The Long Games at Carcharias

Rob Sanders

The end began with the Revenant Rex.

An interstellar beast. Bad omen of omens. A wanderer: she was a regular visitor to this part of the segmentum. The hulk was a drifting gravity well of twisted rock and metal. Vessels from disparate and distant races nestled, broken-backed amongst mineral deposits from beyond the galaxy’s borders and ice frozen from before the beginning of time. A demented logic engine at the heart of the hulk – like a tormented dreamer – guided the nightmare path of the beast through the dark void of Imperial sectors, alien empires of the Eastern Fringe and the riftspace of erupting maelstroms. Then, as if suddenly awoken from a fevered sleep, the daemon cogitator would initiate the countdown sequence of an ancient and weary warp drive. The planetkiller would disappear with the expediency of an answered prayer, destined to drift up upon the shores of some other bedevilled sector, hundreds of light years away.

The Revenant Rex beat the Aurora Chapter at Schindelgheist, the Angels Eradicant over at Theta Reticuli and the White Scars at the Martyrpeake. Unfortunately the hulk was too colossal and the timeframes too erratic for the cleanse-and-burn efforts of the Adeptus Astartes to succeed: but Chapter pride and zealotry ensured their superhuman efforts regardless. The behemoth was infested with greenskins of the Iron Klaw Clan – that had spent the past millennia visiting hit-and-run mayhem on systems across the segmentum, with abandoned warbands colonising planetary badlands like a green, galactic plague. The Warfleet Ultima, where it could gather craft in sufficient time and numbers, had twice attempted to destroy the gargantuan hulk. The combined firepower of hundreds of Navy vessels had also failed to destroy the beast, simply serving to enhance its hideous melange further.

All these things and more had preyed upon Elias Artegall’s conscience when the Revenant Rex tumbled into the Gilead Sector. Arch-Deacon Urbanto. Rear Admiral Darracq. Overlord Gordius. Zimner, the High Magos Retroenginericus. Grand Master Karmyne of the Angels Eradicant. Artegall had either received them or received astrotelepathic messages from them all.

‘Chapter Master, the xenos threat cannot be tolerated…’

‘The Mercantile Gilead have reported the loss of thirty bulk freighters…’

‘Master Artegall, the greenskins are already out of control in the Despot Stars…’

‘That vessel could harbour ancient technological secrets that could benefit the future of mankind…’

‘You must avenge us, brother…’

The spirehalls of the Slaughterhorn had echoed with their demands and insistence. But to war was a Space Marine’s prerogative. Did not Lord Guilliman state on the steps of the Plaza Ptolemy: ‘There is but one of the Emperor’s Angels for every world in the Imperium; but one drop of Adeptus Astartes blood for every Imperial citizen. Judge the necessity to spill such a precious commodity with care and if it must be spilt, spill it wisely, my battle-brothers.’

Unlike the Scars or the Auroras, Artegall’s Crimson Consuls were not given to competitive rivalry. Artegall did not desire success because others had failed. Serving at the pleasure of the primarch was not a tournament spectacle and the Revenant Rex was not an opportunistic arena. In the end, Artegall let his battered copy of the Codex Astartes decide. In those much-thumbed pages lay the wisdom of greater men than he: as ever, Artegall put his trust in their skill and experience. He chose a passage that reflected his final judgement and included it in both his correspondence to his far-flung petitioners and his address to the Crimson Consuls, First Company on board the battle-barge Incarnadine Ecliptic.

‘From Codicil CC-LXXX-IV.ii: The Coda of Balthus Dardanus, 17th Lord of Macragge – entitled Staunch Supremacies. “For our enemies will bring us to battle on the caprice of chance. The alien and the renegade are the vagaries of the galaxy incarnate. What can we truly know or would want to of their ways or motivations? They are to us as the rabid wolf at the closed door that knows not even its own mind. Be that door. Be the simplicity of the steadfast and unchanging: the barrier between what is known and the unknowable. Let the Imperium of Man realise its manifold destiny within while without its mindless foes dash themselves against the constancy of our adamantium. In such uniformity of practice and purpose lies the perpetuity of mankind.” May Guilliman be with you.’

‘And with you,’ Captain Bolinvar and his crimson-clad 1st Company Terminator Marines had returned. But the primarch had not been with them and Bolinvar and one hundred veteran sons of Carcharias had been forsaken.

Artegall sat alone in his private Tactical Chancelorium, among the cold ivory of his throne. The Chancelorium formed the very pinnacle of the Slaughterhorn – the Crimson Consuls fortress-monastery – which in turn formed the spirepeak of Hive Niveous, the Carcharian capital city. The throne was constructed from the colossal bones of shaggy, shovel-tusk Stegodonts, hunted by Carcharian ancestors, out on the Dry-blind. Without his armour the Chapter Master felt small and vulnerable in the huge throne – a sensation usually alien to an Adeptus Astartes’ very being. The chamber was comfortably gelid and Artegall sat in his woollen robes, elbow to knee and fist to chin, like some crumbling statue from Terran antiquity.

The Chancelorium began to rumble and this startled the troubled Chapter Master. The crimson-

darkness swirl of the marble floor began to part in front of him and the trapdoor admitted a rising platform upon which juddered two Chapter serfs in their own zoster robes. They flanked a huge brass pict-caster that squatted dormant between them. The serfs were purebred Carcharians with their fat, projecting noses, wide nostrils and thick brows. These on top of stocky, muscular frames, barrel torsos and thick arms decorated with crude tattoos and scar-markings. Perfectly adapted for life in the frozen underhive.

‘Where is your master, the Chamber Castellan?’ Artegall demanded of the bondsmen. The first hailed his Chapter Master with a fist to the aquila represented on the Crimson Consuls crest of his robes.

‘Returned presently from the underhive, my lord – at your request – with the Lord Apothecary,’ the serf answered solemnly. The second activated the pict-caster, bringing forth the crystal screen’s grainy picture.

‘We have word from the Master of the Fleet, Master Artegall,’ the serf informed him.

Standing before Artegall was an image of Hecton Lambert, Master of the Crimson Consuls fleet. The Space Marine commander was on the bridge of the strike cruiser Anno Tenebris, high above the gleaming, glacial world of Carcharias.

‘Hecton, what news?’ Artegall put to him without the usual formality of a greeting.

‘My master: nothing but the gravest news,’ the Crimson Consul told him. ‘As you know, we have been out of contact with Captain Bolinvar and the Incarnadine Ecliptic for days. A brief flash on one of our scopes prompted me to despatch the frigate Herald Angel with orders to locate the Ecliptic and report back. Twelve hours into their search they intercepted the following pict-cast, which they transmitted to the Anno Tenebris, and which I now dutifully transmit to you. My lord, with this every man on board sends his deepest sympathies. May Guilliman be with you.’

‘And with you,’ Artegall mouthed absently, rising out of the throne. He took a disbelieving step towards the broad screen of the pict-caster. Brother Lambert disappeared and was replaced by a static-laced image, harsh light and excruciating noise. The vague outline of a Crimson Consuls Space Marine could be made out. There were sparks and fires in the background, as well as the silhouettes of injured Space Marines and Chapter serfs stumbling blind and injured through the smoke and bedlam. The Astartes identified himself but his name and rank were garbled in the intruding static of the transmission.

‘…this is the battle-barge Incarnadine Ecliptic, two days out of Morriga. I am now ranking battle-brother. We have sustained critical damage…’ The screen erupted with light and interference.

Then: ‘Captain Bolinvar went in with the first wave. Xenos resistance was heavy. Primitive booby traps. Explosives. Wall-to-wall green flesh and small arms. By the primarch, losses were minimal; my injuries, though, necessitated my return to the Ecliptic. The captain was brave and through the use of squad rotations, heavy flamers and teleporters our Consul Terminators managed to punch through to an enginarium with a power signature. We could all hear the countdown, even over the vox. Fearing that the Revenant Rex was about to make a warp jump I begged the captain to return. I begged him, but he transmitted that the only way to end the hulk and stop the madness was to sabotage the warp drive.’

Once again the lone Space Marine became enveloped in an ominous, growing brightness. ‘His final transmission identified the warp engine as active but already sabotaged. He said the logic engine wasn’t counting down to a jump... Then, the Revenant Rex, it – it just, exploded. The sentry ships were caught in the blast wave and the Ecliptic wrecked.’

A serf clutching some heinous wound to his face staggered into the reporting Space Marine. ‘Go! To the pods,’ he roared at him. Then he returned his attention to the transmission. ‘We saw it all. Detonation of the warp engines must have caused some kind of immaterium anomaly. Moments after the hulk blew apart, fragments and debris from the explosion – including our sentry ships – were sucked back through a collapsing empyrean vortex before disappearing altogether. We managed to haul off but are losing power and have been caught in the gravitational pull of a nearby star. Techmarine Hereward has declared the battle-barge unsalvageable. With our orbit decaying I have ordered all surviving Adeptus Astartes and Chapter serfs to the saviour pods. Perhaps some may break free. I fear our chances are slim… May Guilliman be with us…’

As the screen glared with light from the damning star and clouded over with static, Artegall felt like he’d been speared through the gut. He could taste blood in his mouth: the copper tang of lives lost. One hundred Crimson Consuls. The Emperor’s Angels under his command. The Chapter’s best fighting supermen, gone with the irreplaceable seed of their genetic heritage. Thousands of years of combined battle experience lost to the Imperium. The Chapter’s entire inheritance of Tactical Dreadnought Armour: every suit a priceless relic in its own right. The venerable Ecliptic. A veteran battle-barge of countless engagements and a piece of Caracharias among the stars. All gone. All claimed by the oblivion of the warp or cremated across the blazing surface of a nearby sun.

‘You must avenge us, brother–’

Artegall reached back for his throne but missed and staggered. Someone caught him, slipping their shoulders underneath one of his huge arms. It was Baldwin. He’d been standing behind Artegall, soaking up the tragedy like his Chapter Master. The Space Marine’s weight alone should have crushed the Chamber Castellan, but Baldwin was little more than a mind and a grafted, grizzled face on a robe-swathed brass chassis. The serf’s hydraulics sighed as he took his master’s bulk.

‘My lord,’ Baldwin began in his metallic burr.

‘Baldwin, I lost them…’ Artegall managed, his face a mask of stricken denial. With a clockwork clunk of gears and pistons the Chamber Castellan turned on the two serfs flanking the pict-caster.

‘Begone!’ he told them, his savage command echoing around the bronze walls of the Chancelorium. As the bondsmen thumped their fists into their aquilas and left, Baldwin helped his master to the cool bone of his throne. Artegall stared at the serf with unseeing eyes. They had been recruited together as savage underhivers and netted, kicking and pounding, from the fighting pits and tribal stomping grounds of the abhuman-haunted catacombs of Hive Niveous. But whereas Artegall had passed tissue compatibility and become a Neophyte, Baldwin had fallen at the first hurdle. Deemed unsuitable for surgical enhancement, the young hiver was inducted as a Chapter serf and had served the Crimson Consuls ever since. As personal servant, Baldwin had travelled the galaxy with his superhuman master.

As the decades passed, Artegall’s engineered immortality and fighting prowess brought him promotion, while Baldwin’s all-too-human body brought him the pain and limitation of old age. When Elias Artegall became the Crimson Consuls’ Chapter Master, Baldwin wanted to serve on as his Chamber Castellan. As one century became the next, the underhiver exchanged his wasted frame for an engineered immortality of his own: the brass bulk of cylinders, hydraulics and exo-skeletal appendages that whirred and droned before the throne. Only the serf’s kindly face and sharp mind remained.

Baldwin stood by as Artegall’s body sagged against the cathedra arm and his face contorted with silent rage. It fell with futility before screwing up again with the bottomless fury only an Adeptus Astartes could feel for his foes and himself. Before him the Crimson Consul could see the faces of men with whom he’d served. Battle-brothers who had been his parrying arm when his own had been employed in death-dealing; Space Marines who had shared with him the small eternities of deep space patrol and deathworld ambush; friends and loyal brethren.

‘I sent them,’ he hissed through the perfection of his gritted teeth.

‘It is as you said to them, my lord. As the Codex commanded.’

‘Condemned them…’

‘They were the door that kept the rabid wolf at bay. The adamantium upon which our enemies must be dashed.’

Artegall didn’t seem to hear him: ‘I walked them into a trap.’

‘What is a space hulk if it not be such a thing? The sector is safe. The Imperium lives on. Such an honour is not without cost. Even Guilliman recognises that. Let me bring you the comfort of his words, my master. Let the primarch show us his way.’

Artegall nodded and Baldwin hydraulically stomped across the chamber to where a lectern waited on a gravitic base. The top of the lectern formed a crystal case that the Castellan opened, allowing the preservative poison of argon gas to escape. Inside, Artegall’s tattered copy of the Codex Astartes lay open as it had done since the Chapter Master had selected his reading for the 1st Company’s departure. Baldwin drifted the lectern across the crimson marble of the Chancelorium floor to the throne’s side. Artegall was on his feet. Recovered. A Space Marine again. A Chapter Master with the weight of history and the burden of future expectation on his mighty Astartes’ shoulders.

‘Baldwin,’ he rumbled with a steely-eyed determination. ‘Were your recruitment forays into the underhive with the Lord Apothecary fruitful?’

‘I believe so, my lord.’

‘Good. The Chapter will need Carcharias to offer up its finest flesh, on this dark day. You will need to organise further recruitment sweeps. Go deep. We need the finest savages the hive can offer. Inform Lord Fabian that I have authorised cultivation of our remaining seed. Tell him I need one hundred Crimson sons. Demi gods all, to honour the sacrifice of their fallen brethren.’

‘Yes, Chapter Master.’

‘And Baldwin.’

‘My master?’

‘Send for the Reclusiarch.’

‘High Chaplain Enobarbus is attached to the 10th Company,’ Baldwin informed Artegall with gentle, metallic inflection. ‘On training manoeuvres in the Dry-blind.’

‘I don’t care if he’s visiting Holy Terra. Get him here. Now. There are services to organise. Commemorations. Obsequies. The like this Chapter has never known. See to it.’

‘Yes, my master,’ Baldwin answered and left his lord to his feverish guilt and the cold words of Guilliman.

‘By now your lids are probably frozen to your eyeballs,’ growled High Chaplain Enobarbus over the vox-link. ‘Your body no longer feels like your own.’

The Crimson Consuls Chaplain leant against the crumbling architecture of the Archaphrael Hive and drank in the spectacular bleakness of his home world. The Dry-blind extended forever in all directions: the white swirl, like a smazeous blanket of white, moulded from the ice pack. By day, with the planet’s equally bleak stars turning their attentions on Carcharias, the dry ice that caked everything in a rime of frozen carbon dioxide bled a ghostly vapour. The Dry-blind, as it was called, hid the true lethality of the Carcharian surface, however. A maze of bottomless crevasses, fissures and fractures that riddled the ice beneath and could only be witnessed during the short, temperature-plummeting nights, when the nebulous thunderhead of dry ice sank and re-froze.

‘Your fingers are back in your cells, because they sure as Balthus Dardanus aren’t part of your hands any more. Hopes of pulling the trigger on your weapon are a distant memory,’ the High Chaplain voxed across the open channel.

The Chaplain ran a gauntlet across the top of his head, clearing the settled frost from his tight dreadlocks and flicking the slush at the floor. With a ceramite knuckle, he rubbed at the socket of the eye he’d lost on New Davalos. Now stapled shut, a livid scar ran down one side of his brutal face, from the eyelid to his jaw, where tears constantly trickled in the cold air and froze to his face.

‘Skin is raw: like radiation burns – agony both inside and out.’

From his position in the twisted, frost-shattered shell that had been the Archaphrael Hive, Enobarbus could hear fang-face shredders. He fancied he could even spot the tell-tale vapour wakes of the shredders’ dorsal fins cutting through the Dry-blind. Archaphrael Hive made up a triumvirate of cities called the Pale Maidens that stood like ancient monuments to the fickle nature of Carcharian meteorology. A thousand years before the three cities had been devastated by a freak polar cyclone colloquially referred to as ‘The Big One’ by the hivers. Now the ghost hives were used by the Crimson Consuls as an impromptu training ground.

‘And those are the benefits,’ Enobarbus continued, the High Chaplain’s oratory sailing out across the vox waves. ‘It’s the bits you can’t feel that you should worry about. Limbs that died hours ago. Dead meat that you’re dragging around. Organs choking on the slush you’re barely beating around your numb bodies.’

He had brought the 10th Company’s 2nd and 7th Scout sniper squads out to the Pale Maidens for stealth training and spiritual instruction. As a test of their worth and spirit, Enobarbus had had the Space Marine Scouts establish and hold ambush positions with their sniper rifles in the deep Carcharian freeze for three days. He had bombarded them endlessly with remembered readings from the Codex Astartes, faith instruction and training rhetoric across the open channels of the vox.

Behind him Scout-Sergeant Caradoc was adjusting his snow cloak over the giveaway crimson of his carapace armour plating and priming his shotgun. Enobarbus nodded and the Scout-sergeant melted into the misty, frost-shattered archways of the Archaphrael Hive.

While the Scouts held their agonising positions, caked and swathed in dry ice, Enobarbus and the Scout-sergeants had amused themselves by trapping fang-face shredders. Packs of the beasts roamed the Dry-blind, making the environment an ever more perilous prospect for travellers. The shredders had flat, shovel-shaped maws spilling over with needle-like fangs. They carried their bodies close to the ground and were flat but for the razored dorsal fin protruding from their knobbly spines. They used their long tails for balance and changing direction on the ice. Like their dorsals, the tails were the razor-edged whiplash that gave them their name. Their sharp bones were wrapped in an elastic skin-sheen that felt almost amphibious and gave the beasts the ability to slide downhill and toboggan their prey. Then they would turn their crystal-tip talons on their unfortunate victims: shredding grapnels that the creatures used to climb up and along the labyrinthine crevasses that fractured the ice shelf.

‘This is nothing. Lips are sealed with rime. Thought is slow. It’s painful. It’s agony. Even listening to this feels like more than you can bear.’

Enobarbus pulled his own cape tight about his power armour. Like many of his calling the High Chaplain’s plate was ancient and distinct, befitting an Adeptus Astartes of his status, experience and wisdom. Beyond the heraldry and honorifica decorating his midnight adamantium shell and the skullface helmet hanging from his belt, Enobarbus sported the trappings of his home world. The shredder-skin cape hung over his pack, with its razor dorsal and flaps that extended down his arms and terminated in the skinned creature’s bestial claws: one decorating each of the High Chaplain’s gauntlets.

‘But bear it you must, you worthless souls. This is the moment your Emperor will need you. When you feel you have the least to give: that’s when your primarch demands the most from you. When your battle-brother is under the knife or in another’s sights – this is when you must be able to act,’ the High Chaplain grizzled down the vox with gravity. Switching to a secure channel Enobarbus added, ‘Sergeant Notus: now, if you will.’

Storeys and storeys below, down in the Dry-blind where Enobarbus and the Scout-sergeants had penned their captured prey, Notus would be waiting for the signal. A signal the Chaplain knew he’d received because of the high-pitched screeches of the released pack of shredders echoing up the shattered chambers and frost-bored ruins of the hive interior. The Codex Astartes taught of the nobility of aeon-honoured combat tactics and battle manoeuvres perfectly realised. It was Guilliman’s way. The Rules of Engagement. The way in which Enobarbus was instructing his Scouts. But in their war games about the Pale Maidens, Enobarbus wasn’t playing the role of the noble Space Marine. He was everything else the galaxy might throw at them: and the enemies of the Astartes did not play by the rules.

With the Scout Marines undoubtedly making excellent use of the hive’s elevation and dilapidated exterior – as scores of previous Neophytes had – Enobarbus decided to engage them on multiple fronts at once. While the starving shredders clawed their way up through the ruined hive, intent on ripping the frozen Scouts to pieces, Scout-Sergeant Caradoc was working his way silently down through the derelict stairwells and halls of the hive interior with his shotgun. The High Chaplain decided to come at his Scouts from an entirely different angle.

Slipping his crozius arcanum – the High Chaplain’s sacred staff of office – from his belt and extending the shredder talons on the backs of his gauntlets, Enobarbus swung out onto the crumbling hive wall exterior and began a perilous climb skywards. The shell of the hive wall had long been undermined by the daily freeze-thaw action of Caracharian night and day. Using the sharpened point of the aquila’s wings at the end of his crozius like an ice pick and the crystal-tip claws of the shredder, the High Chaplain made swift work of the frozen cliff-face of the dilapidated hive.

‘There is nothing convenient about your enemy’s desires. He will come for you precisely in the moment you have set aside for some corporal indulgence,’ Enobarbus told the Scouts, trying hard not to let his exertions betray him over the vox. ‘Exhaustion, fear, pain, sickness, injury, necessities of the body and as an extension of your bodies, the necessities of your weapons. Keep your blade keen and your sidearm clean. Guilliman protect you on the reload: the most necessary of indulgences – a mechanical funeral rite.’

Heaving himself up through the shattered floor of a gargoyle-encrusted overhang, the High Chaplain drew his bolt pistol and crept through to a balcony. The tier-terrace was barely stable but commanded an excellent view: too much temptation for a sniper Scout. But as Enobarbus stalked out across the fragile space he found it deserted. The first time in years of such training exercises he’d discovered it as such.

The High Chaplain nodded to himself. Perhaps this cohort of Neophytes was better. Perhaps they were learning faster: soaking up the wisdom of Guilliman and growing into their role. Perhaps they were ready for their Black Carapace and hallowed suits of power armour. Emperor knows they were needed. Chapter Master Artegall had insisted that Enobarbus concentrate his efforts on the 10th Company. The Crimson Consuls had had their share of past tragedies.

The Chapter had inherited the terrible misfortune of a garrison rotation on the industrial world of Phaethon IV when the Celebrant Chapter could not meet their commitments. Word was sent that the Celebrants were required to remain on Nedicta Secundus and protect the priceless holy relics of the cardinal world from the ravages of Hive Fleet Kraken and its splintered tyranid forces. Phaethon IV, on the other hand, bordered the Despot Stars and had long been coveted by Dregz Wuzghal, Arch-Mogul of Gunza Major. The Crimson Consuls fought bravely on Phaethon IV, and would have halted the beginnings of Waaagh! Wuzghal in its tracks: something stirred under the factories and power plants of the planet, however. Something awoken by the nightly bombing raids of the Arch-Mogul’s ‘Green Wing’. Something twice as alien as the degenerate greenskins: unfeeling, unbound and unstoppable. An ancient enemy, long forgotten by the galaxy and entombed below the assembly lines and Imperial manufacturing works of Phaethon, skeletal nightmares of living silver: the necrons. Between greenskin death from above and tomb warriors crawling out of their stasis chambers below, the industrial worlders and their Crimson Consuls guardians hadn’t stood a chance and the Chapter lost two highly-decorated companies. As far as Enobarbus knew, the necron and the Arch-Mogul fought for Phaethon still.

The High Chaplain held his position. The still air seared the architecture around him with its caustic frigidity. Enobarbus closed his eyes and allowed his ears to do the work. He filtered out the freeze-thaw expansion of the masonry under his boots, the spiritual hum of the sacred armour about his body and the creak of his own aged bones. There it was. The tell-tale scrape of movement, the tiniest displacement of weight on the balcony expanse above. Back-tracking, the High Chaplain found a craterous hole in the ceiling. Hooking his crozius into the ruined stone and corroded metal, the Crimson Consul heaved himself noiselessly up through the floor of the level above.

Patient, like a rogue shredder on ambush in the Dry-blind – masked by the mist and hidden in some ice floor fissure – Enobarbus advanced with agonising care across the dilapidated balcony. There he was. One of the 10th Company Scouts. Flat to the steaming floor, form buried in his snow cloak, helmet down at the scope of his sniper rifle: a position the Neophyte had undoubtedly held for days. The balcony was an excellent spot. Despite some obstructive masonry, it commanded a view of the Dry-blind with almost the same breathtaking grandeur of the platform below. Without a sound, Enobarbus was above the sniper Scout, the aquila-wing blade-edge of his crozius resting on the back of the Scout’s neck, between the helmet and the snow cloak.

‘The cold is not the enemy,’ the High Chaplain voxed across the open channel. ‘The enemy is not even the enemy. You are the enemy. Ultimately you will betray yourself.’

