The Dark Path

Gav Thorpe

Fields of golden crop bent gently in a magical breeze as the palace of Prince Thyriol floated across Saphery. A shimmering vision of white and silver towers and dove-wing buttresses, the citadel eased across the skies with the stately grace of a cloud. Slender minarets and spiralling steeples rose in circles surrounding a central gilded needle that glimmered with magic.

The farmers glanced up at the familiar beauty of the citadel and returned to their labours. If any of them wondered what events passed within the capital, none made mention of it to their companions. From the ground the floating citadel appeared as serene and ordered as ever, a reassuring vision to those that wondered when the war with the Naggarothi would come to their lands.

In truth, the palace was anything but peaceful.

Deep within the alabaster spires, Prince Thyriol strode to a wooden door at the end of a long corridor and tried to open it. The door was barred and magically locked. There were numerous counter-spells with which he could negotiate the obstacle, but he was in no mood for such things. Thyriol laid his hand upon the white-painted planks of the door and summoned the wind of fire. As his growing anger fanned the magic, the paint blistered and the planks charred under his touch. As Thyriol contemplated the treachery he had suffered, and his own blindness to it, the invisible flames burned faster and deeper than any natural fire. Within ten heartbeats the door collapsed into cinders and ash.

Revealed within was a coterie of elves. They looked up at their prince, startled and fearful. Bloody entrails were scattered on the bare stone floor, arranged in displeasing patterns that drew forth Dark Magic. They sat amidst a number of dire tomes bound with black leather and skin. Candles made of bubbling fat flickered dully on stands made from blackened iron. Sorcery seethed in the air, making Thyriol’s gums itch and slicking his skin with its oily touch.

The missing mages were all here, forbidden runes painted upon their faces with blood, fetishes of bone and sinew dangling around their necks. Thyriol paid them no heed. All of his attention was fixed upon one elf, the only one who showed no sign of fear.

Words escaped Thyriol. The shame and sense of betrayal that filled Thyriol was beyond any means of expression, though some of it showed in the prince’s face, twisted into a feral snarl even as tears of fire formed in his eyes.

Faerie lights glittered from extended fingertips and silver coronas shimmered around faces fixed in concentration as the young mages practised their spells. Visions of distant lands wavered in the air and golden clouds of protection wreathed around the robed figures. The air seemed to bubble with magical energy, the winds of magic made almost visible by the spells of the apprentices.

The students formed a semicircle around their tutors at the centre of a circular, domed hall – the Grand Chamber. The white wall was lined with alcoves containing sculptures of marble depicting the greatest mages of Ulthuan; some in studious repose, others in the flow of flamboyant conjurations, according to the tastes of successive generations of sculptors. All were austere, looking down with stern but not unkindly expressions on future generations. Their looks of strict expectation were repeated on the faces of Prince Thyriol and Menreir.

‘You are speaking too fast,’ Thyriol told Ellinithil, youngest of the would-be mages, barely two hundred years old. ‘Let the spell form as words in your mind before you speak.’

Ellinithil nodded, brow furrowed. He started the conjuration again but stuttered the first few words.

‘You are not concentrating,’ Thyriol said softly, laying a reassuring hand on the young elf’s shoulder. He raised his voice to address the whole class. ‘Finish your incantations safely and then listen to me.’

The apprentices dissipated the magic they had been weaving; illusions vapourised into air, magical flames flickered and dimmed into darkness. As each finished, he or she turned to the prince. All were intent, but none more so that Anamedion, Thyriol’s eldest grandson. Anamedion’s eyes bore into his grandfather as if by his gaze alone he could prise free the secrets of magic locked inside Thyriol’s mind.

‘Celabreir,’ said Thyriol, gesturing to one of the students to step forward. ‘Conjure Emendeil’s Flame for me.’

Celabreir glanced uncertainly at her fellow apprentices. The spell was one of the simplest to cast, often learnt in childhood even before any formal teaching had begun. With a shrug, the elf whispered three words of power and held up her right hand, fingers splayed. A flickering golden glow emanated from her fingertips, barely enough to light her slender face and brazen hair.

‘Good,’ said Thyriol. ‘Now, end it and cast it again.’

Celabreir dispersed the magic energy with a flick of her wrist, her fingertips returning to normal. Just as she opened her mouth to begin the incantation again, Thyriol spoke.

‘Do you breathe in or out when you cast a spell?’ he asked.

A frown knotted Celabreir’s brow for a moment. Distracted, she missed a syllable in the spell. Shaking her head, she tried again, but failed.

‘What have you done to me, prince?’ she asked plaintively. ‘Is this some counter-spell you are using?’

Thyriol laughed gently, as did Menreir. Thyriol nodded for the other mage to explain the lesson and returned to his high-backed throne at the far end of the hall.

‘You are thinking about how you breathe, aren’t you?’ said Menreir.

‘I… Yes, I am, master,’ said Celabreir, her shoulders slumping. ‘I don’t know whether I breathe in or out when I cast. I can’t remember, but if I think about it I realise that I might be doing it differently because I am aware of it now.’

‘And so you are no longer concentrating on your control of the magic,’ said Menreir. ‘A spell you could cast without effort you now find… problematic. Even the most basic spells are still fickle if you do not have total focus. The simplest distraction – an overheard whisper or a flicker of movement in the corner of the eye – can be the difference between success and failure. Knowing this, who can tell me why Ellinithil is having difficulty?’

‘He is thinking about the words and not the spell,’ said Anamedion, a hint of contempt in his voice. He made no attempt to hide his boredom. ‘The more he worries about his pronunciation, the more distracted his inner voice.’

‘That’s right,’ said Thyriol, quelling a stab of annoyance. Anamedion had not called Menreir ‘master’, a title to which he had had earned over many centuries, a sign of growing disrespect that Thyriol would have to address. ‘Most of you already have the means to focus the power you need for some of the grandest enchantments ever devised by our people, but until you can cast them without effort or thought, that power is useless to you. Remember that the smallest magic can go a long way.’

‘There is another way to overcome these difficulties,’ said Anamedion, stepping forward. ‘Why do you not teach us that?’

Thyriol regarded Anamedion for a moment, confused.

‘Control is the only means to master true magic,’ said the prince.

Anamedion shook his head, and half-turned, addressing the other students as much as his grandfather.

‘There is a way to tap into magic, unfettered by incantation and ritual,’ said Anamedion. ‘Shaped by instinct and powered by raw magic, it is possible to cast the greatest spells of all.’

‘You speak of sorcery,’ said Menreir quickly, throwing a cautioning look at the apprentices. ‘Sorcery brings only two things: madness and death. If you lack the will and application to be a mage, then you will certainly not live long as a sorcerer. If Ellinithil or Celabreir falter with pure magic, the spell simply fails. If one miscasts a sorcerous incantation, the magic does not return to the winds. It must find a place to live, in your body or your mind. Even when sorcery is used successfully, it leaves a taint, on the world and in the spirit. It corrupts one’s thoughts and stains the winds of magic. Do not even consider using it.’

‘Tell me from where you have heard such things,’ said Thyriol. ‘Who has put these thoughts in your mind?’

‘Oh, here and there,’ said Anamedion with a shrug and a slight smile. ‘One hears about the druchii sorcerers quite often if one actually leaves the palace. I have heard that any sorcerer is a match for three Sapherian mages in power.’

‘Then you have heard wrong,’ said Thyriol patiently. ‘The mastery of magic is not about power. Any fool can pick up a sword and hack at a lump of wood until he has kindling, but a true woodsman knows to use axe and hatchet and knife. Sorcery is a blunt instrument, capable only of destruction, not creation. Sorcery could not have built this citadel, nor could sorcery have enchanted our fields to be rich with grain. Sorcery burns and scars and leaves nothing behind.’

‘And yet Anlec was built with sorcery,’ countered Anamedion.

‘Anlec is sustained by sorcery, but it was built by Caledor Dragontamer, who used only pure magic,’ Thyriol replied angrily.

He shot glances at the others in the room, searching for some sign that they paid undue attention to Anamedion’s arguments. There was rumour, whispered and incoherent, that some students, and even some mages, had begun to experiment with sorcery. It was so hard for Thyriol to tell. Dark Magic had been rising for decades, fuelled by the rituals and sacrifices of the Naggarothi and their cultist allies. It polluted the magical vortex of Ulthuan, twisting the Winds of Magic with its presence.

They had found druchii sorcerers hidden in the wilder parts of Saphery, in the foothills of the mountains, trying to teach their corrupted ways to the misguided. Some of the sorcerers had been slain, others had fled, forewarned of their discovery by fellow cultists. It was to protect the young from this corruption that Thyriol had brought the most talented Sapherians here, to learn from him and his most powerful mages. That Anamedion brought talk of sorcery into the capital was a grave concern. Saphethion, of all places, had to be free of the taint of Dark Magic, for the corruption of the power in the citadel could herald victory for the Naggarothi.

‘I am glad you have found us,’ Anamedion said with no hint of regret or shame. ‘I have longed to shed our secrecy, but the others insisted on this subterfuge.’

The mention of the other mages broke Thyriol’s focus and he took in the rest of the faces, settling on the blood-daubed features of Illeanith. This brought a fresh surge of anguish and he gave a choked gasp and lurched to one side, saved from falling only by the burnt frame of the doorway. He had been disappointed but not surprised by Anamedion’s presence. Seeing Illeanith was one shock too many.

It was as if daggers had been plunged into Thyriol’s heart and gut, a physical agony that writhed inside him, pulling away all sense and reason. The mages who had come with Thyriol began to shout and hurl accusations, but Thyriol heard nothing, just the arrhythmic thundering of his heart and a distant wailing in his head. Through a veil of tears and the waves of dismay welling up inside of him, Thyriol watched numbly as the sorcerers drew away from the door, adding their own voices to the cacophony.

‘Everyone but Anamedion, leave me,’ Thyriol commanded. ‘Menreir, I will call for you when I am finished. We must discuss the latest messages from King Caledor.’

The mage and students bowed their acquiescence and left silently. Anamedion stood defiantly before the throne, arms crossed. Thyriol put aside his anger and looked at his grandson with sympathetic eyes.

‘You are gifted, Anamedion,’ said the prince. ‘If you would but show a little more patience, there is no limit to what you might achieve in time.’

‘What is it that you are afraid of?’ countered Anamedion.

‘I am afraid of damnation,’ Thyriol replied earnestly, leaning forward. ‘You have heard the myths of sorcery, while I have seen it first-hand. You think it is perhaps a quick way to achieve your goals, but you are wrong. The path is just as long for the sorcerer as it is for the mage. You think that Morathi and her ilk have not made terrible sacrifices, of their spirit and their bodies, to gain the power they have? You think that they simply wave a hand and destroy armies on a whim? No, they have not and do not. Terrible bargains they have made, bargains with powers we would all do better to avoid. Trust me, Anamedion, we call it Dark Magic for good reason.’

Anamedion still looked unconvinced, but he changed his approach.

‘What good does it do us to spend a century learning spells when the druchii march against us now?’ he said. ‘King Caledor needs us with his armies, fighting the Naggarothi sorcerers. You speak of the future, but unless we act now, there may be no future. For seven years I have listened to the stories of horror, of war, engulfing Tiranoc and Chrace and Ellyrion. Cothique and Eataine are under attack. Must the fields of Saphery burn before you do something?’

Thyriol shook his head, fighting his frustration.

‘I would no more send lambs to fight a lion than I would pit the skills of my students against Morathi’s coven,’ said the prince. ‘There are but a dozen mages in all of Saphery that I would trust to fight the druchii in battle, myself included.’

‘Then fight!’ Anamedion demanded, pacing towards the throne, fists balled. ‘Caledor begs for your aid and you are deaf to his requests. Why did you choose him as Phoenix King if you will not follow him?’

Thyriol glanced away for a moment, looking through the narrow arched windows that surrounded the hall. He did not see the greying autumn skies, his mind wandering to the ancient past. He saw a magic-blistered battlefield, where daemons rampaged and thousands of elves died screaming in agony. He saw the most powerful wizards of an age holding back the tides of Chaos while the Dragontamer conjured his vortex.

His memories shifted, to a time more recent but no less painful. His saw Naggarothi warriors, skin ruptured, hair flaming, falling from the battlements of Anlec while he soared overhead atop the back of a pegasus. Depraved cultists, dedicated to obscene sacrifice, wailed their curses even as lightning from Thyriol’s staff crackled through their bodies.

War brought nothing but evil, even when fought for a just cause. Shaking his head to dismiss the waking nightmare, Thyriol returned his attention to Anamedion, his heart heavy.

‘Your father thought the same, and now he is dead,’ Thyriol said quietly.

‘And your cowardice makes his sacrifice vain,’ Anamedion growled. ‘Perhaps it is not Dark Magic that you fear, but death. Has your life lasted so long that you would protect it now at any cost?’

At this, Thyriol’s frayed temper finally snapped.

‘You accuse me of cowardice?’ he said, stalking from his throne towards Anamedion, who stood his ground and returned the prince’s glare. ‘I fought beside Aenarion and the Dragontamer, and never once flinched from battle. Thirty years ago I fought beside Malekith when Anlec was retaken. You have never seen war, and no nothing of its nature, so do not accuse me of cowardice!’

‘And you throw back at me accusations that I cannot counter,’ Anamedion replied, fists clenching and unclenching with exasperation. ‘You say I do not know war, yet condemn me to idle away my years in this place, closeted away from harm because you fear I will suffer the same fate as my father! Do you have so little confidence in me?’

‘I do,’ said Thyriol. ‘You have your father’s wilfulness and your mother’s stubbornness. Why could you not be more like your younger brother, Elathrinil? He is studious and attentive… and obedient.’

‘Elathrinil is diligent but dull,’ replied Anamedion with a scornful laugh. ‘Another century or two and he may make an adequate mage, but there is no greatness in him.’

‘Do not crave greatness,’ said Thyriol. ‘Many have been dashed upon the cliffs of their own ambition, do not repeat their mistakes.’

‘So says the ruling prince of Saphery, friend of Aenarion, last surviving member of the First Council and greatest mage in Ulthuan,’ said Anamedion. ‘Maybe I have been wrong. It is not battle or death that you fear, it is me! You are jealous of my talent, fearful that your own reputation will be eclipsed by mine. Perhaps my star will rise higher than yours while you still cling to this world with the last strength in your fingers. You guard what you have gained and dare not risk anything. You profess wisdom and insight, but actually you are selfish and envious.’

‘Get out!’ roared Thyriol. Anamedion flinched as if struck. ‘Get out of my sight! I will not have you in my presence again until you apologise for these lies. You have done nothing today but proven to me that you are unfit to rule Saphery. Think long and hard, Anamedion, about what you want. Do not tarnish me with your vain ambitions. Go!’

Anamedion hesitated, his face showing a moment of contrition, but it passed swiftly, replaced by a stare of keen loathing. With a wordless snarl, he turned his back on his grandfather and strode from the room.

Thyriol stumbled back to his throne and almost fell into it, drained by his outburst. He slumped there for a moment, thoughts reeling, ashamed of his own anger. Righteousness contended with guilt, neither winning a decisive victory. What if Anamedion was right? What if he really was jealous of the youth’s prowess, knowing that his own existence was waning fast?

Closing his eyes, Thyriol whispered a few mantras of focus and dismissed his self-examination. The fault was not with the prince, but with his grandchild. For decades he had known that there was something amiss with Anamedion, but had turned a blind eye upon his deficiencies. Now that Thyriol had finally given open voice to his doubts, and Anamedion declared his own misgivings, perhaps the two of them could move on and resolve their differences.

With a sigh, Thyriol straightened himself and sat in the throne properly. Anamedion’s small rebellion was a distraction, one that Thyriol could not deal with immediately. He had Caledor’s messenger waiting, eager to return to the Phoenix King with Thyriol’s answer. The world was being torn apart by war and bloodshed, and against that the petulant protests and naïve philosophies of a grandson seemed insignificant.

Thyriol twitched a finger and in the depths of the palace a silver bell rang to announce that the prince of Saphery wished to be attended.

Anamedion felt the other sorcerers opening the portal they had created for just this situation. The shadow at the back of their hiding place deepened, merging with the shadows of a cave some distance from the palace’s current location. Something seethed in the shadow’s depths, a formless bulk shifting its weight just outside of mortal comprehension.

Hadryana and Meledir lunged through the portal without word, fearful of Thyriol’s wrath. They were soon followed by the other students and Alluthian, leaving only Illeanith and Anamedion.

‘Come!’ commanded his mother, grabbing him by the arm. Anamedion shook free her grasp and looked at his grandfather.

Thyriol was a broken creature. Anamedion saw an elf near the end of his years, frail and tired, his own misery seeping through every fibre of his being. There was no fight left in him.

‘I am not ashamed,’ said Anamedion. ‘I am not afraid.’

‘We must leave!’ insisted Illeanith. Anamedion turned to her and pushed her towards the shadow-portal.

‘Then go! I will send for you soon,’ he said. ‘This will not take long, mother.’

Illeanith hesitated for a moment, torn between love of her son and fear of her father. Fear won and she plunged through the tenebrous gateway, disappearing into the dark fog.

When Anamedion returned his attention to Thyriol, he saw that the prince had straightened and regained his composure. For a moment, doubt gnawed at Anamedion. Perhaps he had misjudged the situation. Thyriol’s look changed from one of horror to one of pity and this threw fuel onto the fire of Anamedion’s anger. His momentary fear evaporated like the illusion it was.

‘I will prove how weak you have become,’ said Anamedion.

‘Surrender, or suffer the consequences,’ growled Menreir, blue flames dancing from his eyes.

‘Do not interfere!’ Thyriol told his mages, waving them back. The pity drained from his face and was replaced by his usual calm expression. In a way, it was more chilling than the prince’s anger. ‘I will deal with this.’

Anamedion knew that he must strike first. He allowed the Dark Magic to coil up through his body, leeching its power from where it lurked within and around the Winds of Magic. He felt it crackling along his veins, quickening his heart, setting his mind afire. Uttering a curse of Ereth Khial, Anamedion threw forward his hand and a bolt of black lightning leapt from his fingertips.

A moment from striking Thyriol, the spell burst into a shower of golden dust that fluttered harmlessly to the bare stone floor.

Only now did Anamedion see the counterspells woven into his grandfather’s robe. The sorcerer’s cruel smile faded. The prince’s body was steeped in magic, subtle and layered. Dark Magic pulsed once more, bolstering Anamedion’s confidence. Thyriol’s defences mattered not at all; the wardings were many but thin, easily penetrated by the power Anamedion could now wield.

The view was breathtaking from the wide balcony atop the Tower of Alin-Haith, the vast panorama of Ulthuan laid out around the four mages. To the south and north stretched the farms and gentle hills of Saphery, bathed in the afternoon sun. To the west glittered the Inner Sea, barely visible on the horizon. To the east the majestic peaks of the Anullii Mountains rose from beyond the horizon, grey and purple and tipped with white. Thyriol noted storm clouds gathering over the mountains to the north, sensing within them the Dark Magic that had gathered in the vortex over the past decades.

‘I am going to tell Caledor that I will not open the Tor Anroc gateway,’ the prince announced, not looking at his companions.

The three other wizards were Menreir, Alethin and Illeanith, the last being Thyriol’s daughter, his only child. Thinking of her led the prince’s thoughts back to Anamedion and he pushed them aside and turned to face the others.

‘I cannot risk the druchii taking control of the gateway from the other end,’ Thyriol explained.

The palace of Saphethion was more than a floating castle. It was able to drift effortlessly through the skies because the magic woven into its foundations placed it slightly apart from time and space. From the outside the palace appeared beautiful and serene, but within there existed a maze of halls and rooms, corridors and passages far larger than could be contained within normal walls. Some of those rooms were not even upon Saphethion itself, but lay in other cities: Lothern, Tor Yvresse, Montieth and others. Most importantly, one of the isle-spanning gateways led to Tor Anroc, currently occupied by the army of Nagarythe.

