Further tales of the Space Marines

DEATHWATCH : SHADOWBREAKER
A Talon Squad novel by Steve Parker

KNIGHTS OF MACRAGGE
An Ultramarines novel by Nick Kyme

BLOOD RITE
A Blood Angels novella by Rachel Harrison

• DARK IMPERIUM •
by Guy Haley
BOOK 1 – Dark Imperium
BOOK 2 – Plague War

SPEAR OF THE EMPEROR
An Emperor’s Spears novel by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

BLOOD OF IAX
A Primaris Space Marines novel by Robbie MacNiven

• MEPHISTON •
by Darius Hinks
BOOK 1 – Blood of Sanguinius
BOOK 2 – The Revenant Crusade

Space Marine Conquests

THE DEVASTATION OF BAAL
A Blood Angels novel by Guy Haley

ASHES OF PROSPERO
A Space Wolves novel by Gav Thorpe

WAR OF SECRETS
A Dark Angels novel by Phil Kelly

OF HONOUR AND IRON
An Ultramarines novel by Ian St. Martin

APOCALYPSE
A Primaris Marines novel by Josh Reynolds

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

About the Author

An Extract from Dark Imperium

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

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

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

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

Chapter 1

The crone, finger painted yellow with the ochre she was applying to the young man’s face, turned her eyes to the sky. She opened her mouth as if to taste the charged wind, but her mouth was empty, for she had no tongue.

‘The gods are coming.’

The words were murmured by the little girl squatting at the crone’s side – her helpmate and her voice.

The crone turned to the young man kneeling in front of her and grasped his face, pulling it close to her.

‘Go to them.’

The words were an echo of the crone’s youth, uttered by the child, who spoke no words of her own. None among the Faithful knew whence the girl came; some whispered that she was the crone’s soul, taken human form; others held that she was the crone’s daughter. The crone herself gave no sign.

The crone’s eyes were black, pits without reflection. The young man could feel her looking into his soul. He felt it quailing before her.

‘Go to them, Montalte. Take them to the saint. He is calling. The gods come at his call.’ The girl’s eyes remained downcast all the while she spoke, as though she were caught in a memory.

As if in answer, lightning forked across the roiling sky then split a Bael tree in half from crown to root. The tree screamed in mortal agony, its thorn ropes lashing, before the holy fire consumed it.

The crone turned her scarred face to the blaze. Montalte saw the light from the holy fire illuminating the dark cave of her mouth as she opened it to savour the smoke. The smell, pungent and aromatic, took Montalte back to a time before the sky had cracked and vomited the Defilers onto his world. The feast of Saint Blaise, its spices, sweets and incense. The flames smelt like ceremony.

Montalte smelled cloves as the Bael tree burned.

The crone turned back to Montalte. ‘The saint blesses you with his fire. Find the gods.’

Montalte nodded.

The crone held out her hand. The silent girl placed on it a medallion – one of the pilgrim medals, cast in the thousands when pilgrims still came to Chevreuse to walk the Chemin Royal to the shrine of Saint Blaise. Montalte bowed his head and the crone hung the medallion round his neck. The metal disc, signed with the Holy Fire, sat cold on his flesh. He looked up again into the old woman’s lined face.

The crone opened her mouth, her lips moving, the words spoken once again by the silent girl at her side.

‘You are the last pilgrim, Montalte.’

Montalte bowed his head and made the sign of the aquila upon his breast.

‘Now go.’

As Montalte got to his feet, the silent girl pressed a needler into his hands. He looked down at the weapon, then to the crone. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Find the gods. Bring them to the saint.’

Montalte lay, silent, in a lightning pit. The sky fire had seared the soil to cracked black glass. All of Chevreuse was pockmarked with these pits, but nowhere more so than the Stations of the Saint that lay at the end of the Chemin Royal.

Around Montalte, the scrub jungle crackled. Flashes of light told of the discharges of sky fire that had been stored in the Bael trees. He was at the edge of the storm zone. Ahead of him, the scrub jungle became a twisted, blasted plain of devastation, littered with the remnants of war vehicles and the shattered stumps of Bael trees. The Defilers had made many attempts to enter the saint’s realm in the years since they had taken Chevreuse, but all such incursions had ended in piles of smoking metal and cooked flesh when the saint sent his fire burning from the sky. Now, the Defilers maintained a sullen sentry on the far side of a no-man’s-land that swelled and shrank as the storm itself writhed above.

No aircraft could fly into the storm zone, not even one bearing gods. Now, Montalte waited. The crone had told him to meet the gods at the ruin of the tomb of Blessed Etienne, companion to the saint. From where he lay in the lightning pit, Montalte could see the broken remains of the tomb, a corona flickering from the jagged ruin of its spire. The sun of Chevreuse, a bloated red giant, hung low in the sky, filling the horizon. To the south, the rising dark told of a sandstorm blowing over the flats. Lightning sparked through that dark, so distant that no trace of its thunder reached Montalte.

Movement. There. Furtive and grey, clambering over the snapped branches of fallen Bael trees. He would likely not have seen them in the gloom, save for the feeble thrashing of the trees’ thorn ropes, struggling to lasso a passing meal.

The yellow ochre painted over Montalte’s face and bare scalp camouflaged him against all but the sharpest eyes. Only the eye whites might give the Faithful away amid the yellow and grey and green of Chevreuse, so they stained their eyes with the juice of the Bael tree. Now he turned his yellow eyes towards the movement and saw it slowly resolve into a Defiler patrol.

The mind that framed the strategy of the Defilers on Chevreuse was subtle, determined and unafraid of taking losses. It had tried frontal assaults, infiltrations, flanking attacks, misdirection and feigned retreats in its efforts to first take the storm zone and then, when that had failed in the face of the saint’s holy fire, it had switched to trying to lure the Faithful out into the killing zones beyond. So far, the Faithful had mostly resisted the temptation to engage the enemy outside the storm zone. But ever and again, the enemy probed and tested. It was doing so now. The patrol, clad in grey and with the foul sigils of the Defilers on their combat fatigues, were sectoring in towards the storm zone.

They were off-worlders. Everything about the way they moved proclaimed that. The way they placed their feet confidently upon the earth, how they scanned for enemies in the distance but looked neither to the ground in front nor the air above, told that they were newcomers to Chevreuse. They did not know its particular dangers.

The ground near the patrol rippled.

Fire worm.

Even off-worlders would know to take cover in a building should a fire worm reach out of the earth of Chevreuse and turn a member of the patrol into a living candle. But that would mean them taking cover in the only structure within reach: the Tomb of Blessed Etienne.

He had to draw them away.

Montalte sighted down the needler. The weapon the crone had given him was a holy relic itself, one of the weapons wielded by the saint’s companions when he first drove back the Enemy. The point man of the Defiler patrol stopped, scanning the distance.

The needles took out his eyes.

Hearing the alarm shouts, Montalte threw a stone into a tangle of nearby metal that had once been a Chimera and, as the saturated metal discharged in a volley of sparks and flashes, he slid, fast as a fire worm, to his right, heading towards the nearest stand of Bael trees.

Behind and above him, Montalte heard the snap of las-rounds. In the storm zone, the supercharged atmosphere left a trail of spark discharges behind every las-round, turning each shot into tracer fire. The Faithful found this useful. They always knew where the enemy was once he started firing.

Coming into the scar zone around the Bael trees, Montalte felt the thorn whips slide over his shaven scalp. Tasting their own ichor, the thorn whips fell still, and Montalte crawled through into the cover of the trees.

Turning, keeping low, Montalte looked to see that he had pulled the Defiler patrol away from the tomb. He scanned the ground for the telltale phase ripple that showed a fire worm was rising, but the earth was still.

For a native of Chevreuse, the marks of fire worm and ball sprite and whistler were learned young and learned well, or the native never grew old. For the many pilgrims who had come to Chevreuse to walk the Chemin Royal to the Stations of the Saint, purifying themselves of sin before coming into the saint’s presence, the learning was often the final act of their pilgrimage.

Montalte squirmed sideways. Occasional las-rounds sizzled through the air, sounding like meat frying on a pan. The patrol was vectoring roughly towards him, but clearly they had no idea exactly where he was. From his position he could see the officer, scurrying from one flimsy cover to another, pointing at various areas for his Guardsmen to fire at. The Defilers had quickly learned that, on Chevreuse, communication equipment worked reliably no further than an officer could shout. It had become a war of runners and messengers. It had cost the lives of a score of the Faithful to bring the message to the crone that the gods were coming.

Glancing to the horizon, Montalte saw the final arc of the sun’s setting.

The gods would come with the night. The Defiler patrol was still too close to the infiltration point. He had to lead them further away.

Montalte began to line up the needler.

Steel. Cold, sharp, thirsty, at his throat.

At the same moment, his mouth was sealed and he was held, with unspeakable strength, against something more unyielding than Chevreuse itself.

A voice whispered in his ear.

‘To call out requires a throat. Make a sound and I will remove yours.’

Montalte felt his head being turned and he looked into the face of death.

And death looked back.

A finger, clad in armour, traced the ochre patterns the crone had painted over Montalte’s face and scalp.

‘You have the mark,’ Death whispered. ‘You live. For the moment.’

Death turned from him then, its red eyes searching through the slowly twisting thorn whips of the Bael trees for the approaching patrol.

Montalte saw the blue of Death’s armour and the black of his bolter and the lightning on his shoulder and he knew that the gods had come. He would have abased himself in worship, but the god held him immobile.

Death gestured and, to his left and right, other gods appeared, moving with a silence and stealth that their size and armour made extraordinary. But then, Montalte thought, ideas tumbling wildly through his mind, they were gods. They could go where they willed, leaving no trace of their passing.

The gods unsheathed their knives. The blades were dulled with oil and rubbed-in dirt but the edges, ah, the edges. Montalte saw the way the cutting edges of those knives sliced the air. Death pointed, flanking left and right, and the gods turned and were gone, slinking into the shadows and rifts.

The Defiler patrol was still directing random las-rounds into the Bael trees while the patrol officer gestured his squads into flanking positions on either side of the stand. But as the squads reached their locations, taking up firing stances and looking to their officer for the command to fire, death rose up behind them.

From where he lay, Montalte saw the blue gods move with a speed and silence that was not human, pulling back heads and slicing throats, crushing windpipes and shattering skulls, killing every man in each of the squads in the time it took for him to look left and right and left again.

‘Fire!’ The Defiler officer screamed his command.

But only silence answered it.

The officer stood up, looking to see what had happened to his men, and as he rose a god rose behind him.

The blue god picked up the Defiler officer, his armoured fist immediately muffling the man’s strangled cries. Around him lay the broken remains of his command squad. None of them were moving.

The blue god made his way towards where Death waited, Montalte beside him, with the Defiler officer dangling in his hand.

The god saluted Death. ‘All accounted for, brother-sergeant.’

‘Vox?’

‘Destroyed. But I could not tell if they made a report first.’

‘Put him down.’

The Defiler officer stood, swaying, in front of Death. For his part, Montalte looked with curiosity at the man, for this was the closest he had ever been to a living servant of those who had torn the sky asunder. The man was bald, as was everyone who stayed longer than a few days on Chevreuse, but his face and scalp were tattooed with sigils and signs that made Montalte’s gorge rise simply from looking at them.

‘Did you send an alert?’

The Defiler officer looked up at Death. The traitor opened his mouth and Montalte saw that his teeth were filed to points and his tongue, licking fear over his lips, was forked.

‘I-I serve the Dark Gods. I do not fear death. I welcome it.’

‘Then today is your day of fortune.’

Montalte, although he was looking upon Death, saw nothing beyond a flicker. Neither, apparently, did the Defiler officer, for he continued to stare in defiance at the skull-headed god standing before him. But a red line opened across the Defiler’s belly, from hip to hip, and the officer, feeling the death he had welcomed, reached down, trying to hold himself together. In his reaching he upset the momentary balance that was binding him. With a look of ineffable surprise on his face, the Defiler officer fell apart, his torso falling backwards, his legs and hips pitching forwards.

Montalte stared up at Death’s blank bone face. He had cut the man in two and Montalte had barely seen him move.

Death turned to the blue god who had captured the Defiler.

‘Assume mission secrecy compromised.’ Death turned his red eyes on Montalte. ‘Why did you alert the patrol?’

The Faithful stared into Death’s skull face. He could not speak. He made to give obeisance but Death pulled him up from the ground.

‘Speak.’

Staring into the face of Death, a memory flicked across Montalte’s mind, of a Defiler running at him, screaming, his face a mask of tattoos and mutilations, flesh self-sacrificed to the Dark Gods. Montalte had been a child up until then. If he had remained a child that day, he would have remained locked in his fear until the cultist skewered his body. But his childhood had ended as he had raised the laspistol his father had given to his keeping, to guard his mother and sisters. Montalte had emptied the entire power pack into the cultist before dropping the empty weapon and staring, in horrified fascination, at the charred lump of flesh that remained. What he had faced down that day was the face of corruption, the horror of an unclean death. Now, face-to-face with Death itself, he saw that true death was clean.

Now, at last, Montalte could answer.

‘Y-your reverence. I-I thought to draw them away from the infiltration point.’

‘We were already here. Waiting for you. If you had not alerted them, they would have all been dead before they could send a signal.’

‘Communications rarely work on Chevreuse, your reverence. Mayhap they could not send word.’

‘Or perhaps they did.’ The man, the god, fell to silence, his red eyes distant.

‘Your reverence?’

The blue-armoured figure glanced at the little man. ‘I am deciding whether to let you live.’

‘Permission to speak, brother-sergeant.’

Death turned to another of those who wore the death mask. ‘Granted, Brother Jansenius.’

‘This creature has already compromised mission security. He will slow us down. Recommend ensuring that he has no further negative impact on the mission.’

Death shook his head. ‘He is our contact with the local resistance and, for the moment, our guide.’

Death turned to Montalte.

‘You live. For now.’

Chapter 2

‘Do you have a name, your reverence?’

They were making their way across no-man’s-land, heading towards the storm zone. Montalte had been chosen for this mission by reason of being one of the most skilled among the Faithful in moving with stealth and speed through the broken land outside the storm zone, yet he could barely keep up with the blue-armoured gods. Nor could he do anything but marvel at how men of such size, wearing ceramite armour, could blend into the yellow and grey and green of Chevreuse, disappearing into shadows and merging into lightning tracks. They were silent as ghosts in the twilit night.

The chief of them – there were five of these gods who wore the shapes of men but the face of death – turned to him.

‘My name is Augustin. I am not your lord. I am a sergeant of the Fulminators, a Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes.’

Montalte bowed. ‘Your reverence, I am named Montalte, son of Clermont, one of the Faithful whom the saint has raised and protected to guard his mortal remains.’

Sergeant Augustin pointed ahead to the storm zone, its twisting mass of cloud lit from within by deep lightning. ‘How long has that been there?’

‘The saint raised the storm when the sky split and darkness came down upon us. Saint Blaise raised it, and we, the Faithful, took shelter within it.’

‘When was that?’

‘Seventeen years ago, your reverence. When I was yet a boy.’

Sergeant Augustin nodded. ‘We have known storms such as this – they raged when our Chapter was raised, on Mars the Red, and to them we owe our name – we are the lightning bringers. Such tempests hold no fear for the Fulminators.’

‘This is the saint’s work, your reverence. It is unlike any other.’

The god turned his eyes upon the man beside him. Even while they talked, they moved with scarce visible movement and less sound through the blasted debris of the battle zone.

‘It is a storm,’ said Sergeant Augustin. ‘An electrical storm. We are Fulminators – we know storms. We bear their mark.’

Then he reached to his head and removed the death mask he wore.

Montalte, schooled into silence through seventeen years of fighting the forces of the Dark Gods, gasped. For Sergeant Augustin’s face bore the fractal scarification of one who had received the saint’s blessing and lived to tell the tale. Zigzagging down the side of his face was the livid lightning scar.

‘You have been touched by Saint Blaise,’ Montalte murmured. ‘And lived.’

Sergeant Augustin shook his head.

‘He did not make this mark on me, nor on the rest of my men. It was the mark of our making, when such storms raged on Mars the Red that had not been seen for millennia. I went into the tempest, still a neophyte, and offered myself to the storm – as we all do – and returned a brother.’ Augustin’s armoured hand, moving with the delicacy of a zither player, traced over the scar that ran from his shaven scalp, down between his eye and ear and on to his neck.

‘Two o’clock.’

Montalte heard the words, hissing and crackly though they were, whisper from Augustin’s vox. The sergeant gestured to him to find cover but Montalte had already slid into the lee of a shattered Bael tree.

‘Hostile?’ Augustin whispered.

‘Unknown.’

‘Assume hostile, Brother Cornelius.’

Montalte tried to get closer to the Fulminator. He knew what was approaching, they did not. But the lead Space Marine had already vectored to eleven o’clock.

‘Stop–’ Montalte began to shout his warning but it was too late.

The grapnel launcher sent its hook unerringly into the rolling ball of light that was approaching and then as quickly reeled back, attempting to haul in its catch before it might transmit a signal.

But the ball of light moved faster than the line, reaching long fingers towards the launcher and following after. As the ball of light rolled towards Brother Cornelius, the Fulminator who had tried to hook it, Montalte broke from his hiding place, running.

The Space Marine reacted faster than the Faithful. His bolt pistol was firing before Montalte had taken a step, each round centred in the heart of the ball of light, each round exiting without exploding.

The ball of light swallowed the Space Marine’s head, blazing brighter as it did so. The Fulminator clutched at his helmet, armoured gloves disappearing into the sizzling, sputtering flames, but the fire only burned brighter. Running towards him, Montalte grabbed from the ground two loose lengths of what he prayed to the saint were metal and, sticking one piece into the fireball that had swallowed the Space Marine’s head, he touched the other to the black glass of a lightning pit.

Then everything went black.

Montalte woke to see Death looking down at him.

Death reached out his hand and helped him up.

Death, Montalte noted, had been badly scorched, the skull face blackened and burned.

Sergeant Augustin pulled the Space Marine round to face him. ‘Brother Cornelius?’

‘I am well, brother-sergeant’

‘Keep moving.’ Augustin turned to the Faithful. ‘You will tell me what that thing was.’

‘A ball sprite,’ said Montalte. ‘Some call them fire dogs. They hunt and burn what they find.’

The sergeant shook his head. ‘Carnivorous ball lightning. Save I saw it, I would not have believed.’

Montalte glanced towards the Fulminator who had been engulfed by the ball sprite. ‘None I know could have lived after the fire dog had bitten for so long.’

‘We know the swift fire. We enter the storm, so it was not the first time Cornelius had felt its bite. But he could not have survived much longer. Faithful, indeed.’

Montalte bowed. ‘Thank you, your reverence.’

The Fulminator shook his head. ‘To be a sergeant of the Fulminators Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes is a greater honour than any Ecclesiarchy title.’

‘I will remember, your reverence… er, my sergeant.’

Augustin pointed ahead. ‘We will soon reach the storm zone. There, no auspex can track us. Once we are secure from tracking, take us to the Shrine Cathedral of Saint Blaise. Then your task shall be complete. We shall see to the safety of the relics of your saint.’

‘But you cannot simply approach the saint. First, you must be purified by completing the Stations of Holiness. Only then, when all sin has been shriven from the soul, is the pilgrim pure enough to approach the Reliquary of the Saint.’

The Fulminator pointed to his armour. ‘Do you know what this is?’

Montalte shook his head. ‘No, your– my sergeant.’

‘This? Or this?’

‘No, my sergeant.’

‘They are purity seals. You take us straight to the saint.’

‘I…I will try, my sergeant.’

‘Good.’

‘But the saint may not be willing.’

Sergeant Augustin looked down at the man scurrying beside him.

‘With every due respect, we are here to preserve the relics of Saint Blaise from desecration by the unclean hands of the Archenemy. The saint himself has been dead for a thousand years. He will have no view on how we appear before him.’

Montalte, fretful and uneasy, made no reply.

‘Do you understand?’ asked Sergeant Augustin.

‘Yes, my sergeant.’ Montalte looked ahead to where the storm zone began. It was not far now: already the electric winds that defined the edges of the storm zone were causing his skin to crackle. ‘But I do not know if the saint will.’

Chapter 3

Captain Donatus knew that he was getting close to where Pelagus had set up his field headquarters when his skin began to crawl.

The encampment was seething. Marching after the messenger sent to fetch him (the gods curse the electrical activity of this planet that made even sending vox messages a lottery), a memory had popped unbidden into the mind of the Guardsman. A memory from when he was a child, before he had heard the dark, siren call. Pouring boiling water into the mound of tarmites that towered in the garden, standing on teetering tiptoe to reach up high enough to pour the water into the mound entrance. Seeing the first wash of boiled tarmites spilling from the bottom of the mound, the young Donatus had run, screaming and flapping desperately at his exposed skin, as a second wave of tarmites came seething from the mound, searching for that which was attacking them. He had had to stay in bed for a week or more after that, drifting in and out of consciousness as the anaphylactic shock pulled him to death’s darkness. That was when he had heard the first notes of the siren call: wandering in those dark places on what he had thought to be the borderlands of death. But, in truth, it was a first intimation of the warp, of the shifting sink of dream and desire that lay underneath everything.

Now, marching to the summons of Pelagus, Donatus saw the camp seethe with the same sort of murderous intensity as that tarmite mound had done when he had attacked it. There was trouble in the charged air – he could feel his skin prickling even more than usual. Without thinking, Donatus reached to scratch the itch, then cursed as the built-up energy discharged, giving him a shock.

