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Waiting Death - Steve Lyons

The Barbed Wire Cat - Robert Earl

An Exclusive Extract from Fall of Damnos - Nick Kyme

Phalanx: Chapter Five - Ben Counter

Hunted - John French

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Waiting Death

Steve Lyons

Borealis Four.

Can’t say it was the most distinguished campaign of my career. A jungle planet orbiting a red giant on the inner rim of the Segmentum Tempestus. A hundred and ten degrees in the shade. Serpents lurking under every leaf, stinging insects as big as a man’s fist. Even the flowers coughed out a nasty muscle-wasting virus. It was a damned disappointment, I can tell you. I had hoped for a challenge.

Never did find out if Borealis Four was worth saving. Could be that its crust was packed full of minerals and precious stones. Could be it was as dry as a corpse’s throat. All that mattered back then was that, when the explorators set foot on this green new world, they had found a surprise waiting for them: a Chaos-worshipping cult, proud of the fact that the Dark Gods had begun to pervert their flesh and deform their bones.

And that’s where I came in: Colonel ‘Iron Hand’ Straken – along with three regiments of the finest damned soldiers in the whole of the Imperium.

Catachan Jungle Fighters.

The cultists on Borealis Four were one of the worst rabbles I had ever seen. Yet again they came bursting from the trees, howling at the top of their voices, throwing themselves at us with no care for their own lives. That was fine by me – we didn’t care about their lives either.

‘Well, don’t just dance with those damned sissies, Graves – use your knife, man,’ I shouted. ‘And Barruga, you’re as slow as a brainleaf plant. You idle slugs, you gonna let this filth spew on the good name of the Catachan Second? I could whip this bunch with my one good arm if you sons-of-groxes weren’t in my way. Thorn, stop flapping about like a damned newborn – you still got one damned hand, so pick up that lasgun! Kopachek, you got a clear shot with that flamer, what the hell are you waiting for? Emperor’s teeth, do I have to do everything myself?’

We tore through that scum like blades through a reed bed. They were ill-disciplined, ill-equipped, didn’t know what had hit them. They’d wasted their damned lives dancing around altars in dresses, waving stinking candles. Should have spent a few days on my world; they’d have learned how to fight like men.

I’d made a bet with my opposite number, Carraway of the 14th, that we’d be done here in four months, tops. Two months in, it looked like I was going to collect on that bet. Until that one night.

That one night, when my platoon of some thirty hardened veterans – along with a certain General Farris – was cut off from our comrades, stranded in the darkest depths of the Borealis jungle. That night, when I faced one of the toughest, most desperate challenges of my life.

That night, when I had to fight my own damned men.

The jungle on Borealis Four was nothing compared to Catachan, but the march was taking too damn long. Cutting a way through the high vegetation was slowing us up, and the men were tired. But sunset was coming soon, and things out here tended to get a whole lot worse after dark, so I decided to offer a few words of encouragement.

‘Pick up the pace back there! What do you think this is, a newborn’s trip to the mango swamps? Myers, put some muscle into those knife strokes. Levitski, Barruga, keep trying to kick some life into that damned vox-caster.’

Still the machine offered nothing but a metallic thunk and yet another blast of static.

‘Emperor’s teeth, it’s come to something when you mommas’ boys can’t finish off a bunch of damned half-mutant freaks.’ I shouted down the line. ‘And in front of the general! Well, I don’t care how long it takes, not one of you is slacking off for a single damn second till we’re back behind our lines. I promised you today was gonna be a cakewalk, and the man who makes a liar out of old ‘Iron Hand’ Straken, I’ll throttle with his own entrails. What…?’

I drew to a halt, and the march stopped all around me. The constant buzz of insects and howl of jungle creatures had suddenly been joined by another noise – the faint tinkling of wind chimes.

‘What am I looking at here? Where the hell did this come from?’ I asked.

Without warning, we had come to a clearing, at least half a kilometre wide. The jungle canopy opened right up, and I was dazzled by the final rays of the setting sun. The air was suddenly cool and fresh, scented with blossom. And, squinting against the light, I could make out dark, unnatural shapes: Buildings. Dark-timbered wooden huts.

My first thought was that we’d found an enemy bolthole. But these huts were sturdy and well-kept, arranged around a larger central hall. Our enemies could never have built anything so orderly. Besides, if the taint of the Ruinous Powers had been there, I’d have damn well smelled it.

Why, then, was my gut warning me of something rotten about this place? And why the hell didn’t I listen to it?

As we stood gawping, a figure approached us from between the huts. A boy, barely into his teenage years – but, with the last of the blood-red light behind him, I couldn’t make out much more than that. Of course, my men reacted as they had been trained to do, raising their lasguns and taking aim, but the boy didn’t seem at all worried by the sight of thirty muzzles pointed at his heart.

He padded closer, as the sun disappeared and the clearing was washed in the faint blue light of a swollen moon. I could make out the boy’s face now, round and gentle, his eyes bright and wide. His skin was sun-bronzed to perfection, and the moonlight made his bald head shine like a halo. He was wearing a simple white robe, ornamented by a garland of flowers.

‘Welcome,’ he offered.

The boy cocked his head a little, his full lips pursed as if he found the sight of thirty bloodied vets on his doorstep somehow amusing.

‘Welcome to safe haven.’ He continued. ‘I am Kadence Moonglow – and all that my people have, we offer to share with you.’

‘So you say, kid,’ I spat back. ‘But before we break out the damned peace pipe, I got a few questions for you.’

General Farris stepped forward with a diplomatic clearing of his throat. It was the first time I’d heard his voice all day.

‘What Colonel Straken means to say is that we weren’t aware of any settlement in this area.’

‘And seeing as how, in two months here we haven’t found a single life form that hasn’t tried to eviscerate us-’

‘I assure you that nobody in this village would wish harm to another being,’ interrupted Kadence. ‘We have learned to live in balance with even this harsh environment. As for your enemies… yes, they were a part of our commune once, but no longer. They have been cast out of this place.’

Sounded like bull to my ears. But General Farris motioned to the men to lower their guns – and, with a few uncertain glances at me, they obeyed.

Farris introduced himself, and the rest of us, to this Kadence Moonglow, and accepted his offer of hospitality.

‘Now hold on a minute, Sir.’ I said. ‘I told the men I’d get us back to the camp tonight. Nothing has changed. We can still—’

Farris shook his head firmly. ‘The men are tired, Straken.’

‘And some of them need proper medical attention. You think they’ve got a damned hospital tent set up here?’

Kadence interjected again. ‘We will do what we can for your wounded. We have balms and tinctures, and most importantly our faith in the healing spirits.’

‘Yeah’, I thought, ’cos a few herbal potions and a bit of wailing to the skies, that’s gonna sew Trooper Thorn’s damned hand right back on. But Farris wouldn’t be moved on the subject.

‘We’ll keep the men in better shape by letting them rest than by force-marching them overnight through that jungle.’

I wondered if he was really talking about the men, or about himself. Farris had taken a scratch in the fighting today. His left arm was held in a makeshift sling. He’d kept up with the rest of us so far, and hadn’t whined about it – but I’d been watching him sweating and stumbling for a while now, waiting for him to drop.

Either way, I couldn’t fault his logic – even if he hadn’t been my superior officer. So, taking my silence as a sign of assent, the general asked Kadence to lead the way forward, and ordered my men to follow. I caught Thorn’s eye as he passed me. He was still holding his bloodied hand to the stump of his left wrist.

‘Never mind, kid.’ I told him. ‘That hand’s looking a bit green now, anyway. Probably too late to save it. Have to make do with an augmetic. Hell, I once had my whole damned arm ripped off by a Miral land shark, you don’t hear me grizzling about that. It’s character forming.’

Walking into that village was like stepping onto a different world. The jungle suddenly seemed a long way away, and I was surprised to see children playing on the grass between the huts. Some of them stopped to stare at us as we passed. There was excitement and wonder in their wide eyes, but not a trace of fear, although we must have presented a terrifying sight in our jungle camouflage, laden down with weapons.

Farris dropped back, falling into step beside me.

‘How do they survive?’ he asked. ‘They let their children play outdoors, for the Emperor’s sake, just a few hundred metres from the monsters and the poison and the sickness out there.’ He shuddered at the thought. ‘We have to evacuate them, Straken. First thing in the morning. They aren’t safe here.’

General Farris, you might have gathered by now, was not one of us. He hailed from Validius, a world so in-bred that eighty per cent of its population belonged to the monarchy, and didn’t they just love to let you know it. To be fair, Farris had posted himself to the front line this morning – he must have had some guts. Somehow, though, during the fighting, he’d been separated from his own regiment and ended up with ours. A scrawny, pasty-faced man, the general clearly wasn’t used to jungle conditions. He had brightened up plenty now that we had found shelter.

Kadence led us into the spacious central hall. It was packed with more of his people, all dressed in white robes, talking and laughing and sharing out bowls of plump, ripe berries. They cleared spaces for us, on benches or on cushions, and handed us fruit, hunks of sweet-smelling bread and mugs of crystal clear water.

Farris was in his element, shaking the hand of anyone who looked like they might be important, thanking them for their kindness, promising to repay it. I was happy to leave all the jawing to him.

My men were approaching the villagers’ gifts with caution. I’d have stuck my boot up the backsides of any of them who hadn’t. As Catachans, though, we have good instincts about food and drink; wouldn’t last too damned long otherwise. We were soon satisfied that no one was trying to poison us.

In fact, the fruits in particular were sweet and moist, quenching the flames in my throat. I couldn’t help but wonder why I hadn’t seen their like before on Borealis Four.

Soon, my men were mixing with the villagers as if they’d been friends all their lives. I listened in on their conversations, heard a lot of small talk about Catachan and life in the Imperial Guard, but not so much about our hosts. They were good at deflecting questions.

Then Farris introduced me to two village elders – white-haired, straight-backed and dignified but with the same glint of humour in their eyes that I’d seen in Kadence’s – and it seemed he had pried some information out of them, at least.

‘They’ve been telling me of their people’s legends,’ Farris began. ‘They believe they came to this world in a “great sky chariot” a thousand generations ago.’

‘The Stellar Exodus?’

I knew that some of the first colony ships had strayed beyond the Segmentum Solar, and so in those pre-warp days had become lost to history. It had even been suggested that one of those ships had seeded human life on Catachan.

‘Their ancestors were born on Holy Terra. They’re the Emperor’s people, like us.’ Farris said.

‘It seems we have a great deal in common, and much to talk about on the morrow.’ One of the elders spoke up. ‘For now, you and your men must sleep. We can clear this meeting hall for you. I see you have bedrolls. We can fetch more cushions and pillows if you wish.’

‘That would be more than acceptable.’ Farris responded. ‘Thank you.’

As Kadence and the elders left, I grumbled something about making the men soft. Farris let out a sigh. ‘You know, your men don’t all have your… advantages, shall we say. You can push them too hard.’

I didn’t bother to answer that. No outsider could understand the bond between me and my men. They’d have crawled through a Catachan Devil’s nest on their bare bellies if I’d asked them to. That much I knew.

‘All right, you milksops, that’s enough damned pampering for one day. Get out there, start laying traps around the village’s perimeter. Go easy on the mines, we’re running dry. I want toe-poppers, lashing branches, anything that’ll kick up a damn good racket. Graves, put that cushion down! Hop to it, you slackers, or do I have to do everything myself? And once you’re done, I want four volunteers to join me on first watch. McDougal, Vines, Kopachek, Greif, you’ll do.’

It didn’t take me long to find a good sentry position, in an old tree right on the jungle line. Its star-shaped leaves gave off a eucalyptus reek that would mask my scent, and my camouflage would be more effective here than against the buildings behind me.

I lowered myself onto my stomach along a low, stout branch, and shouldered my plasma pistol.

I was almost invisible now. So long as I didn’t move a muscle, or make a sound. But then, I had no reason to do either.

Something was wrong.

It was nothing I could see, nothing I could hear. But I knew there was something. Something out there, at the edge of my senses.

I held my breath, straining to catch the slightest sound. There was nothing. Just the night-time breeze. Without turning my head, I refocussed my gaze, through my pistol’s sights. I re-examined my surroundings through an infrared filter, but again there was nothing.

My damned comm-bead was still dead. I couldn’t sub-vocalise a warning to the other four sentries, couldn’t shout to them without giving myself away. It didn’t matter, I told myself. They’d have sensed it, too.

For the next fifteen minutes, I stayed frozen in place – as did my unseen opponents. A waiting game. That suited me. I could wait all night.

Of course, I knew I wouldn’t have to.

They made their move, at last. If I’d blinked, I’d have missed it. I knew then that these couldn’t be the same cultists we’d been fighting these past months. They were too damned good.

But I was better.

There was a subtle shift in the texture of the darkness, the crunch of a leaf on the ground. I had already teased a frag grenade from my webbing and thumbed the time-delay to its shortest setting.

It plopped into the jungle grass just where the disturbance had been, and it lit up the night.

I had hoped to hear screaming, but instead I saw shadows streaming from the impact point, just an instant ahead of the earth-shattering blast. These were lumpen, gnarled shapes that could have belonged to nothing entirely human. I squeezed off ten shots, until my pistol was hot in my hands. I couldn’t tell if I had struck true. The explosion had shot my night-vision to hell. I knew one thing, though. I had to move.

I rolled out of the tree, hitting the ground running beneath a barrage of las-fire from the jungle. Whoever – whatever – was out there, like the cultists, they had Imperial weaponry. At least I had made them reveal themselves.

I feigned a stumble, faltering for an instant, making myself a target. I was hoping to make the hostiles bold – and careless. A few steps forward, and they’d hit the tripwire that I knew was strung between us.

No such luck. I heard a soft thud at my heels, and I leapt for the cover of the line of huts ahead of me. The grenade that had just landed exploded, the blast wave hitting me in midair, engulfing me in a broiling heat but buoying my flight. I was propelled much further than my legs could have carried me. I landed hard, and instinctively rolled onto my augmetic shoulder, letting it take the brunt of the impact. I heard something break inside it, and a servo sputtered and whined, but I felt no loss of function as I pushed myself up and put a charred hut between myself and my attackers.

The sound of las-fire across the clearing told me that Kopachek had also engaged the enemy. I thought about going to his aid, but knew I had a line to hold.

I swapped my pistol for my trusty old shotgun: primitive, in some people’s eyes, but reliable, and suited to firing from the hip. My eyes were readjusting to the dark, and I peered around the hut’s side. The jungle was still again, silent. As if nothing had happened. But that silence was a lie.

The hostiles were still out there. Chastened, maybe; tonight, they had learned that Colonel ‘Iron Hand’ Straken was no pushover. They would be regrouping, redrawing their plans. But they hadn’t retreated. I could still feel their presence, like a stench of old bones in the air.

They were waiting.

A second burst of gunfire took me by surprise. This one came not from one of the other sentry posts, but from the meeting hall at the village’s centre. I hesitated for about half a second before I turned and pelted towards the sound. When I got there, the men were spilling out of the hall. They were still shrugging on jackets, tying bandanas, checking their weapons, but were already awake and alert to their surroundings, looking for a target. I grabbed the nearest of them – Levitski – and ordered him to replace me at the jungle’s edge. I sent the next to relieve Kopachek – I wanted him back here with a situation report.

Trooper Graves was nursing a fresh wound. Snatching his hand from his temple, I saw the familiar red welt of a glancing las-beam hit.

‘What the hell’s been going on here?’ I shouted.

I pushed my way into the hall, where I found the remains of my platoon in disarray – and two of them dead on the floor.

Standing over these two, with his laspistol drawn, was General Farris – and as he turned to me with a regretful slump of his shoulders, I realised what he must have done. He had shot them. A tense silence filled the hall before Farris leapt to defend his actions: ‘I had no choice. They were lashing out, screaming, firing everywhere. This one, he came at me with his knife. He was saying crazy things, calling me a monster. I think… I think the cultists must have got to them.’

‘No!’ The protest came automatically to my lips. ‘No damned way!’

It was one thing to see a comrade cut down in battle, dying for what he believed in. This… This was senseless. I felt cold inside. I felt numb.

I felt angry.

I remembered how Myers had fought so well that morning, laughing as he’d sunk his knife arm up to the elbow in cultist guts. I remembered how Wallenski had been so proud, last week, when the men had honoured him with an earned name. ‘Nails’, they had called him.

‘They were good men, my men. You had no right.’

Farris’s eyes darkened.

‘Do I have to remind you, colonel, that I am the ranking officer here? You weren’t even present. You don’t know what—’

‘I knew them, sir. I know my men, and they were two of the best.’

A heavy silence had fallen upon the hall. All eyes were fixed upon the general and me. Still, my words provoked a ragged, defiant cheer from the dead men’s comrades.

‘Either one of those soldiers would have given his last damned drop of blood for the Emperor.’ I continued. ‘It must have been… They must have come down with some virus. A fever. It made them see things.’

‘Whatever the cause of their behaviour, they were threatening us all. I had to act.’

‘You didn’t even know their damned names!’

And the silence returned, almost a physical force between us.

It was broken by a quiet voice. Kadence Moonglow had entered the hall, and walked right up to my shoulder without my being aware of him. That, as much as any of the night’s events so far, disquieted me.

‘The covenant has been broken,’ the boy said.

‘What the hell does that mean?’ I rounded on him.

‘Blood has been shed. Now, they will not rest until they have blood in return.’

‘Who will not rest? The cultists?’ Farris asked.

Kadence shook his head. ‘The jungle has bred far worse than those misguided souls. There are monsters out there. Monsters that the eye cannot see, but whose presence is felt nonetheless.’

‘Yeah, well, thanks for the warning,’ I said, ‘but those “monsters” of yours already tried to blow me into chunks.’

Kadence shot me a sharp look – and, for a moment, his calm facade slipped and I caught a glimpse of something darker beneath it.

‘They would not have attacked you except in self-defence.’

Then, composing himself, he continued.

‘We welcomed you into our village, our home, because we sensed that you were noble souls. We only prayed that, in return, you could leave your war at our doors.’

‘I don’t know if you’re aware of this, kid, but your monsters have this village surrounded.’ I replied.

‘And now they are free to enter it as they please. By sunrise, all we have built here will be ashes. No one will survive.’

‘In a grox’s eye!’ I spat. ‘Those things out there, whatever they are – they aren’t dealing with a bunch of tree-hugging pushovers any more. If they want this village, they’ll have to go through us to get it.’

‘Colonel Straken has a point.’ Farris cut in. ‘We will do everything in our power to protect you.’

‘There are less than thirty of you. Their numbers are legion.’

‘But we have the defensive advantage,’ I said. ‘My boys can keep those hostiles at bay till dawn, or I’ll want to know the damned reason why.’

‘And once the sun is up, we’ll be able to lead you – all of you - to safety. We have an army, not twenty kilometres from here.’ Farris said.

Kadence bowed his head.

‘As you wish.’

The next half-hour was given over to frenetic activity.

I trebled the guard around the village, this time counting myself out of the assignments. I wanted to be free to go where I was needed. I sent Barruga and Stone around the huts, telling people to pack their things and move to the central hall. They would be safer there, harder to reach. General Farris stayed in the hall, too – his choice. Someone had to organise things in there, he claimed.

I debriefed Kopachek. His story was similar to my own – except that, in his case, the enemy had fired first. Like me, he hadn’t managed to get a good look at them. I sent him, along with MacDougal, Vines and Greif, to grab an hour’s sleep in one of the vacated huts. Farris had been right about one thing: my men were the toughest damned sons-of-groxes in the Imperium. Sometimes, it was easy to forget that they didn’t all have chests full of replacement parts to keep them going.

I hadn’t forgotten about Wallenski and Myers. There would be a reckoning for their deaths, and soon. Meantime, I had warned every man to keep an eye on his watch partner – and to call for a medic if he felt the jungle sweats coming on.

The quiet of the night was broken only by the occasional squawking bird, and the deeper cries of much larger and much more dangerous jungle creatures. Trooper Thorn was sprawled on his stomach, alongside a small, square hut, his wiry body masked by the long grass. His lasgun barrel rested on a mound of dirt, waiting for a target. I hurried up to him, keeping my head down, and dropped to my haunches beside him. He gave me a situation report without my even asking.

‘Nothing, sir. Not a sign of the hostiles. Perhaps you made them realise what they’re facing, and—?’

‘They’re out there.’ I interrupted. I had rarely been more sure of anything in my life.

‘Do you think…? That boy, sir, what he said… was he right? Are we facing… monsters? Daemons, or…?’

‘Trust me, kid, I’ve seen enough monsters in my lifetime, and nothing – not a damned one of them – would last two minutes in a scrap with a Catachan Devil, or make it through a patch of spikers alive. So, don’t you dare start shaking in your boots just ’cos you’ve seen a few drops of blood today and heard some damned fairy tale.’

‘No, sir. It’s just that… Colonel Straken, sir, is something wrong? You… you’re sweating.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I asked.

‘What… what did you say?’ asked Thorn.

Suddenly he was clawing at the ground with the bandaged stump of his left arm, pushing himself away from me and to his feet. His eyes had widened with fear, and his voice was loud – too loud. He had blown our cover for sure.

‘Trooper Thorn, to attention!’ I snapped. ‘You’re behaving like a damned newborn yourself. Hell, I know you’re not long out of nappies, but—’

‘Take that back, sir. Take it back!’

‘I beg your damned pardon, trooper?’

We were both standing now, and Thorn had managed to grab his lasgun and was pointing it shakily at my head. I had brought up my shotgun in return – an instinctive reaction - but the image of a comrade in its sights shocked me to my core.

I lowered my gun, brought up my hands.

‘Listen, kid.’ I said. ‘You’re not yourself. You’re sick. Like Wallenski and Myers, they were sick. But you can fight it.’

‘I don’t want to believe… This is a test, right? Tell me it’s a test. Don’t make me–’

‘Why do you think you’re here? Do you think I make a habit outta taking every snot-nosed brat fresh out of training into my command platoon? “Barracuda” Creek back at the Tower reckons you’re the next damned Sly Marbo. You gonna prove him wrong?’

‘The fever!’ he cried and, for a moment, I thought I’d got through to him.

‘It must be the fever, making you say those things. Please, sir, just… drop your weapons. I don’t want to have to shoot you – not you – but I swear in the Emperor’s name, if I must–’

His sentence was broken by a barrage of las-fire, which provided just the distraction I needed. I tackled Thorn before he could say another word, and the lasgun fell from his grip as we hit the ground together. I’d saved his life, my instincts and a keen ear keeping me a half-second ahead of the fresh salvo of enemy fire that had just erupted from the jungle.

In return for that favour, Thorn was trying his damned best to kill me.

I had him pinned with my knee, keeping him from drawing his knife. But the fingers of Thorn’s one hand were locked tight about my throat. He was stronger than he looked.

No match for my augmetic arm, of course. I fought out of his grip, breaking a few bones in the process. Thorn was screaming curses, thrashing about wildly as he tried to unseat me, foaming at the mouth. In the meantime, I knew the hostiles wouldn’t exactly be sitting around making daisy chains. They couldn’t have asked for a better distraction, or easier targets, than these two damned fools brawling in the open.

I had no choice but to finish this. Fast. I could already hear my men returning fire, and this one was going to get ugly, and quick.

I twisted my shotgun around, trying to jam the barrel up beneath Thorn’s chin. I had no intention of shooting him, of course. If he’d been in his right mind, he’d have known that. Instead, he fought with all his strength to push the gun away from himself. I let him succeed, even as I blindsided him with my metal fist.

The punch knocked Thorn spark out, and left a dent in the side of his skull that would probably take a metal plate to straighten out. The way this kid was going today, he was liable to end up like me.

While we had been grappling, the hostiles had made their move.

They came running, screaming, firing out of the jungle, somehow managing to evade all of our traps. My men were shooting furiously at them, but Thorn’s little turn had left a gaping hole in our defences – and the hostiles knew exactly where our blind spots were.

I was a damned sitting duck. I didn’t know why I wasn’t dead already – but, seeing as I wasn’t, I figured I could spare another second to hoist the unconscious Thorn across my shoulders before I ran for cover. No one gets left behind if I can help it.

My men were closing with the invaders, yelling for the rest of the platoon to back them up. I deposited Thorn on the ground behind a hut. I didn’t stop to check how he was. No time for that. I had a battle to get back to. I raced back to join my men, running at the hostiles with my shotgun blazing. Emperor’s teeth, but they were ugly! It was all I could do not to puke at the sight of them.

They had been human once, that much I could tell. Cultists, no doubt, some of them still wearing the tatters of their black robes.