When the Scout didn’t move, the Chaplain’s lip curled with annoyance. He locked his suit vox-channels and hooked the Scout’s shoulder with the wing-tip of the crozius.

‘It’s over, Consul,’ Enobarbus told the prone form. ‘The enemy has you.’

Flipping the Scout over, Enobarbus stood there in silent shock. Cloak, helmet and rifle were there but the Scout was not. Instead, the butchered body of a Shredder lay beneath, with the hilt of a gladius buried in its fang-faced maw. Enobarbus shook his head. Anger turned to admiration. These Scouts would truly test him.

Enobarbus switched to the private channel he shared with Scout-Sergeant Notus to offer him brief congratulations on his Scouts and to direct him up into the ruined hive.

‘What in Guilliman’s name are–’ Enobarbus heard upon the transferring frequency. Then the unmistakable whoosh of las-fire. The High Chaplain heard the Scout-sergeant roar defiance over the vox and looking out over the Dry-blind, Enobarbus saw the light show, diffused in the swirling miasma, like sheet lightning across a stormy sky. Something cold took hold of the High Chaplain’s heart. Enobarbus had heard thousands of men die. Notus was dead.

Transferring channels, Enobarbus hissed, ‘Override Obsidian: we are under attack. This is not a drill. 2nd and 7th, you are cleared to fire. Sergeant Caradoc, meet me at the–’

Shotgun blasts. Rapid and rushed. Caradoc pressed by multiple targets. The crash of the weapon bounced around the maze of masonry and worm-holed architecture.

‘Somebody get me a visual,’ the High Chaplain growled over the vox before slipping the crozius into his belt. Leading with his bolt pistol, Enobarbus raced for the fading echo of the sergeant’s weapon. Short sprints punctuated with skips and drops through holes and stairwells.

‘Caradoc, where are you?’ Enobarbus voxed as he threaded his way through the crumbling hive. The shotgun fire had died away but the Scout-sergeant wasn’t replying. ‘2nd squad, 7th squad, I want a visual on Sergeant Caradoc, now!’

But there was nothing: only an eerie static across the channel. Rotating through the frequencies, Enobarbus vaulted cracks and chasms and thundered across frost-hazed chambers.

‘Ritter, Lennox, Beade…’ the High Chaplain cycled but the channels were dead. Sliding down into a skid, the shredder-skin cape and the greave plates of his armour carrying him across the chamber floor, Enobarbus dropped down through a hole and landed in a crouch. His pistol was everywhere, pivoting around and taking in the chamber below. An Astartes shotgun lay spent and smoking nearby and a large body swung from a creaking strut in the exposed ceiling. Caradoc.

The Scout-sergeant was hanging from his own snow cloak, framed in a gaping hole in the exterior hive wall, swinging amongst the brilliance of the Dry-blind beyond. The cloak, wrapped around his neck as it was, had been tied off around the strut like a noose. This wouldn’t have been enough to kill the Space Marine. The dozen gladius blades stabbed through his butchered body up to their hilts had done that. The sickening curiosity of such a vision would have been enough to stun most battle-brothers but Enobarbus took immediate comfort and instruction from his memorised Codex. There was protocol to follow. Counsel to heed.

Snatching his skull-face helmet from his belt, Enobarbus slapped it on and secured the seals. With pistol still outstretched in one gauntlet, the High Chaplain felt for the rosarius hanging around his neck. He would have activated the powerful force field generator but an enemy was already upon him. The haze of the chamber was suddenly whipped up in a rush of movement. Shredders. Lots of them. They came out of the floor. Out of the roof. Up the exterior wall, as the High Chaplain had. Snapping at him with crystal claws and maws of needle-tip teeth. Enobarbus felt their razored tails slash against his adamantium shell and the vice-like grip of their crushing, shovel-head jaws on his knees, his shoulder, at his elbows and on his helmet.

Bellowing shock and frustration, Enobarbus threw his arm around, dislodging two of the monsters. As they scrambled about on the floor, ready to pounce straight back at him, the High Chaplain ended them with his bolt pistol. Another death-dealer tore at him from behind and swallowed his pistol and gauntlet whole. Again, Enobarbus fired, his bolt-rounds riddling the creature from within. The thing died with ease but its dagger-fang jaws locked around his hand and weapon, refusing to release. The darkness of holes and fractured doorways continued to give birth to the Carcharian predators. They bounded at him with their merciless, ice-hook talons, vaulting off the walls, floor and ceiling, even off Caradoc’s dangling corpse.

Snatching the crozius arcanum from his belt the High Chaplain thumbed the power weapon to life. Swinging it about him in cold fury, Enobarbus cleaved shredders in two, slicing the monsters through the head and chopping limbs and tails from the beasts.

The floor erupted in front of the Space Marine and a hideously emaciated shredder – big, even for its kind – came up through the frost-shattered masonry. It leapt at Enobarbus, jaws snapping shut around his neck and wicked talons hooking themselves around the edges of his chest plate. The force of the impact sent the High Chaplain flailing backwards, off balance and with shredders hanging from every appendage.

Enobarbus roared as his armoured form smashed through part of a ruined wall and out through the gap in the hive exterior. The Crimson Consul felt himself falling. Survival instinct causing his fist to open, allowing the crozius to be torn from him by a savage little shredder. Snatching at the rapidly disappearing masonry, Enobarbus elongated his own shredder claw and buried the crystal-tip talon in the ancient rockcrete. The High Chaplain hung from two monstrous digits, shredders in turn hanging from his armour. With the dead-weight and locked jaw of the pistol-swallowing shredder on the other arm and the huge beast now hanging down his back from a jaw-hold on his neck, Enobarbus had little hope of improving his prospects. Below lay thousands of metres of open drop, a ragged cliff-face of hive masonry to bounce off and shredder-infested, bottomless chasms of ice waiting below the white blanket of the Dry-blind. Even the superhuman frame of the High Chaplain could not hope to survive such a fall.

Above the shrieking and gnawing of the beasts and his own exertions, Enobarbus heard the hammer of disciplined sniper fire. Shredder bodies cascaded over the edge past the High Chaplain, either blasted apart by the accurate las-fire or leaping wildly out of its path. Enobarbus looked up. The two talons from which he hung scraped through the rockcrete with every purchase-snapping swing of the monsters hanging from the Crimson Consul. There were figures looking down at him from the edge. Figures in helmets and crimson carapace, swathed in snow cloaks and clutching sniper rifles. On the level above was a further collection looking down at him and the same on the storey after that.

Enobarbus recognised the Scout standing above him.

‘Beade…’ the High Chaplain managed, but there was nothing in the blank stare or soulless eyes of the Neophyte to lead Enobarbus to believe that he was going to live. As the barrel of Beade’s rifle came down in unison with his Space Marine Scout compatriots, the High Chaplain’s thoughts raced through a lifetime of combat experience and the primarch’s teaching. But Roboute Guilliman and his Codex had nothing for him and, with synchronous trigger-pulls that would have been worthy of a firing squad, High Chaplain Enobarbus’s las-slashed corpse tumbled into the whiteness below.

The Oratorium was crowded with hulking forms, their shadows cutting through the hololithic graphics of the chamber. Each Crimson Consul was a sculpture in muscle, wrapped in zoster robes and the colour of their calling. Only the two Astartes on the Oratorium door stood in full cream and crimson ceremonial armour, Sergeants Ravenscar and Bohemond watching silently over their brothers at the circular runeslab that dominated the chamber. The doors parted and Baldwin stomped in with the hiss of hydraulic urgency, accompanied by a serf attendant of his own. The supermen turned.

‘The Reclusiarch has not returned as ordered, master,’ Baldwin reported. ‘Neither have two full Scout squads of the 10th Company and their sergeants.’

‘It’s the time of year I tell you,’ the Master of the Forge maintained through his conical faceplate. Without his armour and colossal servo-claw, Maximagne Ferro cut a very different figure. Ferro wheezed a further intake of breath through his grilles before insisting: ‘Our relay stations on De Vere and Thusa Minor experience communication disruption from starquakes every year around the Antilochal Feast day.’

The Slaughterhorn’s Master of Ordnance, Talbot Faulks, gave Artegall the intensity of his magnobionic eyes, their telescrew mountings whirring to projection. ‘Elias. It’s highly irregular: and you know it.’

‘Perhaps the High Chaplain and his men have been beset by difficulties of a very natural kind,’ Lord Apothecary Fabian suggested. ‘Reports suggest carbonic cyclones sweeping in on the Pale Maidens from the east. They could just be waiting out the poor conditions.’

‘Enjoying them, more like,’ Chaplain Mercimund told the Apothecary. ‘The Reclusiarch would loathe missing an opportunity to test his pupils to their limits. I remember once, out on the–’

‘Forgive me, Brother-Chaplain. After the Chapter Master’s recall?’ the Master of Ordnance put to him. ‘Not exactly in keeping with the Codex.’

‘Brothers, please,’ Artegall said, leaning thoughtfully against the runeslab on his fingertips. Hololithics danced across his grim face, glinting off the neat rows of service studs running above each eyebrow. He looked at Baldwin. ‘Send the 10th’s Thunderhawks for them with two further squads for a search, if one is required.’

Baldwin nodded and despatched his attendant. ‘Chaplain,’ Artegall added, turning on Mercimund. ‘If you would be so good as to start organising the commemorations, in the High Chaplain’s absence.’

‘It would be an honour, Chapter Master,’ Mercimund acknowledged, thumping his fist into the Chapter signature on his robes earnestly before following the Chamber Castellan’s serf out of the Oratorium. Baldwin remained.

‘Yes?’ Artegall asked.

Baldwin looked uncomfortably at Lord Fabian, prompting him to clear his throat. Artegall changed his focus to the Apothecary. ‘Speak.’

‘The recruitment party is long returned from the underhive. Your Chamber Castellan and I returned together – at your request – with the other party members and the potential aspirants. Since they were not requested, Navarre and his novice remained on some matter of significance: the Chief Librarian did not share it with me. I had the Chamber Castellan check with the Librarium…’

‘They are as yet to return, Master Artegall,’ Baldwin inserted.

‘Communications?’

‘We’re having some difficulty reaching them,’ Baldwin admitted.

Faulks’s telescopic eyes retracted. ‘Enobarbus, the Crimson Tithe, the Chief Librarian…’

‘Communication difficulties, all caused by seasonal starquakes, I tell you,’ Maximagne Ferro maintained, his conical faceplate swinging around to each of them with exasperation. ‘The entire hive is probably experiencing the same.’

‘And yet we can reach Lambert,’ Faulks argued.

Artegall pursed his lips: ‘I want confirmation of the nature of the communication difficulties,’ he put to the Master of the Forge, prompting the Techmarine to nod slowly. ‘How long have Captain Baptista and the Crimson Tithe been out of contact?’

‘Six hours,’ Faulks reported.

Artegall looked down at the runeslab. With the loss of the Chapter’s only other battle-barge, Artegall wasn’t comfortable with static from the Crimson Tithe.

‘Where is she? Precisely.’

‘Over the moon of Rubessa: quadrant four-gamma, equatorial west.’

Artegall fixed his Chamber Castellan with cold, certain eyes.

‘Baldwin, arrange a pict-link with Master Lambert. I wish to speak with him again.’

‘You’re going to send Lambert over to investigate?’ Faulks enquired.

‘Calm yourself, brother,’ Artegall instructed the Master of Ordnance. ‘I’m sure it is as Ferro indicates. I’ll have the Master of the Fleet take the Anno Tenebris to rendezvous with the battle-barge over Rubessa. There Lambert and Baptista can have their enginseers and the Sixth Reserve Company’s Techmarines work on the problem from their end.’

Baldwin bowed his head. The sigh of hydraulics announced his intention to leave. ‘Baldwin,’ Artegall called, his eyes still on Faulks. ‘On your way, return to the Librarium. Have our astropaths and Navarre’s senior Epistolary attempt to reach the Chief Librarian and the Crimson Tithe by psychic means.’

‘My lord,’ Baldwin confirmed and left the Oratorium with the Master of the Forge.

‘Elias,’ Faulks insisted as he had done earlier. ‘You must let me take the Slaughterhorn to Status Vermillion.’

‘That seems unnecessary,’ the Lord Apothecary shook his head.

‘We have two of our most senior leaders unaccounted for and a Chapter battle-barge in a communications black-out,’ Faulks listed with emphasis. ‘All following the loss of one hundred of our most experienced and decorated battle-brothers? I believe that we must face the possibility that we are under some kind of attack.’

‘Attack?’ Fabian carped incredulously. ‘From whom? Sector greenskins? Elias, you’re not entertaining this?’

Artegall remained silent, his eyes following the path of hololithic representations tracking their way across the still air of the chamber.

‘You have started preparing the Chapter’s remaining gene-seed?’ Artegall put to the Lord Apothecary.

‘As you ordered, my master,’ Fabian replied coolly. ‘Further recruiting sweeps will need to be made. I know the loss of the First Company was a shock and this on top of the tragedies of Phaethon IV. But, this is our Chapter’s entire stored genetic heritage we are talking about here. You have heard my entreaties for caution with this course of action.’

‘Caution,’ Artegall nodded.

‘Elias,’ Faulks pressed.

‘As in all things,’ Artegall put to his Master of Ordnance and the Apothecary, ‘we shall be guided by Guilliman. The Codex advises caution in the face of the unknown – Codicil MX-VII-IX.i: The Wisdoms of Hera, “Gather your wits, as the traveller gauges the depth of the river crossing with the fallen branch, before wading into waters wary.” Master Faulks, what would you advise?’

‘I would order all Crimson Consuls to arms and armour,’ the Master of Ordnance reeled off. ‘Thunderhawks fuelled and prepped in the hangers. Penitorium secured. Vox-checks doubled and the defence lasers charged for ground to orbit assault. I would also recall Roderick and the Seventh Company from urban pacification and double the fortress-monastery garrison.’

‘Anything else?’

‘I would advise Master Lambert to move all Crimson Consuls vessels to a similarly high alert status.’

‘That is a matter for Master of the Fleet. I will apprise him of your recommendations.’

‘So?’

Artegall gave his grim consent, ‘Slaughterhorn so ordered to Status Vermillion.’

‘I can’t raise the Slaughterhorn,’ Lexicanum Raughan Stellan complained to his Librarian Master.

‘We are far below the hive, my novice,’ the Chief Librarian replied, his power armour boots crunching through the darkness. ‘There are a billion tonnes of plasteel and rockcrete between us and the spire monastery. You would expect even our equipment to have some problems negotiating that. Besides, it’s the season for starquakes.’

‘Still...’ the Lexicanum mused.

The psykers had entered the catacombs: the lightless labyrinth of tunnels, cave systems and caverns that threaded their torturous way through the pulverised rock and rust of the original hive. Thousands of storeys had since been erected on top of the ancient structures, crushing them into the bottomless network of grottos from which the Crimson Consuls procured their most savage potential recruits. The sub-zero stillness was routinely shattered by murderous screams of tribal barbarism.

Far below the aristocratic indifference of the spire and the slavish poverty of the habs and industrial districts lay the gang savagery of the underhive. Collections of killers and their Carcharian kin, gathered for security or mass slaughter, blasting across the subterranean badlands for scraps and criminal honour. Below this kingdom of desperados and petty despots extended the catacombs, where tribes of barbaric brutes ruled almost as they had at the planet’s feral dawn. Here, young Carcharian bodies were crafted by necessity: shaped by circumstance into small mountains of muscle and sinew. Minds were sharpened to keenness by animal instinct and souls remained empty and pure. Perfect for cult indoctrination and the teachings of Guilliman.

Navarre held up his force sword, Chrysaor, the unnatural blade bleeding immaterial illumination into the darkness. It was short, like the traditional gladius of his Chapter and its twin, Chrysaen, sat in the inverse criss-cross of scabbards that decorated the Chief Librarian’s blue and gold chest plate. The denizens of the catacombs retreated into the alcoves and shadows at the abnormal glare of the blade and the towering presence of the armoured Adeptus Astartes.

‘Stellan, keep up,’ Navarre instructed. They had both been recruited from this tribal underworld – although hundreds of years apart. This familiarity should have filled the Carcharians with ease and acquaintance. Their Astartes instruction and training had realised in both supermen, however, an understanding of the untamed dangers of the place.

Not only would their kith and kin dash out their brains for the rich marrow in their bones, their degenerate brothers shared their dark kingdom with abhumans, mutants and wyrds, driven from the upper levels of the hive for the unsightly danger they posed. Navarre and Stellan had already despatched a shaggy, cyclopean monstrosity that had come at them on its knuckles with brute fury and bloodhunger.

Navarre and Stellan, however, were Adeptus Astartes: the Emperor’s Angels of Death and demigods among men. They came with dangers of their own. This alone would be enough to ensure their survival in such a lethal place. The Crimson Consuls were also powerful psykers: wielders of powers unnatural and warp-tapped. Without the techno-spectacle of their arms, the magnificence of their blue and gold plating, their superhuman forms and murderous training, Navarre and Stellan would still be the deadliest presence in the catacombs for kilometres in any direction.

The tight tunnels opened out into a cavernous space. Lifting Chrysaor higher, the Chief Librarian allowed more of his potential to flood the unnatural blade of the weapon, throwing light up at the cave ceiling. Something colossal and twisted through with corrosion and stalactitular icicles formed the top of the cavern: some huge structure that had descended through the hive interior during some forgotten, cataclysmic collapse. Irregular columns of resistant-gauge rockcrete and strata structural supports held up the roof at precarious angles. This accidental architecture had allowed the abnormality of the open space to exist below and during the daily thaw had created, drop by drop, the frozen chemical lake that steamed beneath it.

A primitive walkway of scavenged plasteel, rock-ice and girders crossed the vast space and, as the Space Marines made their tentative crossing, Navarre’s warplight spooked a flock of gliding netherworms. Uncoiling themselves from their icicle bases they flattened their bodies and slithered through the air, angling the drag of their serpentine descent down past the Space Marines and at the crags and ledges of the cavern where they would make a fresh ascent. As the flock of black worms spiralled by, one crossed Stellan’s path. The novice struck out with his gauntlet in disgust but the thing latched onto him with its unparalleled prehensility. It weaved its way up through his armoured digits and corkscrewed up his thrashing arm at his helmetless face.

Light flashed before the Lexicanum’s eyes. Just as the netherworm retracted its fleshy collar and prepared to sink its venomous beak hooks into the Astartes’ young face, Navarre clipped the horror in half with the blazing tip of Chrysaor. As the worm fell down the side of the walkway in two writhing pieces, Stellan mumbled his thanks.

‘Why didn’t you use your powers?’ the Chief Librarian boomed around the cavern.

‘It surprised me,’ was all the Lexicanum could manage.

‘You’ve been out of the depths mere moments and you’ve already forgotten its dangers,’ Navarre remonstrated gently. ‘What of the galaxy’s dangers? There’s a myriad of lethality waiting for you out there. Be mindful, my novice.’

‘Yes, master.’

‘Did it come to you again?’ Navarre asked pointedly.

‘Why do you ask, master?’

‘You seem, distracted: not yourself. Was your sleep disturbed?’

‘Yes, master.’

‘Your dreams?’

‘Yes, master.’

‘The empyreal realm seems a dark and distant place,’ Navarre told his apprentice sagely. ‘But it is everywhere. How do you think we can draw on it so? Its rawness feeds our power: the blessings our God-Emperor gave us and through which we give back in His name. We are not the only ones to draw from this wellspring of power and we need our faith and constant vigilance to shield us from the predations of these immaterial others.’

‘Yes, master.’

‘Behind a wall of mirrored-plas the warp hides, reflecting back to us our realities. In some places it’s thick; in others a mere wafer of truth separates us from its unnatural influence. Your dreams are one such window: a place where one may submerge one’s head in the Sea of Souls.’

‘Yes, master.’

‘Tell me, then.’

Stellan seemed uncomfortable, but as the two Space Marines continued their careful trudge across the cavern walkway, the novice unburdened himself.

‘It called itself Ghidorquiel.’

‘You conversed with this thing of confusion and darkness?’

‘No, my master. It spoke only to me: in my cell.’

‘You said you were dreaming,’ Navarre reminded the novice.

‘Of being awake,’ Stellan informed him, ‘in my cell. It spoke. What I took to be lips moved but the voice was in my head.’

‘And what lies did this living lie tell you?’

‘A host of obscenities, my lord,’ Stellan confirmed. ‘It spoke in languages unknown to me. Hissed and spat its impatience. It claimed my soul as its own. It said my weakness was the light in its darkness.’

‘This disturbed you.’

‘Of course,’ the Lexicanum admitted. ‘Its attentions disgust me. But this creature called out to me across the expanse of time and space. Am I marked? Am I afflicted?’

‘No more than you ever were,’ Navarre reassured the novice. ‘Stellan, all those who bear the burden of powers manifest – the Emperor’s sacred gift – of which he was gifted himself – dream themselves face to face with the daemonscape from time to time. Entities trawl the warp for souls to torment for their wretched entertainment. Our years of training and the mental fortitude that comes of being the Emperor’s chosen protects us from their direct influence. The unbound, the warp-rampant and the witch are all easy prey for such beasts and through them the daemon worms its way into our world. Thank the primarch we need face such things for real with blessed infrequency.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ Stellan agreed.

‘The warp sometimes calls to us: demands our attention. It’s why we did not return to the Slaughterhorn with the others. Such a demand led me beyond the scope of the Lord Apothecary’s recruitment party and down into the frozen bowels of Carcharias. Here.’

Reaching the other side of the cavern, Navarre and Stellan stood on the far end of the walkway, where it led back into the rock face of pulverised masonry. Over the top of the tunnel opening was a single phrase in slap-dash white paint. It was all glyph symbols and runic consonants of ancient Carcharian.

‘It’s recent,’ Navarre said half to himself. Stellan simply stared at the oddness of the lettering. ‘Yet its meaning is very old. A phrase that predates the hives, at least. It means, “From the single flake of snow – the avalanche”.’

Venturing into the tunnel with force sword held high, Navarre was struck by the patterns on the walls. Graffiti was endemic to the underhive: it was not mere defacement or criminal damage. In the ganglands above it advertised the presence of dangerous individuals and marked the jealously guarded territories of House-sponsored outfits, organisations and posses. It covered every empty space: the walls, the floor and ceiling, and was simply part of the underworld’s texture. Below that, the graffiti was no less pervasive or lacking in purpose. Tribal totems and primitive paintings performed much the same purpose for the barbarians of the catacombs. Handprints in blood; primordial representations of subterranean mega-vermin in campfire charcoal; symbolic warnings splashed across walls in the phosphorescent, radioactive chemicals that leaked down from the industrial sectors above. The Carcharian savages that haunted the catacombs had little use for words, yet this was all Navarre could see.

The Chief Librarian had been drawn to this place, deep under Hive Niveous, by the stink of psychic intrusion. Emanations. Something large and invasive: something that had wormed its way through the very core of the Carcharian capital. The ghostly glow of Chrysaor revealed it to Navarre in all its mesmerising glory. Graffiti upon graffiti, primitive paintings upon symbols upon markings upon blood splatter. Words. The same words, over and over again, in all orientations, spelt out in letters created in the layered spaces of the hive cacography. Repetitions that ran for kilometres through the arterial maze of tunnels. Like a chant or incantation in ancient Carcharian: they blazed with psychic significance to the Chief Librarian, where to the eyes of the ordinary and untouched, among the background scrawl of the hive underworld, they would not appear to be there at all.

‘Stellan! You must see this,’ Navarre murmured as he advanced down the winding passage. The Librarian continued: ‘Psycho-sensitive words, spelt out on the walls, a conditioned instruction of some kind, imprinting itself on the minds of the underhivers. Stellan: we must get word back to the Slaughterhorn – to Fabian – to the Chapter Master. The recruits could be compromised…’

The Chief Librarian turned to find that his novice wasn’t there. Marching back up the passage in the halo of his shimmering force weapon, Navarre found the Lexicanum still standing on the cavern walkway, staring up at the wall above the tunnel entrance with a terrible blankness. ‘Stellan? Stellan, talk to me.’

