MANBANE

Andy Hoare

Stinking cold mud gushed into Duerr’s mouth as he crashed to the root-choked ground, his ankle turning on a twisted stump. He coughed, spewed the bulk of the vile liquid from his mouth and blew through his nose to clear his nostrils. Gasping, Duerr cursed, invoking dread spirits only one of his calling could name. Duerr was a wizard, a student of the amethyst arts, what some might in their ignorance call a necromancer. Right now, stumbling through the night-shrouded depths of the Drakwald Deeps, he felt he was closer than ever to joining those spirits he had so foolishly named but a moment before.

Up! Gritting his teeth Duerr hauled himself erect, his grasping hands finding purchase on the clammy trunk of a thoroughly rotten tree. He cast around to regain his bearings, then looked directly up into the sickly green orb of Morrslieb. The Dark Moon was high overhead and, as such, little use as a navigational aid. But Duerr was gifted of the arcane sight, perceiving the questing tendrils of raw Chaos that seethed around it like a slithering halo of snakes. Breathing deeply, he turned west, knowing that his one, precarious hope of survival lay in reaching one of the scattered settlements along the Altdorf-Middenheim road before his pursuers overtook him.

As if to underscore his predicament and drive him onwards, the dark woods suddenly echoed to a coarse, braying war cry. Duerr cursed once more, feeling his guts turn to ice as they threatened to void themselves there and then. The sound was unmistakably that of the savage beastmen, the Children of Old Night, of Chaos itself. Beasts that walked and talked like men, or men that fought and rutted like beasts, the nature of the vile creatures that haunted the deep woods of the Old World mattered not. The only thing Duerr cared for was that his pursuers were closing on him, the scent of man-flesh and mortal fear sending them into an animal frenzy.

Another cry split the cold night air, and Duerr was spurred to movement. He pushed through the undergrowth in search of the path he had lost what seemed an age ago. The way ahead was even denser than the path he had already travelled, the trees more twisted and gnarled and the bracken ever more thick and treacherous. Thorns caught on his trailing robes, the deep purple fabric he had paid so much for soon tattered and stained with patches of crimson blood. His breath came in ragged gasps as he stumbled ever on, his arms flailing blindly before him to ward away branches that stabbed for his eyes from the darkness.

Another cry, far closer than the last. Duerr hurtled through the undergrowth, barely keeping his footing as he imagined hot, stinking breath on the back of his neck and razor-sharp, jagged fangs sinking into his flesh. A heavy thud sounded from somewhere behind, as if a body ten times his own mass had shouldered into, and through, the rotten tree he had just skirted. Heavy footfalls thudded hollowly across the moss-carpeted ground, but Duerr knew they were no normal feet. These were cloven hooves, trampling the undergrowth to pulp with their passage.

A hideous screech sounded from somewhere off to Duerr’s left, and he knew that some smaller, faster variety of beastman was attempting to outflank him or to herd him into a trap. Desperation welled inside him and his vision closed down to a tunnel. His every footfall seemed like it would be his last, for now the woods behind were filling with the cacophony of uncounted braying creatures. His imagination populated his wake with fanged, tentacled horrors slithering and stampeding through the undergrowth, every one of them intent upon dragging him to the ground and plunging their teeth into his belly to haul out his guts and suck them dry before his dying eyes. And worst of all, the small part of him that had not yet surrendered to terror knew such visions were, if anything, but the least part of the horrible truth.

Now shadows darted amongst the trees to left and right, little more than darker patches against the black woodland backdrop. Upright creatures, agile and sinuous upon reverse-jointed legs dashed from tree to tree. The nearest beast-thing was little more than a loping silhouette, but Duerr could see it was carrying a short, crude bow in a one of its clawed hands and an arrow in the other. The thing halted, setting arrow to cord and aiming directly at Duerr.

A guttural, incomprehensible, sound escaped Duerr’s throat as he flung himself to the ground at the exact moment the arrow sliced the air where his head had been. He rolled as he struck the ground, his hands sinking into the foetid mud almost up to his elbows. Gritting his teeth, Duerr rolled over onto his back, kicking against the leaf-strewn ground as he backed away from his pursuers.

In an instant, they appeared. Though little more than shadows, the green light of Morrslieb glinting dully from rusted metal cleavers and ragged mail, the beastmen were mighty brutes, a head taller than most human warriors. Duerr was not a large man, and they towered over him as he desperately backed further away, his mind almost shot.

The nearest slowed as it approached, its every movement imbued with savage, raw, animal power. It cast its head, shaped not unlike that of an ox, left and right and huffed, its foul breath billowing in the cold air. Other shapes lurked in the undergrowth behind, but backed away, evidently warned off by this mighty creature of muscle and horn.

Silence hung heavy in the damp air, disturbed only by the ragged gasps of Duerr’s breathing and the slow, steady tread of the beast as it approached. Duerr felt a damp tree trunk at his back, and he knew that he was cornered. He knew that he was about to die.

The thing turned its silhouetted head to look down at the form before it, and Duerr saw that one of its four curved horns was broken, snapped off at the tip in some challenge or fight for dominance. The beast halted not ten yards from Duerr’s supine form, and the breath caught in the wizard’s throat.

‘Morr deliver my soul–’ Duerr began. Something sharp and fast zipped through the air, cutting a stinging furrow across Duerr’s cheek. He caught movement in the undergrowth to his left, and saw there the kneeling form of the creature that had shot at him moments earlier. Already, it was notching another arrow, which this time must surely strike home and bury itself in Duerr’s flesh. In a flash, part of him recognised such a death as vastly preferable to what he could expect at the beast-leader’s hands…

But the twisted wretch of a creature never loosed its third arrow, for the leader took a deep breath that seemed almost to draw the canopy down towards it, then unleashed such a dirge of a war cry that Duerr was forced back against the rotting tree. As the breath was forced from his lungs he screwed his eyes tight shut against a sudden gale that stank of mould and the earth between dead roots. Mindless with terror and deafened to all but the pounding of his own heart, Duerr scrambled around the trunk he was backed against. He stumbled against a looped root, lost his grip and struck his head against the hollow tree, the sudden impact bringing him somewhat back to his senses, though terror still threatened to overwhelm him. He looked desperately around and saw that a wide, open space lay behind the tree, though he had no time to gaze into the inky darkness.

The bellowing of the beast-leader had continued all the while, a steady drone of animal fury, but now it cut out with shocking abruptness. The damp air was silent once more, and Duerr could not help but peek cautiously around the tree trunk, holding his breath so as not to be betrayed by his own fear.

The smaller creature cringed at the leader’s feet with its forehead, studded with two nub-like horns, pressed firmly into the soft ground in abject supplication. The leader reared above its underling, each half of the broken shortbow held in a clenched fist. Duerr’s eyes widened in horror as the leader slowly raised a cloven foot over the smaller creature’s head, the whipcord muscles of its leg tensed in readiness.

With a start, Duerr realised that he had a chance of escape, and he turned his head from the gristly scene to the open space at his back. At that very instant, he heard the leader’s hoof come down with a wet thud, and he knew that the smaller beastman had received the ultimate punishment for the crime of interjecting in its lord’s kill.

That very thought spurred Duerr to push himself from the tree trunk and power forwards blindly into the darkness. The instant he was moving he heard the unmistakable sound of the beastmen pursuing. He turned his head as he ran, glimpsing the brute rounding the tree, following after him. His attention elsewhere than on the ground he was crossing, Duerr lost his footing on the wet soil, his momentum propelling him forward several more steps before he slammed painfully down, the breath driven from his lungs by the force of the impact.

Duerr lay stunned for a moment, his face in the mud, knowing that he would be fortunate indeed to die as the twisted underling who had shot at him had. In what he assumed would be his final moments, Duerr found some peace.

After what felt like an age, death was yet to come. Duerr opened his eyes, not having realised that they were shut. He blinked and strained his ears, but all he heard was the sound of the forest: the swaying of branches in a light wind and the creaking of ancient bowers. He glanced around but saw no sign of any murderous beast-thing nearby. Blinking more rapidly, he dared look up then rolled onto his side and looked about.

Duerr was lying in an expanse of rough ground, a glade or clearing of some sort, though he could not tell if it was natural or manmade. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the tree line a scant twenty yards before him was lined with beastmen, dozens of heavily muscled, horned, beast-headed abominations, all stood in silence with dark eyes glowering straight at him. The stillness was quite shocking in the aftermath of the desperate pursuit through the forest, and more disquieting still because at any moment the beasts could simply stride forward and tear Duerr limb from limb. Why, Duerr thought as his mind struggled to take in the scene, did they not simply do so?

‘They fear this place,’ a dry, death-rattle voice sounded from somewhere behind Duerr. That voice injected ice water directly into his veins, yet the effect upon the beastmen was greater still. They visibly shrank back from it like cringing animals, cornered and desperate for an escape route.

‘And most of all,’ the unseen speaker continued, ‘they fear me.’

At that, the assembled beastmen backed away from the shadowed tree line, slowly at first, as if retreating from a foe that might lash out at any moment. Then they were gone, melting into the undergrowth silently without disturbing so much as a leaf. Duerr watched for long minutes, unwilling to trust that his would-be murderers were gone. He studied the shadows beneath the canopy and then turned slowly to locate the source of his deliverance.

The centre of the wide clearing was dominated by a tower: circular and tall, crooked and ramshackle. Its blocks were rough-hewn and irregular, black and glistening damply in the wan light of the Dark Moon. Ivy crept upwards, the leaves shimmering with silvered spider’s webs and wet moss clothed vast swathes of the surface. As Duerr’s glance climbed upwards, he saw dark, slit-like windows, their stone frames engraved with ancient devices rarely seen in the architecture of the Empire. At the summit, he could just make out an open-topped, crenulated turret set apart from the main structure, seeming like it must surely fall away and topple to the ground far below.

‘You’d better come in,’ the dry voice crackled from the base of the tower. Duerr looked to a dark portal set in its base and the door – heavy oak, iron-reinforced – swung partly inwards. ‘Before they return.’

Galvanised to sudden motion by the thought of the beastmen reappearing from the trees, Duerr climbed shakily to his feet and stumbled towards the doorway. Glancing over his shoulder one last time, he passed through, the door swinging on screeching hinges and slamming shut behind him, plunging him into darkness far deeper than the moonlit night outside.

Only as Duerr had begun the ascent up the winding spiral stairs within the tower had he realised just how bone weary he truly was. The events of the last few hours had blurred into a terrible, confused melange of desperation and panic, which he was unable to string together into a coherent chain of events. How long ago had it been since the sun had set? How long since the beastmen had discovered him wandering lost through the haunted glades of the Drakwald Deeps?

As he climbed the stairs, one leaden step at a time, he gave up trying to make sense of any of it. He looked around as he climbed the narrow flight, which turned every few steps so that he became increasingly dizzy the higher he climbed. The stairs were so narrow and steep that he could set his hands upon them without bending over, which was fortunate because he was so tired he was almost reduced to climbing up on hands and knees.

At length, Duerr came upon a landing. It was dark, but the wan, sickly light of Morrslieb spilled in through an ached window, lending a half-light glow to the numerous objects strewn all about. As his eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom, Duerr saw that the walls were hung with all manner of artefacts, from blades of truly ancient pattern to shields the likes of which he had only seen in the most esoteric tomes of the Colleges of Magic. Fragments of armour were set in nooks, each coated in a layer of dust that had clearly not been disturbed in decades, perhaps even centuries. One floor to ceiling nook contained row upon row of glass containers, ranging from tiny phials to huge bell jars, the shoulders draped in the grey dust of ages and the contents dark and obscured.

A coldness settled upon Duerr’s soul as his eyes grew more used to the gloomy interior and he took in the collection of objects arranged about the landing. As a student of Amethyst magic – the realms of the spirit, of dark dreams and of death, Duerr was well used to dabbling in matters most would find more than a little unsettling. But there was something else here, something old, something…

‘Welcome…’ the same parchment-dry voice that Duerr had heard earlier intoned. He cast about the dark landing, but saw nothing more alive than the spiders that haunted the dusty webs strewn across every surface. His breath quickening, Duerr prepared to answer, but was interrupted before a word had left his lips. ‘The uppermost chamber, boy,’ the voice said, a note of impatience evident. ‘Don’t keep me waiting.’

‘Sit,’ the old man ordered as Duerr came finally to the topmost chamber in the tower, excepting a small turret which he saw was accessible from a low side door. ‘Rest.’

Duerr stepped over the threshold into a circular chamber that occupied the entire storey, finally coming face to face with the man who had apparently saved him from the beastmen. The chamber was lit by flickering blue and green flames dancing in archaic wall sconces, and it took Duerr’s eyes long moments to locate the speaker.

To describe the man as old would be a drastic understatement. The crooked, black-robed individual before him was truly ancient. His robes were ragged, but had clearly been made of the very finest material, for they were patterned in intricate runes and sigils in thread of gold and silver. The ancient’s hands were as twisted and gnarled as the trees outside, his wrists and fingers decorated with bands and jewels that whispered to Duerr of dusty tombs and long dead cities.

Duerr looked into the ancient’s face and his heart froze, just for an instant. For a moment, he had thought he was looking at a dry, wind-blasted skull, the mouth set in a rictus grin, the eyes hollow pits of darkness. Then the effect passed as the green and blue light flickering from the wall sconces changed its rhythm. Life, of a sort, glinted from the depths of the eye-sockets and the raw bone of the skull revealed itself to be covered with a paper-thin layer of dry, liver-spotted skin. Still, Duerr thought as he steadied himself upon the high back of a nearby chair, there was scant muscle and flesh between skin and bone, the sharp edges of the skull threatening to tear through the thin covering.

‘Please,’ the ancient insisted, a wizened arm gesturing to the chair Duerr was leaning against. Duerr looked down at the dusty, black velvet padding, before his mind caught up with him. He nodded, gathering his wits, and seated himself.

‘Well then,’ the ancient said. ‘So long has it been since I had a visitor pay me court. Your name, sir?’

Duerr opened his mouth to speak, then caught himself, his throat so dry he thought he might gag. It was the dust in the air, he realised, and the residue of mud and fear left over from his flight through the Drakwald. He coughed, and tried to speak.

‘Where are my manners?’ said the ancient, a dry chuckle sounding from somewhere inside his robes. ‘Where indeed?’ he continued as he shuffled across the faded, yet still ornate, Arabyan carpet. At length, he reached a cabinet seemingly carved of ivory and opened its doors, the creaking of the dry hinges shockingly loud in the confines of the chamber. The ancient muttered and chuckled as he withdrew a pair of crystal goblets and a decanter filled with liquid so dark it appeared black in the flickering illumination cast by the sconces. As the old man shuffled back the way he had come, Duerr risked a furtive glance about the chamber.

If the landing lower down the tower had been cluttered, this place was overrun with artefacts. Every square foot of the wall was occupied, most of it by curved shelves housing volume after volume of ancient tomes. He squinted as he sought to read the text inset in gold at the spines, then his breath caught in his throat and his eyes widened in disbelief. Mroggdok K’Thing’s Testimony! He could scarcely believe that such a priceless work might be secreted away in the tower of some mad old wizard in the depths of the Drakwald. He scanned the spines of the next few volumes, his disbelief growing all the while. There were several volumes of Drivot’s Diatribes, copies of which he had glimpsed once in the Colleges of Magic, but never been allowed to read. Next was a tattered, rat-chewed copy of Trakall’s Paradox, a tome he knew by its fell reputation, but was unaware that any copy existed within the borders of the Empire.

‘Trakall…’ the old man sneered as he leaned over Duerr, a goblet of dark liquor proffered before him. The sudden speech made Duerr start and he felt suddenly guilty for his curiosity, as if he were a student again, caught rifling in the ingredients store.

‘Bah!’ the ancient continued, waving a hooked, claw-like hand in dismissal. ‘Trakall was a hack,’ he said as he backed away and eased himself down into a chair across from Duerr’s. ‘And he cheated at cards.’

Duerr realised that his throat was still painfully dry, and raised the goblet to his lips. A sharp tang rose from its contents, making his eyes water. He hesitated, yet did not want to appear ungracious to his rescuer.

‘It’s just Solland brandy,’ the old man said, taking a sip from his own glass and grinning wryly. ‘With a dash of black-eyed jenny,’ he added. ‘You’ve had a shock, by the looks of it.’

Duerr nodded as he sniffed the concoction gingerly. Black-eyed jenny was an archaic name for a rare variety of herb he knew to grow about the southern marches of the Midden Moors. It was not unrelated to the reason he had come to the Drakwald Deeps himself. He took a sip, the effect of the herb all but instantaneous. His mind cleared as the preparation worked its way through his system, while the brandy relaxed him, the chamber seeming to come into focus all around him.

‘Back from the dead, eh?’ the old man said, settling into his high-backed chair. ‘What’s your name, boy?’

‘Benedi…’ Duerr started, before taking a second draft on the dark liquor, his throat not quite wetted. ‘Benedikt, sir. Benedikt Duerr.’

The ancient grinned, his features assuming the death mask rictus once more, if only for a second, before he replied, ‘Welcome then, Benedikt Duerr. I am called Koth, Sidon Amen-Koth to be precise. I welcome you to my home, and to the Drakwald.’

Not quite sure how to take the welcome, Duerr decided he owed the old man some form of explanation for his presence. ‘Sir,’ he started. ‘I came for the–’

‘You came for the manbane,’ the ancient interrupted. ‘That much is quite clear, eh?’

‘It is, sir?’ Duerr stammered, his mind racing. How could this Koth have known his reason for coming to the Drakwald Deeps?

Koth grinned once more, the light in his eyes dwindling to a speck as the shadows closed in. ‘You are not the first, young man. And I have no doubt you will not be the last.’

Duerr blinked and took another sip of the Solland brandy to steady his nerves. ‘How could you–’

‘How could I know?’ Koth interjected once again. ‘What else would one of our calling be seeking on the verges of the Midden Moors? You sought the manbane herb, to distil its blood, brew its essence and gain its power over dreams… and nightmares. Did you not?’

Duerr steadied the crystal goblet on the worn arm of the chair, and nodded. ‘You are correct, sir. I needed the manbane to progress in my studies.’

‘To attain the charter?’ said Koth, grinning. ‘To gain permission to practice your arts?’

‘My master requires this of me, sir,’ Duerr admitted, a feeling of dejection stealing over him. ‘Or else I cannot attend to the funerary rites.’

‘Hmm,’ Koth nodded. ‘And who is this mentor to whom you are apprenticed?’

‘My master?’ Duerr replied. ‘My master is Lord Mhalkon, Adept of the Seventh Circle, he…’

‘Hmpff!’ Koth snorted, his grin twisting into a grimace. ‘Seventh Circle, indeed. Lord Mhalkon, you say?’

‘Yes, sir. Are you acquainted with my master?’

‘Acquainted?’ Koth answered. ‘Never heard of him. Should I have?’

‘Well, yes,’ Duerr stammered. ‘He is plenipotentiary-designate of the Cult of Morr, ambassador to the court of–’

Koth raised a wizened hand, affording Duerr a view of his curled and cracked nails. ‘Young man,’ he said, his voice low and dangerous. ‘Do not be so quick to name our true lord and master.’

‘Ours?’ Duerr replied, realisation dawning. ‘Then you serve M…’ he caught himself. ‘You serve those who wear the shroud?’

‘I serve no man, young sir,’ Koth replied. ‘But to answer your question, in a manner of speaking, yes, I serve, though I have scant dealings with those mumbling fools in Lucinni.’

Duerr knew that Koth was referring to the convocation of the priests of Morr, the god of death, sleep and dreams, which gathered once every decade in the city-state of Lucinni, far to the south. The Cult of Morr was a loose affiliation of priests and wizards and followed precious little dogma, with no established church as such. That meant that each practitioner was apt to conduct themselves as they themselves saw fit, and some did so in widely divergent ways.

‘If I might ask,’ Duerr dared venture. ‘How do you serve?’