‘Gods curse this planet,’ Donatus muttered. With a galaxy to liberate from the corpse god, why had the host come here? Why not one of the paradise worlds? Failing that, just an ordinary hab planet would have been fine: plenty to loot on one of those worlds. But no, he had been stuck with Chevreuse. Whisper it – no, make that only ever think of it in the darkest corners of your mind and, if possible, forget about it afterwards – but word was that even the dominus was none too happy about being assigned this mission.

The renewed thought of Pelagus made Donatus’ skin crawl again. His throat tightened. He swallowed to try to loosen it. He had seen men stricken into silence in the presence of Pelagus: a silence that the dominus had made permanent more than once when, irritated beyond endurance by a subordinate’s inability to produce his report, he had removed the unfortunate’s voice.

Donatus swallowed again, trying to work some saliva from the glands in his mouth. Nothing came. Time for an old trick: he bent down, picked up a smooth pebble, ignoring the inevitable static shock, and put it in his mouth, working it round with his tongue.

Coming to the entrance of the command tent, Donatus saluted the impassive guards that stood sentry outside. The tent flap opened and Donatus, hands sweating and mouth dry, entered the personal domain of the Space Marine commanding the Chaos forces investing Chevreuse.

Inside the tent, the sensation of something crawling over his skin – a feeling which accompanied Donatus everywhere on Chevreuse – immediately departed. If there was a residual sense of discomfort, Donatus knew that it arose not from the planet’s electrical field but from the proximity of Pelagus himself.

While the air was free from Chevreuse’s skin-crackle static, it was thick with incense. At each corner of the many-sided tent stood a votary clad in rust red, swinging a thurible from which rose the thick, oily smoke. In the centre of the tent was an altar carved with the sigils of Chaos. Beside the altar lay the crozius – the badge of office and honour of the dominus, and his weapon in battle. And behind the altar, raised on a plinth, was something that made Donatus’ eyes burn to look upon. He looked away, but something deep in him drew his eyes back, though they burned, to look again.

‘Blind servants are of no use to me. I suggest you look away.’

The words came from behind him.

A thought spun through his mind: maybe better to burn his eyes out looking at what was on the plinth than turn to see the one who spoke. But the words were a command – having heeded the dark call all those years ago, he could no more resist the speaker’s will than a sheet of paper might stop a bolter round.

Captain Donatus, leader of men, turned and made obeisance to the Word Bearer.

‘It is not for such as you to look upon the face of my master, exalted. Your soul would burn along with your eyes, leaving a husk with neither wit nor will. I have a surfeit of such servants. What I require now is a servant with wit and will. Do you have these qualities, Captain Donatus?’

Head bowed, Donatus felt, through the sick lurch of fear, that same call from the shadows that had first thrilled through his childish soul as he saw the tarmites boil. Worlds of forbidden experience swung into his imagination: these might be his to know, should he serve the Word Bearer well.

Captain Donatus looked up into a face that had gone beyond death into the infinite.

‘I…I have those qualities, my lord.’

Pelagus nodded. ‘Those who serve me well shall know their reward. The forces of the false one, the corpse of true belief, have tried and failed to retake this world from me. We have driven them back to the southern continent, but we must be wary, for they may try to retrieve the relics of the saint of the false god by other means. A patrol has gone missing east of the cursed storm. A message fragment reached me, nonetheless, along with information from… other sources.’

Donatus followed the Word Bearer’s gaze to a shape beside the altar: something that had once been a man, an officer of the Imperial Guard.

‘The servants of error have despatched a squad of Primaris Space Marines to find and bring from the cursed storm the relics of their saint, that they might still claim some sort of victory from their defeat on this planet. But in doing this, they play into my hands. I will allow them to rescue the relics, and to bring them out of the cursed storm. When the servants of the corpse god leave the storm’s protection, we will fall on them with all the forces we have and take the relics from them. So their defeat shall be complete, and yet more of the deluded shall have their eyes opened to the true faith.’

Donatus gave obeisance to the Word Bearer. ‘What would you have me do, my lord?’

‘Find them, follow them, harass them. Take as many of the Unshackled as you wish. Their deaths shall serve to exhaust the ammunition of the enemy.’

‘Should I retrieve the relics from the enemy, my lord?’ asked Donatus, his eyes still downcast.

In answer he heard a strange, inhuman noise, akin to the death rattle of a scrag-bear. Donatus looked up. Pelagus was laughing.

‘You, take the relics from a squad of Space Marines?’ The Word Bearer wiped his eyes. ‘I have not laughed so much in a thousand years. Captain Donatus, you will have been blessed beyond all measure by our Dark Gods should you survive these next few days – I for one do not expect to see you again. But if I should see you once more, ensure that your men have fulfilled the role assigned to them. They are cannon fodder. Give the enemy surfeit.’

Captain Donatus, keeping his face covered, bowed. ‘Yes, my lord.’

‘As for these Primaris Space Marines, I shall see to them myself.’ Pelagus stood and went to the altar that lay in the centre of the command tent before the statue of the Exalted One. The Traitor Space Marine looked up at the daemon primarch. His eyes bled.

Pelagus shook his head and closed his eyes.

‘Yet unworthy,’ he said softly, to himself. Then he turned back to where Captain Donatus knelt. ‘The enemy thinks these Primaris Marines, whom they bred millennia ago, shall turn back the tide that rolls over the galaxy. They think them superior.’ The Word Bearer smiled, and Donatus felt his skin crawl. ‘I have fought the Long War for ten thousand years and they think these new Adeptus Astartes superior to me. While they slept, I fought, and prayed, and made sacrifice. I thank the Dark Gods that they have sent these upstarts to me. We shall see who is the greater among us.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Donatus.

‘Take as many messengers as you require – do not trust to vox communication. Send word when you find them, and when they have retrieved the relics of their so-called saint. Then I shall come.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Now, go,’ said Pelagus.

Emerging from the command tent, Captain Donatus took a deep breath of the charged air. The Word Bearer had given him carte blanche. If he was going down, he would make sure a thousand men went down before him.

‘You.’ Donatus grabbed a passing orderly. ‘I want three companies of the Unshackled ready to go in an hour, with as many of the Devoted as can be gathered.’

‘Sir, I’m carrying out–’

‘And I’m giving you an order direct from the dominus himself. Who would you most like to answer to for your failure to carry out an order?’

The orderly saluted. ‘Sir.’

As the man ran off, shouting to other command staff to follow, Captain Donatus looked up at the shifting, rolling sky. Clouds were gathering.

Looked like a storm was coming in.

Chapter 4

Montalte tried to blink the rain from his eyes. He looked around, sight swimming in the downpour, trying to gauge where they were. Above, the sky blinked with the saint’s fire, the clouds pulsing a rhythm of light to accompany the pounding thunder. The path that he had been following, the one that he had taken many times before, now simply ended: it ran into a valley of knife grass. The Faithful wiped his eyes again, trying to see what lay on the far side of the valley. Was that the spire of the saint’s shrine cathedral? He could not see for the rain.

‘I said you were to take us straight to the saint’s relics.’

Montalte had not heard the sergeant come beside him. But amid this storm, it was all he could do to hear his words, let alone his approach.

‘I am trying, my sergeant,’ said Montalte. ‘The way… shifts.’

‘It shifts so much that this is the second time we’ve been here,’ said Augustin.

Montalte shook his head, rain flying from his scalp. ‘No, my sergeant. You do not understand. The ways to the saint are none of them straight – the pilgrim must follow where the path leads.’

‘It leads in circles, then,’ said the Fulminator. ‘Which means we are getting nowhere.’

‘Not nowhere, my sergeant. We are approaching – sideways.’

‘I prefer to march in a straight line,’ said Sergeant Augustin. He pointed ahead, across the valley. ‘That is where we are heading?’

‘Yes, my sergeant.’ Montalte blinked the rain from his eyes. ‘Do you see, across the valley? I think that is a spire, although it might be the trunk of a Bael tree that has received the saint’s blessing. We are close.’

‘Good,’ said Sergeant Augustin. ‘Let’s get closer.’

‘We cannot go that way,’ said Montalte as the Fulminator stepped towards the swaying knife grass.

‘Why not?’

In answer, Montalte picked up a wind-broken branch and threw it towards the knife grass. The knife grass, whipped to and fro by the gusts of the storm, sliced through the branch as if it were air, cutting it to kindling. ‘When there is no wind, it is possible to find safe passage through knife grass, but not during a storm.’

But the Fulminator shook his head. ‘It’s grass,’ he said. ‘We do not divert for grass.’

‘But it will cut through anything…’ began Montalte. His words died away as Sergeant Augustin reached out and dragged a great clump of the knife grass from the ground.

‘Not everything,’ said Augustin, dropping the dead leaves in front of Montalte. The Fulminator signalled to his squad. ‘Advance.’

‘B-but, my sergeant, the grass will cut me,’ said Montalte.

‘Go around,’ said Augustin. ‘Or go home. We can see our destination – you have done your duty.’

Montalte gestured, taking in the storm, which was redoubling in intensity all around them. ‘The saint is sending his fire. It is dangerous to be abroad – we should stop until it passes.’

Sergeant Augustin shook his head. ‘It is lightning. We are Fulminators. We know lightning. We walk the storm.’

Then he turned and led his men forwards. The squad of Fulminators, advancing in skirmish line, entered the knife grass. The blades, whipped up by the storm winds, lashed at their armour but did no more than score the ceramite. Behind them, at the edge of the grass, Montalte wrung his hands in a frenzy of uncertainty. Dashing the rain from his eyes, the Faithful looked for some other way around the valley, that he might meet the Space Marines on the other side. But the valley stretched, to left and right, to the limit of visibility. True, that limit was not far; it was possible the valley ended little more than a hundred yards away. But he could not see to tell. Montalte looked ahead. The Fulminators, heedless of the lashing strands, were crushing a path through the knife grass, using their knives as machetes. He might follow and, possibly, survive.

Montalte peered down the new path. Already, the sergeant and his squad were disappearing in among the thrashing blades of grass. If only the storm would die down a bit… But instead, it renewed its intensity. The lightning was near continuous, making over the night of Chevreuse into a brighter day. Montalte took a hesitant step forwards, then stopped. He remembered seeing another of the Faithful take cover in knife grass, only for the wind to start up. He remembered seeing the man crawl out, what was left of him, looking more like a butchered animal than a person.

Even with the rain lashing his skin, Montalte could feel the itch of the building charge: the land and the air and the storm were rubbing against each other, storing up the energy that would be released by the saint’s holy fire. He could see the crackle of discharge as the Fulminators pushed through the knife grass. He saw the earth ripple that told fire worms were being drawn up from their deep lairs underground. The gods were attempting to approach the sanctuary of the saint without first purifying themselves at the saint’s stations.

He had to warn them before it was too late.

Not stopping to think any further on it, Montalte ran after the gods.

The electric wind lashed the knife grass to and fro. Montalte ran in bursts, stopping when a longer clump slashed across the path the Space Marines had broken with their armour, then accelerating again. He had to catch them. The Faithful could feel the charge building in the air and collecting on the grass: each blade stood up, separate. He glanced down at his forearm. The hairs there were standing on end.

The holy fire was building.

Montalte ran on, not stopping the next time the knife grass whipped across the path but using the holy relic, the needler the crone had given him, to fend the blades aside. Still, an edge caught him, laying open the flesh across his shoulder, but the rain washed the blood: it would be a clean cut, Montalte thought as he ran on.

The path was climbing now. He might soon reach the end of the knife grass, which preferred the wetter ground of combes and dells, but the rising path meant that he slipped on the water sheeting down the slope. Each time he fell, Montalte felt the trampled knife grass cut into the hand or knee that came into contact with the ground. Just as well the rain was washing away the blood. Otherwise, every blood fly in the area would have descended upon him to drink its fill and lay its eggs. But the storm wind was too great for their stubby wings: they would be sheltering in the hollows of Bael trees, waiting for the storm to pass.

Coming to the top of a rise, Montalte stopped and, shielding his eyes from the rain, tried to locate the Fulminators. What he saw was something much more unexpected. The high spire that stood over the saint’s reliquary rose above the final belt of knife grass: it really had been the saint’s shrine cathedral that he had seen across the valley.

Then, ahead, he caught a glimpse of the blue of the armour of the gods. They had come to the edge of the knife grass. They were about to enter the Holy Precinct that surrounded the saint’s shrine – the area that none might enter save the pure, those who had endured the trials of the Stations of the Saint and shriven every sin from their souls.

But the gods had come directly to the shrine without passing any of the stations: they must indeed be gods, without stain or fault, for the saint to allow them to approach him this way.

Montalte ran to catch up with them. As he ran, he felt the storm winds die away and the rain slacken. The air felt charged, heavy. Electric.

He looked ahead and saw the first of the Fulminators, the point man in their skirmish patrol formation, poised to step into the Holy Precinct.

They were gods. Pure from sin.

A blue, armoured foot stepped upon the Holy Precinct.

And the fire came.

It crackled from the steeple top, it hissed from the air, it rose up from the ground itself.

The Fulminator was bathed in light.

The blue god stood there, transfixed, arms outstretched in exaltation, blessed as he had been blessed before on his home world.

But then the fire, rather than flickering to black, renewed itself, cracking from the mouths and eyes of the reliefs carved into the façade, striking down from the storm in multiple jagged spears.

The Fulminator arched rigid, his head thrown back. The fire filled him, then burst from his fingertips, from the mouth thrown wide in agony, from the eyes that saw as their last sight only light.

Then, darkness.

The light went out.

The god stood, dark and still, arms outstretched.

The god fell. He collapsed in upon himself in a heap of smoking, blackened armour.

By the time Montalte reached the Space Marine, Sergeant Augustin was kneeling beside him. The rest of the squad had taken firing positions, ready for any assault. But the air was still now, the storm passed.

Sergeant Augustin looked at Montalte. Kneeling, he was eye to eye with the Faithful. Augustin was holding the Space Marine’s helmet. ‘He’s not there,’ Augustin said softly. ‘Nothing’s there. His geneseed is lost.’

But Montalte shook his head. ‘No. This is the saint’s blessing.’

Sergeant Augustin stood up. He was still holding the smoking but empty helmet in his armoured fist. ‘What sort of blessing is this?’ he asked.

‘There is nothing left of your soldier.’ Montalte paused. ‘I…I confess, I did not know his name, so I cannot offer prayers for him, but we have seen this – those whom the saint wishes to destroy, the holy fire leaves as roasted meat, food for the blood flies and flesh worms. But those whom the saint blesses, he takes entire, leaving their clothes – or armour – behind. The holy fire consumes their flesh and frees their spirit.’

Sergeant Augustin shook his head. ‘It was lightning.’

‘A lightning that burns the body but leaves belongings behind?’

Sergeant Augustin shook his head again. ‘He is dead. There is no debate on that.’ The Fulminator began to turn. ‘At least we are at our goal…’

His voice trailed away.

Where before the Shrine Cathedral of Saint Blaise had risen before them, its arches, gargoyles and spires making mute stone counterpoint to the fractured land of the storm zone, now there was only a path – narrow but paved, weaving into a forest of Bael trees.

‘Where has it gone?’

‘None may come into the saint’s presence without first cleansing themselves of sin by passing through his stations,’ said Montalte. ‘I had thought, when I saw the shrine, that mayhap the saint made exception for you. But it is not so. You shall have to walk the Paths of Penance, my sergeant, before you come into the presence of the saint. Until then, he has veiled himself from you.’

Sergeant Augustin ignored the man standing beside him.

‘Readings?’ he called out, while checking his own auspex.

‘Negative.’

‘Nothing.’

‘It’s disappeared.’

‘It was there,’ Sergeant Augustin murmured. ‘I saw it.’

‘This is a sign of the saint’s favour,’ began Montalte, ‘he wishes that you come to…’

But before he could finish speaking, the Fulminator picked him up. By the neck.

Montalte dangled helplessly in front of the Space Marine, choking.

‘We were made, in the depths of time, to guard and protect such as you. But having woken from our long sleep, I sometimes wonder if you are worthy of our guard. You are such insignificant creatures. I could crush you with a finger.’

Montalte, unable to speak, stared goggle-eyed into the face of the Space Marine. But he did not look away. In truth, that was because he was slipping into the grey.

Augustin nodded. ‘You have some measure of courage at least.’

He let Montalte go and the Faithful dropped in a heap on the ground, clutching his throat.

‘You will take us to the shrine of your saint by the path he prefers. Now lead on.’

Still clutching his neck, Montalte got to his feet and started down the path into the trees, the sergeant following silently behind him, the remaining members of the squad fanning out in patrol formation. As Montalte was about to enter the Bael trees, Sergeant Augustin spoke quietly, as if to himself, but loud enough for Montalte to hear.

‘His name was Ambrosius.’

Chapter 5

Sergeant Augustin stopped Montalte. ‘We are not alone.’

He pointed back along the path. The Bael trees that clustered thickly around the path obscured the view for more than a few yards, but the Space Marine had picked up movement.

Montalte nodded. ‘The Faithful. They walk behind us.’

‘We do not need cover,’ said the Fulminator.

‘Nor do we think to provide it,’ said Montalte. ‘Not for such as you. They are here for the honour of following in the footsteps of the gods.’

‘We are not gods,’ said Sergeant Augustin.

‘To such as us, you are,’ said Montalte.

Augustin made no answer. His head snapped right, eyes searching, then locking. ‘I see one of those sprites.’

Montalte peered through the dangling thorn whips. ‘I… I do not see it.’

‘Ten o’clock,’ said Augustin. ‘One hundred yards.’

Montalte glanced at the Space Marine beside him. ‘I cannot see thirty yards through this wood.’

‘Angling away.’ Augustin started forwards again, Montalte scurrying to keep up.

As they went on, the Bael trees started thinning out. Sparks danced over the points of the thorn whips. Montalte pointed ahead.

‘The first station,’ he said.

Sergeant Augustin whispered into his vox. ‘Cornelius, flank left. Jansenius, right. Arnauld, rearguard.’

The three Fulminators silently took up their positions. Montalte marvelled at the way the blue-armoured giants disappeared into the shadows.

‘We are in the saint’s storm,’ said Montalte. ‘No evil can come to us here.’

‘You alerted the enemy to our presence when we arrived,’ said Sergeant Augustin. ‘They will be coming after us.’

‘They cannot enter here and live.’

‘The enemy does not care if they live – only that we die.’ Augustin looked ahead. ‘How much further?’

‘I do not know. Not for sure.’

The Fulminator looked down at the Faithful. ‘You are supposed to be our guide.’

‘The stations are not always where we last saw them,’ said Montalte.

‘You mean to say that chapels and shrines, made of stone and wood, move around?’

‘Yes. Like the saint’s shrine cathedral.’ Montalte paused. ‘Or it may be that we move, while they remain still.’

‘My orders are to find the saint’s relics and make them safe,’ said Sergeant Augustin. ‘How many stations must we pass through before arriving at the shrine?’

‘That depends on the pilgrim – there are as many stations as the pilgrim requires to make his soul pure enough to stand before the saint.’

Sergeant Augustin stopped. He looked down at the Faithful beside him. ‘How many stations did you have to pass through before you saw the saint?’

‘Oh, I know I am not worthy to see the saint – I have never entered the sanctuary of his shrine. But you are a god. The saint will welcome you.’

The Fulminator looked ahead. ‘The first station?’

‘Yes,’ said Montalte. ‘Let us enter.’

The first station was a simple chapel. The Faithful pushed open the door, which was fashioned from the dense, heavy wood of the Bael tree, but Sergeant Augustin’s gloved hand stopped him entering.

Bolter raised, the Fulminator scanned the dark interior. The door’s opening brought to Montalte the familiar smells of incense and candle wax: amid the dangers of Chevreuse, the stations were sanctuaries for the natives of the saint’s world, although they might be fatal to the unworthy pilgrim. But these were gods, not pilgrims, Montalte thought.

Scan complete, Sergeant Augustin made his way into the chapel, Montalte following. The Fulminator kept his bolter ready. The candlelight flickered upon the dark metal.

The chapel was empty, save for them, but to Montalte it felt heavy with the saint’s presence. He was there, with them.

‘Clear.’ Sergeant Augustin signalled his squad, in their positions outside the chapel.

‘The saint would see the other gods too,’ said Montalte.

The Fulminator looked at the Faithful. ‘You are sure of this?’

‘Y-yes,’ said Montalte, suddenly unsure under Augustin’s gaze.

‘Cornelius, to me. Jansenius, Arnauld, remain in position.’ Order given, Augustin glanced round the shrine. ‘What is that?’ He pointed to the ædicule in the centre of the chapel.

‘That was built before the chapel itself, to protect the saint’s anchorhold, the cell where he took refuge from the forces of the Archenemy while he prepared himself spiritually for the struggle that lay ahead.’

Augustin nodded. ‘I would see this.’ He made his way to the ædicule and peered in through its iron-barred gate. ‘It is a hole in the ground.’

‘A cave,’ said Montalte. ‘The cave from which Saint Blaise emerged with his sight restored to defeat the Archenemy. He was blind before.’

‘Open it for me.’ Augustin pointed at the gate.

‘I…I do not have the key.’

The Fulminator grasped the iron. There was no discharge when he touched the metal, Montalte saw. But as Augustin went to pull the gate, the lock clicked open.

The Fulminator let go of the iron. The gate swung open with no touch from the sergeant.

Sergeant Augustin looked at Montalte.