As soon as he had found out that the city had fallen into the hands of the druchii, Thyriol had closed the gate, putting its enchantments into stasis. Now the Phoenix King wanted Thyriol to reopen the gate so that he might send agents into Tor Anroc, perhaps even an army.

‘Caledor’s plan has much merit, father,’ said Illeanith. ‘Surprise would be total. It is unlikely that the druchii are even aware of the gateway’s existence, for none of them have ever used it.’

‘I wish to keep it that way,’ said Thyriol. ‘The wards upon the gate can resist the attentions of any normal druchii sorcerer, but I would rather not test their strength against the magic of Morathi. Even the knowledge that such gateways can exist would be dangerous, for I have no doubt that she would find some means to create her own. On a more mundane point, I cannot make the gate work only one way. Once it is open, the druchii can use it to enter Saphethion, and that puts us all at risk.’

‘The Phoenix King will be disappointed, lord,’ said Menreir.

‘The Phoenix King will be angry,’ Thyriol corrected him. ‘Yet it is not the first time I have refused him.’

‘I am not so sure that the druchii are still unaware of the gateways, prince,’ said Alethin. ‘There are few that can be trusted these days with any secret, and I am sure that there are Sapherians who once served in the palace now in the employ of the cults, or at least sympathetic to their cause. Even within the palace we have found texts smuggled in by agents of the druchii to sow confusion and recruit support.’

‘That gives me even more reason to be cautious,’ said Thyriol, leaning his back against the parapet. ‘Tor Anroc is shrouded in shadow, protected from our augurs and divinations. Perhaps the druchii have discovered the gateway and guard it, or even now work to unravel its secrets. The moment it is opened, it will be like a white flare in the mind of Morathi – I cannot hide such magic from her scrying.’

‘Forgive me, prince, but to what end do you tell us this?’ said Menreir. ‘If your mind is set, simply send the messenger back to Caledor. We are no council to give our approval.’

Thyriol was taken aback by the question, for the answer seemed plain enough to him.

‘I had hoped that you might have some argument to change my mind,’ he said. Sighing, he cast his gaze back towards the mountains and when he continued his voice was quiet, wistful. ‘I have lived a long, long time. I have known the heights of happiness, and plunged into the depths of despair. Even when the daemons bayed at the walls of Anlec and the night lasted an eternity, I had hope. Now? Now I can see no hope, for there can be no victory when elves fight other elves. I wish an attack or Tor Anroc, an assault on Anlec, could end this war, but there is no such simple ploy. Not armed force or great magic will end this conflict. We are at war with ourselves and the only peace that can last must come from within us.’

‘Do not do this,’ Thyriol warned.

‘You are in no position to give me commands,’ snapped Anamedion. A sword of black flame appeared in his fist and he leapt forwards to strike. Menreir stepped in the way, out of instinct to save the prince, and the ethereal blade passed through his chest. In moments the mage’s body disintegrated into a falling cloud of grey ash.

Anamedion swung back-handed at Thyriol, but a shimmering shield of silver energy appeared on the mage’s arm and the flaming blade evaporated into a wisp of smoke at its touch.

‘You cannot control the power needed to defeat me,’ Thyriol said. He was already breathing heavily, and Anamedion heard the words as nothing but an empty boast.

Dispelling the warding that surrounded the room, Anamedion reached out further into the winds of magic, drawing in more and more dark power. A black cloud enveloped him, swirling and churning with its own life, flashes and glitters in its depths. He urged the cloud forward and for a moment it engulfed Thyriol, cloying and choking.

A white light appeared at the cloud’s centre and the magic boiled away, revealing Thyriol unharmed, glowing from within. Anamedion could see that his grandfather’s pull on the winds of magic was becoming fitful and saw a chance to finish him off. Taking a deep breath Anamedion reached out as far as he could, a surge of sorcery pouring into his body and mind.

Thyriol felt a hand upon his back and turned his head to see Illeanith next to him.

‘Anamedion told me that you have banished him from your presence,’ she said. ‘He is stubborn, but he is also brave and strong and willing to prove himself. Please end this dispute. Do not make me choose between my father and my son.’

‘There are no words that will lift the veil of a mother’s love for her son,’ replied the prince.

‘You think me blind to my son’s faults?’ snapped Illeanith, stepping back. ‘Perhaps I see more than you think, prince. Other matters are always more important to you. For over a thousand years you have lived in the mystical realm; you no longer remember what it is to be flesh and blood. I think that a part of you was trapped with the other mages on the Isle of the Dead, a part of your spirit if not your body. Anamedion has not seen the things you have seen, and you make no attempt to show them to him. You think that you guard him against danger, but that is no way to prepare him for princehood. He must learn who he is, to know his own mind. He is not you, father, he is himself, and you must accept that.’

Illeanith glanced at the other two mages with an apologetic look and then disappeared down the steps from the balcony.

‘I miss her, mother,’ sighed Thyriol, leaning over the wall to peer down at the courtyard of the palace where armour-clad guards drilled in disciplined lines of silver and gold. ‘She helped me remember how to stay in this world. Maybe it is time I moved on, let slip this fragile grip that I have kept these last hundred years. I wish I had died in peace, like Miranith. One should not be born in war and die in war…’

The other two mages remained silent as Thyriol’s words drifted into a whisper, knowing that Thyriol was talking to himself, no longer aware of their presence. They exchanged a knowing, worried glance and followed Illeanith from the tower, each fearful of their prince’s deterioration.

‘Sorcery is not an end in itself, it is just a means,’ said Anamedion. ‘It need not be evil.’

‘The means can corrupt the end,’ replied Thyriol quietly, his hoarse whisper further proof of his infirmity. ‘Just because we can do a thing, it is not right that we should do a thing.’

‘Nonsense,’ spat Anamedion, unleashing his next spell. Flames of purple and blue roared from his hands, lapping at Thyriol. The ancient mage writhed under its power, sparks of gold and green magic bursting from him as he deflected the worst of the spell, though it still brought him to one knee. ‘You’ll have to kill me to prove it!’

‘I will not kill my own kin,’ wheezed Thyriol.

‘I will,’ said Anamedion with a glint in his eye.

Anamedion could feel only Dark Magic in the chamber and knew that the prince’s resistance was all but over. All he needed was another overwhelming attack and this would be finished. He would become prince of Saphery as was his right, and they would take the war to the Naggarothi.

Grasping the fetish at his throat, the rune-carved knuckle bones burning his palm, Anamedion incanted words of power, feasting on the sorcery that was now roiling within every part of his body. He visualised a monstrous dragon, drew it in the air with his mind’s eye. He saw its ebon fangs and the black fire that flickered from its mouth. Thyriol attempted a dispel, directing what little remained of the winds of magic, trying to unpick the enchantment being woven by Anamedion.

Anamedion drew on more Dark Magic, swamping the counterspell with power. He focussed all his thoughts on the spell, as Thyriol had once warned him he must. He had no time to appreciate the irony, all his mind was bent on the conjuration. He could see the shimmering scales and the veins on the membranes of the dragon’s wings. The apparition started to form before Anamedion, growing more real with every passing heartbeat.

In a moment the dragon-spell would engulf Thyriol, crushing the last breath from his body.

Thyriol waited patiently in the Hall of Stars, gazing up at the window at the centre of the hall’s ceiling. It showed a starry sky, though outside the palace it was not yet noon. The scene was of the night when the hall had been built, the auspicious constellations and alignments captured for all eternity by magic. Thyriol had come here countless times to gaze at the beauty of the heavens and knew every sparkling star as well as he knew himself.

A delicate cough from the doorway attracted Thyriol’s attention. Menreir stood just inside the hall, a cluster of fellow mages behind him and a worried-looking servant at his side.

‘We cannot find Anamedion,’ said Menreir. ‘Also, Illeanith, Hadryana, Alluthian and Meledir are missing, along with half a dozen of the students.’

Thyriol took this news without comment. The prince closed his eyes and felt Saphethion around him. He knew every stone of the palace, the magic that seeped within the mortar, the flow of energy that bound every stone. The golden needle pulsed rhythmically at its centre and the winds of magic coiled and looped around the corridors and halls. He could feel every living creature too, each a distinctive eddy in the winds of magic. It would not take long to locate his grandson.

But it was not Anamedion that Thyriol found first. In a chamber beneath the Mausoleum of the Dawn, there was a strange whirl of mystical power. It flowed around the room and not through it, masking whatever was within: a warding spell, one that Thyriol had not conjured. It was subtle, just the slightest disturbance in the normal flow. Only Thyriol, who had created every spell and charm that sustained Saphethion, would have noticed the anomaly.

‘Come with me,’ he commanded the mages as he pushed through the group. He showed no outward sign of vexation, but Thyriol’s stomach had lurched. Mages were free to use their magic in the palace, why would one seek to hide their conjurations? He suspected sorcery. Despite his reasons for being in the Hall of Stars, this was more pressing than his division with Anamedion. His grandson would have to wait a while longer for their reconciliation.

Thyriol whispered something, almost bent double, his eyes fixed on his grandson. Anamedion did not hear what the prince had said. Was it some final counterspell? Perhaps an admission of wrong? A plea for mercy?

For the moment Anamedion wondered what Thyriol had said, his mind strayed from the spell. The distraction lasted only a heartbeat but it was too late. The Dark Magic churning inside Anamedion slipped from his grasp. He struggled to control it, but it wriggled from his mind, coiling into his heart, flooding his lungs. Choking and gasping, Anamedion swayed as his veins crackled with power and his eyes melted. He tried to wail but only black flames erupted from his burning throat. The pain was unbearable, every part of his body and mind shrieked silently as the sorcery consumed him.

With a last spasm, Anamedion collapsed, his body shrivelling and blackening. With a dry thump, his corpse hit the ground, wisps of thick smoke issuing from his empty eye sockets.

Thyriol knelt down beside the remains of his grandson. For the moment he felt nothing, but he knew he would grieve later. He would feel the guilt of what he had done, though it had been unavoidable. Thoughts of grief recalled the death of Menreir, his oldest friend. Thyriol had barely noticed his destruction, so engrossed had he been in his duel with Anamedion. Another link to the past taken away; another piece of the future destroyed.

‘What did you whisper?’ asked Urian, his eyes fixed upon the contorted remnants of Anamedion. ‘Some dispel of your own creation?’

Thyriol shook his head sadly at the suggestion.

‘I cast no spell,’ he replied. ‘I merely whispered the name of his grandmother. His lack of focus killed him.’

Thyriol stood and faced the mages clustered around the blackened doorway. His expression hardened.

‘Anamedion was young, and stupid, and ignored my warnings,’ said the prince. ‘Illeanith and the other sorcerers will not be so easy to defeat. There will be more of them than we have seen. The war has finally come to Saphery.’

Exhumed

Steve Parker

The Thunderhawk gunship loomed out of the clouds like a monstrous bird of prey, wings spread, turbines growling, airbrakes flared to slow it for landing. It was black, its fuselage marked with three symbols: the Imperial aquila, noble and golden; the ‘I’ of the Emperor’s holy Inquisition, a symbol even the righteous knew better than to greet gladly; and another symbol, a skull cast in silver with a gleaming red, cybernetic eye. Derlon Saezar didn’t know that one, had never seen it before, but it sent a chill up his spine all the same. Whichever august Imperial body the symbol represented was obviously linked to the holy Inquisition. That couldn’t be good news.

Eyes locked to his vid-monitor, Saezar watched tensely as the gunship banked hard towards the small landing facility he managed, its prow slicing through the veils of windblown dust like a knife through silk. There was a burst of static-riddled speech on his headset. In response, he tapped several codes into the console in front of him, keyed his microphone and said, ‘Acknowledged, One-Seven-One. Clearance codes accepted. Proceed to Bay Four. This is an enclosed atmosphere facility. I’m uploading our safety and debarkation protocols to you now. Over.’

His fingers rippled over the console’s runeboard, and the massive metal jaws of Bay Four began to grate open, ready to swallow the unwelcome black craft. Thick toxic air rushed in. Breathable air rushed out. The entire facility shuddered and groaned in complaint, as it always did when a spacecraft came or went. The Adeptus Mechanicus had built this station, Orga Station, quickly and with the minimum systems and resources it would need to do its job. No more, no less. It was a rusting, dust-scoured place, squat and ugly on the outside, dank and gloomy within. Craft arrived, craft departed. Those coming in brought slaves, servitors, heavy machinery, fuel. Saezar didn’t know what those leaving carried. The magos who had hired him had left him in no doubt that curiosity would lead to the termination of more than his contract. Saezar was smart enough to believe it. He and his staff kept their heads down and did their jobs. In another few years, the tech-priests would be done here. They had told him as much. He would go back to Jacero then, maybe buy a farm with the money he’d have saved, enjoy air that didn’t kill you on the first lungful.

That thought called up a memory Saezar would have given a lot to erase. Three weeks ago, a malfunction in one of the Bay Two extractors left an entire work crew breathing this planet’s lethal air. The bay’s vid-picters had caught it all in fine detail, the way the technicians and slaves staggered in agony towards the emergency airlocks, clawing at their throats while blood streamed from their mouths, noses and eyes.

Twenty-three men dead. It had taken only seconds, but Saezar knew the sight would be with him for life. He shook himself, trying to cast the memory off.

The Thunderhawk had passed beyond the outer picters’ field of view. Saezar switched to Bay Four’s internal picters and saw the big black craft settle heavily on its landing stanchions. Thrusters cooled. Turbines whined down towards silence. The outer doors of the landing bay clanged shut. Saezar hit the winking green rune on the top right of his board and flooded the bay with the proper nitrogen-oxygen mix. When his screen showed everything was in the green, he addressed the pilot of the Thunderhawk again.

‘Atmosphere restored, One-Seven-One. Bay Four secure. Free to debark.’

There was a brief grunt in answer. The Thunderhawk’s front ramp lowered. Yellow light spilled out from inside, illuminating the black metal grille of the bay floor. Shadows appeared in that light – big shadows – and, after a moment, the figures that cast them began to descend the ramp. Saezar leaned forwards, face close to his screen.

‘By the Throne,’ he whispered to himself.

With his right hand, he manipulated one of the bay picters by remote, zooming in on the figure striding in front. It was massive, armoured in black ceramite, its face hidden beneath a cold, expressionless helm. On one great pauldron, the left, Saezar saw the same skull icon that graced the ship’s prow. On the right, he saw another skull on a field of white, two black scythes crossed behind it. Here was yet another icon Saezar had never seen before, but he knew well enough the nature of the being that bore it. He had seen such beings rendered in paintings and stained glass, cut from marble or cast in precious metal. It was a figure of legend, and it was not alone. Behind it, four others, similarly armour-clad but each bearing different iconography on their right pauldrons, marched in formation.

Saezar’s heart was in his throat. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry. He had never expected to see such beings with his own eyes. No one did. They were heroes from the stories his father had read to him, stories told to all children of the Imperium to give them hope, to help them sleep at night. Here they were in flesh and bone and metal.

Here! At Orga Station!

And there was a further incredible sight yet to come. Just as the five figures stepped onto the grille-work floor, something huge blotted out all the light from inside the craft. The Thunderhawk’s ramp shook with thunderous steps. Something incredible emerged on two stocky, piston-like legs. It was vast and angular and impossibly powerful-looking, like a walking tank with fists instead of cannon.

It was a Dreadnought, and, even among such legends as these, it was in a class of its own.

Saezar felt a flood of conflicting emotion, equal parts joy and dread.

The Space Marines had come to Menatar, and where they went, death followed.

‘Menatar,’ said the tiny hunched figure, more to himself than to any of the black-armoured giants he shared the pressurised mag-rail carriage with. ‘Second planet of the Ozyma-138 system, Hatha sub-sector, Ultima Segmentum. Solar orbital period, one-point-one-three Terran standard. Gravity, zero-point-eight-three Terran standard.’ He looked up, his tiny black eyes meeting those of Siefer Zeed, the Raven Guard. ‘The atmosphere is a thick nitrogen-sulphide/carbon-dioxide mix. Did you know that? Utterly deadly to the non-augmented. I doubt even you Astartes could breathe it for long. Even our servitors wear air-tanks here.’

Zeed stared back indifferently at the little tech-priest. When he spoke, it was not in answer. His words were directed to his right, to his squad leader, Lyandro Karras, Codicier Librarian of the Death Spectres Chapter, known officially in Deathwatch circles as Talon Alpha. That wasn’t what Zeed called him, though. ‘Tell me again, Scholar, why we get all the worthless jobs.’

Karras didn’t look up from the boltgun he was muttering litanies over. Times like these, the quiet times, were for meditation and proper observances, something the Raven Guard seemed wholly unable to grasp. Karras had spent six years as leader of this kill-team. Siefer Zeed, nicknamed Ghost for his alabaster skin, was as irreverent today as he had been when they’d first met. Perhaps he was even worse.

Karras finished murmuring his Litany of Flawless Operation and sighed. ‘You know why, Ghost. If you didn’t go out of your way to anger Sigma all the time, maybe those Scimitar bastards would be here instead of us.’

Talon Squad’s handler, an inquisitor lord known only as Sigma, had come all too close to dismissing Zeed from active duty on several occasions, a terrible dishonour not just for the Deathwatch member in question, but for his entire Chapter. Zeed frequently tested the limits of Sigma’s need-to-know policy, not to mention the inquisitor’s patience. But the Raven Guard was a peerless killing machine at close range, and his skill with a pair of lightning claws, his signature weapon, had won the day so often that Karras and the others had stopped counting.

Another voice spoke up, a deep rumbling bass, its tones warm and rich. ‘They’re not all bad,’ said Maximmion Voss of the Imperial Fists. ‘Scimitar Squad, I mean.’

‘Right,’ said Zeed with good-natured sarcasm. ‘It’s not like you’re biased, Omni. I mean, every Black Templar or Crimson Fist in the galaxy is a veritable saint.’

Voss grinned at that.

There was a hiss from the rear of the carriage where Ignatio Solarion and Darrion Rauth, Ultramarine and Exorcist respectively, sat in relative silence. The hiss had come from Solarion.

‘Something you want to say, Prophet?’ said Zeed with a challenging thrust of his chin.

Solarion scowled at him, displaying the full extent of his contempt for the Raven Guard. ‘We are with company,’ he said, indicating the little tech-priest who had fallen silent while the Deathwatch Space Marines talked. ‘You would do well to remember that.’

Zeed threw Solarion a sneer then turned his eyes back to the tech-priest. The man had met them on the mag-rail platform at Orga Station, introducing himself as Magos Iapetus Borgovda, the most senior adept on the planet and a xeno-hierographologist specialising in the writings and history of the Exodites, offshoot cultures of the eldar race. They had lived here once, these Exodites, and had left many secrets buried deep in the drifting red sands. That went no way to explaining why a Deathwatch kill-team was needed, however, especially now. Menatar was a dead world. Its sun had become a red giant, a K-3 type star well on its way to final collapse. Before it died, however, it would burn off the last of Menatar’s atmosphere, leaving little more than a ball of molten rock. Shortly after that, Menatar would cool and there would be no trace of anyone ever having set foot here at all. Such an end was many tens of thousands of years away, of course. Had the Exodite eldar abandoned this world early, knowing its eventual fate? Or had something else driven them off? Maybe the xeno-hierographologist would find the answers eventually, but that still didn’t tell Zeed anything about why Sigma had sent some of his key assets here.

Magos Borgovda turned to his left and looked out the viewspex bubble at the front of the mag-rail carriage. A vast dead volcano dominated the skyline. The mag-rail car sped towards it so fast the red dunes and rocky spires on either side of the tracks went by in a blur. ‘We are coming up on Typhonis Mons,’ the magos wheezed. ‘The noble Priesthood of Mars cut a tunnel straight through the side of the crater, you know. The journey will take another hour. No more than that. Without the tunnel…’

‘Good,’ said Zeed, running the fingers of one gauntleted hand through his long black hair. His eyes flicked to the blades of the lightning claws fixed to the magnetic couplings on his thigh-plates. Soon it would be time to don the weapons properly, fix his helmet to its seals, and step out onto solid ground. Omni was tuning the suspensors on his heavy bolter. Solarion was checking the bolt mechanism of his sniper rifle. Karras and Rauth had both finished their final checks already.