Koth did not answer straight away, but looked about the chamber, his eyes, mere pinpricks of reflected light in the shadowy pits of their sockets, seeming to look beyond his mundane surroundings. His gaze swept over shelf after shelf of arcane tomes and dusty relics, over locked chests and baroque book stands, until, finally, it settled back on Duerr.

The ancient sighed, the sound redolent of stale air stirring within a tomb opened for the first time in centuries. ‘I serve the past. I serve that which has gone before. Most of all, I remember. That is how I serve.’

Duerr nodded and swallowed hard. ‘How long, sir?’ he asked. ‘How long have you served? How long have you remembered?’

The flickering of the wall-mounted sconces seemed to slow to a gentle pulse as Koth’s gaze settled upon Duerr, the air thickening as if reality itself were leaning in closer to hear the ancient’s reply. ‘I have always served, Benedikt Duerr. And I always shall.’

‘Sadly,’ the old man continued. ‘So too must you.’

Duerr’s blood turned cold as he met Koth’s gaze. ‘Really, sir,’ he started. ‘I must return–’

‘You cannot,’ Koth replied.

‘Sir, I–’

The ancient leaned forward, his death mask visage all Duerr could perceive as the shadows seemed to close in. ‘Hush, Benedikt Duerr,’ Koth whispered. ‘This is no doing of mine, and I bear you no ill will.’

‘Then what, sir?’ said Duerr. ‘What holds me here?’

Koth inclined his head towards the nearest window and, after a moment, Duerr broke his gaze and looked out. All he saw was the dark forest, the twisted boughs questing upwards towards the gibbous moon. Then a deep, coarse braying filled the night, and Duerr understood.

‘The beasts?’ he said.

‘Aye. The Children of Old Night. How they hate this place.’

Duerr stopped himself from asking why the beastmen might hate the tower of this ancient wizard. His studies and the arcane knowledge he was party to came to him and he had no need to ask. ‘They know this place is not subject to the laws of nature, the laws by which they themselves live and die. They know that you are not subject to such laws. Am I correct, sir?’

‘Very good, young man,’ said Koth. ‘Very good. This… Mhalkon, is it? Yes, he has taught you something at least.’

Duerr glanced around the chamber once more, seeing as if for the first time just how old its contents truly were. How long had Koth dwelt here, coveting priceless relics of ages long gone, while the surrounding forests seethed with beastmen?

‘There must be a way out,’ said Duerr. ‘Surely you have the power.’

‘I may well have the power, Benedikt,’ Koth replied. ‘But I have no desire to leave.’

‘They protect you?’ Duerr asked. ‘They keep the world at bay. They keep the past locked in.’

Koth chuckled, the sound like an ancient coffin lid sliding from its resting place. ‘They do.’

‘They keep all of your… artefacts, your tomes, your relics, safe.’

Koth nodded, though he did not reply.

‘You have such power here,’ said Duerr, aware that Koth was studying him, his skull-like head cocked at a slight angle. He looked towards the ancient volumes arrayed on the shelves. ‘You have knowledge. If I could harness but a portion of that, I could win past them, and escape.’

Koth remained silent for another minute, though to Duerr it felt like ten times as long. The flickering of the sconces had slowed right down to a rolling rhythm, disturbingly synchronised with Duerr’s own heartbeat. The longer Koth remained silent, the more resolved Duerr became. He was certain of it – Koth must surely have some weapon, some rune-bound blade that would turn the beastmen aside and secure his escape!

‘I have no such talisman, boy,’ said Koth at length. ‘I am no Alaric to craft weapons that hack and hew.’

Without Duerr realising Koth had moved, the old man was across the chamber and standing beside a shelf piled high with dusty artefacts. ‘What use to me Elbereth’s Leash or the Mirrors of Mergith? I have no need for Urn Guards or the Cat of Calisthenes, Niobe’s Torch or Rathnugg’s Boots. Not that they did Rathnugg any good…’

‘But you know spells,’ Duerr insisted, knowing he was correct. ‘You have power. This very place has power. I can feel it!’

Koth fixed Duerr with his pit-eyed gaze once more, regarding the young wizard with something akin to curious amusement. Duerr felt powers moving, energies aligning, and dead things stirring in cold, damp earth. He knew with terrible certainty that here before him was perhaps the most puissant master of the old ways of shyish, the Wind of Death, in all the land. That such a being dwelt within the very boundaries of the Empire, albeit deep within the Drakwald Deeps, was astonishing. He felt the draw of temptation, a small part of him begging leave to remain and to learn the secret arts and become master of nightmare and death. But a greater part of Duerr longed to escape this place and the perils pressing in on it from the forests all about. The sensation of dead things stirring grew ever more powerful, until he could feel movement beneath his feet though he stood upon stone flags. His nostrils filled with the musty stink of worm-chewed earth, his mouth with the copper tang of a mourning coin placed beneath his tongue in the funerary rites…

‘Enough!’ Koth ordered, and the power receded, the stink of rotten earth fled, and the slithering of dead things faded away. The copper tang lingered in his mouth as Koth rounded upon him.

‘You are correct,’ the ancient sighed. ‘I cannot keep you here. But I would not see you consumed by things you have no knowledge of.’

‘You will help me?’ Duerr pressed. ‘You will lend me your power?’

‘I will lend you my knowledge, Benedikt,’ Koth replied, holding up a gnarled claw to forestall interruption. ‘Though be warned. You may not thank me, even should you escape.’

Now the blue-green illumination cast by the archaic sconces was all but frozen.

‘I understand,’ replied Duerr, though both men knew full well that he did not.

One month later, Duerr stood high atop the tower of Koth, looking down from the highest turret upon the wind-lashed, night-shrouded Drakwald. Such knowledge infused his mind and his soul, such power was his to command, that he knew he would soon be gone from this place. He would be free of the beastmen, free to return to the Colleges of Magic. He would show his master and his peers that he was worthy, more than worthy, to serve Morr. Perhaps he would return to Koth’s tower, and treat with him as an equal one day.

‘I am ready, master,’ Duerr announced, feeling a cold wind stir his robes. The gale was not entirely natural, the tang of dark magic underlying it.

‘You know you cannot return,’ the voice of the old man came from behind Duerr. ‘Should you even escape.’

‘I know,’ Duerr lied as the wind increased. ‘I am ready,’ he repeated.

‘Upon your own soul then,’ said Koth as he proffered Duerr a rolled up, ribbon-bound scroll. ‘Begin.’

Duerr took the scroll and broke the black wax seal, the discarded ribbon snatched away upon the wind to flutter to the dark clearing far below. He grinned as his eyes scanned the first lines of the spidery text written countless centuries earlier. Here was the last piece of the puzzle, the completion of the knowledge Koth had instilled upon him this last month. With it, he would turn the beasts to his service and escape this ancient trap.

Unfurling the scroll fully and holding it out before him, Duerr located the archaic sigil which he must enunciate in order to turn the beasts to his service. The night gale increased still further, and now it was clear that the Wind of shyish was building to a storm, an invisible vortex of magical energies forming overhead. The sigil glowed blackly upon the ancient parchment, tendrils of ebon power questing outwards as if to draw Duerr’s soul inwards to embrace it…

‘Speak the word and be done!’ Koth shouted over the now howling winds. ‘Before it is too late!’

Fully appreciating Koth’s warning, Duerr took a deep breath and braced himself, the wind seeming to pause in its surging for that instant.

Then he spoke the ancient word of power.

The word had not been spoken in millennia, not by mortal lips at least. Only one schooled in the funerary rites could form it and not be blasted to crematory ashes or withered to a husk. It was a word that few ever spoke this side of the grave. The Wind of shyish whipped to a howling gale, buffeting Duerr and forcing him to set his feet wide lest he be snatched from the turret and tossed to the storm. The trees all about the clearing thrashed and dry leaves were whipped upwards. In an instant, the night was turned to a howling storm.

The feeling of power that Duerr had experienced a month before returned, only this time it was a thousand times more potent, and a thousand times more than that. He was the master of death and of dreams, the bearer of the forbidden key that would unlock the portal between this world and the next. The air about him transmuted into the cold earth of the grave and the air that filled his lungs was scented with the heady, cloying cocktail of incense masking decay.

The word resounded through the thrashing woods and Duerr knew it had been heeded. Soon, he would be master of life and death – his own life and the death of others. The beast would turn pale and do his bidding, and he would be free.

‘It begins!’ Duerr heard Koth bellow into the wind, his voice tinged with terror.

A wet rending split the earth, and Duerr looked downwards into the clearing. The ground appeared to be boiling, as if the roots of the trees all about were stirring in hideous motion. His eyes widened in horror as he saw what he took for a root appear in the cracked earth, questing upwards with a jagged motion. But it was no root. It was nothing natural at all. It was an arm, or the skeletal remains of one, and it was dragging itself clear of the unmarked grave that must surely have held it fast for centuries.

In moments, the arm was clear and the body itself was visible, as were dozens more as they rose with jerking motions from the cold ground. Skeletons, the bones stained almost black by the raw earth, pulled themselves erect all about the clearing, and only then did Duerr see what he had wrought.

‘Beasts…’ he stammered. ‘Beasts from the earth…’

‘Yes, young Benedikt,’ Koth whispered from behind Duerr, his dry voice somehow carrying over the howling wind and speaking directly into the wizard’s mind. ‘And they are yours to command as you will. Now you have the power to escape this place.’

‘Now you may leave.’

Duerr stepped through the portal at the base of the tower, out into the night and the clearing beyond. He trod cautiously, despite the knowledge that the army of dead things arrayed about was his to command. He felt as though he were walking the hunting ground of the most voracious of predators and knew that, in many ways, he was. Steeling himself, he walked through the tattered ranks, studying the rotting things he had brought into being.

The beasts were dark skeletons, rags of flesh and fabric caught amongst ribs and joints. Insects scuttled about disturbed nests while squirming worms fell to the churned ground. They stood upon cloven bone feet and clutched rusted cleavers and rotten shields in their dead grips. Their skulls were the sharp-snouted forms of cattle, though their teeth, where these had survived, were long and wickedly sharp. A pair of horns framed each skull; some curled tightly, others straight and proud. The eyes were empty sockets, but Duerr could perceive the faint spark of animal cognition deep within.

As he walked through the ranks of dead beasts, the sound of creaking bone and rustling dried flesh all about, he saw that one amongst their number was far larger than its fellows. Cautiously, he approached the mighty beast, looking up into its bovine-formed skull and perceiving in its empty eye sockets a vestige of raw, animal power. Echoes of the creature’s death reverberated about the night, faded visions of blasphemy and desecration imprinting themselves over Duerr’s vision. This beast lord had led its war herd against the hated tower and its fearful denizen, seeking to cast it down once and for all so that no stone was left standing upon another. The creature had failed; it and all of its herd had perished in the clearing. Yet, centuries later, its hatred remained, pure and distilled to the essence that still imbued it with fearful power.

At once quelled by the might of the undead beast lord before him and almost drunk with the fact that it was his to command, Duerr spoke the word of command. ‘March!’

At first, nothing stirred but the wind. Then the wet creak of movement filled the clearing about the tower of Koth, and the army of long dead beasts set out. Slow and unsteady at first, the dead things followed Duerr’s order and were soon marching slowly and irregularly through the undergrowth beneath the dense canopy. Duerr hesitated at the tree line and looked over his shoulder towards the tower. There at its peak was Koth, looking down from the turret. He could not see the old man’s expression for he was silhouetted against the green orb of Morrslieb. Then Koth was gone, the tower fading to the ramshackle aspect that Duerr had found it in weeks before. He turned, and followed his army into the black depths of the forest.

He did not get far.

Mere yards beyond the tree line, Duerr came upon the rearmost ranks of the war herd, stood still and silent. The air beneath the black canopy was still, the sounds of the wind muffled and distant. Duerr felt waves of animal threat spilling off of the dead things all about him and knew that death beyond death waited to be unleashed. He edged forward through the silent ranks until he saw the back of the undead beast lord before him.

Duerr saw then why his army had halted. The path ahead was blocked. A single massive beastman stood waiting, its every muscle bunched and tensed in readiness. Though the beast was wreathed in shadow, Duerr could see clearly the form of its four horns, one of which was broken off at the tip. It was the leader of the war herd that had pursued him through the Drakwald long weeks before, returned for its meat. Likely it had never left, but skulked out of sight in the dark, dank forests, biding its time for the trapped prey to emerge.

Though all but rooted to the ground with horror, Duerr knew what he must do. After all, this was the reason he had imbibed the ancient wisdom Koth had taught him, and why he had spoken that dread word of power from beyond the grave; to command this army of dead things to deliver him through the perils of the Drakwald that he might gain his freedom and escape alive.

‘Kill it!’ Duerr ordered the beast lord of his undead herd, his heart swelling with the desire to avenge himself. ‘Stamp it into the ground! Grind it beneath your hooves!’

Grinning savagely, Duerr waited with bittersweet anticipation for his order to be obeyed. But it was not.

The two beast lords, one towering and skeletal, the other shorter of stature but very much alive, squared off against one another. The war herd of the living beast lord loomed from the shadows behind, but did not approach or attempt to intervene. Instead, the two armies backed off, making a space for their leader to face one another.

‘What…?’ Duerr stammered, before the truth of what he was witnessing dawned. He spun suddenly about to face the ranks of undead beasts behind him. ‘Kill them! Just kill them!’ he bellowed.

But none heeded Duerr’s orders. Instead, the two beast lords began to circle one another in the space cleared for them by the herds. The living one huffed and snorted as its hooves stamped upon the rotten ground. The dead one moved with an oddly disjointed gait, patches of rusted mail rattling against dry, black bones. Though the shadowed pits of its eye sockets were empty, Duerr’s wizard’s sight perceived the dark unlife glinting deep within, responding to, and glorying in, this challenge.

Duerr backed away, his gaze fixed upon the sight unfolding before him. The instant his back pressed up against a rotten tree trunk, the living beast lord bellowed deafeningly loudly and launched itself at its rival. The other moved sideways and raised its shield, but the wood splintered under the attacker’s two-handed cleaver. Splinters as deadly as crossbow bolts showered outwards, but the dead lord recovered, discarding the remnants and diving forward. The living beast lord’s momentum carried it forward as its opponent stepped aside and both turned as one, their positions traded.

The beast that was living flesh snorted loudly, its breath so hot that it steamed from its flared nostrils like sulphurous smoke. The other redoubled its grip on its weapon, a sword of ancient fabrication clearly not made by the hand of his race or any other that Duerr knew of. Once more, the two circled the open ground, Duerr pressing himself against the tree all the while as the living beast lord’s great, rippling back hove near.

‘Morr…’ Duerr breathed, desperately seeking to harness something of the power he had felt at the moment he had brought his army of dead things into existence. But he knew in that moment that the god of death and of dreams would not aid him; that this thing he had done was nothing of Morr’s work. Morr was the god of rest, of eternal slumber and of oracles. This night, Duerr had blasphemed in the worst possible manner. Better that he died, he realised as the living beast lord stepped backwards towards him.

‘Morr!’ Duerr bellowed, his mind all but shattered with grief and horror. ‘Morr, forgive–’

But he never completed his prayer, for the beast lord turned and bellowed its savage war cry directly into Duerr’s face. Noise, and the creature’s vile breath, forced him back hard against the tree trunk, knocking his head and causing his vision to blur. As he slid to the ground, he saw the beast turn in time to block a downwards blow from the undead lord and strike a savage counterblow in return.

The beast lord’s two-handed cleaver struck the undead thing through the middle. Had the target had guts, they would have spilled across the clearing, but instead, the blade severed the exposed spine and brought the two halves of the unliving beast crashing to the ground. Its lower half came to rest amongst its followers, while the upper lay clawing the ground at the victor’s feet.

The beast lord bellowed such a roar of triumph that the trees bowed and the canopy thrashed as if the storm that had whipped the forest when Duerr called forth the undead beast herd was returned. The sound left Duerr stunned and half-deafened, his balance shot and his vision all but gone. As he slumped to the ground, he saw the victor raise its cloven hoof high above the dead-thing’s bovine skull head, and bring it crashing down with such force that the land itself cried out in pain.

The skull splintered into a thousand fragments and the undead beast lord was slain a second time. Slumping to the ground, Duerr rolled over onto his side in time to see the dead beastmen prostrate themselves before the victor.

The challenge was won; dominance was established; the herd was one and the rival beast lord was slain.

But Duerr knew that one more matter needed to be decided: his own fate. He felt his end drawing near, even as the heavy, cloven tread of the beastmen approached.

Imagining the beast lord’s hoof raised above his head, poised to end his existence, he looked away across the ground. His blurred gaze settled upon a nearby object, a black-stemmed plant mere feet from his head, trampled into the ground. It was manbane, the very herb that he had so foolishly ventured into the Drakwald to obtain, so many weeks before.

He screwed his eyes tight shut as the Beastmen gathered all about him. He waited for the inevitable, yet the killing blow never came. Instead of a cloven hoof slamming down upon his head, a stream of near-boiling acrid liquid struck him hard. Another joined it, then a third. One after another, the beastmen of the Drakwald demonstrated their disgust for this human, whose life was so meaningless to them that they would not even deign to snuff it out.

And high atop the Tower of Koth, the ancient Necromancer returned to his studies of texts not read by mortal eyes for uncounted millennia, content to ignore the passage of the ages and the folly of man, until the end of time itself.

THE LAST REMEMBRANCER

John French

‘In an age of darkness the truth must die’

– Words of a forgotten scholar of ancient Terra

They murdered the intruder ship on the edge of the Solar System. It spun through space, a kilometre-long barb of crenellated metal, trailing the burning vapours of its death like the tatters of a shroud. Like lions running down a crippled prey two golden-hulled strike vessels bracketed the dying ship. Each was a blunt slab of burnished armour thrust through space on cones of star-hot fire. They carried weapons that could level cities and held companies of the finest warriors. Their purpose was to kill any enemy who dared to enter the realm they guarded.

This star system was the seat of the Emperor of Mankind, the heart of an Imperium betrayed by its brightest son. There could be no mercy in this place. The ship had appeared without warning and without the correct identification signals. Its only future was to die in sight of the sun that had lit the birth of humanity.

Explosions flared across the intruder ship’s hull, its skin splitting with ragged wounds that spilled dying crew and molten metal into the void. The two hunters silenced their guns and spat boarding torpedoes into the intruder’s flanks. The first armoured dart punctured the ship’s command decks, its assault ramps exploding open and disgorging amber-yellow armoured warriors in a roar of fire.

Each boarding torpedo carried twenty Imperial Fists of the Legiones Astartes: genetically enhanced warriors clad in powered armour who knew no fear or pity. Their enemy bore marks of loyalty to Horus, the Emperor’s son who had turned on his father and thrust the Imperium into civil war. Red eyes with slit pupils, snarling beast heads and jagged eight pointed stars covered the hull of the ship and the flesh of its crew. The air had a greasy quality, a meat stink that penetrated the Imperial Fists’ sealed armour as they shot and hacked deeper into the ship. Blood dripped from their amber-yellow armour and tatters of flesh hung from their chainblades. There were thousands of crew on the ship: dreg ratings, servitors, command crew, technicians and armsmen. There were only a hundred Imperial Fists facing them but there would be no survivors.

Twenty-two minutes after boarding the ship the Imperial Fists found the sealed doors. They were over three times the height of a man and as wide as a battle tank. They did not know what was inside but that did not matter. Anything kept so safe must have been of great value to the enemy. Four melta charges later, a glowing hole had been bored through two metres of metal. The breach still glowing cherry red the first Imperial Fist moved through, bolt pistol raised, tracking for targets.

The space beyond was a bare chamber, tall and wide enough to take half a dozen Land Raiders side by side. The air was still, untouched by the rank haze that filled the rest of the ship, as if it had been kept separate and isolated. There were no jagged stars scratched into the metal of the floor, no red eyes set into the walls. At first it seemed empty, and then they saw the figure at the centre of the room. They advanced, red target runes in their helmet displays pulsing over the hunched man in grey. He sat on the floor, the discarded remains of food and crumpled parchment scattered around him. Thick chains led from bolts in the deck to shackles around his thin ankles. On his lap was a pile of yellow parchment. His hand held a crude quill made from a spar of metal; its tip was black.