Kadence had been right about them. They were monsters, now, no two of them alike. Their flesh had run like wax, set in revolting shapes. Arms had been fused to torsos, fingers melted together, heads sunken into chests. Some of the monsters – the mutants – had sprouted new limbs, from their ribs, their spines, even out of their heads. Some of them had six eyes, four noses, or mouths in their bellies. They were bristling with clumps of short, black hair, with blisters and blood-red pustules.

And they outnumbered us about five to one. There was no way we were going to survive without some discipline, so I started spitting out orders.

‘Barruga, aim for the slimy one’s eyes. No, its other eyes! Emperor’s teeth, this one has a face like a grox’s back end, and it stinks as bad. Greif, wake the hell up, you’d have lost your damned head if I hadn’t shot that one behind you. Move it, you slowpokes, I want you up close and personal, right in their damned faces. Marsh, stop holding that knife like you’re eating your breakfast. It only takes one hand to hold in your guts, so keep the other one fighting. Kopachek, where’s that damned flamer? I want the smell of burning mutants in my nostrils!’

One thing I have learned about mutants over the years: they might be strong – damned strong, some of them – but it’s rare that they’re fast. They’re clumsy, unwieldy. Comes from fighting in bodies they hardly know. That, and having the brain power of a blood wasp on heat.

And, at first, it appeared that these mutants were no different.

I was right in the thick of them. It was safer that way. It made it impossible for their snipers, on the edge of the melee, to keep me in their sights, or to use their grenades without decimating their own ranks.

So, the mutants were swiping at me with poison-dipped claws, straining for my throat with misshapen fangs, and I can hardly deny it, this is one battered old warhorse who has started to slow down himself. I always figured that, what I’ve lost in speed, I make up for by having a tougher damned hide than most. Even so, in a fight like this one, I’d have expected a few cuts and bruises. Not this time, though. This time, it felt like I was charmed. Like those damned freaks couldn’t lay a hand on me.

And yet…

And yet, somehow, my knife thrusts weren’t hitting home either. The mutants were ducking and weaving like experts. And whenever I thought I had a clear shot at one, as I started to squeeze my trigger, my target was gone, spun away, and there were only comrades in my sights instead.

My men were faring no better than I was. They’d slashed at a few of those melted-wax faces, cracked a few twisted skulls, but no more than that. And they’d taken surprisingly few wounds in return, just a shallow cut here and there. It was almost like… like the mutants were playing with us.

Insulted, enraged, I lashed out with my feet and my elbows, widened the arc of my knife swipes, turned my shotgun around and used its butt as a cudgel, but nothing got through. So, I took a calculated risk. I did what every nerve in my body was screaming at me to do.

I leapt at the nearest mutant and I slashed its throat, my frustration bursting out in a cruel bark of laughter as its hot blood spattered my face. My first kill of the night. But to make that leap, I’d had to drop my guard, leave my right flank exposed.

I expected to feel a talon in my ribs, to die in agony, but no such blow came. My instincts had been right. The mutants weren’t trying to kill us. It was worse than that.

‘They want to take us alive!’ I shouted. ‘Well, they can’t have met a Catachan Jungle Fighter before. Time to step up your game, you goldbrickers. Show these mutant scum that we don’t lie down and roll over till we’re damn well stone cold dead!’

With a roar of enthusiasm, the men followed my lead. They fought with abandon, not caring what risks they took with their own safety as long as they hurt the enemy.

The switch in tactics took the mutants by surprise. They were thrown off balance, reeling, falling like tenpins. I knew it couldn’t last.

They must have identified me as the leader, because now they were swarming me, grasping at me with filthy hands. I landed a few good blows, but then strong arms encircled me from behind, and a cold, clammy tentacle seized my left wrist and twisted it almost to breaking point. My shotgun fell from my numbed fingers. My knife hand… that was stronger than my opponents had bargained for.

For a moment, it looked like the struggle – my augmetic arm against three of those freaks – could have gone either way. But then, a flailing limb – or a tail, I suspected – whipped my legs out from under me, something blunt and hard struck the back of my head, and I was toppling backwards.

And the first thing I realised, as I blinked away stars, as I fought to keep awake and on my knees at least, was that my blade – my Catachan Fang – had indeed been wrenched from my grip.

Someone was gonna pay for that!

The mutants were looming over me. Seven of them, I counted. Or maybe just six; I wasn’t sure if one had two heads. They were shouting at me in a language I couldn’t understand, but one that made my every nerve jangle like the strings of a grox-gut harp. I had no doubt that they were screaming blasphemy of the vilest kind, and all I longed to do was to shut them up, to stop those awful, hateful words escaping into the world.

The grenade felt cold in my hand, and reassuringly solid. It gave me strength, put me back in control. I knew it would rip my body apart. I knew that this time not even the most skilled surgeon would be able to stitch me back together. But a glorious death was far preferable to defeat. And a death that took six – or seven – of my enemies with me…

Then, just like that, the mutants were gone. Withdrawn. Swallowed up by the jungle once more, with hardly a ripple to mark their passing. The quiet rhythm of the jungle settled in again as I unsteadily picked myself up. I saw a number of my men doing the same, looking as confused as I felt.

‘How many wounded?’ I asked.

There were only a few, and nothing a can of synth-skin couldn’t fix. It didn’t make any sense. The mutants had been winning!

They had left a handful of misshapen bodies behind them. I glared down at one as if it could tell me in death the secrets it had kept in life. The mutant was lizard-like in appearance, a forked tongue lolling from its open mouth, a thorny tail tangled about its ankles. It hurt my eyes to look at it. I blinked and shifted my gaze along the grass until it found a more welcome sight.

I didn’t dare believe it at first. My knife. My Catachan Fang. Half a metre of cold steel, its early gleam dulled through a lifetime of use but still the most precious thing in the damned world to me. An extension of myself, a part of my soul. And the mutants had left it, standing upright in the ground. Almost… respectfully.

I spent a long time kneeling beside that knife, looking at it, before I picked it up, wiped it down and returned it to its sheath.

I spent a long time thinking about what it might mean.

Twenty minutes later and I was back in the central hall butting heads with Farris.

‘We gotta ship out of here.’ I told him. ‘We can’t wait till morning.’

General Farris shook his head.

‘We’ve been through this before, Straken. I won’t have us marching through that jungle at night.’

‘The men can cope with the jungle.’

‘Maybe they can, but the villagers…’

‘If we stay here, and those mutants attack again, I can’t guarantee we can hold them back. Our best hope is to take them by surprise, punch through their lines and keep on going.’

‘With the hostiles at our heels?’ he asked.

‘We only have to reach base camp, then the odds’ll be even.’ I said. ’With a couple more platoons, we can turn back around and blast that damned Chaos scum to—’

‘But the villagers, man! Some of them are old. There are children. They won’t be able to keep pace with us.’

‘So, we lose a few civilians. Better that than—’

‘No,’ he insisted. ‘We stick to my original plan. You said yourself that there were no casualties of the first attack.’

‘Because the mutants weren’t trying. They thought they could take us alive. Now they know better.’

‘If I didn’t know you better, I’d be starting to wonder if you’d lost your nerve.’

And for the second time that night, I had to fight down the urge to punch this damned Validian upstart in his smug damned mouth. Through gritted teeth I said: ‘You’re asking me to sacrifice my men, my entire command platoon, for a lost cause.’

‘You have your orders, Colonel Straken,’ he said coldly.

One hour till dawn, and a forbidding bird call broke the morning silence. The cold crept into my old bones as I lay waiting, and I longed to feel the warmth of the sun – any sun – one final time.

In the jungle, nothing had stirred. Still, I was sure that the shadows had grown longer. And darker. A deep, unnatural darkness. The mutants – the monsters – were gathering their forces, increasing in number.

There were butterflies in my stomach. That wasn’t like me. A Catachan’s patience is his greatest strength. But tonight, it didn’t feel that way. It felt like we were only postponing the inevitable.

My mind flashed back to my talk with Farris, and I felt my blood heating up at the memory. But I realised something now. The general had had a point. Not about my motives – ‘Iron Hand’ Straken is no damned coward. But I had been reluctant to face the mutants again. I still was.

I couldn’t explain why. It was a churning in my gut. An itch in my brain. An instinct that there was something wrong here, something I’d missed. Thinking back, I realised that the itch had been there all night. Ever since I had first clapped eyes on this damned place.

So, what was I doing out here? Waiting for an attack that I couldn’t defend against, waiting to die? I was following my orders. But the Emperor knows, I’ve defied enough fool-headed generals in my time. I’d have stuck my knife in Farris’s damned heart and been glad to do it, if I’d thought it would save a single one of my men. The problem was, this time, I didn’t know if it would. I didn’t know what to do for the best.

Or maybe I did. Maybe, at some level, I had known all along.

Maybe I just had to listen to my gut.

I climbed to my feet, and I walked towards the jungle, grass rustling beneath my feet.

As I passed the outermost huts of the village, I could almost feel the sights of a hundred lasguns upon me. I was out in the open now, at the mercy of those guns – but not one of them fired. I stooped and laid my guns on the ground, then I shrugged off my backpack and webbing, and set them down too. Finally, I raised my hands to show that they were empty.

I almost choked on the words I had to say, the last words I had ever imagined would come from my throat. I didn’t raise my voice; there was no need.

‘My name is Colonel Straken, and on behalf of the Second Catachan regiment of the Imperial Guard – on behalf of the God-Emperor Himself – I offer you my unconditional surrender.’

It was a minute – a long, anxious minute – before anything happened.

Then, I heard a whisper of leaves to my left and a near-human shape detached itself from the foliage. It padded towards me, lasgun raised, and I felt my fists clenching involuntarily.

The mutant was beside me now. I recoiled from its rancid breath. It spoke to me, in the same unholy language as before, and I wanted with all my soul to lash out. I wanted to punch, to kick, to spit, to pull my knife and to carve my name in that abomination’s chest.

Instead, I just watched as the mutant signalled to its comrades. One by one, they stepped out from the jungle behind it. Each was an abomination, and the sight of them gathered together just made the violent urge grow even stronger.

From behind me, a single lasgun shot rang out. A mutant fell to the floor, clutching its shoulder.

‘Hold your damned fire! That’s an order!’ I cried. ‘No one is to engage these… the hostiles. It’s not us they want.’

The mutants had brought up their own guns, but now they lowered them again. I couldn’t meet their eyes, any of them. I felt sick inside, and my flesh was crawling like I’d been dipped in fire ants.

And now the mutants where shambling past me, a score of them – two score, three – and into the village. Towards the meeting hall.

I saw MacDougal and Stone springing to their feet, getting out of the mutants’ path, drawing their knives but resisting the urge to use them. I was grateful to them. They trusted me. Even though, for all they knew – for all any of my men knew, watching this scene from their vantage points – I must have gone out of my tiny mind. Maybe I had, too.

But, somehow, this felt good to me. It felt like the smart thing to do. For the first damned time in this forsaken night, something felt right. From behind me, I felt the familiar rush of heat and flame as the mutants’ grenades blew the meeting hall apart.

The villagers must have heard them coming – but for most of them, there had been no time to escape. The survivors came charging out of the fire and the billowing smoke. I saw old men and young boys, their faces darkened and twisted by hatred and rage. It was hard to believe they were the same peaceful people whose food we had shared. The villagers moved towards the mutants with an angry roar, lasguns firing wildly as they sought to kill the intruders.

The mutants showed no mercy. Half the villagers were shot down before they could take two steps. The remainder closed with their attackers, but they were unskilled in combat, quickly shredded by mutant claws. Their screams filled the clearing, drowning out the sounds of las-fire and conflict. This was the last thing I wanted to see, but I forced myself to pick up my feet, to get closer. Because I had to see this. I had to know.

Even transfixed by the unfolding horror, my old battle instincts hadn’t deserted me entirely. Someone was coming at me from behind. I sidestepped his charge, threw him over my shoulder. The figure regrouped quickly, scrambling back to his feet. I was horrified to see that it was General Farris. The left side of his face had been burned away. He must have been in incredible pain. He was cursing at me, calling me all the damned names he could think of, and his fury gave him a strength that I’d never have expected. I may have hesitated too, because he managed to plant his foot in my stomach and push me into the wall of a hut.

‘This isn’t what it looks like,’ I forced out. The words sounded pathetic, even to me.

Farris was marching on me with his pistol levelled and eyes bulging white with fury.

‘I knew it would come to this. I’ve been watching you, Straken. You’re undisciplined, insubordinate. I put up with your backchat because this was your regiment. But I always knew you were one step from turning, from betraying us all. I should have put this bolt between your eyes hours ago.’

The fighting suddenly seemed very far away, and in that moment it was down to just me and him.

I could have taken him alive.

But a pair of lasgun beams struck Farris from behind, and he stiffened and gasped, then crumpled to the ground.

Emerging from the shadows, Trooper Vines crouched over the general’s fallen body, and pronounced him dead.

‘I had no choice,’ Vines said dryly. ‘He was lashing out, screaming. He was saying crazy things, calling you a monster.’

I remembered that Vines had been close to Wallenski. I acknowledged, and dismissed, his actions with a curt nod.

The fighting was almost over.

The villagers were struggling to the very end, but there were only a handful left standing. It would be – it had been – a bloody massacre. One for which I could take much of the credit. And in that moment, I was filled once more with a crippling self-doubt.

But only for that moment.

The meeting hall was still alight – and where the blaze flickered across the faces of the last few combatants, native and invader alike, a transformation was taking place. I blinked and I refocussed, unsure at first if I was imagining things. But I couldn’t deny what I saw.

In the glow of those cleansing flames, the lies of the moonlight were dispelled at last, and the truth stood revealed.

It wasn’t till some days later that I heard the other side of the story. Colonel Carraway came to see me in my hospital bed, where I’d just been patched up once again, and he told me how lucky I’d been.

The explorators, it seemed, had left a survey probe in Borealis Four’s orbit – and the tech-priests at HQ had tapped into its scans of the planetary surface. The aim had been to produce a tactical map, locate a few cultist strongholds. Instead, they had discovered a whole damned settlement, where a moment before there had only been trees.

Carraway and I worked out that the village must have shown up on the scans about the same time my men and I found it. As if, by

crossing its threshold, we had broken some kind of foul enchantment.

Anyway, the upshot was that Carraway needed someone to investigate – and, since half my regiment was already in that area searching for me and my platoon, they were quick to step forward.

Kawalski, one of my toughest, most experienced sergeants, led the recce. He found the village soon enough – but his first impressions of it were quite different from mine. In his report, he described tumbledown shacks standing on scorched earth, twisted trees bearing rotten fruit, and a putrid stink in the air that made him want to retch.

I don’t know why Kawalksi and his men saw the truth when I couldn’t. Maybe Kadence’s mind-screwing mumbo-jumbo could only affect so many of us at once. Maybe that was why it hadn’t worked so well on Wallenski and Myers, or on Thorn. Or maybe that damned psyker meant for things to turn out just as they did, Catachan at war against Catachan.

Kawalksi sent a pair of scouts along the village’s perimeter. They returned with reports of booby traps, and sentries hiding in the trees. Even when some troopers exchanged fire with one sentry, they weren’t able to identify him. I had just been a shadow to them.

It was only when Kawalksi’s men broke cover and attacked us that they saw who we were. That was why they had fought so defensively, trying not to hurt us, though we were trying to kill them. Kawalksi himself took me down, with some help. He was trying to get through to me, but he couldn’t seem to make me understand.

We thought we were fighting Chaos-infected mutants. Instead, we were the ones infected. I’ll always be haunted by the fact that it was me who killed Trooper Weissmuller, and laughed as I ripped out his throat. Standing orders say that Kawalksi should have shot me there and then.

But he had more faith in me than that.

It was a damned relief to be back on my feet again, and to have my time on Borealis Four done with.

Or so I’d thought.

We were all sat around a warming fire, with the sights and sounds of the jungle around us. But this wasn’t the familiar scenery of Catachan – this was still a world marked by Chaos, and the ruined village around us was just another reminder of that.

I was the only one who saw him.

I don’t know what made me look, why I chose that moment to tear my eyes away from the dying fire. But there he was, standing in the shadow of a hut – a ramshackle, worm-eaten hut, I could now tell. After all that had happened, he appeared unscathed, his robe still pristine and white. Kadence Moonglow.

He was watching me.

Then he turned, and he slipped away – and I should have alerted my men, but this was between him and me now.

I followed him alone.

Trouble was, the boy was faster than I expected. We were already a good way into the jungle when I caught up with him. Or rather, I should say, when he stopped and waited for me.

‘Colonel Straken. I knew it would be you who came after me. Leading from the front. You always have to do everything yourself.’

I was in no mood for talking. My knife was already in my hand. I only wished I hadn’t laid down my shotgun in the village.

I leapt at my mocking foe. And missed.

I hadn’t seen him move. One second, Kadence had been in front of me, and now he was a few footsteps to the left. I almost lost my balance, having to grab hold of a creeper to steady myself. It was bristling with poisoned spines. If I’d gripped it with my good hand, instead of my augmetic one, I would have been on the fast track to a damned burial pit.

I tore the creeper from its aerial roots and snapped it like a whip, but again, my target wasn’t quite where I’d thought him to be.

‘Your men aren’t here now, colonel,’ he said. ‘You were overconfident, strayed too far from them. They won’t hear your cries.’

And suddenly he threw out his arms – and although he wasn’t close enough to touch me, I felt as if I had been punched. The impossible blow staggered me, and Kadence was quick to press his advantage. More strikes followed – once, twice, three times to the head, once in the gut. I was flung backwards into a thorny bush, caught and held by its thin branches. A thousand tiny insects scuttled to gorge themselves on my blood.

‘You wanna hear crying, kid?’ I yelled, wrenching myself free from the clinging vegetation. ‘How about you get the hell out of my head? Stop making me see things that aren’t damn well there, and face me like a… like a… whatever the hell it is you are.’

Kadence just smiled. And he gestured again, and my left leg snapped. It was all I could do not to gasp with the pain, but I refused to give him that satisfaction. I just gritted my teeth, transferred my weight onto my right foot, and continued to advance on him.

‘I didn’t ask for this fight,’ said Kadence. ‘I was content with my tiny domain, and a handful of followers who would do anything for me. For centuries, we hid from the outside world. Until, by the whims of a cruel fortune, you came blundering into our safe haven.’

I thrust at him with my knife. I missed again, his dodge too quick to even register.

‘Your followers were mutants. Perverted deviants. And you tricked me into eating with them. You made me think… You made me see my own men as…’

I roared in frustration, my rage getting the better of me. I was swinging wide now, hoping to nick my target wherever he might be. My blade whistled through the empty air, and he was suddenly behind me.

‘I knew that, once you had found us, more of your kind would come.’ he said. ‘I could not cloud so many minds at once. I hoped it would be sufficient to make you few see my followers as friends, your comrades as the thing you most despise.’

‘You didn’t count on me.’

‘No. No, I did not. But for all you have taken from me this night, Colonel Straken, you will pay with your life.’

He made an abrupt slashing motion with his hand, and my leg broke again. A flick of his fingers, and my left shoulder dislocated itself. Kadence extended his right arm, formed his fingers into a claw pattern and twisted his wrist, and something twisted inside of me.

I was buckling under the pain, straining to catch my breath, but determined to close the gap between me and my tormentor, even if I had to do it on my hands and knees.

‘Think you can finish me?’ I struggled out. ‘Good… good luck, kid. Better monsters than you have… have…’

I felt my ribs crack, one by one. My augmetic arm popped and fizzed, and became a dead weight hanging from my shoulder. I was on the jungle floor, not sure how I had got there. There were tears in my eyes and blood in my throat. And as I looked up, trying to focus through a haze of black and red spots, I saw Kadence making a fist, and it felt as if he had reached right into my chest and was crushing my damned heart.

And that was when something miraculous happened.

I felt the warmth of the rising sun on my back, saw the first of its light piercing the jungle canopy above me. And where those red rays touched the slight form of my assailant, like the flames of the fire back in the village, they exposed his deceptions for what they were.

Kadence Moonglow – the boy in the white robe – faded from my sight. But a few steps behind him, exposed by the sunlight, was a twisted horror.

I couldn’t see the whole shape of the monster. The parts still in shadow were invisible to me. But I could make out a rough purple hide, six limbs that could have been arms or legs, and a gaping, slavering maw that seemed to fill most of the monster’s – the daemon’s – huge head.

I could make out a single red eye, perched atop that great mouth. And it blinked at me as it realised that I was returning its glare.

As my Catachan Fang left my good hand.

As it flew on an unerring course towards that big, bright target.

It was the shot of a lifetime. My blade struck the dead centre of the daemon-thing’s eye, piercing its shadow-black pupil. It buried itself up to the hilt. And the daemon that had been Kadence Moonglow gaped at me, for a second, with what I took to be an expression of surprise.

And then he exploded in a shower of purple ash.

I don’t know how many hours I lay there, face down in the jungle.

I couldn’t lift my head, couldn’t move my legs without my broken bones grinding against each other. My insides felt like jelly, and most of my augmetics had failed. I was dying.

And if I didn’t go soon, I knew there were any number of predators gathering in the brush, ready and eager to help me on my way.

I wasn’t worried. Far from it.

I knew that my men were nearby. I knew they would never stop searching for me. And I knew that, whatever it took, they would find me. They would carry me off to the surgeons, as they had done a hundred times before.

I could trust them.

And when I heard their distant footsteps, I was still able to force a smile.

The Barbed Wire Cat

Robert Earl

In the darkness, the thing called Skitteka sat and schemed and stroked his pet. A single lantern lit his stone-gnawed burrow. The guarded flame produced barely enough light to lend a twinkle to his beady eyes, although it was sufficient to set the blonde of his pet’s hair aglow. Everything else was in shadow.

Skitteka hadn’t had a pet before. Apart from anything else, not many humans could have borne his touch. Most would have cowered or flinched, or just broken and tried to run. But Adora was not most humans. She purred as he dragged his filthy claws through her hair, and pressed herself into his verminous caress with every semblance of pleasure.

‘I wonder, little cat,’ Skitteka said, ‘how long I will have to wait to become chief overseer.’

Despite his bulk Skitteka’s voice was a high-pitched shriek, like nails being drawn down a slate. Adora seemed not to mind. Quite the opposite, when she cocked her head to listen it was with a keen interest and that, at least, she didn’t have to fake.

‘The slaves all wonder the same, master,’ she told him, her voice perfectly modulated to that sweet spot that lay just between terror and adulation; that sweet spot she’d spent so many hours practising. ‘They see that you are the most powerful, and the most magnificent. And they fear that when you become chief overseer they will have to work harder.’

Skitteka hissed with pleasure, the twin chisels of his incisors gleaming in the scant light.

‘They are right,’ he boasted, his claws scratching deeper into her scalp to show his pleasure. ‘That fool Evasqeek doesn’t know how to handle humans. He should be removed. Replaced.’

The tremble in his paw belied the defiance in its voice and Adora felt a flash of frustration.

So she thought about her father. He had died when she had been a toddler, all she remembered about him was a kindly face, the smell of pipe smoke, and the one thing he had said which she had understood and remembered. It’s a poor craftsman, he had told her three-year old self, who blames his tools. Perhaps he would be proud to know that, whatever else Adora had turned out to be, it was not a poor craftsman. Ignoring the tremble in Skitteka’s paw she arched her back and hummed in a way that she knew pleased him.

When he had stopped trembling she said, ‘Some of the slaves heard Evasqeek talking yesterday, master. He was in the main seam hiding behind his stormvermin.’

‘Hiding, yes,’ Skitteka said, finding reassurance in the description. ‘And what did he say?’

‘He said that he was tired of being frightened all of the time,’ Adora decided. ‘He said that it was too much and that he just wanted to go back to his burrow and sire lots of whelps.’

‘He said that it was too much?’ Skitteka asked, his voice as flat as a blade on a grindstone.

‘That’s what the slave who heard him told me,’ Adora said, and wondered if she had gone too far.

She had.

‘No,’ Skitteka said. ‘No, no, no. Evasqeek wouldn’t tell his stormvermin that. They would kill him’

‘That slave must have got it wrong then,’ Adora said, letting the blame slide from her with a practiced ease.

‘Perhaps,’ Skitteka said, grabbing a fistful of her hair and squeezing so that every root screamed out in pain. ‘Or perhaps it’s lying. Either way, it can’t be trusted. Which one was it?’

Most humans would have hesitated. Even those whose decency had been outweighed by their terror would have struggled to fabricate a scapegoat without missing a beat. But Adora wasn’t most humans.

