete…’

‘It would be,’ remarked Sejanus. ‘The Age of Technology ended five millennia past.’

Horus nodded. ‘The creature called Fo mentioned in the annals was a monster even by the standards of that godless age. Hunted for his blasphemous work, he fled Terra during the stellar exodus. He was presumed lost, long dead.’

He looked at Sejanus. ‘But given his gifts and skill-set, it may be he has survived. Endured is perhaps a better word. Sejanus, we may have found the hidden bastion of one of history’s foulest creatures.’

The vox-system chimed. Sejanus turned and took the signal, listening carefully.

He looked back at Lupercal.

‘Illumination complete,’ he said. ‘We have compliance. Daerec Terminator squad reports penetration of the enclave’s main bunker and the capture of Fo. They’re bringing him here. No other humans found. Not whole ones.’

Horus nodded, and clapped Sejanus on the arm.

‘Your bleak efforts are rewarded, Hastur.’

Sejanus allowed himself a thin smile.

‘I think it was you that turned the tide, lord. Word of your unexpected arrival quickly spread. The Fourth was inspired by your presence. They redoubled their efforts so as not to disappoint you.’

‘A coincidence, I’m sure,’ replied Horus. ‘Since when did the Fourth ever slacken?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Sejanus. ‘But you have an effect. The enemy must have learned of your arrival too, through vox intercept. Their heart was lost to learn a primarch was upon them. Just as our efforts renewed, Daerec reports the biomech misbegots lost a degree of frenzy. Their resistance broke, as if they were, at last, afraid of us.’

‘They faltered just as I arrived?’ asked Horus.

‘As fast as word spread,’ said Sejanus.

Horus paused. He picked up his war helm.

‘Hastur?’

‘My lord?’

‘Get your weapon,’ he growled. ‘They were waiting for me.’

Sejanus began to reply, but his words were lost. The entire west side of the command module ripped out, and hell poured in at them.

The misbegot was the size of three landing ships. It had bored up through rock and soil beneath the Luna Wolves’ forward base, breaching the crust of the world as easily as an ocean creature might rise up from the unlit depths and break the surface. Endless rows of grinding teeth had gnawed the ground away. Great loops and ridges of muscle had pulsed to heave the giant thing along its burrow.

It had no form, yet it had all forms. It was a vast bulk, a slab of flesh reinforced with a rib cage that would have made the frame of a generous dwelling hall. Yet it was also a writhing forest of limbs, of clawing hands, of amputee stumps that wedged and stabilised its weight. It was eyes, wide and weeping, clustered like egg sacks. It was mouths, some opening in its centre mass, some lunging forward on whip-spined necks, every gullet specialised and distinct. One to snap, one to bite, one to grind, one to sever, one to grasp and hold as others fed.

It had no symmetry whatsoever. It was a sample of organic nightmares and anatomical shocks fused in one flesh, resembling no creature, terrestrial or xenos.

Yet its one defining horror was that it, and every disparate part of it, was unmistakably human.

And it was fast. Despite its size, it groped and slithered like a charging grox. It demolished the module chamber, shredding reinforced fabric in a blizzard of splinters, rending cogitator stations into scatters of sparks and debris, ripping up deck plates and undermatting like paper.

Staggered backwards by the shockwave of its burst assault, Lupercal and Sejanus braced side by side, unslung their weapons and unleashed streams of bolter fire into this onrushing misbegot. Wounds stippled the face of it, exploding fibres of flesh and muscle, erupting clouds of blood drizzle. Each gaping injury would have been the kill-wound for any beast of comparable scale.

It did not flinch.

Even with the most curious xenos-form, there was always some defining sense of biology. A common-sense estimation of vital parts, of head or heart, or principal organs. The misbegot’s lack of symmetry made such determinations impossible.

‘With me,’ said Horus.

They fell back through a junction hall into the adjoining module, reloading as they ran. Alarms were already screeching, triggered by seismic tremblers, perimeter auspex and integrity monitors. The klaxons were drowned out by the grinding roar of the horror as it pulverised the modular compartments to get at them.

Ahead, Horus saw men rallying to meet the attack: the startled fleet officers who manned the forward base, army auxiliaries, tactical staff, and a few Luna Wolves charged with station defence.

‘Legiones Astartes, at my side!’ Horus yelled. ‘The rest, fall back!’

Only the armoured would stand a chance. The rest would die in seconds. Some were already spluttering as the corrosive air of Valich Tarn flooded the compromised habitat.

Yet they hesitated, for it was Lupercal, death opening its door at his heels, and they had pledged their lives and come to the stars to stand at his side.

‘I command it! Save yourselves now!’ Horus cried.

They obeyed, reluctant. The Luna Wolves, six of them, made a line with Horus and the Fourth’s captain. The misbegot bore down, half submerged in the ground, sliding through flooring and rock alike, humped spine visible, flinging deck plates aside in its wake. The walls perished. The gale entered. Eight bolters began to fire, spattering meat and swirling the air with blood-smoke.

It reached them, unstopped, unslowed. Some buried, forward part of it tore up through the decking and dragged a Luna Wolf down, churning tooth-drills shredding his legs and lower torso.

‘My lord!’ Sejanus howled.

The misbegot reared up, its titanic form supported by straining appendages and its gnarled trans-skeletal frame.

Horus stood his ground. His warblade gleamed in his armoured fist.

‘Go back to hell,’ he whispered.

‘You slew it?’ asked Fo.

Horus sat down facing him in the stark cell-block chamber. He was drenched in blood, and the chest and fore-guards of his plate were gouged and stripped back to bare metal. He made no answer at first. Blood dripped off him onto the deck. A trail of little blood pools led back to the hatch.

‘It was reluctant to die,’ said Horus. ‘I dismantled your work until I found the one part it could not persist without.’

Fo nodded. He was small and bird-like, his forehead broad, his eyes bright. He perched rather than sat, hunched in his simple black robes.

‘You were waiting for me,’ said Horus.

Fo shrugged.

‘I knew you would come one day, and when you did, I would not win. I resolved to make my stand count for something. If not defeat the enemy, then eliminate the greatest of its party. Its leader.’

‘You knew I would come?’ asked Horus.

Fo nodded.

‘Mm-hmm. You or something like you. One day. Eventually. It’s been a long time, but it was inevitable. Terra endures.’

‘You left there a long time ago.’

‘My art was not appreciated.’

‘I have seen it first-hand. That does not surprise me. Abominations, Fo.’

‘Abominations?’ Fo smiled, and showed small and perfect teeth. ‘I see tastes have not changed.’

He sat back.

‘I have been monitoring your activity since you arrived in this zone twenty months ago,’ he said. ‘Through my listening stations and watch-networks, I have observed your dealings with local cultures. Your message. Your offer of embrace. I knew you would knock on my door before long.’

‘And you were prepared,’ said Horus. ‘Afraid, for you thought we would judge you as poorly as the people of Terra once did.’

Fo frowned.

‘No, you are mistaken,’ he replied. ‘You think I left Terra because I was driven out? Shunned? Demonised? No, no. All artists and innovators are misunderstood.’

‘Then why?’

‘Because I saw the start of his rise,’ said Fo. ‘Even then, early days, but I could see what he would become. Your father, I mean. I knew what future awaited a man who dreamed the dreams he did. Though it took decades or centuries or longer, I knew he would not be denied. I wanted no part of that. I wanted to be as far away as possible.’

‘Why?’ asked Horus.

‘His dream is unthinkable, yet he has the power to make it real. I see he has begun to now. You… you have reached the stars.’

‘Yes, bearing his message. His hope to–’

‘Hope?’ Fo shook his head sadly. ‘Yes. Naturally, he would tell his children that. He always made things sound so optimistic. A glorious and endless future. But, of course, you wouldn’t understand.’

‘I don’t,’ said Horus, rising. ‘You are a maker of abominations. A creator of the most obscene things I have ever beheld. I presume a mind as transgressive as yours would see only horror in the splendour of his ambition. And fear the justice he would mete upon you for your crimes against the human form.’

‘Oh god, no!’ cried Fo in surprise. He hesitated. ‘Do they still speak of god on Terra? Do they still believe? I suppose not. They wouldn’t have to now. Anyway, you’re wrong. I don’t fear his justice. You say I have made abominations? Look what he has made.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Horus.

‘I mean you. You and beings like you. You think I’ve made monsters? In my wildest deliriums I could not have designed monsters like you. I practise simple and ingenious arts of genetics and anatomy. I tinker and edit, to make puzzles and delights and curious wonders, things to make us think, and ponder the nature of our being and our place in the scheme of life.’

He looked up at Horus.

‘I do not make things that will burn the galaxy down. I do not make things that will doom our species and lead it into an endless frenzy of war. You are the most abominable thing I have ever seen. Grotesque. Sickening. Misbegotten. I could not hope to kill you all, but to abort just one before it reached potential… well, that would have been some solace.’

Fo got up, and brushed down his clothes.

‘I’d like to die now,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to live in a cosmos where things like you are loose.’

‘What will you do?’ asked Hastur Sejanus.

‘We’ll purge this place. Let nothing of Fo’s work remain. And quickly, Hastur. The fleet awaits.’

‘Will you execute him as he asks?’

Horus shook his head.

‘For his crimes against the species, I should, I suppose,’ he replied. ‘But I will place him on a ship and bring him to meet our father. Fo is mad, but I dearly wish he could glimpse the honest and whole truth once before his life ends.’

‘You want his compliance?’

‘His ideas are so wrong, Hastur. This is an enlightened age and we are the messengers of hope. A hope that our kind has lacked through all the ages past until this era. I want this man to know his error, and appreciate the truth. It’s the least I can do for him.’

‘You are too merciful,’ said Sejanus.

‘If that is my only flaw, I am glad of it,’ said Horus. ‘His notions unsettled me. How could any man misunderstand the glory of our enterprise so completely? How could any man fear the likes of me?’

Years later, long after the Triumph of Ullanor, and the great bloodshed of the Heresy, and the darkness of the Fall that ended it, men forgot the hope they had once shared.

On ancient Terra, in those final days of the Fall, Basilio Fo heard the thunder approaching through the stout walls of his oubliette cell in the depths of the Imperial Palace.

And, despite the madness that had by then consumed him, he knew he had been right, all along, not to submit to hope.

PERPETUAL

They had been living, against their will, in the city on the lip of the cliff for nearly two years.

Two years that seemed like two centuries to Oll Persson – which was odd, because Oll Persson was used to the grand passage of time. He was one of the rare ones. One of the mythical beings. A vestigial side-branch of the human race that had been born with unique gifts.

One of those gifts was functional immortality.

Oll was old. He had lived multiple lifetimes, so many that he had forgotten most of them. He had no idea of his actual age any more. A man tended to lose precise count somewhere after his one hundred and fiftieth birthday. Oll’s best guess was that he was around forty-five thousand years old. Give or take.

Two years was an interlude to one of the Perpetuals. A sunny afternoon. A long lunchtime.

But not these two years. They had dragged out like a hard term, a relentless prison sentence.

Frustration did that. Frustration and anxiety.

They were lost. They were stuck. Their long, haphazard trek across the wrinkled folds of un-space had brought them to the city, and there the path had run out.

‘When are we, again?’ asked Zybes. All the members of their little band had become used to framing this odd question. Not where they were, but when.

‘I think,’ Oll replied, ‘the tail end of M23.’

He glanced at Zybes, and knew this answer would need expansion.

‘Circa twenty-three thousand AD, by the old calendar. The last few centuries of the Dark Age of Technology.’

‘Which is…?’ asked Zybes, pausing in the middle of his meal, a heel of bread hoisted to his mouth but forgotten.

‘During the long rebellion of the Iron Men,’ said Katt. ‘The cataclysm that led to the… uh… Malthusian Catastrophe.’

‘You remembered,’ said Oll.

‘I listen,’ she replied, glancing at Zybes. ‘Not like him. I remember your words, even if I don’t really understand what they mean.’

At the start of their journey, which had been less of an embarkation and more of a frantic flight from the atrocity at Calth, Oll’s policy had been to tell them very little. The members of his band – Zybes, Katt, Krank, Rane and the agricultural servitor Graft – were just survivors. They had not been chosen or called like him. Oll had brought them with him out of pity, because he had a way out of the slaughter, and it seemed cruel to prevent them from sharing it.

Moreover, they were humans. Mortals, with the exception of the cyborg Graft. Oll had kept truths from them, because he’d been afraid of polluting their brief, limited lives with deep-scale information about the universe. That kind of knowledge might wound them on an existential level and drive them to insanity. How could any of them ever return to normal, mortal lives if he shared the immortal things that he knew with them?

However, their escape from Calth had turned into a trek, and the trek had turned into six years.

Six years of slicing reality open with a knife and slipping from one now to another. Six years of their questions. How do you open space with a knife? Where are we going? Who are you? Where are we now?

When are we now?

In the long run, it had become simpler just to answer them and explain things. They didn’t understand most of it, but they nodded sagely at his stories and explanations, grateful at least to be offered some answers.

The girl Katt, brighter than most, remembered. She stored things up in that unusual brain of hers, and could recite back many of the truths that Oll had told them.

Oll sometimes wondered why he had decided to answer their questions. To shut them up, was the simple explanation. But after a while, it had occurred to him that the more they knew, the better they could help him.

One day, in an atomic bunker a kilometre beneath the pole of a dead colony world, he had told them the big picture.

‘Life hangs in the balance,’ he had said.

Krank frowned. ‘Whose life?’

‘Mostly, everyone’s. What happened on Calth, and what happened to us there – it was part of the End War. A war that could rip our species apart.’

‘Whose side are we on?’ asked Bale Rane, the young soldier.

‘The Emperor’s, of course!’ Graft had whirred.

‘Well, yes, of course,’ Oll replied. As it happened, Oll Persson had little time or liking for the thing that men called the Emperor. But that was beside the point, a personal matter. If you didn’t stand with the Emperor, you stood with the others. The usurpers.

And the usurpers were not creatures that any sane man would want to throw his lot in with.

So, yes. They stood with the Emperor.

‘I’m old,’ Oll had said to them.

‘We know!’ laughed Rane.

‘I mean… I’m older than you can imagine. I wanted no part of this war. I just wanted a quiet life. But I got recruited. Roped in.’

‘By who?’ Katt asked.

‘A friend of mine. He needs me to go to Terra, so that’s where we’re going.’

‘Terra!’ gasped the seasoned army veteran Dogent Krank, amazed. ‘In all my days, I never dreamed I’d end up there, on the Throneworld.’

‘Right. And what do we do when we reach Terra?’ Zybes asked.

Oll had thought about that. Even though he was being more free with his answers, there were still some that he didn’t want to give.

‘Whatever we can,’ he muttered. ‘Okay?’

The trek had been long, and arduous, and perilous, but at the city on the lip of the cliff, it had ground to a standstill. The ancient compass that Oll carried, the one that could read the winds of the empyrean, had stopped working. There was no way to know where to cut next, or what bearing to aim for. They were becalmed, marooned with no way forward.

Sometimes the winds could die down, so at first Oll had presumed it was going to be a minor delay. But days became months, and months became two years. They had set up a home in the city, and spent their days wandering the back lanes and alleys hunting for a spot where the compass might start to twitch again.

The city was a deep, meandering place of dark stone. The locals called it Andrioch. It was a human colony from the days of the first stellar exodus, and Oll fancied that it had once been magnificent. But there had been some sort of misadventure, probably due to the technology wars that marred this bleak era of humanity. The dark stone of the city was dark because it was stained, perhaps with soot or by radiation burns. The cliff that the city overhung plunged away into the centre of the world. If you peered down, you could see, through the clouds of vapour, the glow of the magmatic furnace that was the planet’s core, far below.

He thought Andrioch had likely been twice this size, once. Half of it looked to have been torn away by whatever created the cliff. There were weapons in the older days that could do it: weapons of immeasurable power, tech devices employed by both the Iron Men and the alliances that stood against their cybernetic revolt.

Oll remembered the horror of entropic engines that ignited planets. Sun-snuffers that uncoiled like serpents the size of Saturn’s rings. Mechnivores ingesting data along with the cities that contained them and hurling continents into the heavens. Omniphage swarms stripping flesh from a billion bones in the blink of an eye. Those were the good old days, when war was something too colossal for a human mind to comprehend.

Not like the End War. The Warmaster’s heresy was a smaller thing, scaled for human and post-human brains.

But it was bigger in some ways. Yes, bigger than the god-like struggle of the cybernetic revolt. Bigger in scope, bigger in its implications. More horrible, because humanity could apprehend it and drive it.

Although he did not say so, Oll Persson believed that a mechnivore had bitten Andrioch in two. A rogue unit, perhaps – though by that latter stage of the revolt, almost all machines were rogue, their abominable intelligence querulously hunting for friends but perceiving everything as enemies.

The citizens of Andrioch were pale ghosts, like things that had lived in a cave, lacking colour or health or effective eyesight. Their skin was translucent. They did not interact with Oll and his band, but spent their days and nights in the rotting pits of their dwellings, wired into constant data-feeds sutured into their eyes and scalps, feeding off some illusion of normal life while they waited for the Mechaniclysm to end.

For them, it never would. Their bodies would wither and die, and they would come to exist only as a virtual spectre, the memory of a city stored in a digital gestalt.

Oll was determined not to join them. But the trek was dangerous, and he realised that there was another reason he had started answering the questions his band asked him.

None of them were ever going to go back to normal lives. He’d been fooling himself. He could tell them anything he liked, because they were never going to rejoin the ordinary again. They would probably die on the path, sooner or later, and if they made it to Terra as Dogent Krank so fervently wished, they would die there anyway.

Oll had been weak. On balance, it would have been a greater kindness to leave them on Calth to perish.

That was typical of him. Ollanius Persson had always been too merciful for his own good. A bad trait in a soldier, especially a soldier charged with such a vital mission.

He sighed, staring into their campfire. ‘Two years. We can’t linger here any longer.’

He didn’t dare tell the others how worried he was, because then they’d realise there were some questions to which even Oll the Pious didn’t know the answer.

There was no way forward. No route around. The only way out of Andrioch was to go back, to retrace their steps, and John Grammaticus had warned Oll never, ever to do that.

Oll wandered the alleys where the city leaned over the cliff. He thought he could see the actual bite marks.

He was pretty sure that the cliff itself was the problem. Andrioch was the next step in the trek, but they had arrived there too late. The mechnivore, or whatever other rogue behemoth had preyed on the place, had consumed more than just the physical city and the planetary crust beneath.

It had eaten data.

Not simply the digital data stored in Andrioch’s analytic engines, but the raw data of space-time itself. It had bitten away the vital set of empyreal coordinates that Oll needed, the cosmic vectors of the immaterium that his silver compass and little jet pendulum responded to. The hole they had spent two years living beside was more than a material hole. It was a wound in the ether, the anti-reality that coexisted with the physical universe.

Andrioch perched on the edge of a bite mark in the warp.

The question was: was this situation pure misfortune, or something deliberate?

He believed the latter. There was no doubt in his mind that agents of the enemy were pursuing them. Indeed, he was sure that they had accumulated several enemies – daemons, Word Bearers seeker-legionaries, and the assassins of the Cabal.

But this was not a simple, hostile threat. Someone had steered them, or influenced them. Someone had tricked them into taking the misstep to Andrioch, knowing that they could go no further.

‘Oll!’

He heard someone calling his name. He paid it little heed. His mind was old, and the memory of ancient voices haunted him from time to time.

Then he realised it was a real voice.

‘Oll! Oll!’

There, on the black stones of the broken causeway ahead of him, right on the lip of the endless cliff, stood John Grammaticus. ‘Bit of a mess,’ he called out. ‘Sorry.’

Oll clambered up to join him. ‘We’re stuck here, John. This is a dead end.’

‘I know.’

‘We’ve been here two years.’

John looked aghast. ‘Two? I’m sorry. I’ve been caught up in things. Well, the Cabal caught up with me. Again. They’re putting me back to work for them. I’ve been waiting for a moment when their eyes aren’t on me so I could reach out to you. I’m sorry it’s taken so long.’

‘So am I.’

‘They’re onto you, too,’ John warned. He was wearing the dress uniform of a photon lancer from the Unification Wars. It was rather too ornamental for Oll’s taste, but John’s mind had chosen his form and appearance. He wasn’t really there. Oll didn’t have to reach out and touch the wet nothingness of a psionic projection to know that.

John was an ultra-function psyker. This was a telepresent meeting.

‘Onto us?’ asked Oll.

‘Onto you. The others don’t matter. I’m not sure why you brought them along.’

‘Company,’ said Oll. He knew that John Grammaticus would have little patience for the rationale because I didn’t want them to die.

‘You’re so sentimental, Oll. You should ditch them. You can’t take them all the way to Terra anyway. Especially not the girl. She’s live.’

‘Touched by the warp, I know.’

‘And untrained, which is worse. Come on, you know the only reason you have to go to Terra instead of me is that you’re not psi-active. A psyker can’t get in undetected. It has to be you.’

‘Okay, okay, let me worry about the girl,’ said Oll. ‘Explain about the Cabal, and how I came to be stuck here.’

‘You’re not stuck. You’re hiding. I hid you here. They’ve worked out what you’re up to and they’ve sent hunters to stop you. That last cut you made…’

‘From Ulbanuc to here?’

‘Yes. I had to steer you. If you’d made the obvious cut, it would have led you through to early colonial Cadia, and the Cabal had a kill team waiting for you there.’

Oll remembered Ulbanuc, the last stop before Andrioch. A plague cemetery world from the Age of Strife. The compass and pendulum had behaved oddly there. He’d been about to make a cut, but the needle had moved and he’d made a different cut instead. ‘That was you?’

John nodded. ‘The best I could manage. I nudged the compass so it would bring you here. Cadia was a trap. I brought you here because there is only one way in or out. It’s clear now. Go back to Ulbanuc then cut through to Cadia. You’ll be on your way again.’

‘You told me never to go back.’

‘Well, the rules change, Oll. You have to, this time. This was a hideaway, somewhere they wouldn’t think to look for you.’

‘Because of that?’ Oll asked, gesturing to the chasm that yawned beneath the causeway.

‘Right, because of that. That giant hole of cosmic nothing. Brilliant, eh?’

Oll shrugged. John began to lose his patience.

‘Go back to Ulbanuc, Oll. I’m sorry about the delay here, I really am. Go back, then cut on to Cadia. You’re so close, now.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I swear it, Oll. So close. Go back, cut again. You’ll be on your way.’

Another voice echoed in the gloom. ‘Who is this you’re talking to, Oll?’

Oll and John looked around. Katt was picking her way up the causeway towards them, frowning. Oll realised that he had been gone a while. She’d come looking for him.

‘This is John,’ he began, then stopped. ‘You can see him?’

‘Yes, silly!’

‘Of course she can, Oll,’ said John with a nervous laugh. He tapped his temple with the tip of his index finger. ‘Psyker, remember? Of course she can see me.’

He turned to face the girl.

‘I was just telling Oll the good news,’ he said. ‘It’s time to get moving again.’

Oll went very still. He watched as a handful of pebbles, just tiny flecks of stone, trickled off the causeway and plunged over the edge into the endless drop. They had been dislodged by John’s boots as he’d turned.

But John Grammaticus was just a psi-projection.

He wasn’t really there.

Oll threw his fist into John’s gut. The blow landed solidly. John staggered back, and then came clawing at Oll.

He was strong. Stronger than any human. Stronger than any Perpetual. His blow knocked Oll backwards. Sprawling, Oll landed at Katt’s feet, so dazed that he couldn’t clear his head.

‘I’ll just have to do this here, then,’ said John in a voice that wasn’t John Grammaticus’.

There was a bright flash. John was hit in the chest and knocked onto his back.

A double-pulse from a laspistol. Katt stood with the weapon braced in her hands. She didn’t like guns, but she had learned how to use them.

‘He isn’t your friend, is he?’ she asked.

Oll didn’t answer. He lunged for John in desperation. Despite the las-bolts to his chest, He was picking himself up, so Oll buried the blade of his athame dagger in John’s neck. The man spasmed wildly, then fell, his feet twitching.

Oll made sure he was dead. It wasn’t John. The corpse was too bulky. The falsehood cloak that had been woven around it was failing. Oll and Katt saw what was underneath.

‘What is it?’ asked Katt. ‘Who was he?’

‘An enemy, hunting for us. Trying to lure us into a trap.’

‘He’s so big,’ the girl murmured, more afraid now. ‘What’s that tattoo on his collarbone there? Is it a spider?’

‘No. A hydra.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means the Alpha Legion is hunting for us,’ Oll replied. But that, like most of his answers, meant nothing to her.

Oll gathered his little band together in the rotting black stone house they had been sharing.

‘Enemies are coming,’ he told them. ‘This place, it’s a snare. A dead-end. They managed to make us turn the wrong way. They’re trying to block us from Terra, which means we must be close.’

‘What do we do, Trooper Persson?’ asked Graft.

‘We have to change course. We have to follow the winds a different way for a while, until we can get back on the right bearing again.’

Rane glanced out of a broken window. ‘But we can’t go back, if it’s a trap...’ he began.

‘We can’t,’ Oll agreed. ‘The hunter had a knife like mine. Well, a little like mine. Cuts the same way. Basically, he was moving the way we move. That’s how he found us. He came from Ulbanuc on our heels, so that’s where they’re waiting for us.’

Zybes shook his head. ‘But there is no other direction. You told us, this is a dead end. The only way out is back the way we came, and killers are waiting for us there.’

Oll took a deep breath.

‘There’s one other way,’ he replied. ‘It’s dangerous. It’s extreme, but I think it could work – if you trust me, and you’re prepared to risk it. It’s the only way, apart from living here for the rest of our lives. And our enemy won’t be expecting it. What do you say?’

Krank nodded, trying to look brave. ‘We trust you.’

‘How dangerous is it?’ asked Zybes.

‘I won’t lie. Very.’ Oll took out his blade. ‘But this will get us through. Only special blades can cut through space. They’re rare. This is rarer still. The most special, special blade of all. Blessed and cursed, both at once. If anything can get us there, it’s this. It can cut more than space.’

‘Why, what else can it cut?’ Rane asked.

‘Gods.’

They packed, and headed out after Oll. He guided them towards the place of departure. He was carrying the knife, but had put away the compass and pendulum for the time being. He wouldn’t need them for this. It wasn’t going to be a subtle crossing.

‘Thank you,’ he said to Katt as they walked up through the city.

‘For what?’ she asked.

‘You saved us. I’m getting old. I nearly missed the trick that was being played on me. So, thank you. And thank you for reminding me why it was a good idea to bring you all along on this journey.’

‘Why was it?’

‘Because nobody could do this alone.’

They reached the edge of the causeway. Below them, the cliff fell away into the hole that had been bitten through the world, and through time and space as well.

‘What now, Trooper Persson?’ said Graft, halting at the precipice.

Oll smiled. ‘We jump.’

THE LIGHTNING TOWER

What are you afraid of? What are you really afraid of?

There was once a fine palace, and it sat like a crown of light upon the top of the world. This was in the latter days, when mankind left his birth rock for the second time, to chase a destiny denied him in a previous epoch.

The artisan masters of the many rival Masonic guilds had raised the palace up, block by gilded block, to be a statement of unity, regal and unequivocal. After a dreary, lightless Age of Strife, the warring tribes and creeds of Terra had been alloyed under one rule, and the palace was intended to symbolise that staggering achievement. All the petty dynasts and ethnarchs, all the clannations and gene-septs, all the despots and pan-continental tyrants, had been quelled or crushed, overthrown or annexed. Some, the smartest and most prescient, had offered terms and been embraced to the bosom of the new rule. Better fealty than the wrath of the warriors in thunder armour.

Better submission than the enmity of the world’s new master.

It was said that once you had seen him, or heard him speak, you were never in doubt again. He was the one, and had always been the one. He had been the Emperor long before there was any such office to take. No one knew his birth name, because he had always, naturally, been the Emperor.

Even the artisan masters of the Masonic guilds, famous for their sanctimonious craft wars and vainglorious quarrels, shut up and, in concert, built the palace for him.

It was monumental. It was not so much an edifice as a handcrafted landmass. The artisan masters built it upon Terra’s greatest mountain range, and transformed the monstrous peaks into its bulwarks. It towered above a world laid to waste by centuries of war and perdition, and though that world was being rebuilt, with wondrous cities and architectural marvels blooming in the new age of Unity, nothing could match its magnificence.

For it was beautiful, a euphoric vision of gold and silver. It was said that, when they had finished their task, the artisan masters of the Masonic guilds set down their tools and wept.

By the time it was complete, it was the largest single man-made structure in known space. Its footings sank deep into the planet’s mantle, its towers probed the airless limits of the atmosphere. It owned the words ‘the palace’ wholly, without any need for qualification, as if no other palaces existed.

He had blemished that glory. He had raised dark curtain walls around the golden halls, and cased the soaring towers in skins of armour ten metres thick. He had stripped away the jewelled facades and the crystelephantine ornamentation, the delicate minarets and the burnished cupolas, and in their places he had implanted uncountable turrets and ordnance emplacements. He had dug mighty earthworks out of the surrounding lowlands, and fortified them with a million batteries. He had yoked platforms into synchronous orbits to guard from above, their weapon banks armed and trained, day and night. He had put his men upon the walls, armoured in gold and set for the coming war.

His name was Dorn, and he was not proud of his work.

Vadok Singh, the warmason, had a habit of stroking architectural plans as he laid them out, as if they were a beloved pet.

‘Necessity,’ he said, his favourite word, stroking out the revised schemata of the Dhawalagiri elevation.

‘It’s ugly,’ said Dorn. He stood away from the table, leaning against one of the planning chamber’s thick columns, his arms folded across his broad chest.

‘Ugly is what they will do if they find the Annapurna Gate weak and flimsy,’ Singh replied. He stood back and lit his boc pipe from a taper, allowing his flock of slaves to finish laying out the designs and adjusting the brass armature of the viewing lenses that would magnify details and project them onto the chamber wall for closer examination.

Dorn shrugged. ‘It’s still ugly. The orbis and lazulite work encrusting that gate took Menzo of Travert thirty years to complete. Pilgrims flock here simply to see it. They say it surpasses even the Eternity Gate in its aesthetic.’

‘Aesthetic, now?’ Singh smiled. He began to pace, trailing blue smoke from the bowl of his long-stemmed pipe. His slaves followed him up and down the chamber, like a timorous litter of young following their mother. Singh was a tall man, taller than the primarch, but skeletally thin. His guild gene-bred their bloodline to favour height for purposes of surveying and overseeing. ‘I do so love our conversations, Rogal. They are quite contrary. You, the warrior, and me, the craftsman, and you lecture me on aesthetics.’

‘I’m not lecturing,’ Dorn replied. He was aware of Sigismund and Archamus in the corner of the great room, stiffening at the warmason’s use of his forename. Dorn would hear about ‘proper respect and protocol’ again later.

‘Of course you’re not,’ said Singh, ‘but it is a necessity. How many Legions does the Upstart have with him now?’

Dorn heard Sigismund rise to his feet. He turned and stared at the first captain of the Imperial Fists. Sigismund glowered back for a second, then left the chamber.

Dorn glanced back at the warmason. ‘Too many,’ he said.

Singh held out a long, spindly arm in the direction of the schemata. ‘So?’

‘Begin work tomorrow at sunrise. Dismantle the gate with care, and store the dismantled elements in the vaults. We will put the work back when this is done.’

Singh nodded.

We will put everything back, thought Dorn. When this is done, we will put everything back the way it was.

A katabatic wind was coming in off the lower bulwarks that night. The palace was so immense, the precipice walls bred their own microclimate. Greasy stars swam in the heat ripple of the palace’s new reactors. The void shields were being tested again.

Not a palace. Not the palace anymore, a fortress.

Some of those sullen stars were orbital platforms, catching the last backscatter of the sunlight as Terra turned. Dorn put on a fur-edged robe that had been in his possession since his adolescence on Inwit, and went out to walk the parapets of the Dhawalagiri Prospect, to dwell upon its beauty one last time. It was one of the last sections of the palace that remained untouched. Adamantium armour plates, drab prestressed rockcrete and auto-turrets had yet to blight its ethereal lines.

Soon, though. From the wall, Dorn could see the half a million campfires of the Masonic host, the labour army that would invade the prospect come sunrise with their mallets and chisels and cranes.

The robe had been his grandfather’s, though Dorn had long since understood that no ties of blood linked him to the Inwit ice-caste that had raised him. He had been created from another genetic line, that most singular line, in a sterile vault deep beneath him in the buried core of the palace.

Not a palace. Not the palace anymore, a fortress.

Dorn had been built to rule, built to assist in his father’s tireless ambitions, built to make the hard decisions. He had been made as a primarch, one of only twenty in the galaxy, engineered by the master architect of mankind, the archmason of genetic code.

The Imperium needs many things, but foremost it needs the ability to protect itself, to attack when necessary. That’s why I gave it twenty strong teeth in its mouth.

Attacking was a remarkably easy thing to do. Dorn’s physical prowess humbled all but twenty human beings in creation, and those twenty were his father and his nineteen brothers. In Dorn’s opinion, the real art was knowing when not to attack. His grandfather, the old Inwit sire, patriarch of the ice-hive clan, had taught him that.

Dorn had been the seventh lost son to be reclaimed. By the time his father’s forces found him, he had become a system warlord in his own right, ruling the Inwit Cluster as the head of the House of Dorn. His grandfather had been dead forty winters, but still the warlord had slept with the fur-edged robe across his body at night. His people had called him ‘emperor’ until the true meaning of that title had been demonstrated by a thousand warships in the Inwit sky. Dorn had gone out to meet his father aboard Phalanx, one ship against thousands, but what a ship: a fortress. His father had been impressed. Dorn had always excelled in the construction of fortresses.

That was why Dorn had returned to Terra with his gene-sire. Out of love, out of devotion, out of obedience, yes, but most of all, out of necessity, damn Singh. The stars had turned over, and Chaos had spilled out from under them. The brightest of all had fallen and the unthinkable, the heretical, had become fact.

The Imperium was attacking itself. The Warmaster, for reasons Dorn was quite at a loss to fathom, had turned upon their father, and was committing his forces to all-out war. That war would come to Terra. There was no question. It would come. Terra needed to be ready. The palace needed to be ready. His father had asked him, as a personal boon, to return to Terra and fortify it for war.

No better man for the task. No better master of defences. Dorn and his Fists, appointed the Emperor’s praetorians, could fend off any attack.

Below him, the halls of Terra were silent, and the walls deep. The only sound was the distant, eternal hum of the Astronomican. The Palace Dorn had armoured and defaced sat like a dark crown on the top of the world.

Rogal Dorn had built many of the finest strongholds in creation: the city fortresses on Zavamunda, the pylon spire of Gallant, the donjons along the Ruthan Marches. Impregnable bastions all, palaces for governor lords to rule from. None of them had been so essential as this fortification. None of them had been as painful to accomplish. It had been like blotting out the light or draining a sea. The bright glory of his father’s triumph, the enduring monument to Unity, had been entombed inside a crude shell of utilitarian defence.

All because of Horus, because of the brightest bastard son, the bringer of new strife.

Dorn heard stone splinter. He looked down. He had punched his fist, his Imperial fist, through a block of stone in the parapet. He had barely registered the impact. The block was pulverised.

‘My lord, is everything all right?’

Archamus had shadowed him from the planning chamber. Never so volatile as Sigismund, Archamus was the master of Dorn’s huscarl retinue.

There was a worried look on Archamus’s face.

‘Just venting my emotions,’ Dorn said.

Archamus regarded the splintered block. ‘Making work for Singh’s artisans, then?’

‘Something like that.’

Archamus nodded. He hesitated, and looked out over the high walls towards the distant earthworks of the Mahabarat. ‘You have wrought a wonder, you know.’

‘I have ruined one.’

‘I know you hate it, but it had to be so. And no one could have done it better.’

Dorn sighed. ‘You’re kind, old friend, but my heart is lead. This should never have been necessary. I search the limits of my imagination, and still I can conceive of nothing that begins to explain this war. Pride and ambition, insult, jealousy? They are not enough, not nearly enough, not for a primarch. They are too petty and mortal to drive a primarch to such extremity. They might provoke an argument, a feud at the worst. They would not split the galaxy in half.’

Dorn looked up at the night sky. ‘And yet, against all reason, he comes.’

‘Guilliman will stop him.’

‘Roboute is far away.’

‘Russ, then. The Lion. The Khan.’

Dorn shook his head. ‘I don’t think they’ll stop him either. I think he’ll roll on until he reaches us.’

‘Then we’ll stop him,’ said Archamus. ‘Won’t we, sir?’

‘Of course we will. I just wish–’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You wish what, sir?’ Archamus asked.

‘Nothing.’

The wind suddenly pulled at Dorn’s fur-edged robe. Above them, the shields went out and then test fired again.

‘Can I ask you a question, sir?’ asked Archamus.

‘Of course.’

‘Who are you really afraid of?’

Consider the question, Rogal Dorn. The first axiom of defence is to understand what you defend against. What are you afraid of? Who are you afraid of?

Dorn paced the halls of the Kath Mandau Precinct where the organs of the Adeptus Terra did their work. The Precinct, an entire city contained within the terraced compounds of the inner palace, never slept. Robed clerks and burnished servitors bustled along the broad concourses. Ministers and ambassadors conducted business beneath the kilometre-high roof of the Hegemon. The great mechanism of the Imperium whirred about him, its relentless function like a ticking timepiece. This was what Unity had brought, this and the near measureless expanse of worlds and dominions that it guided and administered.

For two hundred years, the Emperor and his primarchs had fought to create the Imperium. They had waged the Great Crusade from star to star, to forge the Imperium of Man, an epic undertaking they had all made without hesitation, because they believed, with utter conviction, in the bright destiny it would shape for their species. They had all believed. All of them.

What was he afraid of? Who was he afraid of? Angron? Not him. Dorn would split his head without compunction if they came face to face. Lorgar? Magnus? There had always been a foetid whiff of sorcery about those two, but Dorn felt nothing towards them he could describe as fear. Fulgrim? No. The Phoenician was a singular foe, but not an object of terror. Perturabo? Well now, their rivalry was old, the spiteful scrapping of two brothers who fought for a father’s attention.

Dorn smiled despite his mood. His years of exchanged insults with Perturabo seemed almost comical compared to this. They were too much alike, too jealous of one another’s oh-so-similar abilities. Dorn knew it was a weakness for him to have risen to the Iron Warrior’s baiting. But competition had always been a motivating force amongst the primarch brothers. It had been encouraged as a factor to drive them on to greater and yet greater accomplishments.

No, he was not afraid of Perturabo.

Horus Lupercal, then?

Dorn’s aimless wanderings had taken him to the Investiary. In that broad space, an amphitheatre open to the night sky, statues of the twenty stood on ouslite plinths in a silent ring.

There was no one around. Even the Custodian Guard was absent. Lumen orbs glowed on black iron poles. The Investiary was two kilometres in diameter. Under the glittering stars, it felt like an arena, where twenty warriors had gathered to make their combat.

The second and eleventh plinths had been vacant for a long time. No one ever spoke of those two absent brothers. Their separate tragedies had seemed like aberrations. Had they, in fact, been warnings that no one had heeded?

Sigismund had urged that the effigies of the traitors also be removed from the Investiary. He had offered to do the work himself. This, Dorn recalled, had made the Emperor laugh.

For the time being, the traitors had been shrouded. Their towering, draped forms seemed like phantoms in the blue darkness.

Horus, then? Was it Horus?

Perhaps. Dorn knew that Horus was the greatest of them, which made him the gravest foe. Could any one of them hope to best Lupercal on the field of war?

Martial prowess was hardly the point. Dorn had never feared an adversary in his life because of how strong he was or how hard he fought. Combat was only ever a test.

What mattered, what engendered fear, was why an adversary fought. What made him fight.

Oh, now we have it. Now the truth dawns. He felt the hairs on his skin rise. I’m not afraid of Horus. I’m afraid of finding out why he has turned against us. I cannot conceive of any justification for this schism, but Horus must have his reasons. I am afraid that when I know them, when they are explained to my baffled mind, I might… agree.

‘Would you tear them all down?’

Dorn turned at the sound of the voice. For a moment, it had sounded like the soft growl of his father.

But it was just a man, a cloaked and cowled man scarcely half Dorn’s height. His robes were those of a simple palace administrator.

‘What did you say?’ asked Dorn.

The man walked out into the circle of the Investiary to face Dorn. He greeted him with the old salute of Unity rather than the sign of the aquila. ‘You were staring at the statues of your kin,’ he observed. ‘I asked… would you tear them all down?’

‘The statues or my kin, Sigillite?’ Dorn replied.

‘Both. Either.’

‘The statues, perhaps. I believe Horus is doing a fine job with the men themselves.’

Malcador smiled and looked up at Dorn. Like Dorn’s, his hair was white. Unlike Dorn’s, it was long like a mane. Malcador was an exceptional being. He had been with the Emperor from the inception of the Unification Wars, serving as aide, confidant and advisor. He had risen to become the master of the Council of Terra. The Emperor and the primarchs were genetically advantaged post-humans, but Malcador was just a man, and that was what made him exceptional. He stood on a par with the post-human masters of the Imperium, and he was just a man.

‘Will you walk with me, Rogal Dorn?’

‘Are there not matters of state that require your attention, even at this hour, sir? The Council will bemoan your absence from the debating table.’

‘The Council can manage for a while without me,’ Malcador replied. ‘I like to take the air at this time of night. The Imperium never rests, but at night, up here in the thin air of the old Himalazia, I find there is at least an illusion of rest, a time to think and free the mind. I walk. I close my eyes. The stars do not go out because I am not looking at them.’

‘Not yet,’ said Dorn.

Malcador laughed. ‘No, not yet.’