The sergeant of the Imperial Fist boarding squad walked to within a blade swing of the man. More warriors spread out into the echoing chamber, weapons pointing in at him.

‘Who are you?’ asked the sergeant, his voice growling from his helmet’s speaker grille.

‘I am the last remembrancer,’ said the man.

The nameless fortress hid from the sun on the dark side of Titan, as if turning its face from the light. A kilometre-wide disk of stone and armour, it hung in the void above the yellow moon. Reflected light from the bloated sphere of Saturn caught in the tops of its weapon towers, spilling jagged shadows across its surface. It had been a defence station, part of the network that protected the approaches to Terra. Now the treachery of Horus had given it a new purpose. Here in isolated cells suspected traitors and turncoats were kept and bled of their secrets. Thousands of gaolers kept its inmates alive until they were of no further use: until the questioners were finished with them. There were countless questions that demanded an answer and its cells were never empty.

Rogal Dorn would be the first primarch to set foot in the nameless fortress. It was not an honour he relished.

‘Vile,’ said Dorn, watching as the void fortress grew nearer on a viewscreen. He sat on a metal flight bench, the knuckles of his armoured gauntlet beneath his chin. The inside compartment of the Stormbird attack craft was dark, the light from the viewscreen casting the primarch’s face in corpse-cold light. Dark eyes set above sharp cheekbones, a nose that cut down in line with the slope of the forehead, a down-turned mouth framed by a strong jaw. It was a face of perfection set in anger and carved from stone.

‘It is unpleasant, but it is necessary, my lord,’ said a voice from the darkness behind Dorn. It was a low, deep voice, weighted with age. The primarch did not turn to look at the person who spoke, a grey presence standing on the edge of the light. There were just the two of them alone in the crew compartment. Rogal Dorn commanded the defence of Terra and millions of troops but came to this place with only one companion.

‘Necessary, I have heard that often recently,’ growled Dorn, not looking away from the waiting fortress.

Behind Dorn the shadowed figure shifted forwards. Cold electric light fell across a face crossed by lines of age and scars of time. Like the primarch, the figure wore armour, light catching its edges but hiding its colours in shadow.

‘The enemy is inside us, lord. It does not only march against us on the battlefield, it walks amongst us,’ said the old warrior.

‘Trust is to be feared in this war then, captain?’ asked Dorn, his voice like the growl of distant thunder.

‘I speak the truth as I see it,’ said the old warrior.

‘Tell me, if it had not been my Imperial Fists that found him would I have known that Solomon Voss had been brought here?’ He turned away from the screen and looked at the old warrior with eyes that had vanished into pits of shadow. ‘What would have happened to him?’

The flickering blue light of the viewscreen spilled over the old warrior. Grey armour, without mark or rank, the hilt of a double handed sword visible from where it projected above his shoulders. The light glittered across the ghost of a sigil on the grey of his shoulder guard.

‘The same as must happen now: the truth must be found and after that whatever the truth demands must be done,’ said the old warrior. He could feel the primarch’s emotions radiating out from him, the violence chained behind a facade of stone.

‘I have seen my brothers burn worlds we created together, sent my sons against my brothers’ sons. I have unmade the heart of my father’s empire and clad it in iron. You think I wish to avoid the realities that face us?’

The old warrior waited a heartbeat before replying. ‘Yet you come here, my lord. You come to see a man who, in all likelihood, has been corrupted by Horus and the powers that cradle him.’ Rogal Dorn did not move but the old warrior could feel the danger in that stillness like a lion poised for the kill.

‘Have a care,’ said Dorn, in a whisper like a sword sliding from a scabbard.

‘Trust is a weakness in our armour, lord,’ said the warrior, looking directly at the primarch. Dorn stepped forwards, his eyes deliberately tracing the bare grey surfaces of armour that should have displayed Legion heraldry.

‘A strange sentiment from you, Iacton Qruze,’ said Dorn.

The old warrior nodded slowly, remembering the ideals and broken oaths that had brought him to this point in time. He had once been a captain in the Luna Wolves Legion, the Legion of Horus. He was almost the last of his kind, and he had nothing left but his oath to serve the Emperor, and the Emperor alone.

‘I have seen the price of blind trust, my lord. Trust must be proved.’

‘And because of that we must throw the ideals of the Imperium to the flames?’ said Dorn, leaning close to Qruze. Such focus from a primarch would have forced most mortals to their knees. Qruze held Dorn’s gaze without faltering. He knew his role in this. He had made an oath of moment that he would stand watch over Rogal Dorn’s judgement. His duty was to balance that judgement with questions.

‘You have intervened, and so the judgement on this man is yours. He lives at your word,’ said Qruze.

‘What if he is innocent?’ snapped Dorn. Qruze gave a weary smile.

‘That proves nothing, my lord. If he is a threat he must be destroyed.’

‘Is that what you are here to do?’ said Dorn, nodding at the hilt of the sword on Qruze’s back. ‘To play judge, jury and executioner?’

‘I am here to help you in your judgement. I do this for the Sigillite. This is his domain and I am his hand in this.’

An expression that might have been distaste ghosted across Dorn’s face as he turned his back on Qruze.

On the viewscreen the side of the nameless fortress filled the screen; a toothed set of doors opening to greet them like a waiting mouth. Qruze could see a vast loading bay beyond lit by bright light. Hundreds of troops in gloss-red armour and silver-visored helmets waited in ranks, filling the docking bay floor. These were the gaolers of the nameless fortress. They never showed their faces and had no names, each was simply a number. Amongst them the hunched figures of the questioners stood in loose clusters, their faces hidden by hoods, fingers augmented with needles and blades protruding from the sleeves of their red robes.

The Stormbird settled on the deck with a purr of an antigravity field. Ice beaded its sleek body and wings as the warm air met void-cold metal. With a pneumatic hiss the ramp opened beneath the Stormbird’s nose and Rogal Dorn walked into the stark light. He shone, the light reflecting from the burnished gold of his armour, glittering from rubies clutched in the claws of silver eagles. A black cloak lined in red and edged in ivory fell from his shoulders. As one every person in the docking bay knelt, the deck ringing with the impact of a thousand knees. Rogal Dorn strode through the kneeling ranks without a glance. Behind him Iacton Qruze followed in his ghost-grey armour, like a shadow in the sun’s wake.

At the end of the ranks of crimson guards, three figures knelt and waited. Each wore armour the same gloss-red as the kneeling guards, their bowed heads encased by masks of tarnished silver. These were the key keepers of the nameless fortress. Qruze was one of the few people to have ever seen their faces.

‘Ave Praetorian,’ called one of the bowed figures in a booming electronic voice. With one voice every kneeling human echoed the call. The primarch spoke over the fading echoes.

‘Take me to the remembrancer Solomon Voss.’

The man was writing when the cell door opened. The light from the glow-globe above him created a murky yellow halo that cast all but the makeshift desk and the man into shadow. Thin shoulders hunched over a sheet of parchment, a quill in a thin hand scratching out black words. He did not look up.

Rogal Dorn stepped into the cell. He had removed his armour and wore a black tabard held around the waist with a belt of gold braid. Even without his battle-plate he seemed to strain the dark metal walls of the cell with his presence. Qruze followed, still in his grey armour.

‘Solomon Voss,’ said Dorn in a soft tone.

The man looked up at them. He had a flat, handsome face, the skin smooth and lined only around the eyes. His steel-grey hair was pulled back into a ponytail that hung over the rough fabric covering his back. In the presence of a primarch many people would struggle to speak. The man nodded and gave a tired smile.

‘Hello, old friend,’ said Voss. ‘I knew someone would come.’ His eyes flicked to Qruze. ‘Not alone though, I see.’ Qruze felt the disdain in the words but held his face impassive. Voss starred at him. ‘I know your face from somewhere.’

Qruze did not reply. He knew who the man was, of course. Solomon Voss: author of The Edge of Illumination, witness to the first conquests of the Great Crusade, according to many the finest wordsmith of the age. Qruze had met Voss once, long ago in a different age. So much had left its mark on Qruze since then that he was surprised his old face triggered even the weakest memory in this man.

Voss nodded at the bare grey of Qruze’s armour. ‘The colours and markings of a Legion were always a mark of pride. So what does unmarked grey imply? Shame, perhaps?’ Qruze kept his face emotionless. Such a remark would once have angered him. Now there was no false pride for it to cut. He had passed far beyond his lost life as a Son of Horus or Luna Wolf.

Dorn looked at Qruze, his face unreadable but his voice firm.

‘He is here to observe, that is all.’

‘The silent hand of judgement,’ said Voss, nodding and turning back to the sheet of parchment. The quill began to scratch again. Dorn pulled a metal-framed chair close to the desk and sat, the chair creaking under his weight.

‘I am your judge, remembrancer,’ said Dorn in a low voice tinged with a tone that Qruze could not place.

Voss did not reply but completed a line of lettering. He made a low half-whistling noise as he paused over a word. Qruze thought he could see feelings play over the remembrancer’s face, a twinge of apprehension and defiance. Then, with a flourish, the quill completed a line and Voss placed it on the desk. He nodded at the drying words and smiled.

‘Done. In all honesty I think it is my best work. I flatter myself that you would not find its equal amongst the works of the ancients.’ He turned to look at Dorn. ‘Of course, no one will ever read it.’

Dorn gave a half-smile as if he had not heard the last remark and nodded at the pile of parchment on the desk.

‘They let you have parchment and quill, then?

‘Yes,’ sighed Voss. ‘I wish I could say it was kind of them, but I rather think that they hope to scour it for secrets afterwards. They can’t quite believe I am telling the truth, you see, but they also can’t stop hoping that I am. The information on your brother, you see. I can feel their hunger for it.’ Qruze saw the slightest tightening in Dorn’s face at the mention of his brother.

‘You have been questioned?’ asked Dorn.

‘Yes. But the heavy stuff has not started. Not yet.’ Voss gave a humourless laugh. ‘But I have a feeling that it was not far off. Until they stopped asking questions and just left me here.’ Voss raised an eyebrow. ‘That was your doing?’

‘I was not going to let the great Solomon Voss disappear into an interrogation cell,’ said Dorn.

‘I am flattered, but there are many more prisoners here, thousands I think.’ Voss was looking around at the metal walls of his cell as if he could see through them. ‘I can hear the screams sometimes. I think they want us to hear them. They probably think it makes us easier to question.’ Voss’s voice trailed away.

This man is broken, thought Qruze, something within him has died and left only a half life.

Dorn leaned towards Voss.

‘You were more than a remembrancer,’ said Dorn. ‘Remember?’

‘I was something once,’ he nodded still starring into the darkness. ‘Once. Back before Ullanor, when there were no remembrancers, when they were just an idea.’ Voss shook his head and looked down at the parchment in front of him. ‘It was quite an idea.’

Dorn nodded and Qruze saw the ghost of a smile on the primarch’s normally grim face.

‘Your idea, Solomon. A thousand artists sent out to reflect the truth of the Great Crusade. An idea worthy of the Imperium.’

Voss gave a weak smile. ‘Flattery again, Rogal Dorn. Not completely my idea, as you must remember.’ Dorn nodded and Qruze heard a note of passion in Voss’s voice. ‘I was just a wordsmith tolerated amongst the powerful because I could turn their deeds into words that could spread like fire.’ Voss’s eyes shone as if reflecting the light of bright memories. ‘Not like the iterators, not like Sindermann and the rest of his manipulating ilk. The Imperial truth did not need manipulation. It needed reflecting out into the Imperium through words, and images and sounds.’ He broke off and looked at the black ink stains on his thin fingers. ‘At least, I thought so then.’

‘You were right,’ said Dorn and Qruze saw the conviction flow into the primarch’s face. ‘I remember the manuscripts you presented to the Emperor at Zuritz. Written by you and illuminated by Askarid Sha. They were beautiful and true.’ Dorn was nodding slowly, as if trying to tease a response from Voss who was still looking at his hands. ‘The petition to create an order of artists to “witness, record and reflect the light of truth spread by the Great Crusade”. An order of people to be the Imperium’s memory of its foundation: that was what you argued was needed. And you were right.’

Voss nodded slowly, then he looked up and there was a hollow look in his eyes. It was the look of someone thinking about what they had lost, thought Qruze. He knew. He had worn it himself in many dark hours in recent years.

‘Yes, fine times,’ said Voss. ‘When the Council of Terra ratified the creation of the Order of Remembrancers, for a moment I thought I knew what you and your brothers must have felt, seeing your sons bringing illumination to the galaxy.’ He gave a dismissive snort. ‘But you are not here to flatter, Rogal Dorn, you are here to judge.’

‘You vanished,’ said Dorn in the same soft tone he had begun with. ‘In the moments after the betrayal you vanished. Where have you been?’ Voss did not answer for a second.

‘I have been telling the truth since your sons took me from that ship,’ he said, and looked at Qruze. ‘I am sure it is in their mission accounts.’

Qruze stayed silent. He knew what Voss had said to the Imperial Fists that found him, what he had been saying to his interrogators ever since. He knew, and Rogal Dorn would know, but the primarch said nothing. The silence waited until Voss looked at Dorn and said what the primarch had been waiting for.

‘I have been with the Warmaster.’

Iacton Qruze kept his distance as the primarch watched the stars turn above him. They were in an observation cupola, a blister of crystal glass on the upper surface of the nameless fortress. Above them Saturn hung, its bands of muddy colour reminding Qruze of fat running through meat. Dorn had cut short the questioning of Solomon Voss, saying that he would return soon. He had said to Qruze that he needed to think. So they had come here to think beneath the light of the stars and the eye of Saturn. Qruze thought that Dorn had hoped that Voss would deny his earlier claim, that he would find a reason to set him free.

‘He is as I remember him,’ said Dorn suddenly, still gazing out at the scatter of stars. ‘Older, worn, but still the same. No sign of corruption to my eyes.’

I must do my duty, thought Qruze. Even though it is like stabbing a blade into an unhealed wound. He took a deep breath before speaking.

‘No, my lord. But perhaps you see what you want to see.’ The primarch did not move but Qruze sensed the shift in atmosphere, a charge of danger in the cold air.

‘You presume much, Iacton Qruze,’ said the primarch in a low growl.

Qruze took a careful step closer to Dorn and spoke in a level voice. ‘I presume nothing. I have nothing but one unbroken oath. That oath means I must say these things.’ The primarch turned and straightened so that Qruze had to look up into his face. ‘Even to you, lord.’

‘You have more to say?’ growled Dorn.

‘Yes. I must remind you that the enemy is subtle and has many weapons. We can protect against them only with suspicion. Solomon Voss might be as you remember him. Perhaps he is the same man. Perhaps.’ Qruze let the word hang in the air. ‘But perhaps is not enough.’

‘Do you believe his claim? That he was with Horus all this time?’

‘I believe the facts. Voss has been amongst the enemy, whether willingly or as a captive. He was on a ship enslaved to Horus that bore the marks of the enemy. The rest could be...’

‘A story.’ Dorn was nodding, a grim expression on his face. ‘He was the greatest teller of stories that I have ever known. There are billions in the Imperium that only know of our deeds by the words he wrote. You think that he is spinning a tale now?’

Qruze shook his head. ‘I do not know, lord. I am not here to judge, I am here to question.’

‘Then do your duty and question.’

Qruze took a breath and began to count off points, raising a finger for each one. ‘Why did he go to Horus if he is not a traitor? Horus slaughtered the rest of the remembrancers when he purged the Legions. Why would he keep one of them alive?’ When Dorn did not interrupt Qruze continued. ‘And an enemy ship, with a single man held safe within it, does not drift into the Solar System alone.’ He paused for a second, thinking of the thing that worried him most. Dorn was still looking at him, silently absorbing Qruze’s words. ‘It was not accident. He was returned to us.’

Dorn nodded, forming Qruze’s worry into a question. ‘And if he was, why?’

‘Why did you go to Horus?’ asked Rogal Dorn.

They were back in the cell. Solomon Voss sat by his desk with Rogal Dorn opposite him and Qruze standing by the door. Voss took a sip of spiced tea from a battered metal cup. He had asked for it and Dorn had assented. The remembrancer swallowed slowly and licked his lips before beginning.

‘I was on Hattusa, with the 817th fleet, when I heard that Horus had rebelled against the Emperor. I could not believe it at first. I tried to think of reasons why, to put it into some form of context, to make some sense of it. I could not. But when I realised that I could not make sense of it I knew what I needed to do. I needed to see the truth with my own eyes. I would witness it and I would make sense of what I saw. Then I would put it into words so that others could share my understanding.’

Dorn frowned. ‘You doubted that Horus was a traitor?’

‘No. But I was a remembrancer, the greatest remembrancer. It was our duty to make sense of great events in art. I knew that others would doubt or would not believe that the brightest son of the Imperium could turn against it. If it was true I wanted that truth shouted from the works of as many remembrancers as possible.’

Qruze saw the passion and fire flash through Voss’s face. For a moment the tiredness was gone and the man’s conviction shone from him.

‘You take much on yourself. To make sense of something that is senseless,’ said Dorn.

‘Remembrancers made what happened in the Great Crusade real. Without us who would remember any of it?’

Dorn shook his head gently. ‘A war between the Legions is not a place for artists.’

‘And the other types of wars we had been recording, were they more suitable? When all that had been built by you, by us, had been plunged into doubt, where else should I have been? I was a remembrancer; it was my duty to witness this war.’ Voss put his cup of spiced tea down on his desk.

‘I had started to make plans to get to Isstvan V by calling in favours and contacts.’ Voss’s mouth twisted as if chewing bitter words. ‘Then the Edict of Dissolution came through. The remembrancers were no more, by the order of the Council of Terra. We were to be removed and dissolved back into mundane society. Those already amongst the war fleets were no longer to be allowed to record events.’

Qruze could feel the bitterness in the man’s words. In the wake of the news of Horus’s betrayal many things had changed in the Imperium. One of these changes had been the removal of official backing for the remembrancers. With a stroke of a pen the remembrancers had been no more.

Better that than what could have become of them, thought Qruze. The image of men and woman dying under the guns of his former brothers flicked across his mind. An age ago, but no time at all, he thought. He blinked and the cell snapped back into sharp reality.

‘But you did not obey,’ said Dorn.

‘I was angry,’ spat Voss. ‘I was the father of the Order of Remembrancers. I had witnessed the centuries of the Great Crusade since it began on Terra. I had looked on demigods and the scattering of blood amongst the stars that has been the birth of the Imperium.’ He raised his hand as if gesturing to stars and planets above them. ‘I made those events real to minds that will never see them. I bound them in words so that those wars will echo into the future. In millennia to come there will be children who listen, or read, and will feel the weight of these times in my words.’ He snorted. ‘We remembrancers served illumination and truth, not the whim of a council of bureaucrats.’ Voss shook his head, his lip curled for a moment and then he blinked.

‘Askarid was with me,’ he said quietly. ‘She said that it was an impossible idea, dangerous and driven by ego. A pilgrimage of hubris, she called it.’ He smiled and closed his eyes for a moment, floating in lost happiness.

Qruze knew the name Askarid Sha, illuminator and calligraphist. She had lettered Voss’s work into scrolls and tomes as beautiful as his words.

‘Your collaborator?’ asked Qruze, the question slipping out of his lips. Dorn shot him a hard look.

‘Yes, she was my collaborator, in every sense.’ Voss sighed and looked at the dregs of tea in his cup. ‘We argued, for days,’ he said quietly. ‘We argued until it was clear that I was not going to change my mind. I knew it was possible to get to Isstvan V. I had contacts throughout the fleets, on both sides of the war. I knew I could do it.’

Voss paused, staring into space as if someone stood there looking back at him from a lost past. Dorn said nothing, but waited. After a few moments Voss spoke, a catch in his voice.

‘Askarid came with me, even though I think she feared how it would end.’

‘And how did it end?’ asked Dorn. Voss looked back at the primarch, his eyes still wide with memory.