‘It was Jules,’ she said, handing out the death sentence with an instinctive understanding of who was valuable to her and who was not.

‘Jules,’ Skitteka said, savouring the name of its next victim as much as it would any other tasty morsel. ‘Jules. Very well, little cat. Send Jules to me. I will sharpen his ears for him.’

Adora pretended to share the amusement of the thing as he hissed, his murderous laughter as sibilant as an adder’s.

‘But first,’ he said, throwing something splattering down onto the stone of the floor. ‘Eat up, my little cat. I need healthy little helpers in this mine.’

The shapeless gobbet of flesh lay in the filth, glistening. Adora gave effusive thanks as she crawled forward to it. It was meat. That, she told herself, was all that it was. Meat. Down here you could either eat it or you could be it, but either way, meat was life. Adora gnawed off a chunk and swallowed. Then she went to find Jules.

Skitteka didn’t kill Jules outright. Skitteka never killed anybody outright. Despite his stupidity and his clumsy bulk, the thing had a surgeon’s skill and the wounds he inflicted, although always lethal, were seldom immediately so.

Adora found her scapegoat lying by the side of one of the access tunnels. He had been left there so that the other slaves could see him as they trudged down past the warped and trembling mine supports and into the cancerous glow of the main seam. His intestines had been wound out of him and tied into grotesque shapes. His limbs ended in cauterised stumps. He had been blinded. And worse.

The slaves bowed their heads in sympathy for the ruined man. Why not? Sympathy was easy. But none of them dared to brave the guards’ whips by offering him comfort. None but Adora. She sat beside Jules and cradled him. He had been the one who had taught her how to make soap down here: how to mix charcoal and fat, combining dirt in order to achieve cleanliness.

He died in her arms. The last fading rhythms of his pulse disappeared within his wasted frame, pattering away in contrast to the strong beat that pounded within her own breast. He sobbed for his mother right until the end, but it wasn’t his mother who comforted him during his last hours in this eternal night. It was Adora. When he was dead she kissed him, a final blessing, then left the cooling meat of his corpse and hurried along after the other slaves. As Skitteka’s pet she had some privileges. She was left unshackled, loose and generally untouched. Even so, there were things down here with more authority than her patron, and their whips left scars.

She hurried down the claustrophobic squeeze of the narrow tunnel to rejoin her fellow slaves. Even the shortest of them walked with a permanent stoop, the ceiling of their captors’ tunnels being too low for them. Their guards had no such problem. This subterranean world had been built around their rat-like forms, and they scuttled back and forth effortlessly, the razored tips of their whips hissing towards anybody who faltered or stumbled.

As the column entered the weird green glow of the mine proper, one of the slaves fell to his knees. There was a cacophony of shrieking voices, the busy whine of whips and then screaming. The man in front of Adora used the distraction to turn and whisper to her.

‘Was he dead?’ he asked, his voice thick with an Estalian accent. He was called Xavier, and of all the men down here Adora judged him to be the strongest. Although smaller than the northerners she was used to, he had a wiry strength that even this hellish captivity hadn’t been able to sap. He had a hardness in his eyes too. It suggested that, even though he was defeated, he still had enough pride to dream of revenge.

Adora had high hopes for him. So much so that, after casting a quick glance around, she took the risk of whispering a reply.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s dead.’

‘He’s lucky.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ she told him.

The man looked at her. In the sickly green light it was impossible to make out his expression but Adora could see that it was either anger or amusement. As far as she was concerned, either would do.

‘How long have you been down–’ he began, but the sentence changed into a hiss of agony as a guard sliced him with a whip.

‘No talking,’ it squeaked, then chittered something unintelligible as it struck him again. The leather cut through rags and skin both, and his blood spattered onto the floor, black in the sickly light.

Then the column was moving again. The green glow of the wyrdstone grew brighter. Adora felt her skin crawl and her teeth ache as they reached the first deposit. Tools were handed out and she stumbled forward, eyes watering as she started to hack away at the stone in search of the wyrdstone fragments entombed within.

She studied her captors as she worked. As always happened in the presence of the wyrdstone, their demeanour had changed. They had not become calm so much as transfixed by the sickly green glow. They still watched the slaves, in as much as the slaves were revealing the accursed stuff, but mainly they watched each other. The pure black orbs of their eyes glittered with suspicion, and although their whips rested, their paws often strayed to the hilts of their poisoned blades.

Adora could recognise greed when she saw it. That was why today, as every day, she waited to see if an opportunity would present itself.

It did. One of the slaves hacked a lump of the wyrdstone loose, crying out in pain as it sprang away from the rock face with a sudden burst of painful light. The overseers clustered around the find, their scaly tails twitching with horrible excitement and their beady eyes blind to all else, and that was when Adora struck. In a single, fluid movement she grabbed the wyrdstone fragment she had been standing on and concealed it amongst the rags which bound her legs. She only touched it with her bare skin for a moment, but in that moment her bones ached and her muscles squirmed and she had to choke back the cry of horror which rose unbidden to her lips.

The pain faded slowly as she carried on working. She paid it no heed. However vile the wyrdstone was, it was valuable to them and so, she reasoned, it was valuable to her.

‘He’s coming? Here?’ Evasqeek bared his incisors. The guards who were gathered in the chief overseer’s burrow cowered at their master’s agitation. Only the runner who had brought the tidings remained unmoved by his reaction.

‘Yes, master,’ said the runner, revelling in malicious pleasure at the fear it had brought. ‘Chief Vass will visit the mine to see that all is well. He is concerned that production is down.’

Evasqeek lashed the ground with his tail, and his eyes rolled around in panic.

‘The seam is running out,’ he whined. ‘There is less and less of the stone every day. It’s not me, it’s the deposit.’

Then he remembered who he was talking to. Vass was one thing, the vicious old fool, but this runner wasn’t worthy of an excuse. Worthy of punishment, perhaps…

The runner, as though seeing the vengeful turn of the chief overseer’s thoughts, interrupted them.

‘My Lord Vass requests that I return with your estimate of the stone you will have when he arrives,’ he said. In fact, Lord Vass had requested no such thing. It was just that the runner’s whiskers were twitching with the knowledge that this chief overseer wanted a victim, and that it wasn’t going to be him.

‘Tell him forty ingots,’ Evasqeek decided.

‘Is that all?’ The runner asked, pushing his luck.

‘Maybe more,’ Evasqeek said, suddenly aware of how dangerously frightened he had begun to smell in front of his stormvermin. ‘Now go. I have work to do.’

‘I know,’ the runner said and, before Evasqeek’s spite could overcome his caution, it turned and scuttled back out of the burrow.

‘Go and fetch Skitteka,’ Evasqeek said at length. ‘He is the slave master, and the slaves produce the stone. So if we aren’t producing enough, it’s his fault.’

It was a reassuring thought and one that Evasqeek clung to as he worked out how best to shift the blame.

The slaves had no idea how long their shifts lasted. There was no day down here, only an eternal night. The guards merely waited for the first of their charges to collapse before letting the rest of them return to their quarters. All but the one who had collapsed, of course. He’d be flayed alive, a miners’ canary of human frailty who paid the ultimate price for everybody else’s rest.

When that was done the survivors would drag themselves back to where they were quartered, gulp down a bowl of whatever vile broth their captors provided, and then clamber down into the lightless oubliette where they were kept. There were no other exits from the dungeon apart from the hole in the roof though which the ladder descended. The dank cavern stank of human misery and human waste, and if it hadn’t been for the cracks in the rock the inmates would have drowned in the latter long ago.

Now, after gulping down a bowl of something greasy and congealed, Adora climbed down into this stinking pit. The rest of the slaves had already collapsed, allowing themselves to fall victim to terror and exhaustion. Adora felt a flicker of contempt for them as she forced herself to keep moving, keep thinking. Keep one step ahead.

The trapdoor banged closed above her and the darkness became complete. It was a heavy leaden thing, this darkness, as though it bore every ounce of the tons of rock that lay above. The weight crushed some of the slaves, and their howling and sobbing echoed against the damp stone walls. Others raised their voices in a ragged chorus of desperate prayer, the Sigmarite chants a feeble defiance against the all conquering night.

Adora ignored them as she ignored the soft confusion of broken bodies beneath her feet. She was too intent on the cache she had hidden in one of the crevasses that lined the walls.

Over the past weeks she had amassed perhaps half a kilo of wyrdstone. The fragments produced a nerve shredding heat even through the rag bundle she had wrapped them in, and it was no coincidence that the ground beneath them was the only part of the cavern not tumbled with human bodies.

When she had made sure her poisonous treasure was secure she took a deep breath and finally allowed herself to think about sleep. Not here, though. Not by the wyrdstone.

She started picking her way back through the mass of bodies, ignoring the whimpers and cries of protest. Then from beneath her she heard one voice that was neither fearful nor hurt.

‘I’ll thank you not to stand on my hand,’ it said, and Adora realised she had found the Estalian.

‘Then I’ll thank you to make room for a lady,’ she said and, pausing only to knee somebody aside, slid down beside him.

‘Feel free to take a seat,’ he said, and when Adora heard the unmistakable tone of irony in his voice, her heart leapt. Irony. It was like the scent of clean air or a glimpse of blue sky, a thing that could only come from a place of freedom.

‘My name is Adora,’ she said, as though she had just handed him the keys to a kingdom.

‘And my name is Xavier Esteban de Souza,’ he replied, sounding as though she actually had.

‘You haven’t been down here long, have you?’ she asked, and leaned into him with a total lack of self-consciousness. He was lean but not wasted, his slim frame corded with the tight muscles of a fencer, or perhaps an acrobat. She pressed against him, enjoying the warmth of his body against hers.

‘Perhaps a month,’ he said, carefully not moving away. ‘Perhaps more. It’s difficult to keep track.’

‘Try,’ Adora told him.

‘Why bother?’ he asked.

Adora didn’t reply. Instead she slid her hand gently down his forearm, selected a hair, and pulled it out. He yelped with surprise as much as pain.

‘If you and I are to be friends,’ she told him, ‘you are never to ask that question again. Never even to think it.’

He grunted, and she thought he understood. She hoped so. Nobody survived down here once they started to ask that question. Nobody.

‘Where are you from?’ she asked him, stroking the forearm from where she had plucked the hair.

‘From Estalia,’ he said simply. ‘I am a swordsman, as was my father and his father before him.’

‘Are you any good?’ Adora asked, and she could tell by the way he sat a little straighter that he was.

‘One of the best. When we are boys, the sons of our family train amongst pens full of the toros negros, the wild bulls from the mountains. They have horns blacker than this night and natures as fickle as any woman’s.’

‘As fickle as that?’ Adora asked.

Xavier chuckled, and the sound was so alien in the darkness that a silence descended around them.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as fickle as that. You can never tell when they will turn on you or your opponent. It gives those of us who survive eyes in the back of our heads.’

‘If you have eyes in the back of your head,’ Adora teased him, ‘then how were you caught?’

‘Sorcery,’ Xavier replied simply. ‘I was a guard on a caravan. One night there was an alarm and suddenly we were all choking. After that, I don’t remember much. We were all split up, and then there were endless passages. Endless days.’

‘There is no such thing as endless passages,’ Adora told him with the cast iron assurance of a mother telling her child that monsters don’t exist.

Xavier just shrugged.

‘You’re right of course,’ he shook himself. ‘But endless or not I will escape through them. I just haven’t found a way yet.’

‘Maybe I can help with that,’ Adora said. ‘In the meantime let us remember why we should bother.’

She turned her head towards his and kissed him, and amongst the squalor, the madness and the fear, they reminded each other that it was worth staying alive.

Uncountable hours later the trap door opened and the ladder descended into the pit. In the sudden flare of torchlight, Adora watched the struggling mass of slaves as they fought to climb it. They pushed and elbowed each other aside, their tiredness forgotten as they raised their voices and clenched their fists.

One man struck another with a crack of knuckles against bone. Another was pulled down and trampled by the men behind him. With a sudden shriek another gave in to panic and hurled himself towards the ladder, trying to swim through his fellows. He didn’t get far.

‘Why do they rush back to their labours?’ Xavier asked Adora who stood up beside him. ‘Are they mad?’

‘No, just stupid,’ she said. ‘The overseers always beat the last couple of people to come out.’

‘Maybe we should hurry too, then,’ Xavier said, but Adora shook her head.

Even in this gloom he could see the way the light played in her hair, its lustre untarnished. She was beautiful, he decided. The only beautiful thing left in the world.

‘Save your strength,’ she said. ‘There are always a few left stunned by the melee.’

Xavier frowned. ‘What if there aren’t?’

‘Then we’ll stun a couple,’ Adora said and smiled, her teeth as white as a shark’s in an ocean full of seals.

Xavier grunted and decided that she was joking. Soon the crowd cleared and she led him forward, pushing through the weaker of the slaves who remained below. If some of them flinched when they saw who was pushing them, Xavier didn’t notice, or if he noticed, then he didn’t think about it.

He let her climb the ladder first, admiring her form as she did so. Then he followed her up into the waiting torchlight. After the lightless hours spent in the pit he found that he was squinting, and he rubbed his watering eyes as the iron shackles which bound him to the chain gang were snapped around his ankle. When he looked up his breath caught in his throat.

Adora was not locked into the chain with the rest of them. Instead she was cowering beneath the touch of a monster. Like all of its verminous kind the thing had chisel teeth and a scaly lash of a tail. It had the beady black eyes too, glittering with malevolence and cunning, and an obscenely naked wrinkle of a snout. Unlike its fellows it was huge. Even with its stoop it was as tall as a man, and even wider across the shoulders.

But what choked Xavier with horror was not the thing’s bulk but the way it was touching Adora, dragging its filthy claws through her hair with some grotesque parody of affection.

Before he knew what he was doing he was on the balls of his feet, weight balanced and shoulders loose. Had it not been for the shackle on his ankle he would have attacked, weapon or not, and that would have been the end of him. As it was, the dead weight of the steel and the deader weight of the slaves around him gave him pause, and in that moment Adora looked at him.

She winked, and for the first time he realised how blue her eyes were. As blue as the pure seas and clear skies that awaited them above. Then she tilted her head, gesturing him to leave her. It was a barely perceptible sign but he followed it as thoughtlessly as a bull followed the flicker of a red cape.

They would survive, he knew that now. They would survive together.

He let himself be led away with the slaves and didn’t even look back as he heard the soothing sweetness of Adora’s voice whispering in the distance.

And Adora needed to be soothing. Once his underlings had scurried off, their whips dancing gleefully across the skin of their victims, Skitteka turned and lumbered off to the sanctuary of his burrow. It was only when safely ensconced behind the heavy iron doors that he turned to Adora and unburdened himself.

‘Vass is coming,’ he said simply. As he said the name his tail trembled and even Adora could smell the change in his odour. She said nothing. She didn’t need to. Skitteka obviously needed to speak, and of all the creatures down here Adora was the only one it could trust.

‘Evasqeek, Evasqeek, Evasqeek,’ the thing gibbered, its voice a high pitched whine. ‘He will betray me, the vile thing. He will use me to avoid paying for his own failings and make them mine instead. When Vass comes, Evasqeek will blame me for the slackening flow of the stone, the thrice-accursed liar.’

Skitteka clawed at her as he spoke, but she endured his painful caresses as uncomplainingly as ever. In truth she barely felt them, for as her verminous master spoke she saw the first cracks appearing in her confinement.

‘Oh, Vass,’ Skitteka moaned, his voice a terrified combination of horror and admiration. ‘In Qaask he chained all the slave handlers together and let the slaves work them. None of them survived their own whips. Then there was Tsatsabad where they say he simply sealed the entire mine and flooded it with poisoned wind. Imagine how they must have scrabbled and fought as their lungs melted.’

Skitteka paused and licked the yellowed blades of his incisors with a long pink tongue.

‘And in Isquvar he had the overseer sealed into a cauldron and then rendered down into slave gruel. They say he added one scrap of coal to the fire at a time so that it took an entire day for his victim to stop screaming. Mind you, he had been caught stealing warpstone.’

The cracks which Adora had seen appearing at her confinement blossomed into real possibilities. They were tenuous possibilities to be sure, but they were real enough to set the carefully nurtured embers of her hope ablaze. As Skitteka continued to speak her eyes burned blue in the darkness.

‘Curse Evasqeek,’ Skitteka continued, turning from admiration of Vass to shrill self-pity. ‘He will give me to Vass and something horrible will happen.’

Adora felt a flash of contempt, and wondered how this weakling had become the master of the slaves. She supposed it was because of his muscle. It certainly couldn’t have been his courage.

‘My lord,’ she said, her face lowered. ‘If Evasqeek does betray you, I will be finished. Without you I am nothing.’

Skitteka struck her. It took her by complete surprise, and she was sent tumbling across the stone floor of the burrow. There was no pain, not yet, but there was numbness down one side of her body and a warm trickle of blood had already begun to flow.

‘Ungrateful creature!’ Skitteka shrieked as she staggered back to her feet. It had drawn its dagger, and although the metal was dull, the liquid that coated it glowed with a toxic intensity. ‘How can you be so selfish?’

It lurched towards her, its monstrous bulk blotting out the light from the lantern, and Adora knew that in these nightmare depths, death was finally upon her. She didn’t waste time worrying about it.

‘Forgive me, my lord. I only meant that I would like your permission to kill Evasqeek.’

Skitteka stopped and staggered backwards as though he had been shot by a jezzail.

‘Kill him?’ he asked, a new hope in his voice. ‘But how can a little cat like you kill Evasqeek?’

Adora looked at him, and for the first time since she had met the creature she made no effort to compose her features. No pretended humility marred the porcelain hardness of her features; no false fear widened her predatory gaze or trembled on the hungry perfection of her lips. No simulated respect bowed the straight perfection of her stance, nor did it smooth the arrogant composure with which she carried herself.

As she stood before him unmasked, Skitteka took another step back, and another. He felt as though he had bitten down into soft flesh to find a razor blade hidden within. Adora, seeing his beady eyes swivel uncertainly, lowered her head demurely.

‘I will do it because I must. Without you I am nothing, my lord. Get me within striking distance of Evasqeek when Vass arrives and I will do for him.’

Skitteka hesitated, paralysed by hope. Then he sheathed his dagger, the blade hissing like a serpent as it disappeared, and slumped back into his chair.

‘Maybe,’ he murmured, scrabbling in his filthy robes for something. ‘Maybe you will.’

The first hint the slaves got of the impending visit was the sudden cessation of work. In the days preceding their lord’s arrival Vass’s servants insisted on checking every inch of the mine for traps, and while they did so the slaves were locked into their oubliette.

At first they wallowed in their idleness, savouring every moment of it as a starving man will savour every mouthful of a feast. But as time dragged on their permanent exhaustion was replaced by another torture. Forgotten in the blinding darkness, starvation started to take its toll.

It wasn’t long before rumours of cannibalism began to circulate.

‘I think it’s time to escape,’ Xavier said, whispering into Adora’s ear so that they wouldn’t be overheard. ‘What do you think?’

Adora enjoyed the warmth of his breath on her neck. She had long since learned to use such scraps of pleasure to distract her from… well, from everything. She leaned closer to him before she replied.

‘I think we should be patient,’ she said and tried not to sound patronising. ‘Even if you could climb up to the trap door, and even if you could get it open, what do you think would be waiting for you there?’

‘Perhaps nothing. Perhaps we have been abandoned.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Adora asked.

‘Well then, the vermin,’ Xavier said carelessly. ‘I’ll have to kill them to get out eventually anyway.’

Adora smiled and sighed contentedly. Men were all fools, of course, so that was alright. What was important was that she had finally found one with the courage to be a leader. Like all shepherds she knew the value of a good sheep dog and she had truly found one in this tough little Estalian.

‘It might be better to fight them when they aren’t standing on top of a hole waiting for you,’ she said, and felt him pull away.

‘I do not appreciate being mocked,’ he said, and Adora smiled again. Pride. Was there a better way to handle a man? Well, maybe one. She reached for him, but she was interrupted by the clang of metal and a shaft of light cutting down into the darkness. After the blind days she had spent down here the light seemed as solid as a stream of molten iron, and her eyes ached as she looked towards it.

When her tears cleared she could see the mass of slaves that huddled around her, hope and terror warring on their upturned faces. When one of the guards appeared in the trap door opening they froze like a field full of mice beneath the shadow of a hawk.

‘Skitteka wants his pet,’ the creature shrilled.

Adora got to her feet and walked towards the opening. The other slaves pulled away from her, all but Xavier. As she waited for the ladder to tumble down he appeared beside her, and his hand brushed against hers.

‘I’m coming with you,’ he said.

‘You can’t,’ Adora told him, surprise lifting the perfect arcs of her eyebrows. ‘You haven’t been summoned.’

‘They won’t care,’ Xavier said with a fatalistic confidence. ‘And I need to see more of this place. Need to start finding weaknesses.’

‘No,’ Adora shook her head. ‘No, it’s not worth the risk.’

‘I’m coming,’ Xavier insisted.

‘Don’t come,’ Adora said. ‘It’s better if – ‘

‘Quick-quick!’ the creature above shrieked, and Adora realised that the ladder had reached the ground while they had been arguing.

‘Stay here,’ she said, and started up it. When she reached the top she was not surprised to see Xavier clamber up behind her. She was sure that the verminous guards who awaited them would kick him back down, but they seemed hardly to notice.

It slowly dawned on Adora just how distracted they were. Their whiskers twitched at every draft of air and the scaly lengths of their tails coiled and uncoiled nervously. Once, there was a boom of some distant falling rock, and all the guards sprang into the air, their beady black eyes rolling in terror.

When they finally arrived at the entrance to Skitteka’s personal burrow they hung back, chittering nervously.

‘Go on!’ the leader said, pushing Adora towards the iron door. She went, trying not to let her guards’ terror infect her. Xavier followed closely and, as soon as she had gone through the iron door, she closed it behind her, pushing him against it.

‘Wait here,’ she hissed. ‘Any further and we’ll both be killed.’

To her relief he nodded, and she paused to give him the briefest of kisses before composing herself and padding down the corridor into Skitteka’s chambers. As soon as she saw him she knew why his underlings had been so terrified. He had been gnawing on wyrdstone.

Adora felt something like despair as she looked at her chosen master. He wasn’t aware of her or of anything else. His eyes were rolled so far back in his skull that she could see the whites, and pink foam bubbled down from his mouth.

She glanced down and saw the remains of one of Skitteka’s underlings. Its carcass was torn and broken, and as she crept a little closer she could see that it had been partially eaten.

That was no problem. What would be a problem would be if the wyrdstone had brought on more than a fit of madness. She knew what it could do, had seen the half-glimpsed horrors that were occasionally driven screaming from the mine. The wyrdstone didn’t just kill, it transformed.

She squinted into the gloom as she padded silently around Skitteka’s paralytic form. As far as she could tell the body which sweated and wheezed beneath its filthy pelt was the same grotesque bulk as always.

‘Is he dead?’

Adora spun around and glared at Xavier. After a quick glance back at Skitteka she paced angrily towards him.

‘I told you to wait,’ she hissed, but he didn’t respond to her fury. Instead he just pushed past her.

At first she thought that he was making for the half-eaten corpse that lay crumpled on the floor but he hurried past it and into the shadows on the far side of the chamber. When he stood up she saw the glitter of a sword in his hand. He weighed it, looked at Skitteka and smiled.

‘Vengeance comes to those who wait,’ he said softly, and Adora saw that he was going to kill Skitteka. Skitteka the vicious. Skitteka the coward. Skitteka, the weak link upon which all of her plans for escape hung.

‘No,’ she said, starting forward to intercept him. ‘No, leave him. We need him, can’t you see that? We need him!’

But Xavier wasn’t listening to her. His eyes were ablaze with a devouring hatred, and he was holding the blade with professional ease.

She knew that she wasn’t strong enough to stop him. Knew that no words could quench the rage she saw in his eyes. Knew that even if she called for the vermin none of them would arrive in time to help.

So she reached up to her neck, untied the ragged shift and let it fall to the floor.

Xavier stopped, his mouth falling open. She looked like something from another world.

Of course she was scrawny. Scrawny enough that he could count her ribs. But she was still whole, her breasts and hips and thighs still curvy enough to catch the same torchlight which glowed within the golden mane of her hair. She was also incredibly, unbelievably, impossibly untarnished. No trace of disease marred the smooth silken perfection of her skin. Neither did any dirt.

Who was clean down here, he wondered? How was it possible?

But more than that, much more, was her fragility. Only things that haven’t been broken yet can be fragile and he could see that Adora, alone amongst all of the slaves, hadn’t been broken.