‘I think the saint wants you to enter,’ said the Faithful.

The Fulminator, ducking his head, went through the gate and stood before the entrance to the dark cave. Montalte followed behind.

Augustin entered the cave.

He stopped, turned and looked back at the Faithful.

Fire suddenly sheathed Augustin. The saint’s holy fire, which illuminated only that which it touched. Augustin’s eyes were aflame. They stared from the cave, looking at something which Montalte could not see.

One of Augustin’s men pushed past Montalte as he made to enter the cave.

‘Stop!’

Never would Montalte have thought to order one of the gods, but his voice was filled with holy ardour for the saint.

Brother Cornelius turned his death mask on Montalte. ‘What have you done to him?’

‘The saint purifies Sergeant Augustin. If you touch him, he will die.’

The other Fulminators, Jansenius and Arnauld, stood with their comrade, staring at their sergeant.

Augustin began to scream, a guttural roar welling up from chthonian depths.

The Fulminators made to enter the cave.

The fire died.

Sergeant Augustin stood staring at them. The fire had left his body, but there were flames still in his eyes.

‘Sergeant?’

Sergeant Augustin took a step forwards. Tongues of flame flickered where his eyes had been.

Without a word, the three Fulminators raised their bolters and trained them on their sergeant.

Augustin closed his eyes.

The Space Marines stood tense, poised, ready to fire.

Augustin opened his eyes. The flames were now gone. His gaze returned from the far-off place to which it had been directed.

‘Sergeant?’

‘I saw a light, blinking through the storm, all but extinguished. We need to hurry.’

Augustin’s gaze refocused. He saw his squad, their bolters trained upon him. But he paid that no heed, stepping forwards, his old, brisk air of command resumed.

‘Cornelius, take point. Jansenius, right flank, Arnauld, left flank.’

It was the normality of the orders that did it. Montalte heard it in Augustin’s voice, and so did the Fulminators: Sergeant Augustin was not tainted. The three Fulminators lowered their bolters and set to their positions.

But as Cornelius went to leave the chapel, he stopped, auspex flaring. ‘Hostiles. Six o’clock. Closing. Multiple contacts.’

‘Exit and cover.’ Augustin drew his bolter, tagged Jansenius to follow with Arnauld as rearguard, then looked to Montalte. ‘Stay close.’

From outside, through the thick walls of the chapel, Montalte heard the percussive clap of bolter rounds and the sizzling fizz of las-fire. Under the kinetic noise, he heard sounds produced by throats that had once been human but were no longer: howls and screams, ululations and perorations, and the chanting of the ear-bleeding litanies of the Defilers. He would have stopped his hearing, if he could. But instead, he had to follow Augustin as the Fulminator burst through the chapel door then broke left, towards where Cornelius was standing: a pillar of blue, spitting fire and destruction at the onrushing horde.

For that was what it was. A once-human tide, raving and possessed, their bodies mutilated in self-sacrifice to the Dark Gods, any last trace of humanity washed away by the foul rites through which they had given themselves over to heretical worship. The Archenemy had opened the floodgates that held back the damned. By their sheer numbers, by the overwhelming sacrifice of lives, he aimed to force his way into the storm zone and claim the saint for himself at last.

The tidal wave of cultists bore the marks of the storm zone, although it was difficult to tell where wounds ended and self-mutilation began. As they came pouring forwards, the Fulminators calmly took their combat stances and began volley fire. Judging firing angles with preternatural speed, the four Space Marines’ combined fire began to scythe through the advancing horde, so that the following waves began stumbling and falling over the growing bank of their own dead.

‘Chaos forces.’ Montalte heard the message come through on Augustin’s vox.

‘Where away?’

‘Five o’clock. Multiple contacts. Heavy weapon signatures.’

‘Arnauld, take rearguard. Jansenius, break contact. Head…’ Augustin paused, and Montalte saw him trying to get a reading on his auspex.

The Faithful pointed. The path lay beyond the chapel. ‘Follow me.’

‘Further contacts. Nine o’clock… Possible friendlies.’

‘The Faithful.’ Montalte pointed again. Above and before their advance were the fire dogs, the rolling sprites of lightning. ‘The Faithful can stop the Defilers.’

‘You can control those things?’ Augustin asked.

‘By the saint’s grace,’ said Montalte.

As he spoke, the first of the fire dogs rolled over the ebbing tide of cultists, leaving a trail of sweetly smelling burnt flesh behind it. The remaining sprites angled away, towards the oncoming Defilers.

‘The enemy must not follow us,’ Augustin said.

‘I will tell the Faithful,’ said Montalte.

‘Be quick.’

The Fulminator began covering fire. Montalte, running where there was cover and crawling where there wasn’t, made his way across the fire zone to where the Faithful were taking up positions in a welter of lightning pits. He slid into the first he found, pitching up next to one of the Faithful, who went to skewer him with his knife. Montalte grabbed the man’s blade arm, twisted it back around him and pulled the man close and immobile.

‘I am Faithful. Montalte. Take word to the crone – stop them if you can, delay them if you can’t.’ Montalte spun the man round again, looked him in the face. ‘Tell others as you go so that one, at least, reaches her. Now, go.’

Montalte watched the man crawl to the next lightning pit, the snarling fizz of the enemy’s lasguns tracing spark trails through the air above their heads. He waited until he saw three further men crawl from the pit, each charged with carrying the message to the crone, before Montalte made his own way back to where Sergeant Augustin maintained his firing position, in the cover of an outcrop of fused rock – the outcome of three successive lightning strikes at the same point.

Even as Montalte reached the Fulminator, the Faithful renewed their assault, sending fresh waves of fire dogs rolling towards the positions the Defilers were trying to take up. The tide of cultists had ebbed. They had wished to sacrifice themselves for their Dark Gods: their desire has been fulfilled.

‘This way,’ said Montalte.

Augustin pointed for him to go first and signalled Cornelius, Jansenius and Arnauld to withdraw while he laid down a final barrage of covering fire. Then the sergeant followed.

Behind them, the chapel shook, hit by multiple shells from the Defiler mortars, but still stood.

Chapter 6

‘You are greatly blessed, my sergeant.’

Augustin looked down at the little man marching beside him. ‘In what way?’

‘Few have seen the saint and lived to tell of it – his purity is such that few can survive the sight of him.’

‘I did not see him,’ said Sergeant Augustin. ‘I said what I saw – a light, guttering, amid a gathering storm.’

‘You… you are sure?’

‘Yes. What does it matter?’

‘If the saint had vouchsafed you a vision of himself, then it would be possible to bring you forthwith to his shrine and presence, and the path would be taking us there directly. But now I fear that you shall require further purification. We march to the next station.’

‘How far?’

‘That depends upon the pilgrim.’

Sergeant Augustin permitted himself a smile. ‘I thought you would say that.’

‘Am I that predictable?’

‘When speaking of our destination, yes. It is always further than hope would put it.’

‘But not so far as despair.’

‘No. I am a sergeant of the Fulminators. Even in death, there is no despair, for the Emperor is with us.’

Montalte pointed ahead. ‘Our hope is justified. There lies the station. It has not been far.’

‘A night’s march.’

‘Near indeed.’

‘From our auspex readings outside, the storm zone is barely a day’s march across. We have been travelling now for two.’

Montalte’s voice took on the sing-song quality of recitation. ‘The way to the saint goes by many byways.’

Sergeant Augustin voxed Cornelius and Jansenius to take up position outside the next station while he approached with Montalte, and Arnauld stood rearguard.

Where the first station had seemed but a humble forest chapel, the second station was near as large as a basilica of the Ecclesiarchy, with a vaulting roof and great glassaic windows rising above them. The holy doors stood open.

Augustin looked to Cornelius. ‘Clear?’

‘Unsure. Auspex readings inconclusive.’

‘Stand ready.’

Bolter ready, Sergeant Augustin stood next to the holy door with Montalte behind, then entered the basilica, fast.

It seemed even bigger within, a vast, silent, empty space, arched over with stone that took the shape of the ribs of some huge prehistoric creature. The altar stood at the end of the nave, its sober stone lit by the rows of candles that stood to either side of it.

Beside the altar was a jury-rigged comms base, unmanned but powered. As the Space Marine and the Faithful approached, the screen flickered into grainy life, shifted, then settled into the shape of a Fulminator.

‘Sergeant Augustin.’

‘Captain Cavallus.’

‘Report, sergeant.’

‘Effected contact with local agent. En route to the shrine of Saint Blaise.’

‘ETA?’

Montalte saw the sergeant’s eyes flicker towards him, but before he could speak, Augustin answered.

‘Unclear, but less than two days.’

‘The mission has failed, sergeant.’

‘Captain?’

‘The mission is terminated. Return to base.’

‘Captain.’

Sergeant Augustin raised his bolter. The first round shattered the screen. The Fulminator captain’s face dissolved into fragments. The second silenced him completely.

Behind the screen, the candles banked around the altar ignited and flared to flickering light.

Montalte turned to Sergeant Augustin. ‘How did you know?’

‘The mission has not failed.’ Sergeant Augustin holstered his bolter. ‘It will not fail.’ The Space Marine looked down at Montalte. ‘How many more?’

‘It depends…’ Montalte began.

Sergeant Augustin held up his finger. ‘How you answer this question shall determine how much of you will leave this building. I have little tolerance for dissembling.’

‘As I was about to say, I think there will be only one more – the Station of Sight. There, the pilgrim must learn how to see by the light of the Emperor, by the holy radiance of His eternal effulgence. For so does the saint see – all his vision is by virtue of the light the Emperor shines into the darkness.’

‘I will keep my eyes open, then.’

‘It is by the inner eye that one sees the light of the Emperor.’

Sergeant Augustin nodded. ‘I shall keep that eye open too.’

Chapter 7

‘Captain Donatus.’

The Unshackled Guardsman saluted. Donatus noted, in passing, the tattoos on the palm of the man’s hand: an offering to the man’s particular god. They were distracting: the dominus was dedicated to Chaos Undivided, not to any sect sworn to one or other of the Dark Gods. Having men promise themselves to one of the quaternity was an invitation to division and… chaos. Donatus smiled to himself. Not much he could do about that, then.

Donatus had arrived with the last company of the Unshackled. The journey through the storm zone had been even worse than he had anticipated: near fifty per cent casualties, and most of them simply vanished. It was only the waves of cultists that he had sent before the trained troops that had allowed them to come so far. Pelagus had told him to feed the enemy’s cannons. He had fed their cannons, their cursed Bael trees, the knife grass, the fire worms and sprites, the lightning and the storm – he had fed them well, but there had only been just enough. He had already sent runners back for reinforcements, the messengers disappearing into the storm. One at least ought to get through.

‘Report,’ said Donatus to the Guardsman.

‘We have taken the enemy position, sir, as well as some captives. The rest of the enemy have withdrawn.’

‘Take me to the captives.’

The trooper led Donatus through the carnage of the battlefield. Corpses, most of them cultists, lay in the stark, exposed postures of death. Donatus had seen many battlefields in his time. There was no dignity in this sort of dying. But what was unique to Chevreuse was the way the corpses sparked and sputtered, charges arcing from fingertip and toe to the ground. Some of the bodies had begun to burn with the corpse flame that consumed the flesh but left the clothing all but untouched. This Donatus had seen nowhere save on Chevreuse. He had heard reports of people, very rarely, being consumed by a blue fire that would not be put out, and which left the surroundings untouched. He had always thought that these reports, if true, told the tale of an unwonted eruption from the warp. But here on Chevreuse, the dead burned frequently, and the living sometimes burned too.

On his arrival on Chevreuse, one of the first things he had seen was a Guardsman screaming as a blue flame issued from his belly, begging his comrades to put the fire out, only for his screaming to be cut off when one of those comrades put a las-round through the back of his head.

The trooper had looked round to see Donatus staring.

‘No saving them when they get the blue belly fire,’ the trooper had explained.

Donatus strode on, following the Guardsman towards the chapel. Around him, the remaining men of the three companies of the Unshackled that he had brought with him were setting up defensive positions, digging out trenches and surreptitiously rifling the bodies of the dead. No different from what the soldiers of his old Imperial unit – 81st Regiment of the Narsine Yeomanry – used to do. Sometimes Donatus thought there really weren’t that many differences between the soldiers of either side in what Pelagus called the Long War; not between the footsloggers that made up the weary base of every army. But then he saw some men crucifying a captive in a particularly imaginative manner, while others, carefully and with great concentration, were self-mutilating in honour and thanks for the victory given to them by the Dark Gods.

No, the armies really were different. Donatus, arriving at the small group of surviving prisoners, smiled. These men and women would shortly learn just how different.

‘Now, you don’t really want me to have to go over all this again, do you?’

Donatus was enjoying himself. It was duty, but it was fun too. That was one of the many things that dark vision had promised him: the pleasure of destruction. No destruction was sweeter than the breaking of a man’s soul.

The man he was currently breaking was sitting before him – he likely would have found it too difficult to stand – on the ground in front of the little chapel. The chapel itself was pitted with the marks of las-rounds and plasma, but it had stood the tumult of battle remarkably soundly. What was even more remarkable was that the enemy had not used it as a final redoubt as his men closed in around them. They had fought and died outside it, but they had not retreated inside it to fire from within.

Unfortunately, so far he had been unable to find out quite what they had been protecting. Every man he had sent in to scout the chapel had barely made it past the door before collapsing and, usually, dying. One or two, whose comrades had been particularly quick, had survived through being hauled out again fast. But most were dead, with not a mark upon them. Their bodies had simply… stopped. As if their every biological function had simultaneously ceased.

Donatus suspected that there was some sort of field at the entrance to the chapel that disrupted all the electrical systems that maintained the body’s functioning, but auspex readings showed nothing. Mind, in this storm zone, they showed little of anything.

‘As I understand it,’ Donatus said to the man in front of him, ‘in order to find the next station on our way to your saint, we have to enter this chapel and complete whatever rituals your false and foolish religion requires. Seeing as how we deny your corpse god, none of my men can complete those rituals. So, I need one of you to do them for me. You have seen what I have done to the others. Do this thing for me, this single small thing, and I will give you the gift of a swift and easy death – or embrace you as one of my own men, with all the blessings that the true gods may bestow. The choice seems easy to me.’

The Faithful, a man of middle years, who had known Chevreuse before the sky split wide, looked up at Donatus. One of his eyes was puffed shut from the blow that had rendered him unconscious, allowing the Unshackled to take him prisoner.

‘Well?’

The Faithful mumbled something.

Donatus nodded. The man standing behind the Faithful applied pressure to a nerve point. Nothing too much: Donatus wanted him to be able to walk.

The Faithful went rigid, his face a rictus, with no sound emerging from his mouth for so long as the pressure was applied. Then, pressure released, he collapsed back into himself in the manner of a spider falling, wrapping its legs around itself as shield against the coming impact.

‘Well?’ Donatus repeated.

The Faithful looked up again. His tongue flicked out to wet his lips.

Donatus permitted himself an inward smile. The man was breaking. He had all the signs.

‘Yes,’ the man whispered. He was staring into the dirt, as all men did when they knew they were broken. ‘Yes, I will lead you into the chapel.’

But then the Faithful looked up at Donatus with his one good eye, and it was smiling with the mockery that had always taunted Donatus, ever since he had first harkened to the dark call – the mocking uncertainty of some part of his own soul that it was he who had been tricked, who had swallowed the lies and made them his own; he, not all the Imperial drones and ants that he had disdained, even from boyhood, labouring away for scant reward.

‘I will lead you into the chapel,’ the Faithful repeated, his voice growing stronger with each syllable, ‘and bring you before the saint, and he will see you, and he will laugh – he will laugh at your pride and your vanity, and then he will destroy you.’

Donatus stared down at the man. His throat worked. Anger and fear and something like uncertainty filled him. From the corner of his eye, he saw his men, the interrogators, looking sidelong at him, waiting for his answer.

Donatus kicked the man to the ground.

‘Where is…’

Kick.

‘…your saint…’

Kick.

‘…now?’

Kick.

The Faithful was still conscious somehow, although little recognisable remained of his face.

Donatus stopped his frenzied assault, tried to calm his breathing. ‘I’ve got this far despite everything your saint’s thrown at me. He’s not going to stop me now.’

Donatus looked to his interrogators.

‘Make it slow.’

As the men went to work on what was left of the Faithful, Donatus went up to the chapel door, calling his section leaders with him. Standing outside, he looked into the dimly lit interior of the chapel. In spite of everything, the candles inside were still burning, filling the simple interior with flickering light.

‘Have the patrols come back? Any sign of which way they went?’

The section leaders looked to each other: they were trying, silently, to decide who would be the one to deliver unwelcome news.

Donatus decided for them. ‘Arius, report.’

Arius coughed and shifted uneasily, eyes glancing sideways only to see the other section leaders studiedly ignoring him. He would have to deliver the bad news.

‘Sir, we sent out the patrols, as you ordered, but…’

‘But what?’

‘But they can’t seem to get anywhere. Every path they take, it just brings them back here again. It’s like we’re in some kind of web.’

Donatus looked to the other section leaders. ‘You confirm this?’

They each nodded or spoke their agreement.

‘It’s not a web,’ said Donatus. ‘We’re in a recursive loop. We could keep going forever and we would only ever come back to our starting point.’ The captain of the Unshackled forces looked at the chapel, standing quiet and unassuming at the centre of the grove. ‘The only way out of a loop is through its centre.’ Donatus looked back to his section leaders. ‘Check among the remaining cultists, and your men. We need to find natives of this planet. One of them might be able to get into the chapel without dying, complete the ritual and open the loop for the rest of us.’ He looked round them. ‘Find me someone. We’re going to keep sending men in until one completes the ritual or we choke this saint with our dead.’

Chapter 8

‘Wait.’ Montalte held his hand up.

The word was a whisper. But Augustin heard it, and signalled his men, spread to either side of the path, to stop.

They were making their way through a fractured landscape of folded ridges and combes of Bael trees. The pilgrim path wound over the ridges and between the trees. Sometimes a thorn whip lashed out at them as they passed, but the attempts were futile, for the thorns made no impression on the armour of the Fulminators, while the whips shied away from Montalte and his ichor-coated skin.

Montalte indicated ahead. The pilgrim path looped around an outcrop of fire-fused rock, the flow marks on the red haematite the mark of the holy fire which had once turned the rock to liquid by the energy of its discharge. But that was not what Montalte had spotted. There, vectoring in towards the pilgrim path, towards where a makeshift shrine to one of Saint Blaise’s companions stood by the way, was a ripple, a phase shift in the solidity of the very rock of Chevreuse. To anyone who had not been born and raised on the saint’s planet, it would have appeared as no more than the motion of a zephyr over the ground. But Montalte knew it for what it was.

‘Fire worm.’

‘We have no time to stop,’ said Sergeant Augustin.

‘I know,’ said Montalte. ‘Let me go first. If I should burn, my sergeant, continue on this path – it will surely take you to the next station, which I think shall be, for you, the final one.’

The Fulminator made to come with Montalte but the Faithful held up his hand.

‘Please. I know these things, my sergeant.’

‘We will not delay,’ said Augustin.

‘Neither shall I,’ said the Faithful.

Montalte scurried down the path. In the roiling sky, lightning forked, hidden for the moment in the storm, but announcing its ever-presence. In response, the land-shift jerked towards the path. The fire worm could sense the approaching footsteps.

Montalte made no effort to lighten his stride, but stepped heavily, increasing his pace to a jog and then, finally, a flat-out run, as the fire worm jagged towards him and he approached the outcrop of fire-fused haematite.

The fire worm broke the surface in its killing lunge. To the eye, it was a mouth of flame; to the ear it was the hiss of superheated steel plunged into water; to the skin, it was the crawling crackle of living electrical charge all over the body.

The Faithful leapt for the rock outcrop, fingers scrabbling desperately to find purchase in its fused surface, pulling himself up and on to it. The fire worm, sensing its prey leap past, jerked round and struck towards Montalte. But the Faithful had managed to pull himself up higher on the haematite. The fire worm missed its strike, hitting the rock instead, breaking against it with a splash like ocean waves meeting a cliff face. The electric flames that made up the fire worm’s body dissolved into the haematite, the rock absorbing the charge and carrying it down, down, down into the supercharged depths of Chevreuse.

Montalte opened his eyes. He was looking at the sky, lying on his back on the pilgrim path. He saw his hands. The fingers were burnt. The sudden discharge of the fire worm into the rock outcrop had superheated the haematite so quickly that he had not been able to jump off before his hands were scorched.

The sky went blue. Sergeant Augustin was standing above him. The Fulminator held out an armoured hand to help Montalte up. The Faithful shook his head, indicating the burned skin.

Augustin reached down and picked Montalte up by the arm. Despite the power armour that covered it, his hand was gentle.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

Montalte staggered a little. The Fulminator steadied him.

‘Not much further,’ said the Faithful.

‘Not much further indeed,’ said Augustin. He pointed ahead. Rising over the next ridge was a veritable forest of watchtowers and auspex rigs. It could be nothing less than a major military compound. The Fulminator looked to the Faithful beside him. ‘That was on the schematics we studied before the mission – the base from which the saint conducted his campaign. But there was nothing on this scale.’

The Faithful looked up at the Fulminator. ‘There are many things on Chevreuse that remain unknown to those who have not earned the saint’s blessing.’