‘Isn’t that what you are here to decide, Rogal Dorn?’

‘He was right, about the Edict of Dissolution,’ said Dorn. Voss had asked to sleep and Dorn had permitted it. He and Qruze had returned to the dome of crystal beneath the starfield. Qruze could feel the leaden mood of the primarch as he stood looking at the stars.

‘The end of the remembrancers?’ said Qruze, raising an eyebrow and looking up at Dorn. ‘You think that they should be allowed to wander through this war? Recording our shame in paintings and songs?’ There was a pause. Qruze expected another growl of rebuke but Dorn showed no emotion other than in the slow breath exhaling from his nose.

‘I had my doubts when the Council ratified the edict,’ said Dorn. ‘The position as presented at the time was perfectly logical. We are at war with ourselves; we do not know how far the treachery of my brother spreads. This is not a time to allow a menagerie of artists to walk freely amongst our forces. This is not a war to be reflected in poetry. I understand that...’

‘But beyond logic, you had doubts,’ said Qruze. He felt that he suddenly understood why Rogal Dorn, Praetorian of Terra, had come to see an old remembrancer in a prison cell.

‘Not doubts, sorrow.’ Dorn turned, pointing out at the stars beyond the crystal glass. ‘We went out into those stars to wage war for a future of enlightenment. We took the best artists with us so that they could reflect that truth. Now our battles go unremembered and unrecorded. What does that tell us?’ Dorn let his hand fall.

‘It is a practicality of the situation we face. The survival of the truth that we fought for makes demands that must be met,’ said Qruze.

‘Demands that must be wrapped in silence and shadow? Deeds done that must remain unremembered and unjudged?’ Dorn began to walk away from the glass, his steps raising dust from the floor.

‘Survival or obliteration: that will be history’s judgement on us,’ said the grey warrior.

Dorn turned to stare at Qruze, the ghost of anger on his face. ‘And the only way is for the Imperium to become a cruel machine of iron, and blood?’ said the primarch in a hard-edged whisper.

‘The future will have a price,’ said Qruze, not moving from the viewport. Dorn was silent. For an instant Qruze thought he saw a flicker of despair in the primarch’s eyes. Behind him the planets of the Solar System glittered as cold points of light beyond the towers of the nameless fortress.

‘What will we become, Iacton Qruze? What will the future allow us to be?’ said Dorn, and walked away without looking back.

‘When we reached Isstvan V the massacre was complete,’ continued Voss. ‘I never got the chance to see the surface, but the void around it sparkled with debris. I watched it drift past the viewport of my stateroom, fragments still cooling, fires feeding on oxygen trapped in wrecks.’

Dorn nodded, his face unreadable as he listened to the remembrancer’s story. Something had changed in the primarch after they returned from the observation deck. It was as if he had begun to wall something up inside him. It reminded Qruze of the gates of a citadel grinding shut before the advance of an enemy. If Voss noticed he did not show it.

‘They came for us, the Sons of Horus. It was not until I saw them that I began to think that I had misunderstood this civil war.’ Voss glanced at Qruze and the old warrior felt an ice-cold touch in his guts. ‘Metal, sea green metal, edged with bronze and covered with red slit eyes. Some had dried blood flaking from their armour. There were heads hanging on chains and by bunches of hair. They reeked of iron and blood. They said to come with them. Only one person asked why. I wish I could remember her name, but at the time I just wanted her to be quiet. One of them walked over to her and pulled her arms from her body, and left her screaming on the floor. We went with them after that.’ Voss paused, his eyes unfocused as if seeing the woman die again in her own blood.

Qruze found his hands had clenched, angry questions surging through his mind. Which one had it been? Which one of his former brothers had done that deed? One that he knew? One he had liked? He thought of the moment when he had learnt the truth about the men he had called brothers. The past can still wound us, he thought. He let out a quiet breath, releasing the pain. He must listen. For now, that was what he was here to do.

‘There were many remembrancers with you?’ asked Dorn.

‘Yes,’ said Voss with a shiver. ‘I had persuaded a number of others to come with me. Other remembrancers who agreed we had a duty to show the truth of this darkening age. Twenty-one came with me. There were others too, taken from the ships of the Legions who had only just showed their allegiance.’ Voss licked his lips, his eyes wandering again.

‘What happened to them?’ said Dorn.

‘We were taken to the audience chamber on the Vengeful Spirit. I had seen it once before, a long time before.’ Voss made a small shake of his head. ‘It was not the same place. The viewport still looked out on the stars like a vast eye and the walls still tapered to darkness above. But things hung from the ceiling on chains, dried mutilated things, that I did not want to look at. Ragged banners, splattered with dark stains, covered the metal walls. It was hot, like the inside of a cave beside a fire pit. The air stank of hot metal and raw meat. I could see the Sons of Horus standing at the edge of the room, still, waiting. And at the centre of it all was Horus.

‘I think I still thought I would see the pearl-white armour, the ivory cloak and the face of a friend. I looked at him and he was looking at me, right at me. I wanted to run, but I could not, I could not move to breathe. I could only stare back at that face framed by armour the colour of an ocean storm. He pointed at me, and said “All but that one.” His sons did the rest.

‘Three seconds of thunder and blood. When it was quiet I was on the deck on my hands and knees. Blood was pooling around my fingers. There was just blood and pulped meat all around me. The only thing I could think of was that Askarid had been stood beside me. I felt her hand around mine just before the shooting started.’ Voss closed his eyes, his hands held together in his lap.

Qruze found that he could not look away from those ink-stained hands, the skin wrinkled, the fingers gripped together as if clutching a memory.

‘But he kept you alive,’ said Dorn, his voice as flat and hard as a hammer falling on stone.

Voss looked up, his eyes meeting the primarch’s. ‘Oh yes. Horus spared me. He walked to stand above me; I could feel his presence, that chained ferocity, like a furnace’s heat. “Look at me,” he said and I did. He smiled. “I remember you, Solomon Voss,” he said. “I have cleansed my fleets of your kind: all but you. You I will keep. No one will harm you. You will see everything.” He laughed. “You will be a remembrancer,” he said.’

‘And what did you do?’ asked Dorn.

‘I did the only thing I could. I was a remembrancer. I watched every bloody moment, heard the words of hate, smelt the stink of death and folly. I think for a time I went mad,’ Voss chuckled. ‘But then I realised what the truth of this age is. I found the truth I had come to see.’

‘What truth is that, remembrancer?’ said Dorn, and Qruze could hear the danger in the words like an edge on a blade.

Voss gave a small laugh, as if at a child’s foolish question. ‘That the future is dead, Rogal Dorn. It is ashes running through our hands.’

Dorn was on his feet before Qruze could blink. Rage radiated from him like the heat of a fire. Qruze had to steady himself as Dorn’s emotion filled the room like an expanding thundercloud.

‘You lie,’ roared the primarch in a voice that had cowed armies.

Qruze waited for the blow to land, for the remembrancer to be nothing more than bloody flesh on the floor. No blow came. Voss shook his head. Qruze wondered at what the man must have seen to make this primarch’s rage blow over him as if it were a gust of wind.

‘I have seen what your brother has become,’ said Voss, carefully measuring his words. ‘I have looked your enemy in the eye. I know what must happen.’

‘Horus will be defeated,’ spat Dorn.

‘Yes. Yes, perhaps he will, but I still speak the truth. It is not Horus that will destroy the future of the Imperium. It is you, Rogal Dorn. You and those that stand with you.’ Voss nodded to Qruze.

Dorn leant down so that he was looking the man in the eye.

‘We will rebuild the Imperium when this war is done.’

‘From what, Rogal Dorn? From what?’ sneered Voss, and Qruze saw the words hit Dorn like a blow. ‘The weapons of this age of darkness are silence and secrets. The enlightenment of Imperial truth, those were the ideals you fought for. But you cannot trust any more, and without trust those ideals will die, old friend.’

‘Why do you say this?’ hissed Dorn.

‘I say it because I am a remembrancer. I reflect the truth of the times. The truth is not something this new age wants to hear.’

‘I do not fear the truth.’

‘Then let my words,’ Voss tapped his parchment, ‘be heard by all. I have written it here, everything I saw, every dark and bloody moment.’

Qruze thought of the words of Solomon Voss spreading through the Imperium, carried by the authority of their author and the power of their message. It would be like poison spreading through the soul of those resisting Horus.

‘You lie,’ said Dorn carefully, as if the words were a shield.

‘We sit in a secret fortress built on suspicion, with a sword over my head, and you say I lie?’ Voss gave a humourless laugh.

Dorn let out a long breath and turned away from the remembrancer. ‘I say that you have condemned yourself.’ Dorn moved towards the door.

Qruze made to follow but Voss spoke from behind them.

‘I think I understand now. Why your brother kept me and then let me fall into your hands.’ Dorn turned from the open cell door. Voss looked back at him, a weary smile on his face. ‘He knew that his brother would want to save me as a relic of the past. And he knew that I would never be allowed free after what I had seen.’ Voss nodded, the smile gone from his face. ‘He wanted you to feel the ideals of the past dying in your hands. He wanted you to look it in the eye as you killed it. He wanted you to realise that you two are much alike, still, Rogal Dorn.’

‘Bring me my armour,’ said Rogal Dorn, and red-robed serfs scuttled from the darkness. Each bore a section of gold battle-plate. Some pieces were so large and heavy that several had to carry them.

Dorn and Qruze stood once more in the observation dome. The only light in the wide, circular chamber was from the starfield above. Rogal Dorn had not spoken since he had left Voss in his cell, and Qruze had for once not dared to speak. Voss’s words had shaken Qruze. No mad ranting or proclamation of Horus’s greatness. No, this was worse. The remembrancer’s words had spread through him like ice forming in water. Qruze had fought it, contained it within the walls of his will, but it still clawed at his mind. What if Voss had spoken the truth? He wondered if it was a poison strong enough to burn the mind of a primarch.

Dorn had stood looking out at the stars for over an hour before he had asked for his armour. The serfs would normally have armoured Dorn, cladding him in his battle-plate piece by piece. This time he armoured himself, pulling a hard skin of adamantium over his flesh, framing his stone-set face in gold: a war god rebuilding himself with his own hands. Qruze thought that the primarch looked like a man preparing for his last battle.

‘He has been twisted, my lord,’ said Qruze softly and the primarch paused, his bare right hand about to slot into a gauntlet worked in silver with eagle feathers. ‘Horus sent him here to wound and weaken you. He said as much himself. He speaks lies.’

‘Lies?’ said the primarch.

Qruze steeled himself and asked the question he had feared to ask since they had left Voss’s cell. ‘You fear that he is right? That the ideals of truth and illumination are dead?’ said Qruze, an edge of urgency to his voice.

As soon as he spoke he did not want to know the answer. Dorn put his hand into the gauntlet, the seals snapping shut around the wrist. He flexed his metal-sheathed hand and looked at Qruze. There was a coldness in his eyes that made Qruze remember moonlight glinting from wolves’ eyes in the darkness of lost winter nights.

‘No, Iacton Qruze,’ said Dorn. ‘I fear that they never existed at all.’

The door to the cell opened, spilling the shadows of Rogal Dorn and Iacton Qruze across the floor. Solomon Voss sat at his desk facing the door as if waiting for them, his last manuscript on the desk at his side. Rogal Dorn stepped in, the low light catching the edges of his armour. He looked, thought Qruze, like a walking statue of burnished metal. There were no sounds other than the steps of the primarch and the hum of the glow-globes.

Qruze pulled the door shut behind them and moved to the side. Reaching behind his shoulder he gripped the hilt of the sword sheathed at his back. The blade slid out of its scabbard with a whisper sound of steel. Forged by the finest warsmiths at the command of Malcador the Sigillite, Regent of Terra, its double-edged blade was as tall as a mortal man. Its silvered surface was etched with screaming faces wreathed by serpents and weeping blood. It bore the name Tisiphone, in memory of a forgotten force of vengeance. Qruze rested the blade point down, his hands gripping the hilt level with his face.

Voss looked up at the armoured figure of Rogal Dorn and nodded.

‘I am ready,’ said Voss and stood up, straightening his robe over his thin body, running a hand over his grey hair. He looked at Qruze. ‘Is this your moment, grey watcher? That sword has waited for me.’

‘No,’ came the voice of Dorn. ‘I will be your executioner.’ He turned to Qruze and held out his hand. ‘Your sword, Iacton Qruze.’

Qruze looked into the face of the primarch. There was pain in Dorn’s eyes, unendurable pain locked behind walls of stone and iron, glimpsed for an instant through a crack.

Qruze bowed his head so that he did not need to look at Dorn’s face, and held the sword out hilt first. Dorn took the sword with one hand, its size and weight seeming to shrink as he took it. He brought it up between him and Solomon Voss. The sword’s power field activated with a crackle of bound lightning. The twitching glow of the blade cast the faces of both man and primarch in death-pale light and folds of shadow.

‘Good luck, old friend,’ said Solomon Voss, and did not look away as the blade fell.

Rogal Dorn stood for a moment, the blood pooling at his feet, the cell silent and still around him. He stepped towards the man’s makeshift desk where the heap of parchment lay neatly stacked. With a flick, the power wreathing the blade vanished. Slowly, as if goading a poisonous serpent, Dorn turned the page with the tip of the deactivated blade. He scanned one line of text. I have seen the future and it is dead, it read.

He let the blade drop to the floor with a clang and walked to the cell door. As it opened he looked back at Qruze and pointed at the parchment and at the corpse on the floor.

‘Burn it,’ said Rogal Dorn. ‘Burn it all.’

Enclosed with this issue of Hammer and Bolter is an audio version of The Last Remembrancer

THE INQUISITION

++Open vox-net++

My most esteemed Lord Inquisitor,

We have travelled far, to worlds barely touched by the Emperor’s light, but he has slipped through our clutches for the last time! The one known as Darius Hinks is ours! We have prepared the most effective tools of torment for this most heinous of heretics, and shall proceed forthwith.

Interrogator Kerstromm Ordo Malleus

What are you working on at the moment?

The revered, cheese-breathing overlord of this fine publication, Mr Christian Dunn, has recently asked me to contribute a novella to a forthcoming Space Marine Battles book. It was an honour to be asked, of course, and I imagine my fee will be some of that wonderful aged red Leicester he gave me last time, but before starting any writing I’ve decided to do a bit of homework. I haven’t tackled 40K’s most iconic characters before, so I’ve been spending the last few weeks researching the background and trying to get a handle on them. Since I started poring over the rulebooks, one particular Chapter has caught my eye: the Relictors. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do with them yet, but I like the cut of their bad boy jib. It makes perfect sense to me that if there were hordes of gibbering daemons clamouring to enter your galaxy, you’d use whatever means necessary to stop them. Not much has been written about the Chapter so they will also give me quite a bit of leeway to flesh out a (slightly shady) corner of the 40K background. I’ve mainly written fantasy so far for BL, so I’m looking forward to getting my hands on some gun-toting superhuman SF characters.

What are you working on next?

As if that wasn’t enough to keep me occupied this summer, Christian has also asked me to write a short Warhammer story for the 2011 Games Day programme. I’m afraid the details for this are even more sketchy than my Relictors novella, but it will definitely involve humanoid rat-like beings with a penchant for unreliable steampunk weaponry.

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

There’s a Warhammer character called Orion that I think would make a fascinating protagonist. He’d have such an odd, inhuman perspective on his corner of the Old World, that any fiction based around him could be really otherworldly and nightmarish. I’ve mentioned the idea to a couple of the BL editors and they didn’t laugh me out of the building, so it might just happen…

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

I realise this makes me sound like some kind of frock-wearing Edwardian child, but I’ve just re-read Rudyard Kipling’s novel, Kim. I suppose it’s a bit of a comfort read, and I really am too old and ugly to be reading children’s books, but I’ve read it a few times now and I always find it utterly gripping. It has some great boys’ own adventure story elements – a young orphan boy leads a holy man on a quest across British India, becoming a master spy along the way – but it’s the incredibly vivid descriptions of the Indian landscape and culture that I really love. The characters and settings are drawn straight from Kipling’s own childhood and the book is far more bizarre than most of the fantasy novels I’ve read. My favourite fantasy novel of recent years was a book called Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. It’s a weird cross between Charles Dickens, Neil Gaiman and Tolkien. It took over a decade to write and it features a huge, bewildering cast of scholarly, Napoleonic wizards and sinister, demonic fairies.

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

Harry Potter (Because I’d quite like a sprawling Edinburgh mansion with its own formal Renaissance garden).

PHALANX

Ben Counter

Chapter 8

Luko kicked in the door of the archive. Musty air swept out, mixing with the cordite and rubble dust that rolled off the Soul Drinkers. The archive was a high-ceilinged, dim and age-sodden room with rolls of parchment mounted on the walls for several storeys up, and huge wooden reading tables over which bent the archivists, who looked up in surprise as almost sixty Space Marines stormed into their domain.

‘Not too bad to defend,’ said Salk, taking in the sight of the archives. ‘Lots of cover, not many entrances.’

‘At least we’ll have something to read while we’re waiting,’ replied Luko.

The archivists fled. None of the Soul Drinkers had any heart to pursue them. They would tell the Imperial Fists where the escapees had holed up, but the Imperial Fists would learn that anyway, and too many people had died already.

‘Spread out!’ ordered Luko to the other Soul Drinkers. With Sarpedon and Iktinos elsewhere, it had seemed a natural fit for him to take command. ‘Find something we can use! Weapons, transport! It’s too much to hope to find a shuttle that can get us off this can, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look.’

‘And get me something to take this damned thing off!’ Librarian Tyrendian was still wrestling with the inhibitor collar around his neck. ‘Until then I have to think down to your level.’

Luko caught sight of movement and his eyes flickered to the dim interior of the archive. From the shadows shuffled an old, bent figure, wearing the same robes and symbols as the youth who had blown himself up to free the Soul Drinkers from the Atoning Halls. The archivists had all fled, but this man, who seemed more decrepit than any of them, showed no fear.

‘Hail!’ said the old man. Luko saw the rosarius beads and aquila icons of a pilgrim, and the symbol of the blinded eye embroidered on his robes. ‘Brethren of the Chalice! How my heart grows to see you at liberty!’

‘Who are you?’ demanded Luko. ‘One of your pilgrims died to free us, though we didn’t ask for it. What do your kind want from us?’

‘I want only for the path of fate to be walked true,’ replied the pilgrim. ‘Time has sought fit to grant me the title Father Gyranar. My brothers and I are the Blind Retribution, the seekers of justice, the instruments of fate, the Blinded Eye. For longer than I have been alive, fate has taught us of the part we are to play in the fulfilment of the Soul Drinkers’ destiny.’ Gyranar limped forwards and took Luko’s huge paw in his tiny, dry hands. ‘I rejoice that I have lived to see that time! When I drank from the grail, I dared not to beg of the fates that I witness the day the chalice shall overflow!’

‘Explain yourself,’ said Luko.

‘We are a long line of those who have been tasked with making this day happen,’ continued Gyranar. ‘The Black Chalice, the Silver Grail, and countless others, have all followed the same path, one that would ensure they crossed paths with the Soul Drinkers so they could help destiny become reality. You must go free, Captain Luko, you and all your battle-brothers! You must fight here, and see that what must be, shall be! I have broken your shackles, but only you can strike the blows!’

‘What fate?’ demanded Luko. ‘If we are here to do something, then it is news to me. We were brought to the Phalanx against our will, and at the risk of sounding ungrateful, our freedom was something equally unsought.’

‘But now you fight one last battle!’ said Gyranar. The old man’s eyes were alight, as if he was looking beyond Luko to some religious revelation. ‘Instead of a dismal execution, you die fighting, and in doing so your sacrifice will change the Imperium for the better! All human history hinges on this point, captain!’

Luko pulled Gyranar close. The old man barely came up to Luko’s solar plexus. ‘He who longs for one last battle,’ Luko said darkly, ‘has never truly fought a battle at all.’