He tried to hold on to his outrage but then she was running one hand along the clenched line of his jaw and standing so close that he could smell soap. Soap!

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. They were his last words. A sudden explosion of pain blossomed in his belly, and then thrust upwards into his liver.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Adora, and twisted the blade she had taken from him. If she had punctured his heart first it would have been easier, or at least cleaner. As it was his heart carried on beating as he died, pumping great gouts of blood from his desecrated body. It spattered on to her chilled skin with hideous warmth.

‘I’m sorry.’

The look of confusion stayed on his face, pinned there by death, and he collapsed onto the floor next to the verminous corpse of Skitteka’s half eaten victim. Adora knelt down, twisted out the dagger, and slipped it into the stillness of his jugular just to make sure.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her face expressionless. Then she tore off the ragged remains of his shirt to wipe herself clean of his blood, and clean her dagger before slipping back into her clothes. Then, sitting on the cold stone floor, she put her head in her hands, and wept.

An hour later Skitteka regained consciousness. By then she was as composed as ever.

Vass had been born last into a litter of thirteen. He had also been born the runt. Not many of his species could have survived such twin disadvantages but Vass did. He not only survived but thrived, doing so by the simple expedient of devouring his siblings. He started with the weakest, losing three of his milk teeth in the process, and finished with the strongest. That had been just as soon as he had learned to lift a rock above its sleeping head.

This was an exceptional beginning even for one of his species, and his dam was so distressed that she died soon after the last of her other offspring. It was not a sacrifice Vass had let go to waste. The rest of his life had been a continuation of that promising start. He joined his clan’s warriors almost as soon as he was out of the burrow, and soon set about translating the fratricidal excesses of his whelphood into political progress.

Now, at the ripe old age of twelve, Vass had developed a reputation for savagery that made him the envy of his kin. It had preceded him into this miserable mine, a dread that was almost a physical thing. He could see it now in the crouching forms and twisting tails of the chiefs and leaders who abased themselves before him, grovelling in the dirt of what had once been their domain but which was now so effortlessly his.

He had gathered them in the audience chamber. His personal guards stood around the walls, magnificent in their arrogance and cruelty. They would satiate their bloodlust before the day was out, and anticipation of the joys to come set their eyes agleam in the darkness. Their presence did little to help Evasqeek’s nerves.

Instead of executing the chief overseer immediately for his treacherous inefficiency, Vass had decided to let him talk first. Not that it was doing him any good.

‘It was the cave-in, your worship.’ Evasqeek chittered. He was grovelling so abjectly on the floor that the blades of his incisors tapped intermittently on the rock.

‘The cave-in?’ Vass asked, his beady eyes as hard as glass.

‘Yes,’ Evasqeek pleaded, and squeezed his paws together so tightly that he might have been holding a throat. ‘Yes, the cave-in. We lost fifty slaves and a score of the best handlers.’

Vass shifted comfortably on the raised litter that dominated the room. As always on these occasions he was thoroughly enjoying himself.

‘When was this cave-in?’ he asked ingenuously, and was gratified to smell a fresh wave of terror emanating from his victim.

‘A month ago, my liege,’ the mine supervisor admitted and, realising that the excuse had been a mistake, suddenly changed tack. ‘But the real problem is the indolence and treachery of slave master Skitteka. He is too soft on the slaves. He doesn’t look after them either. They keep dying from the lightest of wounds.’

‘I see,’ Vass said. His spies and informers had already determined that the real reason for Evasqeek’s failure was that his mine was almost exhausted. He would still need to make an example of somebody, of course, but it occurred to him that it wouldn’t necessarily have to be Evasqeek himself.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Evasqeek jabbered. ‘It’s Skitteka’s fault. He’s lazy, too.’

‘Then perhaps I should speak with this Skitteka,’ Vass decided. He heard a whimper from amongst the assembled throng and saw an exceptionally bulky figure trying to press itself into the floor.

‘You’re Skitteka I suppose?’ Vass asked. But before the skaven could reply a voice rang out. A human voice.

All eyes turned to the slave who stood at the entrance of the audience chamber. Ordinarily the guards would have lashed the flesh from her bones for such an intrusion, but now they were too busy cowering themselves. The hungry eyes of Vass’s guard had transformed them from predators into prey.

And so Adora padded unbidden into the audience chamber. Evasqeek watched her dumbly and felt vaguely grateful that at least attention had been turned away from him.

His relief was to be short lived.

‘My Lord Evasqeek,’ the slave said, her tone perfectly pitched into the place where hope and terror meet. ‘We are sorry the tribute is late. Please forgive us. It was because we were locked up.’

So saying she fell to the floor besides Evasqeek, pressed her head down even lower than his, and slid a ragged bundle across to him. He reached out for it unthinkingly, and as the rags loosened he was bathed in the hypnotic green glow of wyrdstone.

It pulsed inches away from his snout, and he seemed to feel his blood boil and fizz. Desire and revulsion tore through his thoughts, and he hardly heard Vass when he spoke.

‘I thought that wyrdstone was supposed to be handed directly to the clan’s treasurer,’ Vass said.

Evasqeek felt blood trickling from his snout. He licked his teeth and, eyes still on the pulsing light of the stone, said: ‘What?’

‘Why are the slaves delivering the stone directly to you?’ Vass asked, his tone mild. It seemed that Evasqeek would provide him with his example after all. And why not? He would do as well as anyone. He suddenly had an idea of what that example would be, too.

‘I don’t know,’ Evasqeek said vaguely, and managed to tear his eyes away from the fragments of stone. He looked up at Adora, and although he didn’t recognise her, he did recognise Skitteka’s marking on her.

‘Wait,’ he said, understanding dawning. ‘Wait, this is a trick. Skitteka–’

But at Vass’s signal the guards were already closing in. Evasqeek saw his doom waiting in the manacles they carried, and panic burst inside him. With a scream he launched himself towards the exit, clawing through his fellows as he tried to escape, but he had left it far, far too late. Within seconds he had been beaten down and chained up, transformed from the mine’s master to its most miserable captive.

‘It seems you have developed a taste for the stone,’ Vass said, prowling towards him. ‘But fear not. I have a mind to be merciful. I am going to feed you of much of it as you can take. And then,’ he bent down to whisper into his captive’s ear, ‘I’m going to feed you some more.’

Evasqeek’s last coherent thought as they pinned him to the floor was one of surprise. Who would have thought that the fat fool Skitteka had the wit to set him up like this? How could he have maintained such a facade of gluttonous incompetence whilst setting these wheels in motion?

He saw Vass stalking towards him, the bundle of stone held in his trembling paw. As soon as he realised what was going to happen he started shrieking, froth flecking his snout as he spasmed and writhed. The guards waited for their chance then slipped ligatures around his lower and upper jaws, pulling them open to reveal the thrashing pink of the tongue within.

‘That’s right,’ Vass said softly. ‘Open wide.’

And with that he started to feed Evasqeek. He pressed the stone down his throat one cancerous piece at a time. At first his victim hissed and rolled his eyes in terror. Then he started to shrill and his eyes bulged with a crazed joy. Eventually he started to change.

Fur sloughed away. Limbs withered. A second tail grew from the melting knots of his spine, a paw blossoming from the end of it. Eyes blinked open across his disintegrating form and the claws on his feet lengthened into talons.

Vass’s guard worked to keep pace with the transformation. They tightened some chains, loosened others. The tail was bound with leather ligatures and the eyes blinded as soon as they opened. They worked fast, concentrating on the knots and chains and ligatures that bound the monster’s form with the desperate skill of sailors adjust the rigging of a storm-tossed ship.

Even after Vass ran out of stone the transformation continued. It only slowed after the thing that had been Evasqeek was no longer recognisable. It bubbled and hissed and mewled within the mesh of its confinement, its image reflected in a hundred pairs of horrified eyes.

Alone in the chamber Adora regarded the horror before her with equanimity. Her eyes were as calm as a deep blue sea on a still summer’s day, and a smile played around the perfect curve of her lips. There was a faint blush in the cream of her complexion too, just as much as there might be had she just returned from a vigorous horse ride on a warm afternoon.

Then she shook herself and, whilst her captors still gazed hypnotised at the horror that had once been their master, she slipped away as silently as a cat in twilight.

‘You bring me much luck, little cat,’ Skitteka mused and pawed idly at his pet. Although it had only been a few weeks since Vass had appointed him as mine overseer, he had already gained over twenty pounds in weight. Even the pads on his paws had fattened, and he had taken to slapping Adora to hear the sound echo in the great audience chamber.

His audience chamber.

‘You are truly the only one deserving of this honour, lord,’ Adora told him, and in a way it was true. With Evasqeek out of the way Skitteka was the only one with a vicious enough reputation to rule his subordinates. Since he had taken over, things had certainly run smoothly.

That was something that Adora knew that she had to change. So she said:

‘My lord Skitteka, can I ask you a question?’

Skitteka slapped her playfully, the impact of his paw numbing her back. He was in a high good humour today.

‘Of course you can,’ he hissed. ‘As long as it isn’t a boring one.’

‘Thank you, lord,’ Adora said. ‘I just wondered why you keep the thing that used to be Evasqeek locked in a cell?’

Skitteka hesitated and Adora waited for another blow, harder this time. Instead Skitteka answered her.

‘Vass and I decided to keep him,’ he said, by which he meant that Vass had told him what to do while he had grovelled miserably before him. ‘It’s a reminder of what happens to traitors and thieves.’

Skitteka took a pawful of her hair and twisted it for reassurance. Adora ignored the pain and risked another question.

‘Very wise of you, my lord,’ she said. ‘But what does the thing eat?’

‘Anything,’ Skitteka said with a shiver. ‘Anything at all. And it’s always hungry. But enough about that. Tell me what you have learned in the past few days.

‘Three of the slaves are planning to break through their chains and escape,’ she said, not because it was true but because it wasn’t. The three she had in mind spent every night howling and sobbing and wailing with a misery close to madness. Adora knew that unless she removed them quickly, their despair would weaken others who might otherwise prove useful.

‘Give their names to the guards when you get back,’ Skitteka said.

‘Yes, lord,’ Adora said. ‘There’s also a rumour that an army of ghosts are gathering in some of the worked out tunnels.’

Skitteka hissed and twisted at her hair.

‘Ghosts? What makes them say that?’

‘Some of them have heard things. Seen things. It’s probably nonsense, my lord, but that’s what they say.’

Skitteka shifted, his whiskers twitching in thought. Adora pretended not to watch. She had almost invented something a bit more tangible for Skitteka to send his guards chasing after. Orcs perhaps, or some other monsters. But as always, it seemed, she had judged Skitteka’s gnawing anxieties correctly.

‘Something to investigate,’ he mused, beady eyes darting around the empty spaces of the chamber. ‘What else?’

‘Nothing definite…’ Adora began, then trailed off.

Skitteka, catching something in her tone, forgot about ghosts and fixed his attention on her.

‘Tell me,’ he said, and twisted one of her ears. Pain screamed as the flesh came close to tearing. Adora ignored the white-hot agony and spoke with a perfectly contrived hesitancy.

‘The guard Tso-tso,’ she began. ‘Whenever I am near him, he and his friends stop talking. It is almost as though they are suspicious of me.’

Skitteka released her ear and chittered with agitation. Tso-tso! He should have known that he was a traitor. He was capable and respected by the others. He no doubt had his own designs on Skitteka’s position. Well, he would see where those would get him.

‘Very good,’ he said, and absent-mindedly tossed a gobbet of meat onto the floor in front of Adora.

‘Thank you, my lord,’ she said and scuttled over to claim it. She ignored the rotten iron taste of the raw flesh just as studiously as she ignored the provenance of it. Her gag reflex almost betrayed her as the first torn-off morsel slithered down her gullet, but she massaged her oesophagus and thought about how close she was. How terrifyingly close.

‘I heard it took Tso-tso over three days to die,’ one of the guards said to the other.

‘Three days, yes,’ his companion replied.

Their conversation died. Their tails writhed. Their nostrils wrinkled. Something banged against the iron-bound door behind them and they both leapt into the air. When they landed they turned towards the cell they were guarding. The iron held firm, and the heavy beams that held it shut remained intact. But was that a new crack in the timber?

‘Our shift must be over by now,’ one of the guards chittered. ‘Must be, must be.’

‘It’s that cowardly scrunt Kai,’ the other agreed, fear turning to hatred within the black orbs of his eyes. ‘He’s always late.’

Something heavy slid against the door. It seemed to bulge beneath the guards’ terrified gaze, yet it still held firm. For now at least.

‘Look,’ said one. ‘Why don’t I go and get our relief? You can stay here while I’m gone.’

His companion didn’t deign to reply. He merely hissed with annoyance. Their concentration was focussed so intently on the door that they didn’t hear the footsteps padding up behind them.

‘Permission to speak, my lords,’ a voice said. The guards shrieked as they spun around. When they saw that it was a slave their terror blossomed into rage, and they scrabbled for their whips.

‘I have a message from Lord Skitteka,’ Adora said. ‘It is very urgent.’

‘Speak then,’ one said, paw still closed around the hilt of his whip. ‘Speak, speak.’

‘My lord Skitteka requests that you go to his audience chamber immediately.’

‘What for?’ the two guards said in perfect unison, their voices sharp with suspicion.

‘He didn’t tell me,’ said Adora.

The guards exchanged a troubled glance.

‘But who will guard–’

This time the sound that came from the cell was not an impact but a series of squelches, as though something was being dismembered. Something big.

‘He wants both of us?’ one of the guards asked hopefully.

‘Yes, lord,’ Adora said. ‘And I am to wait here until you get back.’

The guards looked at her. If the thing escaped she wouldn’t be anything more than a morsel for it. But so what? That was gloriously, wonderfully, tail-liftingly no longer their problem.

The two guards took a final look at the door then skittered off. Adora waited until they had disappeared around the corner before she turned to the door.

Three thick wooden beams had been slotted into holes cut into the stone on either side of the door. A lump of ancient iron and battered timber, it rested on crude iron hinges each as big as Adora’s head. The hinges were rusty and the door was heavy, but it opened outwards so that was alright. The thing within would have no problem opening it. No problem at all.

As she tested the weight of the first of the beams that held the door closed, she heard something slither behind it. It would be waiting for her when she freed it, of that she was sure. Waiting hungrily.

‘Good,’ she told herself.

Adora wedged her shoulder beneath the beam and lifted it, freeing one end from the stone slot in which it had rested. Then she dropped it and sprang away as it thudded onto the floor. The noise echoed down the passageway. When the echoes had gone there was silence on the other side of the door.

Ignoring the twist in her stomach Adora removed the second beam, letting it tumble to the floor next to the first. When she stooped to remove the third an almost paralysing sense of reluctance came over her. She had seen the creation of the thing that had been Evasqeek, and beside it all the horrors down here paled into insignificance. There was wrongness to it, a terrible, life-hating wrongness.

‘Good,’ she repeated, lifting her chin and gazing defiantly into space. ‘Then it will serve my purpose.’

Without giving herself any more time to think she wrestled the final bar free and stepped back from the door. It was as well that she did. No sooner had the last bar been lifted than the horror within hurled forward. Iron and wood shattered as it impacted on the stone wall and the thing which had been Evasqeek emerged.

Adora tried to scream, but her throat had locked tight. Her knees had locked tight too, and even though instinct screamed at her to run, run, run damn it, she remained frozen as the thing slithered and lurched towards her.

It had grown during the dark weeks of its captivity. Now it was three times the size of the creature it had once been, and a confusion of pseudopods and limbs grasped greedily at the world about it. The eyes that dotted its form like so many bullet holes swivelled towards Adora and then she was screaming, and she was running, and she had never been so terrified in her life.

The thing chased her and although that was what she had wanted all along she wasn’t happy about that. Not any more, no, not one little bit. For the first time she understood how all of those that had died around her had been able to give up on life.

But she was still Adora. Even as panic gripped her she made sure that the thing remained behind her as she followed the route she had decided upon. This was her one chance to escape, her only chance. And, she decided, she would take it just as surely as a dropped cat will land on its feet.

The guards had just closed the hatch on the last of the slaves when Adora burst in on them. Although they were used to having Skitteka’s pet sidling around they had never seen her like this, fleeing and terrified and suddenly dangerous looking.

‘In the hole with you,’ one of them said and pointed to the trap door that led down into the oubliette. He went to lift it and Adora had a terrible vision of what would happen to the trapped mass of humanity below if the thing behind her got down amongst them.

‘Run,’ she told him and hit him straight armed. He tumbled backwards, shrilling in outrage as he drew his weapon, but then the thing which had been pursuing Adora was upon them.

Their squeals echoed after her as she ran, adrenaline burning within her. After a while she slowed down and eventually forced herself to stop. The sound of the struggle behind her had already died away, and she had no doubt as to who had won. She rubbed the sweat from her face, ran her fingers through the slick of her hair, then circled back around to the oubliette.

The thing had already gone, searching for new victims. The remains of those it had left behind lay scattered around the chamber, torn and dismembered. Adora rolled a head away from the trap door, lifted it, and pushed down the ladder. A ring of terrified faces looked up at her, squinting in the light she had let into their darkness. She looked down upon them and smiled, the radiant expression framed by the golden halo of her hair.

‘Glorious news,’ she told them. ‘Today the gods have given you the chance to take your vengeance.’

With that she threw the rat-featured head of the guard down in amongst them. They looked from Adora to the head and then back again. And then with a collective cry that sounded more like the roar of a wounded beast than anything human they swarmed up the ladder, made fearless by the miracle they had witnessed.

Had Skitteka led the battle against the thing which had been Evasqeek, it might have gone better. Without the confusion it might have been lured into a place where it could have been attacked from all sides at once, or where it could have been pushed down a mineshaft or crushed beneath falling stone.

But Skitteka hadn’t led the battle against the horror. Instead he had driven his underlings towards it, hiding behind their desperate savagery until they had finally overwhelmed it. Their victory had come at a terrible cost. The remains of a score of guards had been smeared throughout the mine, and dozens of survivors lay shattered and broken amongst them.

Even then, had Skitteka led the battle against the slaves he might still have saved the mine. The humans were desperate but compared to the guards they were slow and clumsy, and their makeshift weapons were no match for the razored perfection of the guards’ own poisoned blades.

But Skitteka hadn’t led the battle against the slaves. Instead he had locked himself into his burrow, sweating and stinking and waiting for others to save him.

They hadn’t.

And now he sat, terrified and alone. Although the mine still rang with the sounds of battle, he ignored them. Instead he had withdrawn into the paralysing cocoon of his own cowardice. He was only shaken from it when, heralded by the squeal of a guard who had chosen to skulk rather than flee, one of the slaves slipped into the room.

Skitteka hissed and scrabbled for the handle of his blade, but then the slave stepped into the pool of light and he recognised the blonde of her hair and the meek expression on her face.

‘My lord,’ Adora said, padding forwards. ‘Thank the gods you are still alive. Can I wait with you until the fighting is over?’

Skitteka’s fur bristled, and suspicion wrinkled his snout.

‘Why aren’t you with the other slaves, little cat?’ he said, gesturing towards her with his sword. The murderous sliver of steel gleamed with the venom which coated it.

‘They are mad, my lord,’ Adora said as she closed the distance between them. ‘They think that I am a traitor because of my loyalty to you.’

Skitteka started to speak, then jumped as the door crashed open behind her. The men who charged into the chamber were as filthy and starved as all the humans, but there was a terrifying lack of fear about them. Compared to that, their lack of shackles seemed almost secondary.

‘Save me, lord!’ Adora cried and rushed towards Skitteka, who had no intention of saving anybody but himself. He leapt out of his chair and turned to flee to another exit.

But Adora was even quicker than his panic.

As he turned his back on her she lunged forwards, slicing through first one of his hamstrings and then the other. He collapsed with a squeal and Adora reversed her grip. She punched the steel between his vertebrae with the thoughtless accuracy of a seamstress pushing thread through the eye of a needle.

Skitteka shrieked and spasmed on the cold floor. He tried to make his crippled body work. He failed.

‘Stand back,’ Adora barked at the men who were closing in on their crippled tormentor. They paused uncertainly, their picks and shovels raised for the killing blow. Adora turned on them, and when they saw the rage on her face they retreated.

‘Go and finish off the others,’ she told them as she closed in on Skitteka. ‘This one is mine.’

His spine severed, he was thrashing his limbs as uselessly as a cockroach Adora had once seen nailed to the wall of an inn. She had been a serving girl at the time, and although she didn’t know who had visited the cruelty upon the creature, she had never forgotten it. Between her duties she had watched it dying for almost a week, its struggles getting weaker and weaker. Eventually, when it could manage no more than the occasional twitch, its fellows had returned to devour it.

Unfortunately she didn’t have the time to organise a similar fate for Skitteka.

Never mind. She would make do with what time she had.

‘See this?’ she told him, holding up the bloodied dagger. He rolled his eyes and hissed an entreaty.

‘Please help me,’ he said. ‘I will give you clothes, lots of clothes. And meat! As much meat as you want.’

Adora felt her control tearing.

‘What I want,’ she said softly, ‘is for you not to touch me anymore. Instead,’ she lifted the dagger, ‘I’m going to touch you.’

So she did.

It took a long, long time. When she had finished and the last of his screams had bled out she turned to find that some of the men had stayed to watch her. Their open mouths and wide eyes made them look like startled cattle.

‘Go,’ she said, and tried to ignore the horror on their faces as they fled from her.

Sunlight played upon the rippling surface of the stream. A breeze whispered soothingly through the branches of the trees. There was the smell of jasmine and fresh sap and something that might have been a distant ocean. Even the remains of the fire smelled clean, fresh ash and burned fish bones. Adora enjoyed the fragrances of freedom as she sat in the shade and waited for her rags to dry. She had washed them as thoroughly as she had washed herself and now she was working on her nails, cleaning beneath them with a gnawed twig.

She had left the other survivors as soon as they had emerged from the mine. They were too wild and starving to be of much further use, so she had abandoned them. That had been two days ago, and she was beginning to wonder if it had been a mistake. She had no idea where she was, and there might be anything in this forest.

She was so lost in thought that she didn’t hear the hoof beats until they were almost upon her. With a startled glance upwards she sprang to her feet and hurriedly pulled her damp slip over her nakedness. A moment later, an apparition of coloured silk and burnished steel emerged from the forest. It rode a towering warhorse and carried a lance that was twice as long as she was tall. Adora padded towards the knight.

‘Excuse me, kind sir,’ she said bowing her head so that her hair tumbled forward from her shoulders. ‘I wonder if you might help me?’

The knight stopped and lifted his visor. His dark features were hard with arrogance but as he took a closer look at Adora the expression turned into something else.

‘I would be honoured to, my lady,’ he said and bowed towards her. ‘But first we should leave this place. The enemy are not far behind. Would you ride with me?’

‘I would be honoured, my lord,’ Adora said as he swung her up into the saddle behind him and carried her, sweet and smooth and lethal, back into the world of men.

An Exclusive Extract from Fall of Damnos

Nick Kyme

779.973.M41

The vox-transmitter was wretched with interference, so Falka hit it again.

‘Keep doing that and you’ll break it,’ said a deep and sonorous voice behind him.

When Falka turned, his smile was broad and bright enough to light up the whole mine. ‘Jynn!’

He seized the woman in a bear hug, lifting her off the ground. Even in her environment suit, she felt the steel of his girder-like arms.

‘Easy, easy!’ she warned, mock-choking.

Falka put her down, ignoring the questioning glances from the rest of the shift. Riggers, drill-engines and borer-drones advanced towards the darkness of the vast ice-shaft like an army. They were accompanied by menial servitors and heavy-set chrono-diggers. Like Falka and Jynn, the human contingent of the labour force wore bulky environment suits to stave off the cold and make the twelve-hour cycles possible.

‘Where’s your rig?’ asked the big man. He’d stripped back the thermal protection on his arms, revealing faded gang-tats and wiry grey hair. ‘I didn’t see it.’

Jynn pointed to a docking station, one of many in the massive ice cavern. Like most of the mining vehicles it was squat, decked out with plates and protective glacis and only partially enclosed. A crew of three menials and a pair of chrono-diggers stood around it awaiting her return.

‘She’s all mine,’ she said proudly, adjusting the thermal-cutters, flare-rods and chain-pick fastened to her tool belt from when Falka’s bear hug had dislodged them.

A klaxon sounded and an array of strobe lamps filled the cavern with an intermittent amber glow. They started walking.

‘You look good,’ said Falka a moment later.