If there is nothing here to fight, why were we sent so heavily armed, Zeed asked himself?

He thought of the ill-tempered Dreadnought riding alone in the other carriage.

And why did we bring Chyron?

The mag-rail car slowed to a smooth halt beside a platform cluttered with crates bearing the cog-and-skull mark of the Adeptus Mechanicus. On either side of the platform, spreading out in well-ordered concentric rows, were scores of stocky pre-fabricated huts and storage units, their low roofs piled with ash and dust. Thick insulated cables snaked everywhere, linking heavy machinery to generators, supplying light, heat and atmospheric stability to the sleeping quarters and mess blocks. Here and there, cranes stood tall against the wind. Looming over everything were the sides of the crater, penning it all in, lending the place a strange quality, almost like being outdoors and yet indoors at the same time.

Borgovda was clearly expected. Dozens of acolytes, robed in the red of the Martian Priesthood and fitted with breathing apparatus, bowed low when he emerged from the carriage. Around them, straight-backed skitarii troopers stood to attention with las- and hellguns clutched diagonally across their chests.

Quietly, Voss mumbled to Zeed, ‘It seems our new acquaintance didn’t lie about his status here. Perhaps you should have been more polite to him, paper-face.’

‘I don’t recall you offering any pleasantries, tree-trunk,’ Zeed replied. He and Voss had been friends since the moment they met. It was a rapport that none of the other kill-team members shared, a fact that only served to further deepen the bond. Had anyone else called Zeed paper-face, he might well have eviscerated them on the spot. Likewise, few would have dared to call the squat, powerful Voss tree-trunk. Even fewer would have survived to tell of it. But, between the two of them, such names were taken as a mark of trust and friendship that was truly rare among the Deathwatch.

Magos Borgovda broke from greeting the rows of fawning acolytes and turned to his black-armoured escorts. When he spoke, it was directly to Karras, who had identified himself as team leader during introductions.

‘Shall we proceed to the dig-site, Astartes? Or do you wish to rest first?’

‘Astartes need no rest,’ answered Karras flatly.

It was a slight exaggeration, of course, and the twinkle in the xeno-hierographologist’s eye suggested he knew as much, but he also knew that, by comparison to most humans, it was as good as true. Borgovda and his fellow servants of the Machine-God also required little rest.

‘Very well,’ said the magos. ‘Let us go straight to the pit. My acolytes tell me we are ready to initiate the final stage of our operation. They await only my command.’

He dismissed all but a few of the acolytes, issuing commands to them in sharp bursts of machine-language, and turned east. Leaving the platform behind them, the Deathwatch followed. Karras walked beside the bent and robed figure, consciously slowing his steps to match the speed of the tech-priest. The others, including the massive, multi-tonne form of the Dreadnought, Chyron, fell into step behind them. Chyron’s footfalls made the ground tremble as he brought up the rear.

Zeed cursed at having to walk so slowly. Why should one such as he, one who could move with inhuman speed, be forced to crawl at the little tech-priest’s pace? He might reach the dig-site in a fraction of the time and never break sweat. How long would it take at the speed of this grinding, clicking, wheezing half-mechanical magos?

Eager for distraction, he turned his gaze to the inner slopes of the great crater in which the entire excavation site was located. This was Typhonis Mons, the largest volcano in the Ozyma-138 system. No wonder the Adeptus Mechanicus had tunnelled all those kilometres through the crater wall. To go up and over the towering ridgeline would have taken significantly more time and effort. Any road built to do so would have required more switchbacks than was reasonable. The caldera was close to two-and-a-half kilometres across, its jagged rim rising well over a kilometre on every side.

Looking more closely at the steep slopes all around him, Zeed saw that many bore signs of artifice. The signs were subtle, yes, perhaps eroded by time and wind, or by the changes in atmosphere that the expanding red giant had wrought, but they were there all the same. The Raven Guard’s enhanced visor-optics, working in accord with his superior gene-boosted vision, showed him crumbled doorways and pillared galleries. Had he not known this world for an Exodite world, he might have passed these off as natural structures, for there was little angular about them. Angularity was something one saw everywhere in human construction, but far less so in the works of the hated, inexplicable eldar. Their structures, their craft, their weapons – each seemed almost grown rather than built, their forms fluid, gracefully organic. Like all righteous warriors of the Imperium, Zeed hated the eldar. They denied man’s destiny as ruler of the stars. They stood in the way of expansion, of progress.

He had fought them many times. He had been there when eldar forces had contested human territory in the Adiccan Reach, launching blisteringly fast raids on worlds they had no right to claim. They were good foes to fight. He enjoyed the challenge of their speed, and they were not afraid to engage with him at close quarters, though they often retreated in the face of his might rather than die honourably.

Cowards.

Such a shame they had left this world so long ago. He would have enjoyed fighting them here.

In fact, he thought, flexing his claws in irritation, just about any fight would do.

Six massive cranes struggled in unison to raise their load from the circular black pit in the centre of the crater. The eldar had buried this thing deep – deep enough that no one should ever have disturbed it here. But Iapetus Borgovda had transcribed the records of that burial, records found on a damaged eldar craft that had been lost in the warp only to emerge centuries later on the fringe of the Imperium. He had been on his way to present his findings to the Genetor Biologis himself when a senior magos by the name of Serjus Altando had intercepted him and asked him to present his findings to the Ordo Xenos of the holy Inquisition first.

After that, Borgovda had never gotten around to presenting his work to his superiors on Mars. The mysterious inquisitor lord that Magos Altando served had guaranteed Borgovda all the resources he would need to make the discovery entirely his own. The credit, Altando promised, need not be shared with anyone else. Borgovda would be revered for his work. Perhaps, one day, he would even be granted genetor rank himself.

And so it was that mankind had come to Menatar and had begun to dig where no one was supposed to.

The fruits of that labour were finally close at hand. Borgovda’s black eyes glittered like coals beneath the clear bubble of his breathing apparatus as he watched each of the six cranes reel in their thick polysteel cables. With tantalising slowness, something huge and ancient began to peek above the lip of the pit. A hundred skitarii troopers and gun-servitors inched forwards, weapons raised. They had no idea what was emerging. Few did.

Borgovda knew. Magos Altando knew. Sigma knew. Of these three, however, only Borgovda was present in person. The others, he believed, were light years away. This was his prize alone, just as the inquisitor had promised. This was his operation. As more of the object cleared the lip of the pit, he stepped forwards himself. Behind him, the Space Marines of Talon Squad gripped their weapons and watched.

The object was almost entirely revealed now, a vast sarcophagus, oval in shape, twenty-three metres long on its vertical axis, sixteen metres on the horizontal. Every inch of its surface, a surface like nothing so much as polished bone, was intricately carved with Eldar script. By force of habit, the xeno-hierographologist began translating the symbols with part of his mind while the rest of it continued to marvel at the beauty of what he saw. Just what secrets would this object reveal? He and other Radicals like him believed mankind’s salvation, its very future, lay not with the technological stagnation in which the race of men was currently mired, but with the act of understanding and embracing the technology of its alien enemies. And yet, so many fools scorned this patently obvious truth. Borgovda had known good colleagues, fine inquisitive magi like himself, who had been executed for their beliefs. Why did the Fabricator General not see it? Why did the mighty Lords of Terra not understand? Well, he would make them see. Sigma had promised him all the resources he would need to make the most of this discovery. The holy Inquisition was on his side. This time would be different.

The object, fully raised above the pit, hung there in all its ancient, inscrutable glory. Borgovda gave a muttered command into a vox-piece, and the cranes began a slow, synchronised turn.

Borgovda held his breath.

They moved the vast sarcophagus over solid ground and stopped.

‘Yes,’ said Borgovda over the link. ‘That’s it. Now lower it gently.’

The crane crews did as ordered. Millimetre by millimetre, the oval tomb descended.

Then it lurched.

One of the cranes gave a screech of metal. Its frame twisted sharply to the right, titanium struts crumpling like tin.

‘What’s going on?’ demanded Borgovda.

From the corner of his vision, he noted the Deathwatch stepping forwards, cocking their weapons, and the Dreadnought eagerly flexing its great metal fists.

A panicked voice came back to him from the crane operator in the damaged machine. ‘There’s something moving inside that thing,’ gasped the man. ‘Something really heavy. Its centre of gravity is shifting all over the place!’

Borgovda’s eyes narrowed as he scrutinised the hanging oval object. It was swinging on five taut cables now, while the sixth, that of the ruined crane, had gone slack. The object lurched again. The movement was clearly visible this time, obviously generated by massive internal force.

‘Get it onto the ground,’ Borgovda barked over the link, ‘but carefully. Do not damage it.’

The cranes began spooling out more cable at his command, but the sarcophagus gave one final big lurch and crumpled two more of the sturdy machines. The other three cables tore free, and it fell to the ground with an impact that shook the closest slaves and acolytes from their feet.

Borgovda started towards the fallen sarcophagus, and knew that the Deathwatch were right behind him. Had the inquisitor known this might happen? Was that why he had sent his angels of death and destruction along?

Even at this distance, some one hundred and twenty metres away, even through all the dust and grit the impact had kicked up, Borgovda could see eldar sigils begin to glow red on the surface of the massive object. They blinked on and off like warning lights, and he realised that was exactly what they were. Despite all the irreconcilable differences between the humans and the aliens, this message, at least, mean the same.

Danger!

There was a sound like cracking wood, but so loud it was deafening.

Suddenly, one of the Deathwatch Space Marines roared in agony and collapsed to his knees, gauntlets pressed tight to the side of his helmet. Another Astartes, the Imperial Fist, raced forwards to his fallen leader’s side.

‘What’s the matter, Scholar? What’s going on?’

The one called Karras spoke through his pain, but there was no mistaking the sound of it, the raw, nerve-searing agony in his words. ‘A psychic beacon!’ he growled through clenched teeth. ‘A psychic beacon just went off. The magnitude–’

He howled as another wave of pain hit him, and the sound spoke of a suffering that Borgovda could hardly imagine.

Another of the kill-team members, this one with a pauldron boasting a daemon’s-skull design, stepped forwards with boltgun raised and, incredibly, took aim at his leader’s head.

The Raven Guard moved like lightning. Almost too fast to see, he was at this other’s side, knocking the muzzle of the boltgun up and away with the back of his forearm. ‘What the hell are you doing, Watcher?’ Zeed snapped. ‘Stand down!’

The Exorcist, Rauth, glared at Zeed through his helmet visor, but he turned his weapon away all the same. His finger, however, did not leave the trigger.

‘Scholar,’ said Voss. ‘Can you fight it? Can you fight through it?’

The Death Spectre struggled to his feet, but his posture said he was hardly in any shape to fight if he had to. ‘I’ve never felt anything like this!’ he hissed. ‘We have to knock it out. It’s smothering my… gift.’ He turned to Borgovda. ‘What in the Emperor’s name is going on here, magos?’

‘Gift?’ spat Rauth in an undertone.

Borgovda answered, turning his black eyes back to the object as he did. It was on its side about twenty metres from the edge of the pit, rocking violently as if something were alive inside it.

‘The Exodites…’ he said. ‘They must have set up some kind of signal to alert them when someone… interfered. We’ve just set it off.’

‘Interfered with what?’ demanded Ignatio Solarion. The Ultramarine rounded on the tiny tech-priest. ‘Answer me!’

There was another loud cracking sound. Borgovda looked beyond Solarion and saw the bone-like surface of the sarcophagus split violently. Pieces shattered and flew off. In the gaps they left, something huge and dark writhed and twisted, desperate to be free.

The magos was transfixed.

‘I asked you a question!’ Solarion barked, visibly fighting to restrain himself from striking the magos. ‘What does the beacon alert them to?’

‘To that,’ said Borgovda, terrified and exhilarated all at once. ‘To the release of… of whatever they buried here.’

‘They left it alive?’ said Voss, drawing abreast of Solarion and Borgovda, his heavy bolter raised and ready.

Suddenly, everything slotted into place. Borgovda had the full context of the eldar writing he had deciphered on the sarcophagus’s surface, and, with that context, came a new understanding.

‘They buried it,’ he told Talon Squad, ‘because they couldn’t kill it!’

There was a shower of bony pieces as the creature finally broke free of the last of its tomb and stretched its massive serpentine body for all to see. It was as tall as a Warhound Titan, and, from the look of it, almost as well armoured. Complex mouthparts split open like the bony, razor-lined petals of some strange, lethal flower. Its bizarre jaws dripped with corrosive fluids. This beast, this nightmare leviathan pulled from the belly of the earth, shivered and threw back its gargantuan head.

A piercing shriek filled the poisonous air, so loud that some of the skitarii troopers closest to it fell down, choking on the deadly atmosphere. The creature’s screech had shattered their visors.

‘Well maybe they couldn’t kill it,’ growled Lyandro Karras, marching stoically forwards through waves of psychic pain. ‘But we will! To battle, brothers, in the Emperor’s name!’

Searing lances of las-fire erupted from all directions at once, centring on the massive worm-like creature that was, after so many long millennia, finally free. Normal men would have quailed in the face of such an overwhelming foe. What could such tiny things as humans do against something like this? But the skitarii troopers of the Adeptus Mechanicus had been rendered all but fearless, their survival instincts overridden by neural programming, augmentation and brain surgery. They did not flee as other men would have. They surrounded the beast, working as one to put as much firepower on it as possible.

A brave effort, but ultimately a wasted one. The creature’s thick plates of alien chitin shrugged off their assault. All that concentrated firepower really achieved was to turn the beast’s attention on its attackers. Though sightless in the conventional sense, it sensed everything. Rows of tiny cyst-like nodules running the length of its body detected changes in heat, air pressure and vibration to the most minute degree. It knew exactly where each of its attackers stood. Not only could it hear their beating hearts, it could feel them vibrating through the ground and the air. Nothing escaped its notice.

With incredible speed for a creature so vast, it whipped its heavy black tail forwards in an arc. The air around it whistled. Skitarii troopers were cut down like stalks of wheat, crushed by the dozen, their ribcages pulverised. Some were launched into the air, their bodies falling like mortar shells a second later, slamming down with fatal force onto the corrugated metal roofs of the nearby storage and accommodation huts.

Talon Squad was already racing forwards to join the fight. Chyron’s awkward run caused crates to fall from their stacks. Adrenaline flooded the wretched remains of his organic body, a tiny remnant of the Astartes he had once been, little more now than brain, organs and scraps of flesh held together, kept alive, by the systems of his massive armoured chassis.

‘Death to all xenos!’ he roared, following close behind the others.

At the head of the team, Karras ran with his bolter in hand. The creature was three hundred metres away, but he and his squadmates would close that gap all too quickly. What would they do then? How did one fight a monster like this?

There was a voice on the link. It was Voss.

‘A trygon, Scholar? A mawloc?’

‘No, Omni,’ replied Karras. ‘Same genus, I think, but something we haven’t seen before.’

‘Sigma knew,’ said Zeed, breaking in on the link.

‘Aye,’ said Karras. ‘Knew or suspected.’

‘Karras,’ said Solarion. ‘I’m moving to high ground.’

‘Go.’

Solarion’s bolt-rifle, a superbly-crafted weapon, its like unseen in the armouries of any Astartes Chapter but the Deathwatch, was best employed from a distance. The Ultramarine broke away from the charge of the others. He sought out the tallest structure in the crater that he could reach quickly. His eyes found it almost immediately. It was behind him – the loading crane that served the mag-rail line. It was slightly shorter than the cranes that had been used to lift the entombed creature out of the pit, but each of those were far too close to the beast to be useful. This one would do well. He ran to the foot of the crane, to the stanchions that were steam-bolted to the ground, slung his rifle over his right pauldron, and began to climb.

The massive tyranid worm was scything its tail through more of the skitarii, and their numbers dropped to half. Bloody smears marked the open concrete. For all their fearlessness and tenacity, the Mechanicus troops hadn’t even scratched the blasted thing. All they had managed was to put the beast in a killing frenzy at the cost of their own lives. Still they fought, still they poured blinding spears of fire on it, but to no avail. The beast flexed again, tail slashing forwards, and another dozen died, their bodies smashed to a red pulp.

‘I hope you’ve got a plan, Scholar,’ said Zeed as he ran beside his leader. ‘Other than kill the bastard, I mean.’

‘I can’t channel psychic energy into Arquemann,’ said Karras, thinking for a moment that his ancient force sword might be the only thing able to crack the brute’s armoured hide. ‘Not with that infernal beacon drowning me out. But if we can stop the beacon… If I can get close enough–’

He was cut off by a calm, cold and all-too-familiar voice on the link.

‘Specimen Six is not to be killed under any circumstances, Alpha. I want the creature alive!’

‘Sigma!’ spat Karras. ‘You can’t seriously think… No! We’re taking it down. We have to!’

Sigma broadcast his voice to the entire team.

‘Listen to me, Talon Squad. That creature is to be taken alive at all costs. Restrain it and prepare it for transport. Brother Solarion has been equipped for the task already. Your job is to facilitate the success of his shot, then escort the tranquilised creature back to the St. Nevarre. Remember your oaths. Do as you are bid.’

It was Chyron, breaking his characteristic brooding silence, who spoke up first.

‘This is an outrage, Sigma. It is a tyranid abomination and Chyron will kill it. We are Deathwatch. Killing things is what we do.’

‘You will do as ordered, Lamenter. All of you will. Remember your oaths. Honour the treaties, or return to your brothers in disgrace.’

‘I have no brothers left,’ Chyron snarled, as if this freed him from the need to obey.

‘Then you will return to nothing. The Inquisition has no need of those who cannot follow mission parameters. The Deathwatch even less so.’

Karras, getting close to the skitarii and the foe, felt his lip curl in anger. This was madness.

‘Solarion,’ he barked, ‘how much did you know?’

‘Some,’ said the Ultramarine, a trace of something unpleasant in his voice. ‘Not much.’

‘And you didn’t warn us, brother?’ Karras demanded.

‘Orders, Karras. Unlike some, I follow mine to the letter.’

Solarion had never been happy operating under the Death Spectre Librarian’s command. Karras was from a Chapter of the Thirteenth Founding. To Solarion, that made him inferior. Only the Chapters of the First Founding were worthy of unconditional respect, and even some of those…

‘Magos Altando issued me with special rounds,’ Solarion went on. ‘Neuro-toxics. I need a clear shot on a soft, fleshy area. Get me that opening, Karras, and Sigma will have what he wants.’

Karras swore under his helm. He had known all along that something was up. His psychic gift did not extend to prescience, but he had sensed something dark and ominous hanging over them from the start.

The tyranid worm was barely fifty metres away now, and it turned its plated head straight towards the charging Deathwatch Space Marines. It could hardly have missed the thundering footfalls of Chyron, who was another thirty metres behind Karras, unable to match the swift pace of his smaller, lighter squadmates.

‘The plan, Karras!’ said Zeed, voice high and anxious.

Karras had to think fast. The beast lowered its fore-sections and began slithering towards them, sensing these newcomers were a far greater threat than the remaining skitarii.

Karras skidded to an abrupt halt next to a skitarii sergeant and shouted at him, ‘You! Get your forces out. Fall back towards the mag-rail station.’

‘We fight,’ insisted the skitarii. ‘Magos Borgovda has not issued the command to retreat.’

Karras grabbed the man by the upper right arm and almost lifted him off his feet. ‘This isn’t fighting. This is dying. You will do as I say. The Deathwatch will take care of this. Do not get in our way.’

The sergeant’s eyes were blank lifeless things, like those of a doll. Had the Adeptus Mechanicus surgically removed so much of the man’s humanity? There was no fear there, certainly, but Karras sensed little else, either. Whether that was because of the surgeries or because the eldar beacon was still drowning him in wave after invisible wave of pounding psychic pressure, he could not say.