‘Fate cares not that its instruments are ignorant of their importance,’ said Gyranar. ‘I have been given the blessing of knowing what is to come. You, captain, are no less blessed for having it revealed to you at the moment of your glory.’

Luko let Gyranar go. The pilgrim had no fear. A Space Marine knew no fear because he mastered it, broke it down and discarded it as irrelevant. Gyranar had no fear to begin with, as if even an angry Space Marine bearing down on him was a scene from a play which he had seen many times.

‘You remind me of someone I once knew,’ said Luko. ‘He was Yser, and much like you, a believer. He was the pawn of a power greater and darker than he could have imagined, and it killed him. You will find few friends among the Soul Drinkers, Father Gyranar.’

‘As I said,’ replied Gyranar, ‘there were others. I am merely the most fortunate.’

‘Captain!’ yelled Tyrendian from deeper within the archive, among the shadows that clung around the many archways leading out from the main chamber. ‘I’ve found something. You want to see it.’

Luko followed Tyrendian’s voice. The Librarian stood in an archway leading into another chamber, this one lit sparingly by a few spotglobes that shone their shafts of light onto hundreds of exhibits, like the inside of a museum.

Almost a hundred suits of power armour stood there, on racks that made it look as if their owners were standing there in ranks. The armour of the Soul Drinkers, still spattered with the mud and ash of Selaaca, still with the scars of necron weapons and the claws of the wraiths that had nearly killed so many of them. Sarpedon’s armour was there, battered by his struggle with the necron overlord. Luko’s own armour, too, with the haphazard heraldry of his career as a renegade painted over the dark purple of the Chapter’s livery.

Beside the armour were the weapons. Boltguns racked up as if in an armoury. The Axe of Mercaeno, Sarpedon’s own weapon. Sergeant Graevus’s power axe and Luko’s lightning claws, the huge armoured gloves with their paint scorched and peeling by the constant discharging of the claws’ power fields.

‘The evidence chamber,’ said Tyrendian with a smile.

‘Arm up!’ yelled Luko. ‘Tyrendian, check around and find ammunition and power packs.’

‘Perhaps we can make a stand after all,’ said Salk as he saw the arms displayed before him. Several Soul Drinkers were already going for their armour, while Sergeant Graevus had gone straight for his power axe. With the axe in the sergeant’s mutated hand he suddenly looked more like a Soul Drinker, more like a warrior, and less like anyone who could have been held captive.

Luko slid a hand into one of his lightning claw gauntlets. Its weight felt tremendous, and not just because Luko hadn’t yet donned the power armour that would help compensate for its size.

‘I used to dream,’ he said to Salk, ‘of all this ending peacefully. At least, I told myself, an execution is not a battle. But there is one last battle now. You would have thought I’d have learned by now that there is always one last battle.’

‘Captain?’ said Salk.

‘I hate it,’ said Luko. ‘Fighting. Bloodshed. I have come to hate it. I have lied about this for a long time, Sergeant Salk, but there hardly seems much point now.’

‘I can barely believe you are saying these things, captain.’

‘I know. I disgust myself too, sometimes.’

‘No, captain,’ said Salk. ‘You don’t understand. You hate war, but you fight it because you know you must. There is nothing to disgust in that. Sometimes I take pride, or even pleasure, in it, and I take that and carry it with me to bring me through the worst of it. But without that, I do not know how I could fight. You are braver than I, Captain Luko.’

‘Well,’ said Luko, ‘that’s one way of looking at it.’

‘Let’s make our execution a little more interesting, brother,’ said Salk.

Luko clamped one of his greaves around his left leg. ‘Amen to that, brother.’

The commanders gathered in the Crucible of Ages, safe from the decompression zones around the Observatory. In the ruddy glow of the forges they first counted off their surviving battle-brothers, appointed officers to take note of the dead, and then turned to the task of recapturing the Soul Drinkers.

There was no doubt that the Soul Drinkers had engineered their escape, with the use of accomplices among the pilgrims who had been allowed onto the Phalanx to observe the trial. Castellan Leucrontas had been silent as the commanders discussed their losses and the state of the Phalanx, for it was only a matter of time before his decision to allow the pilgrims onto the ship was examined.

No Angels Sanguine had been lost, added to which Commander Gethsemar and his Sanguinary Guard seemed completely unblemished by the carnage. Howling Griffons had died. Imperial Fists, present in the greatest numbers, had lost correspondingly the most. One Silver Skull and two Doom Eagles were missing, presumed dead and cast into the void by the explosive decompression. Crewmen in void suits were already taking their first steps into the Observatory dome, to hunt for the fallen among the torrents of scorched wreckage, but hopes were not high that survivors would be found.

‘Brothers!’ came a shout from the entrance to the Crucible of Ages. Reinez, severely battered and bloodied, walked in, dragging an unarmoured Space Marine behind him. Reinez’s armour, which had been in poor repair when he had arrived on the Phalanx, was now so filthy with blood and scorch marks that the colours of the Howling Griffons were barely discernible. ‘Are you looking for answers? Perhaps a few explanations? I have done what you cannot do by bickering among yourselves, and found you some!’

Reinez shoved the Space Marine into the centre of the Crucible. The captive showed no resistance, and fell to his knees.

‘It is good that you are alive, Reinez,’ said Chapter Master Vladimir. Siege-Captain Daviks stepped forwards and lifted the bowed head of the Space Marine.

‘He’s a Soul Drinker,’ said Daviks, pointing to the chalice symbol that marked the centre of the surgical scars on the Space Marine’s chest. ‘What is your name?’

‘Apothecary Pallas,’ said the Soul Drinker.

‘One of the accused,’ said Vladimir. ‘You were to be executed. Why did you not flee with the rest of the condemned?’

‘Because we are not free,’ said Pallas. ‘I do not know why we were released, or who is responsible, but we did not seek it. I have been manipulated before, by Abraxes when our Chapter first turned from the Imperium, and I will not be used like that again. If I am to be executed here then so be it. I do not care about that any more. But I will not be a pawn in the scheme of another.’

‘Then who?’ demanded Daviks. ‘Who committed this outrage? My battle-brothers died because someone set the Soul Drinkers loose. Answer me!’

‘I don’t know!’ retorted Pallas. ‘Someone who benefits from a battle on the Phalanx. Someone who wants a last laugh from the Soul Drinkers before we are gone. Your guesses are as good as mine.’

‘They have left this one behind to sow confusion,’ said Daviks to the other Space Marines. ‘Recall the strategies of cowardice, as recounted in the Codex Astartes!’

‘There has been dissent in the ranks of the Soul Drinkers before,’ said Vladimir. ‘They turned on one another at Nevermourn. Reinez, you witnessed that, I believe. That this Apothecary chose not to follow his brothers in evading justice is not impossible.’

‘Dissenter or not,’ said Reinez, ‘we should get everything he knows out of him.’ Reinez took a tool from the closest forge – its metal prongs glowed from the heat. ‘I suggest we not delay.’

‘There will be no need for that,’ said Vladimir. ‘If he is here to misinform us then he will be prepared to spread lies under duress. If he is not, then there is no need for the infliction of suffering.’

‘Then what are we to do with him?’ sneered Reinez. ‘Give him a commission?’

‘He is an Apothecary. He can help tend to the wounded,’ replied Vladimir. ‘Apothecary Asclephin, you will oversee his work once he has answered one question.’

‘Name it,’ said Pallas.

‘Where is Sarpedon?’

Pallas looked up at Vladimir. ‘The last I knew of it, he was in the courtroom. You are in a better position to know his whereabouts than I.’

‘Space Marines died in his escape’ said Vladimir. ‘You understand that justice will fall on him sooner or later, and that your own manner of death will depend on how satisfied we are with your part in that justice.’

‘I barely care for life or death any more, Chapter Master,’ said Pallas. ‘I do not know where he is. Decide among yourselves if I speak the truth, but I know that I do.’

‘Another question, with which our Soul Drinker friend may not be able to help us,’ said Gethsemar smoothly, ‘is the location of Captain N’Kalo.’

Instinctively, the Space Marine officers looked around the Crucible. They were all there save for N’Kalo. His Iron Knights were present, but not their commander.

‘He made it out of the dome,’ said Daviks. ‘I saw him.’

‘But he did not make it here,’ answered Gethsemar.

‘Then locating him is a priority,’ said Vladimir, ‘but not one as high as locating Sarpedon and the Soul Drinkers who broke out of the cell block. If they have a plan then it most likely involves them staying together. If we are to break them with a minimum of losses, we must do so quickly, before they dig in. Lysander!’

‘Chapter Master?’ said Lysander with a salute.

‘You will lead the hunt. You have our three companies at your disposal. Officers, I ask that you cede command to Lysander in my name, and that he send your battle-brothers as he sees fit. I need no reminding of the protocols it breaks to request you place yourselves under the command of another Chapter, but this is not the time to dally over such things.’

‘I will kill Sarpedon,’ said Reinez.

‘You will not put the lives of my battle-brothers at risk,’ said Vladimir. ‘If it is expedient, another will eliminate Sarpedon, not wait for your permission.’

‘My oath of revenge is more important than life.’ Reinez shoved Pallas aside as he took a few steps closer to Vladimir. ‘Even the life of a brother.’

‘And delivering Dorn’s justice upon the Soul Drinker is more important than either,’ said Lysander, putting a hand on Reinez’s shoulder pad. Reinez shrugged it off angrily.

‘For one who despises time wasted in talking,’ said Gethsemar, ‘Brother Reinez does enjoy his little speeches.’

Reinez gave Gethsemar a look that could have killed a star, as the officers rallied their Space Marines for the hunt.

Captain N’Kalo forced off the slab of wreckage that pinned him down. His ears rang and the world was painted in blotchy blacks and reds. He was somewhere in one of the Phalanx’s tribute galleries, the deck divided into displays of art, standards and captured arms evoking the history of the Imperial Fists.

The ceiling had collapsed on him as he fled the dome. The galleries had sealed behind him before they were decompressed, but the shockwaves of the pilgrim ship’s suicide attack had caused enough damage of their own. N’Kalo saw he had been trapped beneath a spiderlike carapace, complete and preserved in a transparent layer of resin, which had been mounted on the ceiling to give the impression it was about to ambush visitors to the galleries from above. The carapace was that of a creature with ten legs and a span of four or five metres across, and still bore the charred bolter scars that had felled it. It was the relic of a battle millions of miles and probably thousands of years distant.

On one side of N’Kalo was a mural of Imperial Fists dragging the enemy dead from sucking tar pits on a primeval world of volcanoes and jungle. The enemy had the blue-grey skins and flat features of the tau, xenos who had tried to expand into Imperial space and been fought to a stalemate at the Damocles Gulf. On the other side were armour plates torn from a greenskin vehicle, a strange, brutal majesty in the savage simplicity of their skull and bullet designs and the blood that still stained the lower edges of a tank’s dozer blade.

N’Kalo tried to get his bearings. He did not know if he was alone. He looked and listened around him, trying to find crewmen or Space Marines through the displays and sculptures.

The hiss of a nerve-fibre bundle reached his ears. The clicking of one ceramite plate on another.

‘Brother?’ called N’Kalo. ‘Are you hurt? Speak to me!’

There was no reply.

N’Kalo tensed. Perhaps Sarpedon had survived the attack, and was free. Perhaps the other captive Soul Drinkers were free, too. He could not afford to think of the Phalanx as safe ground any more. For all he knew, this was enemy territory.

N’Kalo drew his bolt pistol. He wished he had his power sword with him, but he had stowed it in his squad’s cell-quarters when he had exchanged it for the executioner’s blade in the duel.

On the wall next to the vehicle armour plates hung a bladed weapon shaped like a massively oversized meat cleaver, with teeth and jagged shards soldered to its cutting edge. A greenskin weapon. N’Kalo felt distaste as he lifted it from its mountings and tested its weight. A xenos weapon, and one that no Iron Knight should ever use, but circumstances were extreme.

A shadow upon a shadow, through arches between the trophies and memorials, coalesced into the shape of a power-armoured figure. N’Kalo ducked out of sight, behind the mural of the Imperial Fists’ victory over the tau.

‘I spoke for you,’ said N’Kalo. ‘No one else would. I spoke up for your Chapter! Do what the court did not and listen to me.’

Something metal clattered to the floor. Ceramite boots sounded on the tiles.

‘Give yourself up, brother,’ continued N’Kalo. ‘If you will not, if you fight us here, your fate will only be worse.’

‘It is not my fate,’ came the reply, ‘with which you should concern yourself.’

N’Kalo did not recognise the voice. It had an edge of learning and confidence, a calmness quite at odds with its potential for violence.

‘Name yourself,’ said N’Kalo.

‘You will know my name soon enough,’ came the reply.

N’Kalo risked a glance past the mural. The muzzle of a bolt pistol met him. He ducked back as the gun fired, blasting a shower of wooden shards from the edge of the wall.

N’Kalo dived past the other side of the mural, head down, barrelling forwards. He crashed through a display of captured standards, leaping the plinth to close with his enemy.

The bolt pistol fired again. N’Kalo took the shot on his chest, feeling blades of ceramite driven into his ribs. Not too deep. Not too bad. He would make it face to face.

N’Kalo led with his shoulder and slammed into his assailant. He saw not the purple armour of a Soul Drinker, but the skull-encrusted black of a Chaplain. The chalice on one shoulder pad confirmed the Chapter, however.

Iktinos. The Chaplain of the Soul Drinkers, and the man considered the most likely moral threat among the captives until Daenyathos had been dug up. The second man slated for execution after Sarpedon. Armed and armoured, and free.

N’Kalo drove the greenskin blade up under Iktinos’ arm. Iktinos wrenched his own weapon around quickly enough to lever the blade away from him, throwing N’Kalo onto the back foot. N’Kalo realised with a lurch that Iktinos carried the crozius arcanum, the mace-like power weapon that served as a Chaplain’s badge of office.

Iktinos smacked his bolt pistol against the side of N’Kalo’s head. N’Kalo reeled, one side of his battered helmet caved in again along the cracks opened up by Reinez.

‘Kneel,’ said Iktinos, bolt pistol levelled at N’Kalo’s face. ‘Kneel and it will be quick. Is that not what the Soul Drinkers were offered? Submission for a quick death? Then that is what I offer you, Captain N’Kalo of the Iron Knights.’

N’Kalo dropped to one knee and grabbed one of the standards he had knocked onto the floor. It was an iron spear with a ragged banner hanging from it, the standard of some rebellious Imperial Guard regiment.

Another shot caught N’Kalo in the head. His helmet was torn open and one eye went black. N’Kalo thrust the standard pole forwards with everything he had, catching Iktinos in the hand and throwing the bolt pistol off into the shadows.

N’Kalo fell back onto one knee. He wrenched the ruined helmet off his head. He felt hot blood flowing down his face and his fingers brushed wet, pulpy mass where one eye had been. His head rang, and it felt like his skull was suddenly a few sizes too small.

A fractured skull, then. He had suffered that before. Not the worst. He could fight on.

Iktinos strode forwards, crozius in his good hand. He swung it down at N’Kalo, who deflected it away with the greenskin blade he snatched off the floor at the last second. The blade shattered like glass and N’Kalo was driven onto his back by the force of the blow. He reeled, his good eye unable to focus, Iktinos just a black blur over him.

‘Iktinos!’ yelled Sarpedon. For a moment Iktinos thought that Sarpedon was the man attacking him, that he was back in the Eshkeen forests with his battle-brothers. Everything since then had been a dream and he had never left that stretch of marshland.

But no. Iktinos was the enemy. Sarpedon was somewhere nearby. Iktinos dragged N’Kalo to his feet and wrapped an arm around his throat, hauled him into a corner and grabbed his bolt pistol off the floor. The muzzle of the pistol was against the side of N’Kalo’s head.

Sarpedon stood in the middle of the gallery, unarmoured as he had been in the courtroom.

‘Iktinos!’ yelled Sarpedon. He could barely believe that the first Soul Drinker he had come across since his escape was engaged in fighting the one Space Marine who had stood up for the Chapter at the trial. Still stranger was that it was Iktinos, and that he had already found his armour and weapons.

N’Kalo looked nearly dead. His face was barely recognisable as belonging to a human. One eye socket was a gory ruin. Iktinos had disarmed him, and now had him up as a human shield with a gun to his head.

‘Chaplain,’ called Sarpedon. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I am surviving,’ said Iktinos.

‘N’Kalo is my friend. Let him go.’

‘The Soul Drinkers have no friends. N’Kalo is coming with me.’

‘Hostages will do us no good, Iktinos! You know that!’

‘Then it is for the best that I have him, not you. Do not seek to follow, Sarpedon. There is only sorrow this way. Go to your brothers. They are rearming in the archives.’

‘What are you speaking of, Chaplain? Whatever fate waits for us here, are you not a part of it?’

Iktinos dragged N’Kalo towards a pair of double doors at the far end of the hall. ‘Fight, Sarpedon! Fight on! That is what fate demands of you. Stand by your brothers and die a good death!’

‘I know that someone has guided us here without my realising. Someone has used me just as surely as Abraxes did. Is it you, Iktinos?’

‘Goodbye, Sarpedon. A good death to you, my brother!’

‘Is it Daenyathos?’

Iktinos hauled N’Kalo through the doors. They boomed shut behind him. Sarpedon rushed forwards, trying to cover the ground to the doors before Iktinos could turn a corner and get out of sight.

Sarpedon heard the tiny sound of the grenade hitting the floor. He threw his arms up in front of him, supernatural reflexes giving him the warning a split second before the grenade went off in his face. The doors were ripped off their mountings and slammed into him, throwing him back across the display room, crashing through captured arms and victory monuments.

Sarpedon skidded along the floor on his back. When he came to a halt he brushed the debris from his eyes and saw the doorway was full of smoke and rubble. Sarpedon had no way of following Iktinos.

Daenyathos. Rogal Dorn. The pilgrim ship’s suicide attack. Now Iktinos, with an agenda of his own. Everything Sarpedon had believed about the galaxy was falling apart, and he did not know how it could end but with his death and the deaths of every one of his battle-brothers.

One thing that Iktinos had said made sense. Sarpedon had to fight. He had to win a good death, and help his brothers do the same. He owed himself that much. It was not much to fight for, but at that moment it was all he had.

Sarpedon snatched up a sword from a fallen display behind him, and struck out for the archives.

Sometimes a cold wind blew through the Phalanx. It was a trick of the ship’s atmospheric systems, or perhaps a random current created by the coolant pipes and superheated reactor cores of the engine sectors. It howled now through the science labs and triumphant galleries around the Observatory dome, strewn with wreckage. It picked up shards of debris and flapped the Imperial Fist banners that lined the way Chapter Master Vladimir had used to enter the now-ruined Observatory of Dornian Majesty.

It stirred the dust in the Atoning Halls, whistling between the frames of the wrecked torture racks and the bars of the empty cells. A few Space Marines lay there, Soul Drinkers who had been caught in the worst of the explosion and killed. Their battle-brothers had taken a few bodies with them but some still lay where they had fallen, their torn bodies still chained in their cells.

It turned the pages that lay on the reading tables in the archives. The reading hall was held by only a handful of Soul Drinkers, among them Librarian Scamander, the pyrokine who had not so long ago served as a Scout. He crouched in the shadows cast by the dim light and the enormous parchment rolls, waiting with the Soul Drinkers chosen to stand watch with him. When the enemy came – for they had to be called the enemy now, no matter what they had once been – they would come through here, and in force.

The enemy was now gathering in the crew mess hall, which Captain Lysander had designated as the staging post for the assault on the Soul Drinkers. The Imperial Fists and Howling Griffons made up the bulk of the force and Lysander had already had to deal with the competing demands to be the first in against the Soul Drinkers. The Phalanx was Imperial Fists ground and they had the say on who should have the moments of greatest honour in the fight to come, but Captain Borganor had demanded that his Howling Griffons be given the task of charging into the archives and letting the first Soul Drinkers blood. Lysander had agreed, for the Soul Drinkers were enemy enough and he did not need vengeful Howling Griffons facing up to him as well.