They said little at first. They left the Investiary and walked along the beige stones of the Precinct’s highest terraces, between the weeping fountains. They walked as far as Lion’s Gate, onto the platforms that overlooked the docking rings and landing fields of the Brahmaputra Plateau. The Gate had once been a thing of magnificence, two gilded beasts rising up to lock claws in a feral dispute. Dorn’s order of works had replaced them with giant grey donjons stippled with casemates and macro-gun ports. A curtain wall of bleak rockcrete encircled the gate, its edge fletched with void field vanes like the spines of some prehistoric reptile.

They stood and considered it for a long time.

‘I am not a subtle man,’ Malcador said, at length.

Dorn raised his eyebrows.

‘Oh, all right,’ said Malcador, ‘perhaps I am. Guile comes easily to a politician. I know I am considered cunning.’

‘An old word, with no more meaning than “wise”,’ Dorn replied.

‘Indeed. I will accept that as a compliment. All I meant to say was, I will not attempt to be subtle now.’

‘No?’

‘The Emperor has expressed his concerns.’

‘Meaning?’ Dorn asked.

Malcador answered with a slight sigh. ‘He understands you are filled with misgivings.’

‘Only natural, I would think, given the circumstances,’ said Dorn.

The Sigillite nodded. ‘He trusts you to undertake the defence. He counts on you. Terra must not fall, no matter what Horus brings. This palace must not fall. If it is to end here, then it must end in our triumph. But he knows, and I know, and you know, that any defence is only as strong as its weakest part: faith, belief, trust.’

‘What are you telling me?’

‘If there is doubt in your heart, then that is our weakness.’

Dorn looked away. ‘My heart is sad because of what I have been made to do to this place. That’s all it is.’

‘Is it? I don’t think so. What are you really afraid of?’

Malcador raised his hand and the lights in his chambers came on. Dorn looked around. He had never entered the Sigillite’s private apartments before. Ancient images hung on the walls: flaking, fragile things of wood, canvas and decomposing pigments, preserved in thin, blue fields of stasis; the smoke-pale portrait of a woman with the most curious smile; garish yellow flowers rendered in thick paint; the unflinching, rheumy gaze of an old fleshy man, cast in shadow, tobacco brown.

Along another wall hung old tattered banners showing the thunderbolt and lightning strike sigil of the Pre-Unity armies. Suits of armour – perfect, glinting thunder armour – were mounted in shimmering suspension zones.

Malcador offered Dorn wine, which he refused, and a seat, which he accepted.

‘I have made a certain peace with myself,’ Dorn said. ‘I understand what I am afraid of.’

Malcador nodded. He had pulled back his cowl and the light shone on his long white hair. He sipped from his glass. ‘Enlighten me.’

‘I do not fear anyone. Not Horus, not Fulgrim, none of them. I fear the cause. I fear the root of their enmity.’

‘You fear what you don’t understand.’

‘Exactly. I am at a loss to know what drives the Warmaster and his cohorts. It is an alien thing to me, quite defying translation. A strong defence relies on knowing what you are defending against. I can raise all the bulwarks and curtain walls and cannon-bastions I like, and I still won’t know what it is I’m fighting.’

‘Perceptive,’ said Malcador, ‘and true of us all. I fancy even the Emperor doesn’t fully understand what it is that drives Horus against us so furiously. Do you know what I think?’

‘Tell me.’

Malcador shrugged. ‘I believe it is better that we don’t know. To understand it would be to understand insanity. Horus is quite mad. Chaos is inside him.’

‘You say that as if Chaos is a… thing.’

‘It is. Does that surprise you? You’ve known the warp and seen its corrupting touch, that’s Chaos. It has touched humanity now, twisted our brightest and best. All we can do is remain true to ourselves and fend it off, deny it. Trying to understand it is a fool’s errand. It would claim us too.’

‘I see.’

‘Don’t see, Rogal Dorn, and you will live longer. All you can do is acknowledge your fear. That’s all any of us can do. Recognise it for what it is: your pure, human sanity rocked by the sight of the warp’s infecting, suffocating madness.’

‘Is this what the Emperor believes?’ asked Dorn.

‘It’s what he knows. It’s what he knows he doesn’t know. Sometimes, my friend, there is salvation in ignorance.’

Dorn sat still for a while. Malcador watched him, occasionally sipping from his glass.

‘Well, I thank you for your time, sir,’ said Dorn eventually. ‘Your candour too. I should–’

‘There is one other thing,’ said Malcador, setting his glass down and rising to his feet. ‘Something I want to show you.’

Malcador crossed the chamber, and took something from a drawer in an old bureau. He walked back to Dorn, and spread that something out on the low table between them.

Dorn opened his mouth but no sound issued. Fear gripped him.

‘You recognise these, of course.’

Old cards, worn and fraying, discoloured and liver-spotted with time. One by one, Malcador laid them out.

‘The Lesser Arcanoi, just gaming trinkets really, but used widely before the coming of Old Night for divination. This deck was made on Nostramo Quintus.’

‘He used them,’ Dorn breathed.

‘Yes, he did. He relied on them. He believed in cartomancy. He dealt his fate out, night after haunted night, and watched how the cards fell.’

‘Oh, Holy Terra…’

‘Are you all right, sir?’ Malcador asked, looking up. ‘You are quite pale.’

Dorn nodded. ‘Curze.’

‘Yes, Curze. Had you forgotten him, or simply blocked him out? You have bickered and sparred with many of your brothers over the years, but only Konrad Curze ever hurt you.’

‘Yes.’

‘He nearly killed you.’

‘Yes.’

‘On Cheraut, long ago,’

‘I remember it well enough!’

Malcador looked up at Dorn. The primarch had risen to his feet. ‘Then sit back down and tell me, because I wasn’t there.’

Dorn sat. ‘This is so long ago or like another life. We had brought the Cheraut system to compliance. It was hard fought. The Emperor’s Children, the Night Lords and my Fists, we affected compliance. But Curze didn’t know when to stop. He never knew when to stop.’

‘And you rebuked him?’

‘He was an animal. Yes, I rebuked him. Then Fulgrim told me.’

‘Told you what?’

Dorn closed his eyes. ‘The Phoenician told me what Curze had told him: the fits, the seizures that had plagued Curze since his childhood on Nostramo, the visions. Curze said he had seen the galaxy in flames, the Emperor’s legacy overthrown, legionaries turning on legionaries. It was all lies, an insult to our creed!’

‘You confronted Curze?’

‘And he attacked me. He would have killed me, I think. He is insane. That’s why we drove him out, sick of his bloodletting. That’s why he burned his home world and took his Night Lords off into the darkest parts of the stars.’

Malcador nodded, and continued to deal the cards. ‘Rogal, he is what you are truly afraid of, because he is fear incarnate. No other primarch uses terror as a weapon like Curze does. You are not afraid of Horus and his sallow heretics. You are afraid of the fear that sides with him, the night terror that advances alongside the traitors.’

Dorn sat back and breathed out. ‘He has haunted me, I confess. All this time, he has haunted me.’

‘Because he was right. His visions were true. He saw this Heresy coming in his visions. That is the truth you fear. You wish you had listened.’

Dorn looked down at the cards laid out on the table before him. ‘Do you believe in this divination, Sigillite?’

‘Let’s see,’ said Malcador, turning the cards over one by one: the Moon, the Martyr and the Monster, the Dark King askew across the Emperor.

One other card, the Lightning Tower.

Dorn groaned. ‘A bastion, blown out by lightning. A palace brought to ruin by fire. I’ve seen enough.’

‘The card has many meanings,’ said Malcador. ‘Like the Death card, it is not as obvious as it seems. In the hives of Nord Merica, it symbolised a change in fortune, an overturning of fate. To the tribes of Franc and Tali, it signified knowledge or achievement obtained through sacrifice. A flash of inspiration, if you will, one that tumbles the world you know down, but leaves you with a greater gift.’

‘The Dark King lies across the Emperor,’ said Dorn, pointing.

Malcador sniffed. ‘It’s not exactly a science, my friend.’

They had blown their way through the massive earthwork defences at Haldwani and Xigaze. The sky at the top of the world was on fire. Despite the bombardments of the orbital platforms and the constant sorties of the Stormbirds and the Hawkwings, the Traitor Legions advanced, up through the Brahmaputra, along the delta of the Karnali. Continental firestoms raged across Gangetic Plain.

As they entered the rampart outworks of the palace, the streaming, screaming multitudes and the striding war machines were greeted by monsoons of firepower. Every emplacement along the Dhawalagiri Prospect committed its weapons. Las reached out in neon slashes, annihilating everything it touched. Shells fell like sleet. Titans exploded, caught fire, collapsed on their faces and crushed the warriors swarming around their heels. Still they came. Lancing beams struck the armour-reinforced walls like lightning, like lighting smiting a tower.

The walls fell. They collapsed like slumping glaciers. Gold-cased bodies spilled out, tumbling down in the deluge.

The palace began to burn. Primus Gate fell; Lion’s Gate, subjected to attack from the north; Annapurna Gate. At the Ultimate Gate, the Traitors finally sliced into the palace, slaughtering everyone they found inside. Around every broken gate, the corpses of Titans piled up in vast, jumbled heaps where they had fallen over each other in their desire to break in. The heretic host clambered across their carcasses, pouring into the palace, yelling out the name of their–

‘End simulation,’ said Dorn.

He gazed down at the hololithic table. At his command, the forces of the enemy withdrew, unit by unit, and the palace rebuilt itself. The smoke cleared.

‘Reset parameters to Horus, Perturabo, Angron and Curze.’

‘Opposition?’ the table queried.

‘Imperial Fists, Blood Angels, White Scars. Resume and replay scenario.’

The map flickered. Armies advanced. The palace began to burn again.

‘Play it out, simulation after simulation, if you like,’ said the voice behind him. ‘Simulations are just simulations. I know you won’t fail me when the time comes.’

Dorn turned. ‘I would never knowingly fail you, Father,’ he said.

‘Then don’t be afraid. Don’t let fear get in your way.’

What are you afraid of? What are you really afraid of?

The Lightning Tower, thought Rogal Dorn. I understand its meaning: achievement obtained through sacrifice. I’m just afraid of what that sacrifice might be.

MEDUSON

There were no surgical lasers available.

A clustered missile strike over Isstvan V had blown out the Ionside’s flank from the lateral exchangers aft, voiding eight deployment bays and the port-side apothecarion chambers. The smaller medicae annex on the ship’s starboard side was overwhelmed with life-critical cases. Dying legionaries on stretcher boards were lined up along the hallway.

Shadrak had only lost a hand. He reported instead to a makeshift triage station set up in the forward hold. Most of the staff there were frightened serfs drummed up from the ship’s crew. Gorgonson of the Lokopt Clan was the only Apothecary present, the only one that could be spared from the chaos of the medicae annex. He looked at the hand.

‘Excise,’ he instructed the human attendant waiting nearby. ‘Clean down to the forearm bones. Leave some tissue for conjunction and graft. I’ll be back to fit the augmetic.’

Gorgonson didn’t say anything to Shadrak. There was nothing to say.

No. There was a great deal to say – just no words with which to say it.

He treated Shadrak like a piece of broken machinery presented for repair, not as a brother, an old friend or a fellow son of Terra. He didn’t even make eye contact. He just moved on to the next case, a battle-brother whose helm had been fused to his cheek by a melta burst.

The human was a young ensign, freckle-faced and red-headed. His anxiety made him seem like a small boy compared to Shadrak’s bulk. ‘Seat yourself, lord,’ he stammered, gesturing to a commandeered suit-room recliner that had a metal service trolley positioned beside it.

Shadrak didn’t much care for the term ‘lord’. He was a captain, and that word alone was more than sufficient. But he was too tired to correct the serf, too empty. He felt like the tombs of Albia that he had visited as a child: vast and enduring, but long since robbed of the precious things they had once contained.

Using his good hand, he took off his helm and placed it on the deck. Then he unstrapped his weapon belt, so that the harnessed gladius and bolt pistol would not encumber him when he sat. The belt had loops for reload clips. They were empty.

The recliner creaked under his armoured weight. He set his boots on the foot rest, leaned back and placed his ruined left arm on the trolley. It would have been palm up, if he had still had a palm.

The attendant stared at the wound. The hand was missing most of the fingers. It was a bloody mitten of blackened meat, with broken knucklebones protruding like twigs. The wrist was misaligned. The composite ceramite sleeve of Shadrak’s iron-black armour was mangled at the cuff, the torn ends stabbing into his flesh.

‘Is there pain?’

Truth be told, Shadrak hadn’t been aware of any pain – not physical pain, anyway. The other pain was too immense, too entire.

Surprised, he answered, ‘No.’

‘I have no anaesthetic,’ the man added reluctantly. ‘I have some numbing agents, but resources are so–’

‘Just do it,’ said Shadrak. His body had autonomically shut down a great number of his neural receptors at the moment of injury. His left hand didn’t feel much of anything anymore. It was just a dead weight, like a piece of kit he couldn’t unbuckle and remove.

‘There are no surgical lasers either,’ the serf apologised. Shadrak saw he was wiping a manual bone-saw with a sterile swab. The man’s hands were shaking.

Under other circumstances, in other wars, Shadrak would have been amused by the sheer pathos of the situation. But his capacity for amusement was as empty as the tombs of Albia too.

He sighed.

‘You’ll never get through the vambrace with that,’ he said. The man looked as though he was about to panic. ‘Do you have medical training?’

‘I am a junior gunnery officer, lord,’ the man replied. ‘But I have my corpsman certificate.’

Again, the ‘lord’…

Shadrak reached over with his right hand, unclasped the elbow guard and let it fall to the deck. Then he unfastened the clamps in the crook of his elbow and mid-forearm, and tugged the composite plasteel-and-ceramite sleeve off. Parts of the gauntlet were still attached, flapping loose. The buckled wrist seal was impacted into his flesh, and it took a little more effort to wrench it clear. Fluid and flecks of meat spattered the deck.

He stripped away the undersleeve, tearing the fabric. His exposed skin looked as pale as bone, in stark contrast to the mauled mess of his hand.

‘How did this happen?’ the man asked, eyes wide at the fully exposed damage.

‘Horus happened,’ said Shadrak.

He rested his arm back on the trolley. The man approached, gingerly, puffing counterseptic onto the wound from a flask, his hands still shaking. He took a grip on the bone saw, and consulted an anatomical diagram he had called up on the display of his data-slate. Shadrak knew that the man was dying to ask what he had meant, but didn’t dare.

He rested the saw’s serrated edge against Shadrak’s flesh just below his torn wrist. The skin was covered in spots of fast-clotted blood. The serf swabbed them away, and then made the first draw.

There was pain, of course, but it seemed minor and distant.

Shadrak sat back and let it pass over him. He stared at the hold’s gloomy roof, into the darkness beyond the hanging lumens. He let his mind fill with memories – memories from before the pain. He tried to recollect something as far from it as possible. Before this minor discomfort, before the greater injury of the dropsite, before Medusa, before the Gorgon, before the Great Crusade…

He thought of Terra, and the last years of the Unification Wars. He thought of his first days as a Storm Walker, serving under Lord Commander Amadeus DuCaine in the theatres of Afrik and the Panpacific. Back then, justly proud of their fresh, gene-herited might, none of them had known what the Storm Walkers would become, or what revision of structure and loyalty they would have to undergo. And even once they had known, they had embraced it wholeheartedly. It had not been a matter of reformation or repair, though fates knew that the X Legion were especially resilient when it came to repair.

It had been a matter of ascendancy.

It had been a blessing. To be called to your primarch’s side, to become one of his. Shadrak had cast off his Terran surname, a mortal vestige that had fallen into disuse anyway, and taken the name Meduson to demonstrate and affirm his allegiance to his new home world.

He had become Shadrak Meduson of Clan Sorrgol, Captain of the Tenth Company. The Storm Walkers of Unification had become the Iron Hands. They had expected nothing but glory in their future. Even if calamity chanced to overtake the Iron Tenth on the field of war, it would be a glorious calamity in the Emperor’s service.

None of them had ever anticipated this inglorious ruin. None of them could ever have imagined such a measure of raw treachery.

None of them could ever have expected this scale of loss and pain.

‘I’m sorry,’ the man said.

Shadrak opened his eyes.

Despite his clotting factors and vascular shunts, the top of the trolley was running with blood. It was dripping off the edges and making a rectangular, splatter-pattern halo on the deck. The flesh of his wrist was marked with several bloody hesitation wounds. When the young serf had finally found some confidence and purpose, he had opened a gash like a gasping mouth, but the bone was barely nicked.

The man’s hands were shaking more than ever. ‘Your bones are very… very strong, lord.’

Shadrak saw that he was sweating.

‘They were made that way,’ he replied, sitting up. ‘Give me that slate.’

The serf handed him the data-slate, and Shadrak reviewed the anatomical graphic as dispassionately as he might check a mechanical diagram. He made a note of the bone formation, compared it with what remained of his wrist, took note of blood vessels and tendon assembly and paid heed to the recommended link points for structural and neural grafting.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said, handing the slate back. ‘It’ll be quicker.’

The man slowly offered him the bloody saw, but Shadrak had already leaned over the side of the recliner and drawn his gladius. He set the edge of the blade along the clumsy guide cut that the bone saw had scored, paused, and struck his ruined hand off with a single, swift blow. It bounced off the side of the trolley and landed in the pool of blood on the deck. The serf hesitated, as though he felt it would be polite to pick the severed hand up and return it to Shadrak. Then he remembered himself, dropped the saw, and hurried forward to attend with clamps and wadding.

‘If it’s going to hurt anyway,’ said Shadrak as the man worked, binding the stump tightly, ‘it’s better that it doesn’t linger too.’

Good advice, he thought. Applies to so damned much.

Gorgonson returned an hour later and inspected the wound.

‘Do this yourself?’

‘It seemed for the best,’ Shadrak replied.

‘You’re no surgeon,’ said Gorgonson.

‘Never claimed to be. But your man there was intent on whittling me down until I was nothing but a spinal column and a rictus.’

Gorgonson frowned. ‘We’re doing the best we can, given the circumstances.’

‘Well, he made more of a mess of me in ten minutes than the damned Sons of Horus could manage in a week.’

Gorgonson glared at him. ‘Don’t even joke,’ he hissed. ‘Damn you, Shadrak. Don’t even say the words aloud.’

‘You don’t think I’m angry?’ asked Shadrak. ‘I’m beyond rage. I’m in another place entirely. White heat and boiling blood. I’m going to butcher and burn every one of the bastards. Give me my new hand so I can get on with it.’

Gorgonson hesitated. They had known each other for twenty-four decades. Like Shadrak, Goran Gorgonson had been a Storm Walker, a son of Terra. They had fought through the Unification Wars side by side. At their ascendancy, Goran had elected to join Lokopt, the clan that most remembered and celebrated the Terran aspect of the founding. But he had changed his name to Gorgonson in honour of the primarch.

‘Anger’s not going to get us anywhere, earth-brother,’ Shadrak said quietly, ‘except deader than we are already. Anger’s a blindfold, a fool’s motivation. I reserve it only for killing blows. We need cool heads and clear minds. This is survival, repair, rebuilding. Terra only knows, we’re good at repair – we excel at it, so this should play to our strengths.’

‘They’re calling a council,’ said Gorgonson.

‘Who’s they?’

‘The clan-fathers.’

‘A Clan Council?’ Shadrak asked. ‘What in Terra’s name for? This isn’t a matter of bloodline and heritage.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘The clan-fathers are proposing to assume command? Collective command?’

‘I suppose so. In the absence of…’ Gorgonson paused. There were words that were going to be too hard to say, names that were going to be too hard to utter. ‘The clan-fathers take control, for now. Isn’t there comfort and assurance in that? They are veterans who understand–

‘A Clan Council is the last thing we need,’ said Shadrak. ‘Command by committee? Pointless. We need positive, singular leadership.’

‘I didn’t know you had aspirations of command,’ Gorgonson remarked.

Shadrak thought about that for a moment. The notion came as a surprise.

‘I don’t,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never considered it. I just know we need something now. Someone. We’re dead without it. Just a shattered rabble.’

Gorgonson sighed. ‘Any Apothecary, even the best of us, will tell you that you can graft on a new hand, but you can’t graft on a new head.’

‘Then we’ll have to learn how,’ said Shadrak.

A servitor beside Gorgonson was holding the augmetic on a tray.

‘Nothing fancy,’ said the Apothecary, reaching for a scraper and a neuro-fuser. ‘I have no juvenat packing left either, so you’ll have to let it bond by itself. Don’t test it. It’ll be weak. For months, probably. Let it bed in and heal.’

Shadrak nodded.

‘Just fix me up,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I’ll have many weeks of calm and leisure to get the healing done.’

Gorgonson started working. ‘Is he dead?’ he asked quietly.

‘Yes.’

‘You know this?’

‘Amadeus told me,’ said Shadrak. ‘It was confirmed from the surface.’

‘Lord Commander Amadeus is dead too,’ murmured the Apothecary.

‘Yes. I saw it. But his word lives. The Gorgon is dead, and our stepfather Amadeus is gone too. So we can lie down and die with them, or we can learn to graft heads.’

It took eight weeks for the Council to assemble. That meant eight more weeks of running. The Gorgon’s martial policy had always been to fight and move on, but this was not the sort of moving on that Shadrak approved of.

They gathered at Aeteria, a lonely rock of sulphurous waste and tainted pink skies on the edge of the Oqueth Sector.

Twenty-nine ships hung low in the heavens, including two Salamanders vessels and three Raven Guard. They seemed ghostly, like dark thunderheads behind the wispy banks of cloud. They were survivors of Isstvan, all of them.

It wasn’t much of a council. Only five clan-fathers were present. The fate of the others was unknown, though intelligence data reported that the forces of the Iron Tenth had scattered after the massacre, put to rout. Many of the Raven Guard and Salamanders had fled too. Purge-fleets of the Sons of Horus and the Emperor’s Children were reported to be razing system after system in an effort to obliterate any survivors before they could regroup. No reliable figures were available, but it was possible that all three Legions had been reduced to mere thousands.

‘We have been… shattered,’ said Lech Vircule, Clan-Father of Atraxii, rising to his feet. They had gathered in the courtyard of a ruined monastic structure, built in the Age of Strife and abandoned, like Aeteria, generations before. The lonely walls echoed his words.

‘But not broken,’ answered the Clan-Father of Felg, Loreson Unfleshed. ‘There will be others, like us, meeting in secret as we do now. We are disconnected, but not lost.’

Vircule shrugged.

‘We cannot regroup or coordinate,’ he said. ‘Lines of communication are cut or disadvantaged. No one dares show himself or attempt an open signal. With the traitors abroad in force, any glimpse of us will result in unstinting prosecution.’

‘Our structure allows for this, lord father,’ said Augos Lumak, a captain of Clan Avernii. He was one of the few members of the gene-sire’s favoured to have made it out of the massacre alive. ‘Our clan structure, as ordained by the Gorgon, will serve us well. Independent units of command, interlocking. We can survive, by dint of our individual commands, and reassemble.’

The Atraxii clan-father nodded. ‘That is to be hoped. Only when unified can we turn and fight back.’

‘Then we will never fight back,’ said Shadrak Meduson.

There was a silence, filled only by the moan of the wind across the lagoon.

‘You spoke, captain?’ said the flesh-spare Loreson.

‘Quite clearly, lord father,’ said Shadrak. ‘The accursed Warmaster, may fate smite him, will not give us grace to regroup.’

‘We do not need his grace.’ The clan-father’s voice was a synthetic growl. ‘Or his permission.’

‘As he did not need our grace or permission to slaughter us, and to murder our gene-father and stepfather alike,’ said Shadrak. ‘We are not alone in this. Salamanders and Raven Guard stand with us.’ He gestured to the ranks of the other Legions present. ‘Our brothers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth follow different martial philosophies. We could learn, learn mutually. We could learn to fight in new ways, marry the iron force of the Tenth to the stealth of the Nineteenth and–’

‘Our brothers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth are welcome here,’ said Vircule of Atraxii.

‘Our losses match yours in scale and grief,’ said a Raven Guard captain named Dalcoth. ‘We must combine resources–’

‘You are welcome here,’ Vircule repeated, cutting him short.

‘But our words are not?’ asked Dalcoth. There was a bitter grin on his lips.

‘In time, of course,’ said Karel Mach, the Clan-Father of Raukaan. ‘But this is Clan Council business and words. Our way of war is not yours, sir. We will not stoop to sly hit-and-run tactics.’

‘Stoop?’ asked one of the other Raven Guard officers.

‘I meant no insult.’

‘On the flight here, we spent time discussing operational needs with your captains,’ said Dalcoth. ‘Meduson of Sorrgol agreed with my proposal that a hybridisation of tactics might avail us of–’

‘Captain Meduson should know his place,’ said Vircule.

‘He was not the only officer of the Tenth who thought so,’ said Dalcoth.

‘But I was the loudest, so I speak for the notion here,’ said Shadrak. ‘Eight weeks aboard the survivor ships, crammed in with brothers from other Legions. Of course we talked. It is self-evident that–’

‘Know your place, Meduson,’ said the Clan-Father of Atraxii more firmly. ‘Know your place, Terran-born.’

‘I know my place well enough,’ said Shadrak. ‘It appears to be somewhere on a sulphur-stinking waste at the end of the galaxy. Any delay is going to weaken us further. We are not, and we will never be, what we once were. The Raven Guard are ready to fight. Guerrilla tactics, if necessary.’

Dalcoth nodded.

‘The Salamanders too,’ said Shadrak.

Nuros, the most senior legionary of the XVIII Legion present, nodded in turn.

‘This is Clan Council business,’ said Loreson Unfleshed.

‘It would seem that the Council does not know its business,’ replied Shadrak. ‘When we lose in war, we are returned to the enclaves and are rebuilt. We are made better than we were before. But that luxury is not open to us now. When we lose on the field, away from an enclave, what do we do?’

‘We repair as best we may,’ said Karel Mach. ‘Battlefield fixes. We make the best of the resources available to us.’

‘That is our situation now,’ said Shadrak. ‘And what is available to us? The good brotherhood of our fellow Legions. The chance to learn, to alter ourselves, and to remake ourselves in ways that the traitors are not expecting.’

‘Enough!’ barked Jebez Aug. Aug was an Iron Father of the Sorrgol Clan, hailing from Medusa. With his venerable status came great influence. ‘You shame our clan with your outspoken remarks, Terran-born.’

‘I speak only with respect,’ said Shadrak.

‘You have shown the Council precious little respect,’ said Aan Kolver, the Clan-Father of Ungavarr.

‘Indeed, because you have warranted none,’ said Shadrak. ‘I speak with respect to our gene-sire.’

‘Escort the captain from this place immediately,’ said Vircule to Aug. ‘He needs time to level his head and dull his tongue.’

‘What are you playing at?’ Aug asked. Shadrak could feel the Iron Father’s anger radiating out like a force field. They stood on the caustic shoreline of the sulphur lake. Acid vapour swirled like battlefield smoke.

‘What? We bite our lips now? Even now, in this predicament?’

‘Sorrgol has no clan-father here,’ said Aug. ‘You shame us in the company of–’

‘I shame you?’ Shadrak shook his head. ‘Is that really what matters now? The shame of speaking out? Fates above, we are shamed enough! The clan leaders are groping around, trying to recover something we have lost forever. By the time they reach a decision, we will be discovered and slaughtered. Or if they reach a decision, it will be the wrong one, and we will be slaughtered anyway!’

‘We need unification, Shadrak,’ said Aug. ‘For morale alone.’

‘I agree. But under one warleader, with one purpose.’

‘One leader?’ Aug laughed bitterly. ‘Who?’

‘You, perhaps?’

Aug spat and looked away.

‘No one wants it,’ said Shadrak. ‘None of us. Not a single captain, not a single Iron Father. That’s why the clan-fathers have taken the lead. They are projecting a sense of security, of unity, through our blood heritage. A reassurance in this time of loss through the bonds of fraternity. But it’s a group decision, so that no one shoulders the burden alone. No one bloody wants it! That’s why no one has stepped forward and called the rally around him.’ He looked at Aug. ‘No one wants to be seen as trying to replace the Gorgon. No one wants to replace Amadeus DuCaine. No one wants to be seen as that impertinent or disrespectful. I understand it.’

He paused.

‘But we need to raise the storm again. No one wants the command. No one wants to appear so arrogant as to imagine that he can assume the primarch’s role. But it’s not a matter of want, or pride, or vainglorious ambition. It’s a matter of necessity.’

‘This talk will get you killed, Terran-born,’ said Aug.

‘No!’ Shadrak snapped, pointing towards the monastery. ‘That talk will get us killed.’

He lowered his hand. The augmetic graft had not fully healed and still ached abysmally. The violence of the gesture had jarred it.

‘I have it on good medical authority that you can’t graft on a new head,’ he said.

Jebez Aug uttered a dry laugh. He shifted his flesh-spare frame and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘You don’t need to be a medical authority to know that,’ he replied.

‘I’m not suggesting that anyone pretend to be the Gorgon. I’m not proposing that anyone presumes he can command as well as Ferrus Manus, or attempt to be such a master. I am simply talking about focus of authority. One mind, one will, one iron drive strong enough to compel us for long enough to…’

‘To what?’

‘Do what needs to be done.’

‘Which is what? Survive?’

‘No.’ Shadrak looked out over the misted lake. ‘You can’t graft on a new head, but you can cut off an existing one.’ He turned to the Iron Father. ‘We need to focus long enough to get Horus. To cut off his head. We decapitate the traitors. We do to them what they did to us. We shatter them, and scatter them to the winds. We end this treachery.’

After a moment, he added, ‘Then we can die, for all I care.’

Embarkation had been ordered. Stormbirds and lifter ships rose from the surface of Aeteria and soared up to the waiting warships.

Shadrak had been posted to the strike cruiser Iron Heart. They were to escort the flotilla’s flagship Crown of Flame. Iron Father Aug gathered the officers of Clan Sorrgol while the ship prepared to make way. The clan-fathers had instructed the respected veteran Aug to take command.

‘I believe we have Meduson to thank for this,’ he said.

‘What have I done now?’

‘Our clan has the weakest numbers after Avernii,’ said Aug, ‘so we have been told by the Council to absorb the overspill into our formations. We are to coordinate with the Salamanders and Raven Guard squads as they are brought aboard, too.’

‘So we are bastardised while the other clan-companies stand more or less intact?’ asked Captain Lars Mechosa.

‘No one’s intact,’ whispered Shadrak.

‘I’d ask you to watch your words, brother,’ Augos Lumak said to Mechosa. ‘You absorb my Avernii too. Do we make you bastards?’

‘No, you make us fatherless,’ snarled Mechosa. ‘Where were the favoured Avernii at Isstvan? Saving the Gorgon? Why, no! They were dying at his feet.’

‘Damn your eyes!’ Lumak cried, rising from his seat.

‘Sit down, Lumak!’ Aug shouted. ‘Captain Lumak of Avernii! Sit yourself down! This clan-unit is mine to command.’

‘Then bring your foul-mouthed dogs to heel, Iron Father!’ Lumak snapped. ‘If you expect me to recognise your authority, then you damned well better exercise it and put Mechosa in his place.’

‘Captain Lumak–’

‘Or I’ll do it,’ Lumak added.

‘Oh, really?’ replied Mechosa. ‘I would love to see you try, you toothless cur.’

Lumak reached for his sword, but another hand clasped over his before he could draw the blade.

‘Don’t, Lumak,’ said Shadrak through gritted teeth. ‘I mean it. Don’t.’

‘Let go of me,’ said Lumak, looking Shadrak in the eye.

‘Yes, let him go!’ mocked Mechosa. ‘I yearn for some sport.’

‘Do not unsheathe your blade,’ Shadrak whispered into Lumak’s face. ‘Not in here. Not like this, against a brother. Once it’s drawn, it cannot be put away.’

‘You Sorrgol bastards,’ growled Lumak, ‘covering for each other, dishonouring the–’

‘My loyalty to Clan Sorrgol becomes more frayed with each passing hour,’ said Shadrak. ‘I would rather cut it and cast off my chosen name of Meduson. I would go back to my Terran birth name. My loyalty is only to the Tenth, and to the memory of the Gorgon.’

‘Then unhand me,’ said Lumak.

‘We’re in the middle of a civil war against traitor Legions,’ said Shadrak slowly. ‘Is this really time to start another one, inside our own?’

He looked at Mechosa.

‘Apologise,’ he said, ‘right now.’

Mechosa looked down and hesitated.

‘Civil war is the greatest crime humanity has known,’ Shadrak said to him. ‘Brother betraying brother? The very thought sickens me. What about you, Mechosa? Or are you of that disposition too? Do you find it a matter of nothing to draw arms against your own?’

Mechosa looked up, his eyes burning brightly. ‘Damn you, Shadrak,’ he said.

‘Already good and damned,’ Shadrak replied. His grip on Lumak’s sword hand had not diminished.

‘I’m no traitor,’ said Mechosa.

‘Then stop acting like you’re about to become one,’ said Shadrak.

Mechosa cleared his throat.

‘Brother Lumak, I apologise for my words. We have endured too much. Tempers are weak… Ahh, I make no excuses. There was no call for that.’

Lumak looked at Shadrak. ‘Unhand me, brother.’

Shadrak released his grasp. Lumak let go of his sword grip, walked around the table and offered his hand to Mechosa.

‘I would that all of Avernii had died, and more besides, if we could have saved the gene-sire,’ he said. ‘You were not there. You did not see. We did not shirk. We gave all we could. It was not enough. That fact will haunt me until the day I die, surrounded by the butchered corpses of traitors.’

Mechosa took his hand.

‘I do not doubt it. I would gladly join you in that death.’

Shadrak sat down as the officers retook their places. His graft throbbed from the effort of keeping Lumak’s hand in place.

A thin thread of watery blood sobbed from the cuff of his armour.

A fist thumped on the outer hatch. Shadrak rose, rebinding the blood-soiled wrap around his wrist. He was stripped to the waist, his torso and shoulders showing a hundred old scars. His flesh was inlaid with augmetic circuitry. On his right side, his entire rib-wall was an augmetic plate grafted to his flesh-spare bone. That had been part of him since the Battle of Rust.

‘Come!’ he called.

His quarters were small and cluttered. Space was limited on the Iron Heart.

The hatch opened with a scrape of metal on metal, and Jebez Aug stepped inside.

He looked around.

‘Your chamber is no better than mine,’ he remarked.

‘What do we need more than a deck to sleep on?’ asked Shadrak.

Aug smiled. ‘I sleep standing up.’

‘Are we underway?’ Shadrak asked. He knew that they were. He had felt the yawing slip of translation an hour before. His question had been a soft way of asking where they were going.

Aug nodded.

‘I need a Hand Elect,’ he said, cutting right to it.

To recompense Aug and Sorrgol for becoming a bastard clan, the Council had declared him acting warleader of the fleet under their authority. In practice, this simply meant he was responsible for the clan-fathers’ protection. But however compromised a warleader’s role was, a warleader always needed a reliable deputy.

‘You’re asking my advice?’

‘I considered Mechosa, of course, because of his record, but he’s an ill-tempered brute.’ Aug paused, and idly scratched the back of his shaven head. ‘I also considered Lumak, as a gesture of good faith towards the Avernii. After today’s altercation, I can’t favour one without offending the other.’

He looked at Shadrak.

‘By the way, my thanks for that,’ he added. ‘You defused a bad moment.’

‘I spoke my mind, Iron Father. That’s all.’

‘As a Hand Elect should.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, sir, you, sir.’

‘No one likes me,’ said Shadrak.

‘One of your most appealing qualities. You have been pretty blunt about your demand that somebody steps up and take the reins of authority.’

‘Yes, but not me. I have no ambitions above line command.’

‘Wasn’t that your very point?’ asked Aug. ‘No one wants the responsibility? The Gorgon’s gone, and none of us want to suggest we could take his place.’

‘Yes.’

Aug sat down on the cot.

‘Shadrak, you’re Terran-born. That means that we Medusans, no matter how brotherly we are, either think you’re superior because you were gene-reared before us, or dismiss you as not actually Medusa-born true-stock. You favour the welfare of the Salamanders and the Raven Guard more than most. You seem to understand them and liaise with them better than others. You speak your bloody mind all over the place. The clan-fathers despise you. And you’re the only man I know who seems to have a clear and singular vision of what we should be doing.’

‘Which is?’

‘Focusing command and killing that bastard Horus.’

‘So you were listening to me.’

‘Shadrak… for the dubious reasons I’ve just enumerated, you seem to me to be the wisest choice. I can’t think of a better Hand Elect, not when it comes to helping me keep what’s left of this clan in line.’

‘I suppose the Hand Elect would get a privileged look at our line orders?’

Aug reached into his thigh pouch and produced a data-slate. He tossed it to Shadrak. who caught it, instinctively, with his left hand, and winced.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Aug.

‘Graft’s still healing. The augmetic’s fine. The flesh is weak.’

He speed-read the slate’s summary.

‘Several aspects of this I don’t like already,’ he said.

‘I knew you wouldn’t,’ said Aug.

‘Can I consult the other Legions? Share this with them to get tactical feedback?’

‘My Hand Elect can do just as he damn well pleases,’ said Aug.

Dalcoth, Nuros and their seniors slapped their fists to their breastplates as Shadrak entered the chamber.

‘No need to salute,’ he said.

‘I think there is,’ said Nuros softly. ‘You are the Hand Elect. Discipline and respect remind us we’re not dead.’

They took their seats around an oval table. Shadrak placed the data-slate in front of him.

‘You’ve seen the data,’ he said.

‘Troubling,’ said Dalcoth.

‘Enlighten me.’

‘You know already,’ said Nuros.

‘Doesn’t hurt to hear someone else say it.’

‘Your clan-fathers are all transiting together on the Crown of Flame.’

‘The Council stays together,’ says Shadrak.

‘And forms one nice, big target,’ said Dalcoth. ‘Idiocy.’

‘Clan Council business and Clan Council words,’ said Shadrak. ‘They are collectively our leadership, now. No one has pre-eminence. They stay together. Consider them as one being – our leader.’

‘And one big target,’ Dalcoth repeated.

‘How did the Tenth ever conquer worlds?’ asked Nuros.

‘Brute force,’ said Shadrak. ‘And rigid discipline. It served us well. Superbly well. But we always had the Gorgon and DuCaine to remind us when to break the rules. Now we haven’t got the numerical strength to deliver any great degree of force, and we’re hidebound by the traditions of our Legion. The Clan Council has always gathered in times of need, to maintain a sense of union and solidarity, especially in the absence of the primarch or the lord commander. I think the custom was all well and good when those absences were temporary.’

‘Your Legion must unlearn their old ways,’ said Nuros.

‘I know.’

‘Or one of you must step up,’ Dalcoth added.

‘Jebez Aug has been named as warleader for this endeavour,’ said Shadrak.

‘An honorific only,’ said Nuros. ‘That is, if I understand the obscure and shifting lines of allegiance and fealty within your Legion. Jebez Aug answers to the Clan Council. He is only as much of a warleader as they will let him be.’

‘I know that too.’

‘You should also know,’ said Dalcoth, ‘with respect, I’m not sure how long the Eighteenth or the Nineteenth can stay with the Tenth Legion formations while this attitude prevails. Singular vision of war leadership is essential, even if it is then divided between autonomous splinter fleets.’

‘A council can only advise,’ said Nuros. ‘It can’t command. How long will it take them to reach any tactical decision in the heat of combat?’

‘Longer than usual,’ said Shadrak. ‘No one wants to make the call. Unless we can learn to graft heads back on.’

‘What?’ asked Dalcoth.

‘Nothing. No matter.’

‘Let’s move on,’ said Nuros.

‘Oh, let’s,’ agreed Shadrak.

Dalcoth tapped the slate’s screen. ‘And this is what we’re doing? This is our undertaking?’

Shadrak nodded. ‘Sub-vox communiqués have been received. Coded. Iron Tenth battle-cant. There’s an Iron Hands flotilla waiting in concealment in the solar shadow of Oqueth Minor. They have Raven Guard forces with them. They’re awaiting reinforcement. We’re moving to join them. Council’s orders. United, we’ll form a reasonably serious battlegroup.’

‘If I was Horus,’ said Dalcoth, ‘and I was hunting the remnants of my enemy, I’d want to lure them out of hiding. I’d pretend to be a friend and call for help.’

‘Is that Raven Guard tactics?’ asked Shadrak.

‘Sometimes.’

‘Do the traitors know Iron Tenth battle-cant?’ asked Nuros.

‘Why should they?’ asked Shadrak.

‘Why wouldn’t they?’ asked Dalcoth. ‘We study each other. We all do it. We observe the strengths and weaknesses of our fellow Legions. You can be sure as hell the traitors have done it. How else did they overwhelm us so entirely at Isstvan? We trusted them, and they were right inside our comm-nets.’

‘Fulgrim and your gene-sire were good comrades of old,’ said Nuros quietly, ‘as close as any brothers. There was trust there. But Fulgrim cut off the head of Ferrus Manus without a moment’s hesitation. By comparison to that foul act, how little do you think he would have agonised over stealing your ciphers?’

‘So this is a trap?’ asked Shadrak.

‘No,’ said Dalcoth. ‘We’re saying it could be a trap.’

‘I invite your recommendations,’ said Shadrak.

‘If it comes to a boarding action, or a counter-boarding response, we’ll do it the old way,’ said Jebez Aug. ‘Tubes. Launches. Ship-to-ship teleportation requires a vast expenditure of power, and it’s notoriously unreliable. We’re likely to lose a fifth of our forces to an unsecured teleport during combat.’

‘Don’t worry,’ muttered Shadrak, ‘they’ll mainly be Raven Guard.’

‘Your humour grows ever darker, brother,’ said Aug.

‘Are we going to employ their expertise or not?’

‘The clan-fathers will never approve it.’

‘They don’t have to. You have command. This ship is yours. You are the acting warleader.’

‘Is this the true advice of my Hand Elect?’ asked Aug.

‘You’d better hope so,’ replied Shadrak.

Aug pursed his lips, and then nodded.

‘Good,’ said Shadrak. ‘Next, tighter field control on the shields.’

‘Useless against long-range fire.’