They crested the rise and looked down into the hollow that sheltered and partly hid the compound. It was built to the standard Guard pattern, with twin towers guarding the gates to the compound and crossing avenues laid out in a cruciform pattern. Sergeant Augustin and Montalte made their way down to the twin watchtowers guarding the entrance to the compound. As they approached, Augustin voxed to Arnauld and Jansenius, who had taken up flank positions.

‘Can you see where the path goes after this?’

Their replies, crackling and broken though they were, told that the path went no further.

The Fulminator looked down at Montalte. ‘Is this the end of the path?’

‘The path only appears to the pilgrim once the station has been visited. But I do not think we have much further to go, my sergeant.’

‘Good.’

The Fulminator and the Faithful stopped at the compound’s gates. They were closed. Sergeant Augustin pushed at the gates. They did not stir. He pushed harder, but still the gates did not shift, nor did they even settle against the posts: the gates seemed not to even register that a Space Marine was beginning to exert something like his full strength upon them.

Sergeant Augustin looked down at Montalte beside him. ‘What’s this?’

‘I do not know,’ said the Faithful. ‘I… when I came here before, the gates were open.’

The Fulminator voxed his squad. ‘Readings?’

‘Multiple fixed weapon sites in the compound, all unmanned.’

‘They are relics,’ said Montalte. ‘Weapons from the first war to liberate Chevreuse.’

Sergeant Augustin drew his bolter and levelled it at the gates. But then he paused. The Fulminator took a step back, his gaze scanning over gate and towers and perimeter wall.

‘This… this is not what it seems…’ Sergeant Augustin looked to Montalte. ‘What was the passcode, when the saint made this his base?’

‘It was the first line from the Canticle of Deliverance, that the Enemy might never utter. “They walked amid flames…”’

The Fulminator’s deep voice continued the canticle. ‘They stood in the midst of the fire and prayed aloud.’

As he spoke, the gates began to swing open. But in their opening, they changed, and the change spread outwards, flowing over the compound, turning it from a functional military compound to a soaring cathedral.

Montalte looked up at the Space Marine beside him. The Fulminator’s gaze was narrowed and tight, scanning left to right. Augustin was making a visual search for traps.

‘This is the Station of Sight,’ said Montalte.

‘So I see,’ said Augustin. But he did not holster his bolter.

In front of them now stood the façade of a metropolitan cathedral, laid out in the standard Ecclesiarchy cruciform pattern, with a long nave oriented east to west and a shorter transept. The sobriety and restraint of its exterior decoration matched the finest examples of Imperial Gothic architecture. Ranks of stylised hierophants stood in ascending arches over the holy door, with choruses of holy martyrs and warrior saints carved into the façade, and the arms of the faithful primarchs were arrayed on either side of a relief of the God-Emperor, raised from the tympanum.

The two spires of the cathedral which rose from either side of the façade, and which had appeared as watchtowers, and the great single spike, which before had seemed to be a comms tower, towered above the junction of nave and transept, rising into the swirling electric clouds of the storm zone, spitting intermittent fire down the long conductors that ran to the ground all around the great cathedral.

‘Let’s go.’ The Fulminator stooped through the holy door, with Montalte beside him.

The inside of the cathedral was as impressive as its exterior. The nave stretched to the blue distance, appearing almost impossibly long through the sublime art of the architect, who had staggered the high gothic vaulting of the ceiling to create a perspective that lengthened even further the already long nave. The narthex, where they were standing, was bathed in the multicoloured light flooding through the rose window in the façade, the window itself illustrating events in the life of the saint: his enlistment, the debacle at Canna where three Imperial regiments were destroyed, his blinding and his wandering in the wilderness, the retreat to the cave, the Emperor’s commission, the call to hope and fresh arms, the gathering, the first battle, the summoning of the crusade, and the long struggle to free the segmentum of the Archenemy – all was recorded in that window.

The Fulminator looked down at the shadow he was casting on the stone floor. ‘Where is the light coming from?’ he asked Montalte.

The Faithful looked up at Augustin. ‘Light always shines upon the saint.’

Aisles marched up the cathedral, running parallel to the nave, their limits marked by the marching rows of porphyry pillars that ran to the quire, the sanctuary and the apse. As soon as they had passed through the holy door, the skin-tingling effect of the storm zone had stopped. Within the cathedral, the air was still and cool, with only the underlying smell of incense, and something…

‘There is somebody here,’ said Sergeant Augustin.

‘The saint is here,’ said Montalte.

But the Fulminator raised his bolter, scanning the empty aisles while his auspex tracked through transept, quire and sanctuary. ‘Something is here,’ he said. ‘I do not know if it is your saint.’

‘No dangerous creature may enter here,’ said Montalte. ‘This is the sanctuary of Saint Blaise.’

Sergeant Augustin looked down at the Faithful.

‘Ah. No evil creature may enter here,’ said Montalte.

The sound of Augustin’s bolter being locked and loaded echoed through the silence of the cathedral.

With the Faithful following, Sergeant Augustin began to make his way up the cathedral. The light shining in from the nave windows illuminated their way. The Fulminator held up his hand. Montalte stopped beside him.

‘There is light shining in through the windows on both aisles,’ said Augustin.

‘Yes,’ said Montalte. ‘So there is.’

‘Chevreuse has a single sun,’ said the sergeant.

‘I believe so,’ said Montalte.

The Fulminator nodded. ‘This is the final test.’

‘I cannot say,’ said Montalte.

Sergeant Augustin pointed ahead, to the sanctuary. ‘There is no tabernacle.’ He scanned the apse. ‘Nor an ambry.’ He looked back to Montalte. ‘The only metropolitan cathedrals that do not have a tabernacle or ambry are shrine reliquaries.’ The Fulminator looked around at the great building that shrouded them in silence and mystery. ‘This is not a cathedral to Saint Blaise – this is his shrine.’

As the Adeptus Astartes warrior spoke, the light… shifted. Now, through the ring of windows underneath the central dome from which the high spire rose, light speared down from all sides, as if a thousand suns shone in the sky above. Like fingers all pointing to the same spot, the spears of light converged upon the central point of the cathedral, where nave and transept crossed below the dome.

The sergeant looked up, his face lit by the effulgence. His bolter dropped to his side, all but forgotten in his awe. ‘The Emperor’s light,’ he whispered.

And in that light, they saw what had before been concealed from them: the tomb shrine of Saint Blaise.

It stood at the centre of the cathedral beneath four fluted pillars of a baldachin, with the high altar in the apse beyond. Beneath the baldachin’s canopy was an effigy of Saint Blaise, lying in his final repose, with his hands crossed over his breast, and his weapons – the bolter and sword – lying at his feet. Beneath the effigy, in a casket with walls of crystal glass, was the saint himself. His head was turned slightly towards the altar, so that from where they stood they could see only part of his profile. The skin was yellowed with age yet whole and entire, the eyes closed, the lips slightly drawn back. Corruption had not touched the saint.

Sergeant Augustin bowed his head. Montalte fell to his knees and made the sign of the aquila on his breast. Neither knew how long they remained kneeling there, for the moment was beyond any sense of passing time.

But, finally, they returned to themselves.

The Faithful turned a shining face towards the Fulminator.

‘Now I may die content, for I have looked upon the face of the saint.’

Chapter 9

‘Contacts. Multiple, incoming.’

The vox message crackled in the silence, as brutal and demanding of attention as a cultist with a knife.

The Fulminator was up off his knees faster than Montalte could follow.

‘Bearing?’

‘Everywhere.’

‘Establish perimeter. Hold them there.’

Sergeant Augustin looked down at the man tugging at his elbow.

‘They’re us,’ said Montalte. ‘The Faithful.’

‘You are sure?’

‘Yes,’ said Montalte. ‘They will all have felt what I did – the saint is calling us all to his defence.’

Augustin nodded. ‘May be friendlies,’ he voxed. ‘Make positive identification before opening fire. On my way.’

But before the sergeant could get to the holy door at the end of the nave, it was pushed inwards. Standing outside, silhouetted by the impossible light, was a small, slight figure.

Augustin raised his bolter.

The figure hobbled forwards, into the shrine of Saint Blaise, a stick aiding its progress, the hard wood tapping out its advance on the hard stone floor. Behind her, as unnoticed as a shadow, another followed. As it entered, the light that shone within the shrine began to illumine the figures: an old woman, bent and twisted with age, infirmity and the wounds of many battles, with a girl, untouched by age, beside her. The crone’s scalp was bald and streaked with the ichor of the Bael tree; tiger stripes of the same ichor ran down her wrinkled cheeks on to her shoulders and along her arms, to fingers that had been reduced to claws.

The Fulminator levelled the bolter. ‘Stop.’

Montalte made to speak but the old woman raised her hand for his silence.

‘Think you I am an emissary of the dark powers, son of Guilliman?’ The voice was clear and high, untouched by time, and it filled the vaults of the shrine.

‘Do not move.’ Sergeant Augustin whispered into his vox. ‘Contact. Interior.’

Standing next to the Fulminator, Montalte heard the replies coming through on his earpiece.

‘No contact exterior. Standing off.’

‘What are you?’ The Fulminator’s question rang down the nave.

The old woman struggled further upright, so that her bent head might look to the Space Marine standing before her.

‘Look into my eyes, sergeant, and tell what you see.’

Montalte, standing beside the Fulminator, saw the Space Marine’s eyes narrow. In that instant he was reminded of stories his father had told him, back in the days before the sky split, of creatures of the air that hunted from high above, searching the land below with eyes that could switch from seeing all the way to the horizon to suddenly focusing in on potential prey with the magnification of a telescope.

Suddenly, Montalte saw Augustin’s eyes widen in surprise.

‘Yes. You see truly, sergeant,’ said the old woman, in the high, clear voice of the child. ‘No warp spawn stands before you, but a Sister of Silence. Not all who were called home could return.’

Sergeant Augustin lowered the bolter and made the sign of the aquila on his armoured chest.

‘Well met, Sister.’

‘You have answered the saint’s call.’

‘So it may appear, but my mission comes from my superiors.’ Sergeant Augustin spoke into his vox-bead. ‘Cornelius and Jansenius, to me. Arnauld, remain on station.’ The Fulminator looked to the crone. ‘The contacts are your people?’

‘Yes,’ said the crone, her stick tapping out her approach as she hobbled towards the saint’s reliquary. ‘I have called them here that they might aid you in the defence of the saint from the Archenemy.’

The blue armour of another Fulminator appeared in the holy door, followed quickly by another. Cornelius, then Jansenius, made their way swiftly and silently down the nave to where the sergeant stood by the side of the reliquary, passing the crone and her voice on the way.

‘Our orders,’ said Sergeant Augustin, ‘are to remove the relics of Saint Blaise from the reliquary and to take them to an exfiltration point outside the storm zone from where they will be brought to safety.’ He motioned to the two Fulminators. ‘Remove the saint from the shrine, with all due respect, but do it fast. The enemy will not be long.’

‘No!’ The crone’s voice rang through the shrine. ‘This… this is not what you are here to do.’ The crone hobbled forwards, then stopped. ‘I… such as I cannot approach the saint’s shrine, but you must not do this thing.’

But even as she spoke, the two Fulminators had already removed the casket from beneath the baldachin and were carrying it over to Sergeant Augustin.

‘You do not know what you are doing,’ the crone’s voice wailed, cut through by despair. And even as she spoke, there came a change.

Montalte felt it. The two Fulminators carrying the relics of Saint Blaise felt it. Sergeant Augustin felt it.

There was silence.

The storm, the ever-present storm that held and guarded the saint’s relics, had been such a backdrop to those who lived within the storm zone that the crack of lightning, the rumble of thunder and the constant, popping crackle of electric discharges had become the ambience of their existence, no more remarked upon than a fish noticing that water is wet.

‘Brother-sergeant.’ Arnauld’s voice came through Augustin’s vox, and it spoke clearly, without the constant hiss and break-ups that had characterised it throughout the mission. ‘The storm has gone.’

‘What have you done?’ cried the crone.

‘What I have been ordered to do,’ said Sergeant Augustin. ‘Arnauld, confirm, the storm has broken?’

‘Confirmed. Multiple contacts approaching – friendlies.’

‘We will see about that. Arnauld, priority channel – vox for exfiltration vehicle to these coordinates.’ The Fulminator looked down at the crone. The old woman was poking him with her stick.

Sergeant Augustin took hold of the walking stick between thumb and finger and held it away from his armour.

‘For your service to the Emperor I will overlook this, Sister.’

‘You must return the saint to his reliquary. Without the storm, the Archenemy will fall upon us – we cannot protect him without the storm.’

‘You will not need to. We will ensure he is safe.’

‘So shall we,’ said the crone. She turned and started hobbling back down the nave, her voice hurrying along behind her.

Montalte stared up at the Fulminator. ‘You did not tell me that your orders were to take the saint away from us,’ he said.

‘You did not ask,’ said Sergeant Augustin. He pointed for Cornelius and Jansenius to carry the saint’s relics to the holy door. The two Fulminators carried the saint’s casket with the care his divinity demanded. Augustin and Montalte followed behind.

‘Would you have told me if I had asked?’ said Montalte.

‘No,’ said the sergeant.

Augustin went ahead, pushed the holy door open and stepped through.

‘Sergeant.’ Arnauld was waiting outside. He gestured.

Ringed around the Shrine Cathedral of Saint Blaise were the Faithful. They had taken positions in lightning pits and behind fused outcrops. Attack positions, turned towards them.

The crone, the Sister of Silence, stood before the Fulminators with her voice beside her.

Sergeant Augustin signed for Cornelius and Jansenius to wait in the shrine cathedral. Montalte, seeing the Faithful arrayed outside, slipped through the door.

‘We will not allow you to take the saint from us,’ said the crone.

‘Those are my orders,’ said Sergeant Augustin. His bolter remained by his side, but Montalte saw him make subtle gestures with the fingers holding the weapon. In response, Arnauld, Cornelius and Jansenius took their positions.

Standing beside the sergeant, Montalte heard him vox, ‘Arnauld. Exfiltration ETA?’

He was close enough to hear the reply, too.

‘ETA fifteen minutes, sergeant.’

‘You must not take the saint away – that is not his wish,’ the crone repeated.

Sergeant Augustin pointed at the Faithful arrayed around the shrine cathedral. ‘I have seen your weapons. You do not have the means to stop us.’

‘You have not seen them all,’ said the crone.

And from where they were hidden, under Bael netting and behind sheaves of knife grass and in the cover of lightning pits, the Faithful rolled out their heavy weaponry: stubbers, autocannons and a handful of heavy bolters.

Montalte, seeing them, made to slip away, but before he could take a second step he felt the armoured hand of Sergeant Augustin grasping his shoulder.

‘You are staying with us,’ said the Fulminator.

‘I would not wish to come to blows with a brother in battle,’ said the crone.

‘Nor I with a Sister of Silence,’ said Sergeant Augustin.

‘But if have to, to ensure the saint’s commands are followed, I will.’ And the crone let the stick she had been leaning on fall to the ground. Her back straightened, her shoulders levelled and she stood ready, light on her feet, balanced, poised as a dancer. ‘If it should come to it, you will find that I have not forgotten all my old skills, brother.’

‘I trust we shall not need to make trial of them,’ said Sergeant Augustin. ‘I will consider the matter further.’ The sergeant signalled Arnauld to remain on guard outside, then withdrew into the shrine cathedral, taking Montalte with him.

‘Close the door,’ said Augustin.

While Cornelius pushed the holy doors shut, the sergeant inspected the casket that contained the relics of Saint Blaise. For his part, Montalte stood disconsolately by the door, unsure what to do.

Augustin looked to the two Fulminators inside, and included Arnauld via their squad vox-link.

‘Recommendations?’

From outside, Arnauld answered. ‘Exit from rear of cathedral while I draw fire, circle round and destroy placements. Estimated time to complete operation…’ He paused, scanning. ‘Two minutes and forty-five seconds.’

‘I would prefer not to kill them,’ said Augustin. ‘If possible.’

‘Brother-sergeant, a question,’ said Cornelius. ‘They are interfering with the execution of our orders. Should we not remove them?’

‘We are here to protect them,’ said Jansenius. ‘Although the more I see of those we are charged with protecting, the less worthy they seem of that protection.’

‘We serve the Emperor,’ said Cornelius. ‘That is our duty.’

‘But the duty He sets us is to protect these humans,’ said Jansenius.

‘Our duty is to destroy the Emperor’s enemies,’ said Cornelius. ‘If those enemies now include the humans outside, then we destroy them.’

‘You – you wouldn’t do that!’ Montalte, small and insignificant, pushed his way into the conference of the gods. ‘Sergeant, you can’t, you mustn’t!’

The gods looked down at the little human in their midst. But Montalte looked only into the face of Augustin. The Fulminator said nothing. He looked down at the face staring up at him, but his gaze turned inwards, to deep memory.

Cornelius reached towards Montalte.

‘No,’ said Augustin. He held up his hand but his eyes were still turned towards the human standing in front of him. ‘It is true, they are little more than sheep. But are we shepherds, or wolves?’ He looked up, turning his hard gaze on Cornelius and Jansenius. ‘We wait. They do not expect the exfiltration vehicle. When it arrives, we carry out our orders. With their cooperation, if possible, without it if necessary. Stand to.’

Chapter 10

‘Sir.’

Captain Donatus looked down. He had been staring through the mesh of the makeshift Faraday cage that had become his command HQ for the interminable hours he had spent sitting outside this annoyingly opaque chapel. He had been staring at the roiling clouds and the stabbing shafts of lightning. Many of them had struck down, through the clouds, at him. It was only through the contrivance of this bolted-together Faraday cage that he had not been turned into a frazzle of quick-fried meat. But the cage had done its job, catching the lightning bolts and diffusing them down into the ground. Of course, many of the remaining cultists had been fried. But that was their job. Most of his men he had managed to keep relatively safe. But even in a Faraday cage, the other horrors of the storm zone could still get you, from the floating balls that the men called death sprites to the fire worms.

‘Sir,’ the voice repeated.

Donatus looked at the reporting subaltern. ‘Yes?’

‘Sir, we are running out of men to send into the chapel. There are no more natives of this planet that we can use.’

‘Then start sending some other men in there. I don’t care where they come from, just herd them in. Whatever is killing them will run out of energy sooner or later. We just need to keep feeding it until we exhaust its reserves.’

‘Sir,’ said the subaltern. ‘Er, should I send in the cultists or our troopers, sir?’

‘The cultists, of course.’

‘Only, we are running a bit low on them, sir. A lot have been killed while we’ve been stu– I mean stationed here, and I believe others have run away.’

‘Then send messengers for more.’

‘Yes, sir. What do I do if we run out of cultists before replacements arrive, sir?’

‘Then you’ll have to start sending in the men.’

‘Our men, sir?’

Donatus looked at the subaltern. ‘Or I could give you the task of taking a message to the dominus telling him how, having found the enemy, we have been unable to follow him. Would you like to do that?’

‘Er, no, sir.’

‘I thought not. Carry on.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The subaltern saluted, made to turn away and then paused. ‘Sir, there is some reluctance among the cultists to follow our orders.’

Donatus sighed and shook his head. ‘Then kill anyone who objects, round up everyone around them, and herd them into the chapel in their place. Remember – they are sheep, and we the wolves the gods have set loose among them. Never let them have time to think. Otherwise they might realise that they are chattel.’

The subaltern saluted. ‘Yes, sir!’ Although he tried to suppress it, a grin twitched at his lips, the smile of the carnivore when it sees its prey going about its business, unaware of that which watches it.

But as the subaltern turned to carry out his orders, ready to scurry out of the Faraday cage and across the compound, he stopped. He looked up at the sky, his mouth dropping open.

‘Sir…’ He pointed.

‘What is it now?’ snapped Donatus.

‘Sir, look…’

Donatus looked where the subaltern was pointing. The clouds had gone dark.

What was wrong with that?

Then, suddenly, Donatus knew. The lightning had stopped. The constant, devastating discharges that made flying into the storm zone suicidal had ceased. The clouds were just clouds now, dark and looming. The constant background roll of thunder began to recede, dying into the infinite distance. Then, even the clouds began to break, clearing as quickly as a mist of breath exhaled into a chill morning.

Captain Donatus looked to the subaltern. ‘Get on the auspex. Get on it now!’

The subaltern ran to the comms tent with Donatus following behind. The young lieutenant pushed aside the auspex operator.

‘It’s working, sir,’ he cried, pulling in the focus of the scan screens.

With Donatus standing over him, the lieutenant scanned outwards from their position, the screens now reading clearly.

‘Got them, sir, got them.’

Donatus grabbed the vox-operator. ‘Is the vox working?’

The operator nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Get on to Pelagus. Tell him we’ve found them. Tell him to come with everything he’s got.’

Chapter 11

‘Valkyrie inbound, sergeant.’ The message from Arnauld came through loud and clear on Augustin’s vox. ‘ETA two minutes.’

‘Get ready to take the saint out.’

Cornelius and Jansenius picked up the saint’s casket and headed to the doors of the shrine cathedral.

Sergeant Augustin looked down at Montalte. ‘You have served us well, little one. For that, I thank you.’

‘Please, my sergeant, don’t…’ Montalte began. But the Fulminator laid his hands on Montalte’s shoulders, silencing him.

‘We do what we must,’ said Sergeant Augustin.

‘Wh-what do you mean?’ asked Montalte, but the Space Marine had gone to the door to the shrine cathedral. Montalte went after him, but Augustin pushed open the door and slipped out.

Outside, in the sudden, dreadful silence, Montalte heard the whine of approaching turbofans. The Valkyrie was coming. It landed, amid a flare of jets, in front of the cathedral but still some fifty yards from the façade, and its rear ramp swung open.