After a second, the skitarii sergeant gave a reluctant nod and sent a message over his vox-link. The skitarii began falling back, but they kept their futile fire up as they moved.

The rasping of the worm’s armour plates against the rockcrete grew louder as it neared, and Karras turned again to face it. ‘Get ready!’ he told the others.

‘What is your decision, Death Spectre?’ Chyron rumbled. ‘It is a xenos abomination. It must be killed, regardless of the inquisitor’s command.’

Damn it, thought Karras. I know he’s right, but I must honour the treaties, for the sake of the Chapter. We must give Solarion his window.

‘Keep the beast occupied. Do as Sigma commands. If Solarion’s shot fails…’

‘It won’t,’ said Solarion over the link.

It had better not, thought Karras. Because, if it does, I’m not sure we can kill this thing.

Solarion had reached the end of the crane’s armature. The entire crater floor was spread out below him. He saw his fellow Talon members fan out to face the alien abomination. It reared up on its hind-sections again and screeched at them, thrashing the air with rows of tiny vestigial limbs. Voss opened up on it first, showering it with a hail of fire from his heavy bolter. Rauth and Karras followed suit while Zeed and Chyron tried to flank it and approach from the sides.

Solarion snorted.

It was obvious, to him at least, that the fiend didn’t have any blind spots. It didn’t have eyes!

So far as Solarion could tell from up here, the furious fusillade of bolter rounds rattling off the beast’s hide was doing nothing at all, unable to penetrate the thick chitin plates.

I need exposed flesh, he told himself. I won’t fire until I get it. One shot, one kill. Or, in this case, one paralysed xenos worm.

He locked himself into a stable position by pushing his boots into the corners created by the crane’s metal frame. All around him, the winds of Menatar howled and tugged, trying to pull him into a deadly eighty-metre drop. The dust on those winds cut visibility by twenty per cent, but he knew he could pull off a perfect shot in far worse conditions than these.

Sniping from the top of the crane meant that he was forced to lie belly-down at a forty-five-degree angle, his bolt-rifle’s stock braced against his shoulder, right visor-slit pressed close to the lens of his scope. After some adjustments, the writhing monstrosity came into sharp focus. Bursts of Astartes gunfire continued to ripple over its carapace. Its tail came down hard in a hammering vertical stroke that Rauth only managed to sidestep at the last possible second. The concrete where the Exorcist had been standing shattered and flew off in all directions.

Solarion pulled back the cocking lever of his weapon and slid one of Altando’s neuro-toxic rounds into the chamber. Then he spoke over the comm-link.

‘I’m in position, Karras. Ready to take the shot. Hurry up and get me that opening.’

‘We’re trying, Prophet!’ Karras snapped back, using the nickname Zeed had coined for the Ultramarine.

Try harder, thought Solarion, but he didn’t say it. There was a limit, he knew, to how far he could push Talon Alpha.

Three grenades detonated, one after another, with ground-splintering cracks. The wind pulled the dust and debris aside. The creature reared up again, towering over the Space Marines, and they saw that it remained utterly undamaged, not even a scratch on it.

‘Nothing!’ cursed Rauth.

Karras swore. This was getting desperate. The monster was tireless, its speed undiminished, and nothing they did seemed to have the least effect. By contrast, its own blows were all too potent. It had already struck Voss aside. Luck had been with the Imperial Fist, however. The blow had been lateral, sending him twenty metres along the ground before slamming him into the side of a fuel silo. The strength of his ceramite armour had saved his life. Had the blow been vertical, it would have killed him on the spot.

Talon Squad hadn’t survived the last six years of special operations to die here on Menatar. Karras wouldn’t allow it. But the only weapon they had which might do anything to the monster was his force blade, Arquemann, and, with that accursed eldar beacon drowning out his gift, Karras couldn’t charge it with the devastating psychic power it needed to do the job.

‘Warp blast it!’ he cursed over the link. ‘Someone find the source of that psychic signal and knock it out!’

He couldn’t pinpoint it himself. The psychic bursts were overwhelming, drowning out all but his own thoughts. He could no longer sense Zeed’s spiritual essence, nor that of Voss, Chyron, or Solarion. As for Rauth, he had never been able to sense the Exorcist’s soul. Even after serving together this long, he was no closer to discovering the reason for that. For all Karras knew, maybe the quiet, brooding Astartes had no soul.

Zeed was doing his best to keep the tyranid’s attention on himself. He was the fastest of all of them. If Karras hadn’t known better, he might even have said Zeed was enjoying the deadly game. Again and again, that barbed black tail flashed at the Raven Guard, and, every time, found only empty air. Zeed kept himself a split second ahead. Whenever he was close enough, he lashed out with his lightning claws and raked the creature’s sides. But, despite the blue sparks that flashed with every contact, he couldn’t penetrate that incredible armour.

Karras locked his bolter to his thigh plate and drew Arquemann from its scabbard.

This is it, he thought. We have to close with it. Maybe Chyron can do something if he can get inside its guard. He’s the only one who might just be strong enough.

‘Engage at close quarters,’ he told the others. ‘We can’t do anything from back here.’

It was all the direction Chyron needed. The Dreadnought loosed a battlecry and stormed forwards to attack with his two great power fists, the ground juddering under him as he charged.

By the Emperor’s grace, thought Karras, following in the Dreadnought’s thunderous wake, don’t let this be the day we lose someone.

Talon Squad was his squad. Despite the infighting, the secrets, the mistrust and everything else, that still meant something.

Solarion saw the rest of the kill-team race forwards to engage the beast at close quarters and did not envy them, but he had to admit a grudging pride in their bravery and honour. Such a charge looked like sure suicide. For any other squad, it might well have been. But for Talon Squad…

Concentrate, he told himself. The moment is at hand. Breathe slowly.

He did.

His helmet filtered the air, removing the elements that might have killed him, elements that even the Astartes implant known as the multi-lung, would not have been able to handle. Still, the air tasted foul and burned in his nostrils and throat. A gust of wind buffeted him, throwing his aim off a few millimetres, forcing him to adjust again.

A voice shouted triumphantly on the link.

‘I’ve found it, Scholar. I have the beacon!’

‘Voss?’ said Karras.

There was a muffled crump, the sound of a krak grenade. Solarion’s eyes flicked from his scope to cloud of smoke about fifty metres to the creature’s right. He saw Voss emerge from the smoke. Around him lay the rubble of the monster’s smashed sarcophagus.

Karras gave a roar of triumph.

‘It’s… it’s gone,’ he said. ‘It’s lifted. I can feel it!’

So Karras would be able to wield his psychic abilities again. Would it make any difference, Solarion wondered?

It did, and that difference was immediate. Something began to glow down on the battlefield. Solarion turned his eyes towards it and saw Karras raise Arquemann in a two-handed grip. The monster must have sensed the sudden buildup of psychic charge, too. It thrashed its way towards the Librarian, eager to crush him under its powerful coils. Karras dashed in to meet the creature’s huge body and plunged his blade into a crease where two sections of chitin plate met.

An ear-splitting alien scream tore through the air, echoing off the crater walls.

Karras twisted the blade hard and pulled it free, and its glowing length was followed by a thick gush of black ichor.

The creature writhed in pain, reared straight up and screeched again, its complex jaws open wide.

Just the opening Solarion was waiting for.

He squeezed the trigger of his rifle and felt it kick powerfully against his armoured shoulder.

A single white-hot round lanced out towards the tyranid worm.

There was a wet impact as the round struck home, embedding itself deep in the fleshy tissue of the beast’s mouth.

‘Direct hit!’ Solarion reported.

‘Good work,’ said Karras on the link. ‘Now what?’

It was Sigma’s voice that answered. ‘Fall back and wait. The toxin is fast-acting. In ten to fifteen seconds, Specimen Six will be completely paralysed.’

‘You heard him, Talon Squad,’ said Karras. ‘Fall back. Let’s go!’

Solarion placed one hand on the top of his rifle, muttered a prayer of thanks to the weapon’s machine-spirit, and prepared to descend. As he looked out over the crater floor, however, he saw that one member of the kill-team wasn’t retreating.

Karras had seen it, too.

‘Chyron,’ barked the team leader. ‘What in Terra’s name are you doing?

The Dreadnought was standing right in front of the beast, fending off blows from its tail and its jaws with his oversized fists.

‘Stand down, Lamenter,’ Sigma commanded.

If Chyron heard, he deigned not to answer. While there was still a fight to be had here, he wasn’t going anywhere. It was the tyranids that had obliterated his Chapter. Hive Fleet Kraken had decimated them, leaving him with no brothers, no home to return to. But if Sigma and the others thought the Deathwatch was all Chyron had left, they were wrong. He had his rage, his fury, his unquenchable lust for dire and bloody vengeance.

The others should have known that. Sigma should have known.

Karras started back towards the Dreadnought, intent on finding some way to reach him. He would use his psyker gifts if he had to. Chyron could not hope to beat the thing alone.

But, as the seconds ticked off and the Dreadnought continued to fight, it became clear that something was wrong.

From his high vantage point, it was Solarion who voiced it first.

‘It’s not stopping,’ he said over the link. ‘Sigma, the damned thing isn’t even slowing down. The neuro-toxin didn’t work.’

‘Impossible,’ replied the voice of the inquisitor. ‘Magos Altando had the serum tested on–’

‘Twenty-five… no, thirty seconds. I tell you, it’s not working.’

Sigma was silent for a brief moment, then he said, ‘We need it alive.’

‘Why?’ demanded Zeed. The Raven Guard was crossing the concrete again, back towards the fight, following close behind Karras.

‘You do not need to know,’ said Sigma.

‘The neurotoxin doesn’t work, Sigma,’ Solarion repeated. ‘If you have some other suggestion…’

Sigma clicked off.

I guess he doesn’t, thought Solarion sourly.

‘Solarion,’ said Karras. ‘Can you put another round in it?’

‘Get it to open wide and you know I can. But it might not be a dosage issue.’

‘I know,’ said Karras, his anger and frustration telling in his voice. ‘But it’s all we’ve got. Be ready.’

Chyron’s chassis was scraped and dented. His foe’s strength seemed boundless. Every time the barbed tail whipped forwards, Chyron swung his fists at it, but the beast was truly powerful and, when one blow connected squarely with the Dreadnought’s thick glacis plate, he found himself staggering backwards despite his best efforts.

Karras was suddenly at his side.

‘When I tell you to fall back, Dreadnought, you will do it,’ growled the Librarian. ‘I’m still Talon Alpha. Or does that mean nothing to you?’

Chyron steadied himself and started forwards again, saying, ‘I honour your station, Death Spectre, and your command. But vengeance for my Chapter supersedes all. Sigma be damned, I will kill this thing!’

Karras hefted Arquemann and prepared to join Chyron’s charge. ‘Would you dishonour all of us with you?’

The beast swivelled its head towards them and readied to strike again.

‘For the vengeance of my Chapter, no price is too high. I am sorry, Alpha, but that is how it must be.’

‘Then the rest of Talon Squad stands with you,’ said Karras. ‘Let us hope we all live to regret it.’

Solarion managed to put two further toxic rounds into the creature’s mouth in rapid succession, but it was futile. This hopeless battle was telling badly on the others now. Each slash of that deadly tail was avoided by a rapidly narrowing margin. Against a smaller and more numerous foe, the strength of the Astartes would have seemed almost infinite, but this towering tyranid leviathan was far too powerful to engage with the weapons they had. They were losing this fight, and yet Chyron would not abandon it, and the others would not abandon him, despite the good sense that might be served in doing so.

Voss tried his best to keep the creature occupied at range, firing great torrents from his heavy bolter, even knowing that he could do little, if any, real damage. His fire, however, gave the others just enough openings to keep fighting. Still, even the heavy ammunition store on the Imperial Fist’s back had its limits. Soon, the weapon’s thick belt feed began whining as it tried to cycle non-existent rounds into the chamber.

‘I’m out,’ Voss told them. He started disconnecting the heavy weapon so that he might draw his combat blade and join the close-quarters melee.

It was at that precise moment, however, that Zeed, who had again been taunting the creature with his lightning claws, had his feet struck out from under him. He went down hard on his back, and the tyranid monstrosity launched itself straight towards him, massive mandibles spread wide.

For an instant, Zeed saw that huge red maw descending towards him. It looked like a tunnel of dark, wet flesh. Then a black shape blocked his view and he heard a mechanical grunt of strain.

‘I’m more of a meal, beast,’ growled Chyron.

The Dreadnought had put himself directly in front of Zeed at the last minute, gripping the tyranid’s sharp mandibles in his unbreakable titanium grip. But the creature was impossibly heavy, and it pressed down on the Lamenter with all its weight.

The force pressing down on Chyron was impossible to fight, but he put everything he had into the effort. His squat, powerful legs began to buckle. A piston in his right leg snapped. His engine began to sputter and cough with the strain.

‘Get out from under me, Raven Guard,’ he barked. ‘I can’t hold it much longer!’

Zeed scrabbled backwards about two metres, then stopped.

No, he told himself. Not today. Not to a mindless beast like this.

‘Corax protect me,’ he muttered, then sprang to his feet and raced forwards, shouting, ‘Victoris aut mortis!’

Victory or death!

He slipped beneath the Dreadnought’s right arm, bunched his legs beneath him and, with lightning claws extended out in front, dived directly into the beast’s gaping throat.

‘Ghost!’ shouted Voss and Karras at the same time, but he was already gone from sight and there was no reply over the link.

Chyron wrestled on for another second. Then two. Then, suddenly, the monster began thrashing in great paroxysms of agony. It wrenched its mandibles from Chyron’s grip and flew backwards, pounding its ringed segments against the concrete so hard that great fractures appeared in the ground.

The others moved quickly back to a safe distance and watched in stunned silence.

It took a long time to die.

When the beast was finally still, Voss sank to his knees.

‘No,’ he said, but he was so quiet that the others almost missed it.

Footsteps sounded on the stone behind them. It was Solarion. He stopped alongside Karras and Rauth.

‘So much for taking it alive,’ he said.

No one answered.

Karras couldn’t believe it had finally happened. He had lost one. After all they had been through together, he had started to believe they might all return to their Chapters alive one day, to be welcomed as honoured heroes, with the sad exception of Chyron, of course.

Suddenly, however, that belief seemed embarrassingly naïve. If Zeed could die, all of them could. Even the very best of the best would met his match in the end. Statistically, most Deathwatch members never made it back to the fortress-monasteries of their originating Chapters. Today, Zeed had joined those fallen ranks.

It was Sigma, breaking in on the command channel, who shattered the grim silence.

‘You have failed me, Talon Squad. It seems I greatly overestimated you.’

Karras hissed in quiet anger. ‘Siefer Zeed is dead, inquisitor.’

‘Then you, Alpha, have failed on two counts. The Chapter Master of the Raven Guard will be notified of Zeed’s failure. Those of you who live will at least have a future chance to redeem yourselves. The Imperium has lost a great opportunity here. I have no more to say to you. Stand by for Magos Altando.’

‘Altando?’ said Karras. ‘Why would–’

Sigma signed off before Karras could finish, his voice soon replaced by the buzzing mechanical tones of the old magos who served on his retinue.

‘I am told that Specimen Six is dead,’ he grated over the link. ‘Most regrettable, but your chances of success were extremely slim from the beginning. I predicted failure at close to ninety-six point eight five per cent probability.’

‘But Sigma deployed us anyway,’ Karras seethed. ‘Why am I not surprised?’

‘All is not lost,’ Altando continued, ignoring the Death Spectre’s ire. ‘There is much still to be learned from the carcass. Escort it back to Orga Station. I will arrive there to collect it shortly.’

‘Wait,’ snapped Karras. ‘You wish this piece of tyranid filth loaded up and shipped back for extraction? Are you aware of its size?’

‘Of course I am,’ answered Altando. ‘It is what the mag-rail line was built for. In fact, everything we did on Menatar from the very beginning – the construction, the excavation, the influx of Mechanicus personnel – all of it was to secure the specimen alive, still trapped inside its sarcophagus. Under the circumstances, we will make do with a dead one. You have given us no choice.’

The sound of approaching footsteps caught Karras’s attention. He turned from the beast’s slumped form and saw the xeno-hierographologist, Magos Borgovda, walking towards him with a phalanx of surviving skitarii troopers and robed Mechanicus acolytes.

Beneath the plex bubble of his helm, the little tech-priest’s eyes were wide.

‘You… you bested it. I would not have believed it possible. You have achieved what the Exodites could not.’

‘Ghost bested it,’ said Voss. ‘This is his kill. His and Chyron’s.’

If Chyron registered these words, he didn’t show it. The ancient warrior stared fixedly at his fallen foe.

‘Magos Borgovda,’ said Karras heavily, ‘are there men among your survivors who can work the cranes? This carcass is to be loaded onto a mag-rail car and taken to Orga Station.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Borgovda, his eyes taking in the sheer size of the creature. ‘That part of our plans has not changed, at least.’

Karras turned in the direction of the mag-rail station and started walking. He knew he sounded tired and miserable when he said, ‘Talon Squad, fall in.’

‘Wait,’ said Chyron. He limped forwards with a clashing and grinding of the gears in his right leg. ‘I swear it, Alpha. The creature just moved. Perhaps it is not dead, after all.’

He clenched his fists as if in anticipation of crushing the last vestiges of life from it. But, as he stepped closer to the creature’s slack mouth, there was a sudden outpouring of thick black gore, a great torrent of it. It splashed over his feet and washed across the dry rocky ground.

In that flood of gore was a bulky form, a form with great rounded pauldrons, sharp claws, and a distinctive, back-mounted generator. It lay unmoving in the tide of ichor.

‘Ghost,’ said Karras quietly. He had hoped never to see this, one under his command lying dead.

Then the figure stirred and groaned.

‘If we ever fight a giant alien worm again,’ said the croaking figure over the comm-link, ‘some other bastard can jump down its throat. I’ve had my turn.’

Solarion gave a sharp laugh. Voss’s reaction was immediate. He strode forwards and hauled his friend up, clapping him hard on the shoulders. ‘Why would any of us bother when you’re so good at it, paper-face?’

Karras could hear the relief in Voss’s voice. He grinned under his helm. Maybe Talon Squad was blessed after all. Maybe they would live to return to their Chapters.

‘I said fall in, Deathwatch,’ he barked at them, then he turned and led them away.

Altando’s lifter had already docked at Orga Station by the time the mag-rail cars brought Talon Squad, the dead beast and the Mechanicus survivors to the facility. Sigma himself was, as always, nowhere to be seen. That was standard practice for the inquisitor. Six years, and Karras had still never met his enigmatic handler. He doubted he ever would.

Derlon Saezar and the station staff had been warned to stay well away from the mag-rail platforms and loading bays and to turn off all internal vid-picters. Saezar was smarter than most people gave him credit for. He did exactly as he was told. No knowledge was worth the price of his life.

Magos Altando surveyed the tyranid’s long body with an appraising lens before ordering it loaded onto the lifter, a task with which even his veritable army of servitor slaves had some trouble. Magos Borgovda was most eager to speak with him, but, for some reason, Altando acted as if the xeno-hierographologist barely existed. In the end, Borgovda became irate and insisted that the other magos answer his questions at once. Why was he being told nothing? This was his discovery. Great promises had been made. He demanded the respect he was due.

It was at this point, with everyone gathered in Bay One, the only bay in the station large enough to offer a berth to Altando’s lifter, that Sigma addressed Talon Squad over the comm-link command channel once again.

‘No witnesses,’ he said simply.

Karras was hardly surprised. Again, this was standard operating procedure, but that didn’t mean the Death Spectre had to like it. It went against every bone in his body. Wasn’t the whole point of the Deathwatch to protect mankind? They were alien-hunters. His weapons hadn’t been crafted to take the lives of loyal Imperial citizens, no matter who gave the command.

‘Clarify,’ said Karras, feigning momentary confusion.

There was a crack of thunder, a single bolter shot. Magos Borgovda’s head exploded in a red haze.