At first Navarre thought that one of the deadly gliding worms had got him, infecting the young Space Marine with its toxin. The reality was much worse. Following the novice’s line of sight, Navarre settled on the white painted scrawl above the tunnel. The ancient insistence, ‘From the single flake of snow – the avalanche’ in fresh paint. Looking back at the Lexicanum, Navarre came to realise that his own novice had succumbed to the psycho-sensitive indoctrination of his recruiting grounds. All the wordsmith had needed was to introduce his subjects to the trigger. A phrase they were unlikely to come across anywhere else. The timing intentional; the brainwashing complete.

Stellan dribbled. He tried to mumble the words on the wall. Then he tried to get his palsied mouth around his master’s name. He failed. The young Space Marine’s mind was no longer his own. He belonged to someone else: to the will of the wordsmith – whoever they were. And not only the novice: countless other recruits over the years, for whom indoctrination hid in the very fabric of their worlds and now in the backs of their afflicted minds. All ready to be activated at a single phrase.

Navarre readied himself. Opened his being to the warp’s dark promise. Allowed its fire to burn within. Slipping Chrysaen from its chest scabbard, the Chief Librarian held both force blades out in front of him. Each master-crafted gladius smoked with immaterial vengeance.

For Stellan, the dangers were much more immediate than brainwashing. Stripped of his years of training and the mental fortitude that shielded an Astartes Librarian from the dangers of the warp, Stellan succumbed to the monster stalking his soul.

Something like shock took the Crimson Consul’s face hostage. The novice looked like he had been seized from below. Somehow, horribly, he had. The Librarian’s head suddenly disappeared down into the trunk of his blue and gold power armour. An oily, green ichor erupted from the neck of the suit.

‘Ghidorquiel…’ Navarre spat. The Chief Librarian thrust himself at the quivering suit of armour, spearing his Lexicanum through the chest with Chrysaor. The stink of warp-corruption poured from the adamantium shell and stung the psyker’s nostrils. Spinning and kicking the body back along the treacherous walkway, Navarre’s blades trailed ethereal afterglow as they arced and cleaved through the sacred suit.

Howling fury at the materialising beast within the armour, the Chief Librarian unleashed a blast wave of raw warp energy from his chest that lit up the cavern interior and hit the suit like the God-Emperor’s own fist.

The suit tumbled backwards, wrenching and cracking along the walkway until it came to rest, a broken-backed heap. Even then, the armour continued to quiver and snap, rearranging the splintered ceramite plating and moulding itself into something new. On the walkway, Navarre came to behold an adamantium shell, like that of a mollusc, from which slithered an explosion of tentacles. Navarre ran full speed at the daemon while appendages shot for him like guided missiles. Twisting this way and that, but without sacrificing any of his rage-fuelled speed, the Chief Librarian slashed at the beast, his blinding blades shearing off tentacular length and the warp-dribbling tips of the monster feelers.

As the psyker closed with the daemon nautiloid, the warp beast shot its appendages into the fragile walkway’s architecture. Hugging the snapping struts and supports to it, the creature demolished the structure beneath the Crimson Consul’s feet.

Navarre plummeted through the cavern space before smashing down through the frozen surface of the chemical lake below. The industrial waste plunge immediately went to work on the blue and gold of the Librarian’s armour and blistered the psyker’s exposed and freezing flesh. Navarre’s force blades glowed spectroscopic eeriness under the surface and it took precious moments for the Space Marine to orientate himself and kick for the surface. As his steaming head broke from the frozen acid depths of the lake, Navarre’s burn-blurry eyes saw the rest of the walkway collapsing towards him. Ghidorquiel had reached for the cavern wall and, pulling with its unnatural might, had toppled the remainder of the structure.

Again Navarre was hammered to the darkness of the lake bottom, sinking wreckage raining all about the dazed psyker. Somewhere in the chaos Chrysaen slipped from Navarre’s grip. Vaulting upwards, the Space Marine hit the thick ice of the lake surface further across. Clawing uselessly with his gauntlet, skin aflame and armour freezing up, Navarre stared through the ice and saw something slither overhead. Roaring pain and frustration into the chemical darkness, the Chief Librarian thrust Chrysaor through the frozen effluence. Warpflame bled from the blade and across the ice, rapidly melting the crust of the acid bath and allowing the Crimson Consul a moment to suck in a foetid breath and drag himself up the shoreline of shattered masonry.

Ghidorquiel was there, launching tentacles at the psyker. Hairless and with flesh melting from his skull the Librarian mindlessly slashed the appendages to pieces. All the Space Marine wanted was the daemon. The thing dragged its obscene adamantium shell sluggishly away from the lake and the enraged Astartes. Navarre bounded up and off a heap of walkway wreckage, dodging the creature’s remaining tentacles and landing on ceramite. Drawing on everything he had, the Chief Librarian became a conduit of the warp. The raw, scalding essence of immaterial energy poured from his being and down through the descending tip of his force sword. Chrysaor slammed through the twisted shell of Stellan’s armour and buried itself in the daemon’s core. Like a lightning rod, the gladius roasted the beast from the inside out.

Armour steamed. Tentacles dropped and trembled to stillness. The daemon caught light. Leaving the force blade in the monstrous body, Navarre stumbled down from the creature and crashed to the cavern floor himself. The psyker was spent: in every way conceivable. He could do little more than lie there in his own palsy, staring at the daemon corpse lit by Chrysaor’s still gleaming blade. The slack, horrible face of the creature had slipped down out of the malformed armour shell: the same horrific face that the novice Stellan had confronted in his dreams.

Looking up into the inky, cavern blackness, Navarre wrangled with the reality that somehow he had to get out of the catacombs and warn the Slaughterhorn of impending disaster. A slurp drew his face back to the creature; sickeningly it began to rumble with daemonic life and throttled laughter. Fresh tentacles erupted from its flaming sides and wrapped themselves around two of the crooked pillars of rockcrete and metal that were supporting the chamber ceiling and the underhive levels above.

All Navarre could do was watch the monster pull the columns towards its warp-scorched body and roar his frustration as the cavern ceiling quaked and thundered down towards him, with the weight of Hive Niveous behind it.

The Oratorium swarmed with armoured command staff and their attendants. Clarifications and communications shot back and forth across the chamber amongst a hololithic representation of the Slaughterhorn fortress-monastery that crackled disturbance every time an officer or Crimson Consuls serf walked through it.

‘They discovered nothing, my lord,’ Baldwin informed Artegall in mid-report. ‘No High Chaplain; no Scout squads; nothing. They’ve scoured the Dry-blind around the Pale Maidens. They’re requesting permission to bring the Thunderhawks back to base.’

‘What about Chief Librarian Navarre?’ Artegall called across the Oratorium.

‘Nothing, sir,’ Lord Apothecary Fabian confirmed. ‘On the vox or from the Librarium.’

‘Planetary Defence Force channels and on-scene Enforcers report seismic shift and hive tremors in the capital lower levels,’ the Master of the Forge reported, his huge servo-claw swinging about over the heads of the gathering.

‘What about the Crimson Tithe?’

‘Patching you through to Master Lambert now,’ Maximagne Ferro added, giving directions to a communications servitor. The hololithic representation of the Slaughterhorn disappeared and was replaced with the phantasmal static of a dead pict-feed that danced around the assembled Crimson Consuls.

‘What the hell is happening up there, Maximagne?’ Artegall demanded, but the Master of the Forge was working furiously on the servitor and the brass control station of the runeslab. The static disappeared before briefly being replaced by the Slaughterhorn and then a three-dimensional hololith of the Carcharian system. Artegall immediately picked out their system star and their icebound home world: numerous defence monitors and small frigates were stationed in high orbit. Circling Carcharias were the moons of De Vere, Thusa Major and Thusa Minor between which two strike cruisers sat at anchor. Most distant was Rubessa; the Oratorium could see the battle-barge Crimson Tithe beneath it. Approaching was Hecton Lambert’s strike cruiser, Anno Tenebris. The hololithic image of the Adeptus Astartes strike cruiser suddenly crackled and then disappeared.

The Oratorium fell to a deathly silence.

‘Master Maximagne…’ Artegall began. The Master of the Forge had a vox-headset to one ear.

‘Confirmed, my lord. The Anno Tenebris has been destroyed with all on board.’ The silence prevailed. ‘Sir, the Crimson Tithe fired upon her.’

The gathered Adeptus Astartes looked to their Chapter Master, who, like his compatriots, could not believe what he was hearing.

‘Master Faulks,’ Artegall began. ‘It seems you were correct. We are under attack. Status report: fortress-monastery.’

‘In lockdown as ordered, sir,’ the Master of Ordnance reported with grim pride. ‘All Crimson Consuls are prepped for combat. All sentry guns manned. Thunderhawks ready for launch on your order. Defence lasers powered to full.’

Captain Roderick presented himself to his Chapter Master: ‘My lord, the Seventh Company has fortified the Slaughterhorn at the Master of Ordnance’s instruction. Nothing will get through – you can be sure of that.’

‘Sir,’ Master Maximagne alerted the chamber: ‘Crimson Tithe is on the move, Carcharias bound, my lord.’

Artegall’s lip curled into a snarl. ‘Who the hell are they?’ he muttered to himself. ‘What about our remaining cruisers?’

Faulks stepped forwards indicating the cruisers at anchor between the hololithic moons of Thusa Major and Thusa Minor. ‘At full alert as I advised. The Caliburn and Honour of Hera could plot an intercept course and attempt an ambush…’

‘Out of the question,’ Artegall stopped Faulks. ‘Bring the strike cruisers in above the Slaughterhorn at low orbit. I want our defence lasers to have their backs.’

‘Yes, my master,’ Faulks obeyed.

‘Baldwin…’

‘Lord?’

‘Ready my weapons and armour.’

The Chamber Castellan nodded slowly, ‘It would be my honour, master.’ The Crimson Consuls watched the serf exit, knowing what this meant. Artegall was already standing at the head of the runeslab in a functional suit of crimson and cream power armour and his mantle. He was asking for the hallowed suit of artificer armour and master-crafted bolter that resided in the Chapter Master’s private armoury. The gleaming suit of crimson and gold upon which the honourable history of the Crimson Consuls Chapter was inscribed and inlaid in gemstone ripped from the frozen earth of Carcharias itself. The armour that past Masters had worn when leading the Chapter to war in its entirety: Aldebaran; the Fall of Volsungard; the Termagant Wars.

‘Narke.’

‘Master Artegall,’ the Slaughterhorn’s chief astropath replied from near the Oratorium doors.

‘Have you been successful in contacting the Third, Fifth or Eighth Companies?’

‘Captain Neath has not responded, lord,’ the blind Narke reported, clutching his staff.

Artegall and Talbot Faulks exchanged grim glances. Neath and the 8th Company were only two systems away hunting Black Legion Traitor Marine degenerates in the Sarcus Reaches.

‘And Captain Borachio?’

Artegall had received monthly astrotelepathic reports from Captain Albrecht Borachio stationed in the Damocles Gulf. Borachio had overseen the Crimson Consuls contribution to the Damocles Crusade in the form of the 3rd and 5th Companies and had present responsibility for bringing the Tau commander, O’Shovah, to battle in the Farsight Enclaves. Artegall and Borachio had served together in the same squad as battle-brothers and Borachio beyond Baldwin, was what the Chapter Master might have counted as the closest thing he had to a friend.

‘Three days ago, my lord,’ Narke returned. ‘You returned in kind, Master Artegall.’

‘Read back the message.’

The astropath’s knuckles whitened around his staff as he recalled the message: ‘… encountered a convoy of heavy cruisers out of Fi’Rios – a lesser sept, the Xenobiologis assure me, attempting to contact Commander Farsight. We took a trailing vessel with little difficulty but at the loss of one Carcharian son: Crimson Consul Battle-Brother Theodoric of the First Squad: Fifth Company. I commend Brother Theodoric’s service to you and recommend his name be added to the Shrine of Hera in the Company Chapel as a posthumous recipient of the Iron Laurel…’

‘And the end?’ Artegall pushed.

‘An algebraic notation in three dimensions, my lord: Kn Ω iii – π iX (Z-) – Αα v.R (!?) 0-1.’

‘Coordinates? Battle manoeuvres?’ Talbot Faulks hypothesised.

‘Regicide notations,’ Artegall informed him, his mind elsewhere. For years, the Chapter Master and Albrecht Borachio had maintained a game of regicide across the stars, moves detailed back and forth with their astropathic communiqués. Each had a board and pieces upon which the same game had been played out; Artegall’s was an ancient set carved from lacquered megafelis sabres on a burnished bronze board. Artegall moved the pieces in his mind, recalling the board as it was set up on a rostra by his throne in the Chancelorium. Borachio had beaten him: ‘Blind Man’s Mate…’ the Chapter Master mouthed.

‘Excuse me, my lord?’ Narke asked.

‘No disrespect intended,’ Artegall told the astropath. ‘It’s a form of victory in regicide, so called because you do not see it coming.’

The corridor outside the Oratorium suddenly echoed with the sharp crack of bolter fire. Shocked glances between Artegall and his Astartes officers were swiftly replaced by the assumption of cover positions. The armoured forms took advantage of the runeslab and the walls either side of the Oratorium door.

‘That’s inside the perimeter,’ Faulks called in disbelief, slapping on his helmet.

‘Well inside,’ Artegall agreed grimly. Many of the Space Marines had drawn either their bolt pistols or their gladius swords. Only Captain Roderick and the Oratorium sentry sergeants, Bohemond and Ravenscar, were equipped for full combat with bolters, spare ammunition and grenades.

With the muzzle of his squat Fornax-pattern bolt pistol resting on the slab, the Master of Ordnance brought up the hololithic representation of the Slaughterhorn once more. The fortress-monastery was a tessellation of flashing wings, towers, hangars and sections.

‘Impossible…’ Faulks mumbled.

‘The fortress-monastery is completely compromised,’ Master Maximagne informed the chamber, cycling through the vox-channels.

Bolt shells pounded the thick doors of the Oratorium. The 7th Company captain held a gauntleted finger to the vox-bead in his ear.

‘Roderick,’ Artegall called. ‘What’s happening?’

‘My men are being fired upon from the inside of the Slaughterhorn, my lord,’ the captain reported bleakly. ‘By fellow Astartes – by Crimson Consuls, Master Artegall!’

‘What has happened to us?’ the Chapter Master bawled in dire amazement.

‘Later, sir. We have to get you out of here,’ Faulks insisted.

‘What sections do we hold?’ Artegall demanded.

‘Elias, we have to go, now!’

‘Master Faulks, what do we hold?’

‘Sir, small groups of my men hold the Apothecarion and the north-east hangar,’ Roderick reported. ‘The Barbican, some Foundry sections and Cell Block Sigma.’

‘The Apothecarion?’ Fabian clarified.

‘The gene-seed,’ Artegall heard himself mutter.

‘The Command Tower is clear,’ Faulks announced, reading details off the hololith schematic of the monastery. Bolt-rounds tore through the metal of the Oratorium door and drummed into the runeslab column. The hololith promptly died. Ravenscar pushed Narke, the blind astropath, out of his way and poked the muzzle of his weapon through the rent in the door. He started plugging the corridor with ammunition-conserving boltfire.

‘We must get the Chapter Master to the Tactical Chancelorium,’ Faulks put to Roderick, Maximagne and the sentry sergeants.

‘No,’ Artegall barked back. ‘We must take back the Slaughterhorn.’

‘Which we can do best from your Tactical Chancelorium, my lord,’ Faulks insisted with strategic logic. ‘From there we have our own vox-relays, tactical feeds and your private armoury: it’s elevated for a Thunderhawk evacuation – it’s simply the most secure location in the fortress-monastery,’ Faulks told his master. ‘The best place from which to coordinate and rally our forces.’

‘When we determine who they are,’ Fabian added miserably. Artegall and the Master of Ordnance stared at one another.

‘Sir!’ Ravenscar called from the door. ‘Coming up on a reload.’

‘Agreed,’ Artegall told Faulks. ‘Captain Roderick shall accompany Master Maximagne and Lord Fabian to secure the Apothecarion; the gene-seed must be saved. Serfs with your masters. Sergeants Ravenscar and Bohemond, escort the Master of Ordnance and myself to the Tactical Chancelorium. Narke, you will accompany us. All understood?’

‘Yes, Chapter Master,’ the chorus came back.

‘Sergeant, on three,’ Artegall instructed. ‘One.’ Bohemond nodded and primed a pair of grenades from his belt. ‘Two.’ Faulks took position by the door stud. ‘Three’. Roderick nestled his bolter snug into his shoulder as Faulks activated the door mechanism.

As the door rolled open, Ravenscar pulled away and went about reloading his boltgun. Bohemond’s grenades were then followed by replacement suppression fire from Captain Roderick’s bolter.

The brief impression of crimson and cream armour working up the corridor was suddenly replaced with the thunder and flash of grenades. Roderick was swiftly joined by Bohemond and then Ravenscar, the three Space Marines maintaining a withering arc of fire. The command group filed out of the Oratorium with their Chapter serf attendants, the singular crash of their Fornax-pattern pistols joining in the cacophony.

With Roderick’s precision fire leading the Lord Apothecary and the Master of the Forge down a side passage, Bohemond slammed his shoulder through a stairwell door to lead the other group up onto the next level. The Crimson Consuls soon fell into the surgical-style battle rotation so beloved of Guilliman: battle-brother covering battle-brother; arc-pivoting and rapid advance suppression fire. Ravenscar and Bohemond orchestrated the tactical dance from the front, with Artegall’s pistol crashing support from behind and the Master of Ordnance covering the rear with his own, while half dragging the blind Narke behind him.

Advancing up through the stairwell, spiralling up through the storeys, the Astartes walked up into a storm of iron: armoured, renegade Crimson Consuls funnelled their firepower down at them from a gauntlet above. Unclipping a grenade, Ravenscar tossed it to his brother-sergeant. Bohemond then held the explosive, counting away the precious seconds before launching the thing directly up through the space between the spiral stair rails. The grenade detonated above, silencing the gunfire. A cream and crimson body fell down past the group in a shower of grit. The sergeants didn’t wait, however, bounding up the stairs and into the maelstrom above.

Dead Crimson Consuls lay mangled amongst the rail and rockcrete. One young Space Marine lay without his legs, his helmet half blasted from his face. As blood frothed between the Adeptus Astartes’ gritted teeth the Space Marine stared at the passing group. For Artegall it was too much. Crimson Consuls spilling each other’s sacred blood. Guilliman’s dream in tatters. He seized the grievously wounded Space Marine by his shattered breastplate and shook him violently.

‘What the hell are you doing, boy?’ Artegall roared, but there was no time. Scouts in light carapace armour were spilling from a doorway above, bouncing down one storey to the next on their boot tips, bathing the landings with scattershot from their shotguns. Bolt-rounds sailed past Faulks from below, where renegade Crimson Consuls had followed in the footsteps of their escape. The shells thudded into the wall above the kneeling Artegall and punched through the stumbling astropath, causing the Master of Ordnance to abandon his handicap and force back their assailants with blasts from a recovered bolter.

‘Through there!’ Faulks bawled above the bolt chatter, indicating the nearest door on the stairwell. Again Bohemond led with his shoulder, blasting through the door into a dormitory hall. The space was plain and provided living quarters for some of the Slaughterhorn’s Chapter serfs. Bright, white light was admitted from the icescape outside through towering arches of plain glass, each depicting a bleached scene from the Chapter’s illustrious history, picked out in lead strips.

Ravenscar handed Artegall his bolter and took a blood-splattered replacement from the stairwell for himself.

‘There’s a bondsman’s entrance to the Chancelorium through the dormitories,’ Artegall pointed, priming the bolter. Their advance along the window-lined hall had already been ensured by the bolt-riddled door being blasted off its hinges behind them.

‘Go!’ Faulks roared. The four Space Marines stormed along the open space towards the far end of the hall. The searing light from the windows was suddenly eclipsed, causing the Astrartes to turn as they ran. Drifting up alongside the wall, directed in on their position by the renegade Astartes, was the sinister outline of a Crimson Consuls Thunderhawk. As the monstrous aircraft hovered immediately outside, the heavy bolters adorning its carrier compartment unleashed their fury.

All the Space Marines could do was run as the great accomplishments of the Chapter shattered behind them. One by one the windows imploded with anti-personnel fire and fragmentation shells, the Thunderhawk gently gliding along the wall. The rampage caught up with Ravenscar who, lost in the maelstrom of smashed glass and lead, soaked up the heavy bolter’s punishment and in turn became a metal storm of pulped flesh and fragmented armour. At the next window, Artegall felt the whoosh of the heavy bolter rounds streak across his back. Detonating about him like tiny frag grenades, the rounds shredded through his pack and tore up the ceramite plating of his armoured suit. Falling through the shrapnel hurricane, Artegall tumbled to the floor before hitting the far wall.

Gauntlets were suddenly all over him, hauling the Chapter Master in through an open security bulkhead, before slamming the door on the chaos beyond.

By comparison the command tower was silent. Artegall squinted, dazed, through the darkness of the Chancelorium dungeon-antechamber, his power armour steaming and slick with blood, lubricant and hydraulic fluid.

As Artegall came back to his senses, he realised that he’d never seen this part of his fortress-monastery before; traditionally it only admitted Chapter serfs. Getting unsteadily to his feet he joined his battle-brothers in stepping up on the crimson swirl of the marble trapdoor platform. With Sergeant Bohemond and Master Faulks flanking him, the Chapter Master activated the rising floor section and the three Crimson Consuls ascended up through the floor of Artegall’s own Tactical Chancelorium.

‘Chapter Master, I’ll begin–’

Light and sound: simultaneous.

Bohemond and Faulks dropped as the backs of their heads came level with the yawning barrels of waiting bolters and their skulls were blasted through the front of their faceplates. Artegall span around but found that the bolters, all black paint and spiked barrels, were now pressed up against the crimson of his chest.

His assailants were Space Marines: Traitor Astartes. The galaxy’s arch-traitors: the Warmaster’s own – the Black Legion. Their cracked and filthy power armour was a dusty black, edged with gargoylesque details of dull bronze. Their helmets were barbed and leering and their torsos a tangle of chains and skulls. With the smoking muzzle of the first still resting against him, the second disarmed the grim Chapter Master, removing his bolter and slipping the bolt pistol and gladius from his belt. Weaponless, he was motioned round.

Before him stood two Black Legion officers. The senior was a wild-eyed captain with teeth filed to sharp points and a flea-infested wolf pelt hanging from his spiked armour. The other was an Apothecary whose once-white armour was now streaked with blood and rust and whose face was shrunken and soulless like a zombie.

‘At least do me the honour of knowing who I am addressing, traitor filth,’ the Chapter Master rumbled.

This, the Black Legion captain seemed to find amusing.

‘This is Lord Vladivoss of the Black Legion and his Apothecary Szekle,’ a voice bounced around the vaulted roof of the Chancelorium, but it came from neither Chaos Marine. The Black Legion Space Marines parted to reveal the voice’s owner, sitting in Artegall’s own bone command throne. His armour gleamed a sickening mazarine, embossed with the necks of green serpents that entwined his limbs and whose heads clustered on his chest plate in the fashion of a hydra. The unmistakable iconography of the Alpha Legion. The Space Marine sat thumbing casually through the pages of the Codex Astartes on the Chapter Master’s lectern.

‘I don’t reason that there’s any point in asking you that question, renegade,’ Artegall snarled.

The copper-skinned giant pushed the anti-gravitic lectern to one side, stood and smiled: ‘I am Alpharius.’

A grim chuckle surfaced in Artegall. He hawked and spat blood at the Alpha Legionnaire’s feet.

‘That’s what I think of that, Alpha,’ the Chapter Master told him. ‘Come on, I want to congratulate you on your trademark planning and perfect execution: Alpharius is but a ghost. My Lord Guilliman ended the scourge – as I will end you, monster.’

The Legionnaire’s smile never faltered, even in the face of Artegall’s threats and insults. It grew as the Space Marine came to a private decision.

“I am Captain Quetzal Carthach, Crimson Consul,’ the Alpha Legion Space Marine told him, ‘and I have come to accept your unconditional surrender.’

‘The only unconditional thing you’ll get from me, Captain Carthach, is my unending revulsion and hatred.’

‘You talk of ends, Chapter Master,’ the Legionnaire said calmly. ‘Has Guilliman blinded you so that you cannot see your own. The end of your Chapter. The end of your living custodianship, your shred of that sanctimonious bastard’s seed. I wanted to come here and meet you. So you could go to your grave knowing that it was the Alpha Legion that had beaten you; the Alpha Legion who are eradicating Guilliman’s legacy one thousand of his sons at a time; the Alpha Legion who are not only superior strategists but also superior Space Marines.’