Commander Gethsemar picked up a handful of rubble dust from a collapsed wall, felled by the shockwave from the Atoning Halls explosion. He let the dust drift on the wind, as if it was a form of divination and from the eddies of the wind he could read the pattern of bloodshed unfolding into the immediate future. His war-mask was a death mask of Sanguinius, cast from the features of the divine primarch as he lay dying, felled by the Arch-Traitor Horus ten thousand years before. Sanguinius was unspeakably beautiful, and even stylised in gold and gemstones the death mask cast an aura of supernatural majesty that the Sanguinary Guard used as one of their deadliest weapons.

‘What do you see?’ asked Librarian Varnica of the Doom Eagles.

Gethsemar turned to Varnica but his eyes were hidden behind ruby panes set into the mask’s eye sockets and his expression could not be read. ‘Such fates that intertwine here, my brother, are beyond any of us,’ replied Gethsemar. ‘Long have our sages tried to unravel them. Long have they failed. They strive even now, knowing that the future will be forever hidden from them, but that to endeavour in such an impossible task is its own reward. Our immediate task here is far from impossible, but I fear a greater undertaking is revealed that will never end.’

‘Explain,’ said Varnica. ‘As you would to a layman.’

‘Think upon it, brother,’ said Gethsemar. ‘Here Space Marine fights Space Marine. There is nothing new about that. But will it be the final time?’

‘I think not,’ replied Varnica.

‘Then you begin to see our point. What is a Space Marine? He is a man, yes, but he is something far more. He is told that he is far more from the moment he is accepted into his Chapter, when he is little more than a child. His earlier memories may not even survive his training. He may conceive in his own mind of no time but one where he was superior to any human being. What might result from a mind so forged?’

‘He has no doubt and no fear,’ replied Varnica. ‘Such alteration of a man’s mind is necessary to create the warriors the Imperium needs. I see it as a sacrifice we make. We give up the men we might have become to instead serve as Adeptus Astartes. If you believe this is a mistake, commander, then I would be compelled to differ with you.’

‘Ah, but there it is! Do you see, Librarian Varnica? It is true that what we do to our minds to make us Space Marines is as necessary as teaching us to shoot. But what sin is locked in to us through such treatment?’

‘Brutality?’ said Varnica. ‘Many times Space Marines have gone too far in punishing the Emperor’s enemies, and ordinary men and woman have suffered as a result.’

‘Brutality is a necessity,’ said Gethsemar. ‘A few thousand dead here and there mean nothing compared to the millions spared through the intimidation of our foes that our potential for brutality allows. No, it is a far deeper sin of which I speak, something not so far removed from corruption.’

‘Corruption is a strong word,’ said Varnica, folding his arms and straightening up. The threat was clear. ‘Then what is it?’

‘It is pride,’ replied Gethsemar. ‘A Space Marine does not just think he is superior to the ordinary citizens of the Imperium. He thinks, whether his conscious mind accepts it or not, that he is superior to other Space Marines, too. We all have our way of doing things, do we not? Would we all resist any attempt to change us, though violence may be the only route doing so can take? So prideful we are that Space Marines will never stop killing Space Marines. For every Horus Heresy or Badab War, there are a thousand blood duels and trials of honour brought about by our inability to back down. That is the real enemy we face here. The Soul Drinkers were turned from the Imperium by pride. It is pride that motivates us in destroying them, for all we talk of justice. Pride is the enemy. Pride will kill us.’

Varnica thought about this. ‘Throne knows we all have our moments,’ he said. ‘But the mind of a Space Marine is a complicated thing. Can such a simple thing as pride really be its key? And from the way you speak, commander, I would imagine you have a solution?’

‘Oh, no,’ protested Gethsemar. ‘The Sons of Sanguinius all accept that we are doomed. A Space Marine’s destructive pride is the only thing keeping us all fighting, and we are the only thing keeping the Imperium from the brink. No, it is our way to observe our in-fighting for the death throes they are, to understand what we truly are before the end comes.’

Varnica smiled grimly. ‘For all your gilt and finery, Angel Sanguine, you are a pessimist. The Doom Eagles seek out the worst atrocities the galaxy commits because we want to put things right. It will not happen in any of our lifetimes, but it will happen, and it is the Space Marines who will do it whether we are too prideful for our own good or not. Why fight, if you believe all is lost no matter what you do?’

Gethsemar shook out his hand, and the dust drifted away on the thin wind. ‘Because it is our duty,’ he replied.

Lysander stomped past, hammer in hand. ‘Daviks and the Castellan are in position,’ he said. ‘Make ready. Two minutes.’

Gethsemar and Varnica broke away to join their own squads. The main assault force, gathered in the mess halls, consisted of the Ninth and Seventh Imperial Fist companies and the Howling Griffons’ Second. Varnica and Gethsemar’s squads were to follow the Griffons in and, if Borganor was to be believed, clean up the mangled remnants of the Soul Drinkers the Howling Griffons were sure to leave in their wake. Lysander was walking the lines, inspecting the Imperial Fists ranked up along the width of the crew mess hall. The rooms had been built for the normally proportioned crew of the Phalanx and the Space Marines could barely stand upright in it.

Whole planets had been broken by fewer than the two hundred Space Marines that the Imperial Fists fielded for this battle. The Howling Griffons were impatient, broken up by squads to be spoken to in turn by Borganor. Lord Inquisitor Kolgo was there, too, at the back of the hall with his Battle Sisters bodyguard, looking more like a battle observer than a combatant in spite of his Terminator armour.

Varnica returned to his squad. Sergeant Beyrengar, who had been elevated to squad command after Novas’s death, had gone through the pre-battle wargear rites and prayers already. There was little for Varnica left to do.

‘This is where the solution to that puzzle box lies,’ he said. ‘We have pursued the Soul Drinkers, though we did not know it, from the moment the heretic Kephilaes made the mistake of drawing our attention. What we began then, we finish here. We know what the Soul Drinkers are, and more importantly, we know what they are not. They are not our brothers. When you face one of them through a haze of gunsmoke, do not see a brother. See one more symptom of corruption, and excise him as you would any cancer of the human race.’

‘Borganor!’ came Lysander’s yell from the Imperial Fists lines. ‘The honour is yours!’

‘Gladly taken!’ cried out Borganor in reply. ‘Howling Griffons! Roboute Guilliman looks on! Let us show him a fight he will not forget!’

The deck of the Phalanx shuddered as the Howling Griffons advanced.

Scamander almost raised the alarm, but he realised that the silhouette entering the reading room was multi-legged. He stood and saluted. ‘Commander!’ he said. ‘We did not know if you were still alive.’

‘I had plenty of opportunities to die,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘I failed to grasp any of them.’ He shook Scamander’s hand. ‘How long do we have?’

‘Not long,’ said Scamander. ‘The Imperial Fists are gathering to attack us even now. They know we are here.’

‘And the plan?’

‘Hold the library stacks. Don’t die. Circumstances demand our tactics be simple.’

‘I see.’

‘We have your armour, and the Axe of Mercaeno.’

‘Then at least I will not die here unclothed! That would be too humiliating a way to go.’

Scamander smiled. For all the battles he had fought and the dangers his psychic powers posed, he was still a youth. By the standards of the Soul Drinkers, he was just a boy.

Sarpedon headed through the reading room to the archway Scamander had indicated. It led to a maze of bookcases and tables, shelves of volumes stacked high to the ceiling, a thin layer of dust covering everything disturbed by the armoured footprints of the Soul Drinkers. Sarpedon glanced at the books – histories of Imperial Fists actions, battle-philosophy, stories of individual Imperial Fists and their deeds. Sarpedon was reminded of the chansons the Soul Drinkers had once written, epic poems to glorify themselves. Sarpedon had abandoned his own chanson when he had thrown Michairas, his chronicler, out of an airlock during the First Chapter War. The thought gave him an unpleasant taste in his mouth.

Soul Drinkers saluted as he passed. He saw battle-brothers he had fought alongside for years. Some had argued against him, some had sided with him in everything, but they had all followed him into the Veiled Region. They had all accepted capture by Captain Lysander and the Imperial Fists without a fight, because he had ordered it. And they would die here, ultimately because he had ordered it.

‘Commander,’ said Sergeant Graevus as Sarpedon walked past. Sarpedon returned his salute and noted the Assault squad that Graevus had assembled from the Chapter’s survivors. He had picked veterans, bloody-minded Space Marines who could be trusted to give each centimetre of the stacks in return for buckets of blood shed by their chainblades. Sergeant Salk was instructing his squad, and paused to nod his own salute to Sarpedon. Sarpedon scuttled over makeshift barricades of upturned tables, and squeezed through the bottlenecks formed by the chaotic layout of the stacks. In the centre of the book-lined labyrinth, he found Captain Luko standing at a reading table.

Luko grabbed Sarpedon around the shoulders. ‘Good to see you, brother,’ he said. ‘I thought the festivities would begin without you.’

‘I would not miss it for the galaxy,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘How many of our brothers do we have here for the celebration?’

‘A little under sixty,’ said Luko. ‘A few were lost in the escape. Pallas stayed behind. And others have gone missing. It is to be expected, I suppose, but it is strange…’

‘Iktinos’s flock,’ said Sarpedon.

Luko took a step back. ‘How did you know?’

‘Iktinos is not with us,’ said Sarpedon. ‘His flock must have joined him.’

‘Not with us? What do you mean?’

‘Iktinos brought us here. He has been doing it for years now, manipulating us towards this place and time. Why, I do not know. Probably it is at the behest of Daenyathos. Whatever the reason, he has his goals and we have ours, and they do not coincide.’

‘The Chaplain has betrayed us.’

‘Yes,’ said Sarpedon. ‘He has.’

Luko’s customary joviality was gone. ‘I will kill him.’

‘There will be a queue,’ said Sarpedon. ‘Focus for now on your survival. You have picked a good place to make our stand, brother. I would think twice before attacking such a place.’

‘We have your armour, and your axe,’ said Luko. ‘They are stored behind that bookcase. We could not find the Soulspear among the evidence, though.’

‘Then I shall do without. The Axe of Mercaeno is weapon enough for me.’

‘You know, the Howling Griffons would want that back.’

‘Then Borganor can take it from my dead hand,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘I have no doubt he will be seeking just that chance. Many stories will end here, captain. Borganor and I is just one of them. If we can give those stories endings worthy of these histories, then we will have won our victory.’

Scamander’s voice reached them over Luko’s vox. ‘Captain! The Howling Griffons are advancing! I’m falling back towards Graevus’s position!’ The deep spatter of gunfire sounded over his words, and Sarpedon could hear the thuds of bolter impacts through the walls of the library.

‘Then it is done,’ said Sarpedon. ‘I shall arm. To the end, Captain Luko.’

‘To the end, Chapter Master,’ replied Luko. ‘Cold and fast.’

Sarpedon saluted. ‘Cold and fast, Soul Drinker.’

FLESH

Chris Wraight

Fifty years ago, they took my left hand.

I watched, conscious, heavy-headed with stimms and pain suppressants. I watched the knives go in, peeling back the skin, picking apart muscle and sinew.

They had trouble with the bones. I had changed by then and the ossmodula had turned my skeleton as hard as plasteel. They used a circular saw with glittering blades to cut through the radius and ulna. I can still hear its screaming whine.

They were simply following protocol. Indeed, they were further along the path than I was and there was something to be learned from the way they operated.

I kept it together. I am told that not everyone does.

It took three weeks for the new mechanism to bed down. The flesh chafed for a long time after that, red-raw against the metal of the implant.

I would wake and see it, an alien presence, bursting from the puffed and swollen stump of my left arm. I flexed iron fingers and watched micropistons and balance-nodes slide smoothly past one another. It looked delicate, though I knew it was stronger than the original had been.

Stronger, and better. Morvox spent a long time with me, explaining the benefits. He cast the issue in terms of pragmatism, of efficiency margins. Even back then I knew there was more to it than that.

This was an aesthetic matter. A matter of form. We were changing ourselves to comply with the dictates of taste.

Do not mistake this for regret. I do not regret what has been done to me. I cannot regret, not in any true sense.

My iron hand functions competently. It serves, just as I serve. It is an implement, just as I am an implement. No praise can be higher.

But my old flesh, the part of me that was immolated in the rite, overseen by those machine faces down in the forges, I do not forget it.

I will, one day. Like Morvox, I will not remember anything but the aesthetic imperative.

Not yet. For now, I still feel it.

I

From the Talex to Majoris, then over to the spine shafts and the turboclimbers. Levels swept by, all black, mottled with grime. Out of Station Lyris, and things got cleaner. Then up past the Ecclesiast Cordex, taking grav-bundles staffed by greyshirts, and into the Administratum quarter. That looked a lot like real grass on the lawns, baking under hololamps, before up again, through Securum and the plexiglass domes of the Excelsion.

Then things were really sparkling. Gleaming ceramics, floor-to-ceiling glass panels. You could forget the rest of the hive, the kilometres of squalid, close-pressed humanity, rammed into the angles between spires and manufactoria.

Right at the top, right where the tip of Ghorgonspire pierced the heavy orange fug of the sky, it felt like you’d never need a gland-deep dermoscrub again. You could imagine that everything on Helaj V was pristine and smooth as a Celestine’s conscience.

Raef Khamed, being a man of the world, was not prone to think that. He stalked up to Governor Tralmo’s offices, still in his Jenummari fatigues, still stinking from what had happened in 45/331/aX and from the journey up. His lasgun banged against his right thigh, loose in its waist-slung holster. It needed a recharge. He needed a recharge. He’d emptied himself out on those bastards, and they just kept coming.

The two greyshirts flanking the doors saw him coming and snapped their heels.

‘Jen,’ they said in rough unison, making the aquila.

‘She’s in there?’ asked Khamed, pushing the door open.

‘She is,’ came a voice from inside the chamber. ‘Shut the doors behind you.’

He went in, and did as he was told.

Khamed stood in a large circular chamber. The floor was veined stone, grey and pink. False windows lined the walls, looking out on to false meadows and false skies. A bonestone statue of Sanguinius Redemptor stood by the walls, pious and gloomy.

There was a desk at the far end, but it was empty. Set off to one side, three low couches had been set around a curved table.

In one of the couches sat Governor Planetary Anatova Tralmo, tight-skinned from a century of rejuvenat and with oil-shimmer hair. Next to her was Astropath Majoris Eridh, milk-eyed and staring.

‘How goes it?’ Tralmo asked as Khamed sat down. She winced a little as his grimy fatigues marked the cream surface of the couch.

‘Awful,’ said Khamed, not noticing. ‘Bloody awful. I’m not even going to try to describe what I saw this time.’

The Governor nodded sympathetically.

‘Then you’ll like this, I hope. Eridh?’

‘A response,’ said the Astropath, looking at Khamed in that eerie, sightless way of his. ‘Two cycles back, just deciphered and verified.’

Khamed’s weary face lit up. He’d begun to doubt there’d be one.

‘Throne,’ he said, letting his relief show. The time for bravado was long gone. ‘At last. Regiment?’

‘It’s not a Guard signal, Jenummari.’

‘Then what? Who?’

Eridh handed him a dataslate with a summary of the transmission, elucidated into verbose Helaj vernac.

Khamed looked at it, and his muscles tensed. He read it again, just to be sure. He discovered he was holding the slate rather too tightly.

If he’d been less tired, he might have hidden his response better. As it was, when he looked up, he knew he’d given everything away. For the first time, he noticed the air of tight expectation on Tralmo’s face.

Khamed had always liked her. Tralmo was tough. She didn’t shake easily and had been good during the difficulties.

Just then, she looked like she was going to throw up.

‘How long have we got?’ he asked, conscious of the sudden hoarseness in his voice.

‘Less than a standard Terran,’ replied Tralmo. ‘I want you to meet them, Raef. It’s protocol. We should keep this military to military.’

Khamed swallowed. He was still holding the slate too tightly.

‘Got you.’

Bitch.

The docking bay doors were a metre thick. They dragged open, grinding along rust-weakened rails. Outside, the platform was open to the elements. On Helaj, the elements were always hateful.

Tracer lights winked in the orange gale. Further out, deeper into the sub-zero atmospheric bilge, more lights whirled. The storm roared, just as it always did, grumbling away like a maddened giant turning in its sleep.

There was another roar over the platform, closer to hand than the storm, and it came from the blurred outline of a ship. The thing was a brute, far larger than the shuttles that normally touched down at the spire summit.

Khamed couldn’t make much out through the muck – his visor was already clouding up – but the engine backwash was huge. As he’d watched it come down on the local augurs he’d seen rows of squat gun barrels along its flanks, gigantic thruster housings and glimpses of a single infamous insignia.

That hadn’t made him feel well. He was on edge. His hands were sweaty even in the thick gloves of his environment suit. His heart hadn’t stopped thumping.

His men, twelve lostari lined up behind him, weren’t any better. They stared into the raging clouds ahead, their weapons clutched tight, held diagonally across their body armour.

We’re all soiling ourselves. Throne of Earth, trooper – get a handle on this.

The roar transmuted into a booming thunderclap, and the ship pulled away, back into the raging cloudscape. Its dark outline faded quickly, though the noise of those engines lingered for much longer.

New shapes emerged from the smog-filth, resolving into clarity like a carcharex out of the acid sea.

Five of them.

The Imperial Guard garrison in Ghorgonspire was over a hundred thousand strong. They’d made no progress against the incursion for six local lunars, which converted into a lot longer if you went with Terran.

Five of them. Five.

‘Formal,’ hissed Khamed over the vox.

His men snapped their ankles together and stared rigidly ahead.

The quintet approached. Khamed swallowed, and looked up.

Their armour was night-black and plainer than he’d expected. There were white markings on the shoulder-guards, but the finish was matt. Blunt, uncomplicated.

There was no getting away from the size of them. He’d been warned what to expect from Namogh, who’d witnessed a squad of Argent Sabres twenty years ago while on an exchange placement off-world.

‘You never get used to it,’ he’d said, his ugly face thoroughly disapproving. ‘You think, that’s a machine. It has to be. But in there, there’s a man. And then it moves, all that plate, tonnes and tonnes of it, and you know it can move quicker than you can, it can kill you quicker than you can blink, and then you think: I was right the first time. It is a machine, a nightmare machine, and if we need to make a thing like this to keep us alive, then the universe is a scary place.’

Their armour hummed. It was barely audible over the roar of the storm, but you knew it was there. Just like the ship Khamed had seen, the power stored up in those black shells was obvious. They didn’t need to hide it. They didn’t want to hide it. They strode – strutted – up to him, every movement soaked in menace and confidence and contempt.

Khamed bowed.

‘Welcome to Helaj V, lords,’ he said, and was disgusted to hear how his voice carried a tremor even over the tinny transmission of his helm vox. ‘We’re grateful to have you.’

‘I think that unlikely,’ came the response. It was machine-clipped. ‘But here we are. I am Brother-Sergeant Naim Morvox of the Iron Hands. Brief me as we descend, then the cleansing will begin.’

‘They come up from the underhive. We isolate the spearheads and respond with contagion-pattern suppression.’

Khamed had to trot beside the stalking figure of Morvox as he tried to explain the situation. The Iron Hands Space Marine made no effort to slow down and kept up a punishing, metronomic stride. Behind him, the other four giants matched pace. Their heavy treads clunked on the polished surface of the transit corridor. Khamed’s own men trailed in their wake.

‘With little success,’ observed Morvox. His voice. It was a strangely muted sound to come out of such a monstrous mouthpiece. Like all the Iron Hands squad, Morvox kept his helm on. The faceplate was a blank, dark mask.

‘We’ve succeeded in keeping them from the upper hive,’ replied Khamed, knowing how weak that sounded.

Morvox was approaching the honour guard: fifty lostari in greyshirt trim, ranked on either side of the corridor, guns hoisted.

‘But you have not eliminated the source.’

‘Not yet, no.’

From somewhere, Khamed heard Namogh’s voice call the troops to attention, and their ankles slammed together. It wasn’t done smoothly. The men were nervous.

‘I need access to your hive schematics,’ said Morvox, ignoring the troops and carrying on down the corridor. ‘When did it happen?’