Darrion Rauth stood over the body, dark grey smoke rising from the muzzle of his bolter.

‘Clear enough for you, Karras?’ said the Exorcist.

Karras felt anger surging up inside him. He might even have lashed out at Rauth, might have grabbed him by the gorget, but the reaction of the surviving skitarii troopers put a stop to that. Responding to the cold-blooded slaughter of their leader, they raised their weapons and aimed straight at the Exorcist.

What followed was a one-sided massacre that made Karras sick to his stomach.

When it was over, Sigma had his wish.

There were no witnesses left to testify that anything at all had been dug up from the crater on Menatar. All that remained was the little spaceport station and its staff, waiting to be told that the excavation was over and that their time on this inhospitable world was finally at an end.

Saezar watched the big lifter take off first, and marvelled at it. Even on his slightly fuzzy vid-monitor screen, the craft was an awe-inspiring sight. It emerged from the doors of Bay One with so much thrust that he thought it might rip the whole station apart, but the facility’s integrity held. There were no pressure leaks, no accidents.

The way that great ship hauled its heavy form up into the sky and off beyond the clouds thrilled him. Such power! It was a joy and an honour to see it. He wondered what it must be like to pilot such a ship.

Soon, the black Thunderhawk was also ready to leave. He granted the smaller, sleeker craft clearance and opened the doors of Bay Four once again. Good air out, bad air in. The Thunderhawk’s thrusters powered up. It soon emerged into the light of the Menatarian day, angled its nose upwards, and began to pull away.

Watching it go, Saezar felt a sense of relief that surprised him. The Astartes were leaving. He had expected to feel some kind of sadness, perhaps even regret at not getting to meet them in person. But he felt neither of those things. There was something terrible about them. He knew that now. It was something none of the bedtime stories had ever conveyed.

As he watched the Thunderhawk climb, Saezar reflected on it, and discovered that he knew what it was. The Astartes, the Space Marines… they didn’t radiate goodness or kindness like the stories pretended. They were not so much righteous and shining champions as they were dark avatars of destruction. Aye, he was glad to see the back of them. They were the living embodiment of death. He hoped he would never set eyes on such beings again. Was there any greater reminder that the galaxy was a terrible and deadly place?

‘That’s right,’ he said quietly to the vid-image of the departing Thunderhawk. ‘Fly away. We don’t need angels of death here. Better you remain a legend only if the truth is so grim.’

And then he saw something that made him start forwards, eyes wide.

It was as if the great black bird of prey had heard his words. It veered sharply left, turning back towards the station.

Saezar stared at it, wordless, confused.

There was a burst of bright light from the battle-cannon on the craft’s back. A cluster of dark, slim shapes burst forwards from the under-wing pylons, each trailing a bright ribbon of smoke.

Missiles!

‘No!’

Saezar would have said more, would have cried out to the Emperor for salvation, but the roof of the operations centre was ripped apart in the blast. Even if the razor-sharp debris hadn’t cut his body into a dozen wet red pieces, the rush of choking Menatarian air would have eaten him from the inside out.

‘No witnesses,’ Sigma had said.

Within minutes, Orga Station was obliterated, and then there were none.

Days passed.

The only things stirring within the crater were the skirts of dust kicked up by gusting winds. Ozyma-138 loomed vast and red in the sky above, continuing its work of slowly blasting away the planet’s atmosphere. With the last of the humans gone, this truly was a dead place once again, and that was how the visitors, or rather returnees, found it.

There were three of them, and they had been called here by a powerful beacon that only psychically gifted individuals might detect. It was a beacon that had gone strangely silent shortly after it had been activated. The visitors had come to find out why.

They were far taller than the men of the Imperium, and their limbs were long and straight. The human race might have thought them elegant once, but all the killings these slender beings had perpetrated against mankind had put a permanent end to that. To the modern Imperium, they were simply xenos, to be hated and feared and destroyed like any other.

They descended the rocky sides of the crater in graceful silence, their booted feet causing only the slightest of rock-slides. When they reached the bottom, they stepped onto the crater floor and marched together towards the centre where the mouth of the great pit gaped.

There was nothing hurried about their movements, and yet they covered the distance at an impressive speed.

The one who walked at the front of the trio was taller than the others, and not just by virtue of the high, jewel-encrusted crest on his helmet. He wore a rich cloak of strange shimmering material and carried a golden staff that shone with its own light.

The others were dressed in dark armour sculpted to emphasise the sweep of their long, lean muscles. They were armed with projectile weapons as white as bone. When the tall, cloaked figure stopped by the edge of the great pit, they stopped, too, and turned to either side, watchful, alert to any danger that might remain here.

The cloaked leader looked down into the pit for a moment, then moved off through the ruins of the excavation site, glancing at the crumpled metal huts and the rusting cranes as he passed them.

He stopped by a body on the ground, one of many. It was a pathetic, filthy mess of a thing, little more than rotting meat and broken bone wrapped in dust-caked cloth. It looked like it had been crushed by something. Pulverised. On the cloth was an icon – a skull set within a cog, equal parts black and white. For a moment, the tall figure looked down at it in silence, then he turned to the others and spoke, his voice filled with a boundless contempt that made even the swollen red sun seem to draw away.

‘Mon-keigh,’ he said, and the word was like a bitter poison on his tongue.

Mon-keigh.

The Inquisition

++Open vox-net++

My liege,

Our mission has been a success. Inquisitor Swallow, thought lost to the clutches of the eldar, has been returned to the light of the Imperium. Through endurance and faith, he has been able to bring back the following vital information on the Black Library.

Inquisitor Vendal, Ordo Xenos

BL: What are you working on at the moment?

JS: As I write this, my next Black Library project is going to be Red & Black, an audio drama featuring the Sisters of Battle that serves a prequel to my 2006 novel Faith & Fire. I’m planning to follow that up with a new Sisters novel, entitled Hammer & Anvil (not to be confused with this fine publication, of course...) And outside the worlds of Warhammer, I’ve been working on a Star Trek novel called Cast No Shadow and a couple of videogame projects – Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

BL: What are you working on next?

JS: For the future, I’ve got a bunch of ideas for new Black Library projects. I’m certainly going to revisit Brother-Sergeant Rafen and the Blood Angels Chapter, maybe tell more stories about the Sisters and the Doom Eagles... But before then I want to tackle something that I think is going to be pretty epic – namely, the Battle for Signus, a pivotal event during the Horus Heresy where the Blood Angels and their primarch fought an army of daemons, and set in motion events that still echo ten millennia later...

BL: Are there any areas of Warhammer 40,000 that you haven’t yet explored that you’d like to in the future?

JS: The problem with the Worlds of Warhammer is that there’s so much cool stuff out there, it’s almost an embarrassment of riches! There are many interesting places to go to for stories, compelling characters, epic events. It’s hard to pick just one thing. I think what interests me the most are the mysteries and lost histories of the Warhammer 40,000 universe – those are the kind of places I’d like to visit and explore in fiction.

BL: What are you reading at the moment? Who are your favourite authors?

JS: At this moment, I’m reading a modern thriller by an author called Tod Goldberg, and before that I was reading my colleague Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s Horus Heresy novel The First Heretic. As for favourite writers, my list is huge: Joe Haldeman, John Brunner, William Gibson, Phillip K. Dick, Ian M. Banks, Richard Morgan, Stephen Baxter, Rudy Rucker, Neal Stephenson, Carl Hiaasen, Douglas Adams, Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein are just some of them...

BL: Which book (either BL or non-BL) do you wish you’d written and why?

JS: I feel kinda strange answering that, because if I’d written it, it wouldn’t be the book that I have such fondness for; but if I had to pick, I’d say Frank Herbert’s Dune or Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. Both of them rank among the best military science fiction ever put to paper.

Phalanx

Ben Counter

Chapter 3

The cell block had been built for the use of the Imperial Fists’ own penitents. When battle-brothers believed themselves guilty of some failure, they came here, to the Atoning Halls. They knelt in the dank, cold cells lining the narrow stone-clad corridors and prayed for their sins to be expunged. They begged for suffering with which to cleanse themselves, a suffering regularly gifted to them by the various implements of self-torture built into the ceilings and floors of each intersection. Nerve-gloves and flensing-racks stood silent there, most of them designed to be operated by the victim, so that through pain he might drive out the weaknesses that had led to some perceived failing.

The cells had not been built with locks, for all those who had spent their time there had done so voluntarily. But the Halls of Atonement had locks now. Its current penitents were not there by choice.

‘Salk!’ hissed Captain Luko. Luko was chained to the wall of his cell, with just enough freedom in his bonds to stand up or sit down. Like the rest of the Soul Drinkers imprisoned in the Halls of Atonement, he had been stripped of his armour, with his wargear kept somewhere else on the Phalanx to be used as evidence in the trial.

‘Captain?’ came Sergeant Salk’s voice in reply. The Soul Drinkers officers had mostly been locked in cells far apart from one another, but the Halls of Atonement had not been built to contain a hundred Astartes prisoners and so it was inevitable two would end up in earshot.

‘I hear something,’ said Luko. ‘They are bringing someone else in.’

‘There is no one else,’ replied Salk. ‘They took us all on Selaaca.’ Though Luko could not see Salk’s face, the despondency, tinged with anger, was obvious in his voice. ‘They must be coming to interrogate us. I had wondered how long it would take for them to get to you and me.’

‘I think not, brother,’ said Luko. ‘Listen.’

The sound of footsteps broke through the ever-present grinding of the Phalanx’s engines. Several Space Marines, and... something else. A vehicle? A servitor? It was large and heavy, with a tread that crunched the flagstones of the corridor.

Luko strained forwards against the chains that held him, to see as much as possible of the corridor beyond the bars of his cell. Two Imperial Fists came into view, walking backwards with their bolters trained on something taller than they were.

‘Throne of Terra,’ whispered Luko as he got the first sight of what they were guarding.

It was a Dreadnought. It wore the deep purple and bone of the Soul Drinkers, but to Luko’s knowledge no Dreadnought had served with the Chapter since he had been a novice. He had thought the Chapter had not possessed any Dreadnought hulls at all.

The Dreadnought’s armour plating was pitted with age. Its weapons had been removed, revealing the complex workings of the mountings and ammo feeds in its shoulders. Even so the half-dozen Imperial Fists escorting it kept their guns on it, and one of them carried a missile launcher ready to blast the Dreadnought at close range.

As it stomped in front of Luko’s cell, the Dreadnought turned its torso so it could look in. Luko saw that its sarcophagus had been opened partially, and he glimpsed the pallid flesh of the body inside. Large, filmy eyes shone from the shadows inside the war machine, and Luko’s own eyes met them for a moment.

‘Brother,’ said the Soul Drinker inside the Dreadnought, his voice a wet whisper. ‘Spread the word. I have returned.’

‘Silence!’ shouted one of the Imperial Fists in front of the Dreadnought. ‘Hold your tongue!’ The Space Marine turned to Luko. ‘And you! Avert your eyes!’

‘If you wish me blinded,’ retorted Luko, ‘then you will have to put out my eyes.’

Luko had a talent for eliciting a rough soldier’s respect from other fighting men. The Imperial Fist scowled, but didn’t aim his gun at Luko. ‘Maybe later,’ he said.

‘Daenyathos has returned! said the Dreadnought’

Luko jumped forwards against his chains. ‘Daenyathos!’ he echoed. ‘Is it true?’

‘Daenyathos!’ came another voice, then another. Every Soul Drinker’s voice was raised in a matter of seconds. The Imperial Fists yelled for silence but their voices were drowned out. Even the bolter shots they fired into the ceiling did not quiet the din.

Luko did not know what to call the emotions searing through him. Joy? There could be no joy here, when they were facing execution and disgrace. It was a raw exultation, a release of emotion. It had been pent up in the Soul Drinkers since they had seen Sarpedon fall in his duel with Lysander, and now it had an excuse to flood out.

Daenyathos was alive! In truth, in the depths of his soul, Luko had always known he was not truly dead. The promise of his return seemed written into everything the legendary philosopher-soldier had passed down to his Chapter, as if the Catechisms Martial had woven into it a prophecy that he would walk among them once more. Amazingly, impossibly, it seemed the most natural thing in the galaxy that Daenyathos should be there when the Chapter faced its extinction.

Only one voice was not raised in celebration. It was that of Pallas, the Apothecary.

‘What did you do?’ shouted Pallas, and Luko just caught his words. They gave him pause, even as his twin hearts hammered with the force of the emotion.

‘What did you do, Daenyathos?’ shouted Pallas again, and a few of the Soul Drinkers fell silent as they considered his words. ‘How have you fallen into their hands, the same as us? Have you come here to face justice? Daenyathos, warrior-philosopher, tell us the truth!’

‘Tell us!’ shouted another. Those words soon clashed with Daenyathos’s name in the din, half the Soul Drinkers demanding answers, the other half proclaiming their hero’s return.

Daenyathos did not reply. Perhaps, if he had, he would not have been heard. The Imperial Fists hauled open a set of blast doors leading to a side chamber that had once been used to store the volatile chemicals required by some of the torture devices. Its ceramite-lined walls were strong enough to contain the weaponless Dreadnought. The Imperial Fists marshalled the Dreadnought inside and shut the doors, slamming the thing that called itself Daenyathos into the quiet and darkness.

Outside it took a long time for the chants of Daenyathos’s name to die down in the Halls of Atonement.

More than three hundred Astartes gathered in the Observatory of Dornian Majesty. Most Imperial battlezones never saw such a concentration of Space Marines, but these Astartes were not there to fight. They were there to see justice done.

The Observatory was one of the Phalanx’s many follies, a viewing dome built as a throne room for past Chapter Masters, where the transparent dome might afford a dramatic enough view of space to intimidate the Chapter’s guests who came there to petition the lords of the Imperial Fists. Vladimir had little need for such shows of intimidation and had closed off the Observatory for years.

It was one of the few places large enough to serve as the courtroom for the Soul Drinkers’ trial. The ship’s crew had built the seating galleries and the dock in the centre of the floor, an armoured pulpit into which restraints had been built strong enough to hold an accused Astartes. The Justice Lord’s position was on a throne the same height as the dock, facing it from the part of the gallery reserved for the Imperial Fists themselves.

The whole court was bathed in the light from the transparent dome. The Veiled Region was a mass of nebulae that boiled in the space outside the ship, nestling stars in its glowing clouds and swamping a vast swathe of space in the currents of half-formed star matter. Kravamesh hung, violet and hot, edging the courtroom in hard starlight.

The first in had been Lord Inquisitor Kolgo’s retinue of Battle Sisters, ten Sororitas led by Sister Aescarion. They knelt and prayed to consecrate the place, Aescarion calling upon the Emperor to turn His eyes upon the Phalanx and see that His justice was done.

The Imperial Fists 4th Company took up their positions, a hundred Imperial Fists gathering to serve as honour guard to their Chapter Master. Next the Howling Griffons filed in, Borganor scowling at the Observatory as if its tenuous connection with the Soul Drinkers made it hateful.

The other captains were next. Commander Gethsemar of the Angels Sanguine was accompanied by a dozen Sanguinary Guard, their jump packs framed by stabiliser fins shaped like white angels’ wings and their helmets fronted with golden masks fashioned to echo the death mask of their primarch, Sanguinius. Gethsemar himself wore several more masks hanging from the waist of his armour, each sculpted into a different expression. The one he wore had the mouth turned down in grim sorrow, teardrop-shaped emeralds fixed beneath one eye. Siege-Captain Daviks of the Silver Skulls wore the reinforced armour of a Devastator, built to accommodate the extra weight and heft of a heavy weapon, and his retinue counted among them his Company Champion carrying an obsidian sword and a shield faced with a mirror to deflect laser fire in combat.

The Iron Knights were represented by Captain N’Kalo, an assault captain who wore a proud panoply of honours, from a crown of laurels to the many honoriae hanging from the brocade across his chest and the Crux Terminatus on one shoulder pad. He led three squads of Astartes, his Iron Knights resplendent in the personal heraldry each wore on his breastplate and the crests on their helms. The Doom Eagles came in at the same time, represented by a single squad of Space Marines and Librarian Varnica. Where Varnica stepped, the stone beneath his feet bubbled and warped, his psychic abilities so pronounced that the real world strained to reject him, even with his power contained and channelled through the high collar of his Aegis armour.

Finally, Captain Lysander led in Chapter Master Vladimir Pugh. Vladimir took his place on the throne – as the Justice Lord of this court he was the highest authority, and it was at his sufferance that any defendants, witnesses or petitioners might speak. Lysander did not stand in the gallery, for he was to serve as the Hand of the Court, the bailiff who enforced his Chapter Master’s decisions among those present. Lysander looked quite at home patrolling the floor of the dome around the dock, and his fearsome reputation both as a disciplinarian and a warrior made for a powerful deterrent. A Space Marine’s temper might move him to leave the gallery and attempt to disrupt the court’s proceedings, even with violence – Lysander was one of the few men who could make such an Astartes think twice.

The tension was obvious. When Lord Inquisitor Kolgo arrived to join his Battle Sisters, the sideways glances and murmured comments only grew. Space Marines were all soldiers of the Emperor but many Chapters did not have regular contacts with others and some developed fierce rivalries over the millennia. The Imperial Fists had both retained the livery of their parent Legion, and been feted above almost all other Chapters for the service to the Imperium – no little jealousy existed between them and other Chapters who coveted the honours they had been granted, and no one could say that such jealousy was absent from the court.

Fortunately, nothing papered over such schisms like a common enemy.

Sarpedon was led in, restraints binding his mutant legs, by a gang of crewmen marshalled by Apothecary Asclephin. Asclephin had conducted the investigations into Sarpedon’s mutations – indeed, his findings were part of the evidence that would be presented to the court.

Sarpedon was herded into the dock, and his restraints fixed to the mountings inside the pulpit. Sarpedon still had the physical presence to demand a hush from the court in the first moments they saw him. He was bent by his restraints and he lacked the armour which was the badge of a Space Marine, but even without his mutations he would have demanded a form of respect with the scars and bearing of a veteran and the defiance that refused to leave his face. The inhibitor hood clamped to his skull just made him look more dangerous. One of Lysander’s primary duties was to watch Sarpedon carefully and subdue or even execute him at the first suggestion that the Soul Drinkers Chapter Master was using his psychic powers.

Sarpedon’s eyes passed across the faces of the assembled Space Marines. He recognised Borganor and Lysander, and Vladimir he knew by reputation. Kolgo he had never met, but the trappings of an inquisitor sparked their own kind of recognition. Several times the Soul Drinkers had crossed paths, and swords, with the Inquisition. The Holy Ordos had sent their representative here to take their pound of flesh.

Then Sarpedon’s eyes met Reinez’s.

Brother Reinez of the Crimson Fists was alone. He had no retinue with him. His armour was pitted and stained, the dark blue of the Crimson Fists and their red hand symbol tarnished with ill maintenance. Reinez wore a hood of sackcloth and his face was filthy, smeared with ash. Strips of parchment covered in prayers fluttered from every piece of his armour.

There was silence for a moment. Their eyes had all been on Sarpedon, and none had seen Reinez enter.

‘You,’ said Reinez, pointing at Sarpedon. His voice was a ruined growl. ‘You took my standard.’

Reinez had been the captain of the Crimson Fists 2nd Company during the battles with the xenos eldar on Entymion IV. The Soul Drinkers had taken the company standard in combat. Reinez was not a captain any more, and his trappings were those of a penitent, one who wandered seeking redemption outside his Chapter.

‘The court,’ said Vladimir, ‘recognises the presence of the Crimson Fists. Let the scribes enter it in the archives that–’

‘You,’ said Reinez, pointing at Sarpedon. ‘You took my standard. You allied with the xenos. You left my brothers dead in the streets of Gravenhold.’

‘I fought the xenos,’ replied Sarpedon levelly. ‘My conflict with you was sparked by your own hatred, not my brothers’ wish to kill yours.’