Artegall’s lips curled with cold fury.

‘Never...’

‘Perhaps, Chapter Master, you think there’s a chance for your seed to survive: for future sons of Carcharias to avenge you?’ The Alpha Legion giant sat back down in Artegall’s throne. ‘The Tenth was mine before you even recruited them – as was the Ninth Company before them: you must know that now. I lent you their minds but not their true allegiance: a simple phrase was all that was needed to bring them back to the Alpha Legion fold. The Second and Fourth were easy: that was a mere administrative error, holding the Celebrants over at Nedicta Secundus and drawing the Crimson Consuls to the waiting xenos deathtrap that was Phaethon IV.’

Artegall listened to the Alpha Legionnaire honour himself with the deaths of his Crimson Consul brothers. Listened, while the Black Legion Space Marine looked down the spiked muzzle of his bolter at the back of the Chapter Master’s head.

‘The Seventh fell fittingly at the hands of their brothers, foolishly defending your colourfully-named fortress-monastery from a threat that was within rather than without. The Eighth, well, Captain Vladivoss took care of those in the Sarcus Reaches – and now the good captain has earned his prize. Szekle,’ the Alpha Legion Space Marine addressed the zombified Chaos Space Marine. ‘The Apothecarion is now in our hands. You may help yourself to the Crimson Consuls’ remaining stocks of gene-seed. Feel free to extract progenoids from loyalists who fought in our name. Fear not, they will not obstruct you. In fact, the completion of the procedure is their signal to turn their weapons on themselves. Captain Vladivoss, you may then return to Lord Abaddon with my respects and your prize – to help replenish the Black Legion’s depleted numbers in the Eye of Terror.’

Vladivoss bowed, while Szekle fidgeted with dead-eyed anticipation.

‘Oh, and captain,’ Carthach instructed as Artegall was pushed forwards towards the throne, ‘leave one Legionnaire, please.’

With Captain Vladivoss, his depraved Apothecary and their Chaos Space Marine sentry descending through the trapdoor on the marble platform with Bohemond and Faulk’s bodies, Carthach came to regard the Chapter Master once again.

‘The Revenant Rex was pure genius. That I even admit to myself. What I couldn’t have hoped for was the deployment of your First Company Terminator veterans. That made matters considerably easier down the line. You should receive some credit for that, Chapter Master Artegall,’ Carthach grinned nastily.

A rumble like distant thunder rolled through the floor beneath Artegall’s feet. Carthach seemed suddenly excited. ‘Do you know what that is?’ he asked. The monster didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he activated the controls in the bone armrest of Artegall’s throne. The vaulted ceiling of the Tactical Chancelorium – which formed the pinnacle of the Command Tower – began to turn and unscrew, revealing a circular aperture in the roof that grew with the corkscrew motion of the Tower top.

The Alpha Legionnaire shook his head in what could have been mock disappointment.

‘Missed it: that was your Slaughterhorn’s defence lasers destroying the strike cruisers you ordered back under their protection. Poetic. Or perhaps just tactically predictable. Ah, now look at this.’

Carthach pointed at the sky and with the Chaos Space Marine’s bolter muzzle still buried in the back of his skull, Artegall felt compelled to look up also. To savour the reassuring bleakness of his home world’s sky for what might be the last time.

‘There they are, see?’

Artegall watched a meteorite shower in the sky above: a lightshow of tiny flashes. ‘I brought the Crimson Tithe back to finish off any remaining frigates or destroyers. Don’t want surviving Crimson Consuls running to the Aurora Chapter with my strategies and secrets; the Auroras and their share of Guilliman’s seed may be my next target. Anyway, the beautiful spectacle you see before you is no ordinary celestial phenomenon. This is the Crimson Consuls Sixth Company coming home, expelled from the Crimson Tithe’s airlocks and falling to Carcharias. The battle-barge I need – another gift for the Warmaster. It has the facilities on board to safely transport your seed to the Eye of Terror, where it is sorely needed for future Black Crusades. Who knows, perhaps one of your line will have the honour of being the first to bring the Warmaster’s justice to Terra itself? In Black Legion armour and under a traitor’s banner, of course.’

Artegall quaked silent rage, the Chapter Master’s eyes dropping and fixing on a spot on the wall behind the throne.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Carthach informed him. ‘As I have all along, Crimson Consul. You’re pinning your hopes on Captain Borachio. Stationed in the Damocles Gulf with the Third and Fifth Companies… Did you find my reports convincing?’

Artegall’s eyes widened.

‘Captain Borachio and his men have been dead for two years, Elias.’

Artegall shook his head.

‘The Crimson Consuls are ended. I am Borachio,’ the Alpha revealed, soaking up the Chapter Master’s doom, ‘and Carthach … and Alpharius.’ The captain bent down to execute the final, astrotelepathically communicated move on Artegall’s beautifully carved Regicide board. Blind Man’s Mate.

Artegall’s legs faltered. As the Crimson Consul fell to his knees before Quetzal Carthach and the throne, Artegall mouthed a disbelieving, ‘Why?’

‘Because we play the Long Game, Elias…’ the Alpha Legionnaire told him.

Artegall hoped that the Black Legion’s attention span didn’t extend half as far as their Alpha Legion compatriots. The Space Marine threw his head back, cutting his scalp against the bolter’s muzzle. The weapon smacked the Chaos Space Marine in the throat – the Black Legion savage still staring up into the sky, watching the Crimson Consuls burn in the upper atmosphere.

Artegall surged away from the stunned Chaos Space Marine and directly at Carthach. The Alpha Legion Marine snarled at the sudden, suicidal surprise of it all, snatching for his pistol.

Artegall awkwardly changed direction, throwing himself around the other side of the throne. The Black Legion Space Marine’s bolter fire followed him, mauling the throne and driving the alarmed Carthach even further back. Artegall sprinted for the wall, stopping and feeling for the featureless trigger that activated the door of the Chapter Master’s private armoury. As the Chaos Space Marine’s bolter chewed up the Chancelorium wall, Artegall activated the trigger and slid the hidden door to one side. He felt hot agony as the Chaos Space Marine’s bolter found its mark and two rounds crashed through his ruined armour.

Returned to his knees, the Chapter Master fell in through the darkness of the private armoury and slid the reinforced door shut from the inside. In the disappearing crack of light between the door and wall, Artegall caught sight of Quetzal Carthach’s face once more dissolve into a wolfish grin.

Throwing himself across the darkness of the armoury floor, the felled Crimson Consul heaved himself arm over agonising arm through the presentation racks of artificer armour: racks from which serfs would ordinarily select the individual plates and adornments and dress the Chapter Master at his bequest. Artegall didn’t have time for such extravagance. Crawling for the rear of the armoury, he searched for the only item that could bring him peace. The only item seemingly designed for the single purpose of ending Quetzal Carthach, the deadliest in the Chapter’s long history of deadly enemies. Artegall’s master-crafted boltgun.

Reaching for the exquisite weapon, its crimson-painted adamantium finished in gold and decorated with gemstones from Carcharias’s rich depths, Artegall faltered. The bolt-rounds had done their worst and the Chapter Master’s fingers failed to reach the boltgun in its cradle. Suddenly there was sound and movement in the darkness. The hydraulic sigh of bionic appendages thumping into the cold marble with every step.

‘Baldwin!’ Artegall cried out. ‘My weapon, Baldwin… the boltgun.’

The Chamber Castellan slipped the beautiful bolter from its cradle and stomped around to his master. ‘Thank the primarch you’re here,’ Artegall blurted.

In the oily blackness of the private armoury, the Chapter Master heard the thunk of the priming mechanism. Artegall tensed and then fell limp. He wasn’t being handed the weapon: it was being pointed at him through the gloom. Whatever had possessed the minds of his Neophyte recruits in the Carcharian underhive had also had time to worm its way into the Chamber Castellan, whose responsibility it was to accompany the recruitment parties on their expeditions. Without the training or spiritual fortitude of an Astartes, Baldwin’s mind had been vulnerable. He had become a Regicide piece on a galactic board, making his small but significant move, guided by an unknown hand. Artegall was suddenly glad of the darkness. Glad that he couldn’t see the mask of Baldwin’s kindly face frozen in murderous blankness.

Closing his eyes, Elias Artegall, Chapter Master and last of the Crimson Consuls, wished the game to end.

Virtue’s Reward

Darius Hinks

‘In the city of his sisters he will return to us on wings of fire.’

– The Cantos of Maccadamnus. Verse CXXVI

‘What was that?’ said Frederick with a sniff, plucking a thick clot of blood from his nose.

‘What?’

‘I thought I heard something.’

He leant unsteadily on the shattered doorframe, still weak from the fight, and looked up and down the street. Like most of the city, it had seen better days. The colourful stalls of Hauptmarkt Strasse’s famous market were long gone. All that remained were a few pitiful-looking shreds of awning hanging from the blackened timbers.

‘I can’t hear nuthin’,’ Otto replied from within, straining and huffing as he tried to shift the corpse.

‘Leave that for a minute, you idiot. I heard something.’ He squinted, trying to see through the perpetual gloom, but his head was still spinning from the blow that had shattered his nasal bone and the darkness seemed sickeningly animated. ‘Sigmar,’ he muttered under his breath, ‘Who am I kidding? If there is anything out there, I’d rather not know.’ He lowered his lantern with a shudder. ‘Probably nothing,’ he called out, but the tremor in his voice betrayed him and, as he stepped back into the theatre, Otto eyed him suspiciously.

The impressive bulk of the creature still lay sprawled across the stage with a stream of blood flowing slowly from its monstrous head.

‘Haven’t you moved it yet?’

‘Maybe if you helped,’ gasped Otto as he attempted to turn the body over with a broken rafter.

Frederick ignored the request and shook his head slowly. ‘Have you looked at the thing? Where else could spawn such a horror? Is it man… or beast?’ He knelt to examine it closer. The massive, pockmarked body was vaguely human in shape, but the grotesque head was almost completely bovine. Gnarled horns twisted from beneath its matted scalp and where its feet should have been there were two huge, battered hooves. Frederick studied the body for a few moments in silence, then laughed suddenly, kicking a lifeless arm that jutted out from beneath it. ‘Reinhard may have been a worthless layabout, but I’ve got to give him credit where it’s due. I thought we’d met our match, but he showed it. That blow to the head must have killed it. What a catch!’

Otto turned and grasped him roughly by his jacket, his eyes feverish. ‘If we don’t go soon we’ll be the catch.’ He looked around at the ruined theatre. Rows of charred stalls and boxes reared up all around them, reaching out of the darkness like claws towards the vaulted ceiling of the amphitheatre. The heat of the cataclysm had warped the furniture into a tableau of sinister shapes and Otto had the unnerving feeling that not all of the seats were empty. ‘We need to take what we came for and get out of here, before…’ he paused to scratch nervously at his scalp, ‘well, before anything happens.’

‘All right, all right,’ Frederick replied in a soothing voice, patting Otto gently on the shoulder, ‘let’s shift this brute then.’ They grasped the monster by its broad shoulders. ‘On the count of three: one, two, three.’ There was an exhalation of stale breath as they rolled the beast off the flattened remains of their former partner.

‘That,’ said Frederick, stooping down beside the creature’s face, ‘is beautiful.’

Otto knelt down beside him with a sigh of pleasure and clapped his hands together like a child.

Hanging around the thing’s neck was a stone – about the size of a plum, and glowing faintly with an inner fire. Frederick’s eyes widened as he stretched a trembling hand out towards it. ‘After weeks of crawling around this stinking nightmare of a city, we finally have it. A piece of weirdstone. Can you believe it Otto?’ Then his hand froze, and his voice dropped to a whisper. ‘You must have heard it that time,’ he said, looking back towards the door.

Otto didn’t reply, but nodded his head slowly, and as he followed Frederick out onto the street the colour was draining from his face.

‘There,’ Frederick said with a note of panic in his voice, ‘what’s that?’ As they watched with growing horror, a shadow across the street elongated, split into three and moved slowly towards them.

They readied their weapons and Otto stepped nervously back towards the theatre. ‘What is it?’

As the shadows moved nearer, they gradually solidified until the men saw that they were actually three hooded women – draped with chains and spikes – but women nonetheless. ‘Thank Sigmar,’ said Frederick, exhaling with relief and lowering his sword. He began to laugh. ‘Now what have we found?’

‘Absolution,’ replied the woman nearest to him, and slammed a two-handed warhammer into his face.

Frederick’s head snapped backwards with a click, and he dropped heavily to the ground.

Otto stood, frozen with shook, then howled with pain as a steel whip licked across his face. His eyes ran down his cheeks like tears and an agonising blackness engulfed him.

‘I’ll pray for you,’ said a soft voice in his ear, as a quick blade at his throat finally released him from the City of the Damned.

‘Gutless worms,’ said novice sister Wolff, spitting on one of the dead mercenaries. ‘I won’t pray for them.’

Von Stahl looked over at the young girl. Beneath her hood, her pale aristocratic features could just be seen, and as she rifled through the corpse’s pockets her face was twisted in a sneer of disdain.

‘They barely seem worth the effort,’ – Wolff gave up her search with a sigh – ‘and they don’t have so much as a speck of weirdstone on them.’

‘You didn’t seem to think them so gutless a minute ago,’ said von Stahl quietly.

‘What do you mean by that?’ replied Wolff.

The third woman – novice sister Elsbeth Faust – stifled a laugh.

‘Well, you seemed happy for me and Elsbeth to waste our energies on them, but I couldn’t seem to spot you when the fighting started.’

‘Fight? I’d hardly call that a fight.’ Wolff’s eyes were wide with emotion as she stepped towards von Stahl. ‘If you want to waste yourself on such worthless prey as this’ – she spat on the corpses again – ‘then go ahead, but I haven’t forgotten why we’re here. There is the small matter of a trial to be considered.’ Her face was now almost purple. ‘Anyway, how dare you accuse me of cowardice? Remember your place, wastrel.’

Von Stahl winced at the nickname. Few dared to use it since she’d reached adulthood, but it still had the power to hurt. ‘I’m not accusing you,’ she snapped, wiping the mercenary’s teeth from her warhammer, ‘and I haven’t forgotten the trial. Didn’t you listen to their conversation? They’ve found something’ – she gestured over towards the ruined grandeur of the theatre – ‘over in the Magdeburg Playhouse.’

Stepping into the theatre was like stepping into a fractured mirror of the past. Broken marionettes lay scattered across the stage and faded, peeling faces smiled sadly down from the shattered balconies.

‘I came here as a child,’ said Elsbeth as they picked their way through the wreckage, ‘to hear Giotto Vasari. It was beautiful. I remember–’

Von Stahl silenced her with a wave of the hand. They carried no torches and the darkness was almost complete, but she thought she could see movement on the stage. As they crept silently through the shadows, each taking a different path through the stalls, von Stahl noticed Wolff nervously lagging behind again and frowned. Is she ready for this, she wondered?

The dusty boards creaked loudly as they stepped out onto the stage, and von Stahl winced at the noise. Then she stooped to examine something. Sprawled before the broken footlights lay the corpse of a man. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘he seems to have been crushed somehow.’ Wolff and Faust crouched next to her. ‘It’s as though a great weight has fallen on him.’ She prodded his chest with a grimace. ‘His bones have been completely destroyed.’

‘It’s another Marienburger,’ whispered Wolff, noting the man’s flamboyant outfit. ‘More gold than sense, the lot of ’em.’

Von Stahl raised her eyebrows.

‘What?’ replied Wolff, raising her voice a little and blushing again, ‘a blood-tie to Lady Magritte doesn’t lower me to the level of these dandies.’

Von Stahl ignored the petulant tone in her voice, and simply put a finger to her mouth. ‘Look,’ she whispered and gestured to the area of stage next to the body. ‘Something was there. The dust has been disturbed. And all that blood didn’t come from our friend here.’

With a growing sense of unease they rose to their feet – as they all saw a trail of blood that led towards the back of the stage. Wolff tightened her gromril armour and stepped closer to Elsbeth.

‘What did the dandies find, I wonder?’ said von Stahl, throwing back her hood and straining to see through the dark.

Wolff’s voice sounded uneven as she pointed towards the curtains. ‘Is that… what is that?’ In front of the tattered velvet, there was an area of darkness even more intense than the surrounding gloom – a tower of shadow that seemed too solid to be a mere play of the light. For a few seconds no one spoke, as they tried to discern the outline of the large shape.

Slowly, as her eyes grew accustomed to the pitch dark, von Stahl made out a monstrous face, glowering down at them. ‘Sigmar preserve us, it’s–’

Before she could finish, the stage exploded as a huge beast stepped forward and ripped the floorboards from beneath their feet – hurling the three novices in different directions and sending von Stahl’s hammer flying from her fingers.

Von Stahl landed heavily in the pit, momentarily winded and powerless as the creature lunged towards her. It was fifteen feet tall, covered with matted greasy fur and bore a look of such malevolence that she found it impossible to meet its blazing red eyes.

‘Wolff,’ she gasped, ‘wait,’ but the terrified girl didn’t even look back as she fled from the building. Von Stahl’s heart sank as she realised that she and Elsbeth would have to face the creature alone. She rolled to one side as a hoof the size of a small cart crashed down beside her.

Still incapable of breathing, she staggered away through the tiered stalls, trying to gain herself a few seconds to catch her breath.

To her surprise, the beast didn’t follow, but instead gave out a deafening roar of frustration and grasped desperately at its throat. Elsbeth had climbed up the shreds of curtain and leapt down onto its back, from where she was now proceeding to throttle it with her steel whip.

As the monster careered back and forth, howling with rage at its inability to free itself from Elsbeth’s grip, von Stahl searched desperately amongst the seats for her hammer. It was nowhere to be found and as Elsbeth’s cries for assistance grew more desperate, she realised she would have to find another weapon. She grabbed an ornamental sword from the wall and tested its blade. She cursed – it was nothing but a rusty prop.

‘Blessed Sigmar, help,’ cried Elsbeth as the maddened beast span around the theatre, smashing furiously against the already unstable walls.

Von Stahl had no choice. She could hear the frame of the building groaning each time the beast slammed against it – the whole structure sounded like it was about to come down. Clutching the blunt weapon she rushed to help.

By the time she reached it, the creature was in such a frenzy of rage and asphyxiation that she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to get its attention. Its bestial face had taken on a deep purple hue as Elsbeth’s whip bit deeply into its thick neck. A mixture of spittle and blood ran freely from its gaping jaws. After being repeatedly slammed against the walls of the theatre, Elsbeth looked like a broken doll hanging from beneath the beast’s filthy mane.

Von Stahl cried out to the monster from across the stage, waving her pitiful weapon defiantly at it. It whirled around and rooted her to the spot with a withering stare. With a bellow of rage, it threw its massive frame towards her and von Stahl screamed back in defiance and terror.

As she had hoped, it never reached her. In its anger, it overlooked the hole it had torn through the floorboards and crashed through the stage – skewering itself on the jagged planks with a thunderous howl.

An even greater fury now consumed it. It had sunk waist-deep into the floor and one of the planks was deeply embedded beneath its ribs, pinning it to the spot. However much it howled and thrashed about it couldn’t free itself, and every twist increased the flow of blood from its torso.

Von Stahl dropped weakly to her knees and watched the monster’s fury as it gradually ripped itself to pieces on the jagged planks. Soon, the whole stage was slick with blood and with each lunge its struggles grew weaker. Finally, with a gurgled bark of rage, it fell forward onto its chin and lay still.

Silence descended on the theatre, and for a few moments von Stahl lay motionless on the stage, her eyes closed. Then she sat bolt upright. ‘Elsbeth,’ she said in a hoarse voice. ‘Are you there?’

‘I think so,’ came a weak reply from out of the darkness, ‘although maybe not for much longer.’

Von Stahl climbed to her feet, and trod carefully up to the dead creature. Its chest was still, but just to be sure she took her blunt blade, and with all her strength, thrust it deep into the thing’s throat. ‘Nothing,’ she whispered. ‘Dead.’ Only then, as she was about to walk away, did she notice the stone around its neck. ‘Oh, Sigmar. Weirdstone… and the size of my fist.’

A weak cough reminded her of Elsbeth.

‘We’ve done it,’ she cried, rushing to her fellow novice. ‘We’ve got a piece of the stone. One of us at least has passed the trial.’

‘Not me,’ said Elsbeth, grinning through bloody teeth. ‘I think this is my last performance.’

Von Stahl saw with a jolt that the girl was dying. Her face was almost white from blood-loss, and her body was as twisted and broken as the marionettes that lay around her.

‘Elsbeth,’ said von Stahl, taking her hand. She tried to think of something to say but the words caught in her throat, and she simply hung her head.

‘You have a piece of the stone,’ said Elsbeth, after a few moments, trying to smile through the pain. ‘You’ve passed the test – they’ll let you back into the abbey, and you’ll be ordained as a fully-fledged sister. This is a good day, Virtue. You’ll be a novice no more.’

For a few moments von Stahl was unable to speak. Her fellow sisters were her only family and to watch Elsbeth slipping away before her eyes was almost more than she could bear. ‘I can’t return without Wolff,’ she said eventually, hardly aware of what she was saying but desperate to break the awful silence. ‘I must try and find her. Maybe together we can find a second shard and both pass the trial.’

Elsbeth grabbed von Stahl firmly by the arms and pulled her close. ‘Leave her,’ she hissed. ‘She’s no good! Take the stone and return without her.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You must!’ Elsbeth groaned and dropped back to the floor. ‘She should never have been inducted into the order. Matriarch Ebner was just too scared to offend Lady Magritte, otherwise Wolff wouldn’t even be a novice.’

‘But I can’t just desert her. I can’t just leave her out here – alone in the city.’

‘Take the stone back to the abbey and leave her to her fate. It’s all she deserves. Don’t die a novice like me just to save her worthless hide.’

‘But what of my vows – how can I just desert a fellow sister? I know what she is, but she’s still a member of our order. I can’t just–’

‘She betrayed us! If she had stayed to fight–’ Elsbeth’s voice caught with emotion. ‘Well… who knows, but she’s not worth a single drop of your blood.’ She dug her fingers deep into von Stahl’s arm. ‘Promise me you won’t go after her.’

Von Stahl shook her head sadly, but could think of nothing else to say and a short while later, Elsbeth passed away. She prepared the body according to the rituals of her order and laid it out on a makeshift pyre of scenery and curtains. As flames lit up the stage of the Magdeburg Playhouse for the last time, she snapped the stone from around the creature’s neck and dropped it carefully into a small pouch around her own neck. Then, with a final bow to the blazing pyre, she took Elsbeth’s whip and slipped out into the darkness.

Novice sister Wolff grimaced as she crept along the crumbling rooftops. However much she tried, it was impossible to ignore the thick, slightly sweet smell of death. She pulled her hood tighter around her face in an attempt to block out the stench, but Mordheim’s acrid stink had a way of seeping into your skin. She paused, sensing movement in the streets below, and crouched low on the shattered lintel of a long gone window to listen. She picked out a sound, so faint that she thought she had imagined it, but gradually growing louder. It was a kind of undulating wail, drifting up towards her. Music maybe, she thought, or was it screaming? As the minutes passed, she realised that it wasn’t one sound but many, emanating from several different directions. With growing horror, she realised that a symphony of howls and moans was floating towards her out of the dark. She shifted her position slightly and, using her steel whip as leverage, she leant out from the ruined window frame to peer down into the streets below.

The sight that greeted her turned her stomach. As a novice she had ventured into the city before, but only in the company of a matriarch, and never far from the safety of the sisters’ fortress abbey. Until now, she had largely been spared the full horror of Mordheim’s inhabitants, but here they were in all their awful glory. A tightly-packed crowd was shuffling towards her and to Wolff’s amazement it seemed to be some kind of grotesque carnival. The light of hundreds of torches punctuated the narrow, winding streets, and a cacophony of drums, bells and whistles echoed discordantly across the plazas and gardens. ‘What are they?’ she whispered as her pulse quickened with fear. The figures marching towards her were torn from a lunatic’s worst nightmare: she saw men whose faces were in their bellies; men with the bodies of animals; women with serpents for limbs; people whose pulsating viscera lay outside their skins; every possible perversion and permutation of human flesh was crawling and sliding slowly towards her. ‘Blessed Sigmar, save me,’ she said, feeling hot tears forming in her eyes. ‘Save me from the damned.’