‘But perfect for close quarters, which is what this is going to be if it happens. Next, all ship munitions set for impact detonation rather than timed or ranged. Next…’

Shadrak had never even made it onto the surface of Isstvan V. The clan-companies of Sorrgol had been in the second line with Amadeus DuCaine, an orbital reserve for the Gorgon’s main assault.

They had seen the horror blossom across the world below in disbelief. Then it had become a frenzy – first to extract any of their brethren still alive, then simply to fight their way clear. Ships had flamed out all around them. The heavy kill-ships of the IV and XVI Legions had come in gunning, raking their way across the orbital line.

The Ionside’s escape had been stalled by the cluster strike across her port side. With the drives off-line, they had been boarded. The Sons of Horus had poured in through the breach, hungry to take the killing to a personal level. They had fought in corridors where the decks were streaming with blood. They had fought in voided compartments where the space around them was full of spinning debris and wobbling bubbles of gore and fluid.

Shadrak made war with a bolter in his right hand, and a gladius in his left. His aim had always been better right-handed, his speed and strike superior with his left. That was where his strength and dexterity lay.

He’d just emptied the last of his bolt-rounds through the faceplate of an enemy legionary when the plasma blast mutilated and cooked his left hand. He had picked up his fallen gladius and fought on right-handed.

Not long after that, the frantic teams of enginseers had relit the cruiser’s drives and, with a series of desperate and unsteady burns, they had torn free of the enemy ship grappling them.

On the bridge, dripping blood that wasn’t all his own, Shadrak had taken the last message from Amadeus DuCaine.

His old friend. His commander from the very start.

‘The Gorgon’s dead!’ DuCaine had yelled at him over the link, the image of him fracturing and breaking up.

‘My lord?’

‘He’s dead! He’s gone! Fulgrim butchered him! They’re all dying, Shadrak! It’s a bloody massacre! An obscenity!’

‘My lord, move your ship clear of the line!’

‘Too late, boy! The drive’s gone for good. Hull plates are splitting. They’re inside with us! Bastard bloody–’

The image had blinked away for a second. Then it had come back.

‘–ember Rust!’

‘Say again, my lord.’

‘I said, do you remember Rust? Fates, you were there! You were one of the first, Shadrak – one of my Storm Walkers from the very start! Emperor’s bloody own!’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Then don’t you forget Rust, boy! Don’t you lie down and die! Not ever! You know what kind of horror that horde-fight was! Millions of the greenskin bastards! But we raised the storm. We raised the bloody storm! We prevailed!’

The lord commander’s voice had become a brittle screech. Shadrak had not been sure if it was through pain, or the strangling distortion of the vox.

‘My lord? Lord Commander DuCaine?’

The image blinked on and off, choppy and broken.

‘Raise the storm, Shadrak! Raise the bloody storm, my boy! Tell the Tenth to raise the storm and take every last one of the bastards to hell!’

The image had vanished. The screen had fuzzed with white noise.

Then there had been another, final blink. Amadeus DuCaine was screaming.

‘Don’t you forget me–’

Dead air.

Off the bow of Shadrak’s wounded cruiser, the lord commander’s warship had blinked out like a dying comm-link, and been replaced by the heat and light of a newborn sun.

Translating out of the warp, the survivor fleet decelerated towards Oqueth Minor. It was a pale, baleful star.

‘Contacts!’ the Master of Detection announced. ‘Thirty ships!’

‘Code match?’ asked Jebez Aug.

‘Codes confirmed.’

‘Of course they are,’ muttered Shadrak.

‘Profiles?’ asked Aug.

‘Pattern match. Several types. All Legiones Astartes fleet-craft.’

‘Which is in no way an assurance,’ Shadrak whispered to the Iron Father.

‘Ramp up visual resolution,’ Aug called.

‘Standby, commander… Hulls read as blackened. Fire damage. No visible insignia or serial numbers.’

‘You don’t like this, do you?’ Jebez Aug said to Shadrak.

‘I haven’t liked much of anything since my eighth birthday, warleader,’ Shadrak replied.

‘Is Dalcoth prepared?’

‘He is.’

‘I’ll lead them if it comes to it.’

‘No, warleader. That’s the Hand Elect’s job. Your place is here.’

‘Our flagship is hailing,’ reported the Master of Vox.

There was a long wait.

‘Codes exchanged. Cipher confirmed. Lead ship is identified as the Master of Iron. Clan-Father of Borrgos commanding. The Council is greeting.’

Aug tapped his fingers on the console impatiently. ‘Come on, come on…’

‘Request for our flagship to draw alongside the Master of Iron so that the Council can be united,’ reported the Master of Vox. ‘The request has been accepted by the clan-fathers.’

‘Batteries to power?’ asked the Ironwrought Master of Ordnance.

‘We dare not risk anything so provocative,’ replied Aug. ‘But ready the mechanical autoloaders. I want all weapons at my discretion inside ten seconds, if it comes to it. You understand me?’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘The flagship is under our protection,’ Aug reminded everyone.

On high resolution, they watched the tortuously slow progress of the Crown of Flame as it drew alongside the Master of Iron, and secured mooring lines and anchors.

‘Council is boarding,’ advised the Master of Vox.

They waited again.

‘Report?’ asked Aug.

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘It’s been ten minutes. Report.’

‘Vox is dark, sir.’

‘There will be ceremonials,’ said Mechosa. ‘This is a great day, after all.’

Shadrak was about to warn him about tempting fate, but the Master of Vox cut him off.

‘Acoustic echoes,’ he said, straining at his augmetic ear plugs, one hand clamped to the side of his head.

‘Origin?’ barked Aug.

‘From inside the Crown of Flame. Flattening the signal. I’m trying to wash it to get a clean signature. It sounds like… cheering.’

‘I told you,’ smirked Mechosa.

‘Cheering,’ the Master of Vox repeated, and then halted. ‘And gunfire.’

‘Arm the batteries!’ Aug roared. ‘Shields! Ahead half! Battle stations!’

‘Contact group is arming weapons!’ the Master of Detection yelled. ‘Gun ports opening! Their batteries are charging!’

A light licked up inside the Crown of Flame. It stuttered, then grew brilliant, lancing out from every port and launch bay. The flagship began to buckle, as if it was being twisted and wrung out by huge, invisible hands. The hull split and geysers of fire rushed up through the cracks, forming great plumes of burning gas and interior atmospherics.

‘Target and fire!’ Aug yelled. ‘Target and fire!’

The Iron Heart’s deck shivered beneath their feet as the main batteries began to spit. The blackened enemy ships were already purring forwards and unloading storms of ordnance. Space lit up in a blinding flicker show.

Close quarters, Shadrak thought.

The rest of the warleader’s fleet was firing too. Formation against formation, point-blank in starship terms. The flagship was already dead, a burning ruin slowly tumbling away from the enemy’s mooring lines and showering incandescent dust, ash and debris into the void. The cruiser alongside the Iron Heart shuddered and tore open under the enemy bombardment.

‘Get us closer,’ Aug ordered. ‘Gut them!’

‘Raise the storm,’ Shadrak whispered.

He looked at the main oculus screen and shuddered. Hololithic projectors upon the prows of the approaching enemy ships had lit up, unfurling bright banners of light.

Each one, in gold and red, revealed the searing Eye of Horus.

The screen blinked.

‘Intercept signal!’ the Master of Vox called over the general chaos of voices yelling orders.

‘Keep firing!’ Aug shouted.

‘Intercept, sir!’ the Master of Vox repeated.

The screen blinked again. A face appeared. It was cold and expressionless, framed in black armour. There was no mistaking the Cthonian aspect of the features: a true son of Horus.

The vox crackled as the image spoke.

‘I am Tybalt Marr,’ he said. ‘You are declared an enemy without reservation. Your extinction is my undertaking. I offer you a plain choice, in simple respect of our old fraternity. Surrender now, and be rewarded with a swift and relatively painless death, or fight on and receive the most excruciating doom imaginable. You have thirty seconds to answer.’

Jebez Aug looked at Shadrak. ‘Hand Elect?’

‘My warleader?’

‘Board the bastard. Bring me his head.’

‘Gladly. What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to answer him.’

Shadrak ran to the bridge exit, calling out commands into his vox-link.

Behind him, he heard Jebez Aug open a channel and then begin the most profane stream of invective ever uttered by one of the Iron Tenth.

It was as furious and blistering as the void-war around them.

The ship-to-ship fighting was as intense as any that had occurred above cursed Isstvan. There were fewer ships, but they were so closely packed it was as though they were being swept by artillery bombardment from batteries of monstrous guns. Ships burned. Everything shook. Light-bursts bloomed so brightly that they overwhelmed legionary auto-senses. Rail guns spat. Laser batteries and hull mounts streamed ropes and stutters of light. Hard-round cannons hosed shell loads into shields and hulls, or countermeasured rushing shoals of missiles.

Aug drove his fleet directly in amongst the enemy ships, maximising the effect of his tightly calibrated shields and impact-detonating warheads.

He had been designated warleader, the escort protector of the flagship, and thus, according to structure, was de facto second-in-command to the Clan Council.

And the Council was gone.

‘Are you ready?’ Shadrak asked as he entered the tele-portarium.

Dalcoth nodded. ‘All four bays are set and ready for transfer, Hand Elect,’ he replied.

Shadrak eyed the mix of battle-ready Raven Guard and Iron Hands on the transmission platform.

He opened his vox. ‘Warleader,’ he said.

‘Speak,’ Aug replied.

‘Request permission to divert power to the teleportation systems. The main batteries will be deprived to the extent of forty-four per cent for the next two minutes.’

‘Permission granted.’

Shadrak looked at the Master of Transfer as he took his place on the platform beside Dalcoth who drew his bolt pistol.

‘Do it!’ he ordered.

They lost nineteen of their force in the transfer, transmitted atoms scattered like dust by the enemy shielding, or befouled by materialisation inside the dense hull plating.

The interior of the XVI Legion warship smelled of smoke and blood. The lighting was on red reserve, with primary power diverted to weapons and shields.

Coming out of the winding shock of teleport, Shadrak glanced around to get his bearings. Immediately, he saw two Raven Guard planted deep into the deck by mis-materialisation. Both were dead, blood streaming from their dislocated neck seals.

‘Move!’ Dalcoth yelled.

Shadrak ignited his visor’s preysight. The corridor became a luminous green cave. He saw streaks and ribbons of glare as gunfire erupted.

Sons of Horus, night-black in green wash.

Target one. His flickering overlay crosshairs darted. He put a mass-reactive round into a faceplate at ten metres. The traitor’s head detonated in a flash that Shadrak’s auto-senses read as whizzing shards of ceramite and hot, cooking chunks of bone.

Parts of the ceiling blew out. Fizzling power cables slithered out, jerking like snakes. Dalcoth engaged two of the Sons of Horus, gutting one with his chainaxe, then twisting away from the toppling figure in a neat sidestep to blast a bolt-round into the chest of the other.

The legionary flew backwards, crunched off the wall plating, and left a liquid smear of blood and pulped organs on the panel as he slumped onto his side.

Another came at Dalcoth. Shadrak stepped in and sheared the traitor’s head in half cross-wise with his gladius. Blood jetted into the air as the half-headless warrior took a couple of stumbling steps and then collapsed.

Despite the binding and bracing, Shadrak’s left wrist stung with the jarring impact of the blow.

‘Forward!’ he ordered.

Iron Hands Terminators in Tartaros-pattern wargear led the way along the spinal hall, heavy flamers hosing ahead of them. Breacher legionaries flanked the group, their panoplies locked. Shells and bolts rebounded from the shield wall. Then Shadrak heard the shriek of multi-meltas and felt the chest-pummelling thump of heavy bolters.

Heavy contact. The heaviest.

Shadrak passed the fallen form of a Salamander who had been shredded by a volkite caliver. He loosed off mass-reactives into the defensive lines ahead of him. Something energy-laden and sensitive detonated, throwing bodies and deck plates into the air.

‘They have force superiority!’ Nuros voxed.

‘Agreed,’ Dalcoth cut in. ‘If our objective was to take the ship, it is no longer viable.’

‘We’ve barely begun!’ snapped Shadrak. ‘Are you suggesting we abort?’

‘Hit and run tactics,’ Dalcoth replied. ‘We hit, we run. That way, we live to fight again.’

‘Sometimes, with respect, your tactics sound like cowardice,’ replied Shadrak. ‘How did you Raven Guard ever conquer worlds?’

‘By knowing when to fight and when to retreat. It’s called tactical restraint.’

‘Abort denied.’

‘Then select a new objective, Hand Elect!’ Dalcoth’s voice was temporarily drowned out by gunfire.

‘We could loop back to the drive chambers and attempt to trigger an overload,’ Nuros voxed. ‘My assault group has sufficient charges.’

‘Denied. Objective is now Tybalt Marr’s head,’ said Shadrak.

‘How is that strategic?’ yelled Dalcoth.

‘It’s symbolic. It matters.’

‘How did the Tenth ever conquer worlds…?’

‘Exactly like this,’ replied Shadrak Meduson.

Shadrak Meduson of the Clan Sorrgol, Iron Tenth, Terran-born Storm Walker, did not achieve his objective.

Not that day, at least.

He was denied by circumstance, by fate, and specifically by a Sons of Horus Terminator that Shadrak’s visor display identified as Xorn Salbus.

Shadrak, supported by Raven Guard and Iron Hands Breachers, fought as far as the enemy ship’s main bridge interlock. Terminator life-guards met him there, appalled and astonished that the loyalists’ boarding effort had cut so far and so deep.

Volkite and bolter fire sliced into the boarding party. Bodies, and body parts, began to pile up in the narrow entrance to the interlock annex. There was turmoil, a deadlock of wicked crossfire.

In cover, returning fire, Shadrak felt his vox chime.

It was Aug. ‘Shadrak!’

‘My lord!’

‘The day has turned against us, captain. Abort your efforts and jump out.’

‘Negative. We are too close. I can smell Marr’s fear-sweat!’

Shadrak ducked back, and slammed home a fresh clip.

‘I repeat, abort,’ voxed Jebez Aug, ‘We’ve crippled seven of their ships, for the loss of nine of ours. But a relief force flying Third Legion colours has just translated into the system. They’re eighteen clicks out and closing fast. Shadrak, we’re outnumbered four to one now. We can break and run, or we can die.’

‘My lord…’

‘Aren’t they the tactics your Raven Guard friends recommended? We’ve hurt them, and hurt them properly. Let that be enough. Abort and withdraw now, or we leave without you. I’m breaking the grapple lines.’

‘Abort. Understood,’ Shadrak voxed back.

He knew it was the right decision. In the fever of close combat, his blood was up, and that was clouding his judgment. A full measure of vengeance was never going to be taken in a single day. He had to live, so that he could avenge again.

Still, the temptation to press on just a few minutes longer and take Marr’s head as a trophy…

His vox chimed again. This time, it was Mechosa.

‘Meduson! Hand Elect! Promise me you’re aborting the raid now!’

‘Mechosa?’

‘The Iron Heart’s bridge is hit! Two salvos. Warleader Aug is dead. I–’

A roar of blast wash and static drowned out his voice.

Aug was dead. According to the ordained structure, after the Council and the warleader, Shadrak was, by default, next in command succession.

He was warleader now. He had to go where he was needed before the entire hierarchy collapsed in disarray.

‘Abort! Abort now!’ he yelled. ‘All boarding squads trigger abort!’

‘Abort confirmed!’ Dalcoth called.

‘Confirmed!’ voxed Nuros.

Further responses echoed in from the X Legion’s own boarding officers.

Shadrak fired to cover his men as they fell back. He moved clear of the heavy iron bulkhead so that the teleport could get the cleanest possible lock on him.

The air was thick with smoke and blood mist. A black-plated Terminator loomed out of it.

Xorn Salbus.

The Butcher Salbus, whose reputation for brutality had spread beyond the ranks of his own Legion long before he had turned traitor.

The monster swung his chain-blade.

Smaller and lighter, Shadrak evaded, emptying his clip into the giant’s chest plating. Salbus reeled back in a fireball of exploding mass-reactives. Blood dribbled from his peppered, punctured chest, but he remained on his feet.

Shadrak didn’t wait for the Terminator to swing his blade again. He lunged forwards and drove his gladius tip-first into the breastplate where it was compromised.

The plating caved like honeycomb. The gladius cleaved through Salbus’s chest, clean through, until Shadrak’s plunging fist was buried half a forearm deep in the warrior’s oozing, throbbing innards.

Salbus shuddered and began to sink. Shadrak tried to pull his hand and sword free. They were wedged tight by the inward-punched ceramite plate.

Sons of Horus were closing all around him. Shadrak saw them, shadows in the smoke. Dalcoth and others were desperately voxing his name.

He pulled again, unable to relax his grip on the gladius in order to slide his hand free.

Salbus fell to one side, dragging Shadrak down with him, who fought to release himself.

One of the Sons of Horus emerged from the smoke, but was immediately blown off his feet. Nuros appeared, blasting into the choking vapour with a captured volkite caliver. There were two of the Iron Tenth boarders and a Raven Guard with him.

‘Come the hell on!’ Nuros yelled.

Shadrak wrenched again. ‘Trigger the extraction!’ he ordered. ‘Go!’

He pulled as hard as he could. Pain flared up his arm, white hot. He felt flesh tear and graft bonds shear.

He pulled his arm free, and left his augmetic hand behind in Salbus’s chest.

With the loss of one more ship, the loyalists broke from the void battle and made a jump at emergency velocities. They left a half-mauled enemy fleet and a debris halo of burning hulls in their wake.

Jebez Aug was not dead. The strike on the bridge had taken his right arm and leg, and ruptured several organs. But he had survived.

‘He will make recovery in time,’ the Apothecaries told Shadrak, ‘but it will be months, and he will be more flesh-spare by the end of the process.’

Shadrak sat at the Iron Father’s bedside, watching the vital monitors flicker.

Aug stirred.

‘Shadrak…’ He smiled weakly. ‘Did you bring me the head?’

‘I failed to do that, warleader,’ Shadrak replied. ‘Another time.’

‘We tasted some vengeance today,’ murmured Aug.

‘Too little, and at a terrible cost. But it is a start and, if nothing else, we have learned what we must do from here on. We have learned what it means to be shattered, and the path we must follow if we are to achieve our vengeance.’

‘Singular focus of command,’ said Aug.

‘Yes, that. For this force, and for any broken unit like us. But more than that. We must learn to pace ourselves. Tactical restraint. To hit and run, and not to be greedy and trust in overwhelming power as of old. We must learn the tactics and techniques of those thrown in with us and respect them. We must take our iron and alloy it with the mettle of the others who were shattered alongside us. We must mix our broken strength with other broken strengths to forge a new, unbroken edge.’

‘Spoken like a warleader,’ whispered Aug.

‘I am Captain of the Tenth Company, my lord, and you are living yet.’

‘In some degree,’ Aug smiled. ‘Shadrak, I will not be fit for command for a long while yet. These days are too crucial. The line of authority must be constant and unwavering. There must be continuity.’

‘Yes, but–’

‘You know this is the truth of it, Shadrak. You have always been sharper on tactics than me. See the truth of it now, and do not fight me on this. I am too tired to beat you into submission.’

Shadrak smiled. It was the first time he had truly smiled in a long while.

‘I see the truth of it,’ he replied. ‘But I want it recorded that this is not something I ever asked for.’

Aug nodded.

‘That will be recorded. Shadrak, those who aspire to command are seldom the ones best fit to take it. Since Isstvan, you have proven yourself to be the most clear-sighted of us all. The right hour chooses the right man. The right man emerges in the right hour. This is your time, Shadrak. The Tenth Legion needs you. Consider it destiny, if you will. And it may be unwanted by you, but you are the one who must seize it. You are not presuming to take the Gorgon’s place – the void he left has called you to this duty. No one will oppose you, or they will answer to me. Help me up.’

Shadrak eased Aug a little more upright with his good hand.

‘Witness this!’ Aug called out.

Dalcoth, Nuros, Lumak and Mechosa entered from the outer chamber.

‘My last act as warleader is to name Shadrak Meduson as warleader of this battle group. Bear witness, and honour him with your loyal service.’

They nodded and slapped their fists to their chestplates.

‘I will need a good Hand Elect,’ Shadrak said, rising. He looked at the others. ‘I will need the finest force captains too. I want the four of you, and any men, officers or line troops, that you choose to recommend. This is a moment to trust on experience, not the rote of seniority.’

He raised his fist in the old salute of Unity.

‘My first act as warleader is to name Iron Father Jebez Aug as my Hand Elect. If you will serve, brother, and suffer the indignity of our reversal.’

‘No indignity, but I am not fit,’ said Aug.

‘You will be. Until you are on your feet again, these four will jointly serve in the role of Hand Elect as a… What is it they call it again?’

‘A Mournival,’ said Dalcoth.

‘Ah,’ said Shadrak. ‘Just so. But I dislike that term. You are the four quarters of this whole, until Jebez Aug is remade.’

They left the chamber to let Aug rest.

‘Go to the bridge,’ Shadrak said to Mechosa. ‘Open the wide-band comms, and send a direct signal. Iron Tenth cipher. For the attention of Tybalt Marr, son of Horus. Let the message read, “Days will pass. Years perhaps. But know this, traitor. I will raise the storm, and I will find you, and I will take your head. This I swear by the blood of the Iron Tenth and the memory of my gene-sire. Shadrak Meduson, warleader.” Understood?’

‘You would put your name to this?’ Mechosa asked. ‘Why?’

‘Because a shattered Legion of survivors inspires no dread,’ Meduson replied. ‘So we will give them a name to fear. Each strike we make, each blow we deliver, we will leave my name in blood until it breeds in them a terror for their very souls. The Sons of Horus are no match for the wronged sons of Medusa.’

Goran Gorgonson cleaned the ruptured stump and began his repairs. Ceiling fans breathed cold air into the apothecarion chamber.

‘Is there pain?’ Gorgonson asked.

‘None at all,’ replied Shadrak.

The Apothecary showed him the new bionic he was about to graft in. ‘A better design. Superior function and strength. If you let it bed in this time.’

‘I can’t promise anything,’ replied Shadrak.

Gorgonson lit the surgical laser to excise splintered bone. He had alloy mixed ready to remodel the bone ends and make them fit to receive the graft.

‘What was your name?’ he asked as he worked.

‘What?’

‘Your birth name, earth-brother. From before. Before you were Meduson, before you and I were made Terran-born Storm Walkers.’

‘Smyth,’ said Shadrak.

‘Smyth?’

‘You were from Solar Stellax as I recall, Goran. Smyth is a name all too common in Old Albia where I was raised.’

‘But you appreciate the deeper meaning? A worker of metal? A craftsman with a forge?’

‘I do. I seem to have a fondness for symbolism.’

‘You’ve forged something powerful today, Shadrak.’

‘I will forge better tomorrow, Brother-Apothecary,’ said Shadrak Meduson, ‘and the day after, and, even better still, the day after that. Give me my hand, Gorgonson. Make me whole and give me my hand, so that one day soon I might close my fists around the throat of Horus Lupercal and choke him until his filthy light goes out.’

After the repair was finished, Gorgonson left Shadrak alone.

His arm bound to his chest, the new warleader rose from the surgery cot, and walked to one of the chamber’s thick-lensed ports.

He stared out. He saw only infinite blackness.

He knew that somewhere in its enfolding embrace, lost and scattered in the darkness, were the souls of the ones that had lived, souls that he would struggle to unite until death claimed him.

And out there too, blacker than the void by far, were the treacherous souls of the ones he would destroy.

UNMARKED

‘No man ever steps in the same river twice,

For it’s not the same river, and it’s not the same man.’

– attributed to the ancient Herakleitos

[mark: –?]

He is known as Oll. That is what he gives as his name. Back on Calth, some people in the community used to call him Pious, because, in a largely godless age, he still believed in the old faith.

There are five people travelling with Oll. They are starting to believe in things too, the sights they have seen: gods, daemons, heavens, hells, all the apocalyptic fire and lightning of the old-time faith, but real after all.

Oll Persson – the Oll is short for Ollanius – has been his name for a long time.

Oll Persson has been his name for longer than any of his travelling companions can even imagine.

[mark: –?]

They move upcountry, the six of them, climbing scarps and stony ridges that seem to rise above clouds, not because the clouds are low but because the ridges are impossibly high. There are no hills like that on Calth. They are not on Calth, not anymore. They all know it.

They have been walking for about two days. It is hard to know exactly how long. There is no night and no day. Zybes has an old-style wrist-chron, and its hands are spinning backwards all the while. Rane and Krank have Army-issue timepieces, steel dials on rubberised black straps. The timepieces have been reading blank since they all stepped through the cut: blank, no time mark, no time at all, no nothing, just glowing runes --:--, flashing on and off.

Trumpeters boom in the valley below, under the cloud. They have only seen them from a distance. Krank dubbed them ‘trumpeters’ when the travellers first heard the booming calls. Whatever the trumpeters really are, they are probably too old to have a human name.

‘Keep going,’ says Oll Persson. ‘Push on.’

[mark: –?]

The day Calth died, the day the XVII Legion turned traitor and ritually murdered the planet Calth, Oll Persson took a knife and cut a hole in the universe.

He cut a hole, as though he were making a slit in the side of a tent, and he led the five of them through it, and in so doing, he saved them. The alternative was to stay behind on Calth to face a death more painful, more grisly, more fundamentally cruel than it was possible to imagine. The XVII had turned on the Imperium. They had massacred a world, murdered their brothers, slaughtered billions of innocents, and spat venom in the face of the God-Emperor.

To help them commit these crimes, the XVII had brought with them…

…well… what? What had they brought with them? Daemon is the only appropriate human word, but it is scarcely adequate. There are non-human names for the things that the XVII brought to Calth, but none of the travelling companions want to know what those names are.

All five of them – two Imperial Army troopers, a labourer, a girl, and a servitor – would prefer to forget most of the things they already know rather than know any more. They witnessed things on Calth that almost made the sight of Oll Persson cutting a slit in the universe with a ragged athame dagger seem normal.

He saved them. He took them with him to escape the planet’s death. They did not bother to ask where he was going, or how he knew to go about making the journey. They trusted him.

Even before he took out the ragged athame dagger and, right in front of their eyes, cut a hole in time and space, they suspected that Oll Persson was far more than just a grizzled old Imperial Army veteran-turned-farmer.

The five companions are Trooper Bale Rane and his friend Trooper Dogent Krank, both of the Numinus 61st, both raw and inexperienced; Hebet Zybes, who had done piecework on Oll’s farm during the harvest; Katt, the young woman who had done likewise, and who had been so traumatised by the XVII’s attack she could barely speak; and Oll’s old heavy-duty agricultural servitor Graft, who could only ever call him ‘Trooper Persson’.

‘Trooper Persson? What are we now, Trooper Persson?’ asks Graft. They are toiling up the dry scree scarp, skittering loose stones back down into the cloud behind them. Graft’s augmetic voice is like a hollow, badly-tuned vox.

‘Are we survivors, Trooper Persson?’

Oll shakes his head.

‘No, Graft,’ he replies. ‘We’re pilgrims,’

[mark: –?]

The trumpeters are louder. They are getting closer.

[mark: –?]

A sun rises, a local star. It is hot blue in an onyx sky. It is not Calth’s sun – not the Ushkul Thu, the sacrifice star that the XVII’s sorcerers made from Calth’s sun.

It is another sun, in another system, in another part of the everywhere. The six of them have walked for two, unmarked days, and they are on the other side of the galaxy.

The journey’s only just beginning.

Oll gets out his notebook, his pendulum and his compass. He keeps the last two in an old lho-leaf tin. The compass looks as though it is made of silver and designed to resemble a human skull. Neither of these things is strictly true. He hinges the silvery cranium open and peers at the dial. He has a watchmaker’s loupe to help him see the tiny inscriptions.

The pendulum looks like it is made of jet, but it is not. It is warm in his hand.

An old friend gave them both to him, to help him find his way.

The notebook is half-filled with tight handwriting. It is all his, but it has changed over the years, because there have been so many years. There is a chart in the back. He folds it out. It is a twenty-two thousand year-old copy of a chart that was already twenty-two thousand years old when the copy was made. These distances of time seem vast, and impossibly precise, but Oll can be precise. He was there when the copy was made. He made it, on Terra.

The chart shows a wind rose of cardinal points. Oll hangs the pendulum over the compass, records the metrical interaction of both instruments in his notebook, and consults the chart.

‘Africus,’ he announces.

‘What?’ asks Zybes.

‘We need to change direction,’ says Oll.

[mark: –?]

Mountain winds coil like snakes around the ridges and scarps. There is an intermittent rain in the wind, and it tastes like blood.

‘The rain tastes of blood,’ Bale says, a finger to his lips.

‘So don’t taste it then,’ says Oll.

‘He makes a good point,’ Krank says. He laughs, to show that his spirits are still up. It is like him calling the trumpeters trumpeters. He is just trying to keep them cheerful.

It is not really working.

Bale keeps a steady hold of his gun. That reassures him. It reassures him more than his friend Krank’s banter. The gun is solid, the last solid thing in the world, whichever world it is.

The gun is an Imperial Army-issue lasrifle, with a wooden stock and furniture, and blue metal fittings. It is clean and brand new. Bale has a musette bag of clips to fit it. It is not the shoddy hand-me-down weapon he was issued with at the founding.

Krank has a similar, spotless weapon. So does Zybes, though his is the cut-down bull-pup carbine. Katt has a short-frame autopistol. They all got their weapons from the same place.

It was just after they had stepped through and left Calth, left that night-shrouded beach where the air rang with the distant whoops and howls of the things they call, for sanity’s sake, daemons. It was the first place Oll took them to, via another knife-slash in the world. It was lowland, a fen. There had been a battle there, a terrible running skirmish through the reedy dykes and water-logged channels. There were bodies all around, two- or three-days dead, turning black and bloating in the heat. The uniforms they were stretching and straining were those of an Imperial Army unit that neither Bale nor Krank knew had been serving on Calth.

‘This isn’t Calth,’ Oll told them. ‘This is another where, another when. Don’t ask me. I don’t recognise it.’

He bent down, fished a set of dog tags out from under a swollen throat.

‘Mohindas Eleventh,’ he said. He sighed. ‘Mohindas Eleventh. God. Wiped out, to a man, by the Nephratil on Diurnus, in the sixth year of the Great Crusade.’

‘That was more than two centuries ago,’ said Bale.

‘These bodies are fresh!’ Krank exclaimed. He looked at the inflated meat-sack at his feet and shrugged. ‘Fresh-ish. A day old. Two maybe.’

‘They are,’ said Oll, rising.

‘But–’ said Krank.

‘As I said,’ said Oll. ‘Another where, another when.’

They looked at him.

‘I don’t make this stuff up,’ he said, shrugging. ‘I just endure it, like you. I’ll check the compass. We might have to change direction again.’

‘Why do you trust that compass thing?’ asked Zybes.

‘Why wouldn’t I?’ asked Oll. ‘It’s God’s own compass.’

Katt was looking at the bodies littering the ground, the brooks, the ditches.

‘We should stop here,’ she said. ‘We should bury them all. They deserve respect.’

It was only the second or third thing they had ever heard her say, and they were already beginning to realise that Katt spoke rarely, but what she said was honest.

‘We should,’ Oll said, nodding. ‘Heaven knows, you’re right, but this is another when, and another war. Trust me, girl. There’s a terrible darkness coming, and it will leave so many dead, so very, very many, there won’t be enough left alive to bury them all, even if they dig day and night. Only thing we can do is keep going, and fight for the living. We don’t have time to care about the dead. Sorry, that’s the way it is.’

Katt started to cry a little, but she nodded. Just as they had come to see the honesty in her infrequent pronouncements, she had come to appreciate the honesty in him.

Oll stooped again, took a mag clip out of the corpse’s bandolier, and checked the fit to his old, old service weapon.

‘Gun up,’ he said, filling his bag with recharges.

They hesitated.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘These poor souls don’t need guns where they are going. We need them more. Besides, these are new patterns – Crusade issue, brand new, just two or three years old, not like the re-furb crap they handed out at Numinus. We’re lucky. Where we are right now, these are the best and newest weapons we could get our hands on. So get your hands on them.’

They helped themselves. Bale had to get the pistol for Katt, and persuade her it was all right to touch it. That is was ‘okay’ to touch it. ‘Okay’ was an odd word, but Oll Persson used it, and they had learned that it meant ‘all right’.

Oll stood to one side and smelled the wind. He thought about what he had just told them. We’re lucky. Where we are right now, these are the best and newest weapons we could get our hands on.

‘Very damn lucky,’ he said softly to the wind. ‘Who made sure we’d wind up here?’

[mark: –?]

The trumpeters sound, booming up from the invisible valleys below. They all know that there are better places to be.

‘Can’t you make another hole?’ asks Zybes, wiping rain off his face.

‘A hole?’ Oll asks, frowning.

‘A cut… With that knife of yours? This isn’t a good fix to be in, is it? Don’t pretend it is.’

Oll Persson shrugs.

‘It’s not as bad a fix as Calth.’

There is something else he was going to say, but he bites it off. The trumpeters sound again – ominous, like cosmic punctuation.

‘I can’t just cut where I like,’ Oll says, making a motion with his hand as if the athame is in his grip. ‘It doesn’t work like that. I have to be in the right place, and make the right cut. Places touch each other in the oddest ways. I cut through the skin of one and we’re into another.’

They are all looking at him.

‘It’s complicated. It’s not even an exact science. Someone taught me the rudiments a long time ago.’

‘Who?’ asks Zybes.

‘How long ago?’ asks Katt, which is a better question.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ replies Oll, not answering either of them. ‘The point is, it’s not an exact science. And the someone who taught me the rudiments… also told me it was a terrible thing ever to have to do it, that it was something no one would choose to do unless there was no other choice.’

‘Because lives depended on it?’ asks Bale.

Oll shakes his head.

‘No,’ he says, ‘much more important than that.’

He starts walking again, crunching up the scarp in the dying light. He knows he has said too much, and that he has discouraged them. The veteran soldier in him – in fact, there are several veteran soldiers in him – knows better than that. In a ‘fix’ like this, a decent commander does not spit on morale. He cannot take back what he has already said, but he could cheer them by saying more, cheer them or distract them.

‘The winds,’ he says. ‘That’s the key to it. That’s the key to any voyage, as any seafarer will tell you. You follow the winds, follow where they blow.’

He glances back at them.

‘Not these winds,’ he says, raising a palm to feel the cold mountain air run between his fingers. ‘I don’t mean how the air moves. I mean the primordial winds, the winds of the empyrean, the winds that keep the ever-ocean tossing and thrashing.’

He starts walking again.

‘I use the Romanii names,’ he says, ‘because they’re the ones I was taught. Right now, we’re following Africus, following where that wind blows. It’s a south-wester. That’s why the Romanii called it Africus. But the Grekans, they knew it as Lips, and the Franks, they called it Vuestestroni.’

He looks back at them again.

‘See?’ he asks.

Krank raises his hand, like a child in a scholam class.

‘Yes?’ asks Oll.

‘My question would be, what are Romaniis?’ says Krank.

Oll sighs. He wonders if they have time for him to answer that, and he doubts it, because they do not have any time for anything at all.

‘Never mind,’ he says.

‘So… we follow this wind, this Akrifus,’ says Bale Rane.

‘Africus,’ Katt corrects.

‘Yeah, that,’ says Bale. ‘We follow this wind to… where?’

‘To the place where we make the next cut. To the next place where the skin between worlds is thin.’

‘Providing the trumpeters don’t catch us first?’ asks Krank. He laughs, a piping ha-ha-ha that the breeze lifts away.

‘Pretty much,’ says Oll.

[mark: –?]

They sleep under a fold of rock near the summit of a ridge. Oll sits watch. He wants to push on, but he can tell how tired they are. They need food. They need water that does not taste like blood. They need sleep. They need a good, clean cut that will take them away from the trumpeters.

Oll does not think of them as trumpeters. Last time he met anything like them, creatures of a similar breed, it was multiple lifespans ago in the Cyclades, and they were called sirens. It is just another word, no better than trumpeters, no worse. The only thing Oll knew then, and Iason agreed at the time, was that the creatures did not come from the Cyclades. They did not belong there, no more than the trumpeters belong here. They were from an elsewhere that had nothing to do with this world or any other. They were like a damp or a rot that had leaked through a wall from outside.

The noises they made, they would drive a man mad if he had to listen to them for long. They would make him forget himself, make him forget–

[mark: –?]

Oll wakes up. He does not know how long he has been out. An hour? Just a few minutes? The others are still dead to the world. It is as cold as a tomb’s vault under the rock. It is dark, and there is no sound except the pattering of the rain.

He had been dreaming. The remnants of the dream are still hooked in his mind, like splinters in skin: hard, fresh sunlight on moving water; light dappling; the sea green like glass. The ship is a proud ship and will be remembered for so long that it becomes a myth. There is an eye painted on the prow, a common mark in those days. All the galley warships in the Middle Sea had them.

There is laughter from the deck. Oll feels the hot sun on his bare, tanned back. He can hear Orfeus playing the sort of melody that would keep out the noises of the sirens.

It is a good life in that dream, that memory. They were better days, a better adventure than the one he has embarked upon. This new, unmarked journey, knifing a route from world to world, it will not be remembered. It will not pass into myth like that long sail to Colchis and back. This journey will not even be remembered long enough to be forgotten.

It might be more important, though. It might be more important than any adventure he has undertaken in his life.

His lives.

Oll realises he was thinking of it as his last journey, his last adventure. He realises he is expecting it to be the final exploit of his life, the closing act, one last brave outing in the twilight of his time. Except, by any means of measurement, he is supposed to live forever; unless some agency stops his life.

So, why is he thinking so fatalistically?

The last splinters of the dream are still there: the eye on the prow of the boat, staring and hard, beautiful and kohl-edged, like Medea’s enchanting eyes, but terrible too. A single eye. These days, that mark means another thing. He saw it in the last dream he had, the dream where John came to him and showed him Terra on fire. That cursed eye is why this will be his last adventure.

‘Damn you, John,’ he whispers.

He gets up, rubbing his hands, his arms. They have to get moving, push on. They have been down too long. They are getting too cold, too damp, losing too much core temperature.

And the trumpeters have gone quiet. That is not a good sign.

‘Get up!’ he says, trying to rouse them. His hands are numb. It is so dark.

‘Get up, come on!’ he cries. ‘We have to push on.’

No one is stirring, except Graft, who activates at the sound of Oll’s voice.

‘Trooper Persson?’

‘Wake them all up. We have to move,’ Oll says.

Something skitters on the stones out in the darkness.

Oll’s hands are numb, but he takes up his rifle.

‘Get up!’ he cries. Still no one stirs. He aims in the air and fires a shot.

‘Wake up!’ he says.

Now they have.

[mark: –?]

They are all cold and wet, and scared, woken from unfriendly dreams to an even unfriendlier reality. Katt is crying, but it is the cold not the stress. Krank is tearful too, because he has had enough of it all and it is nasty. Oll urges them up the slope, over the back of the ridge.

There are things on the scarp behind them. Trumpeters, Oll guesses. Even trumpeters know that it is sometimes most productive to stay quiet. The damn sirens knew that too.

The ridge is a black hump ahead, suggesting better light beyond. Dawn, maybe? They crest it, and see a paleness, a pale blueness, in the sky behind. They go over the ridge. Oll has Bale lead the way, and takes the tail spot himself, swinging back to watch for things pursuing them. Parts of the darkness move, but not so much he can make a target.

‘God help us,’ he says. He does not doubt God’s plan, because he is a man of faith, but sometimes he thinks God has put them up to all of this. All the holy books, all of them from every creed he has ever studied, they are full of stories about souls being made to suffer and endure, just so they can attain salvation.

This is his time to be Job, his time to be Sisyphus, his time to be Prometheus, to be Odin, to be Osiris. This is his time to endure.

What is more, it is not even his own salvation he is suffering for.

Oll thinks he should not have to be tested any more, not after the life he has led.

They go down the slope and onto the back of the next scarp. It is much lighter; a pre-dawn glow makes the sky ahead of them translucent like smoked glass. Oll has a sudden, bright feeling that they are close to where they need to be. It is like seeing a single star low in the sky on a lightless night and realising there is something to navigate by.

He glances back. There are trumpeters on the ridge behind them. They are huge bipeds, swollen and heavy, with long counterbalance tails held up, swishing the air behind them. Their throats rise into heads like floral blooms or pitcher plants, like fleshy mechanisms that part and extend and broaden. They begin to make the noises again at the dawn sky. The volume is incredible. The strange, wet flanges and crests of the heads move and bunch to modulate the expelled notes.

‘Push on!’ Oll yells at the others.

The noises make them falter – the noises and the sight of the things along the ridge. Oll knows that look. Soon they will not be able to think. Where is Orfeus when he is needed? Some beeswax, even?

He plants the stock of his old rifle against his shoulder and fires at the trumpeters. He sees them whinny and flinch as his shots spark against their leathery, feathered flanks. He does not think he can kill them. He just wants to make some noise. Bale, Krank and Zybes turn and start shooting too, following Oll’s lead. Soon, four las-weapons are cracking away up the ridge at the trumpeters. Zybes cannot hit anything, not even horrors that big, but Bale and Krank, who’ve never seen actual service, are fresh out of Founding Basic and have been gun-schooled. Their shots are clean, decent, neat.

It is not the hits that Oll wants, anyway, it is the noise. The squeal and crack of four infantry weapons up close could drown out, or at least disrupt, the effect of the trumpeting. Make a noise, like Orfeus did.

They keep shooting. After a few minutes, some of the trumpeters turn, belly-heavy, and waddle out of sight behind the ridge, stung too many times by the annoying las-shots to want to stay. The others follow.

Like cattle, Oll thinks. Like cattle, turning away as a herd, a collective. The hooting dies away behind the ridge.

He cannot shake the thought of them as cattle. Cattle suggest grazers, herbivores, and that suggests a darker possibility. It suggests something the trumpeting is supposed to keep at bay.

It suggests a predator.

[mark: –?]