Jynn gave a wry smile. The ice concourse underfoot crunched as they moved. It was hard-packed by industrial presses to create a serviceable roadway for the mine entrance. Most of the light was artificial, though some natural light filtered down from the bore hole above them at the entrance’s threshold.

‘What I mean,’ Falka struggled to say, ‘is it’s good to see you back at the ice-face. I thought after Korve, you might–’

‘Honestly, Fal, I’m fine,’ she said, brushing a strand of errant hair behind her ears and pulling down her goggles.

Falka did the same – close to the vent a fine spray of ice chips saturated the air. Environment suits managed the worst. Get one in the eye and you’d know about it, though.

‘Just with the ’quake and all that…’

She stopped and glared at him. The other workers flowed around them to their riggers and crews. The first few cohorts had already begun descent.

‘Seriously, Falka – just drop it. Korve’s dead and that’s it.’

The big man looked distraught. ‘Sorry.’

She lightly gripped his shoulder. ‘It’s all right. I under–’

‘Rig-hand Evvers,’ a shrill, imperious voice interrupted.

Jynn had her back to the speaker and groaned inwardly before she turned. ‘Administrator Rancourt,’ she replied politely.

A hawkish man, trussed up in thermal gear and flocked by a retinue of scribes and aides, approached them. Despite the cowl drawn up around his small head and the padded mittens he wore, the administrator still shivered.

‘I had not expected to see you on shift,’ he said, fashioning a poor smile. It was meant to convey warmth but only exuded his awkwardness.

‘Nor I, you…’ she muttered.

‘I beg your pardon. I’m finding it hard to hear under all of this.’ He gestured to cowl and thermal coat.

‘I said it’s rare to see you, administrator… at the ice-face, I mean.’

Rancourt moved in close to Jynn.

‘I’ve told you before,’ he said. ‘You may call me Zeph.’

Falka broke his stoic silence to grunt.

Rancourt’s gaze moved to the giant. ‘And Rig-hand Kolpeck. Don’t you have shift to go to?’

‘We both do, administ… ah, Zeph.’ She tugged lightly on Falka’s arm, urging him to join her.

The big man looked like he’d rather stay and squeeze Rancourt’s neck, but he followed anyway.

‘Of course, of course,’ the administrator blathered, shooting a dark glance at Falka. ‘I have much work to attend to. In the Emperor’s name,’ he added, pretending to look at a data-slate proffered by one of his toadies.

‘May His glory watch over us all,’ Jynn replied.

Heading in the direction of the vent, the air suddenly felt as if it were actually getting warmer.

‘He still stalking you, then?’

‘Leave it, Fal. I can handle it. He’s harmless enough.’

Falka grunted again. He was prone to doing that. ‘Eyes and ears,’ he said, peeling off towards his rigger and crew.

‘You too,’ said Jynn, diverting to her vehicle. She’d put one boot on the boarding stirrup when the concourse trembled. She slipped, snatching a holding rail to steady herself. A second tremor shook some debris from the roof. More violent than the first, it sent men and servitors sprawling.

‘What the feg was–’ she muttered over the vox-bead.

A high-pitched keening cut her off.

She fell, the intensity of the sonic burst forcing her to press her palms to her ears. ‘Throne!’ Jynn gasped, grimacing against the auditory pain.

The keening became a hum, throbbing at the back of the skull, but at least she could stand. Around the ice cavern, the walls were shaking. Sections of the ceiling rained down on the labourers in a cascade. The cries of one man ended abruptly when a slab of permafrost crushed him.

Jynn staggered. It was just like with Korve. Memories came flooding back, but she suppressed them, focussed on surviving instead. ‘Not yet, dear heart,’ she muttered, finding some resolve. ‘Not yet.’

Falka was on his feet too and rushing over to her.

‘You hurt?’ He had to shout to be heard above the ice-quake.

Jynn was about to answer when a massive cold cloud ripped through the vent in a bright white bloom. The rig-hands closest to the shaft were shredded by the host of shards within the cloud. Snow crystals fogging the air were tainted a visceral red.

A burst of hard, emerald light followed, refracted from the angular descent shaft beyond the vent. Shouting echoed from the icy dark, injured and desperate men trying to control some unseen catastrophe. The shouts became cries, and then screams. There was something else too… a sort of discharge, as of an energy beam or perhaps a heavy generator.

The winches slaved to the adamantite descent lines at the vent threshold started to retract. Someone was coming up.

‘We have to get out,’ said Jynn, then with greater urgency as the emerald light issuing from the vent intensified. ‘All of us – right now!’

Falka nodded.

‘No!’ she cried, seizing the big man’s arm as he made for the vent.

He looked back at her nonplussed. ‘People are down there, our people. They might need help.’

Jynn was shaking her head. ‘They’re gone, Fal. This way, come on.’

‘Wha… but…’

‘They’re dead! Now, come on!’ She heaved and he followed, reluctant at first but then with more conviction. Something was scurrying up the shaft. It sounded like a horde of giant, mechanical ants.

The first of the rig-hands from below made it to the ice cavern. He was dead. Men screamed, terrified, when they saw the flesh of his partly flayed corpse. Surgical, precise, horrific – it was as if the layers had been stripped anatomically.

More followed, equally gruesome.

Jynn and Falka were running, shouting at anyone who would listen to join them, yanking environment suits or shoving them bodily. Down tools and flee. This was not a rescue; it was a full scale evacuation.

She found Rancourt cowering behind a rigger, getting his aides to peer around its armoured flanks and provide him with updates. Several of his entourage were dead, one from fright when the keening blast had struck; another to the sudden avalanche from the ceiling.

‘Get up!’ She seized his collar and pulled. ‘Get up! These people need guidance. The surface must be told what’s happening down here.’

‘What is happening?’ he shrieked, unwilling to stand at first, casting fearful glances towards the vent where the emerald glow was now spilling into the ice cavern.

Jynn looked over her shoulder, still hanging on to Rancourt’s suit. ‘Falka!’

The big man gently moved her aside and threw the administrator over his shoulder.

‘Unhand me! I am an officer of the Imperium. Release me at once!’

‘Shut up.’ Falka smacked Rancourt’s head into the rigger just hard enough to leave him dazed.

Then they were running again. The remnants of the administrator’s retinue followed without need for coercion.

The exit shaft and the rail-lifters were just a few metres ahead. The light from the surface was like a soothing balm as it touched Jynn’s sweat-slick face. She glanced back.

Several more rig-hands from below had made it to the ice cavern. Though they were far away and her view was unsteady on account of her fleeing for her life, she made out… creatures attached to the miners. The rig-hands were thrashing and squirming. Eventually they fell and the swarm dispersed, silver beetle-like creatures the size of Falka’s clenched fist, leaving a flensed corpse in their wake.

‘God-Emperor have mercy,’ she breathed.

Larger, bulkier shadows were reaching the end of the vent shaft. A coruscating emerald beam lanced from the darkness, throwing a spider-like creature into sharp relief. Like the beetles it was metallic, but almost the size of a rigger. The beam, fired from one of the creature’s mandibles, struck a fleeing rig-hand and atomised him. The afterimage of the man’s flayed skeleton was seared into Jynn’s retinas just before it collapsed into ash and she looked away.

‘Move, move!’

They raced into the nearest rail-lifter. About sixty rig-hands had joined them on the access plate, and Falka gunned the engine as soon as they were all aboard.

Jynn gazed to the distant surface as the heavy winches began to drone. She willed the oval of light from the ground-zero bore point closer.

Below them, the other rail-lifters started up – fifteen in total, all screaming, engines hot, towards the upper world.

One of the cables snapped, lashing wildly with the sudden slack. A beam from one of the spiders had severed it. Rig-hands screamed as they plunged to their deaths. Others, clinging on, could only watch in horror as the beetles already scaling the shaft wall sprang from their perches and landed amongst them.

Jynn saw a few of the miners let go and embrace death by falling rather than face being flayed alive.

The hard drone of a warning klaxon sounded from farther up the shaft. The oval of light was becoming a rectangular strip, narrowing by the second.

Rancourt, having recently regained consciousness, put away his command-stave. Falka saw him do it and rounded on him.

‘What are you doing? The others will never make it.’

The administrator’s pupils were dilated, his eyes wide and haunted. ‘Those th-things…’ he stammered. ‘They can’t be allowed to get out.’

‘Bastard!’ Falka punched him, a solid blow to the chin that put Rancourt back on his arse, and then ripped the command-stave from the administrator’s trappings. ‘Show me how to stop it,’ he said, bearing down on him, threatening more violence.

‘Leave him,’ Jynn wrenched the big man’s shoulder. She had a strong grip and made him turn.

‘You’re defending this worm?’

‘He’s right, Fal.’ The sides of the shaft blurred past and the displaced air snapped at Jynn’s hair.

Falka shook his head. Those men and women were his friends. ‘No!’ He was about to beat down on Rancourt again when Jynn smacked him hard in the chest with the flat of her hand. It didn’t hurt the big man but it got his attention.

‘He’s right,’ she said again, continuing in a small voice when she looked below – her mind tried to blot out the carnage and horror. ‘We can’t let them get out.’

Falka’s grimace became a snarl as he pounded at the holding spar with impotent rage. ‘Hold on,’ he growled, moving towards the engine. ‘We’re about to breach the surface.’

The rail-lifter cleared the slowly closing shaft doors and after a few more metres broke into the pale Damnosian sun. Another miner called Fuge kicked open the exit ramp and the sixty or so survivors pounded it across to the arctic tundra of the upper world.

Though the sun was shining, an icy wind brought a chill and kicked up slurries of snow and frost eddies. The barren wastes of Damnos had never looked so bleak.

There was no need for conversation. What could any of them say, anyway? So the sixty survivors made for the distant comms-bunker, marching in file, heads bowed against the wind and ice. Behind them the shutting of the shaft door was like a death knell for the hundreds still trapped within.

850.973.M41

There was still no word from Damnos Prime, and the Valkyrie gunships Lieutenant Sonne had deployed from Secundus to investigate were also quiet. It didn’t take a soldier’s instincts to realise that something was wrong.

‘We’re experiencing a full communications black-out in the northern regions all the way to the Tyrrean Ocean, colonel,’ he gave his report to Quintus Tarn. The commander of the Damnosian Ark Guard peered over steepled fingers into the shadows of his operations chamber. His mood was pensive. Leaning on the desk with his elbows, he hadn’t stirred the entire time Adanar Sonne had been in his presence.

Behind the colonel a planetary map showed the location of each and every manufactorum, drilling-station, mining complex, refinery, labour-clave and outpost on Damnos. Unlit lume-globes represented the stations that Kellenport, the planetary capital, had lost touch with. Precious few of the globes were lit.

The wave of darkness emanating from the north reminded Adanar of a slowly creeping shroud. ‘We picked up a group of refugee mine workers from one of the outposts near Damnos Prime,’ he offered.

Tarn looked up at Adanar for the first time since he’d entered the room.

‘How many?’

‘Thirteen, sir.’

‘Are they saying anything?’

‘I don’t know yet, colonel. They were picked up by a patrol. Apparently, they’d been trekking across the tundra for several weeks. Administrator Rancourt is amongst the survivors,’ Adanar added.

‘Inform the lord governor and bring them all to me as soon as they arrive at Kellenport.’

‘Yes, sir. Is there anything else?’

‘Do you have a wife and child, Lieutenant Sonne?’ asked Tarn. The colonel was staring right into his eyes.

‘Er, yes… Yes, I do.’

Though Tarn smiled, his eyes were despairing black gulfs.

As if seeing them for the first time, Adanar noticed the stubs of tabac in a silver tray to the commander’s left; on the right was a vox-unit. Its message received light was flashing silently.

‘Is something wrong, sir?’

‘Listen,’ Tarn answered simply.

He broke the steeple of his fingers and replayed the vox-message blinking insistently on the unit. The opening segment was fraught with static, natural interference on account of the distance and the weather conditions. Slowly, a voice resolved through the auditory crackle.

‘…found something, sir…’

Adanar recognised the hard timbre of Major Tarken. He didn’t know the man personally but his reputation preceded him as one of the most lauded combat veterans amongst the Ark Guard.

Colonel Tarn tapped a rune on the vox-unit and a grainy hololith issued from a projector-node. It took a few seconds to synch to the audio. Major Tarken appeared in jagged resolution.

‘Image-servitors accompanied the platoon,’ the colonel explained unnecessarily.

Major Tarken was speaking to the picter. ‘The manufactorums at Damnos Prime were silent, but there is definitely something here.’

The view swung downwards at the major’s request, revealing several skeletal remains.

‘Could be labour serfs or rig-hands…’

Adanar caught Tarn’s hooded gaze. ‘Was this a live feed?’

‘Up until about twenty minutes ago.’

The picter swung up again. Panning left and right, it showed Tarken’s men advancing in echelon formation. The sound kept cutting out, succumbing to crackling interference or the occasional hiss of static, but it seemed quiet. Mist from the cold exuded off the walls in a fine veil. Tarken’s kit and that of his men was wet with the moisture, and crusted from it flash-freezing.

‘…moving into the main drilling area now…’ Tarken was whispering and brought up his lasgun. Somebody shouted from up ahead, a scout off-picter.

‘Where was this?’ asked Adanar, utterly enrapt on the hololith.

‘Dagoth Station, three hundred kilometres north of Secundus at Halaheim.’

A flash on the pict was too bright to be static. Someone had started firing.

‘Contacts! Contacts!’ Tarken was running and the whir of the servitor’s tracked impellers could be heard as it shifted gear to keep pace with the major. Though largely stable, the additional momentum made the image blur and haze. The whine of lasguns was getting louder over the audio, too.

Adanar leaned in closer. Tarken had reached his frontline and was taking up a position behind some riggers evidently in for repair. Around thirty men adopted similar postures and hunkered down. Farther ahead, men were shouting. The scouts were discharging weapons and Tarken was trying to raise their sergeant on the vox.

Something garbled came over the vox-return, twice filtered for Adanar’s ears and totally indiscernible.

The picter was still shaking, although the servitor had stopped behind the major.

‘Can we steady it?’

Tarn didn’t answer. He was fixated on the hololith.

Something was appearing through the mist. An emerald glow coloured the fog suddenly, as if tainting it. Shots from the scouts ended with its arrival.

‘Holy Throne…’ Tarken was levelling his lasgun over the makeshift barricade. A beam snapped out of the dark, ugly and green, and one of the riggers was shorn in two. ‘Holy fegging Throne! All weapons, bring them down!’

The chamber lit up with over thirty las-bursts. Tarken’s troopers went to full automatic, draining their power packs with an abandon and urgency Adanar had never seen before in professional soldiers.

The things coming out of the fog, they were… nightmares. It was the only word Adanar could think of to describe them. Huge, broad-shouldered skeletoids with strange, glowing carbines attached to their arms. Energy coursed up and down the wide tubular barrels and was expelled in bright lances of dirty emerald.

They moved like automatons, neither speaking nor slowing as a barrage of las-bolts hammered them.

‘Increase fire!’

The picter zoomed in, blurring the image at first but then focussing in on one of the metal skeletons. Its eyes blazed with a terrible fire, suggesting a crude sentience that chilled the lieutenant’s blood even removed, as he was, from the firefight and the moment.

Adanar saw the creature jerk spasmodically as it was struck by countless las-shots. It must have taken over ten well-placed bolts to down it. Chunks of metal flew off its carapace body, fused rib-plate and punctured presumably vital systems before it fell.

The picter lingered. Horrified, Adanar watched the broken components slowly reknit as las-fire raged around the creature’s prone form. Wires snaked across the ground finding other wires and, like sewn flesh, drew the shattered pieces together. Metal became as mercury, dissolving into liquid before being drawn to the torso as if magnetised. Impossibly, the skeleton rose intact and fired its terrible beam weaponry again.

‘…all back… Fall back!’

Tarken stood up to order the retreat. The vox-man next to him was spun by a glancing hit from one of the beams. Half of his face and right shoulder were missing, simply stripped down to glistening bone.

It was more rout than retreat.

Major Tarken took a hit to the chest. His carapace armour dissolved on contact, so too his uniform and under-mesh, his skin and flesh and bone. A hole opened up in his back, what remained of blood and innards cauterised before Tarken crumpled in a dead heap.

The image-servitor was the last to fall. Unarmed, Adanar assumed it presented the lowest level of threat to the creatures.

Just before the report ended a looming skeletal face filled the screen. Bale-fires smouldered in its eye sockets and spoke of unfathomable hatred.

A squeal of binaric or something like it keened through the speaker. Adanar winced and recoiled. When he’d opened his eyes a split second later, the screen was dead, frozen on the skeleton’s face.

The lieutenant was sweating, his heart racing in his chest. He licked his lips. They were dry and his voice croaked at first, ‘What are those…?’ He coughed, clearing his throat and tried again. ‘What are they, colonel?’

A figure emerging out of the darkness behind Tarn had Adanar reaching for his laspistol. He only relaxed when he recognised Magos Karnak.

The tech-priest’s timbre was as cold and unforgiving as Adanar imagined the skeletons to be. ‘Ancient and terrible, and they are here, lieutenant.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

Tarn interjected, switching off the hololith and stopping the dead-air audio feed. ‘It means they have come for us, for this world.’

Adanar bit back his anger – he was only reacting to his irrational fear. ‘With respect, sir, that explains shit-all. What’s going on?’

‘The lord governor has been informed,’ said Tarn, ‘and is being secured in a Proteus-class command bunker with his generals as we speak. He intends to conduct operations from there.’

‘Very wise, sir, but what precisely are we dealing with here?’

‘The Nobilis has been contacted and is adopting geo-stationary orbit above the capital.’

Tarn was talking as if he’d lost it. Adanar wanted to shake him. ‘Sir!’

‘They are coming to Kellenport, Sonne. I sent over fifty thousand men to Damnos Prime and Secundus, and all the stations in-between. All of them, our fleet at anchor in the Tyrrean – dead, all of them.’

Adanar nearly choked. ‘What?’

Karnak advanced into Adanar’s eye-line, the whirr of his tracks drawing a scowl from the lieutenant.

‘That scrambled piece of binaric was a data-burst,’ the magos explained. ‘There was a message encoded within it. Based on a proto-Gothic linguistic system, it was easy to discern the meaning. My xeno-linguistic savants took approximately thirteen point two-six minutes to decipher it.’

‘Are you looking for praise, magos?’

‘No, I am merely suggesting that the simple encoding was deliberate. They wanted us to hear it.’

‘Hear what?’ asked Adanar.

Colonel Tarn activated a different message spool on the vox-unit. After a few seconds of charged silence an unearthly voice issued from the speakers. It resonated with age and archaic menace, as if drawn from the grave or the depths of a planet-eating black hole.

We are the necrontyr. We are legion. We claim dominion of this world… Surrender and die.

‘Throne of Earth,’ Adanar could only rasp. He found his composure again after a few more seconds. ‘Surely, it means surrender or die?’

Karnak uttered a sombre reply. ‘No, Lieutenant Sonne, the translation is accurate.’

‘In the Emperor’s name, what are these things?’

‘Death, lieutenant – they are death. Adanar,’ said the colonel, getting to his feet at last. ‘Take your family and get out of Kellenport. Go south. Do it quickly, before it’s too late.’

020.974.M41

Aboard the Nobilis

The bridge was frantic with activity.

Captain Unser barked orders at his command crew from a gilded throne inlaid with operation-gems and picter-slates. ‘Get me firing solutions on those war cells, now!’

Naval ratings scattered as Unser’s flag-lieutenant cracked the whip of his tongue in relaying the captain’s commands. Far below the sub-command dais, servitors slaved to control-pits worked tirelessly to manoeuvre the ship, responding to the dictates of their helmsman; others processed and relayed back firing information, making minor weapons adjustments that would be fed down to the gun-decks.

‘Melta torpedoes at forty-four per cent, my lord,’ said the flag-lieutenant, Ikaran.

Unser’s eyes flashed in the sepulchral gloom of the bridge. The long scar he’d earned whilst posted in support of the Plovian VI Imperial Guard looked like a vertical grin on the left side of his face. ‘Give ’em another dose, sir.’

Ikaran relayed the orders and the message bled down through the ship to the gun-decks.

Unser smiled, his mouth pulling at the injuries that chronicled a life that had only ever known war.

He loved this. He absolutely… Loved. It.

The Nobilis was invincible. A capital ship, the largest in the line, Dominator-class – it was an expression of Unser’s undeniable will and righteous anger. Dread enemies had come to Damnos, unearthed from the very bowels of the world. Though he had not seen them up close, Unser was determined to send them back to whence they came, turning them into the corpses they already resembled.

‘Torpedoes away, lord,’ said Ikaran.

‘Bring it up.’

The bridge picters delineating the forward arc of the command dais came online. They showed a view of realspace and the half hemisphere of southern Damnos. Bright, blazing contrails invaded the vista as the torpedo payload sped earthwards.

Unser leant forwards, revelling in the power. ‘And in three… two… one–’

A series of bright blooms lit the world’s surface from the massive impacts. The Nobilis was at the cusp of the mesosphere and close enough to see the effect of the incendiaries on the ground.

Ikaran had his hand to his ear, a comms-officer on board ship reporting back to him.

‘Hits on eighty per cent of targets, lord.’

Unser allowed himself to sit back. He gripped the arms of his command throne like a triumphant king. ‘Another barrage, if you please.’

The air was hot and sweaty on the gun-decks. Thousands of crew and hauler-servitors scurried in packs as the order came down from the bridge.

Overseer Caenen applied the lash to increase their efforts.

‘Sweat and blood, dogs,’ he drawled, bawling above the heavy drone of the engines and loading machinery. His hellish gaze followed the ammo hoppers, hoisted by teams of swarthy, soot-stained men, and glowered. ‘The cap’n wants another, we give him another!’ The lash cracked out again and the crews of torpedo tubes five through ten picked up the pace. All down the port-ventral aisle of the Nobilis’s gun-deck, the scene was the same. Overseers urged their crews with threats and cajoling, just like any good Navy men.

In less than three minutes the next barrage of torpedoes was prepared, the tubes locked, their deadly cargo primed for launch.

A wave of green ‘ready’ runes flickered down the hot darkness of the gun-deck. Vox communication went to the gunners who angled the tubes mechanically from their firing nests according to solutions provided by the bridge. All was in harmony, the perfect machine with the men of its crew its blood and sinew.

Caenen leapt down from his pulpit, stepping on a servitor’s bent back so he didn’t have to use the stairs. He grunted when his boots met the deck in a heavy thunk, berating a man for getting in his way and punching out another as he moved to a viewport.

The tiny aperture afforded a limited view of realspace, but enough to witness a torpedo barrage. Tearing open the iron hatch, Caenen wiped the grime and warp-frost from the many-layered plascrete protecting them all from the void and simply looked.

To the overseer, a bombardment was a thing of beauty. Even the many slummer-whores he had bedded, in spite of his scars and his lack of hygiene, paled. She, the Nobilis, was his true mistress… and the bitch had quite a slap in her.

When the launch tubes failed to vent, Caenen frowned. He wiped at his heavy breath where it had fogged the viewport, but he hadn’t missed it. The tubes were still full. He was about to start shouting and bawling again, ready to apply his boot to the fegger who’d screwed him, when a dense, ultra-concentrated beam speared from the surface.

‘What the shi–’

We are invulnerable.

The thought was a comfortable one and Captain Unser was enjoying this feeling of pre-eminence when the weapons failure rune on his command-slate spoiled it.

‘Mister Ikaran, report!’

The flag-lieutenant had his hand to his ear again, getting information from the comms-officer. ‘A jam, lord. We’ll have to repack and acquire new firing–’

The massive energy spike raging across all of the pict-screens on the bridge arrested Ikaran’s recommendations.

‘Lord, our shields will be–’

‘Impossible,’ breathed Unser, sitting up so he might defy his imminent death more staunchly. ‘They don’t have… Up here… we’re invinc–’

A bright flare of emerald light filled the bridge, blinding the crew and scorching their flesh despite the plascrete shielding on the viewports. The Nobilis’s shields capitulated in seconds, one after the other, and the once mighty vessel’s armour was sheared away like parchment by the necron beam. It impaled the bridge and lanced the heart of the ship. Plasma drives erupted in conflagration, sending roiling firestorms across all decks. Munitions and artillery cooked off in the blast, killing thousands. The main breach caused by the beam’s hungry trajectory resulted in several more sub-breaches – crewmen, equipment, entire bulkheads and sub-decks were vented into the void, flash-frozen.