She climbed back through the broken window into the remains of a small chapel. ‘What am I to do?’ she said, collapsing to the floor and curling into a foetal position. ‘How can I pass the trial now? Without a piece of weirdstone I can never become a sister,’ – a sickening thrill of adrenaline rushed through her – ‘and I can never return to the abbey.’ Great sobs began to shake her body. ‘Oh, why did von Stahl have to take us into that cursed theatre? She has killed me. She has killed us all.’

She might have lain there, weeping quietly, until the horde of lost souls finally discovered her, but to her dismay she realised that the approaching crowd was not her only problem. Sounds were coming from just below her, within the chapel.

She pressed her ear to the floor to listen. A pompous heavily-accented voice was talking: ‘–to the west?’ it said. ‘What do you expect to find that way? The rat-things came from the quayside, you oaf. Are you really so keen to be more intimately acquainted with them?’

‘We need to go somewhere,’ replied another voice. ‘If we reach the river we might find a merchant’s barge and head south – past the sisters’ rock and out through the South Gate.’

‘Ah, that delightful waterway, the Stir. What a haven of peace and tranquillity that will be. Maybe we could stop for lunch somewhere – perhaps with that wonderfully fragrant family we met in the cemetery, or those quaint creatures we discovered in the Executioner’s Square. Remember, the ones who seemed so interested in our stone?’

At the word ‘stone’, Wolff’s eyes widened.

‘Listen,’ cried the increasingly desperate voice. ‘That mob will be here any minute.’ Wollf realised that he was right, the hideous chorus was growing louder. It could only be a few streets away. ‘If we don’t move now, we’re dead anyway. What choice do we have?’

A note of resignation now filled the first voice. ‘What possessed me to follow you into this festering pit of a city?’

‘But it was your idea, sire. I was just–’

There was a loud crack, followed by a whimper of pain. ‘Now,’ said the pompous voice, ‘take me to this blessed river, and kindly refrain from speaking. If I could have even a few moments’ respite from your whinging, I might even survive this absurd expedition.’

Wolff heard the sound of equipment being hastily packed and felt a sudden panic. Using all the skills she had developed during her training, she crawled silently across the chapel’s dusty attic and peered carefully down through a hole in the floorboards.

Fortunately, the men had their backs to her. In fact, they were already climbing out through a crumbling window and down onto the street. As she watched them, Wolff could easily identify which figure belonged to which voice. One was a tall, distinguished-looking foreigner, wearing a suit of polished plate armour, a brightly-plumed helmet and a shield bearing a colourful chalice motif. How has he survived more than a day, she thought incredulously, in such a gaudy and noisy outfit?

The other figure seemed little more than a human carthorse. He was squat, ugly, dressed in filthy rags, and laden with dozens of bags and weapons – including, she noted with bemusement, a jousting lance.

As the men dropped from sight, Wolff lowered herself cautiously down into the room they had just vacated. She rushed to the broken window just in time to see the gaily-plumed knight and his servant disappear up an alleyway. She hopped out onto the street, and sped after them. That feathered ponce can’t survive much longer dressed like that, she thought, and the fat one wouldn’t put up much of a fight. If there was some way of separating the two, it would be a simple task to get the stone from the servant.

Images of a triumphant return to the abbey suddenly filled Wolff’s thoughts. Then the sound of the approaching mob interrupted her thoughts and, with a nervous glance over her shoulder, she picked up her pace.

Virtue sped through the dark narrow streets, all sense of caution abandoned as she raced across the gloomy squares and scrambled noisily over the crumbling ruins. The novice did not go unnoticed. As she passed beneath the crooked townhouses, indistinct figures peered down at her through filthy windows, while others shuffled awkwardly from doorways in slow pursuit.

‘Where are you, girl?’ she gasped, finally coming to a stop outside a large fenced garden. Her training had led her this far – a footprint here and a piece of robe there had been enough to signpost Wolff’s route, but now she was at a loss. ‘Where are you heading?’ Shaking her head in frustration she began to clamber up the warped, rusted iron of the garden fence, in the hope a better vantage point might give her some clues.

She tried to clear her thoughts and imagine what her fellow novice might do. The girl’s flight from the theatre had confirmed her cowardice: Elsbeth’s accusations had all been true. So what would she do now? She’ll head back to the monastery, decided Virtue, but which way? With a final heave, she swung her leg over the top of the fence and looked out across the wretched pall of the city. ‘Why has she been heading west?’ she asked, as though the ruins themselves might reply. ‘Why head further into the merchants’ quart...’ She laughed grimly. Mordheim looked more shadow than fact, more like a ghost of a city than real bricks and mortar, but deep in the heart of its dark twisted spires and fallen masonry, she glimpsed light: the dull flickering of water, snaking south, back towards the Rock. Back towards home. ‘Of course,’ she breathed. ‘She’s headed for the Stir.’

The clanking of the knight’s armour was almost as loud as his booming voice, and it was all too easy to follow the pair through the dark side streets of the merchants’ quarter. In just a matter of minutes they had reached the river’s edge. ‘Ah, here we are… the Stir,’ exclaimed the knight, picking his way carefully through the rubble. ‘How picturesque.’

From her vantage point on the roof of an old tavern, Wolff could see the two men as they stepped out onto the quayside. The broad river that lay before them had once teemed with barges, laden with exotic goods from across the Old World, but now it was a pitiful sight. Most of the wharves had crumbled into the ink-black water, and the warehouses and taverns that lined the water’s edge were all empty and dark – shadowy reminders of the city’s former glory. Everything she knew about this foul expanse told her that it was not a place to loiter, and she fidgeted nervously as the knight stamped noisily up and down a wharf, complaining loudly to his servant.

‘Fools,’ she hissed, ‘don’t bring every fiend in the city down on your heads.’ As she crept cautiously towards them however, Wolff realised she wasn’t exactly sure what she did want them to do. Wasn’t she hoping that they would call attention to themselves? If not, how could she get her hands on their stone? Did she dare to face them in open combat? For all his ridiculous posturing, she had a suspicion that the knight would be a fierce opponent. ‘Curse you, von Stahl, for putting me in this position’, she whispered. Still, at least she was alive – it seemed unlikely that her companions could have escaped from that horror in the Magdeburg Playhouse.

As these thoughts played through her head, she barely noticed that she had crept silently out onto the shadowy wharf, and was now only a few feet away from the two men. She stopped with a start, just short of the light of the servant’s lamp.

‘I think we could climb down to the boat,’ she heard him say as he leant out over the water. ‘There are still a few steps left intact.’

The knight dealt his servant a sharp clip to the ear that almost knocked him into the water. ‘You think I’m crawling down there like some kind of navvy?’ He hammered his fist noisily against the metal of his delicately engraved breastplate. ‘This is no bathing suit, Diderot. If I fall into that filth I’ll be picking trout out of my teeth for all eternity. Or whatever monster passes for trout in this city.’

‘But, sire, I’ll help you down. It’s only a few steps and I’ll–’

The knight dealt him another stinging blow to the ear. ‘Stop speaking!’

The servant looked at his feet and waited in silence as the knight glowered down at his bald pate.

‘Good,’ said the knight after a few moments. ‘Now let’s get down into this dingy. Take my hand, oaf.’

The servant leapt to obey, and carefully began to lower the heavily-armoured knight off the edge of the rickety pier.

A broad smile spread across Wolff’s face as she saw her chance. Drawing a knife from within her robes, she stepped calmly towards the two struggling men.

‘What are you doing?’ cried the knight as his servant suddenly loosed his hand and sent him plummeting towards the water. Diderot’s only reply was a dark bubble of blood that rose from his mouth as he fell backwards onto the wharf.

‘Confound it all,’ said the knight as he crashed through the surface of the Stir and sank like a stone towards the riverbed.

Diderot thrashed around on the rotten wood of the pier, trying to free Wolff’s knife from his back. ‘Witch,’ he gasped, glaring up at her. ‘You don’t know what you’ve done! That was Ambrose of Mousillion!’ To her amazement he began to crawl towards the edge of the pier, with the blade still embedded in his back. ‘He’ll be drowned. We must save him!’

‘Why do you care?’ she asked, laughing, ‘I’ve just freed you from a tyrant, and you’re cursing me. You should thank me.’ She stooped down and yanked her knife from between his shoulder blades. He grew rigid with pain, and then flopped weakly onto the pier. ‘Don’t die,’ she hissed, flipping him over onto his back. ‘Tell me where the stone is.’

The man’s eyes were already glazing over, but he managed to focus on her for a second. ‘Stone?’ he gurgled through a blood-filled mouth. ‘What stone?’

‘Don’t play the fool. I’ve been following you. I know you have a stone – the one you almost lost in the Executioner’s Square, remember?’

Recognition crossed his anguished face. ‘Oh,’ he muttered, ‘that’s what you want.’

‘Yes, you moron, give me the stone!’

The man shook his head defiantly at her for a few seconds, then made a pitiful attempt to throw one of his bags off the pier. It landed just a couple of feet away and Wolff laughed again. She turned away from the dying man and picked it up. As Diderot continued to curse her, she plucked a stone from out of his bag. ‘I’ve done it,’ she said, holding up Diderot’s lamp to examine her prize closer, ‘I’ve got a piece of…’ – she grimaced – ‘what’s this?’ In the light of the lamp, she saw that the stone was a beautiful blood-red ruby. ‘What’s this?’ she exclaimed again, grabbing the servant by his filthy jerkin, but he was dead and the face she was screaming into was already growing cold. She threw him back to the floor with a howl of frustration.

‘Move, you idiot,’ hissed von Stahl as she crept towards the water’s edge. ‘Don’t just stand there, out in the open.’

She had begun to think her skills as a tracker had led her astray, but there was no mistaking the figure on the pier – it was Wolff. The young novice could clearly be seen ranting and shouting at a corpse. Von Stahl grimaced. With every cry and petulant stamp of the foot, Wolff was drawing unwanted attention to herself. The girl was obviously so consumed by rage that she hadn’t noticed the vague, sinister shapes congregating at the foot of the pier.

‘Sweet Sigmar, what are they?’ whispered von Stahl as she slipped carefully out from a doorway. It was hard to see clearly in the dark, but whatever the creatures were, they had a lank, unwholesome appearance that chilled her blood. She remembered Elsbeth’s last words and paused. Should I just leave? she wondered as she watched the figures crawl towards Wolff. No one would know, she thought, clutching the stone around her neck. I could just leave her and take the weirdstone back to the abbey. Relief washed over her as she turned and began to jog back towards the burnt-out warehouses. She betrayed me first, she thought, so why should I die for her?

A hideous scream echoed out across the river and brought her to a halt. She looked back to see that the creatures had now stepped out onto the pier and were forming a loose circle around Wolff, who, having finally seen them, was wailing with terror. Von Stahl made the sign of the hammer. She saw now that they were ratmen: foul oversized rodents, dripping with river slime and wielding long, jagged blades. As she looked on in horror, the largest stepped forward and clubbed the screaming Wolff to the ground with the back of his hand. Von Stahl gasped with revulsion as the creatures crowded hungrily around her fellow novice. With a rush of indignation, she realised that she couldn’t leave anyone to such an awful fate. She began to run back towards the pier.

As she ran she called out to the ratmen, trying to gain Wolff a few seconds to escape. As one, they span towards her with their long yellow teeth bared. Their greasy snouts twitched as they sniffed new blood and several began skulking towards her.

Wolff had regained her senses though, and while their backs were turned, she smashed Diderot’s lamp over the largest of the creatures and then leapt over the edge of the pier.

The lamp’s oil exploded spectacularly over the rodent’s greasy fur and by the time von Stahl had reached the foot of the pier the ratmen were screaming in dismay. The agonies of their leader distracted them completely and by the time they’d remembered von Stahl’s presence, three of them had fallen to her steel whip.

The surviving creatures were in a frenzy of indecision, unsure whether defend themselves against von Stahl, pursue Wolff or help their screaming leader. As they lurched around in confusion, von Stahl’s steel whip continued to lash back and forth, knocking one of them to its knees and sending another two flying into the river.

A glimmer of hope rose in her mind. There were now only three of the creatures left standing – including the largest, who surely couldn’t survive the flames much longer. Then, to her joy, the burning creature leapt from the pier, leaving her with only two remaining opponents.

She readied herself for their attacks, but the loss of their leader had unnerved them and as soon as von Stahl raised her whip for another blow, they turned tail and dived headlong into the river.

She stood for a few moments in dazed incomprehension. The whole fight had only lasted a few seconds and her adrenaline-charged body remained tensed for battle, waiting for another opponent, but none came.

Another scream echoed across the water.

Von Stahl looked over the edge of the pier. Down below, in a small boat, lay Wolff. Looming over her, still steaming and smouldering from the fire, was the largest of the ratmen. Large patches of its fur had been scorched away, and the thing was obviously dazed with pain, but its eyes still burned with bloodlust.

‘Virtue,’ called the novice, as she tried to fend off the hideous creature, ‘for the love of Sigmar, help me.’

The rat pulled a long, ceremonial dagger from out of its robes and began lunging clumsily at Wolff as she wormed this way and that, trying to avoid the blows.

Even in its confused state, Wolff couldn’t evade the creature for long in so small a space, so von Stahl took the only available option and leapt feet-first from the pier.

It was a drop of twelve feet or more and as she landed heavily in the boat, she cried out in pain and fell to her knees. Her left ankle had snapped like an old twig and her foot had folded back at an unnatural angle.

Her heroics were not completely wasted though. The impact of her landing had rocked the boat so violently that the creature fell sprawling onto its face. Simultaneously the two novices clambered onto its smouldering back and began to rain blows down upon it.

‘Thank Sigmar,’ gasped Wolff, as they pummelled the struggling beast. ‘I thought you were dead.’

‘Not yet,’ replied von Stahl, trying to ignore the wrenching agony in her ankle, ‘and we’re halfway to passing the trial.’

Wolff paused, mid-punch. ‘What do you mean?’

Von Stahl smiled and tapped the pouch at her throat. ‘The thing in the theatre wore some interesting jewellery.’

Wolff remained frozen in shock as she tried to take on board the news. ‘You mean you have–’

The creature suddenly rose to its feet and shrugged them off its back, as easily as if they were children.

Wolff shrieked with fear and began to clamber up the pier’s rotten struts.

Von Stahl tried to follow, but white-hot pain ripped through her ankle and she fell to her knees once more. Then a terrible whistling noise exploded in her left ear and the world went black. When she came to, she was lying on her side with warm blood rushing from the side of her face where the beast had struck her. She looked up to see him raising his ornate dagger over her head.

With her last reserves of strength she rolled out of the way and the dagger plunged harmlessly into the keel of the boat. Then, holding back tears of pain, she clambered to her feet. As the creature struggled to retrieve his blade, she began to climb up the side of the pier.

‘Quick,’ gasped Wolff from above, reaching down to her. ‘Give me your hand.’

With agonising slowness she climbed up the rotten pier. Then, just as she was about to grasp Wolff’s hand, she felt a new pain explode in her leg. She looked down to see the foul creature leering with pleasure at the sight of his cruel blade embedded deeply in her calf. She gave an animal howl of pain.

‘Reach for me,’ cried Wolff desperately, ‘you can still make it.’

Delirious with pain, von Stahl gave one last lunge for Wolff’s hand and finally grasped it.

Wolff gave a powerful tug and dragged her up until she was almost at the top of the pier.

Virtue looked into Wolff’s face and felt a tide of relief rushing over her. ‘Wolff,’ she said, ‘you’ve saved us both.’

‘Well,’ said Wolff with a crooked smile as she plucked the small pouch from around von Stahl’s neck and loosed her hand, ‘maybe not both of us, wastrel.’

‘What?’ stammered von Stahl in confusion, but Wolff would say no more. She simply stood up, dusted herself down and ran back towards the quayside, leaving von Stahl clinging helplessly to the edge of the pier.

Pain and despair washed over her and with a sigh of misery she felt her fingers begin to slip from the damp wood.

Cold, hard fingers pressed painfully into von Stahl’s arms and she awoke.

‘Virtue,’ whispered a voice. ‘It’s time’.

She opened her eyes to see an old woman’s careworn face leaning over her. She recognised the kind rheumy eyes and the steel-grey hair, but she couldn’t place the woman.

‘Who are you?’ she asked croakily.

The old woman laughed gently, and stroked her hair. ‘Who am I, she says! You know who I am, Virtue. Matriarch Margareta Ebner. I practically reared you, child.’

The name triggered a confused jumble of memories in von Stahl’s drowsy mind. A kaleidoscope of violent images filtered through the remnants of her quickly fading dreams and the heavy scent of herbs that filled the room. She looked around in confusion and saw that she was lying in an infirmary. At the foot of the bed there was a small leaded window and beyond it a wide grassy cloister, filled with fountains and fishponds. Hooded figures could be seen, sat alone in quiet contemplation or talking in small groups. She could hardly believe her eyes. It was the Holy Convent. She was home.

‘I was on a trial,’ she said, frowning with concentration.

The Matriarch nodded encouragingly.

‘The trial of Ordination. I had to find a piece of weirdstone to become a fully-fledged sister, or–’

‘Or be banished from the order,’ said the Matriarch, nodding.

Fear quickened von Stahl’s pulse as she remembered how miserably she had failed. She saw Elsbeth’s pitiful funeral pyre in the Magdeburg Playhouse. She saw Wolff’s cruel mocking eyes as she stole the stone from around her neck and left her to die. Then, with a grimace, she remembered falling back into the boat, and struggling desperately with the rat-creature. She buried her face in her hands and groaned. ‘How am I here? I failed the test. I have no weirdstone. How is that you have allowed me back into the abbey?’

The Matriarch was about to reply, but then paused, distracted by the sound of approaching footsteps. ‘I think you have your first visitor,’ she said.

The door flew open and, to von Stahl’s horror, Wolff burst into the room. Disbelief drained the colour from both girl’s faces and each was momentarily at a loss for words. Then, recovering her composure a little, Wolff flew to von Stahl’s bedside, dropped to her knees and hugged her tightly. ‘Oh, Virtue, can it be true? Have you really returned to us?’

Anger welled up in von Stahl, and she struggled to free herself from the girl’s grip, but Wolff wouldn’t let go. She spoke quickly. ‘I thought you had perished at the hands of that foul creature in the theatre. I never dreamt you were still alive.’

Disgust and hatred filled von Stahl, but she couldn’t manage to interrupt the girl’s torrent of false concern.

‘I have been distraught thinking of you and Elsbeth. If it were not for the comforting words of the High Matriarch, I believe I would have lost my mind with grief.’

At the words ‘High Matriarch’, Wolff looked meaningfully at von Stahl, and squeezed her a little tighter.

The message was clear, and von Stahl’s heart sank. To receive words of comfort from the High Matriarch herself was a reminder of Wolff’s honoured position within the order. As a blood relative of the sisters’ most invaluable patron, Lady Magritte, Wolff had a special place in the High Matriarch’s heart, and if a lowly foundling like von Stahl were to accuse her of treachery, the claims would be dismissed out-of-hand as madness… or heresy.

Realising the futility of her position, von Stahl gave Wolff no reply and simply slumped back weakly into her pillow.

Wolff’s eyes lit up as she saw that she had been understood. Then, assuming once more an expression of concern, she turned to matriarch Ebner and said. ‘But what of the trial? Without a piece of the weirdstone she has failed, and cannot be ordained.’ With the ease of a practiced liar she squeezed a few tears from her eyes. ‘Which must surely mean that she will be banished from the order and sent back,’ she gulped, ‘into the city.’

Von Stahl put a hand to her mouth to stifle a sob. Wolff was right. She had failed, and must now be banished, alone in the City of the Damned. The best she could hope for was a quick death at the hands of whichever of Mordheim’s terrible inhabitants found her first.

‘It seems so cruel,’ said Wolff, forcing more tears from her eyes, ‘that she has managed to return to us only to be sent away again,’ she looked searchingly at Matriarch Ebner, ‘but I presume there is no alternative?’

The old woman looked carefully at Wolff. There was something strange in the girl’s manner, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. ‘Well,’ she said, ignoring Wolff, and taking von Stahl’s hand, ‘it seems that Sigmar has his eye on you, Virtue. You must have fought bravely indeed. When sister Schönau plucked you from the river, you were half-gutted. The boat you were drifting in was drenched with blood. Some was yours but luckily there was much more from whatever you had been fighting.’

As the Matriarch spoke, images of the fight returned to von Stahl. She remembered how her rage at Wolff’s betrayal had given her renewed strength. She had fought furiously with the rat-creature as the small boat drifted slowly south down the Stir. With its blade stuck deep in her leg her opponent had found itself unarmed and after a merciless storm of blows from her steel whip, it had finally dived back into the river, leaving her weak and bleeding in the boat.

‘I remember defeating that… that vermin, but then nothing.’ She looked up desperately at the matriarch. ‘And I have no stone. I have failed.’

The old woman rose from her chair, and fetched something from a small table beneath the window. She handed it to von Stahl with a smile. ‘When sister Schönau pulled you from the boat, she had to remove this from your leg.’

Von Stahl looked at the long sacrificial knife. She remembered with a shudder the leer on the creature’s face as it thrust the blade into her leg. Then, a dawning realisation washed over her and she smiled back at the matriarch.

‘What is it?’ demanded Wolff, snatching the blade from her. ‘Just a knife? What’s so special about that?’

Von Stahl continued to smile as she pointed towards a small dark stone embedded the blade’s hilt. ‘Weirdstone,’ she said.

The Inquisition

++Open vox-net++

My most esteemed Lord Inquisitor,

Though our losses were heavy and many sacrifices made in the name of Him on Earth, the daemonhost who goes by the alias Aaron Dembski-Bowden now dwells in a cell beneath our fortress outpost here on the Eastern Fringe. Although our torture of the subject is still in its early stages, useful information has already been gleaned and it is my great pleasure to communicate it to you.

Interrogator Kerstromm Ordo Malleus

What are you working on at the moment?

Same thing that I’m always working on: a master plan to miss every deadline I’ve ever been given. Right now, both my screens are a patchwork mess of several windowed Word.docs, emails and .pdfs. I’m finishing Blood Reaver, the second in the Night Lords Trilogy, and making sure it answers some of the questions left open at the end of Soul Hunter, while also matching up with the events that happen in ‘The Core’, the short story in Fear the Alien which, for bizarre reasons I can no longer remember, I set after Blood Reaver. It’s tougher than it sounds, because being organised is anathema to me. I like to make life hard for myself.

What are you working on next?

Two major projects. The first is one of Black Library’s limited edition novellas, set as part of the Horus Heresy series. That’s got a working title of Cybernetica, following a Sons of Horus Techmarine in his dealings with the corrupted Mechanicum aboard the Warmaster’s flagship. The second is my next novel, which dances between three working titles: The Emperor’s Gift; Sons of Titan; and Someone Help Me Name This Book. That’s going to be the first in a new Grey Knights saga, and I couldn’t be more psyched about starting it. It’s the Grey Knights, man. The best of the best of the best, dealing with threats to humanity that no one else in the galaxy is even allowed to discover, upon pain of death. If you don’t think that’s cool, then you and me simply can’t be friends.

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

Loads. It’s a big playground, though - you’ve gotta respect the fact that other people got there first, and have as much right as you to claim X, Y and Z. So while I’d love a crack at one of the Big Four (Blood Angels, Ultramarines, Space Wolves, Dark Angels) it’s not something I’m exactly crying over. I have way too much coming at me, anyway. I’d really like to do a love story based around Orion and Ariel, the Wood Elf king and queen, from their beginnings as asrai to their seasonal ascension to their people’s spiritual avatars. I’d freaking love to do a series chronicling the rise of the Black Legion and Abaddon’s position as Warmaster of Chaos. On a smaller scale, a short story about Andrej, the stormtrooper in Helsreach, and his search for Domoska in the hive city’s ruins. A lot of people keep asking me about that one.  