Oll cuts a hole, and they step through. It is hot on the far side. Dry heat, like an oven, a bright sky that looks like it has been painted blue and then sandblasted. They are on a road, a dry and dusty track.

They walk for about ten minutes, long enough for Oll to realise he knows where they are.

He sees the first of the dead tanks, a burned out T-62, and knows they will see a lot more if they keep walking. In the space of one long, hot day right at the burned stump of M2, the regional despot lost a mechanised brigade and an armoured brigade. One hundred and fifty tanks and hard-shell vehicles.

‘Why here?’ he asks out loud.

‘Who are you asking?’ replies Zybes.

‘What are you asking?’ asks Katt.

Tank shells and metal wrecks line the road and the wadi beyond. The air smells of smoke and burned oil. Oll wants answers, but there is no one to ask. There is nothing but dry bones.

Zybes calls out. They go to him.

There is a trailer on its side in the ditch. There are plastic jerry cans of water, warm in the sun, food packs, bedrolls. Whatever was towing the trailer was hit so hard only lumps of it remain.

This is why.

They are dry already, and warmed, from the sun. They load up with the supplies they can carry, loading the water cans onto Graft.

This is why.

‘Good luck we came here,’ says Krank.

Oll is looking at something.

‘Someone’s luck,’ he replies, not turning from what he has seen.

He is staring at the remains of another battle tank. The treads are gone and the wheel fairings are bent. The hull’s blackened and scarred, and the turret has been half ripped off like a can that has had its lid gouged away.

There is a mark on the side, just under the 18th Mechanised emblem. It could just be a curious little shrapnel scratch, because it is damned near indecipherable, but it was scored into the metal after the hull burned, showing bare steel through the caking of soot.

It is a word – a name maybe, but not a human one.

M’kar.

What does that name signify?

And who thought to inscribe it there?

[mark: –?]

They stay for a few hours in the sun, moving along the dead road between the corpses of war machines. Oll checks his map and his compass, and discerns the next place.

‘Not far this time,’ he says.

‘You were here, weren’t you?’ Katt asks him.

Oll wonders whether he should answer, and then he nods.

‘Where is this?’

‘They called it 73 Easting,’ he says. ‘The greatest armoured battle of its time, they reckoned.’

‘Which time was that?’ she asks.

He shrugs.

‘Which side were you on?’ she asks.

‘Does it matter?’ he replies.

‘You must have been on the side of the winners,’ she decides.

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re alive and all of these machines are dead.’

‘Okay,’ he nods. Okay means something different now. He looks at her, squinting in the desert light.

‘Just so you know; my being alive doesn’t have much to do with the outcome of any battle. I’ve lived through things on all sides, one time or another. My life isn’t predicated on victory. I’m just fond of it. And I’ll chase after it when I can.’

‘What is your life predicated on, then?’ she asks.

‘Just… being alive,’ he says. ‘I don’t seem to be able to lose the habit, and it’s hard to take from me.’

He looks back at her. Her eyes are dark-lined and big. They remind him of someone. Medea, of course. That crazy witch. So beautiful, and full of so very many difficult questions, just like this girl.

‘It’s hard to take from me, but not impossible,’ he says.

‘You’re some kind of immortal,’ she says.

‘Some kind, I suppose. We refer to ourselves as Perpetuals.’

‘We?’ she asks.

‘There are a small number of us. Always have been.’

‘Should you be telling me this?’ she asks.

Should I? Oll asks himself. I’ve never really spoken of it to anyone, not anyone who wasn’t like me. But I’m standing in my own distant past, in a place that no longer exists, and I’ve got a long way to go before I can rest. A very long way. I’m telling the secrets of ancient Terra to a girl who won’t understand them, and who will never be found or known, and certainly will never be believed.

Under this blue sky, in this desert wind, looking into eyes that should have belonged to a witch from Colchis, or at least been drawn on the prow of a Cyclades warship, what secrets am I really giving away?

‘It’s okay,’ he tells her. ‘I think I can trust you.’

‘What kind are you?’ she asks.

‘What?’

‘What kind of immortal?’

‘Oh,’ Oll says. He has never been required to answer that before. ‘The ordinary kind,’ he says.

[mark: –?]

When he cuts the hole this time, just before dusk, the desert wind gets up at 73 Easting, and the dry bones in the dead hulls start to rattle and fidget. The dead are sensing something, and it is not Oll and his companions.

Oll knows that the dead do not feel much. They are only sensitive to a few things. Things that do not have human names.

They leave through the hole to the sound of dry joints grating, and ribs fluttering, and teeth grinding.

The unease of the dead.

[mark: –?]

They sleep the next night in a wood, in the rain. They make a shelter using canvas rolls they brought from the trailer, and eat some ration packs. Artillery thumps and drums in the distance. There is a war going on over the hill.

Oll knows he is being played with. It is a pine wood, a familiar scent. He is not sure, but he is pretty convinced he knows this place too. Is this benevolent guidance, or someone leading him into a trap?

Most likely the same person, either way.

Damn you, John.

Oll gets up early, and leaves them sleeping. If he remembers it right, there is the end of an old communication trench not three hundred paces from the line of the wood. He can smell the river, which means that Verdun is to the west.

The trench is right where he remembered it, right where he and the other men dug it. It is abandoned, slightly overgrown. A shift in shelling caused a tactical displacement, and this part of the line got emptied out. Small blue weed-flowers nod. Grass sprouts between tumbled sandbags. Bulwark armour-plates are rusting. The trench floor decking is sodden and unmaintained. He can smell coffee grounds and nettles, and latrines. The bright brass of spent shell cases litters the ditch and the sandbag line.

Oll follows the jink in the zigzag trench under a low cover-top. He walks slowly, warily, carrying a rifle that will not be made for almost another thirty thousand years. There is the down-step into the officer’s dugout. He remembers it all, as if it was yesterday.

In the dugout, there is a small desk made from a fruit box: a coffee pot, a stove, a dirty enamel mug. There is a dark stain on the back wall. Someone left in a hurry, someone who was hurt.

On the desk, there is a log book. He opens it.

It is a repurposed civilian diary, locally manufactured. The paper is cream, the numbers and the ruled lines all printed in the faintest blue. The diary was intended for a year ‘1916’, a date so antique that he can barely make sense of it.

The first half is filled in with neat handwriting, ink pen, well-schooled. He wonders if it is one of his own hands, though he remembers the place so well that he would think he would know.

It is not his. There is only one word written in the diary, over and over again.

M’kar.

[mark: –?]

‘I can’t stay long,’ he says.

Oll turns, bringing the rifle up. John is in the trench outside the dugout entrance, leaning against the back wall. He is wearing a bodyglove and dusty overalls.

‘Damn you,’ says Oll, letting his aim slacken, feeling stupid for being surprised.

‘You got it, I see,’ John says, nodding at the athame wrapped up and hooked in Oll’s belt.

‘It’s really that important?’

‘It really is,’ says John.

‘You should be doing this, not me,’ says Oll.

‘Oh, come on,’ says John. ‘You could hardly stay on Calth. It was a friendly warning, to help you get out of there. Besides, I’ve got my hands full. I’ve got a job of my own to do.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Don’t ask and I won’t tell.’

‘I thought this errand you had me running was the really important one?’ asks Oll.

‘It is. It honestly is. But my job is important too and frankly, you were in the right place. I’m on Cabal business, Oll. They sign my paychecks, you know that.’

‘That’s not a phrase I’ve heard in a long time,’ says Oll. He almost smiles.

‘The Cabal watches what I do. I can’t be everywhere.’

‘So I’m not on Cabal business?’ asks Oll.

‘No, you’re not. I shouldn’t even be talking to you.’

For the first time in a long time, Oll sees a look in his old friend’s eyes. It is a look that says he is trying to do the right thing, even though the universe is out to make sure he does not. It is the first time that Oll Persson has pitied John Grammaticus in a long, long while.

‘Look, Oll,’ says John. ‘I’m going to try to be there, when you arrive. I’m going to try my damnedest. But–’

‘But what?’

‘I’ve got this presentiment, Oll. A dark gloom.’

‘That’s the way your mind works, John.’

‘No, Oll, this isn’t a psyker thing. It’s like… just knowing something in your bones. I think I may be running out of road at long last. I think this may be my last adventure.’

‘They’ll just bring you back,’ says Oll. ‘The Cabal will just bring you back like they always do.’ He says it fast, almost like an accusation. He says it to cover what he is thinking. Why do we both feel the same thing? Why do we both feel like this will be the last adventure for us? The universe is in trouble when Perpetuals feel mortal.

‘I thought you said this would be pretty bad for everyone,’ Oll says. ‘On Calth, you told me that. You said it was make or break.’

John nods.

‘It is. I meant it. I just… I mean, personally speaking, I’ve got things to do and… I’ve got a choice to make, Oll, and I don’t think I like either of the alternatives. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I wish I could do this instead of you, and not put this responsibility on your shoulders, but I can’t. I want you to know I appreciate what you’re doing, Oll. I honestly think you’re a better man for this job than I am.’

Oll does not reply.

‘I’ll try to be there when you arrive,’ John says. ‘But if I’m not. If I’m… late… I think you’ll know what to do.’

‘What have you got me into, John?’

‘You’ll be fine.’

‘John, you’ve been guiding me this far… the weapons, the food, the locations. All very apt and ironic. The typical Grammaticus flair for the theatrical.’

John shrugs, snorts.

‘You’re trying to smuggle me along, aren’t you?’ Oll asks. ‘Take me on an indirect route. Take me the long way around so I’ll be harder to track and find.’

Oll steps out of the dugout into the early sunlight to stand face to face with John.

‘That’s why it had to be me, isn’t it?’ he asks. ‘God, I see that now. I’m not a psyker like you. When I move through the warp, I’m not as visible. You’d show up like a beacon. That’s why I’m doing this dirty work for you.’

John does not answer.

‘What’s M’kar, John?’

‘You shouldn’t have brought the others with you,’ John replies.

‘Why?’

‘They won’t make it.’

‘They certainly wouldn’t have made it where they were,’ replies Oll.

‘It would have been quicker. Kinder.’

‘They’ll make it if I make it.’

John nods. It is not reassuring.

‘What’s M’kar, John?’

‘Come on…’

‘What does it mean? Is it a name?’

John looks towards the river.

‘Time’s out of joint for us, Oll. Nothing’s in the right order. M’kar is its name.’

‘Not a human name.’

‘No. I don’t know if it’s called M’kar yet, or if it will be called it one day. The warp doesn’t work in step with time as we perceive it.’

He looks at Oll with sad eyes.

‘The Foe won’t let you just walk away from Calth, not with that dagger. It’s sent something after you. That something is called M’kar. It helps that you’re taking a roundabout route, Oll, and it really helps you’re not psykana and glow in the dark like I do. Yes, that’s why you’re doing this instead of me. Yes, okay? I admit it.’

‘But even so–?’

‘Even so, it’s coming. M’kar is coming. You watch your back. The only real help I can give you is to warn you to keep away from it for long enough.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means it’s needed for another task too, so it can’t keep looking for you forever. Keep going, keep down, stay out of sight, and it will eventually have to give up and turn back.’

‘Why?’

‘It has a destiny of its own. Just watch your back, Oll.’

‘Give me more help than that, John! Damn it! I deserve more than that! How do I fight this thing?’

‘I can’t, I’m sorry,’ says John. He looks genuinely apologetic. ‘I’ve got my hands full. I can’t–’

‘You’re not even here, are you?’ asks Oll, realising. ‘Where are you really?’

‘The wrong side of Ultramar,’ says John.

Oll sighs.

‘So if you’re not here, I’m not either, am I?’

[mark: –?]

He wakes up, in the shelter, in the pine wood, just before dawn. Rain taps on the canvas. The others are asleep.

He knows there is no point heading down to the trench. John will not be there, and Oll has already learned everything the trench can tell him.

It is time to push on.

[mark: –?]

They enter the dead city. No one knows when it was or where it was, not even Oll. The city is made of a dry white stone like chalk, but not chalk. Its surfaces are beginning to turn to powder at the merest touch. Age does that. The sky over the towering city is the blue side of violet, and there are eight bright stars dotted in it. When the wind lifts, as it does now and again, sighs of white dust trail from the sills and corners of the white walls like vapour: a city slowly being erased.

It is an empty place of white buildings with empty doorways. There is no furniture, no sign of decoration or possessions, no sign of the long dead. Oll thinks that whatever used to be in these buildings has long since resolved into dust, along with the inhabitants. Only the silent towers remain, the chambers, the vacant stairways.

After walking for an hour or two, they realise two things. One is that the city has no limits. As they move past towers and walls and rooftops, they sight further towers and walls and rooftops beyond.

The second thing is that the emptiness is unnerving. They feel anxious, though there is no sound except their footsteps and the sigh of the wind, and no movement except the faint streamers of white dust peeling off the edges of walls and doorways.

When they speak to each other, their voices echo from the surrounding streets, but not immediately. Each echo takes a few seconds to return, just a little too long for it to feel comfortable or natural, and each echo returns as a perfect facsimile of the original words, not a sound hollowed by acoustics.

For this reason, they quickly stop speaking.

Oll stops and checks his compass. They have found another cutting place, and by no means too soon. As he takes out the athame and prepares to make the incision, an echo comes to them along the dead, white streets.

The echo is a word, and the word is, ‘M’kar.’

None of them had spoken.

[mark: –?]

The humidity on the far side is intense. They feel it coming through the slit before they step across. Beads of sweat immediately manifest on their pale skins, gleaming like diamonds.

A rainforest awaits them. It has been waiting forever. It is an endless jade twilight of water-logged glades, and they are knee-deep in bright green murk. Graft struggles to maintain traction and stability. Sunlight sparkles and shafts down through the canopy. Moss as thick as emerald velvet coats the tree trunks and half-sunken logs. There is a throat-tightening smell of rot.

Winged insects – each one looking like a watchmaker’s intricate masterpiece – whir past them, hover, and then speed on.

It is another place that Oll does not know. He wonders if this is a sign that their route is less guided now, more random. Or is it a sign that it is becoming all the more concealed? Which forsaken outworld is this? What rimworld hell? His sweating palms shift the rifle nervously. The rainforest is a bad place for a fight. He has never liked jungle warfare.

They keep stopping to help Graft free himself, sometimes having to lever him out of the ooze with blackened lengths of log.

‘I don’t like this,’ Krank remarks. It is matter-of-fact. Oll wonders if the young soldier means the physical discomfort of the wet heat and the toil, or simply the location. The attitude applies convincingly to both.

Then the place falls silent.

It is a chilling thing. Until the silence, they had not realised the rainforest was so full of noises: the buzz of insects, the splash of water, the crack of undergrowth, the chirp of amphibians, the whistle of birds.

Only when it stops, when it all stops at a stroke, do they recognise it by its distressing absence.

They all freeze, listening, willing sounds to return.

Oll holds up a hand, and turns slowly, training his rifle. His movement makes the very slightest slooshing sound in the water around his shins.

Something rushes them from the stand of trees behind them. It is man-sized and man-shaped, though its legs are proportionally shorter and its arms proportionally longer than human standard. It is an ape-thing, scrawny and lean. It has no eyes. Its head is entirely a gaping mouth of carnivore teeth, lips pulled back.

It shrieks as it charges. Water sprays. Katt screams. It bounds over a half-sunken log, leaping, clawing paws outstretched.

Oll fires. Three shots smack into its torso and bowl it backwards into the green soup with a clumsy, slapping splash. Thrashing, it sinks.

‘What in the name of–’ Zybes starts to say, but there is not time. There is another ape-thing charging them, and another, and then a fourth. They come pounding out of the topaz gloom, shrieking, unmindful of the fate that greeted the first of them.

‘Rapid fire!’ Oll commands, shooting. Multiple targets. He cannot take them all. He needs the others. Krank is fumbling with his rifle, his frantic hands caught in the strap. Bale fires, winging one of the creatures enough to slow it, and then aims to kill it. Zybes misses everything including tree trunks.

Oll has shot two more, both clean kills, but other ape-things are appearing, a half-dozen, a dozen, all bounding and charging. Only he and Bale hit anything. The shrieking wounded drop hard into the murk, but others take their place. Their teeth are yellow bone, their maws red. One gets so close that Oll barely gets his shot in.

Krank has finally lined up. His firing is messy, but he adds to the stopping power, dropping one, and then a second.

Katt has taken out her pistol. Bracing it with two hands, she shoots alongside them, and makes hits. She understands the extremity of the situation. She winces every time the creatures shriek.

Zybes makes a kill, but it is a rare success. He is simply not a natural marksman. One of the ape-things gets too close to him, past his ability to hit it, and reaches out to tear his throat out.

Graft grabs it by the neck with a manipulator arm, lifting and hurling it away into the trees like a straw doll.

Oll shoots and brings down the last of the ape-things. No more come. Silence falls again, apart from their rasping breaths and the tap of falling leaves and bark fragments.

Then the noise of the rainforest resumes as if it had never gone away.

Oll breathes out a long breath, and wipes the sweat from his brow. He has finally realised where they are, when. Some kind of intuition has informed him, some kind of deep-time memory.

This is Terra, before the rise of man. The things that attacked them are things that might one day evolve into men.

Except these, these corpses floating face down in the green soup, show how early the taint of the warp touched man’s home world.

Oll does not speak to his companions about any of this.

‘Push on,’ he tells them instead.

[mark: –?]

The compass stops working. The pendulum hangs heavy and refuses to swing.

‘We’re lost,’ says Krank, watching Oll’s work.

‘The word is becalmed,’ Oll snaps, but it does not matter what the word is. He has never attempted this kind of journey before, so he does not know if the problem with the compass is to be expected or not. Nothing he has ever been told or taught about the art of travelling this way has prepared him for the idea that the compass might stop working. He tries to cover his tension. He tries to reassure himself with his own analogy: becalmed. At sea, sometimes, the winds drop away and all is still, and then there is nothing anyone can do and nowhere to go, until the wind comes back.

That is all. That is all that is happening. The winds of the empyrean have simply eased off for a moment, their breath spent. All is still. They will pick back up, soon as you like. They will pick back up, and the pilgrims will be on their way again.

‘Everything’s okay,’ Oll tells them. ‘Everything’s going to be okay.’

They are in some autumnal place. The sky is dark like smudged charcoal, and the distant hills loom, brown with gorse and sedge. Black birds circle in the distance. The surrounding thorn wood, bared of leaves, is an endless thicket of spikes and claws, an organic cage. The thorns and twigs are all pale and cold, like bone. Small birds or insects have speared red berries on some thorn spikes so they can be gnawed and pecked at. The juice drips like blood.

Oll keeps working at the chart and compass, rattling the rose in its little, silver skull-box, rubbing the pendulum weight between his palms, as though communicating body heat may somehow activate it. They remain dead, inert. The others move away from him in different directions, scouting the area. Everything is quiet apart from the sporadic chatter of birds.

What if we’ve made a wrong cut? he wonders. What if they have stepped off the wind routes and now cannot find their way back? What if he made an incision in error, and they are marooned on God-knows-where in God-knows-when?

How can any place, any place in the cosmos, not be touched by the empyrean winds?

The analogy suddenly seems so banal. Even when the winds have dropped and the ship is becalmed, a compass will still spin towards magnetic north, and if there is no wind, a man puts his back into it and rows. He rows, like a bastard, to the beat of the stroke-drum. He had learned that on the voyage to Colchis. That was when Colchis was still a kingdom on the Black Sea, not the home world of the treacherous XVII.

‘We’re going to have to row,’ Oll says out loud, but the others have moved too far away to hear. He gets up, looking for them, and sees their shadows moving through the thorn wood.

‘Come back!’ he calls. Someone answers him, but he cannot make out the words.

Damn them. They are being stupid. It is not safe. Oll knows that with certainty. He knows it suddenly, as suddenly as the tingle of cold at the base of his spine. That is not just the cool woodland air chilling the sweat there. It is a hint, a sign, like the way the root of his tongue used to itch before a big fight, or his hands used to tremble when someone was going to die.

He felt none of those things on Calth, because Calth had happened so suddenly. The doom came masked, until the very last moment, by the darkest treachery.

But here, wherever ‘here’ is, doom is not coming suddenly. It is stalking them. It is drawing close, a relentless predator tracking them, keeping steady, keeping low, just beyond the line of sight. He knows the predator’s name, and it is not a human name.

M’kar.

It is a thing sent to end them, a thing sent to take back the blade, a thing sent by the malicious deities of the warp to ensure that their plans would not be upset.

Oll feels he ought to be flattered. He is a Perpetual, and such beings are far from common. Nevertheless, they are insignificant in the universal pattern. Perpetuals do not upset the plans of the Warped Ones. A renegade Perpetual, on the run with a handful of humans… that is hardly a threat against schemes that encompass light-centuries of space and epochs of the universe.

Yet M’kar has been sent. Flattered, that is what he ought to feel.

Oll hefts his lasrifle, getting it set, as though a lasrifle will be of any assistance when the time comes. He wonders how far off the predator is – a cut or two away, or already in this world, out there in the sedge beyond the thorn wood?

What was it John said? It’s needed for another task too, so it can’t keep looking for you forever. It has a destiny of its own.

Typical gnomic Grammaticus, but the basic advice is sound. Go the long way round, stay low, keep out of sight. You cannot fight it, so wait for it to run out of time and give up.

Yes, sound advice. The trouble is, Oll knows too well, that it has already got their scent. M’kar is tracking them.

It will be a daemon thing, with a non-human name like that. How is it tracking them? The life-glow of the dagger? It is not as if Oll’s a psykana, lighting the way. Oll’s never had the sight, or any of the other gifts that the Perpetuals often have: no sight, no mindgloss, no telekine or pyrokine.

All he has are the tics and twinges, the chill on his back, the itch in his tongue, the hand-tremble. His left eyelid used to flutter when there was a psykana nearby. It used to happen all the time when he was near Medea on that ship. That is why he knew before Iason that the Colchis witch had real gifts, and was not the usual brand of yowling, histrionic soothsayer.

As if on cue, Oll’s left eyelid twitches.

He freezes.

Hands tight on the gun, he waits for the stink of the warp, waits for M’kar, whatever form M’kar takes, to erupt through the thorn wood and finish them.

He waits for M’kar to finish them and make this place their communal grave, unmourned and unmarked.

The dusk continues to close, however, and the birds continue to circle.

He turns. The others are still wandering around, exploring, but Katt is right beside him. She came back when he called.

His eyelid flutters.

‘Oh god,’ he murmurs.

It is not just her dark eyes that remind him of the witch he knew all those centuries ago. He understands why she is quiet and reserved, a loner, an outsider. He understands why she came to do piecework on his farm, like a runaway looking for work in return for lodging. He understands where her knowing questions come from.

He is pretty sure that even she does not know what she is, that she has never been assessed, never been recruited by the Black Ships. She is a latent, touched just enough to give her a life of sorrow and trouble, a life of not fitting in, a life of depression and of not being understood.

She is touched just enough to make her shine like a little lamp in the night.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asks him. ‘Are we okay?’

She smiles at her clever use of the unfamiliar word.

‘We need to find shelter,’ he says. ‘There’s a darkness coming on.’

He wonders, seriously wonders, if he should kill her. Then he wonders at himself for even thinking it.

‘M’kar,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘That word. The echo in that city.’ Katt looks at him with Medea’s big dark eyes. ‘Ever since I heard it, I haven’t been able to forget it, as if the word is poison, filling my mind up.’

Oll lowers his rifle and touches the wrapped athame at his waist. That is what it wants. That is what they are not allowed to have. That is what they must not deliver.

Something occurs to him.

They do have a weapon.

If the athame is so powerful, if it is so precious that the Warped Ones sent a daemon to recover it, then it is a serious damn thing. A serious, serious damn thing. It cuts a path through the warped universe. What else might it cut?

The thought gives him a glimmer of hope, and Katt, at his side, feels that hope and smiles at it, without even realising why she is doing it.

Then the hope goes.

The root of his tongue itches suddenly. His hands tremble.

There is going to be a battle. A battle and a death.

[mark: –?]

What sun there was has gone. The sky is full of banked grey clouds running in the wind, and the breeze makes the thorn cages around them creak and rattle. They feel the wind on their faces, but there is still no wind to stir Oll’s compass.

‘We can’t move from here,’ Oll tells his accidental pilgrims. ‘We can’t go back or forwards. We have to stay here, and that means we might have to make our stand here.’

‘Our stand?’ asks Zybes.

‘This is no place for a fight,’ says Bale Rane. The boy has not seen much war, only been schooled in it, but he is not stupid. A ragged tract of hillside scrub, thickly wooded by autumn thorn and bounded by gorse? It is no place for a fight indeed. If they had an hour, they could trek up the hill to the ring of standing stones, maybe dig in up there.

They do not have an hour. Oll’s tongue tells him that. So does his eyelid, and his hands, and the cold sweat on his back. So does the look in Katt’s eyes.

‘Where do we find cover?’ Krank asks, swallowing hard. He flicks a hand at the nearest branch of brittle, dry thorn.

‘This? This stuff? This won’t stop las-rounds! There’s no shelter! Do we entrench or–’

‘Shhh,’ says Oll.

‘Where do we find cover?’ Krank insists.

‘It won’t be las-fire,’ says Oll.

‘What will it be?’ asks Zybes.

‘M’kar,’ says Katt, unable not to.

‘What does she mean?’ asks Krank, hysteria in his voice.

‘Stay calm,’ Oll tells him. He tells them all. ‘A bad thing is coming our way. We have given it the slip so far, but it’s found us at last.’

‘What bad thing?’ Krank asks.

‘Something from Calth,’ murmurs Bale, understanding. ‘One of those things that came to Calth. Or one that was on its way…’

Oll nods. Krank screws up his face, lets out a squeaking moan, and starts to cry.

‘How did it find us?’ Bale asks.

Oll cannot help looking at Katt.

‘We just got unlucky,’ he replies. ‘We did well for a long time, but we got unlucky. So now we make the best of things.’

‘Where do we find cover from a thing like that?’ Krank wails.

Oll taps his chest.

‘In here,’ he says. ‘Back in the days of faith, that’s how we kept the daemons out. Belief. Strength. Fortitude.’

‘Oll the Pious,’ laughs Zybes without humour.

‘Piety is a virtue,’ Oll nods. ‘I’ve always had faith, right from the moment of the anointing of my newborn head in Nineveh. Always had it. Always kept it, even when all the churches were swept away. Swept away for being anachronistic. I believe in a higher power, and that’s what we’re facing now. Another power, anyway. Higher, lower, other. Not a human thing. Not a mortal thing.’

‘You’re not mortal,’ says Katt.

‘But I’m human. This is god and daemons stuff, and in the midst of that, faith is all you can hold onto. I’ve always had faith. That’s why he never liked me, and never brought me into the trusted circle.’

‘Who?’ asks Bale.

Oll shakes his head.

‘Doesn’t matter. I’ve always kept faith. And I’ve never tried to push it on anyone. Never evangelised. Well, not for a long time anyway. So I’m not asking you to do anything strange.’

He thumps his trembling hand against his heart again.

‘Just believe. Believe in whatever you like. Believe in the Emperor, or in yourself, or in whatever light you see in your dreams, or the solidity of the ground beneath your feet. Believe in me, for all I care. Just believe.’

‘We have to do something else, Trooper Persson,’ says Graft. ‘I cannot believe. There has to be purpose. There has to be activity.’

‘He’s right,’ says Bale.

‘Okay,’ says Oll. ‘Okay, then we sing.’

‘We sing?’ Krank splutters.

‘Yeah, we sing together. Strengthens the mind. I’ll teach you a song. A hymn. In the old days, the faithful sang together to keep their spirits up and keep the daemons and the darkness out. We’ll do that.’

He teaches them the words. Just a verse or two, O Lord and Master of Mankind…

They start to sing, reluctantly. They fumble the words, forget a few, mangle the tune. Graft cannot hold anything but the one drone note. Oll keeps going at it, over and over, repeat and repeat, checking over his shoulder all the while, checking the tingle in his hands and the twitch of his eyelid.

That is all hymns and prayers were, back in the day, when real daemons walked the earth. They were utterances of protection, articulations of defiance. They joined people in the act of singing, joined their strengths, their beliefs. They made faith a weapon, if only a passive weapon – a shield at least. Or, indeed, at most.

Even for those who did not believe like Oll did, there were other benefits. Joined in singing, people were joined in activity. They were reminded that they were not alone. They were connected and bolstered. It gave them something to do, something to focus their minds on instead of fear. Last thing Oll needed was anyone panicking.

And sometimes singing is just noise, and it protects, like Orfeus protected them.

‘Keep going,’ Oll says. ‘Keep singing. Get to the end and start again. Keep singing.’

He turns and goes to the edge of the thorn thicket. Behind him, they are singing as loud as they can. He scans the brown sedge, and the hollows of the land that are already shaded with night. How many thousand battlefields has he surveyed this way, watching for the enemy to show himself? The land here reminds him of the moors beyond the Wall, when he was patrolling the parapets, watching for the painted men. It reminds him of the rolling grasses of the Altai, watching for the approach of the Sarmatian riders. It reminds him–

His hands tremble.

M’kar is not down there at all.

M’kar is here, right at the edge of the thorn cage, looking in.

[mark: –?]

The thorns catch fire.

A stretch of the thorn brush three or four metres broad bursts into bright orange flame, burns up like paper, and spills into ash, leaving a gap big enough to drive a transport through.

Oll backs up, his hands trembling on the grip of his rifle.

It is dark out here, beyond the gap in the white thorn wall, as though a piece of midnight has arrived early. But there are eyes in it. He saw them looking in, ancient eyes for an ancient, feral mind, yellow slits with black slash irises. Glaring eyes. Evil eyes.

Eyes that stared forever from the prow of a ship.

Cursed eyes that mean the end of everything.

Oll backs away. He ignores the twitch and the itch and the tremble. He ignores the lump in his swallow, and the tears in his eyes.

In his long lives, he has seen plenty. He has never seen anything like this, though.

The daemon enters the thorn wood through the gap it has burned in the thicket. It bubbles in, like fluid, spilling over the boundary and collecting in the clumped soil. It is like tar. It smokes in the darkness. All Oll can see is the spreading wet stain of it on the ground, growing like a shadow. There is a bulk of it above, a monstrous, monolithic shape, a slice of darkness cut from pure night, super-heavy like spent plutonium. Above the eyes loom the impression of horns wider than an aircraft’s wings.

He smells it. He retches.

In the seeping black pools around its feet, spider-leg stalks and spastic pseudopods sprout and fade, jutting briefly from the steaming tar and dying back like a time-lapse pict-feed of nocturnal weeds. It is a shadow, straining to exist.

Voices chirp and snigger. Oll hears the voices of people he knows on the wind, and realises they are lies. He hears the voices of people he has not seen alive in thirty thousand years. Lies. Lies.

He hears John’s laugh. He hears Pascal at Verdun, asking for a light. He hears Gaius on the Wall, cursing the rain and praising the virtues of Galician girls. He hears Commander Valis whisper the name of a forgotten god as they both flinch from the nuclear light blooming across the Panpacific horizon. He hears a man question the quality of bronze stirrups in strongly accented Scythian. He hears Zaid Raheem, pinned in his burning T-62, begging to die. He hears the shocktroopers around him moan as the officer tells them that their objective will be the Brumman Hives. He hears Iason and Orfeus, singing together. He hears Lieutenant Winslow dictating his will the night before Copenhagen. He hears Private Labella whistling as she fries beans and eggs the morning after the Socal Basin fell.

He hears his son, five days old, crying lustily in his crib, the day that the Norsemen landed. As if he knew, five days old and knew what was coming.

Oll raises his rifle, slips the toggle to full-auto, and fires.

The advancing darkness ripples as his streaming shots strike it. The darkness absorbs the bright bolts, but spatters too, each wound squirting fluid like milk.

The wounds vanish as fast as he makes them. The lactic blood fades. He cannot hurt it. It knows it, and he knows it. It does not just want him dead, it wants him broken. It wants his soul burned out with misery before it consumes him. It wants to anger him, wants him to feel rage and pain and frustration, and all the other human inadequacies of a thirty-five thousand year long life.

It knows he is a Perpetual.

Oll realises that suddenly, despite the pain robbing him of sense. He is caught up in the death of his son, a loss that took him three centuries to come to terms with, a loss he had pushed to the back of his over-stuffed mind, a loss M’kar has gone straight for, but even so, Oll realises.

It knows he is a Perpetual.

They would all be dead already, otherwise. It does not get to do this very often. It does not get to torment a being with such a great capacity for torment. Oll is a treat, a delicacy. All those heartless centuries of pain and loss and disappointment to tease out and relive, so many more than a human life can encompass.

The pain is going to kill me, Oll thinks. The very thought of me is going to kill me. To remember all I have ever been through will kill me stone dead.

It will not be quick.

He stops shooting. His anger is as spent as his power cell. He throws his rifle aside. He turns his back on M’kar and walks away. He walks back to the others. They are still trying to sing, but it is not working.

‘Keep going,’ he urges, his voice breaking. ‘Keep going… “forgive our foolish ways”… come on! Don’t listen to it! Drown it out! Don’t listen to its lies!’

He hears an old friend in a Dresden shop, chatting as he packs china in newspaper, ‘in case the planes come tonight’. He hears his sisters calling his name from the cages on the caravan. He hears Him, the day they met, recognising a kindred being.

‘The likes of us,’ He says to Oll, ‘the likes of us will leave our print on things down the ages. That is why we were made the way we were. The courses of our lives will not go unmarked.’

‘Mine will,’ Oll assures Him. ‘I have no stomach for the games you want to play with the world. I just want an ordinary life.’

‘My dear friend, you’ll have as many of those as you want.’

It was summer, a meadow beyond the walls of Nineveh. He had never met another Perpetual before. He would never meet another like Him.

Look at him now. After all this time, having turned his back on all those games, and never being a part of any of them, look at foolish old Oll Persson. Crossing the universe on a knifeblade for his sake. Running a fool’s errand through the warp and weft of the cosmos to stop his games from unravelling.

M’kar comes closer, gurgling laughter in the darkness. The voices swirl around him like blossom, the voices of Oll’s life. The pain, the lies.

Oll and his pilgrims are in a circle, their backs facing outwards. Oll’s back is directly to the darkness.

‘Don’t look,’ he says. ‘Don’t listen. Sing up. Drown it out.’

They have stopped singing, though. They just look at each other. Bale Rane is to Oll’s right, Katt to his left. Oll places a hand on each of their shoulders.

‘Don’t look,’ he says. ‘It’s going to be okay.’

It is not, but what else is he supposed to say?

The voices are in his ears. The pain of his life is unimaginable. He knows the others are hearing their own voices too. Bale can hear Neve. Zybes is begging his mother to stop calling out. Krank is crying about someone called Pappi. Katt is just shuddering. Oll does not want to know what she is hearing.

He takes his hand off her shoulder slowly. If there is a chance at all, it is coming and it is going to be miniscule.

‘M’kar!’ she barks, an involuntary sound.

‘Shhhh,’ he soothes her through his tears.

‘Mmmmkk!’ she blurts.

‘Easy,’ he says. He lowers his hand to his waist, to his belt, to the wrapped athame. He can feel the daemon’s breath on the nape of his neck.

The athame is warm too.

One chance. One tiny chance.

‘Maloq!’ Katt squeals, eyes rolling back.

‘Hush now,’ Oll says, taking hold of the dagger.

‘Maloq! Maloq! Maloq!’ she screams. Meaningless. He has lost her. She has gone.

‘Maloq Kartho!’ she cries, and vomits. ‘Maloq Kartho! M’kartho! M’kar!’

He has the dagger. One chance.

He wheels around, blade raised.

[mark: –?]

The thing is gone.

Only ordinary darkness surrounds them. The smell of it has gone, and the heat of it. The tar has vanished.

Only the voices remain, just for a minute or so, receding into the distance like whisperers moving away into a room beyond.

Oll blinks. He realises his mouth is open to scream, so he closes it. He feels sweat on his flushed face. He lowers the blade.

‘I don’t–’ he starts to say.

He looks at the others. Bale is nursing the sobbing Krank. Zybes is sitting on the ground with his head in his hands. Graft has picked Katt up. She is limp.

‘Oh God, no!’

She is not dead, though. There is vomit down the front of her clothes, and blood streaming from her nose.

‘It went back,’ she murmurs, looking up at Oll.

‘Back?’

‘Didn’t you feel it? It was pulled back. It was yanked away from us, from here. It was needed somewhere else, for something more important than us.’

Oll shakes his head. He remembers John’s words. Keep away from it for long enough. It will eventually have to give up and turn back.

‘What in God’s name?’ Oll wonders, out loud.

‘Maloq Kartho,’ Katt says. Graft helps her to stand up. She is not steady.

‘That’s not a human name,’ Oll says.

‘No, it is,’ she insists. ‘I feel it is. A transhuman name, at least. Whoever Maloq Kartho is, Maloq Kartho is why M’kar had to go and leave us.’

‘Then I pity poor Maloq Kartho,’ says Oll.

Katt shakes her head. ‘I don’t know why, but I don’t think you should.’

It has a destiny of its own.

[mark: –?]

Dawn breaks, soft over the thorn wood. The winds rise with it, rustling. Oll takes a bearing. He is pretty sure that the approach of M’kar was shielding them from the winds and prevented them getting a bearing.

The skies are clear, for now at least.

They have still got a long, long way to go, and it is not going to get easier.

‘What do we do?’ asks Zybes.

‘Do we keep going?’ adds Krank. ‘Do we have a route? A… direction?’

‘Boreas,’ Oll tells them, putting the compass and chart away. ‘The north-north-easterly. Boreas, or Mese, to the Grekans, at least. Nordostroni to the Franks. To the Romanii, Aquilo.’

He takes out the dagger and prepares to make the next cut. Their voyage will continue as it has been, like their lives and their destinies, unmarked.

That is why they might succeed.

‘So what do we do?’ asks Bale.

Oll puts his hand flat against the air and starts to cut.

‘We push on,’ he says. ‘Okay?’

LITTLE HORUS

‘Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.’

– Litus, Remarks.

Let us speak of Little Horus, Little Horus Aximand. His aspect was the half moon, and his disposition, according to the humours, was inclining towards melancholia. This explained, many thought, his prevailing mood of sorrow and inner trouble, though he frequently denied it. ‘The melancholic humour is misunderstood,’ he said. ‘You think too literally. It has, in fact, the quality of autumn. It is the spirit of contemplative change, the accelerator of death, the enabler of ends and beginnings. Autumn clears away the world so that a new one may rise. This is my purpose. I am not sad.’

Of course, once they reattached his face, all he ever really looked was angry.

Dwell lay in their path, and illumination was required. The Dwellers were not old way ignorant. The shadows of Old Night had been previously banished from their shores, and they had been compliant since their recovery thirty-two years earlier. The Dwellers had supplied eighty fine, loyal regiments to the Crusade armies.

Isstvan was fresh in the memory, however, and blood-stained rumours of the infamy were spreading. A ferocious series of repercussive combats had flared through the Momed, Instar and Oqueth sectors. The instigator was a leader of the Iron Tenth, a flesh-spare warleader of the Sorrgol Clan named Shadrak Meduson, and it was he who marshalled the loyalists against the approaching fleet of the Warmaster’s 63rd Expedition. Meduson and his formations had come too late to stand with their iron-handed master at Isstvan V. Rage, and calculated vengeance, smoked in his alloy heart. He had gathered fifty-eight full battalions of the Imperial Army about him, war hosts from the Momed voidhives, along with a flotilla of siege hulks from Nahan Instar, a half-broken cadre of Salamanders, some Mechanicum claves, and a White Scars raid-force from the Chondax war front.

Dwell, with its fortified cities, orbital batteries, ship schools, and eight million pinnacle-grade fighting men, would be the cornerstone of Meduson’s line. And any fool could see the Elders of Dwell would never side against the Throne.

It was a matter of priority that their ignorance be illuminated swiftly, before they fell in step with the determined son of Medusa.

Aximand’s face had earned him his name, though he was not the only member of the XIV Legion who resembled the primarch. For a good many, including the First Captain, elective genetics had guaranteed it. They were sons, true sons, amongst the Sons.

Aximand was the most alike of them all. It was not only the face; there was something in the manner of him.

Of course, he was Horus too, a common Cthonian name made popular because of the primarch. They were all sons of Horus in the end.

Little Horus. That’s what he was called, in tones simultaneously affectionate and mocking: Little Horus Aximand.

There was nothing little about him. Captain of the Fifth. One quarter of the Mournival.

‘He who serves as a captain here would be as a primarch in the company of others,’ said Abaddon, and he was talking of Aximand when he said it.

The reattachment left a scar. It set the character of the face differently, altered the seating of the muscles. Somehow, the wrongness, the imperfection, made him more like Horus, not less.

Steel forged on Medusa has such a fine edge.

He had a dream he never shared with anyone. First Captain Abaddon had indeed proclaimed that dreams were a weakness to be eschewed by all the Legiones Astartes. The dreamless Luna Wolves were surely the purest of all.

But times changed. The Luna Wolves had become the Sons of Horus. Kin had become unkind. The Master of Mankind had become the enemy. And, since Isstvan, Little Horus Aximand had begun to dream.

Every dream was essentially the same. Aximand would dream about the events of the day. The dream would match, in all particulars, his experiences, except that someone else was present. Someone else had come to join him, an intruder who remained just out of sight or in distant shadows, in the next room, or the corner of his eye. Aximand could not see the intruder’s face, but he knew he was there.

Aximand could feel him watching. He could hear him breathing.

Little Horus was afraid of the dreams at first. He was afraid to have started dreaming, afraid of what Abaddon might say if he found out, afraid of the faceless intruder watching him whenever he slept.

But he was not afraid of change. Change was, he insisted, part of his ruling character.

‘The melancholic humour is protean,’ he said. ‘It possesses the quality of autumn. It is transformative, the accelerator of death, the enabler of ends and beginnings. Autumn clears away the world ready for renewal. This is my purpose. I am not afraid.’