In the gun-decks, Overseer Caenen didn’t even have enough time to curse before the torpedo wall was ripped away and the entire gunnery crew, all two thousand, three hundred and fifty souls, burned to death before being expelled into the cold night of space.

Lord Governor Arxis had not always been in the business of politicking. Unfortunately, it was a necessary evil when running a world of the Imperium. Such a task required a strong hand and a firm belief in the Emperor. Deviation from the Creed could not be tolerated; the people lived to serve His greater glory and the glory of mankind.

Arxis was once Imperial Guard, a general no less, and now he sat amongst his generals, the trappings of politics forgotten and the familiar mantle of soldier resting firmly upon his shoulders.

It was comforting.

The news he’d just received about the Nobilis was not.

‘Throne, the entire ship? In one attack?’

Field-Marshal Lanspur nodded sombrely. ‘Captain Unser bought us some ground, possibly even some time with the barrages the Nobilis was able to make, but the ship is dead, my lord – all twelve thousand, three hundred and eighty-one souls.’

‘Merciful Emperor…’ Arxis was staring into space, finding it hard to comprehend what the necrons had done. He looked up at his commanders. The sixteen men arrayed around the metal table in the Proteus bunker looked back with carefully neutral expressions.

‘The astropathic message?’

‘Has been sent,’ replied the governor’s choirmaster, a robed adept called Fava who was in charge of all interstellar communication to and from Damnos. ‘We got it out just before the blackout.’

Though most short-wave vox transmissions were still in effect, anything longer range, certainly off-world communication, was utterly dead. The necrons had some kind of jamming shroud fouling it.

‘Then we should pray to the Golden Throne that it reaches allies quickly. For now, we marshal what defences we can.’ Arxis was about to address his master of ordnance, a short, pugnacious man who was loyal like a bloodhound, when a dull scraping sound stopped the words in his throat and altered them. ‘Did you hear that?’

The scraping was getting louder, resonating against the metal inner walls of the bunker.

Several of the governor’s military staff nodded.

Sytner, his chief bodyguard, drew a pistol. ‘Sire, we have to move you. Now.’ He said it forcefully but without panic. Sytner had been a storm trooper, serving in the same regiment as Arxis back in the day. The lord governor trusted the stocky man, recognised the urgency in his tan face, and nodded.

Beneath them, the ground trembled. Sytner stepped in, pushing the lord governor behind him and tipping the table back with one hand. Like the pillars of termites that formed in Damnos’s arid zone, a column of metal-flecked earth spiralled upwards from the ground. The bunker floor was several-centimetre-thick ferrocrete, but the tunnellers bored through it anyway.

A beetle-like creature, silver-backed and dirty with earth, poked out at the apex of the pillar. Sytner shot it with his laspistol, pitching it onto its back, legs twitching.

‘By the ice-hells, what…’ Gaben-dun leaned in for a closer look. The pillar erupted in front of him and in seconds the master of ordnance was swarmed with the beetle creatures. He fell writhing, the weight of the diminutive necrons bringing the big man down, and screamed.

‘Throne of Earth,’ gaped the choirmaster, seeing moist bone poking up from the chitinous mass assailing Gaben-dun. ‘They’re eating his flesh!’

‘Out! Out!’ shouted Sytner.

Lanspur and four of the other commanders had also drawn sidearms and put themselves between the carnivorous beetles and the lord governor.

‘Open fire!’ snapped Sytner and the crack of las filled the chamber along with the stink of fyceline.

Silver beetle-creatures split in half and spun off the corpse. A few las-bolts even pierced poor Gaben-dun, though the master of ordnance was little more than a sack of slowly dissolving meat by now.

When they were done with their first kill, the swarm converged on the rest.

Sytner and his fellows were soon shooting at the ceiling and the walls as the beetles scuttled towards them without impediment. A larger tremor shook the chamber and the room just as they were retreating into the bunker’s annexe.

A vox-unit switched to open frequency crackled to life, adding to the confusion. Frantic reports came over the speakers from the outside: of the walls being compromised; of the enemy inside the defences, seemingly appearing out of thin air; of high-pitched beam weapons and the screaming of their victims.

Arxis clenched his fists impotently as the floor caved in completely, taking Lanspur with it, and a much larger insectoid lumbered into view.

Men were being flayed alive outside…

One creature, its carapace glistening silver and suggestive of an arachnid construct, became three. Sytner’s las-bolt caromed ineffectually off the hide of the first. Its mandible claw snapped out and severed the man in two. To his credit, Sytner didn’t scream.

The choirmaster did, just as his face and torso were melted off by the second spider’s beam-spike. It started as a death-shriek then ended in a wet gurgle of sloughed flesh and matter.

The rest of the command staff didn’t last much longer. Scarabs claimed them – the lord governor could think of no better way to describe the beetle swarms – or the arachnids butchered them.

Arxis was alone, surrounded by foes, trapped by the illusory protection of his own Proteus bunker.

He had time to kneel before he died; a prayer to the Emperor on his lips and the barrel of a laspistol to his temple.

When he squeezed the trigger, the weapon groaned and failed. Exhausted during those first frantic moments, the power pack was out.

Arxis closed his eyes before the claws took him.

Phalanx

Ben Counter

Chapter 5

‘It will not hurt, brother,’ said Sister Solace to Brother Sennon. In the cramped cell, once the living space of an engineer among the cavernous workings of the Phalanx, a few candles guttered, giving a struggling yellowish light. In Solace’s hands was a wide-gauge needle hooked up to a pump and an intravenous bag.

‘I do not fear pain,’ replied Sennon, who lay bare-chested on a mattress. Sweat beaded on his face in spite of his words, and his voice came from a dry throat. He had never looked younger. In the shadows he seemed a child, defying the cowardice that his youth should have brought him.

‘We need not make ourselves suffer now,’ replied Solace. ‘The time for such things is over. Let the Emperor’s kindness soothe you, and I shall make you as comfortable as possible.’

Sennon swallowed, and winced as the tip of the needle touched the vein Solace had located on the inside of his elbow. The needle slid under his skin, the pump began to work and the intravenous bag filled up. Solace hooked up a second bag, this one filled with a clear bluish liquid.

‘Speak to me, my brother,’ she said as Sennon’s eyes drifted out of focus. ‘What can you see?’

‘I see you, my sister,’ said Sennon. His throat constricted and he grimaced as he fought to breathe. Solace took his hand and squeezed. ‘I see… this place is gone. There are no walls. The Phalanx is gone.’

‘What is it? What do you see?’

‘I see… a battlefield.’ Sennon’s body relaxed and his eyes seemed to focus on a point far off, past the ceiling of the cell with its rag-tag collection of mementos from a life among the engines of the Phalanx. Cogs and valves were piled up on a shelf beneath a metal icon painted with the symbol of the Imperial Fists. A few ragged sets of protective clothing were hung up above an alcove containing three pairs of battered steel-toed boots. A paltry collection of religious verses and children’s stories filled a small cupboard beside the mattress on which Sennon lay, and on the ceiling a previous occupier had drawn images of stars and crescent moons. Sennon saw none of it. Solace thought for a moment that she could see an endless landscape of rolling plains and mountains reflected in the youth’s eyes as his pupils expanded to black pools.

‘It goes on forever,’ said Sennon, his breath hushed. ‘They are all there, all those who have died in the Emperor’s name. They are there to join him in the battle at the end of time.’

‘Tell me,’ said Sister Solace. She adjusted the pump, which hummed louder as the liquid coursed faster through Sennon’s veins. Gauges on the side of the pump read various pressures and she tried to keep them aligned. Too fast or too slow and the youth would die.

‘I see billions of them, the uniforms of the Imperial Guard,’ said Sennon. A million regiments, bayonets fixed, stretching across a world. And others too, ordinary men and women in a great throng. All the pious souls that have ever died. And at the forefront are the Adeptus Astartes, the Angels of Death!’

Solace looked up. A trickle of blood ran from Sennon’s nose. ‘As Gyranar told us?’ she asked.

‘Yes! Oh, sister, they are beautiful! Their armour gleams, and they have wings of gold on which to fly!’ Sennon’s face spread into a rapturous smile, even as blood collected in the corner of his mouth. ‘Their eyes are aflame! Mighty blades shine in their hands. But… but the Enemy is here also. The Adversary. All the foul tongues of the warp have spoken into existence an army even greater!’

Sennon’s body began to shudder. Solace took the youth’s pulse from his wrist: his heart was hammering, his face now showing an awestruck fear.

‘Speak to me of them, brother,’ said Solace. ‘There is nothing to fear in them. They cannot harm you. Speak to me.’

‘Monsters without form. Flesh turned liquid, bathed in fire. Legions of the hateful warp-spawned, like regiments on the parade ground. Things of living corruption, smothered under a blanket of flies, seething masses of filth! Mountains of rot that vomit torrents of their progeny onto the field! And worse… sister, worse things, so sinful and lascivious in form that I cannot look away! Tear my eyes from them, sister, before they infect my soul!’

‘Do not fear, brother. I am with you. The Emperor is with you. No harm can befall you, for you are under His protection. Believe in Him, believe, brother!’

‘And still more,’ continued Sennon, his voice speeding up into a near-gabble. ‘The generals and the overlords of the Adversary. They tower! Their shadows cast whole continents into darkness! Mighty horned things, wielding blades wreathed in flame! I see a beast with a hundred heads, crowned with laurels of entwined bodies. I see… I see a creature red-skinned and immense, its wings blocking out the sun, the axe in its hand oozing blood! I can see all the galaxy’s hatred in its twisted face. But it cannot harm me. Though its eyes fall on me, it cannot harm me!’

‘No,’ said Solace. ‘It cannot.’ She lacked the equipment to read Sennon’s vital signs properly, so she had to do it by eye, reading the youth’s pulse and the dilation of his pupils, the spasming of his fingers and toes, the alternating rigidity and weakness of his limbs. The Phalanx had some of the finest medicae facilities in the Imperium within its apothecarion and the sickbays used by the crew, but Solace had to do this work away from the eyes of the Imperial Fists and the Phalanx’s crewmen. It had to be done this way.

And if Sennon died, there were others. She would go through the whole Blinded Eye if she had to. If it came to it, she would do this to herself.

‘I see the gods of the warp!’ gasped Sennon. ‘Saints take my eyes! Faithful hands strip me of my senses! I see such things that creation cannot contain! Talon and hateful eye, wing and feather, an ocean of rotting flesh and the awful knotted limbs of the eternal dancer! And yet… and yet they are in shadow, cast by a far greater light…’

Solace checked the gauges. Most of Sennon’s blood was gone. The fluid that replaced it was pumping through him, but it might not be fast enough. This was the most dangerous point, where the body hovered between bleeding to death and being suffused with its replacement blood.

‘The Primarchs stand ready to command the host. Sanguinius the Angel paints his face with a million tears, one for every blood-brother who stands by his side. Russ and the Lion are side by side, their hatred for one another gone, the Wolves of Fenris and the Dark Angels standing proud. Guilliman and his host, vaster than any other army ever assembled. The Khan, the Iron-Handed One, and Vulkan, all gathered exhorting their brothers to war! And Dorn, holy Dorn, sacred Dorn, the greatest of them, I see the banner in his hands spun from the starlight of every sun within the Emperor’s domain! He is the Champion of the Emperor, the first to fight, the tip of His spear and the lightning that shall be cast down among the enemy! He shines like gold, such a blaze of fire that the enemy are blinded and they howl in anguish at the presence of such holiness!’

Sennon gasped and his eyes rolled back. Solace grabbed his hand and squeezed it tighter. ‘Brother! Keep talking, brother! Tell me what you see! Sennon, tell me what you see!’

Sennon just gasped in response, spraying flecks of blood down his chin.

Solace scrabbled in the meagre selection of medical gear that lay on the floor around her. She found a syringe and tore its wrapping open. The syringe was pre-loaded with a fat needle as long as a finger and a steel cylinder of a body. Solace held the syringe point-down over Sennon’s chest, muttered a prayer, and stabbed down.

The needle punched between Sennon’s ribs. The liquid inside flooded into his heart and his whole body juddered as if hit with an electric shock. Solace had to lean over him and put her body weight on him to keep the needle from breaking off or tearing too big a hole in the youth’s heart. Sennon gasped, sputtering more blood. A mist of it spattered against the side of Solace’s face. His body tensed and arched, joints creaking.

Sennon slumped down again. He let out a long rattling breath from a painfully dry throat.

‘I see the Emperor,’ he murmured. ‘He tells me not to be afraid. He tells me to fight.’

Solace looked down at the gauges and readouts again. They had stabilised. The exchange was complete.

She withdrew the needle from Sennon’s arm and placed a dressing on the wound. She wiped the blood from his face with a wet cloth.

‘You will fight, my brother,’ she whispered. ‘I promise.’

In the tumult following Librarian Varnica’s evidence, Chapter Master Vladimir had called an adjournment to the trial. Sarpedon had been led back to his cell, the Imperial Fists refusing any answer to his requests to speak with Daenyathos. The alleged presence of the Philosopher-Soldier still had his mind in a whirl. The dismay that he had felt to have Abraxes’ existence revealed to the trial was a new counterpart to that confusion. Piece by piece, everything he had been sure of was falling apart.

He was grateful for the cell, though he had never thought he could think so. Its cramped walls and deadening psychic wards, smothering though they were, were preferable to the hatred that surrounded him in the courtroom. He crouched against one wall, and stared for a few minutes at the heap of crumpled papers, all that remained of his attempts to pen final words to his battle-brothers.

What could he say? What would make any difference? He had thought he would face this trial with dignity and courage, perhaps even to make his execution, when it came, a reluctant act on the part of the executioners. Now even that small victory felt very far away.

‘I will not kneel,’ he said to himself. ‘I will not despair. I am Adeptus Astartes. I will not despair.’

‘I fear for your sake, Chapter Master, that whether to despair is not your decision to make.’

Sarpedon’s eyes snapped to the opening in the cell door. It was not the voice of a Space Marine – it was a woman. This one had a note of familiarity to it, though.

Sarpedon scuttled up to the door. Beyond it, flanked by a pair of Imperial Fists with bolters at the ready, was Sister Aescarion of the Adepta Sororitas. She, like the Space Marines, wore her full armour to the trial and still had it on now, a suit of polished black ceramite emblazoned with the iconography of the Imperial Church. Her own weapon was the power axe but it was strapped to the jump pack of her armour now and she did not have it to hand. She was a full head shorter than a Space Marine for she was not augmented like them, and had a stern, angular yet handsome face with red-brown hair tied back in a ponytail.

‘I recall you from Stratix Luminae,’ said Sarpedon.

‘An encounter I would sooner forget,’ replied Aescarion.

‘None of us wish to remember the sight of an adversary who departs the battlefield alive.’

‘And you are still my adversary,’ said the Battle Sister. ‘Nothing has changed on that score. You are a traitor.’

‘And yet,’ said Sarpedon, ‘you willingly exchange words with me. It seems women are as a strange a breed of creature as men say.’

‘Not as strange as a condemned prisoner who makes light of his situation,’ said Aescarion with a withering look that had no doubt been the scourge of the Sororitas novices she had trained.

‘I trust you have not come here to swap insults, Sister,’ said Sarpedon.

Aescarion glanced at the Imperial Fists flanking her. ‘If you please,’ she said to them. ‘A few minutes are all I ask.’

‘Stay in sight,’ replied one of the Imperial Fists. The two Adeptus Astartes parted and walked several paces down the corridor outside Sarpedon’s cell, out of earshot.

‘They run a tight ship, these sons of Dorn,’ said Sarpedon, As strait-laced as they come. It must be a comfort to be in the presence of Space Marines who jump when Terra demands it.’

‘I find no comfort while enemies yet live,’ replied Aescarion sharply. ‘But I have nothing but admiration for the Imperial Fists, it is true. I find a little of my faith in humanity restored.’

‘I have faith in humanity as well, Sister. It is not the people of the Imperium I have ever had a problem with. It is the structures by which the Imperium maintains itself, clinging to existence through blood and cruelty. I have seen them over and over. And you have too, Sister Aescarion. Worlds condemned to misery or death. Freedom and rebellion given the same names and crushed beneath the mass of the shiploads of captives sent to Terra to–’

‘Enough! Do not speak of such things.’

‘And pretend, instead, that they never existed?’ Sarpedon reared up and put his face close to the window in the cell door.

‘No! Accept them as necessary for the survival of the human race, and turn our minds instead to the glory of our survival! That is how the Sororitas are taught.’

‘You think this is survival?’ Sarpedon held his arms wide, indicating not just his cell but everything beyond. ‘The human race is in its death throes! It inflicts miseries upon its people to protect them from its enemies, and yet it is those miseries that bring such enemies into being! Why do so many desperate people turn from the Emperor’s light and make pacts with the Dark Powers? Why do they cry out to be delivered and so walk right into xenos hands? The Imperium inflicts these wounds upon itself. It is nothing more than the slow death of mankind.’

‘You will need to find a far better orator than yourself, Sarpedon, to sway the mind of a Sister of Battle,’ retorted Aescarion sourly. ‘I did not come here to let you practice your closing arguments on me. I am here about my late master, Inquisitor Thaddeus. You know of him?’

Sarpedon sat back down on his haunches. ‘Yes. I knew him.’

‘Personally?’

‘A little.’

‘Thaddeus had the chance to take you down on Stratix Luminae. Perhaps kill you. But he did not take that chance. I was with him at the time and I did not understand his decision. I still do not. I want to know why Inquisitor Thaddeus, a servant of the Emperor and sworn enemy of all that hates mankind, chose to let you go.’

Sarpedon’s memories of Inquisitor Thaddeus were of a man who, at first sight, was completely out of his depth. He had looked like a functionary of the Administratum, some middle-ranking nobody. Some Inquisitors proclaimed their office with the most obvious and terrifying battlegear they could find, huge retinues of warriors and experts, even fleets and armies of their own. But Thaddeus walked softly in his duties.

‘After Stratix Luminae he tried to keep track of us, even after the Inquisition ordered us deleted from Imperial history,’ said Sarpedon. ‘When he found us on Vanqualis he had been hunting down every rumour of us. He had found… there were legends of us in places I was sure the Chapter had never been. One was of the Black Chalice. Another was the Ashen Grail. I did not give much thought to them at the time but now I fear there is some web that has been spun out there, in which the Soul Drinkers have their part but of which they are ignorant. Thaddeus was trying to unravel it.’

‘But he did not succeed,’ said Aescarion.

‘No. I imagine he is dead. The Howling Griffons crossed our path there, perhaps Captain Borganor can tell you more after he stops complaining about me cutting off his leg.’

‘But Thaddeus knew none of this on Stratix Luminae. Why not kill you then when he could?’ insisted Aescarion.

‘Perhaps,’ replied Sarpedon, ‘he knew we were right?’

Aescarion lost her cool for a second. She slammed the palm of her hand into the cell door. ‘You dare!’ she hissed. ‘He would never have thrown in his lot with your kind. Thaddeus was a good man. The best of men.’

‘But you want me to tell you that he was not corrupted. That hardly suggests you have great confidence in the man.’

‘You are just toying with me, Sarpedon. I will not provide you with any more amusement. You don’t know Thaddeus’s motives and I will content myself with that.’ Aescarion turned, about to rejoin her Imperial Fist minders and leave.

‘He tried to warn us,’ Sarpedon said. ‘The Ashen Grail and the Black Chalice, and everything else he found, it all pointed to something he was trying to warn us about. I don’t think even he knew what he had found, but his misgivings were deep enough for him to defy the deletion order and seek us out.’

‘Then he was leading you into a trap,’ said Aescarion.

‘And you have misgivings too. Otherwise you would not have sought me out here. How many lashes would a Sororitas receive for conversing with a known heretic? And yet you come to my cell looking for answers. You see it too, just like Thaddeus did. Something about this trial is wrong and you know it. Daenyathos’s return, here of all places, is no coincidence.’

‘There is no coincidence. You came to the Veiled Region to seek him out. You and he both are puppets of that thing Abraxes that Varnica spoke of.’

‘Well, sister, if you have made up your mind about everything already there hardly seems a need to question me at all.’

Aescarion shook her head. ‘Part of me wishes to know what must have to happen to an Adeptus Astartes before he can turn from the Emperor’s light. But I fear that such knowledge itself has the power to corrupt. I should have let you keep your silence, traitor. I hope this trial ends before you can do any more damage.’

‘Then I doubt you and I have anything more to say to one another.’

Aescarion didn’t bother to reply. She turned smartly on an armoured heel and walked out of sight down the brig corridor. One of the Imperial Fists slammed the window shut, and Sarpedon was alone again.

When visitors sought an audience with Chapter Master Vladimir on the Phalanx, he often chose to receive them in the Sigismarch Forest. This artificial woodland occupied an area amidships on one of the uppermost decks, its greenery illuminated by an artificial sun that made a circuit once every twenty-four hours. A river ran though it, fresh water diverted from the crew’s drinking supply to create the illusion that the forest was just part of a far greater lush and peaceful land where, even on board a vast weapon of war, a place of contemplation might be found.

‘So,’ said Vladimir, taking his place sat on a tree stump by the river bank where he was accustomed to receive his petitioners. ‘Speak.’

In the clearing before Vladimir stood Reinez. Behind him were the officers of the Adeptus Astartes who had come to the Phalanx for the trial. They included Varnica, whose evidence had prompted this re-evaluation of the whole trial. None of the captains and Librarians had brought their retinues with them, for this was not the place for a competitive show of arms.

‘I put it to the Justice Lord,’ began Reinez, ‘that the accused Sarpedon must be considered a moral threat. Librarian Varnica’s evidence proves the accused’s complicity with powers of the warp. This trial must cease and the executions be administered immediately.’ Reinez spoke with a snarling bluntness that made it clear he had thought this from the very start.

‘I see,’ said Vladimir. ‘Indeed, Varnica’s statements have changed the complexion of this trial. And yet I must see to it that justice is not only done, but that no man can find any reason to suggest that the course of justice has not been followed. For evidence of warpcraft, I have but the evidence of one Adeptus Astartes. As high as the esteem in which I hold you, Librarian Varnica, you are but one.’

‘That I cannot deny, my lord,’ replied Varnica. ‘But I know what I saw. The stink of the warp hangs over this whole affair.’

‘And when was suspicion ever insufficient evidence in matters of a moral threat?’ added Reinez.

‘I know that you long to see Sarpedon dead, Reinez,’ replied Vladimir, pointedly omitting any rank when he addressed the Crimson Fist, for since Reinez had become a penitent he had abandoned all rank within his own Chapter. ‘But this trial is not held to give you your vengeance. If you are to remain in the position of prosecutor you must be patient.’

‘Patient? Must I have the patience to endure that heretic speaking in his own defence? And from whence shall I gather the patience, Justice Lord, to sit unmoved through all the lies of the Soul Drinkers? Is Daenyathos to speak, too? Luko, and Salk, and all the Soul Drinkers, are they to have their chance to utter corruption as well?’

‘If that is what it takes for me to be satisfied that justice is done,’ said Vladimir, ‘then yes.’

‘The Soul Drinkers are not the only ones who will have their time to speak,’ said another voice, one who had not joined in the discussion as yet. It was that of Captain N’Kalo of the Iron Knights. The Iron Knights were, like the Soul Drinkers, a successor Chapter of the Imperial Fists, and the stain on Dorn’s honour had seemed enough to bring a delegation from the Iron Knights to the Phalanx. Suddenly, the other Adeptus Astartes present were not so sure that N’Kalo was here just as a matter of course.

‘You have seen the Soul Drinkers for a moral threat?’ asked Reinez.

‘No,’ replied N’Kalo levelly. ‘I will speak in their defence.’ N’Kalo’s expression was impossible to guess at since his face was covered. He wore, even in the presence of the Chapter Master, a helm with an eye slit reminiscent of plate armour from some feudal world. Everywhere on him were hung campaign medallions, laurels and purity seals, the steel of his armour only just showing through the brocade of his many honours.

‘Their defence?’ snarled Reinez.

‘N’Kalo, brother, what are you saying?’ demanded Siege-Captain Daviks.

‘I say just what I say,’ replied N’Kalo. ‘I wish to speak in defence of Sarpedon and the Soul Drinkers. Will you deny me that right?’

‘I shall!’ barked Reinez. ‘As the prosecutor in the Emperor’s name I deny you any right to interfere in the punishment of that heretic!’ Reinez jabbed a finger in N’Kalo’s face, but the Iron Knight did not flinch.

‘Reinez!’ shouted Vladimir. ‘This is not your decision to make.’