‘You lie!’ bellowed Reinez. ‘The life of the xenos leader was taken by my hand! But it was not enough. None of it was enough. The standard of the Second was taken by heretics. I travelled the galaxy looking for an enemy worthy of killing me, so I could die for my failings on Entymion IV. I could not find it. I turned my back on my Chapter and sought death for my sins, but the galaxy would not give it to me. And then I heard that the Soul Drinkers had been captured, and were to be tried on the Phalanx. And I realised that I did not have to die. I could have revenge.’

‘Brother Reinez,’ said Vladimir, ‘has been appointed the prosecuting counsel for the trial of the Soul Drinkers. The role of the Imperial Fists is to observe and administer justice, not to condemn. That task belongs to Brother Reinez.’

Sarpedon could only look at Reinez. He could scarcely imagine that any human being in the Imperium had ever hated another as much as Reinez obviously hated Sarpedon in that moment. Reinez had been shattered by the events on Entymion IV, Sarpedon could see that. He had been defeated and humiliated by Astartes the Crimson Fists believed to be heretics. But now this broken man had been given a chance at a revenge he thought was impossible, and if there was anything that could bring a Space Marine back from the brink, it was the promise of revenge.

‘The charges I bring,’ said Reinez, ‘are the treacherous slaying of the servants of the Emperor, rebellion from the Emperor’s light, and heresy by aiding the enemies of the Imperium of Man.’ The Crimson Fist was forcing down harsher words to conform to the mores of the court. ‘The punishment I demand is death, and for the accused to know that they are dying. By the Emperor and Dorn, I swear that the charges I bring are true and deserving of vengeance.’

‘This court,’ replied Vladimir formally, ‘accepts the validity of these charges and this court’s right to try the accused upon them.’

‘Chapter Master,’ said Sarpedon. ‘This man is motivated by hate and revenge. There can be no justice when–’

‘You will be silent!’ yelled Reinez. ‘Your heretic’s words will not pollute this place!’ He drew the power hammer he wore on his back and every Space Marine in the court tensed as the power field crackled around it.

‘The accused will have his turn to speak,’ said Vladimir sternly.

‘I see no accused!’ retorted Reinez. He jumped over the row of seating in front of him, heading towards the courtroom floor and Sarpedon’s pulpit. ‘I see vermin! I see a foul stain on the honour of every Astartes! I would take the head of this subhuman thing! I would spill its blood and let the Emperor not wait upon His justice!’

Lysander stepped between Reinez and the courtroom floor, his own hammer in his hands. ‘Will you spill this one’s blood too, brother?’ said Lysander.

Reinez and Lysander were face to face, Reinez’s breath heavy between his teeth. ‘The day I saw a son of Dorn stand between a Crimson Fist and the enemy,’ he growled, ‘is a day I am ashamed to have seen.’

‘Brother Reinez!’ shouted Vladimir, rising to his feet. ‘Your role is to accuse, not to execute. It is to prosecute alone that you have been permitted to board the Phalanx, in spite of the deep shame with which your own Chapter beholds you. Petitions will be heard and a verdict will be reached. This shall be the form your vengeance shall take. Blood will not be shed in my court save by my own order. Captain Lysander is the instrument of my will. Defy it and you defy him, and few will mourn your loss if that is the manner of death you choose.’

The moment for which Reinez was eye to eye with Lysander was far too long for the liking of anyone in the court. Reinez took the first step back and holstered his hammer.

‘The Emperor’s word shall be the last,’ he said. ‘He will speak for my dead brothers.’

‘Then now the court will hear petitioners from those present,’ said Vladimir. ‘In the Emperor’s name, let justice be done.’

The archivists of the Phalanx were a curious breed even by the standards of the voidborn. Most had been born on the ship – the few who had not had been purchased in childhood to serve as apprentices to the aged Chapter functionaries. An archivist’s purpose was to maintain the enormous parchment rolls on which the deeds and histories of the Imperial Fists were recorded. Those massive rolls, three times the height of a man and twice as broad, hung on their rollers from the walls of the cylindrical archive shaft, giving it the appearance of the inside of an insect hive bulging with pale cells.

An archivist therefore lived to record the deeds of those greater than him. An archivist was not really a person at all, but a human-shaped shadow tolerated to exist only as far as his duties required. They did not have names, being referred to by function. They were essentially interchangeable. They schooled their apprentices in the art of abandoning one’s own personality.

Several of these archivists were writing on the fresh surfaces of recently installed parchment rolls, their nimble fingers noting down the transmissions from the courtroom in delicate longhand. Others were illuminating the borders and capital letters. Gyranar cast his eye over these strange, dusty, dried-out people, their eyes preserved by goggles and their fingers thin bony spindles. Every breath he took in there hurt, but to a pilgrim of the Blinded Eye pain was just more proof that the Emperor still had tests for them to endure.

‘Follow,’ said the archivist who had been detailed to lead Gyranar through the cavernous rooms. This creature represented the dried husk of a human. It creaked when it walked and its goggles, the lenses filled with fluid, magnified its eyes to fat whitish blobs. Gyranar could not tell if the archivist was male or female, and doubted the difference meant anything to the archivist itself.

The archivist led Gyranar through an archway into another section of the archives. Here, on armour stands, were displayed a hundred suits of power armour, each lit by a spotlight lancing from high overhead. The armour was painted purple and bone, with a few suits trimmed with an officer’s gold. Each was displayed with its other wargear: boltguns and chainswords, a pair of lightning claws, a magnificent force axe with a blade inlaid with the delicate patterns of its psychic circuitry. The armour was still stained and scored from battle, and the smell of oil and gunsmoke mixed with the atmosphere of decaying parchment.

‘This is the evidence chamber,’ said the archivist. ‘Here are kept the items to be presented to the court.’

‘The arms of the Soul Drinkers,’ said Gyranar. He pulled his hood back, and the electoo on his face reflected the pale light. The scales tipped a little, as if they represented the processes of Gyranar’s mind, first weighing down on one side then the other.

‘Quite so. Those who wish to inspect them can claim leave to do so from the Justice Lord. Our task is to make them available for scrutiny.’

‘And afterwards?’

The archivist tilted its head, a faint curiosity coming over its sunken features. ‘They will be disposed of,’ it said. ‘Ejected into space or used as raw material for the forges. The decision has yet to be made.’

‘If the Soul Drinkers are found innocent,’ said Gyranar, ‘presumably these arms and armour will be returned to them.’

‘Innocent?’ replied the archivist. The faint mixture of mystification and baffled amusement was perhaps the most extreme emotion it had ever displayed. ‘What do you mean, innocent?’

‘Forgive me,’ said Gyranar, bowing his head. ‘A wayward thought. Might I be given leave to inspect this evidence for myself?’

‘Leave is granted,’ said the archivist. It turned away and left to take up its regular duties again.

Father Gyranar ran a finger along the blade of the force axe. This was the Axe of Mercaeno, the weapon of the Howling Griffons Librarian killed by Sarpedon. Sarpedon had taken the axe to replace his own force weapon lost in the battle. Such had been the information given by the Howling Griffons’ deposition to the court. Its use suggested a certain admiration held by Sarpedon for Mercaeno. It was probable that a replacement weapon could have been found in the Soul Drinkers’ own armouries on the Brokenback, but Sarpedon had chosen to bear the weapon so closely associated with the Space Marine he had killed.

It was a good weapon. It had killed the daemon prince Periclitor. Gyranar withdrew his thumb and regarded the thin red line on its tip. The Axe of Mercaeno was also very sharp.

Across the hall from the axe was a pair of oversized weapons, too big to be wielded by an Astartes, and with mountings to fix them onto the side of a vehicle. Gyranar knew they were the weapons of a Space Marine Dreadnought – a missile launcher and a power fist. They, too, were in the livery of the Soul Drinkers. Their presence told Gyranar that everything the Blinded Eye had foretold was coming to pass. He was a cog in a machine that had been in motion for thousands of years, and that its function was about to be completed was an honour beyond any deserving.

Gyranar knelt in prayer. His words, well-worn in his mind, called for the fiery and bloodstained justice of the Emperor to be visited on sinners and traitors. But his thoughts as they raced were very different.

The archives. The dome being used as the courtroom. The Halls of Atonement. The map being drawn in the pilgrim’s mind was beginning to join up. Soon, he would hold his final sermon, and the contents of that pronouncement were finally taking shape.

‘Everything,’ said Lord Inquisitor Kolgo, ‘is about power.’

The inquisitor lord paced as he spoke, making a half-circuit around the gallery seating, watched by the Battle Sisters who accompanied him. His Terminator armour was bulky but it was ancient, the secrets of its construction giving him enough freedom of movement to point and slam one fist into the other palm, stride and gesticulate as well as any orator. And he was good. He had done this before.

‘Think upon it,’ he said. ‘In this room are several hundred Astartes. Though I am a capable fighter for an unaugmented human, yet still the majority of you would have a very good chance of besting me. And I am unarmed. My weapons lie back on my shuttle, while many of you here carry the bolters or chainswords that you use so well in battle. I see you, the brothers of the Angels Sanguine, carrying the power glaives that mark you out as your Chapter’s elite. And you, Librarian Varnica, that force claw about your fist is more than a mere ornamentation. It is an implement of killing. So if you wished to kill me, there would be little I could do to stop it.’

Kolgo paused. The Space Marines he had mentioned looked like they did not appreciate being singled out. Kolgo spread out his arms to take in the whole courtroom. ‘And how many would like to kill me? Many of you have experienced unpleasant episodes at the hands of the Holy Ordos. I am a symbol of the Inquisition, and casting me down would be to strike a blow against every Inquisitor who ever claimed his jurisdiction included the Adeptus Astartes. I have, personally, gained something of a reputation for meddling in your affairs, and am no doubt the subject of more than a few blood oaths. Perhaps one of you here has knelt before the image of your primarch and sworn to see me dead. You would not be the first.’ Kolgo held up a finger, as if to silence anyone who might think to interrupt. ‘And yet, I live.’

Kolgo looked around the courtroom. The expression of Chapter Master Vladimir was impossible to read. Other Space Marines looked angry or uncomfortable, not knowing what Kolgo was trying to say but certain that they would not like it.

‘And why?’ said Kolgo. ‘Why am I not dead? I am satisfied that it is not through fear that you refrain from killing me. A Space Marine knows no fear, and in any case, the fulfilling of a blood oath takes far higher priority than the possibility of being lynched or prosecuted by your fellow Astartes. And as I have said, I myself am scarcely capable of defending myself against any one of you. So what is it that keeps me alive? What strange gravity stays your hands? The answer is power. I have power, and it is a force so irresistible, so immovable, that even Space Marines must make way for it sometimes. I say this not to tempt you into action, I hasten to say, but to show you that it is matters of power that determine so much of the decisions we make whether we understand that or not.

‘This trial is about power. It is about who holds it, to which power one bows, and the natural order of the Imperium as it is created by the power its members wield. I say to you that the principal crime of the Soul Drinkers is the flouting of that natural order of power. You have refrained from violence against me because of the place I hold in that order. Sarpedon and his brothers would not. They act outside that order. Their actions denigrate and damage it. But it is this order that holds the Imperium together, that maintains the existence of the Imperium and the species of man. Without it, all is chaos. This is the crime for which I condemn the Soul Drinkers, and thus do I demand to fall upon them a punishment that not only removes them from this universe, but proclaims the horror of their deaths as the consequence for railing against the order the Emperor Himself put in place.’

Kolgo punctuated his final words by banging his armoured fist on the backs of the seats in front of him. He turned, faced the Justice Lord, and inclined his head in as much of a bow as an Inquisitor Lord would give.

‘Are you finished?’ asked Vladimir.

‘This statement is concluded,’ said Kolgo.

‘Pah,’ came a voice from the galleries. ‘One of a thousand he would give if he had leave. The Lord Inquisitor’s desire to hear his own voice borders on the scandalous!’ The speaker was Siege-Captain Daviks of the Silver Skulls. The Silver Skulls beside him nodded and murmured their assent.

‘You wish to make a counter-statement, siege-captain?’ said Vladimir.

‘I wish for the statements to end!’ snapped Daviks. ‘This creature in the dock before us is not deserving of a trial. This thing is a mutant! In what Imperium of Man is a mutant afforded the right to be bedded down in this nest of pointless words? Reinez was right. I have never known a trial granted to such a thing. I have known only execution!’

Several Astartes shouted agreements. Vladimir held up a hand for silence but the din only grew.

‘Kill this thing, kill all the creatures you hold in your brigs, and let this be done with!’ shouted Daviks.

‘I will have order!’ bellowed Vladimir. He was not a man who raised his voice often, and as he rose to his feet the calls for violence died. ‘Apothecary Asclephin has borne witness that Sarpedon is to be tried as an Astartes. There the matter ends. You will get your execution, Captain Daviks, but in return you must have patience. I will see justice done here.’

‘A better illustration of power I could not have created myself,’ added Kolgo.

‘Your statement is concluded,’ said Vladimir. ‘Who will speak?’

‘We have not yet heard from the accused in the dock,’ replied Captain N’Kalo of the Iron Knights. ‘If we are to have a trial, the accused must speak in his defence.’

Vladimir’s recent interjections kept the retorts to N’Kalo’s words to a minimum.

‘I would speak in my defence,’ said Sarpedon. ‘I would have you all hear me. I did not turn from the authority of the Imperium at some perverse whim. For everything I have done, I have had a reason. Lord Kolgo’s words have done nothing but to convince me further that my every action was justified.’

‘You will speak,’ said Vladimir, ‘whether those observing like it or not. But you cannot speak as yet, for further charges are to be levelled against you.’

‘Name them,’ said Sarpedon.

‘That by the machinations of your authority,’ said Reinez, ‘four Imperial Fists died on the planet of Selaaca, three Scouts and one sergeant of the Tenth Company. To the Emperor’s protection have their souls been commended, and to the example of Dorn have they measured themselves with honour. Their deaths have been added to the list of crimes of which you are accused.’ Reinez spoke as if reading from a statement, and the real anger behind his words was far more eloquent. He enjoyed pouring further accusations on Sarpedon, especially one that hit so home to the Imperial Fists on whose forced neutrality Sarpedon depended.

The Imperial Fists around Vladimir made gestures of prayer. The other Space Marines gathered had evidently not heard of these charges, and a few quiet questions passed between them.

‘I know nothing of this!’ retorted Sarpedon. ‘No Imperial Fist died by a Soul Drinker’s hand on Selaaca. My battle-brothers surrendered to Lysander without a fight. The captain himself can attest to this!’

‘These crimes were not committed during your capture,’ said Vladimir. ‘Scout Orfos?’

The Imperial Fists parted to allow a Scout through their ranks. In most Chapters, the Imperial Fists among them, a recruit served a term as a Scout before his training and augmentation was completed. Since he could not yet wear the full power armour of a Space Marine, and since a full Astartes’s armour was ill-suited to anything requiring stealth, these recruits served as infiltrators and reconnaissance troops. Scout Orfos still wore the carapace armour, light by the standards of Astartes, and cameleoline cloak of a Scout. He was relatively youthful and unscarred compared to the Imperial Fists around him, but he had a sharp face with observant eyes and he moved with the assurance of a confident soldier.

‘Scout,’ said Vladimir, ‘describe to the court what you witnessed on Selaaca.’

‘My squad under Sergeant Borakis was deployed to investigate a location that the Castellan’s command had provided to us,’ began Orfos. ‘In a tomb beneath the ground we found a place that the Soul Drinkers had built there.’

Sarpedon listened, but his mind wanted to rebel. He had never heard of any Soul Drinker travelling to Selaaca before he had gone there to face the necrons. The planet was not mentioned in the Chapter archives. It could not be a coincidence that of all the millions of planets in the Imperium, he should stumble upon one where some forgotten brothers had built a tomb thousands of years ago. A tomb which, as Orfos’s evidence continued, had been built to keep all but the most determined Astartes out.

Sarpedon felt a wrenching inside him as Orfos described the deaths of the other scouts. Orfos was well-disciplined and little emotion showed in his words, but his face and intonation suggested the effort he was making in bottling it up. Orfos had been trained to hate, hypno-doctrination and battlefield experience teaching him the value of despising his enemy. That hate was turned on Sarpedon now. Sarpedon felt, for the first time in that courtroom, truly accused. He felt guilt at the Imperial Fists’ deaths, though this, of all his supposed crimes, was the only one that he had not committed.

‘It was a Dreadnought,’ Orfos was saying. ‘The tomb had been built to house it. It had been kept frozen to preserve its occupant...’

‘Justice Lord,’ said Sarpedon. ‘My Chapter has no Dreadnoughts. The last was lost with the destruction of the Scintillating Death six thousand years ago. It is made clear in the archives of–’

‘The accused will be silent!’ snapped Vladimir. ‘Or he will be made silent.’ A glance from Vladimir towards Lysander suggested how Vladimir would go about shutting Sarpedon up. ‘Scout Orfos. Continue.’

‘The Dreadnought awoke,’ said Orfos, ‘and I voxed for reinforcements. A team of servitors and Techmarines made the tomb safe and disarmed the Dreadnought.’

‘Did it speak to you?’ asked Vladimir.

‘It did,’ said Orfos. ‘It placed itself in my custody, and told me its name.’

‘Which was?’

‘Daenyathos.’

Sarpedon slumped against the pulpit.

Daenyathos was dead. The heretic Croivas Ascenian had killed him six thousand years ago.

His mind raced. The impossibility of it stunned him.

Of all the names he might have heard listed as a traitor, Daenyathos was the last he would have expected. Daenyathos had written down the Soul Drinkers’ way of war, and even after casting aside the ways of the old Chapter Sarpedon had still found infinite wisdom in Daenyathos’s works. Every Soul Drinker had read the Catechisms Martial. Sarpedon had fought his wars by its words. It had given him strength. Daenyathos was a symbol of what the Imperium could be – wise and strong, tempered with discipline but beloved of knowledge. Now the philosopher-soldier’s name had been dragged into this sordid business.

And if he was alive... if Daenyathos truly lived still, as only a Space Marine in a Dreadnought could...

‘I swear...’ said Sarpedon. ‘If he lives... I swear I did not know...’

‘And by what do you swear?’ snarled Captain Borganor from the gallery. ‘On your traitor’s honour? On the tombs of my brothers you have slain? I say this proves the Soul Drinkers are not mere renegades! I say they have been corrupt for millennia, under the guidance of Daenyathos, sworn to the powers of the Enemy and primed to bring about some plot of the warp’s foul making!’

Voices rose in agreement. Sarpedon’s mind whirled too quickly for him to pay attention to them. If Daenyathos was alive, then what did that mean? The Soul Drinkers had gone to Selaaca to stave off the necron invasion of an innocent world, and yet Daenyathos had been there all along. Sarpedon traced back the events of the last weeks, his capture, the assault on the necron overlord’s tomb, the battles on Raevenia and the clash with the Mechanicus fleet, and before that...

Iktinos. It had been Iktinos who had suggested the Brokenback flee into the Veiled Region. The Chaplain’s arguments had made sense – the Veiled Region was a good place to hide. And yet he had led the Soul Drinkers straight to the tomb of Daenyathos. Iktinos must have known Daenyathos was there. And yet Iktinos had been one of Sarpedon’s most trusted friends, the spiritual heart of the Chapter...

‘Is he here?’ said Sarpedon, hoping to be heard over the shouting. ‘Daenyathos. Is he here, on the Phalanx?’

‘He shall be brought to the dock in time,’ replied Vladimir.

‘I must speak with him!’

‘You shall do no such thing.’ retorted Vladmir. ‘There will be no provision made for you to plot further! When your trial is complete, Daenyathos’s shall begin. That is all you shall know!’ Vladimir banged a gauntlet. ‘I will have order under the eyes of Dorn! Lysander, bring me order!’

‘Silence!’ yelled Lysander, striding across the courtroom. ‘The Justice Lord will have silence! There is no Space Marine here too lofty of station to be spared the face of my shield! Silence!’

‘This farce must end!’ shouted Borganor. ‘So deep the corruption lies! So foul a thing the Soul Drinkers are, and now we see, they have always been! Burn them, crush them, hurl them into space, and excise this infection!’