Then again, after they reattached his face, all he ever really looked was unlike himself.

Another change, forced on them by the circumstances of Isstvan, was the loss of the Mournival. Changing the name of the XIV, changing the colour of their armour, those transformations had been embraced willingly as positive reinforcements of their resolve. They had never changed their allegiance: they still followed Horus and the Imperium.

The Mournival, though, the Mournival was a painful loss. That small clique of sons, of peers, of brothers, selected to counsel the Warmaster had always been vital, organic.

Little Horus still wore the mark of the half-moon on his helm, above the right eye-piece.

As the fleet translated into the Dwell system, he spoke to Abaddon on the subject.

‘It is an antiquated concept,’ said the First Captain. ‘See how poorly it served us at Isstvan?’

‘People served us poorly,’ Aximand replied, ‘not the Mournival. The Mournival was always intended to provide even-tempered advice. It was supposed to provoke discussion and dissent, so that we could properly debate each issue and be sure of arriving at balanced reasoning.’

Abaddon looked at him, uncertain.

Aximand smiled back.

‘It is true to say,’ he added, ‘that the decisions we had to make at Davin and Isstvan were so extreme, the natural dissent was...’

‘Was what?’ asked Abaddon.

‘Intense. Those who lost the argument could not be permitted to live. It is the way of things. When the matter is so great, those who speak against it become our enemies. They had to say no, for in their no our yes was consecrated.’

They. Abaddon and Aximand never spoke the names any more. Previous members of the Mournival, perhaps: Berabaddon, Syrakul, Janipur and dear Sejanus. All of them were spoken of, as one would speak of beloved ancestors. But the last two to come and go, their names were never uttered. They were memories too painful for even a transhuman to bear.

‘The mechanism always worked,’ Aximand pressed, dropping his soft voice to a leaf-rustle whisper, making Abaddon bend closer to hear. Below them, the vast bridge bustled with activity.

‘The mechanism always worked, even when we had to kill our dissenters. The method was valid and valuable. The Mournival provides balance, and guarantees the right decisions.’

‘So you would reinstate it?’ asked Abaddon.

‘Do we not need balance now, more than ever?’

‘You would reinstate it?’ Abaddon repeated.

‘It was never gone,’ said Aximand. ‘There are simply vacancies.’

‘Who would you approach?’ asked Abaddon.

‘Who would you?’

Abaddon sniffed.

‘Targost.’

Aximand shrugged.

‘A sound suggestion. Serghar Targost is heartwood like us, but he is also lodge-master. The lodge needs him clear-minded, not compromised by Mournival duties.’

Abaddon nodded, seeing the sense of this.

‘Falkus Kibre,’ said Abaddon.

‘Hmmm.’ Aximand smiled again. The Widowmaker Kibre was a true son, but he was also Captain of the Justaerin, and thus Abaddon’s second. Too much weight in one corner of the Legion.

‘Kibre’s an excellent man,’ he began.

‘Kalus Ekaddon,’ said Abaddon, before Aximand could finish.

Ekaddon. Captain of the Catulan Reaver squad. Another of Abaddon’s company. Aximand wondered if Abaddon properly understood the concept of balance.

‘You make a suggestion, then,’ said Abaddon.

‘Tybalt Marr.’

‘The Either? He’s a good man, but he hasn’t got the stomach for the job, not even now he’s shaken off Moy’s shadow. Kibre is a good–’

‘Jerrod,’ said Aximand.

‘He’s got his hands full taking the reins of the Thirteenth now Sedirae’s gone,’ Abaddon replied.

‘He’s more than able.’

‘He is, but he has new responsibilities,’ said Abaddon.

‘Grael Noctua,’ said Aximand.

The First Captain paused.

‘Of the Twenty-Fifth Warlocked?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s just a squad commander.’

Aximand shrugged. He took up a silver cup from the side table and sipped.

‘There is no rule that members of the Mournival be seniors or captains. In fact, if it were just composed of senior men, where would its point be? The Mournival is about balance and perspective. Wouldn’t a good squad leader’s insight complement the judgement of a First Captain?’

‘Noctua is a fine soldier,’ Abaddon mused.

‘A captain in the making.’

‘He’s young.’

‘We were all young once, Ezekyle.’

Abaddon took up a cup of his own, not to drink, just to have something to toy with while he considered.

‘There is precedence, of course,’ said Aximand. ‘To remind you, Syrakul was a squad leader when Litus proposed him. He was ascendant. He was young, but Litus saw his qualities. You’ve said yourself, Syrakul would have been First Captain if he’d lived.’

‘The same could be said for many,’ Abaddon replied. ‘We should consult Lupercal and–’

‘Why would we?’ asked Aximand. ‘The Mournival has always been an autonomous body. Lupercal likes it that way.’

Abaddon frowned.

‘I suppose. So, Kibre and Noctua?’

‘Yes.’

‘You will approach Noctua, if I make the overture to Falkus?’

‘Agreed.’

‘Put him in the line with you at Dwell,’ said Abaddon. ‘Measure him one last time to be sure. You know the old saying? Measure twice, cut once.’

The Mausolytic Precinct was regarded as one of the top three objectives, along with the primary port and the city of the Elders. The Precinct was sited on a high plateau overlooking Tyjun and the Sea of Enna. In its great, stone structures lay the dead of Dwell, each previous generation interred in ritual cybernation so that their collective thoughts, memories and accumulated knowledge could be accessed and consulted, like books in a library.

The Mausolytic Precinct was Aximand’s responsibility. First Company would lead the attack on the city of Elders. Lithonan, the acting lord commander of the Army forces, would take responsibility for the port, with Jerrod and the 13th as their spearhead.

‘I would be disappointed if we were forced to lose a resource like the Mausolytic Precinct,’ the Warmaster told Little Horus. ‘But I would be more disappointed if we lost this fight. Burn it only if the alternative is losing.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Aximand.

‘I would be disappointed if we were forced to lose a resource like the Mausolytic Precinct,’ the Warmaster told Little Horus. The only light in the chamber came from the fire crackling in the great stone bowl.

‘But I would be more disappointed if we lost this fight. Burn it only if the alternative is... Aximand?’

‘Yes, my lord?’ said Aximand.

‘Your attention is elsewhere, I think.’

‘Lupercal, I’m sorry. For a moment there...’

‘What?’

‘I could hear breathing, my lord.’

The Warmaster regarded him with what looked like amusement.

‘We all do it,’ he said.

‘No, I mean... Do you not hear it?’

‘I hear weakness,’ said the Warmaster. ‘Where is this frailty coming from, Aximand? You’re jumpy.’

‘My lord, is there somebody else in your quarters with us?’

‘No. No, there isn’t. I know this for a fact.’

Aximand rose to his feet.

‘Then who is that?’ he asked. ‘Lord, who is that, standing just there, on the other side of the fire?’

‘Oh, Little Horus,’ said the Warmaster, ‘you are beginning to speak with the tongue of madness.’

And just as Aximand realised that he was, he woke.

He assembled his squad commanders, and reviewed the tactical data. Aximand was, perhaps, the most scrupulous of all the XIV Legion’s captains. He was not one, like Targost for example, who only ever wanted to know the fundamentals of a target, or was annoyed by extraneous detail. Aximand liked to know everything, every last facet. He studied climate charts. He learned the names and phases of Dwell’s eighteen moons. He studied the intelligencer plans of the Mausolytic Precinct, and had the fleetmaster’s strategic architects fashion a sensory simulation he could walk through.

He learned the names of his foe. The Tyjunate Compulsories, a high-calibre division of ceremonial city troops whose duty it was, by tradition, to protect the Precinct. The Chainveil, an elite corps named after the ritual screen surrounding the thrones of the Elders of Dwell, who were rumoured to be supplementing the Mausolytic defence.

No confirmation had yet come of Meduson or any of his agents reaching Dwell. If he had beaten the 63rd in the race, it was thought unlikely he would position himself at the Precinct. This role would probably be handed off to one of his trusted warleaders, perhaps Bion Henricos, or to one of the White Scars captains such as Hibou Khan or Kublon Besk.

‘Let us hope for the Fifth,’ said Lev Goshen, Captain of the 25th Company, who was to command the second wave behind Aximand. ‘Ill-favoured for static defence, they will make themselves crazy waiting for our overture, stuck in one place.’

‘The Scars should not be underestimated,’ said Grael Noctua, Sergeant of the Warlocked Tactical Squad.

Goshen glanced up from the strategium display, looked at Noctua, and caught Aximand’s eye.

‘He’s got a voice, then,’ he remarked.

There had been some murmuring amongst the upper ranks of the Legion when Noctua’s role as second to Aximand for the Mausolytic assault had been announced.

‘I have been advised I had better use it well, captain,’ said Noctua. There was a reserve to him, a restraint that reminded Aximand of someone. Noctua had that true son face, but the balance of humours was unusual: there was less of the arrogant charismatic and more of the calculated intellectual. Abaddon described Noctua as a blade weapon rather than a firearm.

Goshen grinned.

‘Let’s have your wisdom, Noctua,’ he said.

‘I had the honour to serve alongside a detachment of the Fifth Legion seven years ago during the Tyrade System compliance. They impressed me with their battlecraft. I was reminded of the Wolves.’

‘The Luna Wolves?’ asked Goshen.

‘The Wolves of Fenris, sir,’ Noctua replied.

‘That’s two enemies you’ve mentioned,’ said Goshen. ‘You understand they are our enemies, don’t you, Noctua?’

‘I understand they are both utterly lethal,’ replied Noctua. ‘Should we not appreciate the qualities of our enemies above all else?’

Goshen hesitated.

‘This terrace here, this parade,’ he said, returning to the chart display. ‘We will need air cover to achieve it.’

The briefing continued. Aximand thought for a moment that someone else had something to say, someone who had come into the room late, to stand at the back of the grouped officers.

But there was nobody there.

‘I hear you’re considering Kibre and Noctua,’ said the Warmaster.

‘You hear everything, as usual,’ Aximand replied.

‘Not Targost, then?’

‘He has other responsibilities,’ said Aximand, ‘and we did not wish to dilute them.’

The Warmaster nodded. He moved another carved bone counter across the board between them. Of all his sons, Aximand most enjoyed the practice and discipline of strategy games. The anteroom was furnished with many fine sets, most of them gifts from war leaders or brother primarchs. There was regicide, chatranj, caturanga, go, hneftafl, xadrez, mahnkala, zatrikion... It was rare to find a primarch’s home world where a skill-honing wargame had not evolved.

‘Ezekyle favoured Targost, didn’t he?’ asked the Warmaster as Aximand studied the field and contemplated his reply.

‘He did, sir.’

‘And when you persuaded him against the choice, did you tell him the real reason, or did you manufacture one that would be more palatable to him?’

Aximand hesitated. He remembered the conversation with Abaddon, wherein he had not chosen to say that Targost, the Captain of the Seventh Company, was not a son, a true son. He was Cthonian stock. Aximand had not chosen to reveal that part of his disinclination.

‘I didn’t–’ Aximand started to say.

‘Tell him?’ asked the primarch.

‘I didn’t... recognise my true motive,’ Aximand replied, with reluctance.

‘Interesting when you see it, though, don’t you think?’ the Warmaster asked, sitting back. ‘You and Ezekyle, Widowmaker and Noctua, all of you... What is it you call it? True sons?’

‘True sons,’ Aximand echoed.

‘So, do you suppose,’ the Warmaster chuckled, ‘it is because you prefer the reassurance of a familiar face? Or is there another face you wish to block out?’

Dry air, cool, a faint hint of salt. The Sea of Enna in the flat rift valley below, like a sheet of glass in a culvert. Along its shore, the teeming city of Tyjun, collected like flotsam, like multicoloured shingle. On the far side of the immense valley, across the back of the sleeping sea, the block line of the opposite valley wall, squared off and velvet black in the dawn light. The sky was violet, shot with stars and occasional moons. To the north, the pre-glow of the rising sun. To the east, the false dawn of the port, on fire since midnight. That was the handiwork of Jerrod and 13th Company.

In the high morning of the Mausolytic plateau, the buildings of the Precinct stood like stone hangars for vast airships. Rectangles, unadorned, they were faced with yellow stone rendered gold by the early light. In places they were linked by soaring colonnades and porticos, gold stone columns the size of ancient redwoods. The pavements were made of etched steel, polished like mirrors. The atmosphere held a dry, static charge, as if great electromagnetic machines operated nearby.

The vaunted Chainveil made no appearance in the direct line at the Precinct. Chainveil soldiers caused a brief delay to Abaddon’s advance into the City of Elders. The First Captain made curt, grudging reports of their determined resistance. Goshen’s advance took a bastion west of the city where the defenders boasted they were Chainveil, but Goshen was sure they were merely regular army claiming to be the elites, so as to seem more intimidating.

He slew them all, anyway.

The Tyjunate Compulsories, resplendent in silver and crimson wargear, formed the main defence. The troopers were armed with long power swords, with energised axes and pikes, with munition-loaders, with sonic tubes, with plasmic-system weapons and las-rifles. Entering combat, they engaged individual, segmented force shields, light-absorbing fog that dimmed the glory of their ritual uniforms and made them look as if they’d each been enveloped in a hand-cut piece of storm cloud.

The shields were annoyingly effective, and deflected most gunfire over a certain range. When a Legiones Astartes bolt-round did pierce them, either through a direct hit or by finding the joint between segments, the Compulsory inside detonated, and his explosive demise was contained, pressurised, inside the shield, like a firecracker destroying a piece of soft fruit inside a bottle. The noise of it was dull, muted, like the slap of a muffled bass drum.

It was infuriating. Dug in around the looming structures of the Precinct, the Compulsories were actually retarding a Legiones Astartes assault. They were holding the line against the XIV.

Yet they were men. Just men. Aximand felt a sense of injustice. The force shields, certainly not the best he’d ever seen, but made effective by their individual mounts and portability, were giving the Compulsories enough of an edge to bother the Sons of Horus. It was an aberration brought about by circumstance. Human soldiers, no matter how good they were, did not resist transhuman soldiers. Aximand wanted to crush them, pulverise them for their temerity, to call in an orbital barrage, ranged shelling, or even one of the squadrons of superheavy armour pieces that were basking nearby like vast crocodilian predators in the rising sun, waiting for his word to send them slipping down to the kill.

However, any of those actions would also raze the Precinct. The Compulsories were protected by the very buildings they were defending. Aximand had latitude, but he sincerely intended to prove he didn’t need it.

Less than twenty minutes from drop landing, the assault on the Mausolytic Precinct had grown bitter and choked. The Sons of Horus and their Army auxiliaries had lost momentum, their offensive stalled, all their advantages cancelled out by the clear-sighted deployment of professional soldiers exploiting their combat assets.

Yade Durso, second captain of Aximand’s company, cursed all the spirits of vengeance and destiny over the vox-link, but Aximand knew Durso was actually cursing him. Xachary Scipion of Metallun Reaver reported his assumption of squad command. His sergeant, old Gaspir Yunkwist, was dead. There was heat in Scipion’s voice. He was calling for an Apothecary. Zeb Zenonius of Bale Tactical reported two fallen.

Somewhere, someone was breathing.

Taking hits, driven into cover, Aximand looked up at the sky above the plateau. It was still flooded with the blue ink of night, but the pale margins were increasing. He could see four of Dwell’s moons in the sky, one large, the other three not much larger than stars. Because of their relative positions, they were each in a different phase: full, gibbous, half, new.

The sight of it let his anger breathe out for a second. It was, what? A sign? A portent?

His vox tapped. Visor display identified the link as Grael Noctua.

‘Forget bolters,’ said Noctua. ‘Blades.’

‘Indeed?’ Aximand replied.

‘Get in close, and the fools do not stand a chance,’ Noctua replied.

Aximand smiled.

‘Blades! he yelled. He locked his bolter to his hip, and unsheathed his sword. Double-edged, power-active, Cthonian bluesteel, etched along the fuller. He’d called it Mourn-it-all. His combat shield was already on his left arm.

He didn’t wait to see his order observed. He powered out of cover, lasbolts clipping his shield face and dinking his leg plates. Two big, bounding strides put him on the colonnade, moving fast, head down, blade up. He saw the first of the Compulsories up ahead, fogged in their shields, dug in around the massive pillars, firing at him. He could see their faces, pale and astonished.

Transhuman dread. Aximand had heard iterators talk of the condition. He’d heard descriptions of it from regular Army officers too. The sight of a legionary was one thing: taller and broader than a man could ever be, armoured like a demigod. The singularity of purpose was self-evident. A legionary was designed to fight and kill anything that didn’t annihilate it first. If you saw one of the Legiones Astartes, you knew you were in trouble. The appearance alone cowed you with fear.

But to see one move. Apparently that was the real thing. Nothing human-shaped should be so fast, so lithe, so powerful, especially not anything in excess of two metres tall and carrying more armour than four normal men could lift. The sight of a legionary was one thing, but the moving fact of one was quite another. The psychologists called it transhuman dread. It froze a man, stuck him to the ground, caused his mind to lock up, made him lose control of bladder and bowel. Something huge and warlike gave pause – something huge and warlike and moving with the speed of a striking snake, that was when you knew that gods moved amongst men, and that there existed a scale of strength and speed beyond anything mortal, and that you were about to die. And, if you were really lucky, there might be just enough time to piss yourself first.

Aximand saw that dumbfounded look on the faces of the Dwellers he was about to gut and section. He heard the men of Fifth Company following behind him. He felt the joy of being Horus’s son.

Noctua was right. They had been wasting time and effort with guns and bolters. The shields were good enough to make the percentages of a firefight poor. The shields were good enough to stop blades too. Bayonets, that was. Pole arms. A sabre. Maybe even a powered blade.

But not, not for a moment, a powered blade driven by transhuman arm.

The shields shattered. They cracked and broke with the sounds of smashing glass. Sharp chips of shield segment flew into the air for a microsecond after each blow before evaporating, the shield first, and then the body inside: the energy shell, then the meat. Blood exploded from the yawning wounds under pressure, jetting into the morning air, hosing Aximand and the great columns of the colonnade with arterial spray. Each sword stroke made an explosion of viscera, a puff of red in the air as if a bag of blood had been detonated and its contents particulated.

Whatever edge the Tyjunate Compulsories had owned, they lost it the moment the most advanced warriors in the Imperium remembered they were adaptable enough to fight the old-fashioned way: blade and trade, strength of arm, sword-school close combat.

The Fifth made the entrance to the Precinct less than five minutes after Aximand’s inspiring charge.

Aximand went into the thick of it with three sons at his side: Zenonius of Bale, Ger Geraddon, and Mir Amindaza, both of Tithonus Assault. They went in at the end of the grand colonnade, under a gateway called the Arch of Answers. Dweller Compulsories were packed in beneath the shadow of the vast archway, ready to defend the sunward entrances of the East Mausolytic Hall.

The air was full of shots, like neon rain, horizontal. Energy bolts and tracer rounds shone especially brightly in the shade of the vast archway. The Sons struck the line with their heads down and their shields up, sucking up the lancing gunfire, barrelling Compulsories over in a crush, like a surging mass of rioters. Dwellers fell, their shields still lit, rolling and bouncing inside the hard-light shells. There was a crush, a sense of crowd momentum, of thousands of bodies rippling as one mass. There were bodies underfoot. Hands clawed. Weapons fired point blank.

The Sons bit deeper. Their shields were ploughs and rams. Their swords were scythes and pikes. Compulsories dropped, spilling from their shredding, fizzling shields in tattered states, blood sobbing and squirting out of the compromised fields. Blades hooked other men, hurled them into the air, their bodies spinning, tumbling, flailing overhead, above the crowd, crashing back down on the necks and shoulders of their kin. Some men were dead, upright, their bodies kept from falling by the press of the mass. The mirrored pavements were running with blood. The huge pool, draining out from under the fighting mass, spread its racing edges out across the etched steel, wider, broader, crimson in the sunlight, scarlet in the shadows, flooding around the bases of the columns, making islands out of plinths and pillars.

The screaming voices of the Compulsories were either muffled by their cocooning shields or rendered tinny and raw by the vox-intercept feeding into the comm systems of the Legiones Astartes. Most of the sounds Aximand registered were the concussive impacts as he chopped and barged and hacked. Mourn-it-all was running red on its hilt and grip, blood-smoke cooking off the powered blade. Blood had painted Aximand’s sword arm to the elbow and was dripping off the edges of his vambrace. His shield boss was bruised, and splattered with gore and brain matter.

Behind everything, he could hear breathing.

Zenonius moved past him, shield up, ripping through waists and hips and ribcages with broad, horizontal slashes, bisecting bodies, rupturing shields. It was a devastating, mechanical action, almost agricultural rather than martial. He was reaping his way through the enemy to reach the Mausolytic Halls. Like a worker in a field of crops, he was cutting his row, back and forth, swinging his long blade from the shoulders.

To Aximand’s left, Amindaza was treating it more as sport. His blade was shorter, and he toyed with the Compulsories he was rushing, as if trying to engage them in combat and test their skill. He looked for blades to lock with, to deflect. No one met his challenge. They were too busy trying to fall back out of the path of his butcher assault. Amindaza favoured hacking downstrokes, deep, crushing blows coming from over the shoulder that demolished his foes and smashed them onto the ground at his feet. Aximand could hear him calling out his enemies, daring them to fight him. He railed contempt at their attempts to retreat. He killed men whether they were facing him or not.

For his part, Aximand, like Geraddon, preferred a more textbook mass assault form: shield at eye level, used as ram; sword tip-forward at chest level, punching and stabbing like a piston from under the shield rim. It was relentless. It was like rolling a heavy piece of fruit into rows of toy soldiers and watching them knocked down and scattered.

The assault was so fierce that a brown smoke of aerosolised blood was fuming off the fighting line into the sunlight.

Zenonius reached the East Hall entrance, and slaughtered a dozen Compulsories around the ornamental fountain and pool in the deep, sunlit antehall. Larger cohorts of Aximand’s company were on their heels on the colonnade. The lake of blood was so deep and swollen, there was some pressure in it as it grew and spread. Bodies on the smooth, polished floor rotated in its current, end to end, like sticks of driftwood caught by an overspilling river.

Aximand followed Zenonius into the antehall. The walls were sheer, the height of the hall impressive, though the floor plan was a small, square area with a central fountain. The top was open to the sky, so that sunlight could lance down and illuminate the quiet space, the polished floor, the clear water, the calyx and tulip carvings of the fountain’s main figure.

Blood spattered the floor, and pooled around crumpled figures and broken weapons. Bloody handprints marked the edges of the fountain bowl where men had struggled to prop themselves up as their last breaths escaped. On the intricately carved walls, jets of blood had left long, pressure-pattern arcs, huge horsetail fans or fern-frond spatters. Some stretched five or six metres up the sheer walls.

Aximand prowled forward. The place was almost tranquil. The din of fighting outside, muffled by the walls, sounded more like the grumble of a distant storm. Zenonius moved ahead, pausing to finish a wounded Compulsory. Amindaza stepped into the light on the far side of the ante-hall, blade sizzling with frying blood. He had entered via one of the other doorways. Two Compulsories and a Precinct docent rushed him, and he turned to greet them with his sword.

Aximand could hear breathing again. It was close now, closer than ever before, closer than a pulse beat in a man’s brow. The breathing, the sense of presence, had followed him out of his dreams and into his daily life. It had got closer and closer, until it was hovering at his shoulder. Now it sounded as though it were sharing his helmet, as though there were two heads in the one helm. Aximand stopped breathing for a moment to see if it was just some acoustic trick, an echo of his respiration.

Silence.

He was about to breathe again when it started, quiet but close, slow and clam, like the hushing of a gentle sea.

‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘Say again!’ Amindaza crackled over the vox.

‘Specify, sir?’ Geraddon linked.

‘Nothing, nothing!’ Aximand answered. ‘Continue.’

Foolish, so foolish, to let it better him like that. To make him speak of it, to speak out loud. He was only talking to himself, to a trick of his mind. He was only talking to his fear.

And fear, like dreams, was something a legionary was not supposed to have.

He knew fear, and he knew the fear would go the moment he could identify the stranger, the moment the intruder’s face became plain to him. Little Horus Aximand wasn’t afraid of anything except the unknown.

A Compulsory charged him from the brown shadows, a lance in his hands. The blade-tip twinkled with blue light, a photonic edge.

Aximand sidestepped, swung his shield, and put the man on the floor. The blow cracked the Compulsory’s bodyshield and broke his arm. He yelped. Aximand was about to put his foot on him and finish the job when two more came at him. Faster now, more urgent, he rotated, scooping Mourn-it-all around in a backwards stroke that snipped the blade-heads off the lances stabbing at him. The blunt hafts cracked and bent against his ceramite armour. His sword ripped one man apart, opening his shield and eviscerating the body inside. He kicked the other backwards, crunching man and energy cocoon into the ante-hall wall. The impact grazed the stone, and caused chips to fly out. Stepping in, Aximand put his blade through the man’s chest. Mourn-it-all punched through the shield shell, the man, and the wall behind him. The Compulsory was pinned there for a second, like an insect specimen on a felt pad, his body-shield flickering and blinking as it shorted out.

Aximand yanked the blade out, and the man collapsed at his feet.

The breathing had drawn so very close.

Aximand stepped forward, through a tall archway, into one of the main Mausolytic Halls. The space was vast, and the air was radiant with yellow light. It was like stepping into heaven. The thin, quiet, shrouded dead of Dwell were suspended all around him in clear glass tubes, supported horizontally in columns of light. A million bodies, framed in light and glass and gravimetric energy, united in cybernation.

Zeb Zenonius of Bale tactical squad lay dead on the floor. He had been split open like a piece of shellfish.

The sight should have put Aximand on guard, on the highest pitch of readiness and alertness. But the breathing was louder than ever and, despite his transhuman instincts, he tried to see where it was coming from.

So the first blow took him by surprise. His attacker struck from the side. Only by fluke did Aximand’s shield take the brunt of it. The attacker’s sword split the shield, and cut into Aximand’s forearm beneath. Aximand staggered backwards, outraged and surprised.

Outraged by his distracted error.

Surprised by the vast strength of the being assaulting him.

Aximand rallied, blocking with his sword. He was face to face with one of the Legiones Astartes, a flesh-spare brute whose glossy black armour was laced with augmetic systems and stark white insignia: a senior captain of the Tenth Legion, the Iron Hands of Medusa. For a moment, Aximand thought it was Shadrak Meduson himself. The warrior had the stature of a warleader, and bore the sigils of the Sorrgol Clan. But visual tagging via visor display identified his foe as Bion Henricos, Meduson’s favoured lieutenant. Henricos’s sword was a long blade of augmented-function Medusan steel.

They whirled down the cybernation hall like dancers, trading blows. Henricos represented a greater challenge than all the Compulsories Aximand had doomed that day, combined. The Medusan’s skill was formidable. His augmetic strength far exceeded Aximand’s. His speed was breathtaking.

For a thrilling instant, Aximand wondered if he was, at last, experiencing transhuman dread for himself.

They fought their way towards the centre of the hall, where a great bio-stasis generator stack rose like a temple altar, gilded and covered with angelic figures. The glass-packed bodies radiated out from it, stack upon suspended stack. Huge white statues, demi-gods shrouded in long capes, bright as snow, knelt in obeisance before the central block.

The silvered-black armour of the Iron Hands warrior gleamed like slicked oil in the Precinct’s weird light. His blade moved like a ribbon of light. Aximand got around the expert guard, and delivered a glancing blow with his hilt that cracked the chest plating of Henricos’s wargear. Henricos responded by planting his feet, locking their blades in a rigid cruciform, and shoulder-barging Aximand.

Little Horus lurched backwards and crashed into the nearest row of cybernators. Glass sleeves shattered, and showers of fragments flew up and caught the light like spring petals. Cybernation tubes cannoned into one another, cracking and disintegrating. Some were pushed clear of the gravimetric support fields and fell, smashing on the polished metal floor. Power relays shorted out. Desiccated bodies tumbled out into the air like bundles of roots and twigs.

Bion Henricos crunched over broken glass and dry bones to get at Aximand. He shoved suspended glass sleeves out of his way. There was a bitter stink of resins and preserving spices. Aximand struggled to get up. Flickers of energy, dark and unhealthy, were flaring like troubled synapses out from the disrupted area of the Mausolytic array. The coloured bursts writhed and fired out into the serene, golden layers of the undamaged structure. Odd harmonics, like the low moaning of a thousand voices relayed by a low quality vox signal, filled the hall.

Henricos reached Aximand. Mourn-it-all cut him across the eyes, shattering one lens unit, and raked a gouge down his stomach and hip. Henricos struck with a swing that would have severed Aximand’s head if he had been a hand-span closer. He drove the Medusan back across the carpet of ancient, pulverised glass and mummified scraps. His next blow wounded Henricos in the thigh. Something silvery, like liquid mercury, sobbed out.

Henricos put him on the ground. Aximand wasn’t quite sure how he’d been hit, but the impact rattled his brain inside his skull and filled his mouth and nostrils with blood. He was face down, groping for his fallen sword, concussed and dazed and vulnerable.

He looked up, wondering why Henricos hadn’t finished him. Amindaza of Tithonus was locking swords with his opponent. Amindaza had fought his way into the Hall, and Geraddon wasn’t far behind. The loud and repeated discharge of weapons from outside the entry space suggested that the assault had washed into the main area of the Precinct, and that the Compulsories were in retreat.

Amindaza had been wounded on his way into the Hall, and his arm was slow. His arrival and interception had saved Aximand, but it had also doomed Amindaza. Henricos was a far superior swordsman. Before Aximand, dazed and spitting blood, could get back up, Henricos had delivered a blow that split Amindaza from his left shoulder to his right hip. He was simply bisected, diagonally, in one stroke. The sections of him fell hard, messily, in an apocalyptic release of blood.

Geraddon flew at him, and Henricos knocked him aside. Geraddon smashed into another row of caskets.

Aximand put Mourn-it-all through Henricos’s spine so that the tip shattered the aquila on the Medusan’s breastplate.

Henricos fell to one knee, and then onto his face. Aximand knelt on his back and cut his helmet off. Henricos’s pale face was turned to the side, cheek to the floor, the white skin flecked with beads of dark red blood.

‘Pray this death takes you, traitor,’ said Aximand. ‘Other deaths would be less forgiving.’

Henricos gurgled something.

‘What?’ asked Aximand, pressing his blade against the neck of the Iron Hands warleader.

‘You are not the trophy we hoped for,’ Henricos whispered.

‘Trophy?’

‘Knew we couldn’t beat you, wanted to hurt you instead. Thought... thought he would value the Mausolytic Precinct above all, and lead this segment attack personally.’

‘This was supposed to be a trap for Lupercal?’

‘May he burn forever.’

Aximand laughed.

‘But your master is a coward and a traitor,’ murmured Henricos, ‘and all he sends is you.’

‘It would appear I’m quite enough,’ replied Aximand. ‘What did you hope to do?’

Henricos gurgled.

‘I said, what kind of trap is one flesh-spare warrior?’

Henricos did not reply. All the life had drained out of him.

Aximand rose, and kicked the corpse.

Geraddon had got back up.

‘What was he saying?’ he asked.

‘Nonsense,’ Aximand replied. ‘Simply nonsense. He was desperate.’

‘It was supposed to be a trap,’ said Geraddon, ‘so why was he alone?’

The sound of breathing had come back. Aximand turned slowly and realised that it was simply the background noise of the Mausolytic Hall, the slow, throbbing murmur of the cybernation system. It was the pulse of the sleeping dead.

He felt like a fool. When the operation was over, he would meditate. He would clean his mind of the fears and dreams that had accumulated. He would purify his thoughts and expel his weaknesses. To serve the Warmaster, he needed to be an even-tempered weapon.

He had let himself slacken. It was time he recommitted his mind and made himself truer to the image of Lupercal.

Aximand opened the vox, and took stock. Large portions of the Precinct were in XIV Legion hands. Grael Noctua reported the West Hall and the approaches secure. Aximand ordered squads forward into the East Hall, to his position. He ordered all access ways closed.

He looked at the cybernation array around them. A little damage had been done, but not too much. The facility was essentially intact, and a little pressure applied to Dweller tech-adepts would soon have repairs completed.

The huge white statues of shrouded demi-gods, bright as snow, that had been kneeling in obeisance around the central great bio-stasis generator stack were gone.

‘Wait–’ Aximand began.

The White Scars killteam rushed them. The five killers of the V Legion had thrown off the white cloaks they had used for concealment. They had used chalk dust or some funereal powder to mask the crimson edges of their armour. Their helms were crowskull, the Corvus pattern.

It seemed Lev Goshen had been badly mistaken. The White Scars did have the patience to wait. What on the open field was fast hit and run became, in city fighting, stealth and swift ambush.

Grael Noctua’s warning had been shrewd.

The first one was up on him. It was Hibou Khan. Aximand identified him from his rank and company pins. This was the practice of berkutchi, to ‘cut the head’. The term came from the Chogorisian art of hunting with eagles, the great akwilluh, using the birds to draw out and isolate the bull leader of a herd. Once the bull was dead, the herd was broken.

It had been their intention to decapitate the XIV. Thwarted, they were going to make do with other prey: other bulls, junior bulls, company captains.

Aximand smashed Hibou away, and broke the White Scar’s blade on Mourn-it-all’s edge. Another Scar lunged in. Aximand parried and heard Geraddon cry out as two blades punched through him. Aximand drove his sword down through the cap of the next snow-white crowskull helm that came at him. Suddenly, not all the red decorating the White Scar wargear was scarlet lacquer. He reached for his bolter.

Gunfire ripped through the Mausolytic Precinct. More White Scars and renegade Iron Hands had sprung their trap. Squads of Aximand’s company were meeting both, bolter to bolter. Fighting on, out-numbered, Aximand slew another White Scar, blasting his bolter point-blank through an eyeslit. He yelled over the link to Noctua and his lieutenant captains to close the fight down.

To be on alert that their enemy was hunting captains as trophies.

To be aware that they weren’t facing Tyjunate Compulsories or Chainveil anymore.

They were facing Legiones Astartes transhumans.

Hibou Khan had got back on his feet. To replace his own, broken sword, the White Scar had snatched up the long blade of Medusan steel that Henricos had wielded. His first blow notched Mourn-it-all, his second beat Aximand’s guard.

His third blow caught Little Horus vertically at the cheek, in a line that began just over the right eye-piece where his Mournival mark was displayed. The bonded ceramite of his helm didn’t even seem to stop the Medusan weapon.

Aximand fell. There was a great deal of blood suddenly, and he couldn’t properly account for its source. He saw something on the etched steel floor in front of him.

It was the visor and snout section of his own helmet, the entire faceplate. It had been sheared off, peeled cleanly away, as though shaved by an industrial slicer.

And it was not empty.

The reattachment left a scar. It set the character of the face differently, altered the seating of the muscles. Somehow, the wrongness, the imperfection, made him more like Horus, not less.

Noctua brought his squads into the East Hall in a rapid counterstrike, and broke the berkutchi. Hibou Khan was denied the opportunity to finish the job. Most of the loyalist Space Marines were driven back out into the lap of Lev Goshen and his Terminator squads.

Hibou Khan fled, leaving twelve men of Aximand’s company dead by his own hand, and earning himself a place on Aximand’s death list.

A new helm was forged for him, with the half-moon above the right eye. The armourers were already busy graving Mournival marks to the helms of Grael Noctua and Falkus Kibre. When Aximand was shown the pieces of his old headgear, he saw that the blade had sliced his half-moon mark in half.

Had he been a man prone to superstition and belief in omens, he might have read bad things into this.

But he was not afraid of change. He was not really even a man.

Under the surgeon’s knife, in stasis sleep, he had dreamt one final dream. The identity of the faceless intruder had ultimately been revealed. Aximand had been slightly apprehensive that the intruder’s face would turn out to be his own, or one just like it, and that lengthy psychological work would be required as a consequence.

It was not. As they restored his face, he dreamt the face of the other.

It was the face of Garviel Loken.

When Aximand woke, he felt a measure of happiness and relief. A man could not be afraid of the dead, and Loken was dead, and that fact would not change.

Not that he was afraid of change. Change was, he always insisted, part of his ruling character.

‘The melancholic humour is protean,’ he said. ‘It possesses the quality of autumn. It is transformative. It makes me the accelerator of death, the enabler of ends and beginnings. I was made to clear away this world ready for renewal. To change the order of things. To cast out the false and enthrone the true. This is my purpose. I am not afraid.’

Then again, once they reattached his face, all he ever really looked was invincible.

BLACK GOLD

undertaking to rosetta

I

The flask is tubular, copper, banded with straps of dull zinc. Brother Memnes draws it from a sheath strapped to the thigh-plate of his Mark VII power armour.

This is the Rite of the Giving of Water, and none will look away. Nine armoured warriors, the entire assault squad, surround the kneeling Apothecary as he unscrews the stopper, then tips a few drops out onto his segmented glove. Their armour is gunmetal grey, edged with white and red, and the desert has coated them all with a film of white dust. The threads of water make stark black streaks on the dusty metal of his gauntlet’s fingers. As the brothers intone the sacred rite, voices toneless as they rasp out through visor speakers, Memnes dribbles the water onto the rock he has chosen. In a second, the suns have baked it away to nothing, but the rite is nevertheless made. Water has been given, precious drops from the raging salt oceans of their homeworld, Ithaka.

They were born from a world of seas, raised from it like the great horn-plated water-wyrms they name themselves after. To them, it is the embodiment of the Emperor, who they voyage space to serve. Wherever they go, they make this offering, the life-water of Ithaka, the blood of the Emperor. This place – called Rosetta on the arcane charts shown to them at briefing – this place is now consecrated. Water has anointed this vast landscape of heat and dust.

They are Iron Snakes. The double-looped serpent symbol stands proud upon their auto-responsive shoulder plates. They are Tactical Squad Damocles, charged with this holy duty. They stand in the ring, as Brother Memnes rises to join the circle, ten warrior-gods in the form of men, armoured and terrible. They sing, a slow ritual tune, and beat time in deadened clanks, slapping right hands against their thigh plates.

Their weapons have been made safe for the Rite of Giving of Water, as ready weapons would be disrespectful. The chant over, they move with smooth precision, clicking sickle-pattern clips into bolt pistols. Brother Andromak connects the power feeds to his plasma gun. Blue lightning crackles into life around Brother-Sergeant Raphon’s lightning claw. He nods. The circle breaks.

The salt-pan glows like milk in the sunlight. Visor tints and nictitating bionic eyelids dim the glare to a bright blue translucence. The brothers are silent as they skirt the littered rocks along the edge of the depression, moving single file through the shadows.

Two suns have risen: one dull and fuzzy like an apricot, the other vast and sizzling and too white-bright for even their visors to negate. The third, a tiny spot of heat like a melta-flame, will be over the horizon in four minutes.

In line then, Brother-Sergeant Raphon, Brother Andromak, Brother Priad, Brother Calignes. A break of ten paces, then in file Brother Pindor, Brother Chilles, Brother Xander, Brother Maced. Another break, then Brother Natus and Brother-Apothecary Memnes. Brother Andromak carries the Chapter standard: the snake crest, double-looped, pinioned above his shoulder blades.

No words are spoken or needed. Visor arrays are matched by sharp senses. Ranges are judged and logged; terrain is assessed and scanned. Brother-Sergeant Raphon uses his auspex to watch ahead. They know why they are here and what they must do. And when they must do it.

A low wind rises in the east, shivering across the pan. It picks up salt dust as it goes, brushing the fine white powder into eddying cones. The dust seethes, flicking like foam off rock outcrops or churning in lines across the flat. The dust ripples look like snakes, Brother Priad thinks, or like waves breaking on a rocky shore. He nods at Brother Calignes: a good portent.

At the head of the snake of men, Brother-Sergeant Raphon sees it too. He knows the dust has been stirred up by a solar wind, precursor of the third sunrise. The third sun is small, but its radioactive force on Rosetta is fiercely powerful. Triple dawn is almost upon them.

With a gesture of his hand, he double-times them. They crunch on through the indigo shadows of scattered white rocks, bleached like teeth. The Iron Snakes pass into a canyon, starkly black and white with its division of shadow and light.

Shadow and light. The key to this.

Beyond, below, in a dimpled basin scoured from the pan, lies the target. Raphon sees it for the first time. Rosetta Excelsis Refinery Nine: a ten kilometre-square edifice of riveted black metal and orange pipe work, looking like a wasp crushed into the desert by a great heel. Oily girder work laces the structures and pouting, soot-mouthed stacks vent dark fumes and the occasional flame-bellied belch of smoke into the crystal-blue desert sky. Raphon looks at it for a while – a few seconds probably, but for him an eternity of contemplation. He knows, for he has been told, that this is a vital facility, sucking black fluid out of the porous rock buried deep beneath the salt-pan. Ten weeks ago, the pipelines that run from here to the cargo port at Alpha Rosetta sputtered dry. The precious supply of fuel had been staunched. Without its flow, the armoured battalions of the Imperial Guard on half a dozen neighbouring worlds had ground to a halt.

Raphon opens his comm, selecting the command channel. ‘Damocles, I witness to you the target. We will begin on my word.’

Liberate, they were ordered. Brother-Librarian Petrok, great Petrok himself, had given the briefing. Liberate the facility and the fuel supply. Exterminate any who oppose.

Such simplicity. Raphon smiles again, feeling the hungry weight of his bolter in his right fist, the warmth of the lightning claw that encases his left.

The third sun rises. A brief and extraordinary phenomenon striates the desert salt-pan. The three opposing suns, with their trio of conflicting intensities and directions, fill the stark whiteness with a startling criss-cross of shadows. The desert becomes a chequerboard of darkness and light, grey sidelong slants, fathomless pools, intersections of harsh glare as stark as snow. It is called the Risings, Raphon knows. Librarian Petrok was quite specific. At this hour, for four and three-quarter minutes, the conjunction of sunlights make a shadow maze of the landscape.

‘Damocles: move!’

Their window of opportunity.