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

Right now, I’m reading Dragon Haven, by Robin Hobb As it happens, she’s my favourite author. I always have a few books on the go at once, which are currently The Stone and the Flute, by Hans Bemman, and The Clash of Fundamentalisms, by Tariq Ali. One of my favourite books is The Thirteen and a Half Lives of Captain Bluebear, which (along with Dune) I tend to read once a year. I feel another round with that beast of a book coming on. I’m sure everyone’s reading Prospero Burns right now, but lucky scamp that I am, I read it over half a year ago. Amazing novel, but a bit too recent for a re-read.

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

The Philosopher and the Wolf, by Mark Rowlands. It’s about a schoolteacher who, through various circumstances, ends up being the owner of a wolf, and spends the course of the book comparing his ape’s perceptions to the wolf’s canine ones. It’s pretty simple philosophy, but it’s beautifully written. Everyone’s got life unique life experiences to draw from and shape into stories, but I wish that’d been one of mine. 

Phalanx

Ben Counter

Chapter 4

The beauty of Berenika Altis was a strange thing, like a work of art not understood. It had been built in the shape of an enormous star, two of its five points extending out to sea on spurs of artificial land. Each point of the star was devoted to a different trade, the five legendary guilds that had built and financed this city. The shape was a reminder of its original purpose as an exclusive retreat for those who deserved better than the other bleak, stagnant cities of the planet Tethlan’s Holt. At the centre of the star was the Sanctum Nova Pecuniae, once a palace existing purely for the beautification of Berenika Altis, and one that now served as the seat of government of Tethlan’s Holt.

Fifteen days ago all communication had ceased with Berenika Altis. Eight million people had vanished. The planetary authorities, those who had not disappeared with the rest of the government, reacted as any good Imperial citizen did when confronted with the unknown. They sealed off the city, quarantined it, and resolved to pretend that it had never existed.

The Doom Eagles were not satisfied with such solutions.

‘A brittle beauty,’ said Librarian Varnica as the Thunderhawk droned in low over the north seaward spur of Berenika Altis. The rear ramp was down and Varnica had disengaged his grav-couch restraints, holding onto the rail overhead to lean forward and get a better look at his target from the air.

‘I see only stupidity,’ replied Sergeant Novas. His voice did not sound over the gunship’s engines, but the vox-link carried it straight into Varnica’s inner ear. ‘A shift in the sea floor and two-fifths of that city would sink into the ocean.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Varnica, ‘that’s the point. Nothing speaks of wealth like spending a great deal of it on something that might be gone any moment.’

‘Looks like they got their wish,’ said Novas. ‘Eventually. It wasn’t the sea that got them, but something did,’

‘Quite the conundrum,’ said Varnica. ‘What a puzzle box they built for us.’

As the Thunderhawk swooped lower, the streets were revealed. Each spur of the city had been dedicated to a different guild and though centuries of rebuilding and repurposing had followed, the original imprint remained. The Embalmers’ Quarter was arranged in neat rows, the buildings resembling elegant tombs. The Jewelcutters’ Quarter was all angular patterns, triangular sections of streets and many-sided intersections echoing the complex facings of a cut diamond. The Victuallers’ District was a gloomy, sheer-sided area of warehouses and long, low halls. The industrial feel of the Steelwrights’ Cordon was entirely an affectation, with rust-streaked metal chimneys and crumbling brickwork concealing the salons and feasting halls where the great and good of Berenika Altis had celebrated their superiority. The Flagellants’ Quarter, founded with the money taken from those who paid to have their sins scourged from them, echoed the flagellants’ frenzy with twisted, winding streets and asymmetrical buildings that seemed poised to topple over or slide into rubble. The Sanctum Nova Pecuniae held the disparate regions together, as if it pinned them to the surface of Tethlan’s Holt to keep them from crawling off to their own devices.

The streets were visible now, the buildings separating into distinct blocks. The streets seemed paved with a haphazard mosaic of blacks and reds, the same pattern covering every avenue and alley.

It was a mosaic of corpses.

The smell of it confirmed the few reports that had reached the Doom Eagles. The smell of rotting bodies. It was familiar to every Space Marine, to every Emperor’s servant whose business was death.

Varnica looked on, fascinated. He had seen many disasters. When not called upon to attend some critical battlezone, it was disasters that attracted the Doom Eagles. Some Chapters sought out ancient secrets, others lost comrades, others the most dangerous sectors of the galaxy to test their martial prowess. The Doom Eagles sought out catastrophe. It was less a policy of the Chapter’s command, and more a compulsion, a dark fascination as powerful as the pronouncements of the Chapter Master.

This was a true disaster. Not the side effect of a war, or a revolt that had turned bloody. It was a catastrophe from outside, beyond the context of anything that had happened on Tethlan’s Holt. The scale of death was appalling. Millions lay decomposing in the streets. And yet a part of Varnica’s mind relished it. Here was not only a mystery, but a scale of horror that made it worth solving.

The Thunderhawk approached its landing zone, a circular plaza in the Embalmers’ Quarter. Like every other possible landing site, it was strewn with bodies. Fat flies whipped around the Thunderhawk’s passenger compartment as it passed through a cloud of them, spattering against Varnica’s armour and the eyepieces of his power armour’s helmet. He took it off as the Thunderhawk came down to land.

The grisly cracking sound Varnica heard was the cracking of bones beneath the Thunderhawk’s landing gear. More crunched below the lower lip of the embarkation ramp as it opened up all the way. Varnica walked off the gunship onto the ground of Berenika Altis, pushing aside the bodies with his feet so he did not have to stand on them.

‘Perimeter!’ shouted Sergeant Novas. His tactical squad jumped down after him and spread out around the plaza. Within moments the foul blackish flesh of the bodies was clinging to the armour of their feet and shins, shining wetly in the afternoon sun. The filters built into Varnica’s lungs took care of the toxins and diseases in the air, but anyone without those augmentations would have vomited or choked on the air.

Techmarine Hamilca was last out, accompanied by the quartet of servitors that followed him everywhere like loyal pets.

‘What do you think, Techmarine?’ asked Varnica.

Hamilca looked around him. The tombs of the Embalmers’ Quarter showed no sign of gunfire or destruction, and the sun was shining down from a blue sky. If one cast his gaze up far enough, there was nothing to see but a handsome city and fine weather. The bodies seemed incongruous, as if they did not belong here, even though they were undoubtedly the remains of this city’s population.

‘It is a beautiful day,’ said Hamilca, and turned to adjust the sensors of his servitors.

‘One day,’ said Novas, ‘they’ll put your brain back in, tin man.’

Hamilca did not answer that. Varnica knelt to examine the bodies at his feet.

What remained of their clothing ranged from the boiler suits of menials to the silks and furs of the city’s old money elite. The wounds were from fingers and teeth, or from whatever had been at hand. Tools and wrenches. Walking canes. A few kitchen knives, chunks of masonry, hatpins. One burly man’s throat had a woman’s silken scarf tied around it as a garrotte. Its previous owner might well have been the slender woman whose corpse lay, broken-necked, beside him. They had killed with anything at hand, which meant the time between normality and killing had been measured in minutes.

‘It was the Red Night,’ said Varnica.

‘Can you be sure?’ asked Hamilca.

‘I admire your desire to gather evidence,’ said Varnica, ‘but I need see no more than this. It is my soul that tells me. So many places like this we have seen, and I hear their echo off the walls of this city. The Red Night came here. I know it.’

‘Then why are we here?’ said Novas. His squad was by now in a loose perimeter formation, bolters trained down the avenues of tombs radiating out from the plaza. Novas’s Space Marines were well drilled, and Novas himself possessed a desire to be seen doing his duty combined with a blessed lack of imagination. These qualities made his squad Varnica’s escort of choice. They could be trusted to do their job and leave the thinking to the Librarian. ‘The last time we came to a place touched by the Red Night, there was nought to find though we turned that place inside out. Why will Berenika Altis be any different?’

‘Just smell,’ said Varnica.

Novas snarled with a lack of amusement.

‘Do not scorn such advice, sergeant!’ Varnica breathed in deeply, theatrically. ‘Ah, what a bouquet! Ruptured entrails! Liquefying muscle! They are fresh! Compared to the last places we visited it, these bodies are ripe! We have got here earlier than before, Novas. These bodies still have flesh on them. We are not picking over a skeletonised heap but sloshing through the very swamp of their decay. Whatever brought the Red Night here, there is a good chance it still remains in Berenika Altis.’

‘We shall not find it here,’ said Hamilca. He was consulting readings from the screen built into the chest of one servitor. Another was taking pict-grabs using the lens that replaced both its eyes, roving across the corpse-choked streets. ‘Not in these streets.’

Varnica held up the burly man’s corpse. It was sagging and foul, the joints giving way so the limbs hung unnaturally loose. The head lolled on its fractured neck. ‘He will not tell us anything more, that is for certain.’ He looked towards the skyline at the centre of Berenika Altis. The Sanctum Nova Pecuniae rose above the necropoli of the Embalmers’ Quarter, its spires scything towards the sky in golden arcs. ‘Let’s ask the people who count.’

The Red Night.

It was a wave of madness. Or, it was a disease that caused violent hallucinations. Or, it was a mental attack perpetrated by cunning xenos. Or, it was the natural consequence of Imperial society’s repression of human nature. Or, it was the influence of the warp seeping into real space.

The Red Night caused everyone in the afflicted city to tear one another apart. The urge to do so came over them instantly. Most such disturbances led to an exodus of refugees fleeing the carnage, as the madness spread along some social vector. The Red Night, however, worked instantly. No word escaped the city, and so no one could intervene until the lack of communication forced an investigation and the first horrified reports came back of the scale of the death.

It had happened five times that the Doom Eagles knew of. Four times Doom Eagles Space Marines reached the afflicted city to find nothing but a multitude of well-rotted bodies, their flesh turned to black slurry caking the gutters and bones already starting to bleach. The fourth time, Varnica perceived a spiralling route that connected the instances of the Red Night and, more through intuition than calculation, plotted a route for his taskforce that took it within two weeks’ travel of Tethlan’s Holt. When the whispers of the Red Night had been intercepted by the astropath on the Killing Shadow, the strike cruiser commanded by Varnica, the ship had dropped out of the warp long enough to point its prow towards Tethlan’s Holt.

In time, the Red Night would evolve completely into legend. Every voidborn shiphand would know someone who knew someone who had lost a friend to it. Collected tales of the Red Night would fill half-throne chapbooks. Melodramas and tragedies would be written about it. Street-corner madmen would rave about the Red Night coming the next day, or the next week, or the next year, to take up all the sinners in its bloody embrace.

Varnica would not let that happen. The truth about the Red Night would be uncovered before all hope of its discovery disappeared among the legends. Too often the Imperium caused the truth to atrophy, replaced by fear and madness. It was Varnica’s duty, among the many a Space Marine had to the Emperor, to scrape back as much of the truth as he could from the hungry maw of history. Each time the Red Night had struck, he had got a little closer to that truth, something he felt rather than understood, as if the screams of the dying got more intense in his imagination each time he saw those dreadful dead streets from the sky.

The truth was in Berenika Altis. Varnica knew this as only a Librarian could. Only a psyker’s inner eye could perceive something so absolutely. Varnica would discover the truth behind the Red Night, or he would not leave this city. He had never been so certain of anything.

The bodies suited the Sanctum Nova Pecuniae. It resembled a scene from a tragic play, painted by a master who placed it on a fanciful stage of soaring columns and marble, the dead contorted, their faces anguished, every clutching hand and sunken eye socket the telling of another story amid the drama.

The ground floor of the palace was a single vast space, punctuated with columns and shrines. It was possible to walk, and indeed see, from one side of the palace to the other from outside through the vast archways, without encountering a wall. To a new visitor the place would at first seem hollow, as if forming some metaphor for transparency or absence of government. The complex architecture of the roof, however, formed of overlapping vaults and petals, hid the spaces where the government actually met and did business. This was a metaphor, too, thought Varnica as he cast his senses around him, half as a soldier and half as an appreciator of the palace’s art. The really important people in Berenika Altis existed on a higher plane, like a heaven sealed off among the friezes and inscriptions of the shadowy ceiling.

The Doom Eagles had entered through an archway above which were carved words in High Gothic proclaiming that portion of the Sanctum Nova Pecuniae to have been built by the Guild of Steelwrights. Notable past masters of that guild were remembered in the statues that stood in alcoves, forming shrines to the exemplars of the guild’s values. They held formidable-looking tools, multiwrenches and pneumohammers, and had faces that looked like they had been beaten out of steel themselves.

‘These dead were not mere citizens,’ said Hamilca, whose medical servitor was playing its sensors over a knot of corpses at the base of the nearest pillar. ‘They wear the marks of nobility. Here, the badge of the Flagellants’ Guild. This one wears cloth-of-gold and ermine.’

‘The government must have been in session,’ said Varnica. ‘Perhaps the timing was deliberate?’

Novas spat on the floor. He was a superstitious type, and the horror of this place was more spiritual than the mundanity of the bodies outside. Showing his contempt with a wad of phlegm scared away the dark things mustering on the other side of the Veil, so the superstitions went.

A pillar a short distance away had a particularly dense heap of bodies around it. They were three deep, as if they had been clambering over one another to get at the pillar. Bloody smudges from fingers and hands painted the flutes of the pillar. Varnica walked over to them, picking his way past the master artisans and councillors who lay in his way. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘There is a way up.’ He hauled on one of the blade-like stone flutes and it swung open, to reveal a tight spiral staircase corkscrewing up through the pillar.

A body fell out. Its face had been torn so much it was impossible to tell the back of the head from the front. Two severed arms tumbled behind it, neither of them belonging to the first body. Varnica looked up the staircase and saw bodies wedged into the pillar, clogging it up before the first twist.

The leaders of Berenika Altis had thought the day-to-day business of government vulgar enough to hide it in the grand architecture of the Sanctum. Men and women had died trying to get at the concealed working of government, even as they were rending each other apart. Was it some bestial remnant of memory that caused them to flee to the only place a nobleman might feel safe? Or had there been something in the madness itself that compelled them to seek something above?

Varnica said nothing. He simple forced his armoured form into the tight space of the staircase and began dragging down the bodies that stood in his way.

Hamilca’s servitors aided the removal of corpses greatly. Thirty more of them lay beside the pillar, all horribly mauled as if chewed up and spat out, before Varnica reached the top. Novas’s battle-brothers followed him up, crouch-walking in the cramped space.

Varnica emerged in a chamber of maps and portraits, a sort of antechamber before the government debating chambers and offices. The lower portraits, more stern steelwright masters along with well-heeled embalmers and jewelcutters in their leather aprons, were spattered with blood. Framed maps depicted early layouts of Berenika Altis and the changing political divisions of Tethlan’s Holt. Various landmasses were drawn in differing sizes from map to map, reflecting their relative importance. Varnica remembered that every planet in the Imperium had a history like this, shifting, waxing and waning for thousands of years, while the Imperium beyond did not care unless something happened to end that history entirely.

The bodies here were clustered around one door. Hamilca moved to examine them while Novas’s squad covered all the entrances.

Varnica took a better look at one portrait, mounted just high enough to have avoided the worst of the spraying blood. It was of a member of the Flagellants’ Guild. It was a large woman, well-fed rather than naturally bulky, whose ample bosom was encased ridiculously in an embroidered version of a penitent’s sackcloth robe. Spots of red makeup simulated self-inflicted wounds and her hair was piled up in a magnificent structure held in place by the kinds of serrated needles more properly used for extracting confessions. In one hand she held, like a royal sceptre, a scourge with three spiked chains, the implement of her guild’s craft.

In the lower corner was a handprint in blood. It was made too surely and deliberately to have been accidental, from a flailing fist. Someone had used this wall to steady themselves. Someone wounded.

Varnica followed the tracks through the gory mess of the floor. ‘They were following someone,’ he said as he paced carefully towards the body-choked door. ‘He was wounded and limping but he wasn’t scrabbling along like an animal, as the rest of the souls were. They were after him. The Red Night sent them after one man in particular.’

The tracks led to the door where Hamilca’s servitors were making a survey of the various wounds. ‘They dashed themselves to death against the door,’ said Hamilca. ‘Few wounds from hands or teeth. They broke themselves here trying to get through.’

The door had been panelled with wood to make it in keeping with the rest of the government officer, but that façade had splintered with the assault to reveal the solid metal beneath. It was a security door to keep out just the kind of frenzied assault that had broken against it.

Varnica sighed. He did not like having to use the full range of his talents. He had always felt that a psyker should properly be something subtle, an intelligence weapon, reading or remaking minds, perhaps astrally projecting to make the perfect spy. His own talents had taken a form that he found ugly in the extreme. Still, duties were duties, and he had the best way of getting through the door that would not risk destroying evidence beyond.

He clenched his right fist and thought of anger. The lines of the room seemed to warp around his fist, as if it was encased in a lens that distorted anything seen through it. Reality did not like it when he did this, and he had to fight it.

Black and purple rippled around the gauntlet. Sparks crackled across the segments of armour around his fingers. The region of deviant gravity Varnica willed into being bowed and seethed as he drew back the fist that now disobeyed the laws of force and energy.

Varnica punched the door clean off his mountings. The whole room seemed to shudder, its dimensions flickering slightly out of balance as Varnica’s psychic power discharged in a thrust of force. The metal door clanged into the room beyond.

The Librarium of the Doom Eagles liked to classify its members’ psychic powers according to categories and strength. Varnica’s was referred to as the Hammerhand, a crude but effective power that typically augmented the Librarian’s capacity for hand-to-hand combat. Varnica disliked the Librarium’s testing of its intensity, but he conceded that it was powerful, and that it would get more powerful the more he exercised the mental muscles that powered it.

Varnica shook out his hand as the power around it dissipated.

Novas smiled. ‘No door is locked when one wields the Emperor’s Key,’ he said.

‘Quite,’ replied Varnica. The Emperor’s Key. It sounded rather more elegant than ‘Hammerhand’.

The room he had opened was an archive. Ceiling-high banks of index cards, yellowing ledger books and scroll racks exuded a smell of old paper that almost overpowered the stink of decay.

On a reading table was sprawled the single body this room contained. It wore grand robes that suggested high office in the planet’s government. The dead man still had a dagger in his hand, probably worn more for ceremony than self-defence. The point of the dagger pinned a handful of papers to the tabletop. Several opened drawers and scattered papers suggested he had rooted around and found them in a hurry, and in his last moments made sure that whoever found him would also find those specific documents.

The man had torn his own throat out with his other hand. He lay in the black stain of his blood. His body sagged with decay beneath the robes now filthy with old blood and the seepage of rot.

Varnica pulled out the dagger and looked at the documents this man had fought to call attention to, even while the Red Night was taking control of him.

They were receipts and blueprints for work done on the sewers beneath the Jewelcutters’ Quarter, between seventy and forty years before. Varnica leafed through them rapidly. They were nothing more than the detritus of a civil service that loved to remember its own deeds.

‘What was he trying to tell us?’ asked Hamilca.

‘He was telling us,’ said Varnica, ‘to look down.’

The first of them had a face like a knot of knuckles, deep red flesh that oozed hissing molten metal, sinewy arms that wielded a smouldering blade of black steel. It congealed up from the black mass of old blood pooling in the sewer, that drizzle of gore from the bloodshed above. Its face split open, tearing skin, and it screamed. A whip-like tongue lashed out.

More of them were emerging. Dozens of them.

The sewers. Berenika Altis’s greatest achievement, some said. Hidden from the world above, each section of sewer was like a cathedral nave, a monument to glory for its own sake, lit by faded glow-globes and faced with marble and plaster murals. Most cities of the Imperium would have gathered here to worship. On Berenika Altis the combined efforts of the flagellants and the jewelcutters had created instead such a place to accommodate the filth of the city.

It was here the blood had flowed. It was here the Doom Eagles had come, following the signs left them by that unnamed nobleman who had died in the Sanctum. It was here they realised they were getting close to the secret of the Red Night.

‘Daemons!’ yelled Novas. ‘Close formation. Rapid fire!’

More daemons were congealing from the blood that slaked the floor of the sewer section. They rushed at the Doom Eagles, hate in their eyes and their swords held high.

Novas’s squad drew in close around Varnica and Hamilca. The ten Adeptus Astartes hammered out a volley of bolter fire. Three or four daemons were shredded at once, gobbets of their molten metal blood hissing against the marble walls. But Varnica counted more than twenty more daemons now charging to attack. Bolter fire would thin them out, but this was a task that had to be finished by hand.

Varnica thrust his right hand into the complex holster he wore on one hip. The sections of his force claw closed around his hand. When he withdrew it, it was encased in a pair of sharp blades in a pincer, each blade swirling with psychoactive circuitry.

Varnica let his psychic power fill his fists. Distasteful as it was, it was for encounters like this that he had trained his mental muscles. The air warped around his hands and the force claw glowed blue-white with its power.

The daemons rushed closer. Novas shot another down, blowing its yowling head from its shoulders. Varnica pushed his way between the two Doom Eagles in front of him and dived into the fray.

His force claw closed on one and sheared it in two. A fountain of red-hot blood sprayed over his armour, hissing where it touched the ceramite. His other fist slammed down, just missing the next daemon in his way and ripping a crater out of the flagstone floor. He span, driving his right elbow into the daemon and backhanding another hard enough to rip its whole jaw off.

He imagined his fists were meteors, smouldering masses of rock, attacked to him by chains, and wherever he swung them anything in the way would be destroyed. That was the secret of many a psychic weapon – imagination, the ability to mould them in a psyker’s mind’s eye into whatever he needed them to be. Varnica needed them to be wrecking balls smashing through the hideous things that reared up around him. Their bodies were walls to be battered down. They were doorways to be opened with the Emperor’s Key.

Rapid gunfire sprayed around him. Hamilca’s servitors were not just scientific instruments – one had opened up, its torso becoming an archway of metal and skin within which were mounted a pair of rotator cannon. They blazed away at Hamilca’s direction, even as Hamilca himself took aim with his plasma pistol and blew the arm off another daemon before it could fully congeal into existence.

Varnica’s shoulder guard turned away one daemon’s blade and he ducked under another. He rose, claw first, lifting a daemon above his head and letting the pincers snap open so the daemon was sheared in two. He stamped down on the blade of the first daemon and, as it fought to wrench its weapon up to strike again, Varnica drove an elbow into its face and punched it in the chest as it reeled. Purple-black light shimmered around the gravity well of his fist as it ripped through the thing’s ribs and burst out through its back.

Hands grabbed Varnica by the collar and backpack of his armour, wrenching him down. He fought to straighten up but the strength and suddenness of the attack had caught him off guard.

He saw the face of Novas, whose hands were pulling him down. Another Doom Eagle fired past Varnica, bolter shells blasting ragged holes in the daemon who had been about to decapitate Varnica with its blade.

‘Must I nursemaid you through every fight?’ growled Novas.

The Doom Eagles now formed an execution line to bring their bolters to bear on the remaining daemons. Varnica had scattered their charge and now they were trying to regroup, or to attack in ones and twos easily shot down. A final few volleys of bolter fire brought down the remaining daemons, blasting off limbs and shredding torsos. The remnants dissolved into the mass of blood and filth that covered the sewer floor.

Novas helped Varnica to his feet.

Varnica clapped the sergeant on the shoulder. ‘You see, brother?’ he said. ‘We are close. Blessed is the enemy that announces himself to us so!’

‘Blessed is your brother that keeps you alive,’ said Novas.

‘We know,’ said Hamilca, adjusting the programming of his gun-servitor, ‘that the enemy fears our closing in on him. Therefore, we approach some place of significance to him. The documents from the Sanctum suggested the importance of a major intersection three hundred metres to our west.’

‘It’s the blood,’ said Varnica. ‘The bloodshed in the city finds its way down here, to the sewers. The enemy places himself some place where the blood gathers, and then... uses it? Fuels something with it?’

‘Bathes in it, for all we know,’ said Novas.

Varnica checked his wargear. The daemons’ blood had burned pockmarks into his armour. Nothing important was damaged. One of Novas’s squad had suffered a deep sword wound to one arm, and the helmet of another’s power armour had been smashed. Varnica recognised the pugnacious features of Brother Solicus, a veteran of Novas’s command. Solicus would make a point of ignoring the minor wound on the forehead and the blood that trickled down his face.

No great harm done, thought Varnica.

‘Move on,’ he said, and led the way westwards.