Lysander vaulted the gallery rail and powered his way up to Borganor. The Howling Griffons were not quick enough to hold him back, and it was by no means certain they could have done so at all. Lysander bore down on Borganor, face to face, storm shield pressing against Borganor’s chest and pinning him in place. Lysander had his hammer in his other hand, held out as a signal for the other Howling Griffons to stay back.

‘I said silence,’ growled Lysander.

‘My thanks, captain,’ said Vladimir. ‘You may stand down.’

Lysander backed away from Borganor. The two Space Marines held each other’s gaze as Lysander returned to the courtroom floor.

‘There will be no further need for calls to order,’ said Vladimir. ‘You are here at my sufferance. When my patience runs out with you, you return to your ships and leave. Captain Lysander is authorised to escort you. Scout Orfos, you are dismissed.’

Orfos saluted and left the gallery, the Imperial Fists bowing their heads in respect to him and his lost brothers as he went.

Reinez had watched the tumult with a smile on his face. Nothing could have pleased him more than seeing Sarpedon’s distress, except perhaps Sarpedon’s severed head.

‘Who will speak next?’ said Vladimir. ‘Who can bring further illumination to the crimes of the accused?’

Varnica of the Doom Eagles stood. ‘I would speak,’ he said. ‘The court must hear what I have to say, for it bears directly on the nature of the Soul Drinkers’ crimes. I bring not rhetoric or bile. I bring the truth, as witnessed by my own eyes.’

‘Then speak, Librarian,’ said Vladimir.

The courtroom hushed, and Varnica began.

The Rat Catcher’s Tail

Richard Ford

The candle he kept by his bedside had long since burnt out and Hugo’s room was bathed in blackness. The shutters over his windows kept out any encroaching moonlight, the double bolts serving to lock him fast within his mansion fortress.

He listened through the darkness, straining his ears for any sound. His eyes were wide as he peered over the top of his fine-stitched Estalian sheets, but could see nothing through the gloom.

There it was again, as it had come every night for the past week – the incessant scratching and pattering of tiny feet. Hugo could no longer deny the fact that it was slowly beginning to drive him insane. They were in the walls, under the floorboards, crawling across the attic, and Hugo was powerless to stop them. He had spent the past two days crawling around his own home with nothing but a sputtering candle for illumination, waiting behind half-closed doors for sound of the vermin’s passing. When he heard it he would burst in, walking cane in hand, but the snuffling, chittering, furry beasts were nowhere in sight.

Would he have no peace?

Hugo Kressler was known throughout Talabheim as a well-respected, and very wealthy, merchant. His business had seen emperors come and go, had survived Chaos incursions and peasant uprisings.

When he had accrued enough wealth, Hugo had commissioned the building of the largest private property in the Manor District and on its completion he could not have been happier. It was a triumph of architecture, sporting wood panelling bought in from Ostland, lancet archways carved by dwarf masons, and boasting the latest security guaranteed by the Locksmith’s Guild of Altdorf. Above all it satisfied Hugo’s requirements for total privacy. For two years he had been ecstatically happy in his new abode, walking his hallways and admiring the works of art from Tilea and Bretonnia, sampling his vast wine cellar and counting his hard-earned coin.

Now all that was falling apart.

He had not slept for days and his usually voracious appetite had all but vanished. Hugo was now a wan shadow of his former self, a bag of saggy flesh with red-rimmed eyes that stared from beneath an unkempt mass of shaggy grey hair. It was like being a prisoner in his own home. He dare not leave for fear of what state his beloved mansion would be in when he returned. What would the pink-eyed beasts do to his belongings in his absence? The filth they would leave behind, the teeth marks… the droppings!

Wrenching back his sheets, Hugo leapt out of bed. He blindly felt around for his bedside candle and the single match he kept on the dresser in case he was caught short during the night. With the candle lit he strode across his bedroom, one hand shading the precious illumination. He opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the wide, panelled corridor.

All the while the noise from within the walls seemed to get louder, the rodents seeming to mock him, knowing they were winning, knowing that Hugo’s wits would soon be frayed to nothing.

‘I know you can hear me!’ he screamed, his voice echoing along the pitch-black corridor. ‘You won’t win. Mark me! Do you know who you’re dealing with? I’m Hugo Kressler, the most powerful merchant in Talabheim!’

As if in answer, the rats fell silent.

Hugo stood in the dark, watching… waiting.

Nothing.

With a sigh of relief he stumbled back to his bed, climbing within the fine, smooth sheets and pulling them up to his chin. Within seconds the gentle mercy of sleep overcame him.

Hugo was running.

He found it curious – normally when he ran in dreams it was as though he were wading through thick treacle, his legs sluggish and listless no matter how he willed them to move. Now however he was speeding along, scurrying even, moving with all the stealth and snap of a wild animal. At first this thrilled him, his heart pounding like a taxman at the door, but soon he realised the reason for his alacrity… he was being chased!

Something was after him, something big and mean and casting a long black shadow, and no matter how he tried to escape it he could not. He jinked left and right, over and under obstacles, but still he could not shake off his pursuer. It was a losing battle, the hunter was gaining, Hugo could hear its pounding feet at his back, and the stink of its hot breath…

He awoke, breathless and panting. His fine satin sheets were drenched, his silken nightgown clinging to his clammy flesh.

This would not stand – awake he was tormented by invaders in his home, asleep he was plagued by night terrors. He had to do something, had to rid himself of these torturous vermin.

Hugo leapt from his bed, flinging open his door and tramping through the corridors of his house, which were slowly brightening in the dawn light. In the porch he donned his boar-skin greatcoat and the boots made especially for him from Arabyan horsehide, then ventured out into the chill morning air.

The streets of Talabheim were all but deserted this early in the day, particularly in the Manor District. It was inhabited by the city’s great and good, and only their footmen and domestics would be out of bed at this ungodly hour. Consequently, when he stepped onto the Avenue of Heroes and headed west to his destination, Hugo had only an endless row of posturing statues to keep him company.

As he stamped through the streets they gradually became busier, and when he moved into the district known as Guildrow the bare cobbled road had become a hive of bustling activity. The Guildrow was a hub for Talabheim’s industry, with blacksmiths and brewers, tinkers and tanners all going about their business. It was here that Hugo would find what he was looking for.

Eventually he located it and with renewed vigour Hugo marched to the front door of the trapmaker’s shop. The lintel had been painted black, and written on it in faded white script was the legend: Gerhardt Moller – Master of Traps, as appointed by Helmut Feuerbach, Elector Count of Talabecland. This on its own filled Hugo with some relief as he rapped on the door. Moller would clearly have the answer to the twitching, scurrying, defecating problem that was assailing his home.

At first there was no answer, but after several successive, and steadily more frantic, knockings at the door it was hauled open. The man Hugo could only assume was the ‘master’ trapmaker stood staring from within the gloom, his hair dishevelled, his body encased in a tattered, furry robe of indeterminate origin.

‘What?’ said Moller gruffly, clearly none too impressed at being disturbed at this hour of the morning.

‘I have a problem,’ Hugo replied, a little more desperately than he had intended.

‘Clearly,’ said Moller, looking Hugo up and down. ‘You’d best come in then.’ He pushed open the door, allowing Hugo to step into the gloomy interior of the shop.

Once inside, his eyes slowly adjusted, revealing the dusty wares on sale. All manner of grim and dangerous-looking equipment lined the walls: spiked cages, leghold- and bear-traps, manacles of varying length and thickness, weighted nets and snares.

‘What is it you’re after, then?’ asked Moller. ‘Bear? Wolf? Boar? I’ll assume it’s game since you certainly don’t look the bounty hunting type.’

‘Erm, no,’ Hugo replied. ‘It’s… well, it’s, erm… rats!’

Moller narrowed his eyes, staring across the dark room with clear disdain. ‘Rats?’

‘Yes, I’m plagued by the filthy degenerate vermin. I need traps, and plenty of them.’

Moller shook his head, grumbling to himself as he entered a back room. Hugo could hear banging and clattering as the man searched through a mass of clutter until he eventually found what he was looking for. He returned with a small wooden box which he dropped on the shop counter with a disconsolate shrug. Peering in, Hugo could see a collection of jumbled garbage, some of it recognisable as trap components, but mostly it was a box full of broken wood and rusted metal hinges.

‘Is that it?’ Hugo said. ‘On your door it says Master of Traps!’

Moller frowned, grasping the box. ‘Now look here – I’ve crafted traps for elector counts in four provinces, hunters come to me from as far as Nordland. If you don’t want–’

‘No, no. I’ll take it,’ said Hugo in a panic, producing a purse from inside his coat. ‘Here, for your trouble.’ He placed four shiny gold crowns on the counter.

Moller seemed to instantly brighten, clapping his hand over the coins and sliding them into his meaty palm.

Hugo grabbed the box and was about to leave when Moller held up his hand.

‘I’ve got something else might help,’ he said. ‘If you’re interested.’

Hugo nodded, unsure whether to trust the wry smile on Moller’s face. The trapmaker disappeared into the back room once more, but this time there was no sound of clattering. What Hugo heard was far worse, as though Moller were wrestling with some kind of foul daemonic creature. He reappeared seconds later, holding a large object with a tattered piece of sacking draped over the top. Once he had slammed it down on the counter he jumped back, as though the object might explode in his face. Hugo could hear a frenzied gnashing and spluttering emanating from beneath the sack, and he too retreated to a safe distance.

‘This,’ said Moller, grasping the cloth between the fingers of his outstretched hand, ‘is Gertrude!’

He whipped away the sack to reveal a cage beneath. Hugo couldn’t tell what the sight within it filled him with more: fear or revulsion. Gertrude was the sorriest looking excuse for a cat he had ever seen – all gnashing teeth and mangy fur. She attacked the cage with a frenzy to rival any Norscan, howling like a banshee all the while.

‘Best ratter in the Taalbaston, although she does have some… issues. Yours for only five crowns.’

Hugo stared as the cat tried to chew her way out of the mesh cage, her chipped yellow teeth grinding against the metal.

‘No thanks,’ he replied. ‘The traps will do for now.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said Moller. ‘But if you change your mind, you can always come back.’

‘Of course,’ Hugo said, backing out into the street, and closing the shop door behind him. ‘I’ll be back – right after I’ve flashed my fruits at the Emperor’s Parade.’

It took him hours to disentangle the mess of traps Moller had sold him. Some had broken hinges, some brittle bases, others were rusted beyond use, but eventually Hugo managed to salvage over a dozen usable rat traps.

After much planning, he located them strategically throughout his house then carefully baited each one with Grossreiche Blue – the most pungent cheese he owned. As he carefully secured the clasp on the last one, Hugo giggled at his visions of an unwary quarry wandering up, summoned by the tantalising aroma, only to have its neck snapped as it tried to take a bite.

Still chortling to himself, Hugo retreated to his bedchamber, snuffed out the candle and jumped into bed.

In the morning, Hugo was awoken to brilliant sunlight invading the slats in his Cathayan blinds. He could remember no nightmares; in fact his sleep had been so sound he couldn’t remember dreaming at all.

With a spring in his step he crossed his room and flung open the door, eager to see the carnage his traps had wrought. He padded, barefoot, to the end of the corridor then gingerly peered around the corner. Hugo had never had the strongest of stomachs, and despite the inevitable joy he knew it would bring, he was still reluctant to view a splattered rat’s corpse.

But there was nothing there – no trap, no Grossreiche Blue, and definitely no dead rat.

Hugo stared for several seconds. He was certain he had placed one of the traps right on that spot, but there was nothing. Scratching his head, he moved on to the next trap.

Perhaps he was mistaken, he thought as he moved through the house, perhaps his frenzied eagerness to eliminate the vermin had confused him and fuddled his mind. It was perfectly possible, he was under a lot of strain after all, but when he reached the location of the next trap he let out an audible yelp. That one had also disappeared!

With rising panic, Hugo rushed through the mansion, his feet slapping against the bare floorboards as he hurried to view each carefully-planned spot in which he had left his baited traps. Every one was missing, with not even a crumb of cheese left to mark where they had been.

His heart was beating now, slamming against his ribcage, the blood pumping audibly in his ears. The pressure in his head felt as though it would smash through his skull, releasing his frustration in a black gout of fetid steam.

‘I know what you’re up to!’ Hugo screamed, his voice echoing through the chambers and corridors of his mansion. ‘You’re trying to send me mad! Well it won’t work! Do you hear me? I’m Hugo Kressler, the greatest merchant of Talabheim, and I won’t be beaten by scavenging pests!’

At that he raced down the stairs, this time not bothering to don his greatcoat or boots before hurrying into the morning air.

Hugo returned two hours later. He tramped up the garden path bearing a heavy package, made all the more cumbersome by the gnashing, whining, spitting creature that was secreted within its wire mesh confines. On any other day his entrepreneurial nature would have compelled him to haggle with Moller over the price, but this was not a day for bartering – besides, five crowns had seemed like a bargain under the circumstances.

The front door slammed open as Hugo entered, a maniacal grin on his face.

‘I’m back!’ he screamed. ‘And I’ve brought a friend with me!’

After placing the cage down in the centre of the reception hall he removed the sack that covered it, eager to release Gertrude on his unsuspecting houseguests. On seeing the raging whirlwind of fur and claws though, Hugo had second thoughts. Perhaps he should try and bond with Gertrude first, at least enough to stop her trying to claw his throat out.

He raced to the pantry, sniffing the pail of milk that sat within. It was a bit on the sour side, but he doubted Gertrude would notice – by the looks of her she’d not been offered anything this fresh for months.

Pouring some of the milk into a saucer he returned to the entrance hall and placed it in front of the cage.

‘How about a little peace offering?’ he said, sliding back the bolt.

In response, Gertrude calmed a little, seemingly mesmerised by the promise of milk.

Hugo swung the cage door open and backed away, leaving the saucer between him and the cat. She padded forwards with a sniff, then tentatively lapped up a mouthful. To Hugo’s relief, his souring milk appeared to Gertrude’s liking and she finished off the saucer with gusto, then sat back with a satisfied purr.

‘There,’ he said, taking a step forwards to pat her head. ‘You’re not all that bad after all, are you?’

His hand didn’t reach within a foot of her before she screeched, clawing at him, yowling her hatred and attacking with unrestrained fury.

Hugo fled, sprinting up his staircase pursued by the angry cat all the way back to his bedchamber. He just managed to slam the door before Gertrude inflicted any further harm, and slid the bolt across just in case.

It was several hours before he mustered the courage to open his door, peering out into the dark corridor beyond. When he saw there was no wicked, hissing cat waiting for him, he let out a sigh of relief and stepped out into the passage.

His bare foot squelched down on something soft and unctuous. It oozed between his toes, unleashing the most horrendous odour Hugo had ever had the misfortune to experience.

He didn’t have to look down to know that Gertrude had left him a gift reflecting just what she thought of him.

Well, she didn’t have to like him, did she – she just had to do what he’d bought her for!

Hugo hopped to his nightstand, removed the doily that sat atop it and wiped the pungent cat crap from his foot, then went in search of Gertrude.

After checking the ground floor and finding no trace of the cat or her prey, Hugo moved to the first floor. As he reached the top landing he cringed as he saw fresh claw marks on his fine oak banister. He clenched his teeth against the fury, and moved towards the stair for the second floor, only to slip and stumble on a warm puddle of what could only be cat piss.

Hugo clenched his fists, moving to the foot of the stairwell and dragging his sodden foot along his embroidered Kislevite rug. It was then there pealed forth a horrendous sound the like of which he had never heard before. It was a tortured crowing, as though some wild animal were braying its last in agonising pain, and he was suddenly frozen to the spot by the sound.

Steeling himself, Hugo moved up the stairs onto the second-storey corridor. A number of doors led off into his various guestrooms and the sound seemed to be emanating from within one of them. It was louder now, and clearly coming from the first room on the right. Hugo grasped the door handle, girding his loins as he pushed open the door, squinting as he entered lest the sight be too much for his delicate sensibilities.

Gertrude let out another shattering howl, and Hugo’s jaw dropped open at the sight. The cat lay in the middle of the room, her fur in tattered pieces, and clasped to her body, from the tip of her tail to the ends of her ears, were Hugo’s missing rat traps.

What could have done this? What foul creature could overcome Gertrude so? What fiendish jester was taunting him in such a manner?

The answer was clear – these rats were revealing themselves as a force to be reckoned with!

‘Bastards!’ Hugo cried. ‘You may have won this battle, but the war isn’t over yet!’

With Gertrude safely de-trapped and placed in her cage, Hugo left his mansion once more. This time he had the wherewithal to dress himself, albeit shabbily, before he set out onto the darkening streets.

The Frog and Trumpet was one of the more upper-class drinking establishments of Talabheim, being situated in the affluent Manor District and with a clientele to match. Although Hugo received a curious look from the doorman as he walked in, his face was well-known enough to secure him entry despite his drab appearance.

Dergen Henschnapf was sitting in his usual spot by the fire, supping his schnapps and listening to the well-versed lute player secreted in one corner of the drinking house. When Hugo slumped into the grand leather chair opposite, Dergen peered curiously over his half-moon spectacles, barely recognising his old friend.

‘I have a problem,’ Hugo said, his eyes wide and desperate.

‘Clearly,’ Dergen replied.

‘Why does everyone keep saying that? Anyway, you have to help me, I have nowhere else to turn.’

Dergen took another sip of schnapps before giving Hugo his Do go on, I’m listening look.

‘I have rats. In my house. They’re everywhere,’ Hugo said before glancing around furtively, as though admitting he had rats in public might be more of a social faux pas than turning up at the Frog and Trumpet looking like a pauper’s dog.

Dergen said nothing, merely altering his expression to What would you like me to do about it.

‘You have connections,’ said Hugo, growing ever more desperate, unable to keep his voice below a hoarse whisper. ‘You move in those kind of circles.’

Dergen raised an eyebrow. ‘What exactly are you suggesting?’ he replied.

‘Do I have to spell it out? You know people in the extermination business.’

Now it was Dergen’s turn to glance furtively before sitting up and moving closer to Hugo.

‘I have contacts, yes, but they’re not skilled in exterminating the kind of vermin you’re talking about.’

‘You must know someone, Dergen. There must be something you can do, I’m at my wits end!’

Dergen reclined in his chair, deep in thought. Then he nodded, a sly smile crossing his lips. ‘Actually I do know someone who may be able to help. Owes me a favour, and he’s skilled in just this line of work.’

‘Really?’ Hugo’s face brightened. ‘You do?’

‘Yes. You can find him in the Ten-Tailed Cat. Just ask for Boris, the barman will know who you mean.’

Hugo suddenly glared with indignation. ‘You expect me to go to the Ten-Tailed Cat? I’m Hugo Kressler, the most powerful merchant–’

‘–in all Talabheim. Yes, I’ve heard it before Hugo, but I’m guessing the rats in your house don’t care about that. And let’s face it, you hardly look too powerful or merchant-like for the Ten Tailed Cat right now, do you? In fact, dressed as you are I’m guessing you’ll fit right in.’

Hugo glanced down at his apparel, then ran a trembling hand through his straw-like mop of hair.

‘Well, I’ve been under a lot of stress,’ he said.

‘All the more reason for you to hurry along,’ replied Dergen, waving Hugo towards the door.

Hugo could only nod, thanking his old friend and rushing from the Frog and Trumpet before anyone else could see him in such a dishevelled condition.

The docks stank of rotting fish and ale, mixed in with the sickly-sweet aroma of cheap perfume wafting from a gaggle of preening harlots. None of them bothered to give Hugo a second glance as he made his way through the shadows towards the Ten-Tailed Cat.

A muted din of conversation emanated from the confines of the alehouse and, as Hugo approached, the door was suddenly flung open, allowing a drink-addled patron to stumble out into the night. The raucous interior was revealed in all its insalubrious glory; a heady mix of dirty laughter and thick pipe smoke.