‘Come,’ said Augustin, and he gestured the Fulminators carrying the casket forwards. ‘Arnauld, left flank.’

The sergeant himself took point.

The crone stepped between the Fulminators and the Valkyrie. ‘You cannot take him from this world.’

Sergeant Augustin stopped. ‘I would not fight you, Sister.’

‘The saint is the soul of this world, and this sector. Take him from us, and all shall fall under the sway of the Dark Gods.’

‘You are falling,’ said the sergeant. ‘This world is all but lost. We will save the holy relics of your saint, that they not be defiled by the enemy.’

The voice of the crone said no more. One of the Faithful ran to the Sister of Silence, holding something wrapped in rich cloth. The Sister unwrapped the relic and drew from its sheath a sword, thumbing an activation rune as she did.

The sword hummed softly into life.

‘An executioner greatblade,’ Brother Cornelius said softly.

Sergeant Augustin looked at the bolter he was holding. He looked to the Sister, waiting in silence. Around her, all around them, the Faithful had their weapons trained upon the squad of Space Marines.

Augustin holstered his bolter and slid his knife from its arm sheath. He looked to the Sister.

‘We settle it between us. Agreed?’

The Sister of Silence nodded her assent.

The sergeant looked to the Faithful beside him. ‘Montalte, you will officiate.’

‘I, my sergeant?’

‘Yes. Come.’

The battle-brother and the Sister, her voice waiting, eyes downcast, to the side, advanced towards each other, weapons held en garde as signal that combat would not yet begin, with Montalte scurrying alongside the Fulminator. He knew, by the laws of combat, that it was his role to signal when the duel was to start.

They stopped, ten yards apart.

At that distance, Montalte could feel the cold nullity of the Sister’s psychic absence as a chill of unease running through him, like the frost touch of early winter on autumn fruit. But he knew well the effect the crone had upon him. He looked to Sergeant Augustin and saw the Space Marine’s face tighten from the effect of the Sister’s psychic blankness.

‘Do not fire,’ Sergeant Augustin said, loudly and clearly.

Arnauld acknowledged.

The Sister of Silence nodded her assent to the sergeant.

‘I have given the same command to my Faithful. This shall be settled between the two of us.’

‘Montalte.’ Augustin signalled the youth to take his position on the midline between the two combatants, safely to one side.

‘To first blood or to death?’ asked Augustin.

‘Oh, to death,’ said the Sister. ‘I find that death solves everything. Don’t you?’

‘To death. Montalte.’

Montalte, standing alone between the crone and the Space Marine, felt the world crashing down around him. After all that they had gone through to save the saint, that it should come down to this.

The Faithful, tears dripping down his face, raised his hand.

He gave the signal to fight.

The Sister of Silence stepped forwards, feinting the greatblade to Augustin’s left shoulder with a lightness of touch that only such a weapon might essay, before switching her attack to a horizontal neck strike.

If the sword had struck, it would have removed the sergeant’s head from his body in one easy sweep.

But as swiftly as the Sister struck, the Fulminator countered. The greatblade screamed frustration at being denied the blood it craved, then sang into motion again. Even as the Sister shifted her feet for a fresh attack, Augustin stepped forwards, moving within the arc of the greatblade and bringing the battle knife jabbing forwards in a rib lunge.

It was calculated to be a fatal strike: the blade slipping between the ribs, piercing the heart.

‘Incoming!’

Montalte screamed the warning as, all around, the Faithful leapt for cover and desperately attempted to turn their heavy weapons to deal with the attack that was coming in from the rear.

But the Fulminator had heard the hiss of las-rounds, the percussive thump of bolter rounds and the sizzle of plasma cannons even before the alarm call. Montalte saw the way he turned his knife strike aside, with a preternatural deftness and speed of thought. But the blade, in passing, nicked the Sister’s flank. At the same moment that blood bloomed from the crone’s side, the greatblade stopped, quivering its thirst as it touched Augustin’s neck.

The Fulminator and the Sister of Silence glanced to each other amid the sudden eruption of explosions and the detonations of bolter rounds. The storm zone was breached and the enemy upon them. All was lost.

‘Save the saint,’ said the Sister. Then she turned and ran, with her voice beside her, towards where the enemy attack was fiercest, with men bearing the foul sigils of the Archenemy advancing into the hollow that sheltered the shrine cathedral, spraying las-rounds everywhere.

Sergeant Augustin turned to Montalte. ‘Get the saint onto the Valkyrie. Run!’

Montalte scurried back towards Cornelius and Jansenius. As he ran, he saw Augustin, bolter levelled, run after the crone, spraying percussive death wherever he looked.

As the Faithful ran to the Valkyrie, he felt more than heard the hiss of ordnance over his head and the sweep of turbofans further up: the Archenemy was putting air cover over the shrine.

‘For Throne’s sake, hurry up!’ the Valkyrie gunner was screaming at them.

Cornelius and Jansenius, with Montalte helping as he could, manhandled the saint’s casket into the hold and got it locked down. The gunner went back to spraying indiscriminate fire from his bolter. From what Montalte could see, he appeared not to be worrying too much about who he hit, friend or foe.

The pilot appeared at the hold door. ‘Where’re the rest of you? We can’t hold much longer – they’re bringing up ground-to-air missiles.’

But Jansenius held up his hand for silence while he listened to his vox.

‘Yes, sir.’ The Fulminator turned to the pilot. ‘You will hold while we clear a launch space. As it stands, you will be shot down before you’ve reached three hundred feet.’ Jansenius looked to Montalte. ‘The sergeant says “look after the saint”.’ The Fulminator removed his bolter from its holster and looked to Cornelius.

The two Space Marines broke from the Valkyrie, spraying death as they went, heading towards where Sergeant Augustin, Arnauld and the Sister of Silence were turning back the enemy assault.

The pilot looked to Montalte. ‘How long do you expect us to wait?’

‘As long as the sergeant tells you to wait,’ said the Faithful.

‘My orders are to get the cargo to safety,’ said the pilot. ‘If they’re not back here in two minutes I’m leaving.’

The pilot slid the hold door shut. From the port and starboard door-mounted bolters, the Valkyrie’s gunners laid down withering cover fire. But already Montalte could hear the hissing jolt of las-rounds striking the aircraft’s armoured hull. Unless Augustin and his squad could turn back the assault, it would soon be the percussive thump of heavy bolter rounds hitting the Valkyrie – and they could do damage to its heavily armoured hide.

Montalte drew his knife. Conflicting thoughts whirled through his mind. Should he break into the pilot compartment and hold the air crew at knifepoint until Sergeant Augustin and the crone reached the Valkyrie? Should he grab a lasgun and join the battle? Should he do nothing and wait?

Never had he felt so useless.

Montalte realised that he had lived all his life in the service of the saint but never before had he had chance to look upon him, face-to-face, alone. The saint lay, quiet and still, in his crystal casket. Of course he was quiet and still, Montalte thought: he was dead. Montalte knelt down beside the casket to look more closely upon the face of Saint Blaise.

He saw that the face was whole and entire, although yellowed with age, with the skin shrunken upon the underlying skull. The saint’s eyes were closed. His lips, dried out, had pulled back so that his teeth showed in a perpetual grin.

‘Saint Blaise, what should I do?’

And the saint turned his head, opened his eyes and looked upon the Faithful, and told Montalte what to do.

Chapter 12

‘By the gods, what are you doing?’ Captain Donatus screamed at the men streaming back past him. Their eyes were wide with terror and completely unseeing. They had come running past his command post, a human tide in full ebb.

Donatus swung his autogun, catching a fleeing trooper full in the face with the barrel. The man went down backwards, his nose exploding blood, but before he had chance to sit up, Donatus was on him, slapping him to one side then the other.

‘Why are you running?’ he screamed into the soldier’s face.

The man, his face red as raw meat, stared stupidly up into the eyes of his captain. The insignia on his shoulder told that he was a lieutenant: Donatus knew him by sight as one of his subalterns.

‘Th-the gods are coming,’ the man jabbered, ‘and the witch comes with them.’

Donatus slapped the subaltern again. The man tried to crawl past him. Captain Donatus put a shot through the back of his skull, splashing the lieutenant’s face on the ground beneath him. Running back to his command post, Donatus pushed the auspex operator aside to look at the screen.

The life traces showed his men falling back before an enemy attack. The signatures told that the attack was being led by the cursed Space Marines… and something else.

But beyond them, near the building that had been the focus of his first attack, was the heat signature of an aircraft, turbofans spinning, ready to take off. An exfiltration Valkyrie.

The enemy was trying to get the relics of their false saint to safety.

The counter-attack, Donatus realised, was a diversion. The Imperials were trying to clear a take-off window for the Valkyrie.

But even as he realised this, Donatus saw the aircraft signature shift. It was taking off.

He began shouting orders to the vox-operators for every missile unit to lock on to the rising Valkyrie.

None of the vox-operators relayed the message. They all sat back from their units, staring behind Donatus. The captain felt his skin crawl. He turned around.

‘My lord.’

The Word Bearer had come.

Pelagus’ glance took in everything at once. He looked to Donatus. ‘I take it we do not want that aircraft to escape?’

‘I-I’ve called up all our missile units…’ Donatus began.

‘Let me take care of it,’ said Pelagus. He stepped out of the command post and looked up into the sky. Some five hundred yards away, the Valkyrie was rising from the ground on a plume of downward thrust. As soon as it had attained sufficient altitude, the pilot would vector the engines to horizontal thrust and power away, flying low to avoid any overflying enemy fighters.

The Word Bearer raised the crozius arcanum he bore. Its interlinked armillary spheres began to rotate, slipping in and round each other in an eye-wrenching, stomach-voiding blur. Those men in the command post who did not look away fast enough found themselves hunching over, vomiting blood onto the ground.

Five hundred yards away, the pilot of the Valkyrie, setting his evacuation route, glanced up from his control panel to see a light in the distance. The dark light pierced his eyes, and he could not look away as it burned out his soul. A hollow thing now, the pilot took up his controls again.

‘What are you doing?’

The pilot did not hear his co-pilot’s question. All he could see was the light, that dark light, calling him to it.

Pelagus held out his hand. ‘Come to me,’ he said. ‘Come to me.’

The Valkyrie, jets firing erratically – for they had not yet been vectored for horizontal flight – began to approach. Suddenly, the jets fired for vertical thrust, and the aircraft began to ascend in a wild, oscillating spiral.

Within the cockpit, the co-pilot was fighting with the pilot, his colleague for five years, his friend for ten, trying to wrest the controls from him, the men fighting with teeth and elbow and knee.

Pelagus raised the crozius higher.

‘Come to me,’ he called, and his voice filled the air with its command.

High above, the Valkyrie stabilised, its turbofans vectoring for downward thrust, and then began to settle lower.

In the cabin, the co-pilot blinked back to consciousness. The gunners were hammering on the cockpit door but the blast bulkhead had been locked down: they would need an autocannon to break through.

‘Maritim, what are you doing?’ he gasped.

The pilot, his old friend, turned his head to him in a broken-necked motion. His eyes were black, burnt out from what they had seen.

‘Kill me,’ he croaked.

The co-pilot levelled his laspistol at Maritim’s temple. The screen splashed red.

The Valkyrie jerked wildly, the turbofans spinning out of control as Maritim’s hands spasmed on the joystick.

‘Come to me!’

The command echoed into the cockpit of the wavering Valkyrie. The co-pilot, whose name had been Ghislaine when he had had need of such a thing, felt his flight hand crawl towards the joystick. He could no more stop it than he could stop his heart beating.

With the hand that still obeyed what remained of his will, Ghislaine pushed the laspistol into his mouth.

‘The Emperor protects,’ were the last words he said.

Then he pulled the trigger.

The ceiling of the cockpit was painted red too.

The Valkyrie, its engines running without pilot control, spiralled downwards and crashed, at full acceleration, into the ground, wreckage exploding from the crash site, scything through the emplaced ranks of the Unshackled.

Pelagus, watching, lowered the crozius.

‘Donatus, send a company. Bring me anything of note from the wreckage.’

‘What are they looking for?’ asked Captain Donatus.

The Word Bearer looked down at him.

‘Dry old bones,’ he said.

Chapter 13

Montalte was running towards the battle front, scampering from lightning pit to rock mound, when he saw the Valkyrie go down. Around him, the Faithful who held the positions that they had been given to defend, cried out in alarm and despair. The Valkyrie was down: there would be no reinforcements coming to their aid now.

But Montalte ran on, barely stopping to take cover, relying on the pause in battle that the aircraft’s crash had brought to see him through. And in that lull, he tumbled into the lightning pit where Sergeant Augustin had taken cover with the crone.

The Fulminator and the Sister of Silence turned to him. The crone, previously so rejuvenated with her greatblade in hand, had aged again, becoming withered and bent. The Space Marine’s face was haggard with defeat.

‘I have failed in my mission,’ said Sergeant Augustin. He slapped a fresh magazine into his bolter. ‘All that remains is to kill as many of the cursed enemy as the Emperor wills.’ The Fulminator moved to climb from the lightning pit.

‘Stop!’ Montalte grabbed hold of Augustin’s arm. ‘The mission hasn’t failed. The saint is with us still.’

‘Wh-what do you mean?’ The voice of the crone asked the question as the crone herself tottered towards Montalte. ‘We saw the Valkyrie crash with our own eyes.’

‘The saint wasn’t on the Valkyrie,’ said Montalte. He looked from the Sister of Silence to the Fulminator. ‘I took him off.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I – he told me, he told me to take him from the Valkyrie. After your men left, I was alone with him, and the saint turned to me, he opened his eyes and spoke to me, and he told me to take him off the aircraft and return him to the shrine. Only, the casket was too heavy, I couldn’t carry it on my own, so I opened it and I took the saint out and carried him from the Valkyrie and took him back to his shrine.’ Montalte looked at the watching faces looming over him. ‘He is there now. Did I – did I do wrong?’

‘Do wrong?’ Sergeant Augustin’s face broke into the most unexpected of expressions: a smile. ‘No, little one, you did right.’ He turned to the crone. ‘Pull your men back to the hollow. We will hold them, we will kill them, we will defeat them.’ Sergeant Augustin turned back to Montalte and made to clap him on the back, only stopping himself just in time. ‘The mission may yet succeed.’ The Fulminator voxed his squad, ordering them to pull back to firing positions on the ridge of the sacred hollow, while he and the crone dispersed the surviving Faithful into firing positions in and around the shrine cathedral.

Following them as they made their way back towards the shrine cathedral, Montalte recited under his breath the litanies of the saint, invoking the intercession of Saint Blaise and all his companions in battle. For as he had started back with Sergeant Augustin and the crone, he had turned to look at the prospect in front of them, and he had seen the columns of Defilers snaking forwards across the now quiet storm zone, and the groups of howling cultists between the columns, rushing forwards like a living wave. They would need all the help they could get to defeat the coming attack.

Sergeant Augustin thought that he had done right! The pleasure at that caused Montalte’s face, despite the horrors that pursued them, to crease into a smile.

It had been a fraught task, getting the saint back to his cathedral. After Saint Blaise had spoken to him, and told him that he must go back, Montalte had struggled with the crystal casket but had quickly realised that, without power armour, there was no way he could carry it on his own. So he had broken the wax seals, marked with the stamp of the cardinal who had declared Blaise a sanctified soul, that covered the locks of the casket and opened the crystal container. The air within the casket had breathed out as if the coffin itself were exhaling: cool and with the scent of roses.

The saint had lain still beneath him, eyes closed once more, dried-out lips pulled back from teeth that were only loosely plugged into their sockets. For a moment Montalte had thought, wildly, what happens if all his teeth fall out?

But even as the thoughts roiled through his mind, Montalte had reached down into the casket and under the saint, preparing to lift him.

Saint Blaise came out of his casket as easily as a baby from its crib, and as lightly. The saint had weighed barely anything in Montalte’s arms. Carrying the saint’s mortal remains, Montalte had stepped to the loading bay door of the Valkyrie. The door gunners were maintaining fire from their bolters, mowing down anything around the aircraft, but their field of fire was away from the shrine cathedral. Montalte had had a clear run across the piazza in front of the building. Another memory fractured through Montalte’s mind: himself as a child, before the sky split, standing among the throng of pilgrims waiting and jostling in the piazza before the shrine cathedral, waiting for the holy doors to open for the start of the Feast of Saint Blaise.

Now the piazza was empty, its bare expanse a killing zone from the las-rounds and plasma jets that splashed across it.

Montalte had looked down into the face of the saint that he cradled in his arms. He had lived almost his entire life in the storm. His family was gone. The life he could have had was gone. He would not let the Archenemy take the saint too.

Montalte had begun to run across the piazza.

Las-rounds sizzled past him, some hissing into the ground, others ripping through the air with the delayed smell of burning dust that told of a near miss. He had weaved as he ran, trying to make himself a harder target, but the shots were coming closer. Montalte glanced up. The shrine cathedral, its holy doors standing open, was close, only some thirty yards away. He had tried to accelerate, to cover the remaining distance faster, but a las-round had clipped his heel and he had begun to fall, turning as he did, so that he might protect the saint’s body from the impact of the fall with his own flesh.

Winded, Montalte had lain still for a moment, gasping, then had begun to try to pull himself up. Only to see, standing between him and the shrine cathedral, a creature that bore only a glancing relationship to the man it had once been.

The cultist had sacrificed his humanity on the altar of the Dark Gods, offering them not only his soul, but all those parts of his body that he might lose while still giving worship to them. The creature was one-eyed, his nose a red wound and his ears meat, one hand a club of bloody bone, the other with fingers pierced through by razors.

Montalte had looked desperately around for support from the Faithful but they were all deployed defending the perimeter: this creature had slipped through the defences, drawn by some dark intuition and desire.

It had begun to advance upon him, teeth chattering with its idiot worship.

Montalte had left everything – his blow pipe, his lasgun – behind on the Valkyrie, so that he might have hands free to carry the saint.

But then he had seen the plasma pistol holstered on the saint’s chest.

It was the saint’s own weapon, the one that had put a superheated slug of gas through the skull of Magister Bakr at the climax of the final battle for Chevreuse, when Saint Blaise had led a kill squad into the heart of the enemy lines to find and kill the mind behind the assault on the planet. That plasma round had sprayed the magister’s mind all over his command tent, and the enemy forces had dissolved into confusion – even chaos – afterwards.

But it had not been fired these past thousand years.

The thought and the response had come together: the saint would not let him down.

Montalte had grabbed the weapon as the cultist scuttled towards him. It felt cold, dead in his hand. But as he had turned it towards the howling monstrosity approaching him, he had felt the grip heat up and had heard the high-frequency hum of its reactor.

The plasma slug had torn a hole the size of Montalte’s fist through the cultist’s torso. On his face, the mask of depravity had slipped: for his final moment, the cultist had seemed to realise the horror of what he had done. Then death had crumpled him.

Las-rounds were still flashing overhead. Montalte, lying on his back, had gauged how far he had to go. Just ten yards.

Rather than getting up, he had begun to squirm closer on his back, holding the saint in his arms, wriggling like a sand snake over the smooth stone of the piazza towards the holy door.

He had made it in – breathless, and with his back and shoulders rubbed raw, but he had made it. In the shrine cathedral, Montalte had lain the saint reverently down in the first side chapel of the nave. For a moment he hesitated. Telling Sergeant Augustin what he had done was possibly his own death sentence. But the Space Marine and the crone had to know: the saint was back where he wished to be, in his shrine cathedral.

So Montalte had set off, through the battle zone, to tell the Fulminator and the Sister of Silence that he had stolen the saint from the evacuation vehicle, only to see the Valkyrie come crashing down. And the message, which he had feared would seal his death, had brought renewed hope.

Now, returning with Sergeant Augustin and the Sister of Silence to the shrine cathedral, Montalte led them to the saint.

Blaise lay in peaceful repose before the Chapel of the Holy Dreamer.

‘We have to get him to safety,’ said Sergeant Augustin.

The Sister shook her head. Her voice spoke her answer. ‘Now that the Valkyrie is lost, the safest place for him is here. We shall make such a mound of their dead that they shall never find him.’

But the Fulminator seemed unwilling to accept this. ‘With comms working again, I can call for another exfiltration vehicle.’

‘Could any such vehicle get through?’ asked the crone. She pointed to the reliquary at the centre of the shrine cathedral. ‘We must put him back.’

Sergeant Augustin nodded. ‘For the moment. Until an extraction vehicle arrives or we are all dead.’ He spoke into his vox. ‘Arnauld, signal to Naval forces. Give them our position. Request bombardment outside a circle, one hundred yards in radius, centred on the cathedral.’

The crone looked to the Fulminator. ‘Many of the Faithful are on station outside that area.’

‘I will give warning for them to pull back.’ Sergeant Augustin checked his auspex. ‘The fight is going to be at close quarters. Any further out and the bombardment will miss too many of the enemy.’

In the relative silence of the shrine cathedral – its six-foot-thick walls muffled even the detonations of mortar rounds outside – the answer coming through on Augustin’s vox was loud enough for them all to hear.

‘Request denied, sergeant. Naval forces engaging enemy. Exterminatus to proceed on schedule.’

The crone gasped. Montalte looked to her. Hearing those words, her face had blanched, giving her a deathly pallor. He looked to the Fulminator.

‘What does that mean?’ Montalte asked. ‘What is Exterminatus?’

‘Our last resort,’ said the Fulminator. ‘The ending of all life on this world.’