‘8.2 Standard Terran lunars ago,’ replied Khamed, shrugging an apology as he sailed past Namogh’s position. His deputy looked even more irritated than usual. ‘Insurgents control fifty-five percent, all lower hive. We have no access to the levels below the base forge.’

‘And I’ll need full asset inventory. All troops are under my command. What is your name?’

Only now. Now you ask.

‘Raef Khamed, Jenum–’

‘You will remain with me. We will commence assault as soon as I have the data. Your men will be mobilised by then and I will order their deployment.’

‘Very good. The men stand read–’

‘Warn them they will need to be.’

They passed from the long corridor, through a pair of slide doors and into an octagonal command node. The walls were lined with picts. There were cogitator banks along the near flank, attended to by servitors bearing the cog-skull of the Mechanicus. Hololiths shimmered over projection pillars showing various cross-sections of the Ghorgonspire.

Morvox stopped walking. He said nothing, but his squad immediately fanned out and began to assimilate information from the picts. One of them pushed a servitor aside and extruded a dataclaw from a compartment in his gauntlet. None of them spoke out loud, though Khamed guessed that there was plenty of chat over closed channels.

‘Leave us now,’ ordered Morvox.

Khamed hesitated for a moment. Only minutes had passed since the docking bay doors had opened. This was all happening very quickly and he’d expected... well, he didn’t know what he’d expected.

‘Your will, lord,’ he said, bowing.

He withdrew from the command node and blast doors slid closed behind him. He turned, and saw Namogh waiting for him.

‘So?’ the deputy asked. Orfen Namogh looked out of place in ceremonial armour, and it fitted him badly. Then again, the deputy only looked comfortable with dirt smeared on his face and a lasgun stock wedged against his shoulder.

‘We asked for help,’ said Khamed. He suddenly felt weary. He hadn’t slept for twenty hours. ‘We got it. Get everything together – we’re going in again and they’re in charge now.’

It took longer than he expected. The Iron Hands didn’t emerge from the command node for over seven hours, during which time Khamed snatched some sleep, reviewed tactical readouts from the containment operation, and shared a meal of dried multimeat and tarec with Namogh.

‘We’re going to have to work with them, Orfen,’ said Khamed, chewing through the gristle methodically.

‘No,’ said Namogh bluntly. ‘No, we’re not. You don’t work with them. They order you into shitholes. You go down them. That’s the way it works.’

‘Fine. But stow your attitude. I don’t want it getting down to the grunts.’

Namogh laughed, and took a swig of tarec. He had flecks of meat all over his big, yellow teeth.

‘Don’t worry. They’re all crapping themselves already. And I haven’t said a thing.’

A bead on Khamed’s starched collar blinked red. Despite himself, he felt his stomach lurch.

‘What are we afraid of?’ he muttered, getting up and retrieving his helmet.

‘You heard of Contqual?’ asked Namogh, wiping his mouth and following Khamed out of the hab. ‘You heard what they did there?’

Khamed brushed his uniform down and put his helmet on, twisting the seal as he walked.

‘You shouldn’t believe what you read, Orfen,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of crap on the grids.’

‘One in three. That’s how many they killed. Punitive measures, they called them. And those poor bastards were on our side.’

Khamed opened the blast doors from the officers’ quarters and strode out into the antechamber of the command node. He kept his shoulders back, head straight. The little things were important.

‘Like I said. There’s a lot of crap out there.’

He opened the doors. Morvox was waiting on the far side of them, vast and mordant.

‘We have what we need,’ said the Iron Father. ‘Now we go in.’

Out of the Excelsion, moving at a clip, and into the long bunkers of Securum, lit by gloomy strip-lumens. Administratum was amusing, with scholiasts looking terrified at the sight of the black giants striding through the lexchambers. Then down into the vaults of the Cordex. Some of the priests had tried to perform some kind of benediction on the Space Marines there, but had been simply brushed aside, just like everyone else.

After that, the dirt got bad. The air got hot. The floor got sticky, and the aircon wheezed like a phenexodrol junkie. There were men waiting at Station Lyris, arranged in ranks of a hundred. They looked pretty good, kitted out in full staff grey and assault armour. There wasn’t much blood to be seen. The floors must have been swabbed.

‘Will you address them?’ asked Khamed, not really knowing whether that would be good or bad for morale.

‘No,’ said Morvox, and kept moving.

He never stopped moving. He just kept going.

Then you think: I was right the first time. It is a machine, a nightmare machine.

It was the implacability that was so unsettling. They looked almost invulnerable, to be sure, and their armour-hum was eerily threatening. But it was the sense you got, the sense that they would just keep on going, that got to you.

A mortal would know when to quit, even a dogged one like Namogh.

They wouldn’t. Ever.

‘How do you want the lostari deployed?’

‘You have orders on the tac. For now, just try to keep up.’

Then down again, past the station bulwarks and along service runners towards the core hab clusters. The light got worse. The shafts got smaller and less well repaired. Loops of cables hung down from the roof, and moisture pooled in dark corners. Defective lumens guttered behind panels of iron mesh.

They were getting to the heart of it. Half a kilometre down in Ghorgonspire was like being a long way underground. The nearest patch of sky was buried under a lot of rockcrete. The air that coughed through the circulation systems was humid and smelled of human excreta. Major power grids had gone down early on in the difficulties, and battlefield gen-units struggled to keep the lumens in operation.

Khamed switched on vision-aug in his helmet. The men in his lead unit, twenty of them, did the same. They were all practically running in the wake of the Iron Hands, none of whom had broken their striding rhythm.

‘This is Node 4R,’ announced Morvox, coming up to a massive, closed siege gate at the end of the corridor. On either side of it, teams of greyshirt sentries waited warily, weapons hoisted. ‘We will cleanse it. Consolidate in our wake. Are you prepared?’

Khamed was already out of breath. He shot a quick glance back down the crowded corridor. His lead unit was in readiness. Behind it, stretched out in the gloom of the long tunnel, were more squads coming into position. He could see some of them ramming energy packs into their lasguns and strapping helmets securely. They were as prepared as they would ever be.

‘On your command,’ he said, nodding to Morvox.

‘We do not need your fire support. Do not join the assault. Secure the ground we clear. You will be given new orders on completion.’

Something was exchanged over a private channel, and the Space Marines unlocked their sidearms. Four of them, Morvox included, carried huge, boxy guns with blunt barrels and a chunky protruding magazine. They looked more like grenade launchers than regular firearms.

The fifth hoisted a truly massive weapon – an artillery piece with a core housing the size of a man’s torso. It took both hands to hold it and there was a grip over the main carriage. A loop of ammunition hung underneath, stiff and chain-linked.

That wasn’t all. They had blades. Some of them were like the short stabbing swords Khamed’s own men used, albeit twice as big. Others weren’t. Two of the giants carried massive rotary saws in their free hands, each one shaped like a gigantic broadsword.

Those weapons were ludicrous. Outsized, industrial-scale killing implements, dreamed up by some crazed enginseer and borne by superhumans. Khamed knew that he would have barely been able to lift one of those guns, and yet they hefted them lightly, one-handed.

He swallowed dryly. He also knew what was on the other side of the barrier.

‘Open the gate,’ he voxed.

And so the doors opened, grinding against metal, punishing old and arthritic gears, gradually exposing the chamber beyond and framing a window on to Hell.

II

Land Engine. Long for its class – a kilometre from sensorium fronds at the head to waste grinders at the arse. Vast, swaying, crowned with parapets of dusty smog that rolled down the side armour. Faint yellow lights studded weathered plate, tiny in the howling storm.

It rocked against the wind. Gigantic suspension coils flexed with the movement, supporting the thousands of tonnes of superstructure and its long, long train of drive mechanics, processing tracks, forges, crew habs and weapon banks.

All the time, the engines growled. On and on. They never stopped.

It was making good speed: 0.3 kilometres an hour, Medusan measures. The drives were operating noisily, making the floors tremble and shaking the black dust from the intakes.

Outside, it was blowing a gale, thick and black and grimy. There were voices on the wind, wailing.

On Medusa, it was always blowing a gale, thick and black and grimy. On Medusa, there were always voices on the wind.

Ahead of the Land Engine, the plain stretched away in a morass of cracks and sharp-stepped rock. On the far horizon, red lightning jumped down from the smogline.

Haak Rejn sat back in his metal lattice chair and rubbed his eyes. He felt the metal of his right optical implant snag on his skin.

There were picts around him in the sensorium chamber – a narrow control unit perched right out at the fore-left corner of the lead crawler unit. The screens were close-packed and flickering orange. Runes burned dimly, summarising feedback from the Mordecai’s seven thousand augur pinpoints. His implant helped him make sense of them.

It also gave him headaches. The implant burned the whole time, dull and hot. The damn thing was like a chunk of molten metal in his skull. But he didn’t complain. It had never occurred to him to complain. Neither had it occurred to him to complain when they’d flank-wired him into the lattice chair, nor when the flesh of his thighs had withered away to straws from lack of movement, nor when he’d found he could no longer sleep except after a double shot of dousers and a course of binreflex exercises.

Very few people on Medusa saw the point in complaining. It wasn’t that kind of place.

Something flickered on one of the picts. Rejn blinked blearily and reached over to it. He turned the gain up and calibrated his implant with it.

‘Throne,’ he swore, and ramped up the feed. ‘Traak, you getting that?’

A thousand metres away, on the far side of the Mordecai’s lead unit, a commlink crackled into life.

‘Yeah.’ Traak’s voice was sluggish, like he’d been trying to snatch a nap. ‘I know what I’d like to think. Put a crawler down?’

‘Good. I’m on it.’

Rejn’s right hand, the one that could still move, worked the input vectors. His left, the one that terminated in a bunch of steel cables, twitched as his neural link communicated with the Mordecai’s Soul. It took a few moments for the protocols to clear.

Acknowledgement come back over the grid. From somewhere a long way down, he heard metal grind back against metal. There was a shuddering movement, and then a heavy crash. He switched to another pict, one that watched the port flank of the Land Engine’s lead unit.

A hatch had opened near the base of the unit between two tread housings. A ramp extended from it, gouging a slow furrow in the rock below as it made contact.

A four-tracked crawler rolled down. Its angular, ugly frame rocked as it hit the plain. Exhaust columns belched black soot, and then it was off, lurching across the uneven surface.

Rejn switched to the crawler feed. Static rushed across the pict before clarifying. He saw the shape of a man resolve out of the blinding duststorm. The figure was still on his feet, leaning into the wind, limping badly. His ragged clothing was covered in plains-dust, making him look like so much charred meat.

The crawler reached his position and ground to a halt. The man staggered up to the back of it and hauled himself in. The crawler swung round and headed back to the ramp.

Rejn switched to an interior cam. The man was slumped in the corner of the crawler’s load bay.

‘Life signs,’ ordered Rejn.

A series of indicators ran down his nearside pict. All low, all borderline viable.

Tough bastard. He’d make it, if they got him up to the medicae in time. Rejn punched the order into the grid and heard the click as the Soul registered.

‘Any markings?’ asked Traak, no doubt looking at the same feed.

‘Not yet,’ said Rejn, zooming in and scanning across the dirt-streaked face. Whatever the man had been doing, it had nearly killed him. Half his storm armour had been ripped away. ‘He’s not one of ours.’

‘Can you patch an ident?’

‘Yeah, just give me a second, dammit.’

Rejn watched as the crawler came back onboard. He ran a request and got clearance for a deep scan. The augurs calibrated, and a line of laser red ran down the man’s body in a long sweep. The temple-stud got picked up and a fresh burst of data loaded on to the grid. Rejn looked at it carefully.

‘Anything?’

Traak was getting annoying.

‘Nothing to get excited about,’ replied Rejn, preparing to shunt the data up to medicae and close the crawler hatch. ‘Gramen clan, long way from home. Manus only knows what he’s doing out here.’

‘And a name?’

‘Morvox. Doesn’t mean much to me. You? Naim Kadaan Morvox.’

Land Engine. Smaller than the Mordecai but taller and more heavily armoured. It had no clan markings on the hull and its flanks were black. No lights blinked across the carapace, and the steep sided flanks were free of ore intake ramps.

As it inched its way across the desolate plain, the storm hammered uselessly against it. It didn’t sway.

Deep within the core, far into the sarcophagus of metal and rockcrete and machinery, there was a half-lit chamber, perfectly square. The floor was black stone. The walls were lined with an organic mass of piping. The roof was vaulted, crowned with an iron boss and studded with weak downlights.

A man knelt in the centre of the chamber. He was naked, and the light glistened from the sweat on his skin. His shaven head was lowered in submission. Around him were robed figures, tall and broad-shouldered. They wore metal masks.

The grind of engines made the walls tremble.

One of the robed figures stepped out. He looked down at the kneeling figure for a long time, saying nothing.

When he spoke at last, the voice did not match his huge frame. It was thin and flat, as if run through overzealous audio filters.

‘Of all the aspirants from Gramen, only you survived the trial of the plains. What lesson is there in this?’

The kneeling figure neither responded nor moved.

‘Well?’

‘I do not know, lord.’

‘There is no lesson. You are not chosen. You are not unique. Some years, none come back. Some years, many do.’

The kneeling figure kept his head down. His muscles trembled slightly from holding position. His physique was impressive – tight, lean flesh over a tall frame. There were many scars on that flesh. Fresh wounds too.

‘You may prosper in the trials to come. You may die from them. In all this, do not look for fate. Do not look for significance. There is only what functions and what does not.’

‘Yes, lord.’

The robed giant withdrew a long steel blade. It was not a fighting blade – too clean, too fragile. It had a look of a surgical instrument, albeit one with a ceremonial purpose.

‘You will learn this. You will learn that the path of your life is not unique. It has purpose only as part of a whole. You are an element within a system. You are a piece within a mechanism.’

The blade came closer. The kneeling man extended his left arm, holding it rigid before him, fist clenched. His head stayed bowed.

‘As time passes, you will see the truth of this. You will wish to discard those things that remind you of how you are now. You will forget that you were the only survivor of the trial. You will only remember the trial itself. You will remember the process. You will be the process.’

The giant kneeled in front of the naked man, and placed the blade against the flesh of the forearm, halfway between wrist and elbow. The cutting edge rested on the sweat-sheened skin.

‘This is the first mark of that process. Do you wish it to continue?’

The question was incongruous. The journey had already been started, and there were no choices left. Perhaps the question was a hangover from some older rite, a rite where personal determination had mattered more than it did now.

‘I wish it,’ came the response.

The blade pressed into the skin, carving deep. It slid to the right, leaving a clean cut in the muscle before slipping out. The man emitted the faintest intake of breath at the pain. Blood welled up quickly, thick and hot.

He was still mortal. His control was not yet perfect.

The giant stood up, letting the blood run down the blade, and withdrew.

‘That is the mark,’ he said. ‘That is where the greater cut will be made.’

The blade passed from view.

‘Rise, Aspirant Morvox. You are no longer what you were. From this point on, you will be a battle brother of the Iron Hands Clan Raukaan, or you will be nothing.’

III

The siege gates opened.

They exposed a long, wide hall beyond. It was almost totally dark, lit only by flares of orange gas from a broken supply conduit. The ceiling was lost in a writhing morass of gloomy mechanics. Bracing pillars, heavy columns of black iron, studded the rust-streaked floor.

They came out of the shadows, as if released by some soundless command. Dozens of them, bloated and chattering. Some hauled their distended stomachs along the ground, leaving trails of glittering pus in their wake. Others were emaciated, nothing more than sacks of leathery skin and splintered bone. Some of the bodies had fused together, creating sickening amalgams of men with multiple limbs, suppurating flesh and weeping organs hanging in chains. Some had talons, or bone outgrowths, or dull black teeth, or wickedly spiked spine ridges.

Only the eyes were the same on all of them. They glowed in the dark, lime green and as bright as stars. No pupils studded those eyes, just blank screens of eerie witchlight. As the gates opened to the full, the eyes narrowed. Faces, marked with fangs and hanging jaws and long lines of clumsy sutures, contorted into a mix of hatred and joy.

They scuttled into combat like spiders. They wanted it. What debased existence they possessed hungered for it in a way that they would hunger for nothing else ever again.

Khamed, still in the relative safety of the corridor outside the hall, watched them come, a weary sickness in his stomach. He’d been fighting those monsters for months. Every week, he’d fallen back a little further. Every week, a few dozen more of his men hadn’t got back to the rally points in time.

And back then he’d always known that the next time he saw them the shambling horde would have more tattered grey uniforms hanging from hunched shoulders, and there would be more remnants of faces he recognised.

He gripped his sidearm with sweaty hands, keeping it in position, ready to go in again when the order came.

Then the Iron Hands got to work.

They didn’t move fast. Khamed had heard that the Emperor’s Angels could fight like daemons, hacking and whirling and tearing their foe apart in an orgy of destruction. These ones didn’t. They walked out calmly, spreading out in front of the siege gates, opening fire from their massive weapons in long, perfectly controlled torrents.

Khamed just watched. The more he watched, the more he appreciated the truth of the legends he’d heard. For the first time in months, he dared to hope that the Spire would be saved. It was then that he realised just how strange that emotion – hope – had become to him.

The giants’ firearms were neither las-tech nor solid ammunition. Khamed realised what they were as soon as the first volley went off. The Iron Hands used explosive charges, primed to ignite on impact. The noise of their discharge was phenomenal. They maintained a withering wall of fire, tearing apart the oncoming ranks of walking dead in an orgy of slime and fluid. The muzzle flashes lit up the hall in a riot of sharp electric light, exposing the tortured faces of their victims in brief, snatched freeze-frames.

The heavy weapon that one giant carried two-handed thundered like nothing Khamed had heard before. Its operator, placed right in the centre of the squad formation, wielded it calmly, drawing the devastating column of destruction across the enemy in a slow, deliberate sweep.

The enemy were not just killed. They were obliterated, blasted apart, torn into tatters of flapping skin and powdered bone. Bitter experience had taught Khamed that you couldn’t down them with a flesh wound – you had to take them out with a head-shot or knock their torsos into pulp. That wasn’t a concern for the giants. They walked into the hall, methodically firing the whole time, laying down a maelstrom of destruction, not letting a single mutant get out of the path of their awesome, silent vengeance.

Then, suddenly, the deluge stopped. The echo of the massed volley died away. The hall sunk back into gloom. The Iron Hands remained poised to fire, their weapons held ready. They had advanced halfway across the space. Everything in front of them had been killed.

Khamed stayed where he was for a moment, ears ringing, stunned by what he had just witnessed. Then, cursing himself, he remembered his orders.

‘Follow them in,’ he snapped over the comm to his men. ‘And look like you know what you’re doing.’

He stepped over the threshold, sweeping his lasgun warily up and around. His boot nearly slipped and he looked down. The floor was covered in a thick carpet of bubbling sludge. It was moving. Some of it was bloody; some looked like sewage. An eyeball, swollen and yellow, floated past him, carried down into foaming drainage ducts by the current.

They’d been rendered down into soup. Flesh soup.

Ahead of him, the Iron Hands were calmly reloading. One of them took out what looked like a handheld sensor and tapped on it with a blunt armoured finger.

‘Raef Khamed,’ said Morvox. There was no inflexion there, nothing to indicate the extreme violence the giant had just unleashed. ‘The area is cleansed. We will progress to Nodes 34, 45, 47 and then assess. Immolate this chamber and secure it. Deployment patterns are on the tac.’

‘As you command, lord,’ said Khamed, his voice sounding very quiet after the wall of noise.

The Iron Hands hadn’t waited for the acknowledgement. They pressed on, heading deeper into the dark reaches of the lower hive. Already, from far below, sounds of scratching and screaming were massing.

Namogh’s voice crackled over the comm.

‘You need backup, Jen?’ he asked. His voice sounded worried. ‘We’ve got a lot of static at your position.’

‘No,’ said Khamed, knowing that he sounded distracted and not really caring. ‘No, maintain your position. I think we’re good. Throne, I actually think we’re good.’