When he looked back on the Red Night of Berenika Altis, it would always be the face of Gunther Kephilaes that Varnica would remember first. That look of surprise when he saw the Doom Eagles entering his realm, to be replaced with an awful smile, as if they were guests he had been waiting for all this time.

The second memory would be of the writing on the walls. Kephilaes, later identified as an arch-heretic who had escaped repeated attempts to execute him on a dozen worlds, had chosen for his base of operations a cistern in the sewers of Berenika Altis. This place, an enormous tank built to accommodate overflow from the sewers, had been drained of water so that when the Red Night occurred, it filled up with blood. The roof was an enormous dome carved with images of jewelcutters on one side, flaunting their elaborate arrays of jewellery and gems, and on the other a parade of flagellants lashing supplicants with their scourges. This dome, and every visible surface of wall and pillar, was covered in writing. At first it appeared black, but it was in fact a dark reddish brown. Every word had been written in blood.

Varnica, like every Space Marine, had been taught that speed of decision was essential in the opening seconds of battle. Even before Gunther Kephilaes’s face had broken into that mad grin, Varnica had decided that Novas would pin the heretic down with gunfire while Varnica himself would close across the duckboards and jerry-built rafts that had been lashed together over the surface of the blood. Kephilaes sat on an island made of toppled pillars in the centre of the blood, hundreds of books and tattered papers lying on the broken stone or floating on the surface around his makeshift pulpit. Varnica could reach him, scale the drums of the broken pillars and get to grips with this heretic in a handful of seconds. He just needed those seconds, and the job would be done.

A few hand signals passed the orders on to Novas’s squad, who immediately began to fan out around the ledge running around the cistern to get multiple angles of fire on the enemy.

Varnica knew by now why Kephilaes was happy to see them. These intruders meant fresh blood in which to dip the quill he held in one gnarled hand, the white feather stained with old blood. As Varnica ran forwards he noted the scholarly robes Kephilaes wore, the straggly white hair and hooked axe-like face, the way the substance of his large white eyes seemed to liquefy and run in greyish tears down his cheeks.

Kephilaes raised his quill and sketched a symbol in the air. The same symbol appeared scored into the chest of Brother Kouras of Novas’s squad, the channel cut deep down through the armour in the flesh of the Adeptus Astartes’s chest and abdomen. Kouras slumped to one knee and toppled forwards into the blood. Another of the squad ran to grab him and haul him onto the ledge. With a flourish, Kephilaes drew another symbol into the second Adeptus Astartes’s face, the faceplate of his helmet sliced into pieces and revealing the red wetness of the scored meat inside. The second Space Marine was dead before he fell into the blood behind the first.

The gunfire began. Bolter shells erupted against the fallen pillars. Kephilaes drew a letter that hung in the air in lines of burning red, a complex sigil that formed a shield against which the bolter fire burst harmlessly.

Varnica leapt from one platform to another. This one nearly gave way beneath him. He jumped the last few metres, scrabbling for a handhold on the pillar drum he hit chest-first. A few more seconds. He needed a few more seconds, and then it would be over, and he would know what the Red Night meant at last.

He made his own handholds, the stone warping against his fingers as the psychic field around them leapt into life.

Kephilaes laughed and whooped as he scrawled in the air with abandon. Squad Novas dived for what little cover they could find as deep burning letters appeared sunk into the blood-spattered stone behind them. The letters were in an unfamiliar alphabet but somehow they made an appalling sense as Varnica glanced behind him. They were exultations, celebrations, of some vast power that had reached down from the warp and torn out what little sanity this heretic had possessed. The white-haired lunatic above Varnica had done all this to extol the virtues of heresy.

Novas fell just as Varnica closed on the heretic. A message in that profane alphabet appeared across his face, chest and left shoulder. It said that this vile thing was no longer an enemy, but was a gift to the Dark Gods, with a message of thanks scrawled upon it, to serve as an offering. Varnica could see the wet masses of Novas’s lungs pumping and the glistening loops of his entrails.

Varnica roared. The hate turned white around his hands and the fire blazing around them was almost too much for him to control. He scrambled up the last of the pillars and was face to face with the madman.

The man Varnica would later identify as Gunther Kephilaes seemed happy to see him. He held out his arms, and Varnica saw the letters he had carved into his own chest beneath his scholar’s robes.

‘Welcome,’ he said.

Varnica punched the heretic in the face with enough force to topple a wall. Kephilaes did not come apart under the blow as honest human flesh would. Dozens of sigils burned pain fully bright around him, channelling the power away from him. Enough force got through to knock Kephilaes to his knees. He held up a hand to beg.

‘No,’ the heretic gasped. ‘You do not understand. Look around you! You do not understand.’

Varnica bent down and wrapped his arms around a section of pillar. The psychic warp around his hands made it light. He hauled it up over its head, and felt a thrill of satisfaction as its shadow passed over the heretic.

Varnica slammed the stone down. The heretic was completely crushed, the last of his witchcraft protection bled away by Varnica’s first assault.

Varnica felt the crunching of bones and the wet slurp of the flesh torn flat. Just to be sure, he lifted the stone again and hammered it down once more.

Something about the deadness suddenly in the air told him this heretic had breathed his last.

Their gods always abandon them, thought Varnica. In the end.

The Red Night had been created by Gunther Kephilaes to provide the vast amounts of angrily-shed blood he needed to write down what his gods dictated to him. This was the conclusion made by the Doom Eagles’ Librarium after all the evidence, including the script transcribed from the walls by Hamilca’s servitors, was presented to the Chapter.

Varnica had buried Sergeant Novas that morning. Novas and the three Doom Eagles who had died at Kephilaes’s hands were laid on stone slabs, anointed with medical incense to seal up the wounds where their gene-seeds had been removed, and lowered into the funerary pits where the Chapter interred their dead. Novas was buried with his bolter, his copy of Principles of Squad-Level Purgation of the Emperor’s Foes, and the shell of a bullet that had wounded him early in his career and which he had saved as a memento mori. Varnica had prayed at the graveside, and wondered how it was that an Adeptus Astartes, with his soul steeled against the worst the galaxy could throw at him, could still feel such a human thing as grief.

Now Varnica sat among the archives of the Chapter Librarium, surrounded by freshly inked tomes filled with the profane writings of Gunther Kephilaes. Some Chapters would have destroyed the writing on the walls, and compelled any Space Marine who had seen them to cleanse himself with fire or denial until their corruption was gone. But the Doom Eagles were not like those other Chapters. They wanted to understand.

The Librarium’s scribe-servitors were still transcribing the complex code-language into High Gothic, and filling ledger after ledger with the ramblings that resulted. Varnica had one such book in front of him, leafing through the parade of obscenity. Kephilaes had been a prophet, in part at least, and the endless train of prodigies and omens filled Varnica’s mind with images of stars boiling away and the galaxy burning from core to rim.

‘Librarian,’ came a familiar voice.

Varnica looked up to see Techmarine Hamilca walking among the small forest of servitors that chittered away as they wrote. ‘I had heard tell I would find you here.’

‘Where else would one find a Librarian,’ replied Varnica, ‘but in a library?’

Hamilca smiled. ‘Your levity need be a shield no longer, Librarian. Not while you and I are the only ones to see it. The loss of Novas has affected you more deeply than an Adeptus Astartes is apt to admit.’

‘One more trial on the path, brother. One more trial.’

‘What did Kephilaes have to say for himself?’

Varnica closed the tome he had finished scanning through. ‘At the last count, Techmarine, seventeen million people died so he could tell us that a great feathered serpent was going to swallow the sun. And that a plague of cockroaches would devour a great empire. No details on which sun or which empire.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Hamilca, ‘this is a task that could be shared?’

‘One mind, I fear, is better than two when it comes to such things. I consider reading Kephilaes’s drivel a penance for losing good Doom Eagles under my command.’

‘So be it, Librarian. I and my servitors shall be ready to assist you.’ Hamilca finished making a few adjustments to the scribe-servitors, and the hum of their scribbling autoquills changed pitch slightly. ‘And so, brother I leave you.’

‘Wait,’ said Varnica. Hamilca stopped just as he was turning away. Varnica had opened another volume of the heretic’s writings. ‘Here. And here. The same name. A daemon prince. This is a record of its deeds.’

‘Kephilaes’ patron?’ asked Hamilca.

‘Perhaps. It was one of the most powerful of its kind, one of the brood of the Change God. Throne alive, I fear I shall need the services of the Flagellants’ Guild to purify myself after reading this. It was... it was a plotter without compare. A manipulator. “There was not one living soul without a flaw that he could not widen to a chasm into which that soul would fall. A saint would be prey to this great cunning.”’

‘This daemon prince,’ said Hamilca, sitting opposite Varnica and taking a book for himself. ‘It is active now? The Red Night was some form of sacrifice to it?’

‘It is possible. There is more. Here – a record of its deeds. It polluted the gene pool of a triad of worlds, so they became barbarians and warred with one another. An obscene tale about Saint Voynara, who before she died gave in to despair and called upon this prince to deliver her. And its masterpiece, the crowning glory... by Terra, what foulness I see before my eyes!’

Hamilca leaned forwards. ‘Librarian? What is it? What have you seen?’

‘It took a Chapter of Adeptus Astartes,’ read Varnica, ‘and it found in them a fatal flaw. It was their pride. That same sin we all commit, brother. Our pride, our weakness. And it turned this Chapter into an instrument of its will, through trickery compelling them to do its bidding while they thought they were doing the Emperor’s work.’

‘What Chapter was this?’ asked Hamilca. ‘Many have fallen from grace or disappeared. Is this the truth behind the fall of the Brazen Claws or the Thunder Barons?’

‘No,’ replied Varnica. ‘This daemon prince, when its name was spoken, was called Abraxes. The Chapter it commanded was the Soul Drinkers.’

Charandis

Ben McCallum

I

Prey, drunk and foolish, blundered onward, oblivious and uncaring.

The scent stung his wet nostrils, sinking hooks into his brain, flaring his bloody instincts. He could taste the blood that ran in their veins even from this distance, a coppery tang that made his lolling tongue ache, and sang up the length of his killing fangs.

Each step he took betrayed a burning hunger that physically hurt. Claws that were too long slid in and out of his monstrous paws with a lethality he had forgotten how to control. They itched so incessantly, so furiously, with pain that echoed up limbs swollen by the anger that had plagued him for so long.

Thick ropes of sour drool swung from his open maw as he moved, his lethal bulk passing soundlessly through a woodland that had been blessed by rain only a few hours ago. Water was no longer a relief to him. Each raindrop that fell from the leaves of whispering trees sent spikes of migraine-fierce pain through his leonine skull. A pelt that was once the pearly white of pure moonlight felt heavy on his back, soaked with cold rainwater and caked with a thousand kinds of filth.

He quickened his pace, his loping gait lengthening into a staggering gallop. The prey-scent intensified, and his nose burned in sympathy. He was close enough to hear the breath in their lungs, and smell the stinging reek of alcohol sweating through their pores.

Other smells clung to them, too; scents he dimly remembered as city-smells, laden with the promise of glittering spear tips and baying horns. There was a time when he would have shrunk from this scent in favour of softer, less dangerous prey. But now the anger wouldn’t let him. The anger burned in his guts and banished his instincts, compelling him to drown his pain in the hot rush of the kill.

They were making noises, now. Elf-speech whispered under the trees, their voices softened by the wine that had compelled them to journey out here. The sound lanced into his mind, firing a predator-rage he once knew how to contain. This was wrong. This was not how he was supposed to hunt.

His quarry stopped, and the low murmur of their soft voices began to grow louder. This prey was not as lethal as the other elf-creatures that moved through the woods like ghosts, but he was not blind to the danger of the metal that gleamed in their slender hands.

Slowly, agonisingly, he prowled forward, even as the unkind rage knifed arcs of pain into his bleary eyes and screamed at him to lunge.

When the moment was right, it would be satisfied.

‘A Chracian myth,’ Darath said through smiling lips, his thin arms spreading in an expansive gesture. ‘That is all this is, my friends.’

He spoke the words in the sing-song accent of the Lothern aristocracy, his diction flawless. The bleariness of his dark eyes betrayed his drunkenness.

‘Hundreds dead?’ Nesselan slurred, announcing every glass of wine he had put away today. ‘This is no myth, Darath. There is a terror loose.’

‘There is no terror here in this Chracian wilderness,’ Darath snapped, the wine fouling his temper. ‘You are a fool to believe so. We are all fools for coming here, through the rain and the wind, hunting for a ghost that does not exist.’

Darath’s sculpted cheekbones flushed red. Here, in these woods, even as the sun edged ever closer to the distant horizon, he wanted to strike Nesselan. The fool was bleeding the fun from this journey with every word that passed his lips. He had never met an elf so negative in all his days.

Thyran tried and failed to banish the tension with a false laugh.

‘These woodsmen are not liars,’ Nesselan said, crouching low and pressing his fingers to the damp earth, as if this somehow proved the truth of his words. ‘Hundreds, this ghost of yours has claimed over the years. I swear to you, by Asuryan‘s blood, that this beast is real.’

Darath knew he believed those words. Only hours ago, as they strode into the woodland of mighty Chrace, they had been warned off the trail by unwashed, uncouth locals. A great beast, they claimed, was skulking beneath this canopy. Whole scores of men had fallen to its filthy claws. Armed men, too.

In Darath’s most humble opinion, this tale was a mean-spirited jest by the lesser folk of this barbarian wilderness.

It simply would not do.

Thyran held a flask to his lips and drank deeply. The wine was perfection, if a little too sweet.

‘Exaggeration, Nesselan, you silly man,’ Thyran laughed, ever the voice of reason. ‘Maybe it does skulk through these trees. This doesn’t mean it has slain so many. This doesn’t mean it can’t die at the tips of our blades.’

Darath watched as Thyran’s sword rasped from its sheath, feeling a jealous pang at the work of art in his fellow noble’s hand.

‘I have sparred with the very best Lothern has to offer,’ he continued, brushing a strand of fair hair from his eyes, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. ‘I promise you, we are in no danger here.’

Darath filled his lungs to speak, to curse them both for their foolish notions and their uncouth bravado. They were nobles, after all. Maybe the other two were minor nobles, of lesser houses, but the blood in their veins was of privileged stock. They were being ridiculous. They were above this.

But the words caught in his throat.

‘What was that?’ both Nesselan and Thyran said at once.

All of them had distinctly heard the loud, brittle crack! of a fallen branch being snapped in half. Darath’s fingers, thin digits armoured in gold rings, wrapped around the handle of his sword. His tongue traced a nervous circuit around his lips.

‘I told you this was no ghost,’ Nesselan hissed, his eyes wide with fear.

‘Be quiet!’ Darath could feel how heavy his breath was, laden with alcohol fumes. They should not have taken the wine with them.

‘Do not worry,’ Thyran spoke, sounding infuriatingly composed. ‘I think it was just--’

The sound that interrupted him was torn straight from a nightmare.

‘Charandis,’ Darath breathed, as the lion pounced.

A small sound escaped the prey’s trembling lips as he thundered from cover in a blur of dirty white fur and scything black talons.

He associated those three syllables with hunt-kill sensations: the pungent sting of urine in the air; the quickening percussion of a fluttering heartbeat; the cloying fear-musk screaming from their pores; the widening of their dark eyes as their gaze locks with his, a connection between predator and prey.

He would never know the significance of that frightened little noise. He would never know that the elf-creatures had characterised him as a soul-shaking rumble of deadly thunder, the booming echo of lightning lashing the wet ground.

To him, it was just a noise they made before they died.

His paw thundered like the hammer of a wrathful god into the first elf’s fragile skull, pulping bone and flesh. The echo of its snapping neck jarred up through his front leg from claw to shoulder, throwing the elf ten yards.

His claws snagged on skin, stunting the creature’s flight. It landed in a wet crunch of broken bones, twitching fitfully as it died.

His head swung to face his other prey, their harsh breathing and thundering hearts like a balm to the disease that was slowly killing him. His eyes were bleary red orbs, locking the two elf-creatures somewhere between fight and flight.

He opened his jaws and roared. A sound like a volcanic eruption tore from his chest. The fury of a predator king vomited forth in a deafening torrent through fangs that had snatched life from a hundred souls.

It was only natural that they fled.

The chase was brief and violent, and his instincts sang with exultant rightness. This was how things were supposed to be. This hunt was pure, lifting him from the ravages of sickness. Blood slicked his claws as he pounded across the wet soil, his breath like rumbling like a summer thunderstorm in his chest.

He tasted elf blood before the creature even knew it was dead. His fangs crunched through ribs and pierced lung and heart in the time it took for them both to hit the ground. He lashed out with leonine claws at the body beneath him in afterthought, spattering blood against a tree, painting it in wet smears.

His limbs burned, though unlike the pain behind his eyes, this was wholly natural. Welcome, even. It was the ache of taut muscles and expended strength, the kind to be slept off with a full belly.

The third creature actually turned. A yard of shining metal sang from its sheath, making a series of panicked slashes. Maybe it actually thought it could survive. Maybe this display of desperate aggression was intended to scare him off.

It did not.

The elf was in two pieces in as many seconds. Both fell to the ground. Both bled crimson fountains into the soggy earth. One tried to crawl away, raking its fingers across the earth in an effort to escape.

Even as the creature burbled a garble of broken syllables, Charandis bellowed another peal of thunder to the skies.

Everything was as it should be. Everything was normal again.

II

‘You said you were coming alone,’ he says, as if I am not even here. His teeth flash milky yellow in the afternoon sun, his white lips pulling taut against a dozen scars. His tone is even, but he doesn’t look happy. And those scars tell me that saying something… brash, would be unwise.

Very unwise.

‘Is this a problem?’ Alvantir’s voice is confident, yet his hand strays to the oval birthmark blotching his cheek. I know these men make him nervous, and I don’t blame him.

There are three of them, and underneath the swaying trees they look like kings. Their pointed helms rest in the crooks of their arms, glinting bright silver against the sunlight, each adorned with oval sapphires staring out like cyclopean eyes.

Their armour is… magnificent. I have never seen craftsmanship like this before; not even on the shoulders of strutting peacocks on the streets of Tor Achare. From steel cuirass to masterfully wrought sabatons, they radiate authority. They lean on their heirloom axes with a casual ease born of confidence; centuries-old weapons gripped by well-oiled gloves.

But it is what they wear upon their shoulders that sends my heart racing.

The dead faces of conquered lions glare at me from over their armoured spaulders. The pelts are draped like tattered banners over their armour, frayed in places like forgotten standards, ending in claws the length of my fingers. Their leonine faces snarl soundlessly, the empty sockets of their eyes still narrowed in silent fury.

It marks the greatest honour a Chracian can earn. It demonstrates the exultant heights to which a lowly woodsman like myself can rise.

I am… jealous.

I stand before the Phoenix King’s chosen blades; his loyal shields against which a thousand foes have fallen. The eyes of the White Lions are upon me, and all I can think of is how jealous I am.

‘You said you were coming alone,’ the lead elf repeats, his thunderstorm-black eyes locked on Alvantir. The sound of creaking leather reaches my keen ears. I know this to be his grip tightening on the oak haft of his weapon.

My companion dips his head. I can feel his aching desire to be anywhere but here.

‘I crave your pardon, kinsman,’ he says evenly, sweeping a braid of autumn-brown hair behind his ear. ‘He knows these woods unlike any other. Whatever you are looking for, he can find.’

He looks at me for the first time, and I see nothing but cold, pitiless scrutiny in those dark eyes. I fold my arms across my chest without thinking, shielding myself from his attention.

He nods, as if satisfied.

‘I am familiar with your friend,’ he says to me, directly. His voice is deep, worn raw and gravelly by distant battlefields. ‘But not you. Tell me your name, and we can begin.’

I incline my head as I speak, but I do not break eye contact.

‘My name is Korhil.’

The scene before us is repugnant in a thousand ways.

Chrace’s forests are famously beautiful, but equally dangerous. A woodsman does not roam beneath the evergreen canopy unprepared. This is why our axes know the kiss of a whetstone every day. This is why our tunics are oiled and treated every time we leave our homes. This is why our fathers spent endless years teaching us the manifold ways of surviving the forest. This is why we are Chrace’s proud children.

I step over a severed hand bedecked in fabulously expensive rings, fighting the rising urge to empty my guts. Blood paints the boles of trees in dried smears, and innards festoon the forest floor like wreckage wreathed in swarms of black flies.

The first body lies by a mossy boulder. His features are… gone, but I know him to be a noble by the fine cut of his bloodstained clothes. His arms and legs are bent in ways that defy reason, and the blow that snapped his neck was close to taking the head from his shoulders.

The second body sprawls near the roots of a powerful tree. This one died as he fled, that much is obvious. His chest is crushed, his broken ribs jutting outward in angles that speak of unthinkable strength. Whatever killed him came back after it had finished, and vented its wrath on the ragged corpse. The coils of vital organs decorate the gnarled fingers of clawing roots.

The third is in two pieces, and the upper half tried to crawl away. His spine is a jutting cord of bone, black with dried blood and alive with a carpet of flies. His legs bear the ugly lacerations of scything claws and…

And I have to look away.

When outsiders speak of Chrace’s wild and untamed beauty, this is what they mean. This is what they foolishly think they know. I have been a woodsman for a long time; long enough to know that I am the best at what I do. I have seen a wealth of unsettling scenes underneath this canopy; a menagerie of horrors that have actually made me want to run.

But this… this is something else.

Alvantir worries at the plain band of gold around his finger, a wedding ring he could barely afford. The look on his face tells me that his thoughts are awash with worry. He thinks of his stunningly beautiful young wife, and the son who he has tried to shield from the hardships of the forest.

But beneath these thoughts, I know he is also thinking the same thing as I.

There is something in the air; something that lingers between a taste and a smell. It settles on my tongue and gathers at the back of my throat; a copper tang that speaks of old blood, and a musty reek that whispers of burial grounds.

There are too many flies. The drone of the feasting insects is loud, aching my ears and building a pressure behind my eyes. This is unnatural.

Alvantir meets my gaze. Both of us know what did this.

‘They were nobles,’ the lead elf says, breaking the uneasy silence. He hefts an axe that is almost the mirror of my own over his armoured shoulder, the lines and angles of his face tightening. ‘Lothern born and bred.’

‘Why were they here?’ I ask, with genuine curiosity. I know outsiders to be stupid at times, but this…

‘An adventure in wild Chrace? I neither know nor care.’ The words leave his lips laced with bitterness, biting like acid into the still air.

‘And why are you here?’

He laughs, a series of hoarse barks that are anything but genuine. ‘We are their shields against harm; their bulwark against danger. They were our charges.’

Realisation is a shard of ice knifing into my guts. This is why these men are so grim and unwelcoming. This is why they stare out at the forest with narrowed eyes.

‘I am sorry,’ I say, and not because Lothern lost three of its spoiled children this week.

‘Charandis.’ Alvantir blurts out the name because he can hold it in no longer. Four pairs of eyes turn to look at him. Only one grasps the meaning of what is said.

‘What about Charandis?’ This is asked by another White Lion, the one with a sickle-shaped scar blighting his cheek. He sounds as if he is stung by that name being spoken in the presence of such an atrocity.

Every woodsman knows Charandis. He is Thunder, the King of Prides, the Child of Kurnous, the Hunter under the Canopy. A thousand romanticised poems detail the tragic fall of his pride, the clack of his claws upon the rocky mountains, the grace of his every movement, the mercy in his killing blow…

‘Charandis is no longer pure.’ There is no regret in my tone. Not even slightly.

‘A foul wind blew down from the Annulli Mountains last year,’ Alvantir elaborates. He clutches a small wooden token around his neck, a mirror of the one he carved for his boy.

‘You are saying the lion is tainted?’ This, asked by the third White Lion, sallow-faced and hook-nosed.

‘A child of Kurnous does not hunt like this. If this slaughter were pure, then why have only the flies come to feast?’

Silence. Droning.

‘Then our path is set? Thunder dies by our hand tonight?’ says Sickle-Scar.

‘No.’ My reply is coloured by my smile, brought unbidden to my lips at the look on Alvantir’s face. ‘Mine.’

‘I will restore your honour,’ Korhil said, still with that smile creasing his slanted eyes. ‘But more importantly, I will earn my own.’

Alvantir pinched the bridge of his nose, suppressing a heartfelt groan. The silence that met this wondrous announcement was filled by the frenzied buzzing of a thousand flies, ignorant of the staggering stupidity that just left Korhil’s lips.