‘But… but I thought you had come to save us,’ said the Faithful. ‘To save the saint.’

Sergeant Augustin looked at the man standing before him. ‘This world is lost,’ he said. ‘We tried to save it. But the invasion of the northern continent has been thrown back. Enemy naval forces are engaging our Navy beyond the Kuiper belt and will soon break through. The world is lost. All that remains is to deny it to the Archenemy.’

The Sister of Silence turned her corpse-face to the Fulminator. ‘How long?’

‘Two hours.’

She nodded, slowly. Her voice spoke her answer. ‘Very well. Then we must hold for those two hours. The Archenemy shall not take the saint.’ The crone pointed to the reliquary. ‘Let us return him to where he belongs. Then…’ points of blood red bloomed on her white cheeks, ‘…we will return to the battle and destroy so many of the Archenemy that our passing shall be heard in the wailing of the dark places.’

Sergeant Augustin indicated for Montalte to pick up the saint.

‘Wh-why me?’ he stammered. ‘Better far that you two, god of battles and Sister of Silence, return the saint to his rest.’

‘The saint would have already been lost to us if not for you,’ said Sergeant Augustin. ‘It is fitting that you carry him this final way.’

And the crone nodded her agreement.

So Montalte, to his astonishment, found himself carrying the mortal remains of the saint in his arms once more. The crone shuffled in front of him, using her greatblade as walking stick, and the Fulminator marched behind, his shadow lying over Montalte as they proceeded down the nave with the sounds of battle as the processional hymn.

They came to the baldachin and there the Sister of Silence stopped and stood aside to the left. Sergeant Augustin made the honour guard to the right. Space Marine and Sister of Silence made the Imperial salute and presented arms.

Montalte stepped forwards, under the protecting canopy of the baldachin, and lay the saint on top of the sarcophagus with its carved reliefs of the crusade. Before, Saint Blaise had been contained in his crystal casket, but now he lay there as one newly dead, brought to the cathedral for burial.

As the Faithful lay Saint Blaise down on the marble, the shrine cathedral, a building made of six-foot-thick walls of dolerite, seemed to shimmer as if it were no more substantial than the daydreams of a young boy dozing by a pool on a summer morning. From the great spire, which rose directly above the saint’s remains, a thousand sparks flamed and went springing across all points of the sky, trailing thunder in their wake.

A storm was coming.

And even through the walls of the shrine cathedral, they could hear the cries and alarms of the Enemy, as the clouds rolled over the bloated red sun and the lightning struck like daggers.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Montalte, ‘but have you seen this?’

While the Fulminator and the Sister of Silence had been looking down the nave through the great doors to see what was happening outside, Montalte had been on his knees in front of the saint, head bowed in thanksgiving and prayer. But as he had finished reciting the Agimus Gratias, the tears streaming down his cheeks, he had looked up to see…

Montalte pointed.

Between the two rearmost pillars of the baldachin the air was shimmering, as if they were looking through a screen of falling liquid; as if they were standing behind a waterfall, peering at the land beyond.

Sergeant Augustin looked to the Sister of Silence.

‘A portal,’ he said. ‘We can get the saint to safety.’

‘If it goes to a place of safety,’ said Montalte.

‘Pick up the saint,’ the Fulminator ordered Montalte as he approached the baldachin.

But no sooner had Montalte raised the saint’s mortal remains from the plinth on which he was lying, than the portal guttered and died. Montalte stood there, gaping down the length of the shrine cathedral to the quire and the distant apse.

‘Where did it go?’ he said.

Montalte laid Saint Blaise gently back on to the plinth and the portal flickered open once more.

Sergeant Augustin ran his fingers over the surface of the plinth, searching, until he found what he was looking for.

‘The lock gate. Keyed to the saint’s genetic signature. It will remain open only so long as he is in contact with it.’

‘But the saint has lain here for centuries,’ said Montalte. ‘Why didn’t the gate open before?’

‘The casket,’ said Augustin. ‘The crystal casket he was kept in. Only now, now he is in contact with the plinth, can the gate be opened.’

‘But where does it lead?’ asked Montalte. ‘There is nothing in the sagas that tells of this.’

‘We will have to go and see,’ said Sergeant Augustin.

But even as the words came from his mouth, the shrine cathedral shuddered and shook. From the vaulted ceiling, stone chips broke and fell like solid rain. And as they turned, the great rose window in the façade of the shrine cathedral shivered, the preternatural light that shone through it flickered, and it shattered.

And in its breaking, it let in the night.

Winged creatures, ravening and misbegotten – some forced hybrid between men and the reptilian raptors of a corrupted world – came streaming in through the space where the window had been. Many were sliced open by the remaining shards of glass, or impaled themselves upon spikes, but more flew through – to be greeted by the explosive rounds rattling from Sergeant Augustin’s bolter. And those creatures of dreadful miscegeny that evaded the hail of bolter fire and dived down the nave towards the reliquary were eviscerated by the executioner greatblade of the Sister of Silence, the death-dealing sword humming in satisfaction as it cut through wing and thorax and claw.

But even as this assault was broken and left lying bleeding and dying on the cathedral’s stone floor, Sergeant Augustin’s vox sounded out. Montalte looked round in alarm.

‘Perimeter broken – withdrawing, withdrawing on cathedral.’

‘Hold, hold,’ Sergeant Augustin voxed back, ‘I’m coming.’

‘Engaging enemy commander.’

‘Arnauld, report. Who are you engaging? Arnauld.’

‘What’s happening?’ Montalte asked. But the Fulminator was staring at his auspex.

‘Something is outside.’ Augustin looked at the Faithful. ‘It is slaughtering your people and now Arnauld is engaging it.’

‘He’ll defeat it, won’t he?’ asked Montalte. ‘He is a god.’

‘Cornelius, Jansenius, report. Arnauld engaging with the enemy. Report.’

But the renewed storm, as its fury mounted, was starting to blank out comms again. All that came through was the pop and hiss of the storm zone.

The vox crackled. A voice came through it, a voice that spoke of ten thousand years of blood and terror.

‘I have a gift for you, new servant of the corpse god – the vox-unit of your soldier. I will deliver it with his head attached.’

The vox fell silent. A wisp of smoke rose from the speaker. Sergeant Augustin wrenched his vox-bead out.

As he did so, the remnants of the Faithful came streaming in through the holy doors, all that still lived and could move; many others remained at their stations, reduced to gibbering, fearful creatures with no more control over their functions than a servitor left to its own devices.

Sergeant Augustin turned to Montalte. ‘The portal. Go through it. Find where it leads. There may still be hope.’

The Fulminator turned to the holy door.

‘The Sister and I will deal with what is coming.’

Chapter 14

The Word Bearer stood tall in the storm, holding the crozius arcanum high in one hand while in his other he displayed the head of the Fulminator, Arnauld, to the baying hordes of cultists and the chanting ranks of the Unshackled.

Captain Donatus stood beside Pelagus, but not too near to him. The captain kept glancing up at the roiling clouds. Within their seething black banks, sheet lightning was flashing in an almost incessant stream, unleashing an ongoing roll of thunderclaps. As far as his eye could see across the scarred landscape of the storm zone, electric zephyrs and crown coronas were flashing. But as yet the lightning was merely arcing through the clouds: it had not yet started striking to earth. Donatus’ eyes flicked up at the sky again. It was building up to something. He took a further step back from the dominus.

Pelagus was driving the watching men, and those that had once been men, into a frenzy. They had already cleared the enemy from its forward positions, most of them left lying dead in their lightning pits, and back into their final redoubt, the shrine cathedral. The Word Bearer had personally killed the servant of the false god, cutting his head from his body with a sweep of his crozius; Pelagus had driven the other two false Space Marines back into the shrine cathedral, spitting defiant but futile bursts of bolter rounds as they retreated through the doors and sealed them against the onrushing night of Chaos.

However, the shrine cathedral was well defended. Their first attack had been driven back with horrendous losses, although those losses consisted almost entirely of cultists, whom Pelagus was naturally using simply to test out the enemy’s defences and to use up some of their ammunition. But that attack had revealed that many of the cathedral’s buttresses and towers doubled as emplacements for plasma cannons and heavy bolters: the place bristled with the heavy weapons that had protected the saint’s military compound over which his shrine cathedral had been built.

For his part, Captain Donatus was somewhat lacking in heavy weaponry. Now, with the storm back, he worried if he would be able to get men and materiel through to the battle. If nothing else, the supply drivers could follow the trail of bodies and twisted vehicles lying by the side of the tracks they had made through the storm zone. The dead, Donatus found, made for an unerring compass bearing even through the twisted geography of this cursed land. The trucks were running now, rumbling through the storm, carrying heavy bolters and meltas, mortars and missile launchers. But from the way Pelagus was rousing the men – and the rest – into a blood fervour, it seemed the Word Bearer did not want to wait for the heavy weapons to arrive in sufficient numbers that they might do the job for them. No; Pelagus wanted to win this battle and this world with blood.

Not that Captain Donatus had any compunction about shedding his soldiers’ lives in pursuit of victory; it was just that he did not want to be one of the coins handed over to the ferryman. So, glancing up once more at the turbulent sky and the seething sheets of lightning, Donatus took another step back from the Word Bearer.

Pelagus raised both his hands high as the men – and other things – proclaimed their devotion to the Dark Gods of the Word Bearer’s heart. But as he did so, he glanced towards Captain Donatus, edging ever further away.

‘Worried you might fry, Donatus?’ Pelagus said, his words a whisper of sibilance into the captain’s ear.

‘No! No, sir,’ said Donatus. ‘I-I just wanted to ensure you received the acclaim due to you.’

The chants and roars rolled past them, a guttural counterpoint to the continual rumbles of thunder in the storm head above.

‘Of course, captain, of course,’ whispered Pelagus, his gaze still turned over the Unshackled and the cultists screaming their devotion but his voice directed at the man beside him. ‘Now I have whipped them up to the necessary pitch of fervour, turn them loose.’

‘What is our strategy?’ asked Captain Donatus.

‘One that, as a former officer of the corpse god’s Imperial Guard, you will be most familiar with – frontal assault. You will buy victory with blood. Drown the enemy in our dead. We have enough and more. Let this be an offering for the gods.’

Captain Donatus signalled his adjutants to him and gave them their instructions. Beyond the ridge, he could see the high spire of the shrine cathedral, wreathed with shifting fire plumes. As the adjutants ran back to their units to begin the assault, Captain Donatus could not resist another worried inspection of the storm clouds stacking above the shrine cathedral. They were being continuously lit from within by sheet lightning, but so far none of the bolts had struck to ground. He feared that the storm was storing its fury, waiting for the attack before unleashing the saint’s fire.

‘Are you concerned, little man?’

Donatus started. Normally, he was alerted to the presence of the Word Bearer by the skin crawl, but now Pelagus was standing directly behind him and he had not felt his approach. The captain cursed himself, silently, then turned, while fixing an expression of bland acceptance on his face.

It did not work.

The Word Bearer looked down upon him and Captain Donatus felt his soul retreat spiritually just as his body retreated physically, making the physiological changes attendant upon abject fear and flight. With the greatest of psychic efforts, he tightened his muscles, holding himself still, although his face, he knew, had gone slack with terror.

Captain Donatus opened his mouth, tried to say something, but no words came out.

The Word Bearer continued to look down upon him with cold, detached interest.

‘You fear the fire,’ said Pelagus. ‘I see it in your eyes, in the hunch of your shoulders, in the set of your bones. You fear it, and your fear infects the others.’

‘N-no, my lord, I do not fear it…’ stuttered Donatus, ‘…but I wonder if we should not take account of it in our plans before we begin the attack.’ Emboldened by the Word Bearer’s listening silence, Captain Donatus plunged onwards. ‘A frontal attack concentrates all our men into a small area around the shrine cathedral to the false saint. There is a lightning head building higher above the shrine cathedral, one that has not released its fire. I fear that our attack might be the occasion for… the occasion for…’ Donatus’ voice dragged down into silence, for Pelagus had reached his hand down to him and touched it softly on the side of his face.

‘Have no fear, little one,’ said Pelagus, softly. ‘Have faith, and your faith shall be answered.’

Donatus could feel the skin of his face at once going numb and burning. As an officer, first in the False Emperor’s Imperial Guard and then as a captain of the Unshackled, Donatus had done many brave things, for praise, glory and battle madness. But never, ever, had he done something so brave as standing still and apparently unmoved while the Word Bearer ran a single, ungloved finger gently over his cheek.

‘For you are all mistaken.’ Pelagus, to Donatus’ immense relief, removed his hand and looked up to the stacked thunderheads looming over the shrine cathedral. He looked intently, with the expression of one who finally sees clearly what had for long been obscure. ‘And, in truth, I was mistaken too. But now I see.’

Pelagus put a finger under the chin of Captain Donatus and gently lifted his head, so that he too was looking up into the sky. The captain felt his neck strain, so far did the Word Bearer push his head, but he said nothing and stared blindly upwards.

‘My mistake was to believe the believers in the false god – to accept their pronouncements that the fire and storm of this planet were the products of their saint.’ The Word Bearer made again that noise more akin to a death rattle than a laugh. ‘What power can a devotee of a false god wield? I should have known – I do know.’

Pelagus removed his finger and Donatus let his head, neck mercifully unbroken, drop down.

‘All this…’ The Word Bearer swept an area encompassing land and sky, all the storm zone about them, with his crozius, ‘all this appeared after the truth of our gods erupted into the skies for all to see. This is not the fruit of the vain worship of a failed god. No! It is a result of the Holy Opening, a product of the Great Rift, a seed fallen from the tables of the Dark Gods. This is the touch of the immaterium, the hand of Chaos Undivided reaching out to grasp the galaxy for its own. This storm is our storm, Captain Donatus. It will not stay us now.’

The captain of the Unshackled nodded his approval but said nothing.

The dominus looked back to him. ‘You have a question, captain?’

‘It… it has killed a lot of my men.’

‘All the more fitting as a final offering to the gods. Chaos drinks of the pain and despair of mortals. Let us give it meat. Then, when it has feasted, I will draw these new servants of the corpse god out from their bolthole and offer them the truth. For we are servants of the truth above all, we Word Bearers.’

Captain Donatus made the ritual abasement and withdrew, leaving the Word Bearer staring up at the lowering clouds lit up from within. He sent runners to fetch his adjutants – the storm was playing hell with comms again. As he waited for his men to come to him, to finalise the plans for their attack, Donatus glanced up at the storm himself. He had served Chaos, unknowingly and then knowingly, since he had left childhood behind. In that time, he had learned that it was a capricious master, as ready to damn as to reward, and sometimes for the very same action. There were times, and this was one of them, when the forbidden thought crossed through his mind: had he chosen the wrong side?

But then he thought of the impossibility of return, the fragility of forgiveness, and the penalties attendant upon those few who turned. The path he trod was broad, its destination certain (although its rewards less sure) and he was, generally, comfortable to walk it. He would not turn aside now.

Donatus looked around the circle of expectant, hungry faces.

‘Hold the artillery – he wants to take the objective intact – but apart from that, hit them with everything we’ve got. Hold nothing back. Throw every Unshackled, cultist, mutant, xenos, everything, at them. If the living do not take the objective, the dead will.’

He looked each man in the eye.

‘Understood?’

They understood.

The officers ran off to prepare the final assault on the shrine cathedral, waiting only upon the signal from Captain Donatus.

They would not have to wait long.

Chapter 15

It felt like being dragged through a sieve backwards.

Montalte, on his hands and knees, took a deep breath. There was something about the quality of the silence that surrounded him that told Montalte he was in a great building, maybe as large as the sanctuary of Saint Blaise. The light flickered with the telltale quality of banks of candles moved by the slightest of draughts. The Faithful forced himself to his feet. Standing, he swayed for a moment while his sight glazed and threatened to darken completely. But he forced back the tides of nausea and stood upright.

He understood, then, that he was continents away from the shrine of Saint Blaise, at the very start of the pilgrim route, the Chemin Royal, standing before the reliquary of Saint Jacqueline.

Montalte had made the first part of the pilgrimage as a child, in the company of his father, before the sky split and the world changed. Now, he began to stagger down the nave of the deserted basilica towards the doors left open in its façade. The light outside was red and weary, the waning light of a dying star, barely brighter than the candles that illuminated the interior of the basilica.

Although there was no sound or movement within the shrine now, save for that sound and movement that he brought, someone had put a lit candle in every sconce, candlestick and candelabrum in the basilica. The air was heavy with incense. It was as if a solemn requiem had just been completed in the cathedral, but at its conclusion the bishop, the deacons and arch-deacons, and all the congregation had vanished, rather than stopping for the usual conversations and refreshments.

The shrine tomb of Saint Jacqueline lay at the crossing of the basilica, where the transept crossed the nave, the saint’s relics lying in a crystal casket the twin of the one that had contained the remains of Saint Blaise. The portal had shimmered open between the columns of the baldachin over her sepulchre, a match for the portal that the Faithful had gone through on the other side.

For a moment, Montalte thought of going straight back through the portal, to tell Sergeant Augustin and the crone what he had found. But the basilica was empty. While there was no immediate sign of the Enemy, nor was there any obvious friendly presence either.

Montalte decided to quickly scout outside before returning.

Making his way down the nave, Montalte felt, fleetingly, the impression of a thousand years of pilgrims. Having kissed the tomb of Saint Jacqueline, they would turn and start the Chemin Royal. Maybe only one in fifty, one in a hundred, would live to reach its end, but even falling along the way was to have one’s sins washed clean by way of the saint’s promise: that none who followed him in service to the Emperor should be truly lost.

Going through the great doors in the façade of the basilica, Montalte blinked in the light. The Chemin Royal continued straight on from the basilica, running swiftly on to a narrow strip of land that disappeared into the hazy distance, an isthmus bounded on each side by electric seas. He remembered, as a young boy, coming out of the basilica to stand at the start of the Chemin Royal, peering after its apparently endless recession. As a native of Chevreuse, Montalte’s father had not been required to complete the whole length of the Chemin. But they had walked the first stage, down to where the electric seas ran up alongside the pilgrim’s causeway. There, they had stopped, looking at the surging currents and sparking waves that claimed so many pilgrims.

Caught by the memory, Montalte looked along the causeway. But rather than vanishing to its disappearing point at the horizon, the causeway, in its middle distance, seemed encrusted, as if with some newly erupted tumour. Montalte squinted, his eyes slowly regaining their acuity, and what he saw started to come into focus.

It was wreckage.

The burnt-out, mutilated, twisted wreckage of Imperial vehicles: there the protruding cannon of a Leman Russ, here the fire-blackened hull of a Chimera. This was where the Imperium had launched its great assault to take back Chevreuse. And here it had failed. As his eyes adjusted to the horror of what he was seeing, Montalte realised that the pilgrim causeway had become a charnel path, a road into infinite terror from which few, if any, had returned. The wreckage stretched as far as he could see, coating the horizon of the northern continent with fire-blackened metal. Had any part of the army fought its way through to the mainland? From what he could see, Montalte did not think so.

‘Hey!’

The shout came from behind Montalte.

He turned to see a man pointing a lasgun at him.

‘Stop there,’ the man shouted, his accent thick and off-world, but comprehensibly Low Gothic nonetheless.

The man was wearing the khaki-and-green combat fatigues of the Imperial Guard.

Sebastea, the southern continent, had not yet fallen to the Enemy. They could send help, they could save the saint…

They could save Chevreuse.

‘Help,’ said Montalte, ‘you’ve got to help, I’ve got to see your commander, help…’ In his eagerness, Montalte stepped forwards, towards the nervous young trooper who was looking at him down the barrel of his lasgun.

The impact threw Montalte on to his back. His sight darkened, then cleared for a moment. He raised his head – it was a struggle to do even that – and he looked down at his chest. He saw the neat, circular hole produced by a las-shot. Then his head fell back – he had not the strength to hold it up any longer – and he stared up into the sky. There were no clouds here. The sky was blue.

And then it went black.

Chapter 16

The Defiler herald advanced under the white flag of parley. He passed between the piles of bodies that lay heaped across the piazza, some still quivering in their death throes, most now set into the stillness of death. He walked, slowly, waving the white flag above his head so that all might see it. Behind him, and ranged around the vale of the shrine cathedral, the bloodied forces of the Archenemy waited in watching, feral silence, their quiet threaded through by the howls and yelps and gurgles of the cultists.

From their position behind the shattered remnants of the holy doors, Sergeant Augustin and the Sister of Silence watched the herald’s approach. The Fulminator checked his auspex, looking to see if the man was strapped with explosive, but the storm was playing havoc with the readings. The herald’s advance was lit by the strobe effect of the almost continuous lightning, turning his walking into a jerky series of marionette postures, yet the lightning remained in the clouds swirling above the shrine cathedral: none of it was striking the ground. The saint had deserted them.

Sergeant Augustin spoke into his throat-vox – at least within the cathedral, comms were still working – to check whether Cornelius or Jansenius had spotted any enemy incursions under cover of the herald. The sergeant had put the other two Fulminators on roof emplacements covering the flanks of the shrine cathedral. The remnants of the Faithful were manning positions at the slit windows.

The next assault, when it came, would have ramps to climb up to the shattered windows – ramps made by the piled-up bodies of the dead. Ammunition was running low, with all three Space Marines down to their final few magazines of bolter rounds. The Faithful had piled up wood in the nave and set it to fire, the smoke curling up into the vaulting, and the men too injured to fight were given the task of cooking depleted power packs in the flames in an effort to recharge them.