Ten armoured warriors descend the dimpled slope at a run, crossing shadow and light, lost like sifting sand in the complexity of the flickering cross light.

II

Brother Raphon reaches a sloping wall of iron-buffered siding. He scales it, ripping hand-holds with his claw, sliding over the top to bring his bolter to bear.

Two men guard the parapet, two men dressed in refinery overalls augmented with sections of body armour. The backs of their tunics are marked with sprayed stencils showing the vomitous sign of the Ruinous Powers, of Tzeentch. The skin of their faces is dark and knobbed, like the hides of crocodiles. They have injected fluid tars under the skin to taint it, and buried metal piercings, girder rivet heads, in the flesh. A mark of honour, so Librarian Petrok said, of membership to their foul cult. They stand by their pintle-mounted autocannon, watching the sun rise, feeling the warmth on their lumpy, black faces.

Raphon fires twice. One drops without a head; the other reels, his spine removed in an explosion of blood, gristle and bone shards.

Brother Andromak reaches another part of the perimeter. The alternating light and dark flicker of the three suns is confusing him, but Sergeant Raphon explained how this would be to their advantage. He kicks open a shutter door and enters the gloom, squeezing the grip of his plasma gun. Things with bright eyes set in black faces look up for a second and then die, screaming.

Brother Priad leads the assault over the north wall. Grenades loop from his hand and scatter like seeds across the grilled deck-way. Explosions rattle the length of the wall line. Somewhere, an alarm starts to whoop.

They are in.

Pindor crosses an open space between derricks, blasting freely. Huddles of bleary enemies stumble outside in confusion, and are cut down as they flee. Calignes enters a service vault by the north wall and finds three cultists struggling with the tripod of a storm bolter. He saves ammunition and butchers them with his knife.

Chilles and Xander catch a dozen of the enemy as they panic. They impose a crossfire that pulverises all. More emerge, firing back with lasguns and autocannon. A searing shot marks Xander’s shoulder guard with a denting scorch. Memnes moves in around them, setting up a third part to the crossfire. Like the three suns with their inescapable shadows, the three tracing lines of their bolter fire pummel into and explode corrupted bags of flesh. Memnes chuckles as he does the Emperor’s work.

Calignes moves from bunker to bunker, slaughtering. Through one doorway, he turns to face the stained features of a screaming heathen who opens up on him with an autocannon. Thumped backwards three paces by the succession of impacts to his carapace, Calignes grunts. His boltgun has been blown from his fist and his smallest finger has been vaporised. The autocannon cycles suddenly on empty, and as the cultist gropes for a reload, Calignes rushes him, exploding his head with a clap of his augmented fists.

The Iron Snakes move deeper into the facility. Between two low concrete blockhouses, Maced is rushed by twenty cultists who stream over him like ants, bludgeoning him with girder strips and wrenches. He laughs as he kills them, crushing necks, splintering limbs, punching his fists through bodies. His battledress now dressed with blood, he churns through the gore into the control room and tears the cultist he finds at the primary console into two twitching pieces.

His laughter rolls through the comm. The other Snakes rejoice in it. Raphon kills as he laughs with a shot from his bolter. Priad fires on full auto. Andromak scorches. They kill and kill again.

Something stops Chilles in his tracks. He pauses, almost thoughtful, trying to make sense of things, struggling to overcome his clinically trained battle hunger. He stands on a derrick walkway, with a good view of the control centre. He looks down.

There is a hole clean through his torso, a hole that passes right through him. As his legs give out, Chilles screams in rage. He was not finished. His face hits the grille deck, denting it.

They all feel his death. Through the rapport of inter-fed life signs, they all feel it. The Iron Snakes mourn Chilles even before he has fallen. And they see his last sight: the Traitor Marine. The hulking, pustular form of a Dark Tusk warrior, cackling over the smoking muzzle of his weapon.

Eyes wet with anger, Priad turns to find another Dark Tusk mere paces from him, charging with a rusty, barbed lance. Priad can smell the rot in the air, the foetid stench of corrupting matter.

A bolter is not enough to cleanse this filth. Priad bowls the primed grenade in his hand with such fury it smacks the Dark Tusk off his feet as it strikes him in the gut. He falls, almost comical, spread-eagled around the impact. Then the grenade ignites.

Priad is drenched in mauve fluid. It clogs his vents for a moment and he falls, choking with the stench. As he gags, he sees the feet beside him, the great steel-bound boots of another Dark Tusk who is standing over him, whooping and sucking with liquid laughter, about to fire.

Raphon kills it. He squeezes the trigger of his boltgun until the entire sickle clip is empty and a hurricane of rounds have hammered the Chaos Marine into a heap of organic and metal wreckage wreathed in a mist of blood.

Raphon pulls the choking Priad to his feet. ‘More than we thought,’ he rasps.

‘Is it not the way?’

‘The way of killing?’

‘Just so… give me more, make them lethal, make the fight worth fighting.’

Raphon clips Priad on the shoulder in respect and encouragement as the younger brother reverses the cycle of his helmet vents to expel the ichor clogging his intakes.

They turn. There is another scream. Maced is dead. Poisonous splinter barbs from some inhuman Dark Tusk gun have blown his legs and lower torso to shreds. A dirty, toxic knife has silenced his screaming rage.

Vengeance burns in their throats, making them as dry as the salt-pan. As he strides forward with Priad, Raphon uses his auspex to judge the deployment of Damocles. The surgical precision of their strike is melting as the men turn back to avenge their fallen brothers. The assault is hesitating.

Raphon will not allow this. Keying open his comm again, he barks off a string of orders that redirects and fortifies the ebbing wash of his men’s advance. He quotes the motivational sermons on the use and abuse of vengeance in battle that they all heard during tactical indoctrination on the fortress-moon, Karybdis.

Memnes supports him, cutting in on a sub-channel, singing the battle dirge of Ithaka that glorifies the dead in the Emperor’s name.

Raphon and Priad meet with Andromak and Xander at a railed walkway by one of the facility’s well-head arrays. There is a fog of liquid oil in the air. Xander finds Maced’s corpse, sprawled in pieces in the shadows of a ductway. He signals Memnes to it.

The Apothecary arrives, opening his belt pack for the reductor and the other tools of removal. Maced himself is beyond the help of Memnes’s narthecium. The bright steel tongs of the reductor are already slick with Chilles’s blood. With deft but reverential hands, Memnes strips open Maced’s chest armour and begins to dig the flesh apart for the sacred progenoid gland. Such rare treasure, the genetic wellspring of a Space Marine’s power, cannot be abandoned. He pulls it free, a glistening thing, drops it into a chrome bowl, cleans it with a spray from a sphyxator, then places it carefully into a self-locking, sterile tube. He stoppers the tube and slides it back into the rack in his narthecium, next to the one already holding Chilles’s gland. There are eight empty tubes just like them.

Bestial wails and calls reverberate the ironwork. Andromak and Xander have cornered a Dark Tusk. The exchange of fire is brief but intense. Xander takes a hit that rips a thermal waste dissipater off his backpack. In return, he puts a bolter round in through the Dark Tusk’s left visor socket. As the Chaos servant falls, thrashing, Andromak roasts him slowly with his plasma cannon.

Raphon and Priad skirt the vaulted bunkers a hundred metres west. Sharp slabs of sunlight interlace long shadows thrown by the buttresses. Priad sees where the etched inscriptions on the Imperial iron facings, eulogies to the Golden Throne, have been defaced and overwritten with dripping blasphemies. He starts to repeat the dirge to soothe his mind.

Raphon silences him. Drips of something like tar soil the white sand in the sunlit openings. They think they have another of the Tusks, gone to ground between two pump station units but the pulsing machinery is fogging Raphon’s auspex.

The Tusk comes on them from the rear, grabbing Raphon from behind with great armoured limbs that lock around his throat. It drives a barbed and rusted spike through his left hip. Priad turns and dives into them, so that the three sprawl, locked, armour grinding and scraping together. The Tusk is half as big again as either of them, ancient armour black and shiny like a great scarab, dressed with filthy loops of chain. Priad twists, fighting to get his bolter close to the vile thing’s face.

Blood in his mouth, Raphon fights the Tusk, fights the grip, fights the pain. He writhes to give Priad a clean shot. The spike breaks. It shatters inside Raphon. He blacks out.

The Tusk gets a hand around Priad’s wrist and hauls him over, but this is a mistake. It has cleared the shot. Though still gripped, Priad fires twice, the point-blank shots shattering the Tusk’s helmet and skull and igniting its power pack.

The blast lifts Priad and Raphon and tosses them ten paces. By the time Priad is on his feet again, they are lying in a wide pool of blood which is streaming from the spiked hole in Raphon’s armour. The wound is huge. Blood drizzles out from under him, through the buckled puncture in the plating. Wordlessly, for to speak would be to scream, Raphon shudders and uncouples his lightning claw.

Priad wants to argue, but knows this is not the time or the place. Raphon has been grooming Priad for command responsibilities since Priad’s induction into Damocles five years earlier. Priad has always hoped that such an inheritance would be a long time coming. He pulls off his own left gauntlet and arms himself with the claw.

He plugs the power lead into a rune-shaped socket on his elbow. Gold leaf traceries etch the knuckle backs of the ancient weapon, recording its history and uses. The commander of Damocles squad has always worn the claw. Priad flexes its fingers as the electrical charge shimmers around it. On the ground, a stiffening island of metal in a lake of blood, Raphon opens his command channel and begins his eulogy, his passing over, instructing them all to answer to Priad.

He is finishing, his voice fading, when Memnes arrives. The Apothecary clasps Raphon’s naked hand once as a gesture of honour. He opens his narthecium for medical tools.

‘No time,’ Raphon murmurs.

Memnes scans, concurs. Raphon’s pelvis is shattered and his lower abdomen is laced with metal fragments from the shattered spike-haft still impaling him. With a ship’s infirmary, care, time, and bionics it would be repairable but there is no time, and the spike was venomed. Filth and toxins permeated the Traitor Marine’s weapon, plague spores that blister and chew their way through Raphon’s body, despite his superhuman, implanted metabolism. Soon he will be a tainted slab of decaying flesh, the progenoid gland too.

Memnes removes the gland. He doesn’t wait for Raphon to die. Despite the pain of the extraction, Memnes believes that all Marines would rather die knowing their legacy had been saved. The surgery wounds, rending and deep, kill Raphon. They are perhaps a blessed relief from the toxic wave that sweeps over him.

Another tube for the rack.

III

Priad opens the command channel and speaks to his men. They hail him with grim solemnity and utter devotion. Raphon will be mourned later. Natus reports the southern perimeter secure, and Pindor and Calignes add that all opposition has ceased. In thirteen minutes, they have killed three hundred and eleven of the foe, including the Dark Tusks. For the loss of three. It has been a costly victory.

The Iron Snakes regroup at the main gantry as Memnes and Andromak torch the corpses of the foe, and lay out the three dead Iron Snakes with honour and ceremony. Working from stored instructions in their helmet memories, Priad and Natus toil to re-engage the pipeline so that fuel pumping may recommence.

Calignes searches the scrappy and incomplete log entries of the refinery’s control personnel. He draws Priad across and shows him what he has found: listings of anomalous core samples and petroleum spectrographs. Three months before, to the day, Rosetta Excelsis started to suck something other than oil up from the desert aquifer.

‘There is something down there,’ Calignes says. ‘Something foul and ancient that has slumbered in the oil reserves for…’ He does not finish his sentence. Time passages of that length are beyond his ability to guess or articulate.

Priad is silent, numb perhaps. Their mission here, the directives of which he has inherited and intends to carry out with loyal precision, were to recapture this valuable well-head. It was assumed that the forces of the enemy had overtaken this place to disempower the Imperial Army.

That is shown to be a lie, and the deployment of the Dark Tusks to bolster the cult’s troops now makes sense. There is something valuable to the Ruinous Powers here. Some artefact, perhaps, some icon, some thing of power, perhaps even an entity, buried deep below in the lightless lakes of oil.

Damocles has won: won the facility, discharged its mission at great cost. And yet it has lost. They have won a place that is worthless, seized back precious Imperial territory, only to find it now tainted and despoiled. If they had known, from orbit, they could have…

Priad pauses. He clears his mind with slow intonations of the focus chant. Disappointment is a mind poison. So is the thought of failure or the loss of belief in either cause or purpose. Calignes knows it too and follows Priad’s lead, casting out the negative senses of loss and error gnawing at him. He needs no cue or command to do this. They are Adeptes Astartes, Iron Snakes Chapter. There is no failure, there is no defeat. There is only victory and death, and both are to be savoured when they come.

Priad looks around, imagining the moment when the refinery first spewed up the taint from deep below. He feels a tiny stab of pity for the workforce, men he has helped slaughter this day. Loyal servants of the Emperor turned to the ways of Darkness by something that they began to exhume from the depths. There is no choice now. They must do what should have been done first of all.

Priad orders Natus to stop work on the reconfiguration of the pipeline pumps. He summons Pindor and Xander, and makes them assemble all the explosives they can find. They take the full complement of grenade munitions from each Space Marine, then search the weapons stocks of the enemy for more.

Memnes enters the gantry and Priad quietly tells him of the discovery. Memnes thumbs open the neck seals of his helmet and removes it. His scalp is shaven and beaded with sweat. He wipes a gloved hand right back across its stubbled dome, his old face dark and serious.

‘Your decision is correct. You do as Raphon would have done.’ Though second in the chain of command under the squad leader, the old Apothecary has seniority on his side and his assent is always noted by the leader. Memnes knows that is what Priad, a Marine barely half his age, is looking for.

‘We have not failed. It is simply that the nature of the victory has changed,’ Memnes says.

‘I know it. We will make true victory from this spoiled triumph, and celebrate both in the Emperor’s name.’

Pindor reports that the munitions are collected. They load them into a cargo cart and push them to the well-head. Natus and Andromak take drill weights off one of the main bores and strap the explosives into place, lashing them into mesh ore sacks.

They are half-finished when the counter-attack comes: a bombardment from the east that fractures the perimeter wall and flattens two derrick towers in a frenzy of sparks and shrieking metal. Roses of fireballs bud into the sky. Priad has signalled their egress to the east and now he countermands, asking for a western extraction. The change will add four minutes to the Thunderhawk’s flight-time.

Pindor works to complete the stowage of the explosives. He is stripped down to the waist to allow him access to the cramped space under the bore-head, his armour stacked nearby. Fluid-heavy feed lines cross his naked carapace from the belt mount, held in place by flesh staples. His shoulders bear the old scars of punishment rituals carried out on Karybdis. Pindor always scored low on morning firing rites, but his expertise at close-fighting and explosives have made him indispensable. Scar tissue, puffy and pink as coral, bunches and twists as he works.

The enemy advances from the east. More long-range bombardment, and then the first signs of troops. Dark Tusks, in two assault teams, with Razorbacks in support.

Damocles have no long-range weapons, nothing with reach like the Razorbacks. Resistance at this point would be futile. Priad orders midday prayers, and they circle around him, kneeling, helmets off, heads down, as he chants the litanies of devotion, the psalms of destruction and fortitude. He does it so they will not even consider the idea they have failed. No one voices such a thought. He asks each man in turn to speak a word for the fallen.

Calignes remembers Chilles, a moment of bravery on Paradis Antimony. They all nod, remembering. Xander shows a scar that would have killed him on Basalt Ignius III, but for Maced. Maced is remembered too. Natus celebrates Brother-Sergeant Raphon’s tactical skill and his bravery. Andromak recalls the day Chilles slew a water-wyrm on beloved Ithaka. Naked on a rock-tower, with a sea-lance braced. He took the horn-hide. The polished scales were still looped in his belt when he died. Memnes speaks well of Maced, reminding them of his brute strength against the grisly H’onek on Parlion One-Eleven. Chapter legend, a legend that has died today in flesh but which will live in memory. And not, Priad reminds himself fiercely, in vain.

Pindor joins them, still half-stripped, dripping sweat and oil. He kneels and tells a short, gutsy story of Raphon at the gates of Fewgal, blinded by mud and killing all the foe he could find, cursing all the while for ‘a good sea-lance’ to test them. Pindor draws their laughter: honest, forthright, uplifting. No hint of defeat or failure in them now.

As is should be, thinks Priad. We have won; the Snakes have won, no matter what.

‘I have done the work,’ Pindor tells Priad as the laughter subsides.

They help Pindor redress his armour, while Calignes cycles the rock-bore to dig and sends it down. Oil waste flushes up around his feet like a black tide and then seeps away down through the mesh of the gantry deck.

The foe is at the gates. A tumult of voices and gunfire. Helmets in place, the seven Iron Snakes withdraw in close file down the main cargo avenue, under the shadows of lifters and skeletal cranes. They fire as they go, lacing bolt-traces and plasma fire into the buildings and niches.

At the west cargo gate, they form into a spearhead as the Tusk advance guard rushes them down the avenue. Blisters of light mark the air, exploding metal bulkheads, breaking girders and digging white powder from the ground. A descending hellstorm, chasing after them. The Snakes drop two of the foe with concentrated fire before Priad orders them out of the gate. He himself pauses in the archway long enough for the first Tusk to reach him. Priad disembowels the disgusting creature with the lightning claw.

In Raphon’s name.

A saved grenade brings the cargo gate down after him and they are moving into open desert away from Rosetta Excelsis with the Chaos advance momentarily halted. The stark light of the midday suns burns the landscape white and shadowless, and there is no longer a horizon between bleached land and colourless sky.

The gunship awaits, hazed by heat and dust, in a narrow arroyo. Its entry ramp is down like a tongue in the soft dust. Bolter rounds whine after them as they board. The Dark Tusks have broken through in pursuit. Memnes and Priad, in the rear, turn and engage for one last time, killing as if to underline the undeniability of their victory.

IV

From space, the surface of Rosetta is hard and white and sharply scored, like the back of a dry skull. They are just making transitory orbit when the munitions fire, nine hundred metres down in the oil reserves. There is no visible sign from up here. Almost an hour later, the surface turns dark and puffy, like wet-rot, the patch extending for three thousand square kilometres around the focus of the refinery. Sub-crust fires, linked to magmatic disruptions and fuelled by some unknown source of exploding power, burn out Rosetta a day later.

In the dank belly of the gunship, their discarded helmets rolling on the metal floor in little circles as the ship pitches and yaws, the survivors of Damocles sit in silence. They are tired, blank, parched. They mourn. Now, and only now, do they allow themselves the thoughts. They have lost. Yet they have won. They have taken a victory, the right victory, but not one they expected or were sent to achieve.

Memnes takes out his flask. It is tubular, copper banded with straps of dull zinc. He draws it from a sheath on the thigh of his armour.

This is the Rite of the Sharing of Water, and none will look away. Six armoured forms, the remains of the assault squad, watch as Priad takes the flask. He wants for cool, slaking water, but he knows this must come first. A sip of the salt water of Ithaka. He swigs it. It is sharp, warm, saline, bitter.

He looks up at them all and they pound their thigh armour in approval. The ceremony is over but the bitterness in his mouth remains.

Whether it’s from the water of his homeworld or the mission, Priad isn’t sure.

THE FALL OF MALVOLION

By his wrist-chronometer, it was not yet noon, but the air was warm and clammy. Trooper Karl Grauss of the Mordian Iron Guard 15th let his lasrifle swing loose on its harness strap, wiped the perspiration from his eyes, and pushed the angular nose of the wrench-bar into the rusty door lock.

He paused and glanced around at Major Hecht. The officer was tensed, his lasrifle pulled up tight with the butt in his armpit, ready to fire. Beads of sweat dotted his face too, and it wasn’t just the heat.

‘What are you waiting for?’ he hissed.

Grauss shrugged. He didn’t know, exactly. He didn’t know anything except what Hecht had told him and the others of Zwie Company that morning: get out to that pumping station in the delta and find out why they hadn’t checked in for three days.

Grauss jiggled the wrench-bar until the tool locked against the latch mechanism, and then began to wind the ratchet so that the door release slowly began to turn manually.

Down the low hallway behind him, the major and six other men from Zwie hugged the walls and braced lasguns. This was the job at its worst, thought Grauss as he cranked the tool. Sneaking into a mystery and opening doors blind when you had no idea what in the name of the God-Emperor lay on the other side.

But, dammit, they were Iron Guard! More disciplined, determined Imperial soldiers you couldn’t find.

They’d reached the pumping station early that morning. A cluster of machine-barns and modular habitats, it stood at a confluence of irrigation channels which watered the entire delta area and fed over a dozen farm steads. The suns were low and cool. There had been no sign of life, not even the ever-present water birds that Grauss had seen everywhere in the marshes.

And once they had got inside, with no answers to their voice or vox calls, it had been so damned hot and humid, like someone had set the environment controls to ‘tropical’.

The latch popped and Grauss kicked the door inwards, swinging aside so that the major could slide in, gun raised and aimed.

Before them lay some kind of hydroponics workshop, with a high, cera-glass roof and metal support pillars rusting in the steamy air. Samples of crops and yield-plants stood in labelled pots and trays and bins all around. The walkways between the bins were metal grille. Sappy moisture dripped from the transparent panes above.

The Mordians fanned out into the hothouse, dripping with sweat in their temperate zone-issue fatigues and tunics.

‘What’s this?’ called Trooper Munce. Grauss moved over to him, and the major joined them too. Munce gestured with disgust at a rack of culture-trays set under some daylight lamps. Nutrient feeder sprays intermittently misted what was in the trays with chemical washes.

Major Hecht cursed. The things in the trays looked like rotting, globular fungi: puffy, swollen, the size of human heads. They pulsed irregularly. None of the Mordians had any horticultural training, and none had been on Malvolion long enough to get a feel for the local flora, but they all knew this stuff just wasn’t right.

‘Burn it. Get a flamer in here and burn it all.’ Hecht looked away from the obscene crop.

Grauss was about to obey the command when they heard the las-fire. Close by, two or three buildings away. Six short, frantic bursts, then a longer report made by several guns on auto, firing together. Zwie Company’s vox-intercoms spluttered out an overlapping, unintelligible series of ear-splitting cries and yells.

The platoon turned and ran towards the sounds, Hecht in the lead. Platoon Two, scouting to the left of them, was in trouble.

Hecht’s men burst into the chamber that had been Two’s last recorded position. It was a hangar barn, with several big-wheeled agricultural vehicles parked in it. The air was full of smoke from discharged weapons.

There were two bodies on the floor, both men from Two, both looking like they’d been dismembered by industrial crop-reapers.

Platoon One crept forward through the gloom, twitching for targets. Grauss found the headless corpse of another man from Two leaning against the wheel-arch of one of the agri-tractors.

Looking aside from the corpse in distaste, Grauss saw that the tractor was hitched to a big flatbed cargo truck, with something large and strange chain-lashed to it. Caked in the mud of the delta, it looked for all the world like some kind of ship: those bulbous projections at the rear could only be propulsion units. But… it was small, not large enough for anything more than a single human, and it made him sick to look at it. It wasn’t made of metal. It wasn’t technology as he understood it. It looked… organic. Fleshy, pod-like, akin to the things he had seen growing in the hothouse but many, many times larger. Was this something the station crew had found out there in the delta and hauled back for study?

There was a cry and a burst of las-fire behind him. Grauss spun around, in time to see Trooper Munce’s body sailing across the chamber in a welter of blood and torn flesh. Lasguns roared and flashed. Something was moving through the gloom with terrifying rapidity. Something with claws. Four sets of claws.

It sliced through Major Hecht at the waist, and his body fell in two, still firing.

It was right on Grauss now. He howled and started to fire.

Genestealer…

Grauss woke with a start. He was wet and slippery with night-sweat and his head pounded. It had been two weeks since that nightmare in the pumping station, a nightmare that only he and three others from the Zwei Company detail had survived. And he could not shake it. He’d had battle-shock before, he was a veteran But the sheer alien horror of what he had seen, and smelled, and felt… it haunted his sleep and his waking mind.

Genestealers…

Grauss got off his barrack cot unsteadily and pulled on dirty combat fatigues. Outside it was daylight, and he could hear men and vehicles. He needed to get active. If he was going to get past the trauma, he had to keep his mind and body occupied.

He went outside, into the raw suns-light, and watched the troop trucks and cargo-machines rolling past in the mud. Unseasonal, warm rain hosed the street. The modular roofs and towers of Malvolion Collective farm-plex 132/5 glistened and their gutters drooled.

The evacuation was underway.

As he crossed between growling heavy transports, he tried to reassure himself. He’d killed the thing, blown it apart with his lasgun. It and two more like it. Then he and the other survivors of the search detail had blown the pumping station with krak mines. They’d kept their heads, true to the famed iron discipline of the Mordians. They’d got their report back to Guard Command, and thanks to them, the planet-wide advisory had been issued.

That had to make him feel better, didn’t it?

Grauss spotted Colonel Tiegl supervising the loading of transports on a stretch of hardpan behind a row of produce barns. The colonel looked hot and flustered. Settlers thronged around him, begging for more of their valuable agri-machinery to be included on the evacuation manifest.

Tiegl broke off from them as he saw Grauss approach.

‘By the Golden Throne,’ he muttered under his breath to the trooper, ‘these people will be the death of me! I just want to get them, their loved ones and their basic possessions out of here, and they’re all too worried about their damned cultivators and multi-ploughs! I’ve half a mind to let you tell them what you saw.’

‘And cause a mass panic, sir?’ smiled Grauss sadly.

Tiegl sighed. ‘No, no…’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘I thought you were on sick-rest? Medic’s orders?’

‘Making me crazy, sir. Give me something to do, and it might take my mind off the… the things in my head.’

The colonel nodded. ‘Good man. Well, we need drivers. Can you handle a truck-rig?’

‘Pretty much,’ said Grauss.

Tiegl consulted his dataslate and pointed to a dirt-caked eight wheeler parked over by the side sheds. ‘Unit 177. She’s yours.’

‘What’s the program?’

‘I want the main evacuation section out of here by 15.00. No excuses. Anything we haven’t loaded by then is staying, and that includes these bloody farmers. Uplift point is the Nacine Plains, nineteen hours north of here. According to transmitted reports, we’re expecting nearly sixty bulk transports to be waiting there to take us to the orbiting fleet units. There are eight other evac convoys like ours heading in from other collectives, so it’ll pay to be on time. We want to get our place, and if things turn nasty, we don’t want them leaving without us.’

‘What if it does come to a fight, sir?’

‘Then we’ll show these alien freaks what Mordian fighting spirit is. There are seventy thousand men from our regiment deployed planetside, not to mention thirty thousand from the Phyrus regiments. General Caen has informed me that armour units are a few hours from landing, and there’s even talk of help from the Chapters.’

‘That’s reassuring,’ said Grauss. ‘It may have been a little isolated outbreak we found down at the pump station, but it pays to be prepared.’

‘More then prepared now,’ said Tiegl, a little darkly. ‘The alert’s moved up a notch. Didn’t anybody tell you?’

‘Tell me what?’

‘Off-world astropathic communications went down five hours ago. The Shadow has fallen across us. They’re coming, Grauss, they’re definitely coming.’

Like beached leviathans with screaming, wide mouths, the vast battle-barges squatted on the dry, stony flats of the Nacine Plain, disgorging rivers of armour amid clouds of churned, pale dust. Even from the high observation mast of the command ship, three hundred metres above ground, General Caen could hear the clank and grumble of the Paladian tanks and fighting vehicles. He swept his magnoculars around and then nodded in satisfaction. Colonel Grizmund was deploying his armour as fast as ordered, faster perhaps. A good, clean dispersal. The sky was a clear blue, and they had visibility to ten kilometres. They wouldn’t be caught napping.

Caen let the magnoculars dangle against the crisp, pressed front of his immaculate Mordian uniform. Beside him on the ship’s watch-platform, two servitors and three Mordian adjutants manned the supervision consoles and vox-caster sets. A steady stream of radio traffic crackled in the background.

Hanff, one of the adjutants, approached him across the metal grille and handed the general a data-slate.

‘Reports in from all the evacuation points, sir. Most of the collectives are underway to us in convoy. Tiegl at Collective farm-plex 132/5 informs you they will be underway by 15.00.’

‘Why so slow?’

‘That’s where the outbreak occurred, sir. I think the colonel is being especially careful.’

Caen nodded. He knew Tiegl and trusted him well. The man would get the job done.

‘And this?’ he asked, pointing to the slate. ‘Collective 344/9?’

‘They haven’t embarked either, General. Men from the Phyrus regiment are there. I… don’t know what the hold up is.’

‘Vox them. Find out. Tell them I’ll skin them alive if they don’t move soon.’

‘Sir.’

The air trembled with subsonic, basso power. A shadow passed over them. Another ten thousand ton bulk transport swung down in to land on the plain, braking jets squirting blue flames.

‘The Ariadne,’ said Hanff. ‘Right on time.’

Boots clanged up the mast ladder and Colonel Grizmund pulled himself up onto the platform. He was a tall, thick-set man wearing the crimson battledress of the Paladian armour brigade proudly. He saluted Caen.

‘Reporting in person,’ he said. ‘We’re ready to move out. Where do you want us?’

Caen shook the colonel’s hand and showed him the chart table.

‘We’re playing watchdog right now, Grizmund. Some of my men down in the delta stirred up genestealers two weeks ago, and blew the whistle. From the reports, it looks like the locals found some kind of tyranid scout-drone or incursion probe and woke it up. Emperor alone knows how long its been sending its beacon, but since the Shadow fell this morning, we can be sure it’s been heard. I’d like you to move south. The evac convoy from the delta collective may need support if trouble starts there, and they’re lagging.’

‘We’ll embark at once, and meet them en route.’

‘Good, good…’ Caen turned to look at Hanff. ‘Any joy with those damned Phryus idiots yet?’

They’d been in Farm Collective 344/9 only six hours and Trooper Nink was already banging on that something bad was coming.

The Phyrus troopers were packing crates into the pack of heavy transports behind the main maize silo and the suns, a matched pair, were coming up hard and bright. Sergeant Syra Gallo tossed another crate up into Nink’s hands and told him to shut the hell up.

‘Of course there’s something bad coming, you moron! That’s why we’re here! That’s why we were diverted nine days ago with express orders to head for Malvolion! That’s why we’re busting our humps getting a bunch of dirt-scratchers onto transports and away to the uplift! Something bad! Something really bad!’

Nink looked down at him as if the sergeant had just broken awful news about his wife.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Gallo turned around to regard the other men of the Phyrus Fourth Regiment who had all paused in their work. ‘None of you!’

‘For the Emperor’s sake, you moon-eyed bastards, we’re Imperial Guard! We only go to places like this because something bad is coming! I mean, the Warmaster doesn’t say “Oh, Malvolion, nothing bad’s gonna happen there. Let’s deploy thirty thousand of our brave Phyrus boys immediately!” does he? Eh? No he freaking doesn’t! We’re here because we are the Imperial freaking Guard and people give thanks and kiss our spotty butts in gratitude because we are there when that Something Bad arrives! Now get these crates stowed and tell yourselves this…’

Gallo dropped his voice and grinned at his men. ‘We’re the freaking Phyrus Fourth. We’re stone-killers to a man. It had better be something really freaking bad because when it gets here, it’s gonna find us, and we are gonna kill it so many times it’s gonna wish it had never been born!’

There were cheers. Even Nink cheered. The Malvolion colonists trudging past to the waiting trucks further down the evacuation convoy line were silent and looked far too scared for Gallo’s liking.

Silently, he just wished he knew what was coming, what they were up against, and why they were here.

‘Repeated signals from Nacine Plain Command,’ Vox-officer Binal called to Gallo.

‘Yeah, yeah…’

‘It’s the general himself, sergeant. He wants to know why we’re not moving yet.’

Gallo dropped a crate in contempt and turned to look at Binal. ‘We’re not moving because Major Hunnal hasn’t given the order yet. Tell him that.’

‘I did, sergeant. He wants to know why not.’

Wiping his sore, dusty palms, Gallo stalked away across the sunlit compound. ‘Tell him I’ll ask the major himself.’

Gallo entered the main hall of the collective, a dirty, zinc-panelled prefab that creaked in the heat. Air-scrubbers chattered fitfully. Gallo had seen the major and two other officers disappear inside an hour before to discuss the final evacuation conditions with the collective’s selectmen.

‘Major? Major Hunnal?’

Gallo checked a few rooms. The place was empty. Unnerved, he called in a squad to help him search. Five men, all in heavy Phyrus battledress, clattered in through the entryway to join him. One brought Gallo his lasgun. ‘Spread out,’ he told them.

Gallo and a trooper called Matlyg had the pleasure of finding Hunnal, the other two officers, and the six farm selectmen. What was left of them anyway. Reduced to blood and bone-meal, they coated the floor and walls of cargo bay behind the hall.

Matlyg threw up and fell over in the mess of bloody remains. Gallo tried to stammer into his vox-link.

Something tall and still that he had taken to be a roof support quivered and moved. Fast… so freaking fast! A scything talon the size of a grown man lashed out of the shadows and ripped the vomiting Matlyg into ribbons of flesh and a spume of airborne blood.

Gallo found his legs, retreating, screaming, firing. Purple plates knotted with whitish bone, iridescent green tendrils lapping between its jagged, filthy teeth, the mantis killer disengaged itself from the ultraviolet spectrum and shimmered into being, towering over him.

‘Spook! Spook!’ Gallo wailed.

His shots punching into the dark, bony plates of the thing’s belly and chewed off some splinters of chitin. Then he was in through the doors and running.

The vox-channels were alive with panic. Gallo ran into two of his searchers and pulled them down into cover, backs against the prefab wall.

He was trying to tell them what he had seen when two metres of talon sliced in through the wall and one of the troopers. Blood boiled out of the trooper’s sagging mouth as the talon withdrew and let him slide free. Gallo threw himself away as another bio-blade slammed through the wall and decapitated the other trooper, splitting his skull lengthways.

It can see us. Even through the walls, it can see our heat!

Gallo ran.

He reached the outside.

The evacuation convoy was where he had left it, still not underway. Now it would never get underway. Ever. Several trucks were overturned, and two were on fire. Phyrus troops ran in all directions, firing into the smoke. Farmers and their families stampeded in panic all around. Bodies littered the ground. None were remotely intact.

Stumbling forward, Gallo found Nink. From the belly down, Nink was nothing but tatters of bloody cloth, ropes of torn entrails and fragments of semi-articulated raw bone. But somehow, horribly, he was still alive. He clawed at Gallo, begging the sergeant to take him with him. Nink clutched at Gallo’s leggings.

Gallo shot Nink through the forehead. A mercy, he considered.

He dropped into cover as a clutch of farmers tumbled by in extreme distress. Something darted after them, taller than a man, its armoured body swept forward over racing, bird-like limbs. The genestealer’s primary limbs, hugely taloned, the uppermost of its four torso limbs, raked at the screaming settlers, disembowelling one. Its drooling tongue flapped between snapping teeth.

Like the mantis killer, it moved so fast….

It corralled the settlers, and two more abominations just like it chased in out of the fuel-oil smoke, stubby tails erect and wagging like excited dogs. Together, their limbs thrashed and ploughed, ripping the frantic people into offal.

Gallo realised two things with ghastly clarity. He would never forget the screams of the slaughtered farmers and their folk for as long as he lived. And that wasn’t going to be very long.

He saw a mantis killer through the smoke, busy rending a truck apart. He ran, reaching one of the laden trucks at the edge of the compound. Binal lay dead by the rear wheels. Gallo knew it was Binal because the corpse still wore the vox-caster set, even if it didn’t have a head any more.

He tore the vox-unit from the body and clambered into the truck’s cab.

It took him a moment to find the emergency channel.

‘344/9! 344/9!’ he rasped. ‘Incursion! Tyranid incursion! Repeat–’

There was no time to repeat. The genestealers were at the cab windows, on the bonnet, smashing the glass and reaching in.

Though unintelligible and more a sound of pain than real words, Gallo’s last transmission was heard six hundred kilometres away at Nacine Plain.

The channel went dead. Caen looked away, avoiding Hanff’s face as he tried to compose himself. That sound. That scream…

He was about to signal Grizmund’s armour brigade, which had left the plain just forty minutes before to turn on a bearing for 132/5, but the sky went abruptly black.

Wind-borne spores began to winnow down around them, burning flesh and thickening the air.

Caen ran to get below as the first of the atmospheric toxins began killing Mordian troops and navy personnel. Ship landing lights came on automatically as the natural light died, illuminating streams of pelting spores like a black blizzard.

Against the blackness high above, colossal shapes descended. Harridan brood-organisms, the tyranid main dispersal form. Caen had read about them. But to see them, to see their size, smell their downwashed stink… it ruined his mind.

Swarms of winged bat-forms swirled out of them like drifts of fallen leaves billowing on the wind. The gargoyles filled the air, shrieking, targeting individual men, membranous wings beating. They executed steep, perilous dives, raking the ground beneath them with the flesh borers they clutched to their leathery torsos. Plasma fire rained down, shrivelling and igniting men as they ran for cover.

Caen pulled out his power-sword, and slashed at a gargoyle that swooped towards him. He split it into two, and was drenched in its stinking ichor.

He fell.

Rising, the ground shaking, he saw how the corrosive spore-mines were collapsing the superstructure of most of the landing ships. Bulk transports were sagging and melting as they lost integrity. Parts of some exploded outwards.

Things no bigger than a man scuttled forward through the burning darkness and confusion. Termagants and the larger, bounding hormagaunts. There were thousands of them, Caen realised. So many, so many…

He sliced at the alien filth that closed on him. He cut the snout off one termagant, the forelimb off another. He was distracted by a liquid scream as Hanff, running for cover nearby, was destroyed by mycetic spores, both necrotic and corrosive. A fat, bubbly slick punctuated by corroding bone mass was all that remained of him after thirty seconds.

The fleshborer hit Caen in the chest. He writhed and wailed as it quivered and dug and turned the contents of his body cavity into mush.

The evac convoy was two hours out from 132/5 when they saw the change in weather patterns a hundred kilometres ahead. A dark stain, like a wash of thunderheads, was bruising the distance, widening with every passing moment.

From the cab of unit 177, Grauss saw the blue skies fill with dark-bellied clouds. His guts tightened. Around the black stain in the distance, the weather was being tormented in an ever-expanding radius. Frothing clouds whirled cyclonically like blast ripples from the ominous darkness. Drizzles of rain, thick with dingy fluid and what seemed like seed-pods, pelted down. The two kilometre-long convoy switched on their headlights almost as one, and wipers began to beat.

‘What the hell is this?’ asked Trooper Femlyn, riding shotgun next to Grauss, an autogun across his lap.

‘Turn west! Turn west!’ Colonel Tiegl’s voice rattled over the inter-vehicle comm. The convoy, ungainly and slow to respond, shunted and churned as it tried to make the new heading.

The air was sweet and hot, Grauss realised. It smelled like the pumping station hot-house.

Two trucks overturned on the trackway, slumping into revets as they tried to turn. Another three broke axles and were stranded. Tiegl left them and their screaming occupants behind.

‘Nacine Plain has gone!’ he yelled into his vox-horn. ‘Our only hope is the main hive at Malvo Height! Turn west!’

Grauss looked at his chart-plate. Malvo Height was a thousand kilometres away to the west. They’d never reach it. Never.

He put his foot down anyway.

Grizmund’s armour was running hard from the filth storm that expanded ever outwards from the Nacine Plain. All hope of reaching the evac convoy from 132/5 was gone. All hope was gone, period.

He turned his vehicles to meet the onrush. It was a slow business, because the torrential rain had turned the dry, stony fields to mud and tangles of vegetation were growing up out of it even as he watched. In the space of fifteen minutes a dry, arid upland had turned into a mossy, fern-filled swamp. Another hour, and it would be a thick, impenetrable jungle of creepers and moulds, spilling outwards and consuming the dry land.

Grizmund didn’t have an hour, and would never see that floral conquest. His tank guns roared up into the dense packs of flying things that swooped from the staining sky. Burning, membranous creatures dropped to the ground or were annihilated in the air.

Then his tanks started to die. Advancing tides of biovore engines spat spore mines into them, blowing armour units apart or melting them with acid and poison. Overwhelming floods of hormagaunts and termagants skittered forward out of the deluge, completely burying some vehicles under their writhing numbers. The air pulsed with the psychic throb of the tyranid warriors, tall and hideous, as they advanced amidst the smaller monsters. Zoanthropes, glistening like great floating brains, their atrophied limbs clutched to themselves, hovered over the swarms and flashed out lances of energy that blew tanks asunder.

Grizmund saw the twisting, lashing shapes of raveners approaching, and shouted down from his turret for the gun layer and aimer to increase fire.

Then the carnifex was on them. Shrieking, it lacerated two nearby tanks and flicked them aside. The last thing Grizmund saw was mouth of the venom cannon it raised towards his vehicle.

The evac convoy from collective 132/5 was running west, hard, turbines roaring. They’d laboriously crossed a network of interfarm trackways and finally made it onto a metalled highway running east-west, the main overland arterial route used by the produce road-trains every harvest season to ship grain to the world hive at Malvo Heights. They were kicking dust in a trail four kilometres long from the dry white roadway, passing irrigation canals and wide, flooded field-basins lined with rows of growing frames. Then the rain caught up with them again, washing out the dust, glistening the roadway, until they were kicking up spray instead.

South of them, the sky was pale and blue; north, black and oily like pitch, a swirling, expanding bolus of dark cloud that blotted out the light.

Femlyn was rechecking his autogun’s drum magazine. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, Grauss pulled out his laspistol and tossed it to Femlyn.

‘Check it,’ he ordered. ‘My rifle too.’

The wipers were thumping hard. Wind blew spume up over the road from the waterbeds like ocean spray. Grauss tried not to notice the wriggling black spores that were hitting the windshield and conglomerating like pus in his wipers.

Through the driving rain, he saw the braking lights of the truck in front come on suddenly, and slammed on his own brakes. Rig 177 slid violently from side to side on the wet road. Femlyn cried out and Grauss hauled on the wheel. They stopped hard, clipping the rear bars of the truck ahead.

The inter-cab vox was crackling with shouts. Grauss opened his door, about to get out, peering ahead to identify the obstruction.