Hugo hesitated at the threshold. What had he been reduced to? Sneaking through the dark of Talabheim’s most woe-begotten streets to mix with the patrons of the city’s foulest dives. But he was here for a reason… a quest some might say. Even the heroes of legend had to reach their lowest ebb before rising to victory. This was merely another step on his path to defeating the enemy in his home.

Raising his chin, Hugo strode forwards, opening the door to the Ten-Tailed Cat and walking in as though he owned the place. Immediately, several sets of mean, hard-bitten eyes turned his way, and any confidence he may have summoned immediately vanished.

Dropping his head to avoid eye contact with anyone, Hugo made a dash for the bar. It turned into a weird kind of dance as he jinked and dodged to avoid touching any of the hulking, brutish patrons in his path, but eventually he made it in one piece. He squeezed between two grimy dockers and signalled the barman. Over the din of the alehouse he explained he was looking for Boris, and with a nonchalant nod of the head, the round-faced barman signalled towards a booth in one dank corner.

As Hugo approached he saw that Boris was a hulking figure, his head encased in a tight leather skullcap, his bare arms bulging with thick, corded muscle. He nursed a large pewter tankard into which he stared with a strange melancholy and, despite his rough exterior, Boris looked as out of place amongst the boisterous carousers of the Ten-Tailed Cat as Hugo felt.

‘Erm, Boris?’ Hugo asked as he reached the booth. The man seemed to brighten at Hugo’s approach, nodding and offering the bench opposite. ‘You’ve been recommended to me by Dergen Henschnapf as a man who might be able to eradicate a certain pest problem I currently have,’ said Hugo, taking the proffered seat.

Boris frowned, suddenly deep in thought. ‘Can’t say as I recognise the name,’ he replied in a rumbling voice. ‘But my memory’s not been all it was since I got retired from sewer duty.’

‘Retired? Does that mean you’re no longer in the business?’

‘Depends what the problem is.’

Hugo glanced around, but it was clear the rest of the alehouse was too busy with its own revelry to care about his problems. ‘I have… rats. In my house,’ he whispered over the din.

‘Have you tried traps?’ asked Boris.

‘Of course I’ve tried bloody traps,’ Hugo snapped with immediate regret. ‘I mean, yes. But these ones are clever, devious… cunning.’

Boris smiled knowingly. ‘Ah. You’ll be needing an expert then.’

Of course I will, that’s why I’m in this stinking fleapit! was what Hugo wanted to say, but he merely nodded in reply, keeping his lip firmly buttoned.

‘Well, you’ve come to the right man,’ Boris continued. ‘I’m the best rat catcher in the city. Let me know the address, I’ll pick up some supplies and be right round.’

Hugo felt a sudden rush of elation. ‘Excellent,’ he replied.

He gave Boris the details of his mansion, along with easy instructions on how to find it, then stood to leave. Before he could escape the cloying confines of the Ten-Tailed Cat, though, he paused, curiosity getting the better of him.

‘You say you were retired from sewer duty? What exactly happened?’

Boris smiled, gripping the leather skullcap and pulling it from his head to reveal a gristly stump where his right ear should have been. ‘Big ’un took my ear off. Made a right bloody mess it did. Don’t worry though, I took the bugger’s own ear right back.’ With that he reached into his hide jerkin and pulled out a chain, on the end of which dangled what was clearly the ear of a cow.

Hugo began to wonder whether this was a good idea – Boris was plainly unhinged, but then he guessed most rat catchers were.

‘How come losing your ear meant you had to retire?’ he asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.

‘Oh, it’s not because of this. Me ear wasn’t all the big ’un took.’ With that, Boris heaved himself out from behind the table, to reveal a chipped and weathered wooden leg, which he patted affectionately.

‘A rat took your leg?’ said Hugo in astonishment.

‘Like I said; it was a big ’un.’

Hugo could only smile, staring down in bewilderment. A rat took his ear and his leg? The man was clearly out of his gourd. Was this the kind of person he wanted running riot through his house – his beautiful home? Some nutter with delusions of monstrous rats that could tear you limb from limb?

The answer was obvious.

‘On second thoughts,’ Hugo said, trying to smile through his discomfort. ‘I’ve just remembered I may have double booked. Yes, that’s right, I have someone else on the job, so there’s really no need for you to trouble yourself. Anyway, must dash.’

With that he stumbled away from the booth, turning to push his way through the crowd, this time not caring who he nudged and shoved out of the way to escape the madhouse.

Once out in the street he breathed in the fetid air, sucking it into his lungs in relief.

The Ten-Tailed Cat indeed! What was Dergen thinking to recommend such a place, and such a man? Once this whole business was over, Hugo was sure he would be having stern words with his old friend regarding his recommendations, and with the sound of the bawdy house ringing in his ears he made his way back home.

That night, Hugo dreamed again.

He was running flat out, his tiny heart fluttering like a hummingbird’s wing, his feet tapping against the hard ground in a staccato beat. The hunter was after him once more, pounding the earth in his wake, chasing him down, relentless and indomitable. Still Hugo dare not look back, dare not look upon the beast on his trail, so determined was he to avoid his fate.

But he could not.

No matter how fast or how far he ran it was still there, always there, breathing down his neck, slavering at the mouth in anticipation of the catch.

Hugo suddenly stumbled, losing his footing, falling, rolling. In an instant he was back on his feet, ready to move once more but that single mistake was enough for the hunter to gain on its prey.

Strong hands, iron hard and huge, grasped him tight, digging their fingers into his flesh, lifting him, raising him towards that infernal maw…

Hugo screamed himself awake, his eyes wide, staring into the blackness of his bedchamber. He panted in the dark, feeling every bit the helpless child. It was all he could do not to cry out for his mother. Once he realised he was alone, and there was no dark hellish beast after him, he let out a laboured sigh of relief. It was only then he realised he was sitting in a damp patch of his own urine.

With a low moan of resignation, Hugo donned his clothes, his boots and his greatcoat. It was a long walk back to the Ten-Tailed Cat, and he didn’t want to catch his death in the night chill.

When Boris knocked at the door of the mansion the next day, Hugo almost fell over himself in his eagerness to open it. The rat catcher stood there with a huge grin on his face, stinking of stale booze and pipe smoke.

‘Come in,’ said Hugo, stepping aside as Boris clunked forwards on his wooden leg. The sturdy appendage clacked against the polished wood floor of the entrance hall and Hugo winced at the prospect of having to call in the polishers to retouch and varnish it.

Boris gawped in astonishment at the interior of the opulent mansion, the grin never leaving his face. ‘Nice place you’ve got,’ he said.

Hugo didn’t reply, he was too busy staring at the paraphernalia Boris was carrying. Some of it was clearly designed for a purpose – two cages, a snare and various traps dangled from the thick belt at Boris’s waist – but there were other items that Hugo did not recognise.

‘What’s that?’ he said, pointing at the wooden barrel under the crook of Boris’s arm.

‘Rat poison,’ Boris replied. ‘Got to be careful though, it’s very potent.’

‘And that?’ Hugo pointed at the huge steel-headed maul strapped to the rat catcher’s back.

‘Oh, that’s for the big ’uns I mentioned before. You can never be too careful in this game. Anyway, shall we get to it?’ Without invitation Boris moved into the mansion, placing his cages down, securing his snares and traps, all the while sniffing the air and muttering to himself about ‘infestations’ and ‘soon having this all sewn up’.

Hugo could only look on with trepidation as the gigantic rat catcher stomped through his beautiful house, exuding his unique aroma and making a mess of his floorboards.

‘Right, all done,’ Boris said finally. ‘Just got to lay the poison and we’re all finished. Of course, you might want to wait outside while I put it down, it doesn’t half hum.’

‘Are you sure this is strictly necessary?’ Hugo said, looking around his home with growing concern.

‘Course I am. Poison’s the best way to flush ’em out. Then the fun starts.’ Boris patted the head of his maul affectionately.

Hugo nodded uncertainly and made to leave, but he paused at the doorway, a portentous feeling of dread filling the pit of his stomach like corked wine. With one last glance around his magnificent entrance hall, he retreated to the safety of the garden.

Boris appeared some time later, trailing the contents of his barrel over the threshold of the doorway and out into the garden. Hugo could only look on in confusion. With the poison laid, Boris place the barrel down on the lawn and turned, a self-satisfied smile on his broad features.

‘Now the fun starts,’ he said. ‘Once we’ve flushed ’em out of course.’

The burly rat catcher took something from his pocket, and knelt down at the end of the trail of poison. Hugo heard a clinking sound as Boris ministered to the trail of powder on the ground.

The trail of black powder.

Hugo was suddenly gripped with a panic. He dashed forwards, about to ask what in the hells Boris was doing, when a flaring sound and the stink of phosphor suddenly struck the air.

‘No!’ was all he could manage to scream as Boris lit the powder trail with a strike of his flint. It ignited, sending a blazing spark along the garden path towards the house. Hugo chased it, vainly trying to catch the burning trail before it ran rampant through his house and set light to the floorboards, but he was not fast enough. Once in the hallway he saw that the powder trail ran of in several different directions – up the stairs, into the parlour, down into the cellar – setting the floor alight in a flickering trail as it went. Flames began to spread throughout the house, and Hugo ran forwards, stamping vainly at the blackening floorboards in an attempt to rescue his home.

Boris walked in after him, and Hugo glared up with unrestrained hatred. ‘What have you done, you imbecile? You told me it was rat poison!’

‘It is,’ replied Boris, a hurt expression on his face. ‘Rats can’t stand it – they likes it even less when you set fire to it. It’s the best thing for flushing them out – look!’

With that he pointed towards the cellar entrance as a horde of rats suddenly scurried out of the dank pit to safety.

Boris grinned, unslinging the maul from his back and rushing forwards with an expression of pure glee on his dumb features. The maul came down with an audible swipe, smashing one of the rats to sludge and knocking a huge hole in the floorboards.

‘I told you it would work,’ he yelled as he went about decimating the rat swarm, crushing them to a bloody pulp, along with the polished floor of the entrance hall.

More rats began to flood from various parts of the house, rushing down the stairs in a squeaking, scurrying mass in their eagerness to escape the flames. Boris was waiting, the delight he derived from his work seeming to increase with every sweeping blow of his maul.

Hugo couldn’t just stand by and watch as his house was demolished. In a panic, he ran to the cupboard under the stairs, ignoring the swarm of rats that billowed from it, and grabbed a bucket. He rushed out into the garden, filling the bucket with pond water and a few unlucky fish, then rushed back inside to quench the flames that were threatening to set fire to his embroidered Bretonnian drapery.

The mansion’s systematic destruction went on for almost an hour, with Boris stomping along the best he could on his wooden leg, swinging his maul with abandon at the fleeing rats, as Hugo gradually emptied his stagnant pond onto the spreading flames. In the end he managed to put out the fires before his house was completely gutted, but meanwhile Boris had managed to lay waste to almost every room. Smashed furniture and squashed rats littered every floor, and as Hugo surveyed the carnage a tear rolled down one cheek. Boris stood in the entrance hall, or what remained of it, gasping for air, a satisfied grin on his face.

‘Well,’ he said cheerily. ‘This was a good start, don’t you think?’

At first Hugo couldn’t speak, so griefstricken was he over the destruction of his home and the precious contents within it. Artworks he had collected over decades had been smashed to shards and the fine décor was blackened by smoke and flame. As he looked at Boris with that idiot’s grin on his face, his grief suddenly turned to anger.

‘A good start?’ he growled. ‘A good bloody start? Are you insane, you brainless oaf? Look what you’ve done to my house! Get out! Get out now and take that thing with you!’ Hugo pointed accusatorially at the huge maul in Boris’s hand that had wreaked so much destruction in the house.

Boris could only look back with a hurt expression. ‘I was only trying to help,’ he said dejectedly, before turning and limping off into the evening air.

Hugo watched him go, making sure he was well off the boundary of his property before he slumped down on what remained of his grand staircase and wept.

The next day, Hugo Kressler found himself in Kreiger’s Gunsmiths of Wehrmunch Strasse. He had at first intended to purchase a pistol, one of the finely crafted matchlocks that Herr Krieger was so famous for, but after browsing for several moments he espied something much more suitable. Hugo had never fired a blunderbuss before, nor a matchlock pistol for that matter, but he guessed the wide spread of its shot would make it much a more suitable firearm for a novice such as himself.

Once back home, he loaded the weapon, dressed himself in his finest regalia, or at least what he could salvage from his partially singed armoire, and sat on the edge of his bed.

At the time of purchasing it, Hugo hadn’t quite decided whether he would use the weapon to defend himself from the remaining rats in his house, or if it was to blow his own head from his shoulders. Now it came down to it, he still couldn’t make up his mind. He sat for almost an hour, glaring at the blunderbuss, cocked and ready for action by his side.

But Hugo knew deep down in his tiny withered heart that he couldn’t do it. It would take a braver man than he to take his own life; he simply didn’t have the courage for it. And so, saying a little prayer to thank Shallya for her mercy and guidance, he placed the blunderbuss by his bed, laid down still fully clothed, and cried himself to sleep.

An explosion rocked Hugo’s mansion to its very foundations and at first, as he awoke bleary-eyed and terrified, he thought his newly acquired blunderbuss had suddenly gone off of its own accord. He quickly realised something far more sinister was afoot, as the sound of falling masonry echoed from beyond the door of his bedchamber.

Hugo rose from his bed, having the wherewithal to grab the loaded blunderbuss before venturing out to investigate the calamity. He did not have to move very far along the corridor before he saw what the source of the noise was. A huge crater had suddenly appeared in the middle of the mansion. Two floors had collapsed into a deep hole which, from the look of the passages that led off from it, was some kind of mine shaft.

Possible causes for this started to swirl around Hugo’s head. Had this been here all the time? Was it part of the ancient sewer system? Were dwarf prospectors digging beneath his house? Before he could begin to think of the litigious consequences for the guilty parties involved, something moved along the shadows of the corridor. As he stared, dumbfounded, a stooped and filthy figure slowly emerged from the dark and Hugo realised that those responsible for the crater were not dwarfs.

It was four feet tall with clawed hands and feet. Filthy robes covered it from the neck down and they stank of putrescence and muddy earth. But it was the face that most filled Hugo with terror – a rat’s face, with red, baleful eyes and monstrous incisors that clacked together hungrily.

He didn’t even think, raising the blunderbuss in his numb hands, and as the creature rushed towards him he pulled the trigger. The blunderbuss roared, bucking in his hands and knocking him flat on his backside. A spray of white-hot buckshot blasted from the barrel, destroying the creature’s bestial face in a splatter of crimson gore.

Gingerly, Hugo pulled himself back to his feet, staring down at the filthy animal’s corpse.

‘Ha!’ he bellowed. ‘Not so clever now are you!’

As if in answer, something pulled itself from the pit in the centre of Hugo’s mansion – something huge and hairy. Its muscles were thick, its flesh covered in a thick, shaggy down, its hands like clawed shovels, built for tunnelling through solid earth. It too bore the face of a rat, but this was no diminutive drone like the last; this was a beast, nine feet tall and monstrous to behold.

It glared at Hugo, anger burning in its tiny eyes, and as it approached Hugo noticed that one of its huge ears was missing. Despite the necessity for flight in this situation, Hugo found his feet simply would not move, and all he could do was stare as the creature approached, its foetid breath washing over him, inducing the need for him to vomit. He could only close his eyes, and await his inevitable fate.

‘Oi!’

The deep cry echoed through the cavern that now made up most of Hugo’s home. The massive rat creature craned its neck to see who dared to disturb its feasting. Hugo, too, glanced towards the entrance of the mansion to see a burly figure framed in the doorway.

‘I told you there’d be big ’uns,’ shouted Boris hefting his maul. ‘Remember me?’ he said cheerily. Then a sudden dark intent fell across his visage as he limped forwards on his wooden leg.

The monstrous fiend roared, and Hugo was all but forgotten as it leapt down from the balcony to land in front of the rat catcher. It swept its shovel-like hand toward Boris, but despite his peg leg he was nimble enough to avoid it, slamming his maul down on the creature’s clawed foot. It roared in pain, hopping back as Boris advanced.

‘I’ve been after you for ages,’ he said, slamming the maul forwards again. There was an audible crack as the maul struck the creature’s knee and it fell forwards, foundering in what remained of the entrance hall. Hugo could only watch agog as Boris set about the creature with gusto, smashing it with the hammer as it tried its best to avoid the solid blows that rained down, cracking its bones and smashing its limbs.

In the end it teetered at the edge of the huge crater, beaten and bloody, and with a final mighty swing Boris smashed it back into the black pit from whence it came.

Hugo’s knees knocked together, his body wracked by a convulsive spasm, but he still managed to descend from the first floor, avoiding the crater that had opened in the middle of his house, to fall at the rat catcher’s knees.

‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ was all he managed to say as he clung to Boris’s wooden leg.

‘All right fella,’ Boris replied, clearly embarrassed. ‘No need to make a scene.’

When Boris finally managed to extricate himself from Hugo’s unrestrained display of gratitude he glanced down into the pit and frowned.

‘Ah,’ he said, pointing into the crater. ‘There’s your problem. Weirdstone!’

Hugo looked down, and running along the side of the shaft beneath his house was a seam of glittering black ore.

‘That’s most likely what they were after,’ Boris continued. ‘It draws ’em like flies to sh… well, you know what I mean? If you’re planning on staying here, make sure you get that removed.’

‘Yes, yes, I’ll do that,’ Hugo replied, still trying to take in what had just happened.

‘Anyway, must be off. Lads’ll never believe me down the Cat when I tell ’em what I’ve just done.’

With one last grin, Boris swung the maul over his shoulder, and sauntered out of the mansion, his wooden leg clicking against the ground as he went.

Hugo watched as he left, standing amidst the ruin of his house. ‘Thank you,’ was all he could think to say.

He was running, always running, in perpetual motion, legs pumping, breath coming in quick rasps. On it came in pursuit, on his heels, keeping pace, smelling his scent, dogging his trail.

This time he was slower, or was his pursuer just faster? Either way it caught him quickly, those iron hands grasping him in a solid embrace, squeezing the air from his lungs, raising him high.

He turned, looking at the hunter for the first time, seeing it glaring down at him with hate in its beady eyes, and he recognised that face, those bedraggled features. It was the face of Hugo Kressler.

In terror he squeaked, squirming for freedom, lashing his pink tail, twitching his whiskers…

Hugo’s eyes blinked open and he panted for breath. He was wrapped up in a tangle of sheets that held his arms and legs tight. With some difficulty he unravelled himself from the stark white bedding and sat up, breathing a sigh of relief.

All was well, he told himself, the rats were gone – there was nothing to fear.

He rose with a smile, suddenly remembering that it was to be a good day. He had commissioned Gepetto Montalban himself, the most famous architect in the province, to oversee the mansion’s renovations. The Guild of Miners had sent a dozen men to remove the strange glittering ore from beneath the cellar, and he had even started to put weight back on.

A smile crossed Hugo’s lips as he walked to the window, opening the shutters and looking out onto Talabheim. It wasn’t the most aesthetic of cities, it was certainly no Praag or Luccini, but it was still his city.

Glancing down he noticed the small black statuette that sat at his bedside, the first new piece of art Hugo had commissioned. It was in the shape of a hammer, in honour of Boris, and was crafted from the glittering black ore that had run beneath his house. Yes, Boris had warned him about it, and he had heeded that warning and had the glittering ore removed – but what harm could one little statuette do?

Taking a deep breath he turned, ready to break his fast heartily and sate the ravenous appetite he had recently developed, when the statuette suddenly fell from the table. Hugo stared down at it curiously. He was two feet away, how had he managed to knock it from the nightstand?

Then he saw it, just from the corner of his eye, something behind him, something long and sinuous.

He turned, looking down to see with horror that it was protruding from beneath his nightgown, twisting and writhing of its own accord, an appendage that had seemingly grown overnight – a long pink rat’s tail.

Hugo opened his mouth wide and squeaked in terror…

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2010 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Neil Roberts

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