As the herald slowly approached, Sergeant Augustin took another quick glance down the nave to the baldachin. Still nothing.

As soon as Montalte had passed through the portal, it had closed, and nothing the Fulminator, the Sister of Silence or her voice could do had been able to open it again. Then the first assault had come, and since then they had been too busy to do anything other than fight.

The waves of attackers had been relentless, a nearly continuous set of assaults, before this sudden lull. Although it seemed as if the attacks had lasted for hours, it could not have been very long. Augustin checked his readings, set for battle onset. Yes, little more than an hour so far.

‘How long?’ asked the voice of the crone.

‘Forty-five minutes.’

‘I hope they will begin Exterminatus here. I shall enjoy, as my final sight, watching them turn their eyes to heaven as death descends.’

‘Then let us ensure that they are occupied until their end comes,’ said the Fulminator.

‘Servants of the false god.’ The herald was shouting, but through the continual thunder his voice was barely audible. He seemed to realise this, for after a veiled glance upwards, he came further forwards, waving the flag of parley with renewed vigour.

Now only thirty yards from the doors, the herald stopped.

‘Servants of the false god,’ he tried again. ‘Servants of the false god, answer me!’

Augustin, Fulminator, sergeant of the Adeptus Astartes, stood up, and his presence seemed to fill the space where the doors to the shrine cathedral had once been. Now new barriers, the piles of enemy dead, defended the sanctuary of Saint Blaise.

‘Those who would speak under the flag of parley would best speak without insult,’ said the sergeant and, in a single motion too fast for human eye to see, he raised his bolter and put a shell through the centre of the herald’s chest. The man glanced down in time to see his torso explode.

From where they were watching up on the ridge, the Word Bearer sighed and turned to Captain Donatus beside him.

‘The man was an idiot. You go.’

‘I recommend Major Marcion, as he was previously trained in negotiating…’

Pelagus looked back down, and Donatus was reminded of how small he was next to the Word Bearer, how insignificant.

‘I’ll go,’ said Captain Donatus.

As he made his way down to the piazza, one of his adjutants rushed up to him with a new white flag, but Donatus brushed him aside. If he was going to die, he would die as a soldier, not as some prissy bureaucrat vainly waving a flag neither side paid any mind to. But as a soldier, he would respect an enemy marching, bold and unafraid and in plain sight, towards his lines. He hoped that the Space Marine would think likewise – although what went through those brains, genetically engineered to deal out death, was anyone’s guess. Having spent far more time in the company of Pelagus than any sane man might wish, he was still no closer to understanding the workings of the Word Bearer’s mind. He was not sure that he could understand it and remain sane.

Better, therefore, to march towards death without quailing and look it in the eye.

Captain Donatus marched to within twenty yards of the doors of the shrine cathedral. During the last third of that long march he could all but feel the sights of the bolter centred on the middle of his chest.

But the round did not come.

Having passed the body of the herald, Captain Donatus stopped, came to attention and saluted sharply – he had never forgotten the training at his boot camp, many years ago.

‘I bring a message from Dominus Pelagus of the Word Bearers, general of our forces on this planet, to the defenders of the shrine of the Imperial saint, Blaise.’ Captain Donatus paused. ‘Is there anyone who will hear it?’

‘I will hear it.’

The Space Marine, the one who had shot the herald, appeared in the shadows of the shrine cathedral. Donatus supposed that there were multiple long-las snipers targeting the entrance to the cathedral, but there was an indefiniteness to the Space Marine’s image that suggested a speculative shot would merely heat up empty air: he was using some sort of hologram projector to appear where he was not.

‘My dominus sends you his greetings. He bids me pass on to you this information, of which you may not be aware – that the Naval ships of the false god have been driven from orbit. This planet will not suffer the fate your god decrees for so many worlds that have entered the true faith.

‘My dominus further bids me to tell you that it is only the relics he desires from this place, so that no further souls may be led astray by false belief. If you would surrender them, he would guarantee you safe passage.

‘Finally, my dominus bids me to make you a proposal, if you will not accept this generous offer. He would meet with you, face-to-face, alone, that the matter be settled between the two of you.

‘My dominus tells me to add this – he has fought the Long War for ten thousand years, ten thousand years that you have passed in slumber. He would see you wake.’

Captain Donatus paused. Even the thunder had slackened off during his peroration, and the serried ranks of his men were watching in admiration. But from the shrine cathedral there came no response, simply silence.

Donatus waited a moment longer, then turned, shoulder blades itching – this was the first time he could remember intentionally turning his back on someone pointing a weapon at him – and made to start back to the Word Bearer.

‘Stop.’

The command stopped him as completely as one from Pelagus.

Captain Donatus turned back again. The Space Marine was there – more there, this time.

‘I will fight your master,’ he said, simply. The Space Marine pointed to the space directly in front of the shrine cathedral. ‘I will fight him there.’

‘My dominus will do this,’ said Captain Donatus.

‘We will meet in half an hour,’ said the Space Marine.

‘My dominus would not squander so much time.’

‘Half an hour,’ the Space Marine reiterated.

‘Very well,’ said Captain Donatus. ‘My dominus will meet you here, one on one, in half an hour. Then shall combat tell whose gods are true and whose false, for the judgements of battle tell true.’

‘They tell true indeed,’ said the Space Marine. ‘Half an hour.’

‘He does not know you are here.’ Sergeant Augustin turned to the Sister of Silence. He had learned to put the psychic discomfort she caused him from his mind, but now he called it forth, briefly, to examine it.

‘That spawn of Chaos cannot see me,’ said the Sister’s voice. ‘But I see him.’

The Fulminator was preparing himself for battle as he spoke to the Sister of Silence: carefully checking his ceramite armour, honing his reiver knife, reciting the litanies of battle.

‘I will draw him towards the doors,’ said Sergeant Augustin. ‘When we are within ten yards, but not before, strike. The shock of your presence will give us an opening – seize it.’

As the Space Marine had been preparing his weapons, so at the same time had the Sister of Silence been preparing hers, running a whetstone up and down, down and up the edges of her executioner greatblade until it was so honed that it might slice time.

‘I will,’ said the crone’s voice. The Sister stood up and began swinging the blade through its combat patterns, the sword weaving intricate figures through the air. ‘But the Archenemy shall be weaving traps of his own. Beware of them.’

‘The Archenemy,’ said Sergeant Augustin, ‘is above all other things a liar.’ The Fulminator indicated the sky above. ‘If there had been an engagement in orbit, we should have seen some trace of it, even beneath these clouds. I believe the fleet is still on station, ready to render the Emperor’s mercy to this world. It is our task, now, to see that these enemies receive the Emperor’s justice before they have a chance to flee.’ The Fulminator stood up, his preparations complete, and looked again to the Sister. ‘Wait until we are close, then strike.’

For answer, the crone made the sign of the aquila.

Sergeant Augustin nodded, then turned and made his way to the doors.

The half hour was over.

From outside came the chants of the enemy, the rhythm fractured and the sound throat-tearing, telling of the Archenemy’s approach. Sergeant Augustin moved cautiously forwards, remaining behind cover, to where he could see out over the piazza to the enemy positions.

Ranks of men were rippling aside on the slope of the hollow. Sergeant Augustin scanned: he could not see the officer he had spoken to earlier.

Then he saw something else. Striding towards the cathedral was a monstrous figure. It wore dull red power armour of an antique type, and in one hand carried a crozius surmounted by the spiked wheel of Chaos. In the other it held a bolter, modified, Augustin saw, with attached blades – it would make for a useful hand-to-hand weapon. His scan took in but ignored the trophies carried on the Traitor Space Marine’s armour, the scalps and skulls of previous victims, for these had no relevance to his tactical estimation of the abilities of the enemy.

But the crozius told Augustin that he would be facing one of the champions of Chaos, a servant of the Dark Powers since the first ruination of the Word Bearers, one of the Dark Apostles who had first spread heresy among the Legions.

Sergeant Augustin smiled. It was for such enemies as these that Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl had engineered the Primaris Marines. He stepped to the door as the Word Bearer reached the far side of the piazza, stopping at the edge of the killing zone. Then Pelagus stepped forwards, followed by the yells and screams of the cultists, and the beating of gunstocks on rock from the Defilers. As the Word Bearer approached, Augustin cast a final glance to the sky: the clouds there still roiled with lightning, but the sound of thunder had grown more distant, as if the storm were retreating.

‘Is my enemy too fearful to let himself be seen?’

The Word Bearer’s words cut, sharp and raw, across the background rumble.

Sergeant Augustin stepped forwards himself, so that he now stood framed in the ruined doors of the Shrine Cathedral of Saint Blaise.

The Word Bearer paused in his approach. At this range, Sergeant Augustin could see that foul scriptures were tattooed over every inch of the Traitor Space Marine’s skin.

The Word Bearer raised his crozius. ‘I call on you, cousin and brother, to think on this. For ten thousand years you have slept, at the behest of the false god that raised you. You have been denied ten thousand years, and for what? To serve, to follow, to worship a lie. I bring you the truth, cousin and brother – the truth of the universe and of its gods. Cast off false worship and you will be as the gods are, free to follow the dictates of the power that lies within you, not the commands of a master who sits rotting on His uneasy throne. I put before you a choice, the blessing and the curse. Choose the curse and be free.’

Even as the Word Bearer spoke, Sergeant Augustin felt the Traitor Space Marine’s words working at his mind, whirling around it like water eddying around a rock, seeking for some weak point in the structure. But behind him, standing in the lee of the door, the Sister’s presence made the words into mere buzzing things, as harmless as dead flies.

‘I will take the blessing, the Emperor’s blessing, and pronounce my curse on you and all your kind.’ Sergeant Augustin stepped forwards, trying to gauge how far the protective influence of the Sister’s psychic blankness projected.

But Pelagus had done with trying to preach his dark doctrine. Now, he approached in silence, while behind him the enemy yowled and screeched. By the rules of combat, they should meet at the halfway point between them, but Augustin hung back, seeking to pull the duel as close as possible to the shrine cathedral without making that wish too obvious.

The two Space Marines stopped.

The men watching fell silent. Even the thunder paused.

Everything waited on this: a clash to the death between a Word Bearer, upon whom the weight of ten millennia sat, with all its sins and blood, and a Primaris Marine Fulminator, called fresh from the sleep of centuries through the return of the primarch Roboute Guilliman.

The two superhuman creatures stood staring upon one other, linked by the understanding that soon one of them would be dead. Then, as one, they lay their bolters aside. This would be done by blade and hand and fist.

Pelagus took a step forwards, then another, each step faster than the one before, and Augustin matched him, until the two Space Marines were charging at each other like two primeval, armoured beasts.

But they were both also among the finest warriors to walk beneath the galaxy’s hundred billion stars. And at the moment of impact, when it seemed that they must surely collide with the force to shatter the ground beneath them, they each stepped aside, feinting and striking with reiver knife and whirling crozius, their blows coming faster than the eyes of the ordinary men who watched could follow.

The strikes caught, and while Augustin’s knife scored the armour of the Word Bearer but did not pierce it, the crozius cut deep into the Fulminator, reaching flesh, tearing it. At once, the preternatural system of the Space Marine engaged, sealing wounds, pumping stimms through his body, lending Augustin a strength and swiftness far beyond any mortal.

They stood there, in the centre of the piazza, surrounded by the heaps of the dead, and traded blows and blocks in a flurry and fury of movement, the Word Bearer whirling his crozius in intricate sweeping arcs, the Fulminator seeking to disrupt the arcs and to close into killing distance with his reiver knife.

Sparks flew from the clash of weapons, arcing through the charged air of Chevreuse. The eyes watching saw the Fulminator, unable to get within range with his knife, take a step back, and then another. The crozius radiated the fury and thirst of its wielder, blurring into a vision of spiked death. The Word Bearer pressed harder, following up each attack, pressing the Fulminator back and back so that he was desperately fending off blows and having to sometimes use his other forearm to block the crozius before it struck home.

Back and back, step by step, Pelagus rained a frenzy of blows down upon Augustin, while the screeches and howls of his men grew louder with their increasing intensity. The Word Bearer began to sing the litanies of his foul faith, the words pulling at the threads of Augustin’s mind like a weaver unmaking a pattern.

Augustin realised that Pelagus was toying with him. But as the Word Bearer had his sport, the Fulminator was backing closer and closer to the shrine cathedral.

Back to within a few yards of the doors.

Back to within killing distance for an executioner greatblade.

Then, two vast explosions blossomed from amongst the heaps of dead at the base of the cathedral, just behind Augustin, bringing down the towers on which Cornelius and Jansenius had their emplacements and burying the two Space Marines in rubble. While the masonry fell, a third explosion ripped a gaping hole in the apse of the shrine.

They had sent charges in with their cannon fodder, on timers.

Sergeant Augustin, pulling back from the combat, risked a glance behind.

But the Word Bearer stopped too.

‘Were you expecting something else to happen?’

Without waiting for an answer, Pelagus brought his crozius downwards in a killing arc.

‘Kill them, kill them all!’

Captain Donatus set his death squads loose, sending them through the opening that the demolition charges, carefully set under cover of the piled dead, had torn in the walls of the shrine cathedral. But while the death squads hunted through the labyrinth of arches and vaults and crypts, he led a picked band of men down the quire towards what they had been fighting for all along: the relics of the Imperial saint. Captain Donatus aimed to claim them, to present them to the Word Bearer. He would lay them at his feet and step back, respectfully silent but fully cognisant of the reward due for such a prize – as indeed would be Pelagus. So while the Word Bearer took care of the Space Marine outside the cathedral, he would take care of the saint inside it.

Donatus had five men with him, all picked for their abilities and experience, and with strict orders to stick with him.

The death squads were advancing into the cathedral, spraying las-fire and auto-rounds as they went, but Donatus, the experienced soldier, noted that the enemy, though taken completely by surprise, was rallying to some extent. Ragged bursts of return fire were coming from the nave, while further bursts were shooting down from the clerestory. Taking cover in one of the quire stalls, Donatus signalled the nearest squad leader to take his men up to the clerestory level to clear it. None of the assault squads were armed with anything heavier than lasguns and autoguns; Pelagus wanted the saint’s remains recovered intact.

Behind cover, Donatus took a mirror from his combat jacket and used it as a periscope to look ahead. The quire had been cleared of the Faithful but crossfire was still coming in from the transepts, while the enemy had taken temporary positions in some of the many side chapels that lined the nave. Donatus could see the baldachin that marked the saint’s tomb standing at the crossing of the cathedral. Stone splinters came flying from the columns as auto-rounds slammed into the marble, while las-shots left little smoking pits. The captain knew he had to get to the relics quickly, before they were caught in the crossfire and his plan for taking credit for their retrieval was destroyed alongside them.

Captain Donatus signalled all his squad leaders to lay down suppressing fire, and the shrine cathedral was filled with the hiss and hail of automatic shot as the death squads unleashed their weapons on full-auto. Under the rain of fire, Donatus signed his men forwards, all of them running low to keep from being hit by their own side, past the high altar and down to the baldachin.

He rolled into cover behind the heavy sarcophagus, then risked getting up to his knees. They had come a long way, over hills and mountains of the dead, to get the relics of this man. Now, so close to him, Donatus wanted to have a look at what had brought them to Chevreuse.

He popped up level with the saint’s head. Donatus saw the skin, yellow and stretched tight over the underlying skull but without tear or decay, the lips drawn back to show the teeth pegged loosely into the dried-out jaw, and the closed eyes looking blankly up at nothing.

‘Is that it?’ Donatus asked, and he felt a laugh bubbling at his throat. ‘Is that it?’ A desiccated corpse to a cadaverous god.

By the gods, his doubts were done now. He had chosen the right side.

Through the hail of fire arcing down the nave, he saw a figure emerge from one of the side chapels, a woman, twisted and old, and with a child following in her wake. The old woman bore a sword of extraordinary length and potency. She whirled it in front of her, and began to advance down the nave. Others tried to follow her, but they were cut down, their cries a counterpoint to the shrieks of ricocheting auto-rounds.

‘You shall not have him!’ the voice was high and pure, soaring over the firestorm that threatened to engulf them.

But Captain Donatus had faced many things, holy and unholy, in his years as a soldier. Although he felt the discomfort of the crone’s void deep in his soul, he discounted it, putting the pain aside as he might put aside the pain of a physical wound until it could be seen to after the battle. For now, there was only action. And as the Unshackled assaultslackened off in the face of the woman’s advance, Donatus looked down his sight at her and saw that she was old, her joints stiff with age. And though she wielded her sword as lightly and swiftly as one half a century younger, yet there were places that she could no longer cover easily through the stiffness of her bones.

Sighting down his autogun, Captain Donatus smiled. The galaxy was a cruel place to the elderly.

And he fired.

The round slammed into the crone’s knee. The old woman fell forwards, the sword falling from her hand as she hit the ground. Beside her, the girl fell, as if she had been hit too. The old woman made to crawl after her sword, but the blade had bounced too far away. She stopped and looked up, only to see Donatus stand up behind the sarcophagus, drawing his sight on a kill-shot to the crone’s unguarded head.

‘Battle is no place for old women,’ he said.

The crone raised her hand and pointed behind Donatus.

The captain of the Unshackled smiled. ‘Nice try.’ He squinted down the sight, lining up the centre of the old woman’s forehead. It cost little to be kind to the old. He would give her a clean death.

Donatus’ nose twitched. He could smell roses.

The captain of the Unshackled never saw the lasgun butt descending on his skull. Donatus slumped to the ground next to the saint.

Montalte was standing in front of the shimmering portal, with Imperial Guardsmen streaming through after him. He ran to the crone.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked her.

The Sister hauled herself upright, using Montalte as a prop. Her voice clung to Montalte too. ‘Get me to the door – the sergeant is fighting the Traitor Space Marine alone out there.’

Off balance and on the back foot, Augustin could neither deflect nor avoid the downrushing crozius. There was only one last, desperate option. He dropped his knife and, reaching up, caught the shaft of the crozius as Pelagus brought it down on him.

Now the two Space Marines were locked together, each with both hands on the shaft of the crozius, both knowing that to release it would mean the other having the chance to wield it for a killing blow.

Now all the years of training and drills, the battle craft and tactics, came down to a single, titanic contest of strength and will. Face-to-face, Word Bearer and Fulminator struggled with each other, seeking to twist the crozius out of their enemy’s grasp, breath breaking from their mouths in great bursts, the servo-motors of their power armour straining at maximum output, their bodies flooding with every stimm their engineered systems could pump into their blood streams, their double hearts pounding.

Face-to-face, the twin titans struggled for mastery, neither retreating.

And, face-to-face, they spoke.

‘He is… a false god… a corpse god. Command your soul.’

‘My purpose… is the Emperor’s will.’

‘Abandon him… become a god.’

‘I am… a sergeant… of the Fulminators.’

The heavens cracked.

All the fire that had accumulated in the storm head over the shrine cathedral slammed downwards, and Sergeant Augustin, Fulminator, born amid the greatest electrical storms known in Martian history, storm walker, lightning branded, felt in the rise of every pore in his skin the fire seeking its strike zone on the earth.

He let go.

The lightning struck.

The saint’s fire lit up the Word Bearer from within, every bone and vein and capillary momentarily burned blue with a light so intense that the image was left branded in the vision of those who saw it.

Then the fire burst through every tattoo and sigil inscribed on the flesh of the Word Bearer, burning out from within the foul doctrines of the primarch Lorgar.

Pelagus, Dark Apostle, veteran of the Long War, who had seen the Emperor in His glory and yet had fallen into heresy, fell, a smoking ruin of burnt flesh.

The crozius arcanum splashed on to the ground, reduced to molten metal.

And the Defilers, seeing the Word Bearer fall, fell silent. Then the dogs ran loose among them, the hounds of fear and panic, and they turned to run, throwing down their weapons in their terror. The cultists, lost and abandoned, for the most part simply sat down where they were, eyes vacant and empty as mark of their lost souls.

Sergeant Augustin, weary as he had never been before, had not the strength to pursue them. He stood, swaying but upright, in front of the broken doors to the cathedral.

‘I see you did not need my help after all.’

Augustin turned to see the Sister of Silence hobbling towards him, supported by Montalte, with the child limping behind them.

‘The saint…’

There was nothing else for Augustin to say.

‘How did you know to let him go?’ asked Montalte. ‘I feared you would be struck too.’

‘You forget,’ said Sergeant Augustin, ‘this is not the first time I’ve walked the storm.’

‘The saint saved me too,’ said Montalte. He took out, from under his tunic, the medallion stamped with the saint’s sign, given to him by the crone when first she sent him from the storm zone to bring the gods to the saint. It had been beaten flat, as if it had been hit by a hammer. Or a shot.

Recounting what had happened after he had left them to step through into the unknown, Montalte concluded, ‘They took me to the section commander. When I told them there was a portal to the saint’s shrine, they took me back to the basilica. When they saw that there was no portal, they almost shot me again. Then I remembered. To open the portal at this end had required the saint to touch the key, with his holy flesh. When I took Saint Jacqueline from the casket and laid her on the plinth, the portal opened.’

The three of them watched the Imperial Guardsmen streaming out of the shrine cathedral, officers setting their men into pursuit order, while commissars dealt with the remaining cultists in the only way possible. The piled-up rubble of the towers began to shift and move. From the wreckage emerged the dust-coated shapes of Cornelius and Jansenius.