Something came off the back of the truck ahead of them and landed on the bonnet of 177, denting the metal. It crouched there, for what was probably only a second but felt like an eternity, the rain dribbling down over its bared, smiling teeth.

Femlyn threw Grauss his laspistol, and Grauss fired it wildly. His salvo burst the termagant’s neck open in a fountain of noxious fluid and it crumpled off the bonnet.

Settlers were streaming back down the road past them in blind panic.

The truck ahead started again, wheels spinning, drove ten metres and then plunged sideways off the road, rolling down the levee into the water-bed. Grauss saw four termagants scampering towards him. He stood on the throttle. Two of them were crushed under the heavy truck, another slammed away through the air after contact with the wheel arch.

Femlyn was firing out of the cab window. Shell cases tumbled down into the footwell.

The convoy ahead was now moving, though several trucks had slewed off the road and one was burning. Grauss had to drop speed to inch past them. Something grotesque and grinning appeared at the cab window beside Grauss and he dropped forward, allowing Femlyn to blast it through the glass.

A smaller vehicle drew level with them, matching their speed. It was one of the open, short wheel-base escorts mounting a Hydra battery. Grauss waved the driver past and then fell in behind. A moment later, the Hydra battery was pounding, firing directly ahead of the speeding machine. Grauss saw something big and iridescent explode under the anti-aircraft fire and collapse off the road. 177’s wheels span in the ichor slick as they sped past.

Behind them, on the highway, the racing convoy was assailed by things that poured up out of the fields and irrigation channels to the north and into their hindquarters. The escort vehicles, mounting Hydras and heavy stub-guns, ran alongside the transports, raking the fields. Mantis killers reared and clacked their talons, disintegrating in drizzles of mucus and chitin as the guns found them. Swarming termagants were smashed under speeding wheels. Hit by multiple fleshborers, a Hydra truck span out of control and flew off the road, exploding in a drain canal. Biovore spore mines crumped down, blowing two of the fast-moving transports into fragments.

There were bat-shapes in the air above.

The convoy’s heavier armour – four Chimeras and a half dozen standard-pattern Leman Russ tanks in Mordian camo, were lagging badly, and found themselves cut off from the fleeing convoy elements.

Hormagaunts overran two of the Chimeras, covering their hulls with squirming shapes as they opened them like seed cases. Two of the tanks stopped dead, traversed their turrets and began pounding at the wave of obscenities that rippled after the convoy. The crews knew they were as good as dead. Mordian discipline made them sell their lives as dearly as they could. Spitting bio-plasma destroyed one tank. The other was struck by some energised flash that looked like green lightning, and blew apart as its munitions ignited.

Caught by a trio of lictors, another Chimera tried to turn and was thrown end over end, torn track sections flying. Corrosive spores reduced another of the Leman Russes to tar and semi-solid lumps.

Standing in the back of a speeding escort truck, Colonel Tiegl manned the gun mount himself. Searing, frenzied, red tendrils had just turned his main gunner inside out. He swung the stub-gun on its pintle, squeezing the firing grip, spraying the road behind him with twin, dipping, dragging streams of heavy fire. He was drenched with rain.

There was something in his mouth, something crawling on his skin. Mycetic spores plastered him, eating him away.

By the time his driver fell to a barb-round and spun the vehicle into a transport’s back wheels with splintering force, there was nothing left of Tiegl but some articulated limb bones dragging from the gun-grip.

Ten kilometres on, out of the irrigated arable spread and into the lowlands beyond, evac 132/5 found there was no going forward. The convoy was a ragged mess. The black, weeping sky had utterly overtaken what remained of the column and the tide of horror was upon them.

Femlyn was blasting from the cab window with his autogun, and Grauss was firing his lasrifle out the other side. There was no shifting truck 177 now. Vines, thorn-creepers and other fast-growing things had meshed the axles and ruptured the tyres.

‘Look! Look!’ cried Femlyn.

There were dots in the sky, burning dots that fast resolved themselves into drop-pods flaring in atmospheric entry. A dozen, two dozen, three.

‘Oh, praise the Emperor!’ Grauss breathed.

The first pods hit the ground, bouncing and tearing through the cushion of foliage.

Grauss saw the men clamber out. Adeptus Astartes. Space Marines, the Lamenters. They had come, as promised, yellow armour gleaming in the dying light. They had come despite the odds.

The giant armoured warriors, humanity’s finest, deployed from their pods, blasting with boltguns, flamers and meltas. Termagants and hormagaunts exploded beneath the withering firepower. Flamers burned the stinking plant growth away. Gargoyles were blown, ruptured, out of the sky. Grauss saw a ravener convulse and die under a melta’s kiss. He saw plasma-fire destroy a mantis killer.

There, a Marine with a power claw ripped a tyranid warrior in two, the corpse exploding with bile and psychic energy. Here, a Marine with a rocket launcher sent up a jinking missile that blew a zoanthrope into flaring specks of matter.

Grauss leapt from the truck’s cab and ran into the fray, his lasgun blasting. Mordian troopers were with him now, enervated by the Lamenters’ swinging assault. Grauss cut down a leaping termagant in mid-air, blowing it apart. He saw four Marines cripple and kill a lictor nearby.

We could live, we could live yet, he thought triumphantly!

He heard a keening behind him, and turned to face the horror of a carnifex charging, blades clicking, saliva flying from the cutting limbs. Femlyn tried to turn his autogun but became nothing more than a shower of meat.

A lamenter, two of them, hit the screamer-killer from the left side with bolt rounds, and as it turned, destroying its head with melta-fire. Its scything blades, still whickering lethally as it toppled, decapitated them both.

Grauss fell to his knees. He honestly didn’t think it possible that Space Marines could die. They seemed to him invulnerable, god-like, the walking manifestations of the God-Emperor of Terra himself. But it was true. He looked down at the fallen, splintered helm of one Marine, the glassy, dull, dead face peering out of it.

He looked away, but saw another Lamenter ripped in two by a mantis killer fifty meters away. A ravener fell, twisting and flicking, onto three more and ground them into the soil, ripping open their armour with its chitinous mouth-parts.

Then Grauss saw the worst sight of all, the worst, most unmanning thing his eyes had ever witnessed. Four Lamenter Space Marines: falling back, overwhelmed.

They scrambled through the treacherous, matted ground-growth, trying to find cover from the zoanthrope that shimmered after them, spitting bolts of energised death. They turned, fired, ran on, to no avail. The hovering thing exploded one of them and then closed on the other three. One headed left and ran onto the keening bone-swords of a tyranid warrior. Another was felled by a glancing blast from the zoanthrope and was swiftly torn apart by a pack of termagants.

The last made it another twenty metres before the relentless zoanthrope hit him and exploded his armoured form with a vicious stab of energy.

Grauss couldn’t believe was he was seeing.

In the first twenty minutes from drop, the Lamenters had cut a hole in the alien assault that had punished them cruelly. Now, in just five more minutes, they were being annihilated.

A spore mine from a biovore blew two more apart and sent a wash of mud and sap high into the air.

Two Lamenters faced down another carnifex and blew it apart with sustained bolt fire. A second later, they were both dismembered by hormagaunts before they could reload.

Grauss saw the hive tyrant advancing through the flaming greenery, slaughtering Space Marines with its massive blade. He saw the vast, obscene shapes of the bio-titans lurching forward in the distant smog.

The last Lamenter died thirty-nine minutes after the first had clambered from his drop-pod.

The convoy was ablaze, what parts of it weren’t shredded or swarmed over.

Grauss dropped into a foxhole, feeling the undergrowth flourish and twist around him. His body was crawling with parasitic infection. He heard chattering.

On the horizon line, most nightmarish of all, the vile ripper swarms were moving in, consuming everything in their path, eating up the world.

Karl Grauss made his peace with the God-Emperor, with his long dead parents, with his long-lost homeworld, beloved, distant Mordia, praying it would never suffer this blasphemous fate.

He put the snout of his lasgun in his open mouth.

ORK HUNTER

Keyser, who they call the sergeant but who wears no rank pins I can see, calls a halt. He gets up on the limed trunk of a massive fallen cypress and stands, sniffing the air.

We wait, thigh deep in the stinking soup below.

The wet air seems to fill my lungs with steam, and I want to cough, but the Skinner nearest me, a lean brute with charcoal-blackened eye-sockets and piercings down his ears, fixes me with a savage glare as if he can tell what I’m thinking. Keyser waves three scouts ahead, and that leaves thirty of us, twenty-two Skinners and eight Jopall Indentured. I’m halfway down the file, the swamp water bubbling and oozing around my legs, dust flies swirling round me.

The silent halt seems to last an eternity. There are spiders in my hair. I can feel them.

Captain Lorit, looking as out of place as the rest of us Jopall in his white-flecked, jade green fatigues and white peaked cap, wades forward. ‘What are we–’ he begins.

The Skinner they call Pig, standing to the captain’s left, surges forward and takes my commander in a choke hold, clamping one greasy paw across his mouth. The captain struggles, wild-eyed, and Pig tightens his grip. The reason for Pig’s nickname is self-evident – slabby and fat, with vastly developed muscle groups stretching his tattered tunic, he has a face ruined by scars and a ragged snout of flesh where his nose was bitten off.

Pig’s muscles tighten further and the captain begins to turn blue. We Jopall look on in silent disbelief.

Keyser drops his hand and the Skinners un-freeze and move again. Pig releases the captain and throws him, gagging, face down into the water.

Keyser’s jumped down off the cypress by then, and drags the captain up with one hand.

‘He assaulted me! That man assaulted me! Put him on a charge!’ The captain spits out weed and slime, indignant. Keyser doesn’t put Pig on a charge. He punches the captain in the throat and silences him. The Skinners laugh, an ugly sound. Pig snorts, a far, far uglier noise.

‘I thought we covered this in basic back at Cerbera. When I signal silence out here in the Green, I mean silence.’ Keyser’s voice is as sharp and taut as a wire. He says this to the captain, who is too busy grovelling and vomiting in the liquid mud to listen attentively.

He turns to the rest of us. ‘We’ve got a scent of the ’skins. Close by, no more than a kilometre. Arm, load and follow. No noise. Especially you skinbait.’

That’s what we are to them. Not Imperial Guard, not fellow troopers, not noble soldiers from the Jopall Indentured Squadrons. No matter most of us are from good, up-hive stock, no matter our comrades are even now defending the walls of Tartarus Hive against the Invasion.

We are skinbait. Nothing. Lower than scum.

For these Skinners set the value of scum. There are juve-gangs from the Tartarus underhive I’d have more respect for.

It is my considerable misfortune, mine and the other members of my squad, to have been sent to Cerbera Base to undergo jungle warfare training with the ork hunters just as the war for beloved Armageddon began. There is no hope of rejoining our company or hive. We are stuck for the duration, seconded to one of the most notorious units of ‘skull-takers’, the so-called Keyser’s Skinners.

Once in a while, from very far away, we hear the thump of artillery or the scream of ram-jets. Open war is being waged in the lands beyond the jungle, far away. It may as well be on another world. Word is Yarrick himself had returned. Oh to be part of that!

Oh to not be part of this... I believe the Skull-takers have been fighting the feral greenskins for so long, they have begun to mirror what they fight. The least of them are painted and pierced, the worst have implanted tusks jutting from their jawlines. All have ork finger-bones, teeth and ears dangling from them as grisly trophies. They have no official chain of command. They respect no rank or authority other than their own. I have been told they elect their leaders. Think of that!

We edge forward now, slopping through the pools of mire; thick, sticky fluid like mucus. Dragonflies, with stained-glass wings as wide as a man’s arm span, cross the glades, beating the air louder than the blade-fans of the air-cars in Tartarus’s elite district. Skaters as big as my hand skitter across the sheened water.

Pig tells us we’re wading through sap, sap drooled out of the fleshy cycads and root-ferns all around. He snorts again. It’s hard to catch my breath, the air is so humid. The Skinners though... they move so silently. They disturb nothing. They make no ripples, leave no trace. Their damn boots never get stuck in the mud-pools. Their sleeves never catch on thorns. Fronds never whip back as they pass. Bark doesn’t snap as they climb over it. Even cobwebs remain miraculously intact, as if the Skinners were never there.

For coarse brutes, they move with unimaginable care and enviable skill. We Jopall blunder like fools amongst them. I spent four weeks last summer on a covert training course at the Hades Hive Guard Academy. I did well. I thought I was good. How... how in the name of the Emperor who watches us all do you not make a ripple when you wade through water?

We stop once more, and I lean against the bole of a giant ginkgo. Something has laid a clutch of wet, yellow eggs in the fabric of my jacket cuff. The size of rice grains, they glisten. I shudder and make to wipe them off.

A dirty hand grabs mine and stops me. It is the Skinner with the blackened eye sockets.

‘Don’t touch them. Rot-wasp eggs. Be thankful they chose your fancy jacket to lay in and not your ear, or your genitals, or your tear-ducts.’

He scrapes the eggs off me with the blade of a rusty shearknife.

I look at him, bewildered.

‘You wanna wake up with larvae munching out of your nose? Eating out your brain?’

I shake my head. Who would?

He chuckles.

‘What’s your name?’ I ask.

‘Deadhead.’

‘No... your real name.’

‘Er... Rickles,’ he replies, as if he has to think about it. Then he turns away.

‘Don’t you want to know my name?’ I call after him.

He turns back with a shrug. ’No point remembering the name of a skinbait who’ll be dead by tonight. I’ll never use your name anyway.’

Anger puffs up inside me, dry and fire-hot despite my sweat. ‘I’m Corporal Ondy Scalber of the Jopall Indentured, you scum-sucker! Remember it! Emperor help you that you do ever have to use it!’

He grins, as if my forthright attitude has impressed him.

But he punches me in the mouth anyway.

We press on, the ever-quiet Skinners silently punishing every clumsy stumble of us Jopall. We reach a glade where the vast upper canopy is broken and sunlight streams down bright as lasers. There are flowers here, floating on the frothy, weed-choked water, huge flowers with shocking pink heads. Vast insects too, slow and drowsy, buzzing the air like chainswords and dripping nectar from each hideously limp proboscis. A pallid white serpent with vestigial limbs slides through the murk between my legs. My friend, Trooper Rokar, starts to whimper. He has just discovered that something unseen and submerged has gnawed off the cap of his boot... along with two of his smaller toes.

I was in a scholam with Rokar. I pity him. His injury. His weakness.

The scouts come back, two of them. We never see the third again. They confer with Keyser for a while. Then he tells us, low and mean, there’s a nest nearby and we must fan out.

Rokar is whimpering even more now, and begins to climb up into a tree. The captain tries to call him down. Rokar shakes his head, refusing, terrified.

Keyser gets him out of the tree. He throws a stab-knife and impales my old friend through the sternum. Rokar drops and hits the ooze with a wet slap. His body sinks.

‘He was no use to us anyway. A liability. Worse than a liability,’ Keyser tells the captain.

The captain is speechless with rage and horror. We all are. I don’t know what to think or feel any more.

I am sent on the right hand side of the fan advance, with Deadhead and Pig, and another Skinner called Toaster who hefts a heavy flamer unit. Trooper Flinder of the Jopall is with us.

Pig stops us under the shade of a horsetail and smears foul smelling grease over our skin from a dirty pot. Now we smell as bad as the Skinners, and I notice for the first time that they are caked in the stuff. It isn’t just dirt. It’s deliberate.

‘It’s skin tallow,’ Toaster sneers as he explains while checking the hoses of his sooty flamer. ‘Now you won’t smell of soap and humans.’

Pig has just daubed us with ork grease, blubber fat from their pestilent bodies. My stomach turns over.

We edge onwards. Flinder and I try to be as silent as the Skinners. Our efforts seem laughable. Then Deadhead stops me again, and points down at the gossamer skein my shin was about to break. He traces it back to a clump of flowering moss and gently exhumes a clutch of stikk-bombs, wired to the cord.

Keyser appears.

‘Good work, Deadhead. Good eye.’

‘Wasn’t me who found it, sir. It was Ondy there.’

I look round, delighted to hear my name used.

‘His shin, anyway,’ Deadhead adds, and he and the Skinner boss laugh out loud. Curse their filthy hides.

We crouch in sap-water for half an hour, not daring to breathe. Bird calls and insect chirrups wing through the air. Some of them are natural, some are disguised signals. I can’t tell them apart.

Deadhead waves us on.

As we cross a deep culvert of mud and slime, I see movement in the far tree-line. I’ve always had a good eye. It’s the one skill I’m still proud of. I make something pustular and green amid the Green.

So I don’t hesitate. I raise my lasrifle, and fire a stuttered burst.

Something big and green and tusked and monstrous slumps out of the foliage, its chest cavity exploded, and drops into the mere.

Then hell breaks loose. There are ’skins all around us, throwing themselves up out of the ooze, spitting out the hollow reeds they were breathing through. They are lean, malnourished, pale things, with jutting teeth like anthracite and deep-set eyes like diamonds. They howl and whoop. They stink. They wield heavy cleavers, cudgels and crude sidearms.

We’re all firing. Gunfire explodes from the other elements of our formation. The wet air becomes cinder dry with ozone from the laser discharge. Las-rounds pepper through the leaf cover and fill the air with sap-vapour.

Toaster triggers his flamer and wastes the curtain of foliage before us. Swine-shrieks issue from the raging fire, piercingly harsh.

I fire, on full auto now, dropping ’skins around him. A rusty cleaver takes Flinder’s head off his shoulders in a welter of blood and frayed tissue. I see Captain Lorit lifted right up out of the water on a primitive spear that transfixes his gut. He screams, piteously, flailing his limbs.

I had fixed my bayonet hours before, as per the Skinners’ briefing. Now, with las-rounds expended and no time to change the clip, I stab and gut and slash.

Deadhead is nearby. He has wrested an ork lance from some dead grip, and is splitting skulls and whooping like a ’skin. Toaster fires again, his belch of flamer vaporising a tide of charging ’skins so that nothing but their fused skeletons slump in the steaming water, dribbling molten fat.

I impale a charging ’skin on my rifle-blade. It howls and pulls towards me, dragging the weapon out of my grasp. There is a plate-metal hatchet in its massive paw already wet with human brain tissue.

I pull my autopistol and blow its face apart.

‘Throw! Throw!’ yells Deadhead, tossing me a clutch of stikk-bombs.

We hurl them together into the densest part of the ’skin press. In the flash-wash, slivers of shrapnel flutter back, stippling the water with a million separate impacts.

The orks turn and melt away, as if they were never there.

We regroup. Five Skinners are dead. I am one of only three Jopall left alive. I slump, hollowed by shock, against a lichen-covered rock with the others of my hive as the Skinners lock down the perimeter and take the spoils.

‘What do you want?’ Pig asks, and I turn.

He is sawing the head off an ork corpse with a serrated knife.

‘What?’

‘An ear? A tooth? You earned it.’

My gut tosses in revulsion. ’Skin ichor is leaking from the sawed incision he is working and forms a stinking slick on the water’s surface.

‘Don’t make a mistake now, Ondy Scalber.’ It is Deadhead. His voice is low.

‘A mistake?’

‘Pig’s offering you a trophy. Can’t remember the last time Pig did that for skinbait. It’s an honour. Don’t refuse it.’

‘A tooth then,’ says I, turning back to see the butchery.

‘Yeah,’ agrees Deadhead. ‘He had a good eye back there. Saw them first.’

Pig nods, snorts, and digs his blade in.

‘A good eye? Then that’s what he’ll get. A good eye for Good Eye!’ Pig and Deadhead laugh.

Pig hands me the trophy. It dangles like a pendant on its long rope of blood-black optic nerve.

I can’t refuse. I take it, tie it to my dog-tags. It thumps against my chest like a rubber ball at every move I make. As soon as Pig is gone, I’ll lose it.

The Skinners build what they call warning shrines. Ork skulls and limbs spiked on posts or nailed to trunks. The idea is the ’skins will now shun this area because it stinks of murder and defeat. But the Skinners wire up the remnants to grenades anyway, in case the ’skins decide to recover their dead.

It’s what Keyser calls a win-win situation.

Keyser. I see him across the clearing as the Skinners raise the ork heads on display all around us. He is bent over the eviscerated body of Captain Lorit, who is cruelly still alive. Toaster says Keyser is giving the captain last rites. I see the sudden twist of Keyser’s hand. That wasn’t last rites as we know it.

The nest is close. We move in, forming small groups. I find myself with Pig, Toaster, and two other Skinners called Slipknot and Buck.

In the glade ahead, swathed in vapour, rises a great, ghostly tree. I sense it is not one tree but several that have become wrapped around each other over time. Hundreds of metres tall and thousands of years old, the great, entwined trunks are lifted clear of the water by a vast raft of winding roots. Birds flitter in the upper canopy. Beetles crawl and gnaw on the exposed roots.

We enter the root system, finding a tunnel half-filled with rank water. The roots coil and interlock above our stooped heads, reminding me of the interlocking arch vaults of the glorious Ecclesiarchy chapel back home on Jopall.

Toaster leads the way. We can smell the leaking promethium of his blackened flamer.

Buck shows me how to take a strip of field dressing and soak it in the swamp water to make a breath mask. Already, the pungent smoke of fires deliberately lit by the scouts on the far side of the nest is creeping back to us.

I breathe through wet gauze.

They’re on us a moment later. Toaster scours the tunnel with his flamer, but they’re pouring out of side turnings we didn’t even see. I’m killing them even as I realise these are youngsters, small ork spawn no taller than my waist, weeping and shrieking as they run from the smoke.

Children. That’s what we’d call them.

I don’t care any more. Slipknot and I push down a side-vent, clawing our way through the tangles of black roots, and engage fierce ’skin youths, who jab at us with short spears and broken blades.

No match for las-fire.

‘This way, Good Eye!’ I hear Slipknot shout.

Then I’m into a larger root cavity, with Buck and Slipknot on my heels. We can still hear the rasp of Toaster’s flamer nearby, and smell the burning promethium.

Feral orks are all around us now, many full-grown and massive. Some have guns. Slipknot is blown apart by a bolt round. His left hand slaps against my shoulder as it is blown clear of his carcass.

I kill the ork with the bolter. Then Buck and I pepper the cavity with random automatic fire. Green blood splats and sprays in the close air.

An ork is right on top of me, howling, raising a blade in a meaty paw bigger then my head. My gun is out. I fumble. It sees the eye bouncing across my chest and it seems to make it pause. I need no further urging. I slam the bayonet up into its jutting chin so the blade-end punches out through the back of its skull. Its huge jaws, spasming shut as it dies, bite the end off my lasgun.

I take up its blade in my right hand, holding my autopistol in my left. With the blade I dash out ’skin brains. With the pistol I wound and cripple and kill. I am plastered with ’skin blood now, as feral as the things I slay, murderous, wanton, out of my mind.

Jopall seems a long, long way away. Further than ever before.

And I know now I can’t go back there.

Not now.

Not after this.

Toaster comes in behind us and yells for us to drop. Buck does, and I pull my head down as the flamer wash gusts like a sun’s heat over our heads, incinerating the rest of the chamber.

We’re all laughing as we clamber out of the nest. Golder and Spaff, the remaining Indentured Squadrons, look as me as if I have run mad. I know how I must look to them, singed and filthy and covered in ’skin blood that is baked like treacle. I don’t care. I don’t care what they think. I don’t care for anything any more.

Keyser is fighting the boss. Driven out by the smoke and carrying a ragged stomach wound, the massive ’skin has found himself cornered in a sap-pool east of the nest. Keyser confronts him. We all group around to watch. No one interferes. We just watch and whoop and chant.

Like orks.

The ’skin boss is one hundred kilos heavier than Keyser, and massively muscled, with molars like daggers and tusks like bayonets. It wears a turtle-shell breast plate, and carries a hooked bill on one paw and a gutting knife in the other. Its torn belly oozes foul-smelling ichor, making the thing crouch.

Keyser, lank and lean in tattered camo-fatigues and webbing, his skin white with paint, has only a shear-knife. They circle and jab. We stand around the clearing, clapping and cheering, chanting ‘Key-ser! Key-ser!’ like animals. The boss circles in, sidestepping Keyser’s blade and taking a decent cut of meat from Keyser’s left thigh with its bill. In return, Keyser swings and kicks the monster square in its wounded abdomen, throwing it back into the water in a spray of slime.

The boss rises to its feet awkwardly. Keyser is now limping from the ragged slice in the meat of his thigh, a slice that has flapped the skin open to show pink meat and gleaming white bone.

Another swing with the bill, an evasive deflection from Keyser’s knife. How can he go on with a wound that bad, I wonder?

But he does. Keyser splashes through the churning, foamy water and rips his blade along the boss’s forearm, causing it to drop its bill.

Then Keyser swings in counter-clockwise and buries his blade up to the hilt in the boss’s throat.

Gurgling and aspirating mists of blood, the boss falls on its back, surging water across the clearing under its vast bulk. And dies.

We chant Keyser’s name so loud that leaves shake lose and drop from the canopy.

Ondy Scalber is dead. He died somewhere and somewhen in the glades of Armageddon’s vicious jungles.

I only barely remember him now. He was a good sort, I suppose.

What I am become now, only time will tell. I hate it, yet I love it too. It is a way of life and of death that appeals to me in its simplicity. To hunt, to kill, to be a better hunter and better killer than the brutes we stalk. To be Good Eye.

One day, perhaps, I’ll remember Jopall and the life I had there. Perhaps. I may wake screaming in the night, dreaming of it. I may not.

The Green waits for me. There I will do my work, in the Emperor’s name. There I will find my glory.

MIDNIGHT ROTATION

Yeah, I know what I done.

We was on the midnight rotation at the depot last night, and–

Oh. You want the particulars? All formal and correct? A statement? Yeah, suppose you do have to do things by the book. Circumstances like these.

I’ll lay it out, then. I am Cawkus, trooper, second class, and it were my honour to enlist for the service of the Throne at the founding of the Fiftieth Urdesh Regular, Astra Militarum, eighteen year gone. May we bless the Throne, above us all, and the light of Terra, for which mankind fights. I am a true man, sir.

I was put upon my watch by my commanding officer, Major Zailman. I believe he is an upstanding man, sir, a fine soldier, for he has many pieces of shiny metal on his chest, and he polishes them every day. I was sent, with my platoon, to the depot in the last hours of the evening. Yes, that is Depot 686, the long building down by Division Arch, in the Munitorum Precinct. Well, it has been quiet there, though there was shelling last fortnight. The roof is caved in, in parts, and there are holes in the courtyard that have become ponds due to the rain. There is vermin, also.

But, in general, quiet. The eternal bastards, by which, sir, I mean the Archenemy, have slackened their assault on this part of the city of late. Because, I believe, of the action of our armour in the fields. The treads have driven them back into the highlands, and they concentrate now on the docks and the Western Gates. The siege stands. That is my understanding of affairs, though I am not privy to strategic overview being, as I am, a trooper second class. The flow of this war is explained to me by my superiors, men like Major Zailman, when they consider it appropriate, and the rest I have learned through gossip.

The depot– yes, Depot 686 – is for food storage. Consumables. The stuff is packed in there in crates. There’s stuff in cans and jars, and dried rations, and also food that is packed and sealed in stasis cartons, so as to preserve it. Food is scarce. From the hollow of your cheek, sir, I see you know that as well as I. The siege has been a long one. What food reaches the city gets stored at the depot, and then distributed by the watchful and diligent officers of the Munitorum, so there is a fair and equal share. Many souls, particularly them citizens what live in the rubble zones, they do fair crave for sustenance, as you might understand, and being desperate, they sometimes try to pillage and raid, for which reason a guard is set day and night.

Midnight rotation was our watch. We come down and assembled in the courtyard, between the rain-ponds. A servant of the Munitorum, all in his robes and whatnot, he come out and explained the wherewithals to our sergeant, who then explained them all to us. I don’t know why he could not explain them directly to us, but this, apparently, is not the way the Munitorum do things.

Our sergeant, Pawlak, is a good man. Paws, we call him. Well, because he is a robust sort, with strength in him, and I’ve seen him take his solid fists to the enemy more than once, when things got close. He keeps to himself a fair bit, but he is a decent sort. He is a sight better than our previous sergeant, Gamberlin, who was lost in the highlands last year, when he had the misfortune to greet one of the eternal bastards’ bayonets with his face.

So Paws– yes, by that I mean Sergeant Pawlak – so, Sergeant Pawlak he done listen to the Munitorum officer, and then he done turn right around and explain it all again to us, all waiting there in the yard with nothing but the skitter of the vermin for company. He explained where the access points were, the limits of the fence and the wall, and the location of a few sneak-holes where looters were known to try their luck. They patch them up, as best they can, when they find them, but the looters dig more, you see? Especially in them parts where the shells have fallen and brought in the roof and whatnot. Close one rat-hole up, and another one gets dug out.

Well, because they’re hungry.

Paws– yes, Sergeant Pawlak – he sets us to our duties. Sentries on the fence, the walls, the holes and the gates, and patrols to circuit the depot. We’d switch from standing watch to patrol every two hours, so every man could stretch his legs and stay fresh. We was sharp enough. Standing still, sentry at a gate, can get soporific, but you don’t doze off when Paws is watching you, for fears he might discover you slacking and lay his paws upon your head.

I were with him, though, in the second two-hour stretch. A moving patrol. Me and Paws, and Trooper Eron and Trooper Fevurse. We walked up and down the stacks – rows and rows of crates and pallets – checking that all was the way it should be. We had been at it an hour, walking up and down, looking under tarps and making sure the drain covers were secure, and Paws says ‘I don’t like the smell of that.’

And I says, ‘Smell of what, sarge?’ Because frankly the depot has a smell to it that is quite noticeable at all times. Damp and decay and vermin droppings, and wastewater what comes up through the drains, and spoiled food, of which, I am sad to say, there is a lot. It is a heady mix, and you breathe through your mouth for some time on first arrival.

So I says ‘What smell, sarge?’ And he says, ‘That smell,’ and he means a sort of chemical stink, and once he points it out, I notice it. It smells like cleaning fluids, which is strange, because believe you me, sir, there isn’t nothing what has been cleaned in this city for many a month now, excepting perhaps the Warmaster’s chamber pot, which I wouldn’t know anything about, being a trooper second class.

‘It’s coming from over there,’ says Fevurse, and we go and look. And there’s water, and Paws says, ‘I don’t like the look of that water there.’ It’s laying on the ground, on the floor of the depot, seeping out from under a great big stack of crates, eight high, all set on metal shelving. So we figure it’s another sneak-hole – a new one, dug up by some poor soul underneath the crates – and groundwater is running out of it, chemical stuff, polluted and whatnot. So Paws says to move the crates so we can find the hole and plug it. He fishes out an incendiary grenade to roll down the chute when we find it. ‘As a deterrent,’ he says.

We start moving them crates. They’re big and they’re heavy. The Munitorum officer told us not to touch or move anything, because it weren’t our business to do so. Moving crates was Munitorum business and guarding crates was Militarum business, and never the twain should meet. But Paws says we move the crates or we won’t find the hole, so we have to move them. We move them and stack them in the walkway so we can put them back again after. The crates, they are big, as I said, and sealed with Munitorum shipping tags, and they have transit marks writ on them. They are stasis cartons, and they hadn’t been in long. The handling mark says they had been brung in two days previous, from the landing grounds.

We’d cleared a few away, and it was sweaty work, and by the third row we’d leant our rifles against the racks and tooken off our jackets and all. ‘Where’s this hole then?’ says Eron, and Paws says, ‘I think the water’s coming out of the crates. Look at this.’ And some of the crates, they are wet all right, as if there was water inside and it was dribbling out around the seals. Paws wipes his hand in it and sniffs and says, ‘Chemicals,’ like the smell we noticed before. ‘That isn’t right,’ he says to us. ‘Something’s not right. We should open one of the crates.’

So Eron says, ‘Hang on, Paws, we can’t do that. Munitorum property. We shouldn’t even be moving them without permission. Tampering with Munitorum seals, that’s a crime. It’s looting, and that’s a hanging offence.’ Paws says to us he agrees, it would be a hanging offence right enough, but there’s a security issue too. A Militarum issue. This isn’t right and we should check it, hanging offence or no hanging offence, because who do we serve? The God-Emperor of Mankind what watches over us all, that’s who, and not some jumped-up fart from the Munitorum, thank you.

Well, Eron complains again, and Paws tells him, ‘Eron, you run along and fetch the Munitorum fellow, and bring him here, so he can see for himself what we’re about.’ Eron sees the sense in this, and he runs off to locate the gentleman. And Paws looks at us, and says, ‘Get me a crowbar, Cawkus, we’re having these boxes open.’

So I get him a crowbar.

And we push a crate out into the open, one what was particularly leaking water, and Paws says, ‘Yeah, I’m really not having this,’ and gets to work with the crowbar, and he breaks the seals and gets the lid off.

A stasis carton’s meant to be all cold inside, and there’s always a hum of the system keeping it stable. Tech stuff, I don’t know. But this box, it’s swimming in water, chemical water, and there’s no hum or nothing. No what-you-call-it. Stasis field.

So I figure it’s broken, and the field’s failed, and the contents are spoiled and that’s why the water’s coming out. And Paws rolls his sleeve up and sticks his arm in, and pulls.

And there’s a man inside. He’s all curled up, in a plastic bag. And he’s dead.

And we flop him out on the ground, our eyes right wide, and stare at him. And he’s still dead. And Fevurse gets out his combat knife, and he slits the plastic bag, and all this stinky, filthy stuff pours out, like water from the bottom of a trench. Stagnant water. And the dead man flops out with it, and he’s still dead.

We look at this dead man, and we know. He isn’t one of ours. He’s in combats, old combats, but his face is all marked with these scar-patterns, and there are badges on his tunic. Signs. Symbols. Insignia of the eternal bastards.

So I curse out loud, and Paws says, ‘Enough of that mouth, Cawkus,’ and he fishes around and finds a lasgun and some webbing that were also in the sack with the dead man.

‘This isn’t food,’ says Fervurse, ‘unless the Munitorum is so desperate they’re hoping to feed us the enemy dead for our suppers.’ And I says, ‘They wouldn’t do that, would they?’ And Paws says, ‘It depends how desperate the shortage is, what with the siege and all,’ but none of us believes they would actually do that, so there has to be another explanation.

About then, Eron comes back with the Munitorum officer and the Munitorum officer is all, ‘What the hell do you men think you’re about? You shouldn’t open that,’ and gets quite beside himself until Paws shows him the dead man, and then he gets even more beside himself, but this time it’s with fear.

And he starts shouting, and Paws starts shouting back, and we all start shouting, and there’s a right barney, which is probably why we didn’t notice what was happening right away.

Some of them other boxes were opening. All by themselves.

There was men in the other boxes too. Eternal bastards, all bagged up with their guns and everything. But they weren’t dead, sir, because the stasis fields on their crates hadn’t failed. They was alive. And they had been waiting until all was clear to come out.

I suppose, sir, it were a scheme, devilish, devised by the Arch-enemy to sneak pioneer forces into the city and break the long siege. Sneak them in, pretending that they’re food, so they could come out and undermine us from within. I don’t know how long they’d been in them crates, or how far they’d come, but them stasis fields had kept them alive, suspended, and because we had disturbed them, they was waking up.

They were coming out of boxes all around us, using rusty blades to slash open the plastic sacks containing them, grabbing their guns, shouting obscene things.

Well, Eron, Throne rest him, he dies right away. They shoot him, plain as that, and he shudders and twists and falls on the ground with holes in him. And we back up, in a mad scramble, and grab our rifles, and Paws is yelling orders. And that’s when the firefight started.

The Munitorum gentleman, I don’t know what he was about. He was running around, yelling and screaming.

I fancy he was in on it. I fancy he knew what was in them crates. The eternal bastards, they must’ve had a man on the inside to get the shipment into the depot, past all the checks. That is just my notion, sir. I have no proof, and we can’t ask him now, because the eternal bastards, they shot him too. He looked surprised, I know that. He looked disappointed when they turned their guns on him, like it was unfair. But they shot him anyway.

So we was firing at them and they was firing back, and there was a lot more of them than there were of us. Paws tells Fevurse to go and get the men, but Fevurse got clipped in the leg and fell down, and could do no more than sit there and shoot back. So Paws, he tells me to go instead, and that he would cover me.

He’s a good shot is Paws. I saw him, dug in between the shelving, knock four of the bastards down with clean shots. Then he yells, ‘Run, Cawkus, you idle mug. Run and get the others.’

So I start to run, dodging the fire coming my way, and poor Fevurse is shooting, and Paws pulls out the incendiary grenade that he had kept for later use, and lobs it in amongst them, and there’s a bang and half a dozen of them start lumbering around screaming, all alight from head to foot.

Yes sir, I do believe that is when the depot caught fire.

I rallied the men and we came back, and by then Fevurse was dead and the depot was all ablaze, half of it anyway. Paws was still going. He’d littered the place with kills. We laid in beside him, and set up a fusillade, and did the bastards some harm.

But it were the fire that stopped them, sir. There were too many of them. Hundreds, maybe more, all coming out of boxes. My platoon couldn’t have held them long. And it would have taken too long for reinforcements to arrive from the garrisons. By the time they’d got there, we’d have been overrun, and the eternal bastards would have been out, into the streets, into the city and, well…

Yes, sir, I understand that food supply is a vital resource and we cannot afford to lose a principal depot. And I also understand that arson in a Munitorum facility is a serious offence. Even in time of war, under extremis. I understand that. But it was the fire that stopped them. But for the fire, the city would be gone.

Did Paws make it out? Sergeant Pawlak? Well, I’m glad of that. I’m sure he can explain the matter better than I can. I’m sure he can make a good account of our midnight rotation and the emergency. You’ve already spoken to him? Good, then. Good.

No, sir. Nothing else to add, sir. Yeah, I know what I done. I saved your fragging arses is what I done.

What’s that? The Commissar will see me now? Yeah. Yeah, I bet he will.

BORN TO US

If I have learned one thing in my career as a devoted inquisitor of the Holy Ordos, it is that there is always some truth at the heart of a story. No matter how fanciful the notion, how remote the myth, how distant the originating point in history, some indelible truth always lies at the story’s beginning.

I remember, in the old days, when I was just a novitiate, when I was just plain Interrogator Eisenhorn, I would marvel over the strange wonders that I was required to examine in old books, in flickering data-slates, in crumbling scrolls. They were most often legends of the remote past, stories of wonder and, as I believed then, wild imagination. They were tales, I was sure, designed to entertain the young or the gullible, tales of thrills and miracles and amazements and terrors, all of them constructed from nothing but invention.

Then I learned, and I saw. I experienced. I discovered that the universe we inhabit is a place more darkly strange, more grimly dangerous and more impossibly fanciful than anything that human imagination can manufacture. Immortal beings roam the stars. Primordial entities lurk in the bleak fastnesses of space. Daemons plunge and breach in the malevolent oceans of the warp. There are no stories, no tales of wonder, no myths, no fairy tales, that do not in some way depend upon a grain of truth, like every pearl depends upon a grain of sand. A good inquisitor needs to learn this and be sure of it, or he will always be surprised when the truth emerges.

I remember Koradrum. I remember the cold wind coming out of the northern wastes, the small villages and settlements shuttered against the pitch of winter. I remember the single, vigilant star that hung in the mauve evening sky, as cold and bright as a Glaw’s ambition. It was a portent, the locals said, a sign, a warning from the gods of the advent of some great occurrence. The star had not been there the year before.

Of course, I knew from the Celestial Navigation advisories circulated by the Imperial Navy Scarus Sector that the mature veil star at 476 Gamma Haruspex had gone supernova ten years earlier, and the flash of its scintillating demise had finally reached Koradrum. Nevertheless, the locals clung to their stories. A birth, they said: it presages the birth of a great being. A leader will be born to us, they told me. He will be a god in the form of a man. He has slept in death for thousands of years, but he will be resurrected. He will be the life. He will deliver us from evil.

Nayl was with me. Even in those days, he’d seen his share too. He knew the hocus pocus and the mumbo jumbo, and he knew that both could conceal the awkward trace of a truth. Still, he scoffed.

‘They are slaves to their superstitions,’ he grumbled, trying to get the cargo-8’s engine started with cold-numbed fingers. ‘A star in the sky, speaking of a deliverer? A resurrection and a birth? Please.’

He had read the Celestial Navigation advisories too. His cynicism was understandable. The vast proportion of the common Imperial population lives in a condition of startling ignorance. It is often safer that way. We let them keep their traditions of devils and gods and angels, to dabble in their heathen beliefs, because it is easier than having to nurse their sanity after admitting that devils and gods and angels do exist.

‘Remain open minded, Harlon,’ I counselled him. ‘The legends of this place run deep. That is why Lenhema came here to excavate.’

I believe I may have treated him to a friendly elaboration of the essential wisdoms I put forth at the start of this account. He bore it stoically.

Darred Lenhema was one of the sector’s most admired archaeologists. He specialised in human remains from the earliest times, from the era of the First Expansions, before Old Night fell upon us. He had been missing for two years.

Once we got into the hills, we found the site where his team had last been seen. An extensive area had been cleared and an entrance dug into a mound structure. There was a great deal of equipment around, but no sign of life.

‘The popular legend here,’ I remarked, as we made our way down the excavation tunnel by lamplight, ‘is an old one, Nayl. One of the oldest of all. It appears throughout human space, and was one of the most important and significant to our distant ancestors before Old Night.’

‘The return of a king?’ asked Nayl. ‘A god-as-man reborn to redeem us?’

‘Correct. It dominated Terran culture between M0 and M5, and undoubtedly predates that period. Many faiths were founded upon it, including the preeminent ones of the age. A god in human form, immortal and ineffable, is born to us to guide us to salvation.’

‘He’s a little late,’ Nayl growled. ‘We already have a perfectly good God-Emperor.’

Nayl had his sidearm drawn. His cynicism was matched by his caution.

We found the deepest buried chamber. It had been opened by Lenhema’s drills and cutters, though there was still no sign of him or his team. The chamber had been sealed for an unimaginable time.