‘By the Throne, I say it is! Upon my honour as an Adeptus Astartes, you will have to go through me before you utter one word that does not condemn the traitors!’

‘If I may,’ interjected Commander Gethsemar of the Angels Sanguine, ‘I believe that the precedent exists for him to do just that.’ Gethsemar, like N’Kalo, had spoken little, and his voice was a smooth, honeyed sound quite at odds with the warrior heritage of his Chapter.

‘Is that what you desire, Reinez?’ said Vladimir. ‘An honour-duel with Captain N’Kalo?’

‘If that is what it takes,’ replied Reinez, still face to face with N’Kalo. ‘If the Emperor lends strength to my arm, N’Kalo stays silent and the Soul Drinkers are condemned no matter what he wishes.’

‘And if I best you,’ said N’Kalo, ‘I say my piece.’

‘It does not matter what you will do,’ said Reinez. ‘I have torn the throats from warp-beasts a million miles from any Battle-Brother. I stood on worlds as they died and fought through armies of the damned to survive. You are a child compared to me. You cannot win. Drop to one knee now, acknowledge me your superior, and there need be no duel. I will accept your surrender without your having to suffer at my hand.’

‘I would not deny you the pleasure of breaking my bones,’ said N’Kalo, voice still calm.

‘Where is this duel to be held?’ said Gethesemar.

‘Here,’ replied Reinez. ‘This is the place where Sigismund, the first Templar, came to contemplate his duty, is it not?’

‘It is,’ replied Vladimir.

‘Then perhaps Captain N’Kalo will have the chance to contemplate his own duties as he lies on this ground beneath my boot.’

‘Enough talk, Reinez!’ said Vladimir. ‘Gethsemar, since you proposed it, you shall oversee the duel. Brothers, gather your Adeptus Astartes so that all will witness the result. N’Kalo, Reinez, select your weapons and make yourselves ready. Then we shall have no more discussion of this matter. The honour-duel shall be final. This is the Emperor’s justice, and all aboard will hold to it as His word.’

‘Amen,’ said Reinez with a smile.

Gethsemar revelled in his role as master of ceremonies. He changed his mask for one with a stern brown and downturned mouth, ruby eyes and a stylised scar on one cheek. His Sanguinary Guard stood watch alongside him, glaives drawn, framed by the wing-like stabilising fins on their jump packs. Their gilded armour gleamed almost painfully bright as the forest’s artificial sun came overhead and bathed the riverside glade in light. Lysander waited behind them, knowing that although he was here to enforce Vladimir’s will just as much as the Angels Sanguine, there was no need to impede Gethsemar’s sense of showmanship.

Around the edge of the clearing were stood the Space Marines attending the trial. There had not been enough room for all the Howling Griffons so Borganor looked on flanked only by his honour guard. A single squad of Imperial Fists attended Vladimir. Kolgo was there too, with his Sisters of Battle in attendance. The Iron Knights who had accompanied N’Kalo stood a little apart, perhaps aware that if their commander lost this duel they would be leaving the Phalanx very quickly.

Reinez had chosen his thunder hammer to fight with. It was a well-used weapon, its adamantium head well-scored in hundreds of battles. Reinez made a few warm-up swings, loosening his arms and shoulders, and the weapon thrummed through the air as if it was purring with pleasure at the impending combat.

N’Kalo had chosen a double-handed sword from the armoury of the Phalanx, a weapon normally wielded by the Imperial Fist chosen to serve as the Emperor’s Champion while on campaign. As an Iron Knight who called Rogal Dorn his Primarch like the Imperial Fists, N’Kalo had the right to wield such a weapon. It was a compromise – his own power sword, now held by one of his Iron Knights, was one-handed, and might have been shattered or knocked from his hand trying to parry Reinez’s thunder hammer. The champion’s blade would not break, but it would be slower.

‘In the sight of Rogal Dorn,’ intoned Gethsemar, ‘beneath the aegis of Blessed Sanguinius and of the Emperor of Mankind, our battle-brothers here seek justice through the clash of holy arms. May the Emperor lend strength to the arm of the righteous! Begin!’

For a long moment, neither Space Marine moved as they gauged each other’s stance, deciding which way to go. Reinez crouched low, hammer held behind him ready to strike. N’Kalo’s sword was up in a guard, the point hovering level with Reinez’s eyeline.

Reinez moved first. N’Kalo barely reacted in time, bringing the blade down to block the blow that Reinez aimed at his legs. N’Kalo pivoted and caught Reinez with an elbow, but it clanged harmlessly into the Crimson Fist’s breastplate. Reinez hooked N’Kalo’s leg with his hammer and threw him head over heels backwards, to sprawl on the grass.

Reinez’s hammed arced down. N’Kalo rolled aside as it slammed into the ground, throwing up a great shower of earth and leaving a crater in the dark soil. N’Kalo swung wildly, a vast steel crescent that Reinez sidestepped with ease before landing a kick so hard in N’Kalo’s side that the Iron Knight was thrown to the ground again.

‘I’ll hear your surrender any time,’ gasped Reinez. ‘There is no shame in it. Any time.’

N’Kalo responded with a reverse strike from the ground, the sword’s point arrowing up behind him towards Reinez’s throat. Reinez batted it aside with the haft of his hammer and cracked the butt of the weapon into the side of N’Kalo’s head. N’Kalo reeled and Reinez closed, driving his shoulder into N’Kalo’s midriff and hauling the Space Marine off the ground.

Reinez hefted N’Kalo into the air and threw him. N’Kalo tumbled over the bank of the river and into the water, the powerful stream foaming around him. Reinez jumped in after him, dragging N’Kalo to his feet. The water came up to each Space Marine’s chest. Reinez slammed a headbutt into the face of N’Kalo’s helm, denting the ceramite faceplate.

N’Kalo drove a knee into the inside of Reinez’s thigh. Reinez stumbled back a step, feet slipping on the stones and mud of the artificial riverbed. N’Kalo crunched an elbow into the back of Reinez’s head and pulled his sword from the water again, slicing left and right. Reinez deflected each blow with his hammer or glanced them from his shoulder pads.

N’Kalo paused, having created the space he needed between the two combatants. He shifted his footing to plant himself more firmly on the bed of mud and rocks. Behind him, rapids rushed around several large boulders, plunging down a low waterfall. The branches of overhanging willows almost brushed the river’s surface. If it were not for the two Adeptus Astartes struggling to shed one another’s blood, it would have been a tranquil and beautiful place.

N’Kalo’s breath was heaving. Reinez looked like he had barely broken a sweat. N’Kalo had not yet managed to draw blood from the Crimson Fist.

‘Do you think this will be over?’ said Reinez as he forged through the waters, trying to force N’Kalo back towards the rapids. ‘If the galaxy turns upside-down and you beat me, how long do you think your victory will last? You think you will have any brothers here? They will turn their backs on you.’

‘They are not so consumed with bitterness as you, Reinez,’ replied N’Kalo. ‘They have not let failure make them less of an Adeptus Astartes.’

Reinez’s face darkened. He spat a wordless syllable of anger and charged – not at N’Kalo, but at the closest tree that clung to the riverbank. Reinez wrenched the tree free of its roots, showering dirt and loose stones across the water.

Reinez’s anger gave him strength. N’Kalo had barely the time to get his sword up before Reinez slammed the shattered tree trunk into him, throwing him backwards into the water. The impact was enough to knock him senseless and his heavy armoured body thudded onto the riverbed, waters rushing around him.

Reinez pounced from the bank into the water, one knee pounding square into N’Kalo’s solar plexus. Reinez hauled the Iron Knight over his head, out of the water, and slammed him down into one of the massive boulders making up the rapids. The boulder shattered under the impact and N’Kalo sprawled against it, water foaming white around him, unable to move.

Reinez planted a foot on N’Kalo’s midriff. Both hands free now, his hammer holstered, he grabbed the lower edge of N’Kalo’s helmet and wrenched it halfway around, forcing it off N’Kalo’s head.

The helmet came free with a shower of sparks. Reinez was looking into a face severely burned, every blister and scour looking like it had just been inflicted, red and weeping. N’Kalo’s lips were pale streaks in the blackened skin, his eyes kept open only by artificial surfaces of milky glass that made them look blind. His jaw and back teeth showed through the tears in his cheeks, and segments of cranium glinted as if polished between the stringy remnants of his scalp.

‘When I am finished with you,’ spat Reinez, ‘you will look back and remember how handsome you were.’

Reinez shouldered N’Kalo over the rapids down the falls. The Iron Knight was barely sensible as he plunged into the pool formed by the waterfall. Reinez stood on the rapids, hauling another rock up from the riverbed. He hurled it down at N’Kalo, who got an arm up to ward off the worst of the impact but who was crushed down into the pool, trapped by its weight.

Reinez jumped down onto the rock that pinned N’Kalo in place. N’Kalo was not quite beneath the surface but little more than his ruined face could be seen above the water. Reinez stood and took his hammer off his back, holding it with both hands, the well-worn head of the weapon aiming down at N’Kalo’s face.

Reinez drove the hammer down at N’Kalo. N’Kalo forced his sword out from below the rock and slashed the hammer aside. Expecting an impact and off balance Reinez fell forward, landing face to face with N’Kalo.

The other Adeptus Astartes had by now gathered on the bank of the river and they watched as the two Space Marine wrestled in the water, Reinez trying to force N’Kalo’s head below the surface, N’Kalo trying to wriggle from under the rock and bring his sword to bear. The thunder hammer lay in the water, abandoned, as Reinez went at N’Kalo with his bare hands.

The watching Space Marines parted as Vladimir joined them. He stood on one of the flat rocks that made up the rapids, no expression on his face.

N’Kalo hurled the rock away. Reinez had to jump back to keep his own legs from being trapped under it. N’Kalo slammed the pommel of his sword into Reinez’s side and kicked out at him, trying to drive him against the stone wall carved by the waterfall. Reinez spun, locked N’Kalo’s sword arm in the crook of his elbow and ripped the sword from N’Kalo’s hand. Reinez threw the sword aside and it disappeared under the foaming water.

Both Space Marines were bleeding now. N’Kalo’s armour was dented from the impacts, to the extent that it was as much a hindrance to his movement as protection. Reinez’s nose might have been broken, judging by the blood spilling down his chest, black against the dark blue of his breastplate.

When the two closed in and locked up in a wrestler’s clinch, every Space Marine watching knew it was for the last time. N’Kalo was a fine combatant, but his wounds, more severe on the inside than the outside, drained the strength from his limbs. Reinez had been fighting for the last few years without any battle-brothers at his side, learning to survive by his wits alone, with fists and teeth if need be. Reinez pushed N’Kalo down onto one knee, wrenched one of the Iron Knight’s shoulders out of its socket, and dropped into a shoulder charge that smashed N’Kalo into the riverbank.

N’Kalo could not raise his free arm into a guard. Reinez slammed his fist into N’Kalo’s face.

‘They will cast you out!’ roared Reinez, his fist hitting home again. ‘They will banish you! You will know my pain!’

Reinez punched over and over. Ultra-dense Adeptus Astartes bone fractured. N’Kalo’s cheekbone caved in, then his jaw. One eye socket was stove inwards, half-shutting his eye. Bloody skin clung to Reinez’s knuckles.

‘Outcast! Pariah! You shall be no man’s brother!’

‘Stop,’ said Vladimir.

Reinez did not stop. Another half-dozen blows rained down. Broken teeth clotted the blood that oozed from N’Kalo’s shattered mouth.

The boot that cracked into Reinez’s face belonged to Captain Lysander, who had stepped out of the watching crowd at a signal from Vladimir. The blow caught Reinez by surprise and he fell backwards off N’Kalo, sprawling in the water.

‘I said stop,’ said Vladimir.

Reinez scrabbled to his feet, wiping the back of one gauntlet across his face to remove the worst of N’Kalo’s blood. ‘You see?’ he gasped. ‘The Emperor lent me strength. Dorn has spoken. The duel is over.’

‘It is,’ said Vladimir. ‘My brothers, the apothecaries among you attend to Captain N’Kalo while the Phalanx’s own medicae staff are summoned. I must have him conscious to present his evidence.’

‘Lord Vladimir!’ protested Reinez. ‘He was defeated! The duel was won! I demand N’Kalo’s silence as is my right by victory!’

‘The duel is won, Reinez,’ replied Vladimir, ‘but you may claim no victory. We are not at war, and Captain N’Kalo is not your enemy. In showing such brutality to him, even at the moment you became the victor, you abandon all semblance of honour. In an honour-duel, that is as good as a physical defeat. You have forfeited the duel, and Captain N’Kalo is the winner.’

Reinez stood speechless in the rushing river as the Space Marines on the bank picked up the winner and carried him off to the apothecarion.

The first thing Sarpedon noticed as he was led to the dock again was the Iron Knight without his helm. He had encountered the Chapter once before but there had been no way of telling, beneath the feudal helm, if the Iron Knights’ commander was the same Adeptus Astartes he had spoken with on Molikor. Now, there could be no mistake. It was the same man.

Half of N’Kalo’s face was still hidden, this time by medical dressings covering fresh wounds. The rest, however, was that familiar mask of burn tissue, and the one visible eye was the same glassy prosthetic.

Sarpedon tried to hold N’Kalo’s gaze, but he was shoved into the accused’s pulpit by the Imperial Fists who had escorted him from his cell, and found himself looking at Lord Vladimir.

‘Justice Lord,’ said Sarpedon before anyone else could speak. ‘I would know of my brothers.’

‘They are safe and well,’ said Vladimir.

‘And Daenyathos?’

‘He is captive, like them. And like them, he has not been harmed.’

‘I know that I am to die here, Lord Vladimir. I wish to speak with my battle-brothers before that happens. And I must have leave to speak with Daenyathos, even if only to ascertain that the dreadnought you hold indeed contains him. My Chapter thought him dead for thousands of years. I must at least see for myself that he lives.’

‘What you ask is a luxury that cannot be afforded to the condemned,’ replied Vladimir. ‘The nature of your crimes means that you cannot be given the chance to conspire further with your fellow accused. Such requests are denied.’

Sarpedon did not argue. It was a motion he had to go through. He had to show that he had not given up, not completely. It was a feeble gesture among so many warriors, but it was made.

‘Brethren,’ began Vladimir. ‘During the last adjournment the matter of the Soul Drinkers’ defence was decided. Commander N’Kalo?’

Sarpedon realised that among the assembled Space Marines, he could not see Reinez.

N’Kalo stepped forwards. ‘Brothers,’ he said, and Sarpedon recognised the grating voice of an improvised vox-unit. It was hooked up to N’Kalo’s dented breastplate, amplifying the voice that struggled to get past his shattered jaw. ‘I must speak to you of a world called Molikor.’

Hunted

John French

Thaddeus blinked and his world vanished in a scream. Blind darkness surrounded him, caged him in a dream of pain. Then light and sensations came in a burning rush: a white room, a wide face, eyes glowing red in the dark cave of a hood, the ground splitting with cracks of fire, the wetness of tears, anger like a red storm, a ringed hand, then darkness and silence.

He blinked again and was looking an enemy in the eyes. They were black eyes that glittered from a blunt hairless head, jagged patterns burned into the flesh. The man’s body was a massive slab of hard muscle, covered in tarnished armour and stained ochre fatigues. His head was cocked as if Thaddeus had stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence and the man was waiting for it to finish. Rusted metal lined the walls around them, their surfaces scratched with evil runes and lit by the fever yellow light of a glow-globe. The air reeked of blood, sweat and raw meat. Every detail told Thaddeus that he stood in a lair of the enemy, and with an enemy in front of him.

A frown creased the man’s face and his mouth began to move, forming a question. Thaddeus slammed a fist into his throat. The man gave a strangled cry, staggered, hit the grime-smeared metal wall behind him and exploded forward with a roar, trying to drive Thaddeus off his feet with raw strength. Thaddeus pivoted an instant before the charge struck, grabbed the man’s head in both hands and felt his brute power slide past him as he twisted. With a loud snap, the man’s body crashed onto the metal floor and was still.

Shaking with adrenaline, Thaddeus looked at the corpse at his feet. Sinuous tattooed patterns and eight-pointed brand scars covered the dead man’s skin. He looked at his own hands. Tattoos spiralled around his fingers and palms; they were the marks of ruin and blasphemy, like those on the hands and arms of the man he had just killed. Thaddeus ran his hands over his body, feeling the scars on his scalp and face, the beaten metal of a breast plate and the saw-toothed blades at his waist. Panic surged through him and he fought to keep it down. Who was he? Inside his mind a locked door opened and memories returned: he was a servant of the Imperium, a warrior in a war of shadows and lies. The realisation was like the touch of a cool hand on his head: comforting, removing doubt. He knew where he was and what he had to do: he was in the heart of enemy territory and far from help. He had to reach a vox-caster, transmit an extraction location to Imperial forces and reach that location at any cost. Beyond this driving need there was something else, something always just beyond his grasp, always out of sight in the labyrinth of his mind.

‘Lost in the land of the damned,’ he muttered to himself and began to run. He passed through narrow tunnels ducking into the shadows as figures passed him. He saw the scars patterning their skin, heard the cruel tongue in which they muttered to each other. The air pulsed to the hiss-thump of air processors shifting foetid air.

When he reached the communications room he slid a long, serrated knife from a sheath and banged on the door until it opened. A renegade trooper in dark fatigues looked out; a fabric mask covered his head, bloodshot eyes wide behind grimy glass eye-holes. Thaddeus could hear static and fragments of distorted noise spilling from the room. It was small and rank with the smell of sweat and ozone, consoles lined the walls, the light of readouts pulsing to the sounds from speaker grilles. There was a moment of stillness the length of a heartbeat.

Thaddeus’s first movement was a backhanded cut with the knife that took the renegade in the throat, severing his neck to the spine. Warm red spray splashed his face. The man collapsed, blood bubbling dark on the floor. Thaddeus stepped forward with the momentum of the cut. Terror and fury flowed through him; he could feel its acid touch in his guts and a copper tang in his mouth. He was screaming. A spindle-limbed man with a face like a dried corpse stood, a laspistol in his hand. Thaddeus heard a crack and felt the shot burn across his temple. He stepped to the outside of the man’s gun arm, reversed his knife and rammed it into the neck. The body jerked as the man died and Thaddeus yanked the blade out in a thick spray.

He stood in pooling blood, gasping air as the rage receded and fear returned. Lurching to the console he examined the equipment, frequencies and ciphers flashing through his mind. His hands moved over controls without guidance, sending the location of the Fallen Spire far out in the no-man’s-land beyond the underground fortress in which he stood.

He picked up the renegade’s laspistol and stripped power cells from the corpses. The jagged marks and eight-pointed stars cut into the men’s skin made him retch. He thought of the killing rage that had surged through him; its touch had been alien, like someone touching the inside of his skin. It made him feel tainted, unclean, as if the marks on his skin were scars on his soul. He shook the thought off and pushed himself to his feet again. The one thing that was certain was that if he were to live, he had to reach the Fallen Spire. He stepped out of the chamber, pulled the hatch door shut and began to run.

From the highest tower of the Imperial command fortress Colonel Augustine Tarl looked out on a ruined world. It was sunset, but the sky remained the dull tan of a soiled funeral shroud. From here he would have once looked across a string of hives, their sides rising liked armoured mountains into a cobalt sky. Seismic charges and plasma warheads had reduced those hives to a sea of torn metal and ash that extended to the horizon like a frozen sea; its wave crests ragged edges of metal, its troughs filled with spreading shadows. They were called the Murder Wastes; the vast no-man’s land in the war between the Imperium and the forces of Chaos on Hranx.

‘Admiring the rewards of hubris, colonel?’ Inquisitor Sargon said from behind Tarl who turned and snapped a sharp salute. Tarl was tall, with a broad face, bright blue eyes and a strong jaw. It was a face full of confidence, the type of face that inspired trust. Clad in the gloss-red armour of an Inquisitorial storm trooper he stayed at attention as the inquisitor advanced towards him.

‘At ease, colonel,’ said the inquisitor. He was shorter than Tarl, broad-shouldered with a big pockmarked face. Bronze plate armour glittered under a heavy robe of deep purple.

Tarl tried to adopt a casual stance as the inquisitor came to stand next to him; it was difficult to relax in the presence of this man who had the power to kill billions with a word.

‘You summoned me, my lord,’ said Tarl.

‘Yes I did. I am giving you a mission that will be the most important of your service.’ The inquisitor’s voice was a bass rumble like the grating of stone. Tarl kept his face impassive but he felt a jolt of anticipation run through his gut. ‘I am trusting in your nature and abilities. The Imperium is trusting in them too.’

‘I understand, my lord,’ said Tarl.

The inquisitor twitched his lips as if at a joke.

‘Not yet, colonel, but you will.’ The inquisitor leaned on the tower’s parapet, his red bionic eyes staring out at the darkening world from within his deep hood. ‘An hour ago we received a signal on a long unused frequency.’ A hand, thick with rings, emerged from under the sleeve of the inquisitor’s robe and handed a brass-framed data-slate to Tarl, who took in the information on its surface with a glance.

‘A set of location coordinates in the Murder Wastes and a single word: Thaddeus?’ Tarl looked up at the inquisitor.

‘You are to take an assault carrier and go to that location. Take a handpicked squad of storm troopers.’ The inquisitor turned away from the parapet to look at Tarl. ‘There you will find and retrieve a man in my service.’

Tarl looked back at the signal data displayed in glowing green symbols on the data-slate.

‘These analysis readings indicate that the signal came out of the renegade’s fortress zone; probably transmitted using enemy equipment.’

‘Yes, the signal came from within the enemy stronghold.’

‘It is not a trick, a lure?’

‘No. It is victory.’ The inquisitor smiled at the puzzled look on the colonel’s face. ‘How long have we been fighting here, Tarl?’

‘At least a decade, my lord.’

‘Too long, and we have paid too high a price.’ The inquisitor gestured at the land below the fortress tower. Tarl knew what the gesture meant: he had been here when the Imperium had levelled the hives hoping to destroy the rebellion within. The Chaos renegades led by the Alpha Legion had been prepared, and had buried themselves beneath the ground in a subterranean fortress complex they called the Pit of the Hydra. There they survived and endured while the Imperium burnt its own flesh to try and kill a disease that had already spread. If Hranx did fall then the Alpha Legion would have secured a gateway for its corruption to spread into other sectors and kill other worlds. The Imperium was caught in a snare: unable to yield and unable to destroy its enemy.

‘And this man will win the war, my lord?’ asked Tarl.

‘Our forces are infiltrated by Alpha Legion agents. They are serpents in our midst, killing us with a thousand bites. How many of our operations and offensives have been blown or crippled? And while they rob us of our strength, theirs grows.’ The inquisitor turned and placed his hand on Tarl’s shoulder and looked directly into his eyes. ‘The man you are to retrieve is a servant of the Imperium who has infiltrated the renegades and remained hidden within them for several years.’ Tarl allowed his shock to show on his face.

‘How is that possible?’

‘His personality and memories have been replaced with a constructed identity so that he is incapable of giving himself away.’ The inquisitor let his hand drop, looked away from Tarl. ‘He has believed that he is one of them. Under particular circumstances he is conditioned to shake off his false self and return to us.’

‘What circumstances, my lord?’ Tarl asked, though he thought he knew. The inquisitor smiled revealing silver-inlaid teeth.

‘He was conditioned to return to us once he had learned the identities of the agents the Alpha Legion have infiltrated into our forces,’ he said.

Night was falling when Thaddeus heard the howl of the hunters at his back. It rose in a harsh, high note gathering replies and echoes until it was a wailing chorus calling him to oblivion. He had known that his flight would not go undiscovered, and so once above ground he had run hard, knowing that every stride was a moment stolen from death. He knew the hunters were close; they had tasted his scent on the wind and they howled in anticipation of the kill.

The cries of his pursuers faded as Thaddeus scrambled up another slope of jagged rubble, his hands bloody from a thousand sharp edges. In the distance the Fallen Spire rose above the Murder Wastes like the broken tip of a god’s spear thrust into the ground; a far-away promise of safety. He slithered down a slope of ash into a wide valley, its bottom filled with debris and blade-like shadows; a hundred paces away a wide pool of liquid glittered like a dark mirror. A gust of dry wind brought a thick chemical stench to his nostrils from the pool’s surface.