‘My lord.’ An officer of the Imperial Guard, a colonel by his insignia, saluted Sergeant Augustin. ‘I have been authorised to tell you that, consequent upon opening up this new front in the war for Chevreuse, Exterminatus is suspended.’

‘I told you the saint wanted to stay here,’ the crone’s voice said to the Fulminator.

‘You did,’ said Sergeant Augustin. ‘You did indeed.’

Chapter 17

Captain Donatus woke, head throbbing, to find himself lying in a pile of bodies shoved to one side of the saint’s sepulchre.

He lay there, not moving, trying not to breathe, while he tried to figure out what had happened. From the orders he could hear, quite distant now, Imperial forces had somehow managed to retake the cathedral. Evidently, the mission had failed, and failed badly.

The generals of Chaos had little patience with failure, particularly when it came to a low-ranking officer like a captain. Even if he managed to escape, they would hang him to encourage others not to fail. He thought, for a moment, of turning sides again, returning to the armies of the Imperium. But that would mean a death sentence too, and one carried out all the more quickly, given that the enemy forces were nearer.

Donatus risked opening an eye.

The shrine cathedral was a wreck, but a largely empty wreck for the moment. There were guards at the door, but few other people he could see. From the sound of it, there was a quiet service of thanksgiving being held in one of the side chapels, but he could not see who was taking part in that. Moving infinitely slowly, Donatus looked to the rear of the cathedral. The hole they had blown in the apse was still there and, so far as he could see, it was not guarded.

A possible escape route. Then it would be a matter of sneaking through enemy lines. But those lines would still be fluid and fast-moving. Steal an enemy uniform from a corpse and he would be able to move through them with relative ease.

There would be no point escaping, though, unless he could provide his superiors with something, some trophy or token sufficient that they might brandish it as a victory and therefore let him live.

That was when his eye rested upon the mortal remains of the saint.

He could steal victory from Saint Blaise. He would take his head.

Moving quickly and quietly, Captain Donatus unsheathed his knife and stood over the saint.

He felt a blow on his chest, strong enough to send him staggering backwards. He looked down. That shouldn’t be there, should it?

Captain Donatus looked up.

The crone stood in the nave, with the Space Marine and one of her Faithful on either side of her. Donatus looked down again. Now he recognised it. The sword that the old woman had wielded. It was sticking out of his chest.

Donatus fell dead.

‘Allow me.’ Sergeant Augustin stepped forwards and removed the executioner greatblade from the Defiler’s chest. The Fulminator held it for a moment, appreciating its balance and edge.

The Sister of Silence held out her hand.

Sergeant Augustin handed it back to her then made the sign of the aquila.

‘I have seen many remarkable sights on this planet,’ the Fulminator said, ‘but none more so than a greatblade thrown like a dagger.’

‘He was not going to get away with our saint.’ The crone held out her hand. Her voice took it. ‘Not now.’

‘He is our saint?’ Montalte asked anxiously, turning to the Space Marine. ‘You’re not going to take him away?’

‘After this,’ said Sergeant Augustin, ‘no one would try to take him from you.’

About the Author

Edoardo Albert Edoardo Albert is a writer and historian specialising in the Dark Ages. He finds that the wars and cultures of the early Medieval period map very well on to the events of the 40th and 41st millenniums. His Black Library fiction includes ‘Green and Grey’ and the novella Lords of the Storm.

An extract from Dark Imperium.

The void is impossible for the human mind to encompass.

Within the galaxy mankind calls home there are three hundred billion stars. Around these revolve hundreds of billions of worlds, and the spaces between are crowded by a diversity of objects which defy enumeration. Mankind’s galaxy is but one of trillions of galaxies in a universe of unguessable size. The distances between even proximate astronomical bodies are inconceivable to creatures evolved to walk the warmer regions of single small world.

This is why the void cannot be understood. Not by men, nor by their machines.

The magi of Mars insist on their understanding, but their apprehension can only ever be an abstraction, dead numbers modelled by dead-flesh cogitators. No matter how brutally expanded their minds, men cannot comprehend the majesty of the void.

And when one considers the warp, that nightmare realm skulking behind that of touch, sound and sight, well… any being who claims understanding of that is either deluded or insane, and is in both cases dangerous.

Among the higher races there are those better equipped to grasp their own limitations. They understand that the cosmos is ultimately unknowable; they accept their lack of insight. By comparison, the creatures of Terra are so crude in thought that – in the opinion of these more enlightened civilisations – it is a wonder humanity can understand anything at all.

Humans are beings of short reach. Give them voidships, change their shape by geneforge and augmetic, provide them with weapons of sufficient power to break a star, and the children of Old Earth are still but apes removed from the savannah. And just as an ape’s mind cannot hold an ocean, and the notion of a whole world is inexplicable to it, so a man’s mind cannot hold the void, and the layered infinities of the warp are beyond him entirely.

The Imperium claims a million worlds as its own. It is an empire spread gossamer-thin across the run of stars, its worlds so far removed from one another that it requires the bloody effort of countless men and women to sustain. In the grand flow of history, the Imperium is the greatest galactic empire of its day. To the people who populate it, it is the most powerful ever to have existed.

However, to the uncaring universe, it is nothing, the latest in a line of such realms that stretches back to the days of the first thinking beings, when the stars were young and the warp was calm, and horror had yet to uncoil its tendrils into the material realm.

There are philosophers that argue war is man’s natural state, and to the inhabitants of this era of blood it is a proven hypothesis. War is everywhere. Peace is the dream of a silent Emperor, broken by His treacherous sons.

Those sons continued to fight.

Over the green gas giant of Thessala, two great battlefleets engaged. Titanic energies snapped and blinked in the eternal night of space.

The total efforts of star systems went into the construction of these fleets. Neither was free of the taint of blood, not in their construction – for tens of thousands of lives had been expended in their making – nor in their usage. The resources of planets had been poured entire into the forging of their frames, and the secrets of ancient sciences plundered to bring them to murderous life. Both had been responsible for the levelling of civilisations.

The fleets differed in only two regards. First was in their appearance. One was a gaudy assault on the senses, the other a motley collection of sober liveries. The second and more fundamental difference was in their allegiance. The sober fleet fought for the continuation of humanity’s great stellar empire; the gaudy one was dedicated to its extinction.

The battlefleets pursued each other in a slow dance that broke through Thessala’s rings, hundreds of vessels ploughing gaps through the dust that would take centuries to close. The voiceless lightning of their guns filled the skies of Thessala’s inhabited moons. The lives of millions below depended on the outcome of the battle, but the consequences would ripple much further.

At the centre of this iron storm there was no calm, no eye in which respite might be found. Instead, there was a pair of leviathans: the Ultramarines battle-barge Gauntlet of Power and the Emperor’s Children battleship Pride of the Emperor. Two vessels, forged in a common cause but now implacable enemies, locked together in mortal combat only thirty kilometres apart – no distance at all in void war.

Each was the flagship of a primarch, genetically engineered demigods crafted by the Emperor of Mankind. Aboard the Gauntlet of Power stood Roboute Guilliman, the foundling of Ultramar, the Avenging Son. The Pride of the Emperor was home to Fulgrim – the traitor, the fallen exemplar, the blighted phoenix. Once covered in his Emperor’s blessings, Fulgrim had followed the arch-traitor Horus and pledged his allegiance to ancient dark gods, becoming the herald of perversity.

In fighting for their father, both primarchs were made fathers themselves, though not of princes or strong daughters; through the application of arcane science, they were the sires of two of the Space Marine Legions, mankind’s greatest warriors. The Space Marines were lords of the galaxy, designed to reunite the human race and shepherd it to a glorious future. Instead, they had failed and turned upon one another, and their war had nearly destroyed the Imperium.

Such fury a battlefleet can unleash!

It can cow a world without a shot. It can extinguish the life of a species. Battlefleets are the tools of tyrants, whomever they fight for. Whether their admirals espouse salvation or damnation matters not to the execution of their purpose. Death follows in their wake.

To those participating, a void war seems a terrifying, roiling chaos of violence, but it is the pinnacle of mankind’s destructive ingenuity, a whirl of gigantic explosions where lives are snuffed out by the hundred. In such combat, a single man is nothing; he is but part of the machine of the ship he serves, as essential or otherwise as a steel cog or an indicator lumen. He can do nothing but work his appointed task and pray his life will not end, or if it must end, that it does so in painless disintegration. A single crewman’s task dominates everything, even his fear of death. There is no escape from service. War and his part in it are the totality of his existence.

Yet what is a void war to the timeless deeps of the blackness that envelops all these footling motes of light that sentient creatures battle so earnestly over? A void war is twinkles in the distance. It is silence. It is infinitesimals of matter sparking and dying, scintillas of metal and flesh consumed by transient fires. The detonation of a battleship kilometres long is insignificant to a cosmos where the death of a sun atomises worlds. On a galactic scale, the loss of a warship and ten thousand lives is a nugatory flash outshone by the billion-year candles of the stars.

The inverse is true to a single man. His life is all that matters, for one life is all a man has, and he fears to lose it. Yet he must blindly serve in terror. The universe gives meagre gifts, and it does not care how they are spent.

Over Thessala, mankind fought in a civil war already centuries old. The Emperor of Mankind, a human with the power of a god, had tried and failed to unite humanity’s scattered worlds so that the species might survive the supernatural threat of Chaos. His sons, the primarchs, godlike beings He had created to complete this task, had themselves been corrupted, and half had turned against Him. The Horus Heresy, that war was called. It had ended the Emperor’s dream.

The Heresy was part of a war that had continued for aeons and would continue for aeons still.

To the beings of this galaxy, the war was everything; to the blank gaze of time, it was nothing. And yet, for all humanity’s seeming inconsequence, the children of its greatest son held the fates of two realities in their careless grasp.

Roboute Guilliman remained loyal to Terra. His ship was sternly decorated in gold, so much so that it rivalled that of Fulgrim’s vessel in ornamentation, but whereas the Gauntlet of Power was ornate, the Pride of the Emperor appeared vulgar. Its decoration had been applied with abandon – everything that could be adorned had been adorned. Back when the two ships had fought side by side, its extravagance had not been to the taste of the Ultramarines, who were born of more solemn worlds. Now it was an affront to decency, added to and added to again until tawdry obscured all trace of art. Neglect went hand in hand with this ostentation, and it made the Pride of the Emperor appear ugly. It was a decayed relic from a bygone age, like a theatre from a decadent century left to rot in the rain.

However, the Pride of the Emperor’s ability to mete out destruction remained undiminished. At point-blank range, it traded punishing blows with the Gauntlet of Power as the ships passed slowly alongside each other. Huge cannons flared, exchanging projectiles the size of transit containers. The space between became a deadly thicket of lance beams and laser light. Void shields blurred and sparked with the dissipation of mighty energies. Multi-hued lightning silenced communications and burst sub-systems with their feedback for thousands of miles around. Weaponry capable of levelling cities blinked and flashed on both sides.

Around these metal behemoths, dozens of other ships struggled in cosmic silence, some approaching the size and power of the flagships in their own right. Without exception, those on Fulgrim’s side were the damned ships of the Emperor’s Children. Though Fulgrim had lost his war and his humanity, his Legion yet held some cohesion. On Guilliman’s side fought half a dozen successor Chapters of the proud XIII Legion: the Ultramarines. Dissolution had been the price of faithfulness for the Legion of Ultramar, and though there were strengths in the smaller formations Guilliman had forced upon the Space Marines after the Great Heresy War, there were weaknesses also.

For all their primarch’s famed strategical genius, the loyalists had been out-manoeuvred and caught. Their pursuit of the fallen primarch had become a fight for survival. Three fleet elements of Emperor’s Children had pinned the loyalists into place above Thessala; Fulgrim had turned his flight from Xolco into a devastating trap.

Once, Roboute Guilliman would not have made such an error. Perhaps the dire situation over the emerald skies of Thessala was simple misfortune, and Fulgrim was no ordinary opponent, after all. Should Guilliman fail, history would surely be forgiving, if there were any good men left to write it.

Or perhaps the truth was that rage had clouded the Avenging Son’s judgement. Perhaps, some dared whisper, Roboute Guilliman had allowed his desire for revenge to overtake his reason.

Roboute Guilliman was stretched. Although several other primarchs still stood as champions of humanity, the wounded Imperium looked to Guilliman to save it. Every man has a limit, demigod or peasant, and Guilliman’s burden was the heaviest of all. He was the saviour of humanity.

The Pride of the Emperor heeled over, bringing its portside weapons batteries into better firing arcs. In response, the Gauntlet of Power intensified its barrage, and the void shield covering the Pride of the Emperor’s ventral towers winked out.

Explosions bloomed suddenly across hull plating encrusted with gold and filth.

An opening had been made.

On board the Gauntlet of Power, one hundred of Ultramar’s finest warriors waited on teleport blocks surrounded by buzzing machinery. They comprised fifty of the First Company and fifty of the Second, all garbed in the deep blue of the Ultramarines Chapter. The white helmets of the First Company’s veteran Space Marines, recessed under the cowls of Terminator armour, looked out at hundreds of tech-adepts and mortal crewmen labouring to prepare the Ultramarines’ way through the warp.

The Space Marines of the Second Company were in standard power armour, and were being equipped with tall breaching shields by arming servitors. Their battleplate lacked the sheer thickness of Terminator armour, and the shields, though bulky, would increase their survivability in the close-quarter fighting of the coming boarding.

Ammunition trains rumbled across the deck on plasteel wheels. Smartly uniformed Ultramarines Chapter menials handed out munitions to their masters while the enhanced warriors performed last-minute armour checks on themselves and their brothers. Chaplains strode from platform to platform, hearing oaths and affixing papers to armour with wax that hissed as they were impressed with sacred iron seals. Whether human or transhuman, every member of the Chapter worked with perfect efficiency. Even so, as invested as they were in their preparations, all of them had half an eye on the grand archway leading onto the deck.

The ship shook violently. Alarms blared. Lumens spat sparks and went dark. A section of gantry clanged down from the tangle of struts and pipes that clogged the ceiling high above. The crew continued upon its business with unhurried purpose. Orders were given to reroute power. Emergency teams of armoured voidsmen and specialised servitors began clearing the wreckage. All was restored to order.

Such calm made it easy to forget the punishing fire the ship was under. But there was no doubt that they were losing.

This was not how the battle was supposed to have gone.

From voxmitters studded into the columns and walls, a clipped voice sounded.

‘Shields down on the Pride of the Emperor. Prepare for assault.’ The words were swallowed by the clatter of preparation and tumult of war beating at the ship. They were not repeated, for the superior hearing of the Space Marines caught them all.

A clarion followed shortly, sharp and loud enough to be heard by mortal and transhuman alike. The servants of Ultramar stopped what they were doing and stood to attention.

A towering figure clad in the famous Armour of Reason strode through the archway. On his left hand he wore the Hand of Dominion. Belted at his waist was the Gladius Incandor. The bearer of these weapons was taller by far than the Invictarus Suzerain guard escorting him. He exuded a power and purpose that halted the breath of mortals in their throats.

‘First Captain Andros! Second Captain Thiel! Are your companies ready?’ the giant called.

The two captains crossed the floor to meet their lord. Second Captain Thiel was helmetless in power armour heavy with honours, while First Captain Andros was completely enclosed in a hulking suit of Terminator battleplate. They saluted their father the Ultramarian way, one fist across their chests – the old symbol of unity.

‘My Lord Guilliman! Your veterans await your command,’ said Andros, his voice ringing from the voxmitter set below his helm.

‘We stand prepared, my primarch,’ said Aeonid Thiel. His voice, rich and soft, was unmoderated by machinery. It was not so very long after the Heresy, and Thiel was still young for a Space Marine, though his face was lined with cares.

Guilliman looked down upon his captains resolutely. The primarch overtopped even Andros in his massive Terminator armour. He was a living god, humanity’s might captured and moulded as flesh.

Thiel gazed back, seemingly unable to take his eyes from the face of his gene-sire. Thiel was a good warrior, tested in battle many times, unafraid to voice his mind and modest enough to hide the love he had for his lord, but it shone in his face like a light.

Such devotion they bear me, thought Guilliman, even as I fail them.

There were so few of his original Legion left alive, and their replacements were born of a different, less certain era. Thiel’s regard was tempered by long friendship, and he had never lost his rebellious streak. The younger Space Marines were another matter. Guilliman remembered when his warriors had been less reverent. They had been better times.

‘We depart immediately,’ he said, his voice uncompromising. ‘The traitor will not escape again. The warriors of six Chapters stand ready to aid us. We shall not fail. To your stations – prepare for mass teleport.’

‘My lord, we are prepared,’ said Andros carefully. ‘But the enemy will outnumber us greatly. I am concerned for our chances of success. What is the practical action should resistance prove overwhelming? It is Second Captain Thiel’s and my opinion that you should remain here. We shall occupy the enemy, while the Gauntlet of Power withdraws. We cannot–’

The Avenging Son cut Andros dead with a look.

‘Too much blood has been shed on my behalf. I will not shy from this fight,’ Guilliman said, and his tone would brook no disagreement. ‘There can be no retreat until the Pride of the Emperor is crippled. I must face my brother and occupy him while these tasks are done. And if I must fight him, I will kill him, or I will die in the attempt. I cannot let him escape unpunished again. My sons,’ he added, his voice softening, ‘it is the only way to escape this trap.’

Andros bowed his helmeted head. Thiel paused a moment, uncertain, before doing the same. Sure of their agreement, Guilliman took his own helm from a grav-platform pushed by two mortal men. He mounted the teleport platform – stepping directly onto it with no need of the steps that led from the deck – and turned to address his sons.

‘Now, my warriors, let us show my brother the consequences of turning upon the Imperium of Terra!’

‘We march for Macragge!’ they bellowed, and their combined voices were enough to drown out the thunder of battle.

Guilliman’s Invictus Suzerain guard followed him onto the teleport pad. They formed a protective ring around him, their shields and power axes held up in a shield wall in preparation for teleportation directly into the jaws of battle.

To those around him, Guilliman was an infallible leader, his abilities supernatural. Even to the rational Ultramarines, who believed the Emperor of Mankind to be a man and not a god, and likewise His primarch sons, a sense of near-religious awe had crept into their attitude towards him. It had only become more pronounced since the last days of the Heresy.

But Roboute Guilliman was not infallible.

He knew this course of action to be fraught with risk. Andros had been right to raise the possibility of defeat. The primarch only wished he could praise his son for his insight rather than dismissing his concerns. His campaign against the Emperor’s Children had, to all purposes, failed. Fulgrim had the initiative. Guilliman’s choices had been made for him. The pieces were set on the board, there was only one option: they had to withdraw.

Currently, withdrawal was impossible. If the Gauntlet of Power broke off from the fight, then the Pride of the Emperor would inflict massive damage upon the battle-barge. Fulgrim would then most likely attempt a boarding assault of his own once their defences were shattered. Guilliman could not allow his brother to do that at a time of his choosing.

The primarch’s powerful mind had examined all possibilities. His own strategic treatises would have him retreat quickly, forming a fighting rearguard so that he might withdraw those of his ships that he could, minimising the damage to his flagship by sacrificing many of his others. Expending the lives of other men to save his own was not to Guilliman’s liking, especially when he saw a slim chance for true victory. He could not ignore this opportunity to slay his treacherous sibling. Guilliman had come to the conclusion that by defying his own tactical orthodoxies, he might surprise Fulgrim.

It was a slender chance. Fulgrim might well have dropped his ship’s shields on purpose, a mocking re-enactment of Horus’ last gambit to lure the Emperor aboard his ship at the end of the siege of Terra.

Guilliman had his own plans. Several boarding forces with independent but mutually supportive objectives would teleport in simultaneously with his own force. Teams drawn from multiple Chapters were tasked to head for the enginarium, the command deck, the navigatorium, the magazine, the subsidiary command deck and the main gunnery control. If only half of his strike teams were successful, they had a good chance of crippling the Pride of the Emperor from within. His warriors had orders to withdraw immediately once their objectives had been achieved. He would make sure as many survived as possible; he would not let his sons pay the price for his mistakes.

He had to settle the reckoning for his own errors.

Guilliman could not deny he had been hooked and played like a fish. All he could do was struggle free and bite the one who had snared him.

‘Make ready! We go to war!’ he called.

At his signal, the machines of the teleport deck hummed into life. Giant reaction columns crackled with immense power, feeding the focusing arrays that would tear open the veil between realspace and the warp. They glowed with painful light. As they shone brighter, curls of materialising corposant were leached from initiation prongs and fed into containment flasks, where it twisted as if alive.

So many of my brothers are dead, fallen to Chaos or lost, thought Guilliman. We assumed we were immortal. We are not. My time must come, but not today. Not at the hands of Fulgrim.

The arcane machineries of teleportation whooped and hummed, the deck vibrating with their activity. The tumult built to a crescendo.

A booming crack and flash of actinic light whited out the teleport deck. Suppressant vapours gushed from wide-mouthed tubes in anticipation of fires from over-stressed machinery. Human armsmen raised their shotguns in case of warp breach and daemonic incursion.

None came. Signal strobes blinked: red, red, red, then blue.

‘Teleport success, teleport success,’ droned a mechanical voice.

The lumens came back on. Corposant flasks emptied to the sounds of half-formed screams. Atmospheric vents drew smoke away, revealing empty pads. Adepts consulted vid screens and paper cogitator strips, and relief crossed their faces at the readouts.

Roboute Guilliman and his warriors were aboard the Pride of the Emperor.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by David Sondered.

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ISBN: 978-1-78999-484-1

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