Nayl called out a warning, but I had already seen it.

Something had indeed been born, reborn, in fact, after a period of death beyond measure. It was a god in the shape of a man, his auspicious resurrection from lifeless sleep aptly signified by the star.

He was no redeemer, not for the likes of us, anyway.

The stories had not been entirely correct. Myths are full of lies, but a grain of truth always emerges at the heart.

Nayl started firing. I raised my staff.

The necron king rose from the bodies of Lenhema and his team, and turned to greet us.

KILL HILL

(Fifteen Years Later...)

Priad of Damocles, of the Iron Snakes of Ithaka, is clad in slate grey armour, one shoulder marked with a blue coiled snake upon a white field.

Iron Snake. Indomitable. Relentless.

The hour is approaching. The final hour. The ending of the fight. The end of the undertaking. The skin of his armour is crazed with a million tiny nicks and gouges, scratches and grazes.

The place is called Bar’ad Atyok. In the voice of the greenskins, this means Kill Hill. It is the highest peak of the western continent of the world Koram Mote. Priad of Damocles, of the Iron Snakes of Ithaka, knows this for a fact. He knows it because there is not one place, not one single, lonely part of the western continent of the world Koram Mote that he has not been to, measured, cleared of enemies, and conquered. He knows Kill Hill is the highest peak because his armour’s visor display tells him so, to eight decimal places. It is sixty-one metres higher than Osh Tarr (‘Blood Summit’), and a mere seven metres higher than Bar’ad Onkgrol (‘Marrowbone Hill’). It is demonstrably, technically the highest peak on the western continent of the world Koram Mote, and that is what matters.

Screamer vox-signal to Ithaka Beacon: Extraction point, highest geo-feature/western continent.

Greenskins await in the slipline of the rocks as he ascends. Another day on Koram Mote. More to kill, ever more to kill. Another day on Koram Mote. Except it is the last day.

Priad of Damocles, of the Iron Snakes of Ithaka, still carries his boltgun, though it has been dry of rounds since the seventh year of the undertaking, the pod-dropped ammo-hoppers finally emptied. It is too beautiful and precious a weapon to leave behind. Priad bears his power sword, and his automated claws. They still function. He had fashioned a lance too, but he left it behind last night, rammed through the gizzard of a greenskin warboss on the lower slopes of Bar’ad Atyok.

As good a place as any to leave it.

The first of the greenskins rush him, howling rage. They are all spittle and slack, trembling lips filled with rot-peg teeth, their animal bulks painted with ochre, chalk and woad. Spears and cleavers rip at him. More tiny marks on the patina of his armour.

He has been here for fifteen years. Fifteen years. Still the greenskins haven’t learned they cannot kill him. They will not ever kill him. If he stays any longer, the highest peak on the western continent will be the mound of greenskin corpses he has stacked up.

He meets the first, braced, armour joints locking to withstand the collision, clouts it aside, greets the second and decapitates it. Its lungs are still exhaling a war cry, and air slaps and farts out of the severed throatpipe as it pitches away.

Blood droplets in the air.

The third. A dull steel axe-head sparks off Priad’s shoulder guard. His lightning claws find a throat and chest, and fork through the flesh as if through wet parchment. A fourth. His sword takes off an arm, and the axe it is holding. Priad kicks, his amplified blow casting the maimed greenskin down the slipline scree, head-over-heels. He catches the axe out of the air. It is still spinning and falling, slipping from the dead arm that is also still spinning and falling. He is moving so fast, it is as though time has slowed down to wait for him, as though the greenskin left the axe in mid-air for him to take, as if the air held it for Priad like an obedient servitor.

He catches the axe, turns it, buries it in the face of the fifth. Blood spray. On, on up the slope.

Priad of Damocles, of the Iron Snakes of Ithaka, has been here for fifteen years. To the human mind, that is a great chunk of a lifetime. To an Imperial Guardsman, that would be a long and heartless tour in hell.

To Priad, it is an undertaking, a period of occupation, a duty. Onerous, perhaps, grueling even, but in the end just another mission notch on his service history, just another action to while away a life that will be functionally immortal if violent death does not claim him.

He looks forward to seeing Ithaka again. He looks forward to the surroundings of Karybdis, the fortress moon, the Chapter House. He looks forward to seeing his brothers in Damocles Squad. He looks forward to the Rite of Returning. These are the only consolations he permits himself, the only comforts for the vestigial humanity he allows in a mind that otherwise has been a focused weapon for fifteen years.

He looks forward to speaking to another soul for the first time since the undertaking began. The silence has been long. He looks forward to cleaning and mending his armour, to polishing out the million scratches, to servicing his boltgun, to sleeping for a term, more fully than the half-rest periods he has eked out with his catalepsian node so that he cannot be taken by surprise.

Fifteen years. Hold the greenskin clans at Koram Mote, said the Chapter Master. Keep them occupied. Focus their attention. Stem their numbers. Buy us time to range Battlefleet Reef Star against their base worlds, and purge them.

How long will it take to manoeuvre the fleet into position? Priad asked.

Not long. Fifteen years.

Entirely reasonable. For a moment, Priad had been concerned that it might be a significant length of time. Great Petrok’s two centuries spent holding Ankylos might have become tedious by the end. Steelmen are less entertaining to hunt than Greenskins.

He’s reaching the summit. One of the suns is coming up in the south. The light is yellow, sidelong. He sees a bright speck, like a low star, to the west. Running lights. Inside his visor, a chime sounds and an icon illuminates.

Two minutes out. The last two minutes of fifteen years.

There are greenskins on the summit. He has become a myth to them, a monster, hunting and killing them across the western continent for fifteen years. They want him dead, but they cannot have him dead. He cuts one in half with his sword, punches the face off another with his claws. A warboss looms, twice Priad’s size, laughing like an ogre, a grunting infrasonic boom, axe side-swung to chop.

Huge, but just so slow. Priad of Damocles, of the Iron Snakes of Ithaka, leaps over him, drops in behind, cuts through a tree-trunk spinal column with his sword, cuts throat blubber as the warboss sprawls, vast body no longer working. Priad lops the giant, bloodied hands aside as they spasm and grope at him.

He delivers the killing blow.

‘Ithaka!’ he cries, the first word he has said aloud in fifteen years on Koram Mote, and the last.

The Thunderhawk powers in, hanging overhead, settling down onto Kill Hill, ramp open, thrusters screaming.

The fifteen years are done.

He wonders what they will have him do tomorrow.

THE INVITATION

Beyond Kaerograd and the fertile plains, where the northern country rises into the maw of winter, there is a place called Namgorod, which men held for a long while until the holding of it became too hard and they let it go into the wilds. Even in summer, the northern country is no friend to man: the steep, flinty hills, the ragged forests, the deep glens where streams are frozen in their beds for three-quarters of the year. In winter, the north coughs up snow upon the place, as a consumptive coughs up blood, and the region is a mortal enemy to anything warm and alive. Men knew this when they built Namgorod, knew it every winter as they tried to hold on, and when they left it to the ministry of the ice and snows, they understood that winter was its true master.

Tegget came to Namgorod on the eve of glittering winter. He could taste it in the air, like a cold stone in his mouth, and smell its sharp edge. Tegget was a catcher of men, and the northern country sheltered its fair share of outlaws, absconders and fugitives in the summer months, so he knew the trails well enough. But it was six weeks past the end of catching season, and those fugitives that did not intend to die of cold had already tried to flee across the plains: most of them into the waiting clutches of professional men like Tegget.

A catcher of men, especially one so honed and experienced as Tegget, had no business coming to the north so late in the year, but Tegget had good reasons. The bounty was one; more than he could make in three decent seasons. The loan of an expensive, self-heating bodyglove was another. Most of all, it was the nature of the request. By dint of his profession, Tegget was an outsider to the finer echelons of society in Kaerograd, tolerated as a necessary evil by the grandees and nobles of that city. For the Regent himself to make the request, well that was a wonderful thing indeed. Tegget anticipated prestige, an elevation in rank, perhaps even a royal commission. ‘Lowen Tegget, Catcher of Men, by appointment to his Excellency the Regent.’

Tegget worked alone. He had explained this fact to the Regent, and it seemed to suit. The Regent, speaking somewhat indirectly to Tegget, as if a bad odour had invaded the private chambers of the Regency, had emphasised the delicate nature of the matter. It was to be kept ‘close’. If rumours of it got out, Tegget would find his prize money forfeit. Other punishments were hinted at, and stipulations made.

Tegget had never been one for talking about his work. He just did what he did. He imagined that was why the Regent’s people had sourced him. That, and his reputation. Though Tegget didn’t talk about his work, others did, and Lowen Tegget was known for his wetwork, and the remarkable extent to which he messed people up.

Tegget rode his transport, a fat-wheeled AT-bike, to within a kilometre of Namgorod, then killed the drive and continued on foot. The bike’s engine had a mute-shield, which had cost him plenty on the black market, but he didn’t want to push his luck. He buckled up his armoured jack, slid his hunting las from the bike’s saddle boot, and threw two of his best psyber lures into the air. The metal blades of their wings opened as they ran free, and they circled the treetops with gentle beats. Both of them were small aquila-form: artificial kestrels wrought from steel and compound ceramics. Tegget pressed his left cheekbone, and the occular implant in his left eye-socket began to display, split-screen, the view from the lures.

Namgorod was quiet. Flaking black ruins, the largest a great shell of ribs open to the wind. There was a light dusting of snow on every surface. The sky was hard and dark, like smoked glass and, in the west, the first, bright winter stars had just appeared like lanterns.

‘Where are you?’ he whispered.

‘If I’d–’ Pavlov Curtz, Regent of Kaerograd, cleared his throat, trying to compose himself, ‘If I’d had some notice of your visit, great lady, I would have prepared a rather more–’

Olga Karamanz held up her hand for silence. ‘Do not exercise yourself, Regent. I require very few things of you, and a formal, ceremonial welcome is not one of them.’

Curtz shrugged. ‘Forgive me, great lady, but the Cauldrus system is a backwater, most often overlooked. State visits are rare, especially from such an august personage as the Canoness of the Order of the Martyred Lady. The Ecclesiarchy will wish to schedule conference with you, to discuss matters of faith, and the–’

‘This is not a state visit,’ said the battle-sister standing to the left of the canoness.

‘As has been specified,’ added the other, waiting by the door, ‘this is a private matter.’

Curtz opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, and sat down. The minute they had arrived and been announced, he had realised something was wrong. A canoness like Olga Karamanz did not make an idle visit to a place like Cauldrus Prime. Nor did she come so secretively, hurried in through the back doors of the Regency, attended by just two sisters. There was no entourage, no massed escort. The three women were dressed in veiled black robes, which only slightly betrayed the armour beneath.

From what he could see of Canoness Karamanz’s face behind the veil, she seemed surprisingly young. Her features were slim and very fair, almost adolescent in their purity. He could not guess her age, though her voice was soft and dry as if it was a thousand years old.

‘You know what this concerns?’ she asked.

Curtz nodded. ‘The... uh, the matter of the miscreant.’

The battle-sisters attending the canoness were both considerably taller and more robustly made than the great lady herself. Faces invisible behind the veils depending from their starched black headresses, they stood with their hands clasped in front of them. The canoness had introduced them as Sister Elias and Sister Bernadet, though the Regent had lost track of which was which.

‘The miscreant,’ said Elias or Bernadet.

‘You saw fit to report the incidents discreetly via ecumenical channels,’ said Bernadet or Elias, ‘which tells us you understood the sensitivity.’

‘I... yes,’ said Curtz.

‘Yet you are surprised to see us?’

Curtz cleared his throat again, and rose to his feet. He crossed to the sideboard and retrieved his half-drunk glass of amasec. He had been called away from the end of a trade dinner for this unexpected event. He was still wearing his formal robes and the ridiculously ostentatious badges of the guild and union offices he was patron of. He took a sip and let the sliding warmth of the liquor stiffen his resolve.

‘I expected a response,’ he said. ‘Perhaps an envoy, perhaps even a sister ambassador. Someone to smooth things over and see that things were done properly. Not... not the canoness herself.’

He looked round at them. ‘I’m so sorry, may I offer you a–?’

Olga Karamanz shook her head on behalf of all three of them.

‘You are put out, Regent,’ she said. ‘My apologies. We were already in the vicinity at the request of the Most Holy Ordos. And, well, we want to make sure that this is handled… properly, don’t we? Why don’t you begin by telling me exactly what happened?’

Curtz nodded. He thought, in a sudden, uneasy flash, of Tegget, and wondered if he had done the right thing in hiring him. Throne knew, he had no wish to anger a canoness.

Nor any wish to send a man to his death.

Even a piece of scum like Tegget.

The great hall of Namgorod loomed over him like the bones of a whale. Flakes of snow were falling, silent and soft and almost luminous, out of the night, and the wind had dropped. The air-chill was savage.

Lowen Tegget had known hardship. He was ex-Guard, ex-stormtroop elite. He’d seen some living hells, and dreamt of them still, some nights. This cold was just a trifle.

He moved in through the ruins, all the while rubbing the powercell of his hunting las with his heated glove to keep it lively. There was something here. Signs of heat residue, a cook fire, the gnawed bones of small animals. And something else: a presence, a shadow that lurked just out of reach in the silent ruin.

He knew what he was supposed to be tracking. The fact didn’t scare him, but it made him particularly alert. ‘The miscreant is a dissembler,’ the Regent had said. ‘It wants us to think it is something, and it is most certainly not that thing. God-Emperor, Tegget, I’d not send you up there if I thought there was any truth to it. This is a matter of pretence, and blasphemy.’

Blasphemy. That was a word to conjure with.

Namgorod had been the first township built by the settlers when they had reached Cauldrus Prime centuries before. They had raised it here because it was a site adjacent to their initial landing zone. The great hall he was presently creeping through had been built from ribs and girders scavenged from the wrecked colony ship that first winter. Later, the colonists had realised that other parts of the planet offered more decent and habitable conditions, but Namgorod, as the first coming place, had persisted out of respect for a long time, until it had become untenable.

Untenable. Untameable. Such was the northern country. The people of Cauldrus Prime, Tegget’s ancestors, had abandoned Namgorod, because it was too wild, too inimical to human life.

Something wild was with him now. He could taste it as surely as he could taste the snow.

He checked the view from the lures. They were circling the hall, their vision boosted by cold-light and night-fibre arrays.

Tegget heard something. A tiny mouse noise in the darkness to his left. He raised the rifle, panning it slowly.

There was a blink, and his lure-sights went dead. First one, then the other. He tried to re-cue them, but the links were flat. He felt his pulse rate elevate.

Something hit him from behind so hard, so fast, that he had no time to cry out. He saw his rifle spinning in the air. He saw the world upside down as he was somersaulted away from the collision.

He saw blood in the air, jetting arterial blood, and knew it was his own.

‘I strove, more than anything, to protect the reputation of the order,’ Curtz said, resuming his seat. ‘There were three incidents, mass-killings. The perpetrator made a great effort to suggest they were the work of a battle-sister.’

He paused, and looked at the canoness and her guards. ‘A battle-sister of the Order of the Martyred lady,’ he emphasised. ‘A battle-sister... corrupted.’

The three veiled women remained silent.

‘I knew this was impossible,’ Curtz went on. ‘Absolutely impossible. Your kind – forgive me, great lady – your kind are incorruptible. I made a careful study of the archives to reinforce my opinion. History shows us many horrors, but never a battle-sister fallen. That was when I realised it was a sham. Lunacy in fact. I suspected that it was matter of blasphemy. You are no doubt aware that the Pyrus Reach is greatly conflicted of late. Terrible times, and the poison of it, I’m glad to say, is slow to reach us. Sometimes being a backwater has its benefits. I supposed that some miscreant desired to stain the order’s name by committing these crimes, to engender unrest and panic. I sent the reports to alert you to the defamation.’

He paused. Still, the three women remained silent.

‘Now... now, I’m not so sure.’

‘Because?’ asked the canoness.

‘Because you’re here.’

‘What did you do?’ asked Elias or Bernadet.

‘I hired a man. A fellow of decent reputation as a catcher of men. I hired him to hunt down the miscreant, so that the matter might be settled and the good name of the order cleared.’

The canoness rose to her feet. ‘You sent a man after this... as you said... miscreant?’

‘A good man. A capable man.’

‘Regent,’ she said. ‘You have signed his death notice.’

‘I made provisions,’ Curtz said quickly. ‘The man was no fool. Very capable, very sly. He will keep his mouth closed.’

‘Forever,’ said Bernadet or Elias.

‘Now look–’ the Regent began.

‘You look, Regent,’ snapped the canoness. ‘I have to know where the man went, and on what clue. This must be contained.’

‘Are you telling me–’ Curtz began, astonished by the realisation of what they were saying.

‘I am telling you nothing,’ the canoness said. ‘It is better that way. Throne knows, for all of us. Tell me where this man went.’

‘I can do better than that,’ the Regent said, his voice tiny and terrified. ‘I can show you. As one of the terms of his employment, I insisted he carried a tracker.’

‘Report?’ whispered the canoness into her vox. The night was moonless, and flakes of falling snow stuck against the dark gauze of her veil.

‘Trace is clear,’ Battle-sister Elias replied.

‘Advancing,’ voxed Battle-sister Bernadet.

Two of the best, the canoness thought to herself. Bernadet and Elias, two of the most profoundly gifted warriors in the order. They were long since out of sight, but she could picture them. Elias with her storm bolter, Bernadet with her power sword and flamer. Two of the best.

Then again, the canoness thought, Miriael was the best of the best.

The canoness walked down an avenue of black trees through the falling snow, her hand upon the haft of her mace. Her gown was unheated, but the armour beneath it protected her from the hideous cold. This cold has been sent by the Emperor, she reasoned, and thus was mortifying and uplifting.

Her lander had put them down two kilometres from the place called Namgorod. The Regent had begged them to wait until morning, at which time he would have been able to summon a significant force of PDF troopers from the Interior Guard to support them.

Not appropriate. This had to remain a private matter. If anyone found out, if word spread–

Olga Karamanz stiffened in dread. This whole matter was unthinkable. Unbearable. Better it was finished now, quickly, under the silent folds of a bleak winter night. Miriael. Miriael.

They had found the AT-bike up on the track, and followed the tracer signal down towards the ruins. The Regent’s man – Tegget – was undoubtedly hours dead, but the tracker had been a smart idea. His corpse might be cooling, but the device was still alive and signalling.

‘Something–’ Elias voxed.

Then, ‘No, nothing. Just a dog-fox. Area’s clean.’

Karamanz raised her tracker handset. The signal from the poor unfortunate’s body was still clear, and stationary. Ahead, in the ruins of the great hall.

Where are you, Miriael, Karamanz wondered? That wasn’t the real question. The real question was: what did they do to you?

What did the vile powers of Chaos manage to do to you when they held you in their clutches? Verdicon. That’s where it happened. Miriael Sabathiel, sister superior, had been reported as missing in action during the vicious fighting against the unholy Emperor’s Children.

And then this. Back from the dead. Back, but changed. Changed in ways no other Sister of Battle had ever been changed.

Second only to the mighty Astartes, the Sisters of Battle were the most perfect fighting mechanisms of the Imperium of Man. Unlike the Astartes, none of them had ever fallen to corruption. What a trophy for Chaos. What a twisted champion.

‘Canoness?’ It was Elias.

‘Speak, child.’

‘The outbuildings are empty. I’m coming west on your flank.’

‘Close in.’ Karamanz drew her mace and ignited it. It hummed blue in the snowy dark. ‘Bernadet?’

‘East of you, approaching.’

The canoness stepped into the great hall. Snow sifted down like flour through the bare rafters, tie-beams salvaged from a long-defunct starship. The trace was just ahead of her now. She paced forward, mace by her side, anticipating the sight of Tegget’s corpse.

There was no corpse. Just a spatter of blood across the black flagstones.

A spatter of blood and small, blinking device...

Karamanz’s mind turned quickly. ‘Beware!’ she voxed.

Her warning came too late for Sister Bernadet. Clambering over the slumped, snow-dusted rubble of the east transept, Bernadet turned and raised her weapons as she heard a whirring. The psyber lure, beak and claws to the fore, whipped down out of the night and punched through her veil, through her face, through her skull. Bernadet staggered, clutching automatically at her ruined head, her discarded sword and flamer bouncing off the loose stones around her. A half-noise burbled out of her ruptured throat.

She fell dead on her face.

Elias heard her fall and ran to her. She was ten paces away when Bernadet’s fallen flamer somehow misfired all by itself. The firestorm hit Elias like a hammer, and burned off her robes, her veil, and the skin of her face. She stumbled, on fire, screaming in fury. She raised her bolter in a hand dribbling with molten fat and tissue.

A las-round, a hot-shot from a hunting weapon, burst her cranium and felled her.

Twisted and still, her corpse continued to burn.

‘Elias? Bernadet? Sisters?’

Silence. The crackle of the dead-link vox. The crackle of the flames. The sigh of the winter wind.

‘Miriael?’

Karamanz turned in a slow, wary circle, her mace ready.

‘Was I so easy to find?’ asked a voice from the dark.

‘Miriael?’

‘Was I so easy to find?’

‘Yes!’ Karamanz hissed.

‘Good.’

‘Miriael, please. I want to help you.’

A shadow disengaged itself from the night. Just a shadow, hunched and puppet-like, its long, shaggy hair backlit by the glow of the snowfall.

‘I knew you would come looking for me,’ the shadow said. ‘I knew you would hunt me forever.’

‘I want to help you.’

The shadow laughed.

‘By the power of the Throne, and the God-Emperor–’ Karamanz began.

‘Shut up! I won’t listen to that any more.’

‘Miriael...’

‘There are so many things I want to do. So many things I need to do, but all the while you are hunting for me, I can’t be free. I needed this.’

‘This?’

‘Oh, great lady, why do you think I made it so easy for you to find me?’

Olga Karamanz froze. Her grip on the haft of her mace tightened.

‘I wanted you to come, so we could be done with this.’

The shadow stepped closer. It wasn’t Miriael. It was a rough-set woodsman in an armoured jack, swaying and pale, wounded. He held a hunting las across his chest, but made no attempt to raise it.

‘Miriael!’

‘My lord Balzaropht has plans for me,’ the hidden voice said. ‘But I can’t accomplish them all the while you’re hounding me. So I called you here, so this could be done with.’

Canoness Olga Karamanz swung around and raised her mace into the third quarter defence. The sword, its blade as bright as the snowlight, was already inside her guard. It ripped through her gown and plate armour, and opened her body to the spine.

She fell, pouring hot blood into the cold floor. Steam rose. Behind her veil, her mouth opened and closed uselessly.

‘Hush,’ said the voice. ‘We’ll speak no more about it.’

‘I’m cold,’ said Lowen Tegget. He sat down, and hunched his head between his knees. He was tired. There was a dreadful stench of blood in the air of the great hall, like hot iron.

‘Cold can be ignored,’ said the shadows.

‘Says you. I’m cut here. You cut me.’

Miriael Sabathiel emerged from the darkness, sword in hand, and bent down beside him. ‘You’ll heal. You’re mine now. Daemon princes sing and my pulse quickens. Soon yours will quicken too.’

‘Throne,’ Tegget sighed. ‘Am I cursed? Have you cursed me?’

‘You were the invitation, Lowen. You helped me defeat my enemies. I’m showing my gratitude by sparing your life... and sharing with you the wonders I’ve seen.’

Tegget groaned.

Miriael Sabathiel straightened up and held out her arm. The two kestrel lures swooped in and perched there. One was dripping with blood.

‘I like you, Lowen. I like your toys. They please me. You could serve me.’

‘How, lady?’

‘Oh, Lowen Tegget. By being you. You are a cunning man. A fine killer. See, tonight you did for two Sisters of Battle. There is nothing you can’t do.’

Tegget smiled and shook his head sadly.

‘I’m just a catcher of men, lady,’ he said.

She reached out her hand and began to stroke his shaggy hair. ‘You’re so much more than that, Lowen,’ she said. ‘You’re my friend, and you’re an instrument now. I’d like you to walk with me and serve at my side.’

He looked up at her, his face pale and frightened. ‘Is this what corruption feels like?’ he asked.

She nodded, still stroking his head.

‘Feels good,’ he admitted. ‘Where will we go?’

‘Ah, now, my little hunter,’ Miriael Sabathiel said. ‘How are you at hunting eldar?’

ETERNAL

Froer watched as the retrieval detail brought out the bodies on bearer boards. A dismal return for a day’s effort.

The sun was painfully bright. His mouth was dry. He took a tin beaker from his musette bag and scooped some water from the pool. The water was so clear he could see the pebbled bottom gleaming like a mat of glass beads. Tiny silver fish flitted around his Militarum-issue boots.

‘Sir!’

The men at the picket were signalling to him. He splashed back through the long pools under the trees.

A figure approached across the mossy sweep of the lagoon edge.

Froer took a breath. It was a rare and remarkable sight.

Adeptus Astartes.

The warrior’s massive plate armour shone red in the hard sunlight. A Blood Angel. Two yellow teardrops on the shoulder plate denoted Sixth Company.

The warrior’s helm was off, slung at his belt. His hair was cropped gold, his face that of a noble statue in a silent chapel. A man of–

No, not a man. Not a man at all.

Froer went to meet him. He bowed his head and made the sign of the aquila.

‘Captain Froer, Sixteenth Betal, Astra Militarum,’ he began. ‘May the Throne be–’

‘Gammarael,’ said the Angel.

‘We appreciate the assist,’ said Froer. ‘Been trying to clear the Plunge for–’

‘Show me.’

Froer fell in beside the not-man. He had to scamper every third or fourth step to keep pace. They walked along the flowered bank and began to wade into the crystal pools. Froer glanced back. His boots had crushed the delicate flowers growing along the bank, but there was no sign of the Angel’s passing. It was as though the giant’s vast heels had not trampled anything, or had caused the stalks and bright blooms to spring up again, renewed, after his passing.

‘Can I fetch you food, sir? Drink?’

‘No.’

‘The water here is quite fresh,’ Froer added, dipping his fingers into the pool. ‘Clean. We do not thirst here. There are also edible berries and fruit.’

The not-man said nothing.

‘Odd place for a war,’ said Froer.

‘Odd?’

Froer made a gesture at the glade around them, the stretches of sparkling water, the silver-trunked trees with their graceful khaki leaves, the flowers, the pure sunlight, the emerald velvet of moss on boulders.

‘A paradise, I mean. After the mud-holes we’ve seen, sir, the slime-pits, the toxic trenches, arguing over the last drops of filthy water in the canteens. Here, the Emperor has provided us with food and water, with no need for urgent resupply, and–’

‘You talk a great deal,’ remarked the Angel.

‘I–I’m sorry.’

‘Is the enemy here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it is not an odd place for a war.’

Froer didn’t know what to say.

‘Assessment,’ said the Angel.

‘Oh, well… main dispositions are infantry to the west of the lagoon basin. My unit was ordered to circle east of the lagoons to flank and–’

‘This has not been achieved?’

‘No, sir,’ said Froer. ‘There is a deep plunge ahead, a grotto. Something is in there. It is denying my progress and killing my men.’

‘Type?’

‘Some kind of beast,’ said Froer. ‘It snorts like a hog. No formal identifi–’

‘Have your men form a cordon behind me. If it comes past me, they shoot. Full auto.’

‘Understood.’

Froer fanned his men out. They waded through the pools, thigh-deep, their rifles ready. The Angel moved ahead, with Froer following his ripples. Sunlight dappled the water.

The plunge was gloomy, a steep, gurgling basin choked with weed and briars. It smelled of rot and mould, and the sun seemed to shun it. It was like a blemish in the landscape, a darkness lurking within perfection.

‘Do we–’ Froer began.

The Angel raised his hand for silence and drew his blade, a glaive with a fine edge and a gilded grip.

He took another step, ripples expanding around his knees. As he pulled back an overhang of discoloured leaves there was a snort of phlegm.

Then the beast came out to meet them.

Froer gasped. It moved so fast, he could barely fix on it. It was twice the size of the Angel, obese, with black bristles blotching its pallid hide. Froer saw claws like broken femurs, a drooling smile full of yellow teeth, a muddle of wet eyes like frogspawn.

Talons squeaked on plate. The Angel grunted, meeting the charging weight, and slashed sideways. Blood as black and sticky as tar spurted into the air. The beast let out a pig-squeal.

The Angel cut again, a two handed back-slice. More tar-blood bloomed in the clear water like oil. The beast used its thrashing bulk, churned up the water in a furious surge, and struck the Angel sideways. Froer saw gouges in the red plate.

But the Angel had drawn it out.

‘Fire!’ Froer yelled, a tremor of fear in his voice.

The beast knocked the Angel over. Water sheeted up. It came on, thrashing. Froer fired at it as it went past. His wading men started shooting, ripping las-bolts across the surface of the pool. There was a stink of scorched meat.

It didn’t stop, but embraced Corporal Engg and bit off his jaw. It shredded Trooper Layune’s torso.

The Angel surfaced in an explosion of spray. He drove his glaive down into the thing’s spine with both fists, wrenching back to split ribs and open the wound.

The water turned black. The beast squealed, vomited bile, and collapsed sideways.

The Angel withdrew his blade and then took off the beast’s head with an overarm stroke.

The squealing stopped.

‘You may advance,’ the Angel said.

The not-man looked at the dead thing, and then at the floating bodes of the men it had slain. The pool was stained black around the beast’s corpse, and bright red around the Guardsmen. The Angel’s gaze seemed to linger on the red. Froer took his expression for regret.

‘You may advance,’ the Angel repeated.

‘My thanks to you,’ Froer said. ‘My thanks indeed. I–’

‘I am thirsty,’ said the Angel.

‘Sir, there is water all around us,’ said Froer. ‘This pool is tainted, but the others… fresh water and–’

The Angel glanced at him. It was a strange look.

‘There’s not enough water,’ he replied. ‘Not even here in paradise.’

The not-man turned, moved into the darkness of the Plunge, and disappeared into the shadows where the sun could not see him

About the Author

Dan Abnett has written over fifty novels, including Anarch, the latest instalment in the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series. He has also written the Ravenor and Eisenhorn books, the most recent of which is The Magos. For the Horus Heresy, he is the author of Horus Rising, Legion, The Unremembered Empire, Know No Fear and Prospero Burns, the last two of which were both New York Times bestsellers. He also scripted Macragge’s Honour, the first Horus Heresy graphic novel, as well as numerous audio dramas and short stories set in the Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer universes. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.

An extract from Anarch.

Under the watchful glare of mosaic saints, the floor was a lake of blood.

The saints were ancient and Imperial, and their names were mostly forgotten. Tesserae were missing in places, making their shapes ill-defined, their features indistinct, their frozen, pious gestures vague. But their eyes remained, weary eyes that had seen long histories pass, with all the blood and loss that histories claim as their price.

Still, they seemed appalled. The eyes of some were wide, in astonishment or horror; in others, they were half-closed in denial. Some looked away entirely, as if it was too much to bear, diverting their gaze to the distance, perhaps to some golden light of promise that might appear on a far horizon and spare them from witnessing more atrocity.

The blood was shin-deep. It had been dammed inside the great chamber’s floor by the short flights of ouslite steps that rose to each entry. It was bright, like a glossy red mirror, rippled by the movement in the room, glinting in the torchlight. It had frothed and clotted into curds around the piled bodies. Half-submerged, soaked in blood, they seemed like tumbled island outcrops rising from a red sea, or moulded plastek forms lifting from run-off liquid composite on a manufacturing rack.

The hot stink of it was unbearable.

The screams were worse.

Damogaur Olort oversaw the work, hands behind his back, barking orders to his sonpack. Sons of Sek brought the captives in one by one. Some struggled and fought, shrieking and spitting obscenities. Others came placidly, stunned by the fate that was overwhelming them. Each of the Sons had made more than one visit to the chamber, and their ochre battle gear was dappled with gore. From the very sight of them, any prisoner brought up from the pens knew what awaited them.

Even when they fought and cursed, and had to be beaten and dragged, the sight and smell of the chamber silenced them. Some fell mute, as if dazed. Others wept. A few prayed.

The chamber was the inner precinct of the Basilica of Kiodrus on Sadimay Island. A holy place. That it had been transmuted into a hell was too much for most of the prisoners to bear.

Olort studied the next captive as he was brought in. The man stumbled, splashing through the blood, as though led to a baptismal pool against his will.

‘Da khen tsa,’ Olort said. Hold him.

The Sons, big brutes, their faces covered by glowing optic units and the human-hide leatherwork that stifled their mouths, obeyed, dragging the man upright. Olort approached, noting the insignia and unit marks of the captive, the torn and filthy state of his uniform. The man flinched as Olort lifted his dog tags to get his name. Kellermane. There was a paper tag pinned to the left breast of the man’s tunic. It read ‘Captured near the Tulkar Batteries,’ in handwritten Sanguinary block-script.

Olort saw a tear running from the man’s eye, and wiped it away with his fingertip. The almost tender gesture left a smudge of blood on the man’s cheek.

Kellermane. Artillery officer. Captain. Helixid.

‘Kell-er-mane,’ Olort said, switching to the clumsy language of the foe, of which he had some small measure. ‘An offer. Renounce your god. Assent now, pledge fellowship to He whose voice drowns out all others, and keep your life.’

The captive swallowed hard, but didn’t reply. He stared as if he didn’t understand.

Olort tried to look encouraging. He had unclasped his leather mouth guard so that the captives could see and appreciate the honesty of his smile.

‘Cap-tain Kell-er-mane,’ he said. ‘Repudiate, and pledge. Thus, life is yours.’

Kellermane mumbled something. Olort leant in to hear.

‘Join you?’ Kellermane asked in a tiny voice.

‘Yes.’

‘A-and you won’t kill me?’

Olort looked solemn, and nodded.

‘Th-then I swear,’ stammered the captive. ‘Yes. Please. Yes. I w-will s-serve your Anarch…’

Olort smiled and stepped back, the blood pool swirling around his boots.

‘Vahooth ter tsa,’ said Olort. Bless him.

One of the Sons took out his ritual blade, the hooked skzerret of the Sanguinary Worlds, and opened the captive from throat to sternum with one downward slash. The man convulsed, useless noises of dismay and loss coming from his mouth, and collapsed. Arterial spray hit the temple wall and jetted across the faces of disgusted saints.

The Sons let the body fall.

How simply they fold, Olort thought, when faced with something so brief as death. Where is their trumpeted mettle? He whose voice drowns out all others has no use for cowards.

Olort resumed his place, hands behind his back.

‘Kyeth,’ he said. Next.

The Sons waded back across the chamber and left. Two more entered, a sirdar and a packson flanking another captive.

This one didn’t look promising to Olort. His black hair was matted with blood and dirt, and he evidently carried several minor injuries. But at least he walked unaided. The Sons didn’t have to drag him or frog-march him.

Olort approached, noting how the prisoner refused to make eye contact. There were no rank pins or regimental patches on the man’s torn black fatigues, and the paper label was missing.

Olort glanced at the sirdar.

‘Khin voi trafa?’ Where is his label?

The sirdar shrugged apologetically.

‘Let’he het?’ Olort asked. Circumstances?

‘Tyeh tor Tulkar, damogaur magir,’ the sirdar replied, and continued to explain that the captive had been taken alive after fierce fighting in the boat-docks near the Batteries. He had fought, the sirdar said, like a cornered ursid.

Interesting after all, thought Olort. A man of courage. He reached for the captive’s dog-tags. The captive did not flinch.

Mkoll. Recon. Sergeant. Tanith First.

‘Mah-koll,’ Olort said, in the foe’s ugly tongue again. ‘An offer. I make this now. Renounce your god. Pledge fellowship to He whose voice drowns out all others, and keep your life.’

The captive did not reply.

‘Repudiate and pledge,’ said Olort. ‘Do you understand?’

The captive remained silent.

Olort considered things for a moment. The man was evidently strong. He had borne a great deal. He had not broken. This was the mettle that the Sons watched for. He whose voice drowns out all others had no place for cowards.

But some could be too brave. This man stank of a silent defiance that would not submit and could not be broken. That was the way of things. Most were too weak. Some were too strong.

Olort glanced at the sirdar, who already knew what was coming and was unfastening his skzerret.

‘Vahooth ter tsa,’ Olort instructed.

The blade flashed up. Olort abruptly stopped the sirdar’s hand.

He had noticed something.

The captive had an insignia pin after all. A small dark badge fixed to his torn collar. It had been blackened to dull its gleam, which is why Olort hadn’t spotted it at first.

He unfixed it. A skull, with a straight dagger placed vertically behind it.

‘Mortekoi,’ he said. Ghost.

‘Magir?’ the sirdar asked, blade poised.

‘Ger shet khet artar, Sek enkaya sar vahakan,’ said Olort. This is one of the special ones, the ones He whose voice drowns out all others has told us will lead the way to the Victory.

Olort looked at the pin again, then slipped it into his tunic pocket.

‘Voi het tasporoi dar,’ he ordered. Make him ready for transport.

The sirdar nodded and sheathed his blade.

Olort looked at the captive.

‘Mah-koll,’ he said, with a soft smile. ‘Ver voi… you are a ghost, kha? A ghost? Mortekoi, kha?’

The captive looked directly at him.

‘Nen mortekoi,’ he said. ‘Ger tar Mortek.’

Olort jerked backwards. The sirdar and the Son started in surprise, and looked at the damogaur, bewildered. The Imperial had just used their language fluently. I am no ghost. I am death.

Mkoll lashed out with his right hand. The brass hook-pin that had once fastened his missing label had been straightened and concealed in his palm. He punched it into the packson’s neck just below the ear.

The Son reeled away, yelping and clawing at his neck. Mkoll was already turning on the sirdar. He grabbed the sirdar’s right wrist, snapped his arm straight, and twisted, forcing the officer over in a helpless, painful stoop. Mkoll brought his knee up into the officer’s bowed face.

The sirdar dropped to his knees, lifting a spray of blood. Mkoll maintained the arm lock, reached over the officer’s hunched back, and yanked out his skzerret.

He pivoted, locking the arm in a tighter twist with his left hand, meeting the charging Son with his right. The packson still had the pin jutting out of his neck. The ritual blade sliced through the Son’s throat. He staggered backwards, blood jetting between his clamping hands, and fell sideways, lifting waves that churned the surface of the blood pool.

Olort lunged at Mkoll. Mkoll kicked him in the gut and folded him up. Everything was slick and sticky with blood. The kneeling sirdar managed to wrench his wrist out of the armlock.

He tried to tackle Mkoll. Mkoll blocked him with a forearm, grabbed him just below the left elbow, and forced him to turn with another twist. The sirdar barked in pain. He was rotated. Mkoll forced the trapped left arm up like the lever of a pump, and punched the skzerret hilt-deep in the sirdar’s armpit.

Mkoll wrenched the blade out, and the sirdar dropped on his face in a violent splash. Olort was trying to back up, trying to rise, trying to breathe. He floundered in the blood pool.

He pulled out his sidearm, but Mkoll kicked it away. Mkoll grabbed him by the front of his soaked tunic, dragged him to his feet and slammed him back against the mosaic wall. He put the skzerret to the damogaur’s throat.

The saints watched, eyes wide.

No one was coming. The Sons in the anteroom outside were used to cries of pain and dismay echoing from the chamber.

‘What did you mean… special ones?’ Mkoll hissed.

‘Voi shet–’

‘My language!’ Mkoll whispered. ‘I know you have some. Why are we marked out by your Anarch?’

‘Khet nen–’ Olort gurgled.

Mkoll pinned him by the throat with his left forearm, and used the edge of the ritual knife to cut open the seam of the damogaur’s tunic pocket. He fished out the Tanith pin and held it up for Olort to see.

‘Why does this matter?’ he growled.

‘Y-you are the ones,’ Olort gasped. ‘He whose voice drowns out all others has identified this. You are enkil vahakan. You–’

‘Those who hold the key of victory.’

‘Kha! Kha! Yes!’

‘So he fears us?’

Olort shook his head.

‘Nen. He will take the key from you. For the woe is already within you.’

‘Woe?’

‘The Herit ver Tenebal Mor!’

‘The bad shadow? The Heritor’s bad shadow?’

‘Yes. It was cast upon you a long age ago, mortekoi.’

Mkoll glared into the damogaur’s eyes. He relaxed his grip.

‘Next question,’ he whispered. ‘How do we get out of here?’

Click here to buy Anarch.

A Black Library Publication

‘Missing in Action’ and ‘Pestilence’ first published in 2001.
‘Backcloth for a Crown Additional’, ‘In Remembrance’, ‘Ork Hunter’ and ‘Vermilion Level’ first published in 2002.
‘The Curiosity’ first published in 2003.
‘Thorn Wishes Talon’ first published in 2004.
‘Gardens of Tycho’ first published in 2005.
‘Playing Patience’, ‘The Fall of Malvolion’ and ‘The Invitation’ first published in 2006.
‘Black Gold’ first published in 2007.
‘Blood Games’ first published in 2009.
‘The Iron Star’ and ‘The Strange Demise of Titus Endor’ first published in 2010.
‘Master Imus’s Transgression’ and ‘Regia Occulta’ first published in audio in 2011.
‘Little Horus’ and ‘The Lightning Tower’ first published in 2011.
‘Born to Us’, ‘Kill Hill’ and ‘Perihelion’ first published in 2012.
‘A Ghost Return’ and ‘Unmarked’ first published in 2013.
‘Eternal’, ‘Family’, ‘Forgotten’, ‘Ghosts and Bad Shadows’,
and ‘You Never Know’, first published in 2014.
‘Midnight Rotation’ and ‘Of Their Lives in the Ruins of Their Cities’ first published in 2015.
‘Perpetual’ and ‘The Keeler Image’ first published in 2016.
‘Killbox’ and ‘Meduson’ first published in 2017.
‘Misbegotten’ first published in 2018.
This anthology first published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Ignacio Bazan-Lazcano.

Lord of the Dark Millennium © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2020. Lord of the Dark Millennium, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78999-323-3

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.