‘You,’ spoke the senior White Lion, ‘are going to restore my honour.’ His tone didn’t make it a question.

Korhil unfolded his arms – noticeably big, eye-catchingly brawny – and laughed.

‘This is no longer about you. I mean you no insult, kinsman, but you have failed today. We stand in the aftermath of an evil you were duty bound to prevent. I will right this wrong. I will kill Charandis. And I will walk with you to Lothern with his carcass slung over my shoulders.’

So this was it. The glory Korhil had been talking about for years. Korhil did not see a gaggle of bereaved lovers and mourning relatives in the clotting blood of these dead nobles. He did not see lives cut short and ambitions slashed by a sick beast.

This was about the glory.

Bringing him here was a bad idea.

To say the lead Lion looked stung was understating things. White-lipped, he stood speechless for several long moments, his gloves creaking as he tightened and relaxed his grip on his weapon.

Finally, ‘You would stand in defence of the Phoenix King.’

‘I would.’

He sighed, a weary exhalation whispering through his teeth.

‘Then go, Korhil. We will camp nearby for two days. That is how long I will grant you. That is how long I will wait before I come and destroy this beast myself.’

Alvantir cleared his throat.

‘Come, Korhil. I will help you pick up the trail.’

A fool could find where Charandis’s claws had touched bare earth.

Alvantir silences the question about to pass my lips with a withering glare, his brow creasing in ugly furrows.

‘Fool.’

‘I can track him easily–’

‘You insulted Valeth.’

For this, I have no response. Valeth the Wyrmslayer. Valeth the Kinhammer. Valeth the Mighty. Why, I ask myself, do I live to regret insulting his honour?

This… puts things into perspective.

‘You don’t realise, do you? We stood under the gaze of Captain Ironglaive’s second.’ When I don’t respond, he continues. ‘The Phoenix King himself knows his name. This goes straight to the top. This is…’ He gestures weakly. ‘Big.’

I look at my closest friend walking next to me, our boots sinking into wet mud as we leave the White Lions and their charnel scene behind. He sees my perplexed smile.

‘Why is this a bad thing, Alvantir?’

‘Charandis will kill you.’

‘No, he won’t.’

‘What if he does?’

I laugh, and he knows why. He should know better than to say ‘what if’ in my presence. A bad habit of his.

‘Why does Ironglaive send his most esteemed warrior to Chrace, picking up after foolish nobles?’

Alvantir answers with a shrug of his narrow shoulders, ducking under an overhanging branch. ‘It is a different game in Lothern, Korhil. It is political.’

‘Nonsense is what it is. When I stand astride the White Lions, I will march to the defence of worthy charges. Generals, scholars, spellweavers; not spoiled children. Never spoiled children.’

‘They march in regiments, fool. You go where they tell you.’

‘But I’m about to kill Charandis. You think they would damn me to mundane duties like that?’

‘Why don’t you ask Valeth that question?’

I ignore this last remark, lowering my gaze to the ground, focussing on my task. The forest speaks to me in a voice I know well: a patchwork of muddy browns and vital greens, whispering morsels of secret knowledge.

My strength is my axe – it always has been. Tracking is Alvantir’s expertise, but it takes no master to follow the trail Charandis has left behind him. Here, a faded print twice the size of my hand. There, a claw mark, scored into the jutting root of a tree. The clumsiness of the lion’s passing is a testament to how sick the creature is. White lions move with a grace that matches their savagery. That is why the Chracian rite is such a hard test. Usually, finding them is hard enough.

Usually.

‘I have come far enough.’ Alvantir thumbs his wedding ring, giving me a look that I find hard to read. ‘I am not going to convince you that this is folly.’

‘No,’ I agree. ‘Because it is not.’

He sighs.

‘I will go back to Valeth for my payment. Be swift. And don’t die, fool.’

In the shadow of the forest, as the sun sets in crimson fire, we shake hands.

III

At first, he could not move.

This was something new. This was a fresh affliction, added to the dozens that already blossomed in his blood and bred behind his eyes.

It was impossible. His bones were shafts of ice, his muscles frozen in painful stiffness. Breath vented between his locked jaws in volcanic hisses. Dreadful cold was beginning to settle on his guts. The thump of his heart was sluggish, beating without vigour, languishing beneath his ribs.

In the stillness of night, the lion whined.

Perception had steadily become harder to grasp as he awoke from slumber these last weeks. He always emerged from a realm of nightmares – where prey is predator – into a world of threats he couldn’t see, and dangers he couldn’t hear. Being aware of any difference between the two was difficult. So sometimes he would awake roaring, lashing out at shadows with extended claws and yellow fangs.

But not tonight.

Again, a whine escaped his jaws.

Maybe he would slip into prey-sleep. Maybe it would be for him that the ravens wheeled overhead. Maybe it would be his bones that the wolves gnawed upon.

But that didn’t happen.

The prey-scent was faint, diluted by distance. It reached him as a weak spice, hanging loose in the air, drifting at the mercy of gentle breezes. It spoke of something far away, alert yet relaxed; wary, yet oblivious. He tasted flesh, wet and tender, torn from the bones of something taken by surprise. The promise of a successful kill raced through his mind.

Normality. Rightness. Relief.

With a snarl of effort, the lion moved.

It was slow, at first. He clawed trenches into the ground in an effort to crawl forward, his muscles burning red hot under his skin. Agony came afresh with every beat of his heart, coursing fire through his veins, painting his vision in varying shades of murderous red.

But at least he wasn’t cold any more.

At least he would hunt again.

The lion staggered shakily to its feet, no longer mewling meekly at imagined predators. His perception was sharpening again, throwing his world into blade-sharp clarity. His eyes rolled in their gummy sockets, identifying his surroundings. His nostrils flared, sucking in lungfuls of nectar-rich prey-scent.

It was… that way. Beyond the trees. Out of the forest.

He reeled at first, his gait drunken and clumsy. Twice, he stumbled, and both times he vented his aggression on thin air, lashing out at nothing.

He couldn’t hear the soft thump of his shaky footfall as he moved. He couldn’t even hear the blast of his breath, gusting in and out of his lungs. All he heard was a strange buzzing.

Like flies gathered on a carcass.

She fought a rising thrill of panic, straining to see out into the void-black darkness.

Nothing moved. There were no animals out here, tonight. The familiar rustle of fallen leaves as the nocturnal foragers came out to hunt was an absence she sorely wished wasn’t there.

There wasn’t even a breeze. Not even slightly. The treeline was a collection of pale silvers and dark greys, unmoving and soundless in the moonlight. It was an unreasonably close night. The air spoke of thunderstorms yet-to-be, which was hardly ideal, given the situation they found themselves in.

She clutched her boy closer to her waist.

‘We are lost.’ He stated this simple truth without a trace of fear, in a matter-of-fact voice that reminded her painfully of his father.

The father that should have been here. Now. At this very moment.

‘Hush.’

The silence that met this gentle scold told her everything she didn’t want to hear. The boy was young – an infant, even, but he was perceptive beyond his years. She knew that he knew she was scared. But then wasn’t his father always saying she was so easy to read?

‘Where is he?’ This, not so blunt. A tremor of doubt crept into the boy’s voice, making him sound like the child he pretended he wasn‘t. She squeezed his shoulder.

‘I don’t know, dearest. Just keep walking. Please.’

Their feet whispered over the rocky outcrop, their slow advance defined in the soft swish of a silk dress and the gentle creak of the boy’s handmade shoes. The moonlight was dim and worthless, spilling weak silver light across shoulders of jutting rock, casting shadows that made leering faces of mundane features.

They stuck to the line of trees because it was a point of reference. Her instinct was to turn the other way, and be as far from the shadows under the canopy as possible – but that would make them more lost than they already were. She knew that they would find shelter if they walked for long enough, but walking in the dead of night, blind, unarmed, scared…

‘He said we shouldn’t leave the house,’ the boy whispered. She heard his fingernails scrape along the wooden token that hung around his neck.

‘I know he did. But if anyone can find us, it’s your father. You know this.’

He was silent for several moments.

‘What if he doesn’t?’ This question scared her, spoken from the lips of her own son.

‘I said hush. He will. I promise you.’ To her own ears – city ears, as her husband called them – these words sounded empty.

The need to blame someone for this nightmare was a tingling in her fingertips. Her husband, for not returning home tonight. Her, for leaving the house regardless of his absence. This Kurnous-damned wilderness, for its silent promises of danger.

He had enough money. This was what he had told her, yesterday. He had enough money to move them into the city, away from the pointless harshness of life out here. Years of guiding outsiders through the safe trails of Chrace had paid off.

One more errand. That was all he said it was. One more errand, for a wealthy outsider, and then they could leave.

But he had not come home tonight. Why did she leave? Why did she drag her child into this?

‘There is something over there.’ The boy pointed towards the trees.

She squinted until she saw. A gleam of something white moved on open ground, a ghost something big made small by distance.

It looked like it was… running. Bounding, on muscular legs. Straight for them.

‘What is that?’

She clutched him tighter, her slender hands grabbing his shoulders white-knuckle tight.

In the dead silence, she thought she heard the droning of flies.

The lion was galloping.

His claws sought purchase on rock that the great lion prides had claimed as their own for generations. He had run across this very same plateau years ago, before the world had become varying shades of danger and pain. The females of his pride had shed the blood of countless prey, hooved-creature and elf-creature alike, across this highland of rock and tall grass. The land was fat, nurturing his cubs into strong hunters, almost without exception.

Good land. Rich land.

His prey was no different now, even if he hunted for reasons other than hunger. A female, scared and alone with her cub, had spotted him. He didn’t need to see this to know it was true. Prey-scents were rich in the air, the usual cocktail of fear-laced sweat and… something else. Something that stung his nostrils. A curious musk that females often had coating their skin. It would taste vile, but that was not what this was about.

They were running, and he savoured what all but one of his senses told him. He was still deafened by the constant dirge inside his head. He was denied the patter of running feet and the rapid gasp of filling lungs.

He quickened his pace, a bound lengthening into a sprint. Flecks of drool stood at the corners of his mouth, spraying behind him in sour ribbons as he began to close the distance.

He was probably close enough for them to smell him with their blunted and clumsy senses. The blood that caked his filthy hide was nearly four days old, the gory dappling blighting a mane that had once shone silver under the moonlight.

His moment came all too soon. The female looked over her shoulder as he leapt, his finger-sized claws flexing in predatory menace. Their eyes met before the kill came, as he widened his jaws and bared his leonine fangs.

With hunt-kill came blood.

And with blood, there came relief.

My axe is in my hands.

The haft is two yards of Chracian oak, carved with a screed of flowing Asurii script. The names of my forefathers are tiny grooves against my fingers, reminding me of the weapon’s legacy every time I shift my grip.

The head is a work of art that could shame princes. Subtly enchanted steel catches the dawn’s first rays as I turn the weapon over; as light as a walking staff, and in the right hands, as deadly as dragonfire.

A weapon Vaul himself would be proud to wield.

A blade that could one day save the life of my king.

I bring the weapon to bear because there is something up ahead. The shapes that lie across the rocks tell an ugly story. I know a kill when I see one.

The flies alone are enough for me to be wary as I approach.

The woman’s dress would be pretty if the body it clothed wasn’t lying in a dozen pieces. Her hair is black. Her skin is pale, paler even than mine. There is literally nothing else I can see that identifies her, save for the ring that adorns a hand that would once have been long-fingered and slender.

I blink sweat from my eyes and turn to look at…

No.

Blood of Kurnous, no.

That is a child.

I cannot – will not – look at the ruins of what was once a mother and son. I have seen enough. My boots whisper over grey stone as I stalk around the edge of the killing, my jaw hardening, my eyes watchful for clues.

These bodies are hours old. They died in the hours before dawn. Why they were out here at night is anyone’s guess, but the clues are arrayed before me. I see recent gouges in the earth where something huge propelled itself forward. I see a scattering of tracks that speak of a lethal sprint from the forest. I see bloody paw-prints leading a meandering, drunken path back to the line of trees.

Still new. Still fresh.

Charandis is scant hours ahead of me. I can waste no time.

A burial for the dead is not even an option. I will not touch what this tainted beast has defiled. I will not be surrounded by those fat-bellied flies. I will not draw another breath of this sickly air, blighting my lungs in the name of ceremony.

No, mother and child can lie here, in the first minutes of dawn‘s pale light. My quarry is too near. My glory is too close.

I break into a run, leaving the mounting drone of feasting flies behind me.

IV

The lion was afraid.

He paced in wide circles, his fear manifesting in strangled whines coughed up from the back of his throat. The Wind was back – the Wind that had brought this sickness to him, blown down from the ephemeral peaks – but this time it was… everywhere.

Literally, everywhere.

On every moon-drenched leaf, on every fallen branch, even on the ground he walked upon, the Wind had settled. It was a filmy substance, sticking to his claws; a slime that squelched between his toes and burned his skin like acid.

He could feel himself becoming sicker by the minute. His consciousness waxed and waned, coming and going like a red tide. He couldn’t focus. The buzz of flies had become all-consuming.

He made a sound, something between a yelp and a roar.

He saw creatures watching him. Their eyes were the pale yellow of dying suns, leering from every shadow, bright with the promise of yet more pain, yet more agony… The predators from his dreams. They had come with hunt-kill on their minds.

His own eyes felt like they were aflame. They burned in their sockets, making the predators little more than phantoms, escaping his vision.

But he knew they were there. And he wouldn’t let them drag him into prey-sleep. Ever.

Tonight is a night of ill omens.

I have tracked him for a day. I have followed his trail without rest, tailing him deeper and deeper into the forest. My cloak is unrecognisable under the inch-thick layer of grime, earned from the tireless chase through mile after mile of endless nothing.

My braided hair falls about my face in dirty ribbons, sticking to my sweat-slick skin. My heels burn with hot blisters, and I bleed from a dozen minor cuts and scrapes on my cheeks and forearms.

That is not why my confidence has fled me. That is not why I am certain I am going to die tonight.

It shows through a crack in the clouds, staring blearily down at the world below. It colours everything in its own sickly shade of venom-green, staining the skies noxious.

Tonight, as I set my gaze upon the tainted lion I must kill, the Dread Moon waxes.

Fear is my guts turning to ice, and my skin crawling with each moment I linger out here, in the open. I should be indoors, hidden from the Dread Moon’s baleful gaze. Not risking my life for a glory that could see me dead.

Charandis howls again, and I rise to my feet. I am being ridiculous. I have come this far. At this point, I would rather die than turn back.

My axe leaves its sling in a whisper of motion, its weight a balm to my sudden doubts. The subtle enchantments laced within the age-old steel shines bright in the insidious glow of the watchful eye above me.

I step from my hiding place, emerging from a thorny bush.

I am ready. Charandis must die.

As it moved from the shadows, the lion flinched.

He knew what it was. Pale-skinned and baleful-eyed, it stalked forward with something lethal clutched in its hands, hunched and feral. It flashed its leonine fangs in angry challenge, a territorial roar hammering from its throat.

Maybe it walked upright like an elf-creature. Maybe it clothed itself like an elf-creature.

But he knew that the pride leader of the dream-predators was coming for him.

The lion’s reply was thunder of his own, a hoarse bellow torn from ravaged lungs. They stood at opposite ends of the clearing – aggressor and defender, challenger and challenged.

The lion wasted no time.

He charged.

My eyes widen as this… thing… comes for me.

I do not even recognise the beast as a lion. Haggard and sunken-eyed, it is wreathed in flies. Patches the colour of sour milk show through what little isn’t a chittering, buzzing carpet.

Its mane hangs loose on its ravaged frame, sagging with each leaping bound. As it tries to barrel me to the ground, I leap sideways, moving fluidly into a painful roll over jutting stones.

Charandis moves fast. He is nearly on me by the time I have regained my footing, his stinking, fetid breath a hot blast in my face. My axe howls in a blistering arc, thumping into the lion’s side.

I wait for the scream of anguish. I wait for him to back away from me, bleeding from his crushed ribcage, mewling in his last moments of defeat.

But none of these things happen.

My axe bounces from Charandis’s hide as if it were made of rubber. This is unthinkable. I have felled trees with a single swipe of this weapon. That is their purpose. That is what they were made to do.

He does not bleed, nor does he back away.

Instead, he nearly kills me.

The lion’s claws tasted the flesh of his tormentor in a flash of venomous fury.

Blood, salty and stinging, flecked the lion’s face in spattering droplets. The dream-predator staggered backwards, clutching his ruined visage.

Three bloodied canyons ran from cheek to brow, raining waterfalls of crimson down the aggressor’s front. The predator roared in anger, futilely lashing out again with the gleaming blade it held in its clawed hands. It was useless.

The lion was the dominant one here.

He went for the throat, even as it screamed a meaningless screed of guttural sounds.

Even as I circle around Charandis’s lethal bulk, I roar in pain. My vision is painted arterial red, my face a bleeding mess snagged by filthy talons. I will have these scars for the rest of my life, even if that life is measured in minutes or years. But at least he didn’t take my eyes. At least I can still see.

We pace around each other like dominant males sizing each other up, gazes locked and teeth bared. My axe is useless, here. The taint must allow him to endure the blessings wrought into the steel of my blade.

He comes at me for a third time, his matted fur flashing acid-green under the fell light of the moon as he thumped forward. My life is saved by throwing up my hands, letting his claws scrawl against my axe’s haft. Countless names of my bloodline vanish under his talons, buckling my knees with the force of impact.

As his sword-like talons lock with my weapon, he begins to push down.

I do not know how I manage to even begin resisting. Ropes of drool hang down in foul-smelling strands as I push back against the lion’s strength, the muscles of my arms and legs burning with slowly faltering effort. He is slowly forcing me to the ground.

What I do next is out of desperation. I do not know what I am trying to achieve, but my life at this point can be measured in painful seconds.

I drop to my back.

My hands fasten around the small stone as if it were as precious as the Phoenix Crown itself. It leaves my fingers in a blur of motion, just as the lion sweeps down.

I hear the thok of impact, and close my eyes.

Death does not come.

The lion could not breathe.

Something cold and hard lodged deep in his throat, filling his windpipe with a painful lump. It was as if a band of iron had been placed over his chest. His lungs could not move.

He could not even roar in pain.

His heart – wet and thumping – began to beat faster, soaking his blood in adrenaline. The fight was bleeding from him rapidly. He leapt away from the predator under his claws, trying to choke and gasp.

Soon he was writhing on the ground. His lungs were burning. The desperation to draw breath was a need that sang in his blood. He rolled over onto his back, writhing in fear.

He was not aware that the predator had gotten to its feet.

I toss my axe aside. It has failed me here. My walk is a purposeful stride, my features bloodied and ruined. Charandis is on his back, like a dog rolling in mud, swiping gamely at imagined assailants. He makes no sound. He can’t even choke. I bare teeth, wet with my own blood, in a triumphant smile.

But I am not finished yet.

My fingers are not slender, delicate things. When they wrap around Charandis’s throat, they squeeze with vice-like strength. I climb atop this Chaos-maddened lion – thrashing and biting – and I throttle him in the light of the Dread Moon.

I know he would die if I just left him. He would choke to death on the stone I picked up in desperation, but that is not enough. That is not how I want this to end. A legend dies under my hands, caked in the filth of his own corruption. I will throttle the last vestiges of life from his ravaged body.

And I do.

The lion was dying.

He did not feel sick. Not any more. There was still pain, settling on every bone, biting into every muscle, but this ache was an absence of affliction. It was… gone. Just like that. It vanished, as if it had sensed he would soon be gone, fleeing his body.

He was still going to die. He had stopped fighting his impending demise – that was pointless. He had been sick for too long to even think of surviving beyond these next minutes.

The predator was on him, and with the sudden passing of the sickness, he saw what was truly there. No fangs. No hunched shoulders, overgrown with a mane that had no place there. No claws. No bleak yellow eyes.

It was just an elf. Blunt, rugged features; maybe brawnier than most elf-creatures, but one of them all the same.

As prey-sleep took him, he still looked upon a predator.

V

Valeth spat the pulpy remains of a bitter herb onto the fire.

Two days, he had said. Two days, and the White Lions would hunt the beast themselves. That was his promise to Korhil. That was the terms upon which he allowed the woodsman the honour of this hunt.

The Khaos Moon had set over the distant Annulli Mountains, the jutting peaks that knifed up from the faraway horizon. The sun took its place in a rising curtain of ruby fire, bathing the trees in warmth, banishing the moon‘s corrupting influence.

The woodsman had not returned, and that meant he was probably dead. Who knew what last night could have done to creature like Charandis?

No, he had said a prayer for him this morning. That would have to do.

Alvantir was twitchy, and had been this whole time. He kept on mentioning how he should get home to his wife, but Valeth bade him stay. The tracker was phenomenal, he had a nose like a wolf’s, and eyes like a hawk’s. He would be useful when it came to finding the beast.

Valeth rose to his feet, his shoulders unburdened by the weight of his trophy and armour. ‘Get kitted up.’ His voice was clipped and tightened by discipline. ‘We move after we eat.’

His two companions murmured their assent, and went about their tasks silently. Only Alvantir didn’t move.

‘He might still come back,’ he said, chewing at his fingernails. ‘There is still a chance.’

Valeth hadn’t the heart to tell him that his closest friend was probably lying in pieces. ‘Maybe,’ came his doubtful answer. ‘Maybe.’

‘Such little faith, kinsman.’

The voice was hoarse, gravelly and raw from a night without rest. It rumbled over the clearing, reaching their fire in a hoarse whisper. Four pairs of eyes widened in surprise.

The speaker looked as if he were dead. The bags under his eyes spoke of exhaustion and fatigue, and the clumsy stitching across his face did little to halt the blood that oozed from his ugly wounds. His teeth were a slash of white in a sea of grime; a smile that seemed out of place considering what the man had on his broad shoulders.

The head was… huge. Bigger than the rest of its kind, by far. Blood-caked dirty white fur in inch-thick blotches, most of it the lion’s own; some of it the blood of its old victims. The mouth was still open, still roaring soundlessly. Its empty sockets glared with the anger that had sealed its demise, biting through the air with hot intensity.

‘You…’ Valeth began, uncomprehending.

‘Yes,’ Korhil replied. ‘I did it.’

I became used to the smell on the journey. My nose is numb to the stench, now. It does not affect me.

I watch as it hits them, one by one, and my smile widens. I know I have stunned them. They look at me, slack-jawed and wide-eyed.

I do not blame them. They have just witnessed the birth of a legend.

‘I did it,’ I say again, savouring the way the words sound. ‘I have passed the rite. I am a White Lion.’

Silence, again. As I walk forward, dry blood falls from my skin in crimson snowflakes.

‘That is Charandis?’ Alvantir asks, choking on his own words. This is the first time he has seen the beast.

I shrug my shoulders, feeling the heavy weight of my burden. The skull alone weighs as much as a child. ‘Yes, my friend. This is Charandis.’

He laughs, cutting through his shock with surprised amusement. As he does so, he runs his fingers through his hair. The gleam of the ring adorning his hand catches the firelight. I begin to laugh, too, and–

The ring.

‘Alvantir,’ I say, my heart thumping. ‘Let me see your hand.’

He obeys, still laughing, still hardly believing what I have achieved.

The ring is a band of plain gold, its plainness its true uniqueness. It is tradition for rings of betrothal to be gaudy and bejewelled. This is something Alvantir has never cared for.

Neither does his wife.

I step forward and snatch at the wooden disc he has hung around his neck. It, too, is simple – carved into a rough circle, engraved with the Asuuri rune for courage.

His boy has such a pendant, too.

‘No…’

‘Korhil? What?’ He sees my fear. He sees the recognition in my eyes as I look at these very personal trinkets.

‘Alvantir, I…’ I cannot say it. I cannot say I am wearing the carcass of the beast that has killed my closest friend’s only family.

But he is a smart man. He knows.

‘No!’ He shouts at first, railing at me. ‘That is not true!’

‘My friend, I am so sorry…’

But he is gone. He sprints into the woods, choking on his grief, following the trail I have left behind me.

The weight on my shoulders doubles.

My elation vanishes.

‘Come, Korhil,’ Valeth says, clueless as to what has just transpired, here. ‘It is time for you to come with us.’

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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

Cover illustration by Cheoljoo Lee

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