Thaddeus began to move across the floor of the valley, running from cover to cover, ash rising from his footsteps. A whisper-soft sound of movement reached his ears; he glanced behind and went very still. Long, lean shapes were slinking down the side of the valley where he had been. Each was humanoid but moved close to the ground on reverse jointed-legs and long arms, their muscles taut under pale skin. The hunters had found him. They were human mutants selectively altered by the renegades to hunt the Murder Wastes. They were blind and stalked by scent, tasting the air with long tongues. Thaddeus gripped the butt of his laspistol. He could count at least three of them and knew there were more. They would be fast. He watched one of them pause on a lip of rubble he had passed seconds before. The hunter crouched, its elongated head turning from side to side, its long tongue flicking between needle teeth.

He began to ease himself into cover, moving one limb at a time, blood hammering in his ears. Could they hear his heart beating, he wondered? He lifted his foot to step forward, and a stone shifted with a small noise; he froze. Another shape bounded onto a rise of rubble ten paces away. Thaddeus felt a drop of sweat run down his face. The hunter bounded towards him. Behind it the others snarled and followed. Thaddeus drew his laspistol and fired. The hunter jinked aside with unnatural speed and the bolt of energy fizzed into the air. He fired again, the shot kicking up a hot splash of melted dust where it hit the ground. He turned and ran, knowing that he could not escape. Even if he killed some of the hunters there were others and they had his scent.

The pool was in front of him, its surface black and still, its chemical stench thick in his throat. The hunters were blind and if his scent vanished so did he. He dived in and felt the liquid darkness swallow him. It was silent under the surface of the pool, and he kept his mouth and eyes closed. He felt the acid burning his skin and pain began to spread from his chest. For a second he thought of letting the liquid wrap him in its corrosive embrace forever. He would not be losing much; he could remember almost nothing but a handful of hours filled with death and fear. There would be nothing in the future but more fear, more blood and the breath of enemies at his back. An image came to him of a world burning around him, and he knew he had seen it happen, had been there as the forces of ruin had destroyed something very dear to him. The loss and anger was like a raw wound in his soul from which snatches of memory poured: a hand on his shoulder, a bronze aquila ring, a face with red eyes. He was a warrior that walked amongst the enemy, it was his purpose; he was a servant of the Imperium.

Thaddeus kicked for the surface, bursting into the air with a suppressed gasp. He trod water, eyes sweeping the darkness, ears straining for any sound. There was no sign of the hunters. He swam to the pool’s edge and pulled himself out, chemical sludge dripping from his body. The smell would hide his scent from the enemies, or so he hoped. He lay on his back for a moment, breathing hard, his eyes looking up towards where the Fallen Spire glinted against the dull black sky. With a grunt of effort he got to his feet and scrambled through the dark, pushing himself until he was in the shadow of the Fallen Spire but could go no further. Exhausted, he found the entrance of a wide pipe and dragged himself inside. Curled and shivering in the dark he fell into a sleep disturbed by dreams filled with burning worlds and a wide face with red eyes.

The Valkyrie swept across the darkened plain towards the Fallen Spire. Its hunched fuselage and wings were a matt charcoal grey broken by a night camouflage pattern of black lines sprayed in an irregular grid. Its cockpit and crew compartment were dark, all readouts and displays disabled, its pilot flying by night-vision and instinct. From its open side door Colonel Tarl watched the ground below, his own night-vision visor showing a rushing expanse of luminous green. From the crew compartment behind him Tarl could hear the low noises of the squad of storm troopers checking equipment and eating rations. Each would be wearing night-vision visors and passing the time with mundane routines to keep their minds focussed. Even for men such as these, who were hardened by years of war, the time before an action was a battle against boredom and fear.

‘Hungry, colonel?’ came a voice from behind Tarl. It was Kulg, the squad sergeant, a smiling slab of a man who was one of Tarl’s best.

Tarl turned and leaned back into the crew compartment, his night vision showing his storm troopers sitting on the flight benches, their black armour making them look like statues carved of obsidian. Each had a hellgun strapped tight across his chest and a bulky grav-chute on his back. Kulg was holding out a foil-wrapped bar in a gloved hand.

‘Field rations?’ Tarl took the bar and bit into it. The sergeant grinned. ‘Thanks,’ said Tarl making a face; the rations tasted vile. ‘So kind of you to spare some for me.’ The sergeant chuckled, his teeth gleaming in the green tint of the night-vision. Tarl grinned back. Kulg and his squad were cold killers to ordinary men, but Tarl had that combination of competence and good humour that made these men like and trust him. ‘Now, if you happen to have a flask of hot caffeine, I might just forget about the taste of this.’

‘Here, sir.’ The sergeant smiled and handed Tarl a small metal flask.

‘Thanks,’ said Tarl sipping the hot liquid. Now was a good time to tell them, he thought. ‘Listen up,’ he said, raising his voice over the drone of the Valkyrie’s engines. ‘You know the brief: we drop using grav-chutes, form a perimeter, secure the target, and the Valkyrie pulls us out.’ He waited for assenting nods. ‘The target will look like one of the enemy, a renegade in every detail.’ Tarl paused ‘Securing him is of absolute importance.’

‘We’re clear on the plan, sir,’ said Kulg.

‘Don’t forget that the Alpha Legion has used witches, flesh-changers, even turncoats before.’ There was a scattering of nods; all of them had seen the tricks and lies used by of the servants the Dark Gods. ‘Until we are sure it is him, assume nothing. Be ready to respond if it is a trap, and wait for my authentication of the target’s identity.’ He looked around at each of them. ‘Understand?’ Each gave a clipped ‘Sir’ in reply. Tarl nodded and turned back to looking out of the side hatch; the sky had begun to lighten. The pilot and weapons officer already had their special orders and would be ready if he needed them. He took a sip from the flask and thought of the man out there in the dark, running to him bearing the greatest of secrets.

Thaddeus woke to the sound of whispers. He could not see the speakers and so lay still, and listened. Grey light seeped into the pipe mouth where he shivered in the dawn chill. His vision was restricted to a circular scoop of mud grey sky cut by the looming silhouette of the Fallen Spire. The whispering voices were coming closer; he could hear the soft brush of fabric against webbing, and the low clink of weapons. Whoever they were, they were moving with deliberate slowness: searching, hunting. He prayed that they would not check the pipe that hid him.

A boot crunched a pace away. Adrenaline began to seep into his cold muscles, the instincts of the cornered animal making his mouth dry and his gut twist. Keeping his breath slow, he began to move his hand towards his knife. Memories flicked through his awareness: a smiling face, a bright white room, a world dying around him. Then something else rose from the depths of his mind like a grinning skull pulled from a slaughter pit. Anger overwhelmed his thoughts; he was not prey to be run to ground and gutted; he was the predator. His hand closed around the handle of his knife, and a red cloud unfolded in his mind like blood pouring into water.

A figure blocked out the light at the pipe opening, a slouch-shouldered silhouette, the barrel of its lasgun pointed into the darkness. A cyclone of rage boiled through Thaddeus’s mind and body, its surface alive with flashes of pain and black coils of hatred. He wanted blood; he wanted to feel the warm wash of it on his hands, and to see the life leave his kill’s eyes. The figure was three paces away, its wide eyes blind to the death that waited in the darkness. Thaddeus’s muscles coiled ready to spring forward in a killing leap.

There was a blurt of static from out of sight, and a muffled voice speaking clipped Imperial Gothic into a voxcaster. The figure in front of Thaddeus twitched at the sound, took a pace back into the light, and Thaddeus saw the glint of the grubby bronze aquila on the figure’s helmet. He remembered a bronze aquila ring, and red eyes staring at him. The tide of anger receded leaving him shaking silently in the darkness. He was a servant of the Imperium, not a beast, but for a moment he had been someone else, someone monstrous. To infiltrate the renegades he had become one of them, and something of that other self remained inside him. He thought he could hear it whispering to him, telling him secrets. The damned still walk in me, he thought.

‘Throne, no!’ came a voice, loud enough for Thaddeus to hear.

‘What is it, sarge?’ asked the man Thaddeus could see. He looked young, his green fatigues smeared with ash, eyes shot red with days of fatigue and fear. This was a sweeping patrol, a small unit that probed deep into the Murder Wastes with nothing but their nerves and a lasgun to keep them alive.

Thaddeus thought of stepping out of his hiding place; he was a servant of the Imperium, so were they: they would help. But then what would they see step from the shadows? A man clad in barbed armour and dark cloth, dried blood on his hands, and a face twisted with evil runes. They would see an enemy, a predator like those that took their comrades and stalked their nightmares. They would see a renegade, and how could he persuade them that he was not?

‘We pull out now,’ said an unseen voice, its tone harsh. As it spoke, the ground began to shake.

‘Wait, what…’ asked another voice out of sight, trailing off as a sound like the beating of great drums became louder and louder.

‘Run!’ Thaddeus could hear more than fear now, he could hear terror. The air shook with a roar like rolling thunder. The man at the pipe mouth stared at the sky and fled. Thaddeus, scrambling to the end of the pipe, looked up and knew why. A wave of flames surged towards him, and above it the sky burned.

The Valkyrie shuddered as black pillars of smoke rose into the air around it. Looking down from the side door of the assault carrier, Tarl could see a tide of fire roll across the Murder Wastes towards the Fallen Spire. There was a stink of burning oil on the furnace-hot air and the ground seemed to ripple under the impact of the artillery fire. The renegades had artillery buried underground that they hoisted up to hidden firing points along the edge of the Murder Wastes. There were hundreds of guns and they were all firing: a rhythmic chorus of war wiping the wastes clean of life. The Chaos forces were burning the land to kill one fleeing traitor. That, or they were driving their quarry into the jaws of the hunter, thought Tarl.

‘Bring us in over the spire’s tip,’ shouted Tarl. The Fallen Spire loomed through a haze of dust and smoke. As tall as a Titan, it was a blackened spit of metal jutting out of the ground at an angle. At its tip there was a flattened point no more than twenty paces across. It had once been the peak of a now dead-hive that had fallen as it burned, embedding itself upright in the ruin below. It thrust above the vast tangle of wreckage like the tip of a sword from a dead man’s back. It was the location the infiltrator, Thaddeus, had transmitted, the place from which the inquisitor had sent Tarl to collect him.

Tarl stood, gripping the rail that ran down the centre of the Valkyrie’s crew compartment. He wore the red storm trooper carapace, a respirator mask hanging unfastened at his cheek. The squad were on their feet, their faces hidden by bug-eyed faceplates, their black armour glistening. A caress of static ran over Tarl’s skin as he powered up his grav pack.

‘Extraction point in twenty kilometres,’ said the pilot. Tarl nodded to Sergeant Kulg.

‘Form up,’ shouted Kulg, and the storm troopers formed two lines facing the closed rear hatch, their shoulders touching, left hands gripping cleats in the ceiling. The sergeant gave Tarl a thumbs-up.

‘Open rear hatch, and ready for drop,’ said Tarl into his throat mic. The pilot gave a curt reply and the rear hatch split with the hiss of pistons, opening to show the land and sky racing to a vanishing point behind the Valkyrie.

‘Jump on my command,’ said Tarl, and fastened his respirator.

‘Death and honour’ shouted Kulg, and the squad echoed the words.

‘For the Emperor,’ said Tarl, but his words were lost in the roar of the wind.

The firestorm surged towards him and Thaddeus fled before it. White-hot sparks drifted down around him and sweat poured down his soot-smeared face. He did not know where the guardsmen were, his only instinct was to run, to reach safety. The fire tide surged on in a blazing wall that flowed over the rises and gulleys of rubble with a roar as it sucked in air. It was fifty paces behind him and he could feel the heat sear across his exposed skin. Above him the black speartip of the Fallen Spire thrust into the sky. It was so close that he could see the bent girders that jutted from its sides. Safety was so close, but the fire tide was at his heels.

He heard howls rise over the roar of the fire as the long, lean shapes of the hunters appeared out of the smoke-filled air, their pale bodies black against the fire, oblivious to the danger now that they had found their prey. There were dozens of them, their skin scorched and blistered but their fanged mouths wide with glee. He could not turn, could not fight, he could only run. His lungs felt as if they were on fire, his legs shot with pain. Then he was over the crest of an ash dune and the side of the Fallen Spire was in front of him. He gripped a jutting girder, swung up and began to climb without thinking, feet and hands scrabbling for purchase.

He was ten feet off the ground when the hunters crested the dune behind him. The first bounded to the base of the spire’s side and leapt, springing up the tangle of projecting girders. With a snarl of triumph it was on him, talons raking his leg. Thaddeus screamed as pain ran up his body, but inside he felt a part of him bellow for blood. He kicked down with his other leg and felt bone crunch beneath his boot. The mutant fell, its limbs thrashing, its mouth snapping at the air. More were climbing, pulling themselves up with long arms, their claws screeching on the metal. He looked up at the spire’s summit and took another grip. With a shriek of super-heated air the fire tide crested the dune and crashed into the base of the Fallen Spire. The hunters that had only just begun to climb were vapourised, others higher up screamed as the heat cooked their flesh and they fell into the inferno. Those above the tide of flame came up faster, their arms reaching for Thaddeus, tongues flicking at the blood dribbling from his leg.

With a grunt of pain Thaddeus gripped the girder above him with one hand and drew his laspistol with the other. Twisting to look down, he thumbed the safety off and pulled the trigger. Glowing bolts of energy plunged onto the hunters, burning through flesh and bone. Thaddeus kept the trigger squeezed until the clip was empty and the pistol was hot in his hand. He dropped the spent pistol and climbed, shutting out the numbness spreading from his shredded leg and the scrabbling noise of the surviving hunters climbing after him.

The Valkyrie turned hard, dropping in a controlled spiral towards the Fallen Spire. In the crew compartment the high pitched whine of grav-chutes cut through the bass rumble of the engines. A view of the spire’s blunt summit, set above a surging ocean of flame, filled the open hatch.

‘Jump!’ shouted Tarl and the storm troopers leapt into the smoke-darkened air.

Thaddeus heaved himself onto the flat summit of the Fallen Spire. It was no more than twenty paces across, a sheer drop all around and the burning plateau below. He could hear shouted orders and see blurred images out of the corner of his eyes. Storm troopers in black armour were landing around him, tucking into tight rolls as they landed with the lightness of windblown seeds. They fanned out with mechanical precision and speed, scanning for targets. He tried to stand but his savaged leg gave way and he sprawled onto the rough metal, blood dripping from him in thick runnels. He rolled onto his stomach, the storm troopers ringing him; they had come for him, he had reached the extraction location, and the secrets he held would reach his master.

A tall man, the only one in red plate, crouched down by Thaddeus, his face hidden by a respirator, a bolt pistol held loose in his hand.

‘Who are you?’ said the red-armoured man.

‘I am a servant of the Imperium. I am Thaddeus,’ he said. The man leaned closer, unclipping the respirator to show a smooth, handsome face.

‘Do you know who I am?’ his voice was low. Thaddeus felt something whisper inside his head as a feeling like the pricking of needles ran over his skin. He could feel the red cloud of his other self within him thrashing as though it sensed and saw something he did not.

‘Colonel Tarl, the Valkyrie’s inbound. Is the target cleared for extraction?’ shouted one of the storm troopers, and in that instant Thaddeus knew. Tarl. The name echoed in his mind. Colonel Tarl. Names, faces, details flickered past an inner eye, as secrets unlocked inside his skull. He knew this man, knew what monster lay beneath his unscarred skin. He saw the bolt pistol held casually at the man’s side, a finger on the trigger, and the unscarred face. It was the face of an Alpha Legion infiltrator, an enemy of the Imperium. Tarl’s eyes met his.

Tarl saw the recognition in Thaddeus’s eyes and brought the bolt pistol up to fire. Thaddeus rammed his fist into Tarl’s face with bone-splintering force. Teeth and blood arced up as Tarl’s head snapped back. Thaddeus pushed away from the floor, raw anger blotting out pain and exhaustion.

‘It’s a trick,’ shouted Tarl, through blood and ruined teeth.

Hellgun blasts sliced the air where Thaddeus had been. Inside his mind he could hear the beast within howling at the gates of his will, laughing; he was going to die at the hands of his own side because of a traitor. He spun looking for safety, but there was none, only death waiting in the hellguns’ muzzles.

There was a howl and mutants were leaping onto the summit, their bare skin blistered from the fires below, and their mouths wide as they tore into the ring of storm troopers, clawing and biting. In an instant everything was confusion and bloodletting. A storm trooper fell to the ground, a mutant on top of him, its jaws fastened upon his neck. Glowing energy from a hellgun punched through a mutant in mid-leap, burning through its chest. The storm trooper that had fired shifted target and fired again, his shot hissing wide, and then a mutant had him in its clawed grasp. Gore sprayed across the platform. Thaddeus had his knife in his hand as a mutant came at him, its claws raking over his arms and face, the anticipation of the kill in its rank breath. He brought the tip of the blade up under its ribs and felt it die with a surge of delight.

A bolt round passed over Thaddeus’s shoulder, hit the corpse of the mutant he had just killed, and exploded in a spray of flesh. Thaddeus reeled and stumbled as another explosive round passed over his head. Tarl stalked towards Thaddeus, uncaring of the slaughter around him, his pistol aimed, his face a mask of blood and triumph. Thaddeus stared back into the waiting blackness of the bolt pistol’s iron mouth. Blood dripped from the tip of his knife and he felt the red cloud rise within him. He stopped resisting it and let it slide into his limbs and senses. Pain like a hot knife stabbed into his head, and images rushed through his mind: a wide smile, a hand, a white room. Then it was gone and the beast had him.

Thaddeus leapt towards Tarl, his knife held high, face locked into a snarl. Tarl’s bolt pistol roared fire into empty air, as Thaddeus landed and cut down at Tarl’s neck. It was a fast cut, but Tarl was faster, pivoting around the blow and hammering a kick into Thaddeus’s chest. Bones cracked and Thaddeus stumbled, his lungs empty. Tarl brought the pistol up and Thaddeus sprung at the arm forcing it up as it fired. Hands locked around Tarl’s bolt pistol, Thaddeus twisted with all his strength. Tarl’s fingers snapped in the trigger guard and Thaddeus ripped the pistol free. Tarl stumbled near to the summit’s edge, his splintered fingers clutched to his chest, his other hand gripping his throat mic. Thaddeus levelled the bolt pistol at Tarl and smiled.

‘Now,’ said Tarl.

With a roar of engines the Valkyrie rose up next to the platform. It was so close that Thaddeus could see the pilot’s thumb poised over a firing stud. Multi-laser fire poured across the spire’s summit, incinerating mutants and storm troopers alike. Thaddeus rolled as the surface of the summit melted around him. Tarl was on his feet as the Valkyrie slewed around, its side door open. He jumped, landing on the deck of the crew compartment with a clang. Thaddeus came up from his roll and sprinted towards the Valkyrie. He saw the pilot looking at him, shock on his face. He reached the edge and leapt, hitting the edge of the Valkyrie’s side door, his legs swinging in space, his free hand scrabbling for a hold. Tarl came at him, kicking at his head as Thaddeus pulled himself into the vehicle. The kick sent Thaddeus lurching against the metal wall at the front of the compartment, and the bolt pistol slipped from his hand. Tarl was on him, hands locked around his throat. Thaddeus saw the bolt pistol sliding across the floor of the crew compartment towards the open hatch. The summit of the Fallen Spire loomed in the opening as the Valkyrie pitched and yawed. Thaddeus slammed his forehead into Tarl’s face, ducked, grabbed the pistol and brought it up to fire. Tarl’s good hand locked on Thaddeus’s wrist, and the false colonel snarled with effort as he twisted the gun arm upwards. Thaddeus felt his strength breaking, the killing rage draining away. Thaddeus looked into Tarl’s face and pulled the trigger.

The bolt round ripped through the roof of the crew compartment, hit the engine, and exploded. The Valkyrie began to spin, trailing debris and black smoke. Tarl fell back across the compartment as the floor tilted, fumbling to keep his grip on Thaddeus. The summit of the Fallen Spire spun into view beyond the open hatch as Thaddeus broke from Tarl’s grip, scrambled to the hatch, and jumped. He hit the blood and fire-marked summit as the Valkyrie exploded in a black edged cloud, debris spilling down the spire in a cascade of flame.

Thaddeus opened his eyes, and blinked at the bright light. He sat on a chair in a white room, his body covered in a loose smock. His wounds had been sealed and clean bandages covered burned skin and there was an empty chair opposite him. A door opened in the smooth white wall, and a man in deep purple robes over bronze battle plate stepped in.

‘Good, you are with us again,’ said the man, settling himself into the empty chair.

‘Where am I?’ asked Thaddeus.

‘Don’t you recognise it?’ Thaddeus looked around. It was a bright white room. He snapped his eyes back to the man who sat opposite him. He saw the broad face and the red lenses of bionic eyes looking back at him.

‘You are–’

‘Yes,’ said the inquisitor.

‘I made it then,’ breathed Thaddeus, relief washing through him.

‘Yes, you did. Even if we had to dig you out of the debris. That leap onto the spire saved your life.’ Thaddeus thought of the spinning Valkyrie, of the fireball and of falling, the summit of the spire coming up to meet him with a hard kiss.

‘So…’ began Thaddeus. Confusion was replacing relief; he had to give something to this man, something he could not remember.

‘I have already obtained and acted upon the information you brought to me. I removed it from your mind while you were unconscious.’ The inquisitor smiled but his flame red stare made it seem grotesque. ‘And thank you for dealing with Colonel Tarl. I had my suspicions, and you provided not only the confirmation but the solution.’

‘What?’ Thaddeus frowned at the inquisitor.

‘Ah yes, you don’t remember that. Sorry, I had to be sure.’

‘What are you talking about?’

The inquisitor just smiled. Thaddeus could feel anger building inside him. He could remember what he had done to survive, but he could not remember the exact reason why. ‘Tell me.’ He was nearly shouting, rising from his chair. Something was whispering on the edge of his thoughts, begging to be set free.

‘Yes, the beast is close isn’t it?’ The inquisitor had not moved but Thaddeus could feel an atmosphere like a gathering storm pressing against his skin. He felt as if the inquisitor was looking into his skull. ‘Can you feel it?’ Thaddeus slumped back into his chair. He felt sick; it was still part of him, that shard of the renegade he had become to serve this inquisitor.

‘Why is it–’

‘Still part of you?’

‘Yes.’ Thaddeus watched as the inquisitor examined a ring-covered hand, watching the light play over metal and jewels.

‘How much can you remember of your time before you infiltrated the renegades?’

‘Not much,’ replied Thaddeus. ‘Snatches. I can remember a face, an aquila ring.’ He looked up at the inquisitor. ‘I saw a world destroyed once, it makes me–’

‘Angry. Yes it would. It still makes me angry.’

‘What?’ Thaddeus looked at the inquisitor, his mouth open. The inquisitor let the hand he had been examining drop and looked straight into Thaddeus’s eyes.

‘Those snatches of memory are not yours. They are mine.’ Thaddeus felt as if he was drowning in his own fragmented thoughts and memories. He tried to grab on to something that would make sense of what the inquisitor was saying.

‘I…’ Thaddeus began.

‘They are selected instances in my life: things that drive me to do what I do; to hate the enemy, to be an inquisitor.’ he was leaning forwards a look of pride on his face. ‘That drive to serve is mine: your loyalty to the Imperium, all the imperatives that made you return to me are mine. They are all mine. I gave them to you. I put them into you.’

‘But I am…’ stammered Thaddeus, and inside he thought he could feel another self howl with mirth.

‘Real renegades make the best infiltrators, Thaddeus.’ The inquisitor’s voice was low, the whisper of a priest speaking a secret in a dying man’s ear. ‘Why make a loyal Imperial servant believe they are a soldier of Chaos? Why? When I can take a soldier of Chaos and make them what I need?’

‘I am not… I have never been…’ said Thaddeus.

‘No you have not. You are a renegade, Thaddeus. The beast caged inside you is not a remnant of a false life. It is you caged behind lies that I created.’ The inquisitor stood up. Thaddeus watched him through tear-filled eyes as he reached out a hand. The ring-covered fingers were cool against his hairless scalp. He felt the air take on a charged lightning storm quality. The inquisitor, his master, looked down at Thaddeus and spoke in a voice that echoed inside his skull. ‘You have served the Imperium many times, and you will serve again.’ Darkness swallowed him with a scream.

Thaddeus woke amongst the dead. There was a knife in his hand and blood on its blade. He looked at the corpses around him, their dark robes woven with twisting runes. He looked at his own hands and saw the jagged scars and sinuous patterns marking his skin; he was alone amongst the damned. He remembered a white room, a man with a broad face and red eyes; he must return to his Imperial masters.

He began to run.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Raymond Swanland

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ISBN 978-0-85787-996-7

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