It got harder. The lower levels had been dens of disease and corruption for years, and the mutants had had time to turn it into a paradise of pustulation.

The walls were alive with curtains of viscous slime. Growths burst out of air-con ducts, corpulent and luminous. Quasi-human mutants shambled up from the depths, heedless of their losses, jaws wide and ringed with filed-down teeth. They screamed like mockeries of children, stretching warped vocal cords beyond their tolerances. Khamed saw one grotesque long-necked mutant scream itself to a standstill, its throat overflowing with a bubbling cocktail of phlegm and clots. Morvox aimed a single shot and the creature’s head exploded in a shower of sticky, whirling gobbets, silencing the shrill chorus from its owner.

As they descended, the layout of the tunnels changed. Ceilings closed in and walls narrowed. The slurry of excreta was ankle-deep at the best of times, knee-deep at the worst. There was no reliable light – just the sweeping lumen beams from helmets, exposing the breadth of the horror in fragmentary pools of surgical illumination.

Every mutant coming for them had once been a human inhabitant of the hive. Every contorted face had once run the full gamut of human laughs and tears. They had been technicians, lectors, machine operators, arbitrators.

No one knew exactly when it had started. The first signs had been small ones – increased workload at the medicae stations, reports of infection in the scholae, power-loss in the deep hive and rioting across the semi-policed hinterlands running out to the ore-plains.

The authorities hadn’t been slow to act. Tralmo was sharp, and had never been negligent. There had been quarantines, shipments of antibiotics, blockades of crime-controlled sectors and curfews across the Ghorgonspire.

But by the time the 1324th lostari ‘greyshirt’ Imperial Guard had been mobilised to restore order, it was already out of hand. The situation had changed from a public health problem to a fight for survival, and so it had stayed for months.

They never got to the bottom of what had caused it. The originator was, presumably, buried far down in the depths, squatting in the dark places under Ghorgonspire that had long been lost to the contagion. The Holy Emperor alone knew what was down there, pumping bile and energy into the ruined bodies of those it had corrupted.

Such speculation was useless. The Iron Hands moved with purpose. They punched through the ragged columns of mutants like a blade through rusty armour, tearing and burning and hacking and blasting. They never sped up, never slowed down. Step by step, metre by metre, they reclaimed lost ground, operating like silent golems of myth.

In their wake came the mortal troops, reinvigorated by the example they had in front of them. Exhausted lostari found the will to take the fight to the mutants. Volleys of lasfire suddenly found their marks more often. Objectives were isolated, taken and consolidated. With the indomitable example of the Space Marines in front of them, the 1324th lostari of Helaj V stood up, and found they were stronger than their desperation had made them believe.

They descended from level to level in orderly bursts of activity, clearing out connecting chambers of filth and pressing on into the tunnels beyond. Flamers came next, boiling off the stinking layers of slime and acid and charring the metal beneath. Obscene sigils were scored from the walls. Power was restored. The mark of the Imperium was reinstated.

At the forefront, as ever, were the Iron Hands, the Emperor’s holy Angels of Death.

And as they killed in those terrible, industrial quantities, never had a moniker seemed so apt.

The eyes came out of the darkness as if swimming up from the frigid abyss. They swarmed, flocking at the invaders, locked into snarls and yells of utter mindless hatred. As they neared, limbs became visible. Limbs with hooks run through them, or stitches running down them, or iron pins shoved up under the necrotic skin and bulging like parasites.

Khamed shrugged off his tiredness and shouldered his lasgun. He moved smoothly, aping the frictionless methods of the Iron Hands who fought ahead of him, and drew a bead on the lead mutant.

He fired, and his las-beam cracked off, impacting between a pair of staring green eyes and cracking the skull into hemispheres.

Another kill.

And then he was moving again, marshalling his squad and pushing them forward. He swept his muzzle round, looking for mutants crawling across the roof or punching their way through sewer outlets.

They were deep down and the air was hot and seamy. No light existed save for the mess of helmet lumen beams, and every trooper was now on full infrared. The chamber was just like a hundred they’d already cleansed – close, claustrophobic, stuffed with a crawling mass of suppurating terror.

It had ceased to matter. Khamed had begun to forget his life had ever involved anything different. The undead poured towards him, snapping fangs and loping on all fours into contact. He reacted passionlessly, efficiently, optimising his shots and taking time over the targeting. He could rely on the Iron Hands to take out the mass of them – he was there to mop up the stragglers and the outriders.

He swung round just as three skinny mutants, their bulbous heads bobbing on scrawny necks, bolted from cover and out toward the leftmost Space Marine of the Iron Hands squad. Each one was carrying heavy projectile weapons and let off a flurry of lead as they splashed through the ankle-deep lake of effluvium.

Khamed got his aim and fired, missing the lead mutant by a finger’s width. In the time it took him to curse, wipe his eyes and re-aim, it was over.

The Iron Hand didn’t seem to move fast. He seemed to move with the same unearthly, ponderous manner as his brothers. But, somehow, he got his weapon up and fired off a round before the mutants had taken another step. The bolt crashed through the neck of the first, tearing the muscles open and leaving the head lolling on stretched sinews like an amulet. It exploded in the chest of the second, blowing open a ravaged ribcage into splayed splinters.

Then the sword, the mad sword with its insane rotary blades, swept round in a heavy lash, whipping out sticky fluid from previous kills. The surviving mutant tried to dart under it, aiming to get close enough to use a rusty killing blade it held in its left hand.

The Iron Hand adjusted the weapon’s descent and the sword whirred into the mutant’s leading shoulder. It burrowed down, carving its way through diseased muscle bunches and flinging out gouts of boiling, frothing blood. The mutant screamed for a fraction of a second, locked in agony as the juddering blades ate through its bony frame and minced what was left of it into a marrow-flecked broth of body fluids.

The Space Marine hauled the sword free, breaking the ruined body of his prey into two pieces as it was withdrawn. Then he turned, implacable as ever, and kept on fighting.

He’d never said a word. He’d not changed a thing. No hurry, no fuss.

Nightmare machines.

Khamed laughed.

The Jenummari laughed as he brought his own weapon round and splashed through the filth, looking for new targets. It was a laugh of disbelief, a laugh of wonder that killers of such intensity existed in the universe. It was a laugh of fear, and of relief that they were on his side. He had last laughed six months ago, and the noise of it was unfamiliar in his parched throat.

‘Keep up, you dogs!’ he snapped over the comm.

He wasn’t scared anymore. His body pumped with adrenaline. He was beginning to enjoy himself.

That, of course, was his first mistake.

It was fast as well as strong. Its hide was pale brown, like old leather. It had four heavy arms, perhaps grafted on to the torso by some demented chirurgeon. Its face was long, stretched by weights nailed to its distended chin. The skin of its cheeks was ripped and weeping and its clustered eyes bled witchlight.

As it crashed through the slurry, it howled like a dog. Its hands clenched pairs of gouges, each dripping with virulent, glistening fluid. Long, lank hair flailed around it as it came, and trails of livid saliva hung down from a bloodstained jaw.

It veered sharply, crashing its way through a knot of its own warped kin. They were crushed underfoot as it came, trampled into the mix of blood and mucus that bubbled underfoot.

For once, the Space Marines missed the main target. They were all occupied, pinning back the tide of raging, screaming fury that hammered against them. Their guns slammed back into their armoured fists, spitting the surge of reactive rounds that cracked and boomed into the oncoming wall of corrupted flesh.

Khamed saw the mutant come in his direction, and the laughter died in his mouth. One of his men got a shot, and a las-beam whipped across it.

It didn’t drop. It launched itself into the close-packed press of lostari, limbs whirling, roaring a strangled cry of ecstasy and fury.

Khamed tried to swivel round to get an angle, but slipped. He crashed back to the ground, bracing himself with his free arm, only to see three of his men taken out by the mutant. It went for their throats, biting through the neck armour and shaking their limp corpses. Las-beams seared into it, ripping away whole strips of skin, but that didn’t slow it down much. It rampaged through the knot of men, shrugging off anything that hit it, scattering the survivors. Then it turned and saw Khamed.

It smiled.

The mutant leapt at him, all four arms extended. Khamed fired again, hitting it once in its massive chest. Then he was scrabbling back through the scummy fluid, desperately trying to clear some distance.

The mutant stumbled from the las impact, then regained its feet. It lurched down and grabbed Khamed’s trailing boot. Khamed felt the vice close around his ankle and thrashed to escape, kicking wildly.

He stood no chance. The mutant pulled him back savagely, gurgling, readying its blades for the plunge that would rip his stomach open. Khamed was wrenched back, dragged through the liquid and along the chamber floor. Frothy slime splashed across his helmet, running across the visor and clouding it in a film of brown.

Khamed fired again, blindly, and heard the snap of the lasbeam as it shot harmlessly into the roof. Then the gun was knocked from his grasp. He tensed for the bite of the gouges, knowing that they would plunge low, right into his gut.

Then something huge exploded above him, throwing the slime up in waves. The grip on his ankle released. Khamed pulled himself out of the grime and shook the screen of filth from his visor.

The mutant was gone. Its lifeless body was crumpled up against the metal wall, pumping black blood solidly. In front of Khamed loomed an Iron Hand, filling his field of vision, vast, black and indomitable.

‘Can you fight?’ came the voice from behind the visor.

It wasn’t Morvox. The tone wasn’t as metallic, not as heavily filtered. It almost sounded human, albeit far more daunting and resonant than any human Khamed had ever encountered.

‘Yes,’ he said, shaking himself down and bending to retrieve his lasgun. ‘Yes, I can.’

‘Then do so,’ replied the Space Marine, turning away from him and striding back to the main fighting. The chamber was still full of the sounds of combat. Fresh lostari were piling in to replace those felled by the mutant, but there was no sign yet of the horde of bloated horrors relinquishing the chamber. The clamour of bolter detonations, howls and screams just kept on going.

Khamed watched the Iron Hand go, his heart thumping hard. He realised his hands were shaking, and clenched his fists to stop it.

Then do so.

He hefted his lasgun again, checking to see if the fluids had interfered with the mechanism. The simple things helped.

‘Very well,’ he muttered, still trembling. He braced himself and looked for a target. ‘I will.’

The noise of the assault died away. The Iron Hands began to move on, wading their way toward a long access shaft. They maintained the same pace as before, never speeding up, never slowing down.

The same punishing pace wasn’t possible for the mortal troops. They needed rotations, rest periods, resupply and medicae treatment. After hours of fighting, almost without respite, Khamed’s turn had finally come.

Namogh’s force-signal flashed across his helmet display, indicating that he was moving into position to relieve him. Khamed turned to the Space Marine who had rescued him, still the closest to hand of the quintet. For some reason, it felt more natural to address that one than Morvox, who in any case had already stalked off into the dark ahead.

‘My deputy will provide fire support beyond this node,’ Khamed announced. His voice gave away his extreme fatigue. The adrenaline from the last encounter had drained away, leaving him feeling empty. ‘This detachment needs to rotate.’

The Space Marine turned to face him. His facemask was streaked with blood and bile, making him look even more grotesque than normal. There was a pause, possibly due to some internal comms between the squad.

‘We will maintain the assault,’ the Iron Hand replied. ‘Order relief forces to follow us down when they get here.’

The Space Marine turned to move off, then stopped. He looked Khamed up and down.

‘How long have you been on your feet?’

‘Fifteen hours, lord. The same as you.’

The Space Marine nodded slowly.

‘Fifteen hours.’ There was a strange noise from the vox grille. On a human, it might have been a laugh – a strange, attenuated snort. From one of the giants, Khamed wasn’t willing to assume anything.

‘We forget where we come from, sometimes,’ said the Iron Hand. The tone of voice was almost reflective. ‘You fought well, human. Tell the others they fought well.’

Khamed didn’t reply at once, stunned by the unexpected compliment. Then suddenly, from nowhere, encouraged by the unlikely candour from the Angel of Death, he dared to ask for more.

‘I will, lord,’ he said. ‘But I have no name to give them.’

Again, the noise. Perhaps irritation. Perhaps amusement. Perhaps warning.

‘Ralech,’ came the reply, before the Space Marine strode off to join his brother warriors. ‘Ralech Grond, Clan Raukaan, Medusa. Tell them that.’

‘He said that?’

Khamed nodded between gulps of stimm-laced water. He was enjoying Namogh’s expression – a cross between disbelief, horror and disapproval.

‘I don’t believe it.’

Khamed put the canteen down. He was sitting on an old iron crate, shoulders hunched and head low. He could already feel oncoming sleep crowding out his thoughts. The chamber was full of men, exhausted ones from his command being replaced with fresher ones under Namogh’s.

‘He was almost… normal.’

‘Crap.’

‘I’m telling you.’

Khamed watched the survivors of his platoon limp back up toward the transit shafts at the rear end of the chamber. Their armour was caked in filth and blood. Some couldn’t walk unaided and hung like sides of meat from the shoulders of their comrades. He’d be joining them soon.

‘I think they change,’ said Khamed thoughtfully. ‘The leader – Morvox – he’s further down the road than the others. They forget.’

Namogh spat into the floor-slurry, and the spittle spun gently away toward the drain meshing.

‘You’ve taken a hit, Jen,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘They don’t feel nothing. They’d throw us into the grinder without a blink.’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘They ain’t human.’

‘Not now, no.’

‘We’re nothing to them. Just spare parts.’

Khamed looked up at his deputy. Namogh was as adamant as ever. His ugly face was twisted with distaste. There was anger there, to be sure, but also fear. Khamed couldn’t blame him for that. The Iron Hands scared everyone, even the mutants.

‘I don’t want to believe that, Orfen,’ said Khamed quietly. ‘They are sons of the Emperor, just as we are. We fight together.’

‘Crap. You’re delusional.’

‘But what changes them?’ asked Khamed, ignoring Namogh. He remembered the way Grond’s voice had sounded. ‘Why do they change? I’d like to know that.’

IV

The knife went in, moving across the flesh of the arm, tracing a thin line of blood.

Morvox watched it. He had an almost uncontrollable urge to seize the nearest medicae servitor by its desiccated throat and slam it against the walls of the apothecarion.

That had been predicted. He fought the urge down. The hormones in his body, the ones introduced during the changes, made him belligerent in the face of injury.

The servitors carried on, heedless of the turmoil in their patient. They moved on tank tracks around the metal chair Morvox had been clamped into. Their faces were shiny curves of steel, dotted with sensoria. Their limbs were entirely augmetic and terminated in a dozen different surgical devices. They chattered to one another in a basic form of binaric. It was a soft, low clicking backdrop to their grisly work.

The skin was peeled back, exposing raw muscle. The ligatures below the bicep tensed. The knives went in again, parting the muscle mass.

Morvox watched it happen. He watched the rotary saw whine through the bone. It had only just finished growing into its new, improved form. Amputating it seemed wasteful.

They broke the bones. He watched his hand fall away, clutched in the claws of a metal servitor. He watched the blood run out of the wrist, steaming as it cooled in its steel bowl. He watched sutures run across his severed forearm, rebinding the muscles and stabilising them. He watched the drills go in and the pre-augmetic bindings lock on to his broken bones.

There was hours of work to come. Rods would be implanted, running nearly up to his elbow. Braces would encircle the pronator, studding through the skin of his forearm. Neural relays would be dropped into place, and nerve-sockets, and tendon housings. And then, finally, they would drill in the new hand, the mark of his Chapter, the sign of fealty to the primarch and to the ideals of Medusa.

He would watch it all. The procedure was the mark of passage, the signal of his transition from mortal to superhuman. When it was complete, it would make him stronger. He knew this. It was fact, as revealed by Iron Father Arven Rauth, and so could not be doubted.

But, even though he knew it to be true, even as he watched the rods go in, bisecting the muscles that had kept him alive out on the ash plains, he did not yet believe it.

One day, like the Iron Father who had retrieved him from the trials, Morvox would not remember anything but the aesthetic imperative, the desire to purge the machine of the flesh that impeded it. One day, Morvox would no doubt pass on the ways of Manus to another, believing it with both hearts, no longer regretting the loss of a part of himself.

But not yet.

For now, he still felt it.

There were more trials. Long years as a neophyte, learning the ways of the Adeptus Astartes. A hundred worlds, all different, all the same.

He saw them first as a Scout, learning to use his enhanced body without the full protection of power armour. He enjoyed feeling his augmented muscles flex. He revelled in the strength of his new sinews. He could run for hours without fatigue, or lay in wait for days without the need for sustenance. He was a miracle, a scion of demigods.

The disquiet grew slowly. He noticed during an engagement with the greenskin how quickly his iron hand functioned, how elegantly it curled into a punching fist, how efficiently it was able to turn the cutting blade. He moved his close combat weapon to his left hand after that, trusting in its ability more than the natural flesh of the right.

It was after the Valan Campaign when he was elevated into the ranks of the Clan proper. His carapace protection was returned to the foundry and, for the first time, he was bolted into the hallowed shell of power armour. He remembered the cool touch of the interface nodes against his carapace, how the ceramite skin worked in such perfect conjunction with his own.

He remembered the first time the helm was lowered over his face, sealing him off from the universe in a cocoon of dense protection. He remembered how it made him feel. He flexed the gauntlets, watching the ceramic plates move over one another, watching the artificial perfection of the curves.

‘What do you feel?’ came a familiar voice.

Morvox looked at Rauth. His vision was mediated by the datastream of the helm’s lensfeed.

There were a number of answers to the question. He felt powerful. More powerful than he had ever been. He felt honoured, and unworthy, and impatient for the next engagement. He felt all of these things.

‘I feel…’ he began, looking for the right words.

The Iron Father waited patiently, locked behind his own mask.

‘I feel… imperfect,’ said Morvox, landing at last on what he wanted to say. He looked down at his left hand and his emotions clarified. ‘I feel flawed.’

Rauth nodded.

‘Good,’ he said.

Medusa was a planet of scarcity, of wastes, of darkness. Mars was a planet of wonder, of abundance, of dull red light that bled from a horizon of a million foundries.

The translation took several months, during which time Morvox trained incessantly. He read the rites of the Machine over in his mind until the words cycled in his sleep, burning themselves on to his unconscious mind like a brand. He learned the lore given him by the Iron Father perfectly, making full use of the eidetic function he’d possessed since his mind had been transformed. By the time he’d arrived, he felt almost prepared for what awaited him. All that remained was anticipation.

As the drop-ship fell steadily through the thin atmosphere, Morvox watched the landscape resolve into detail beneath him. Every metre of surface was covered in an industrial landscape of dark iron, belching red smoke from soaring towers. Structures ran up against each other like jostling herd beasts, massive and obscure. He could see transit tubes run across the face of gigantic factories like arteries on a flayed corpse.

The drop-ship flew low on its approach vector. It passed huge trenches, alive with glittering light, glowing at their bases from the magma that pooled there. There were clusters of cyclopean refineries, dark and shrouded in boiling walls of smog. Huge areas looked semi-derelict. Fields of tarnished steel ran away toward the horizon, marked by trenches and studded with arcane citadels. There were cages, each the size of a hive spire, within which vast war machines – superheavy vehicles, Titans, even starships – were being slowly assembled.

As the drop-ship slowed its descent ready to be received by its iron docking cradle, Morvox had a final glimpse of the Martian landscape at close quarters. Every surface was covered in a layer of red dust. The metal beneath was near black with age and corrosion. Nothing living was visible. Everything was ostentatiously artificial.

Morvox thought it was beautiful.

The vessel came to rest, and the airlock doors hissed open. Beyond them was a cavernous hall lit by long red strips of subdued neon. The air was dry and tanged with rust. The sound of hammering echoed up from deep vaults.

A single figure waited for him. It was human – of a sort. Deep green robes covered what looked like a skeleton of plasteel. No face was visible under the cowl, just a long iron snout from which wheezing breath issued.

Morvox’s helm feed added extra information. He knew that the figure’s rank was Magos, and that her name had been Severina Mavola on accession to the priesthood in 421.M38. He knew that her body was now 67 percent augmetic and that she hadn’t communicated verbally for nearly a century.

He also knew that she had once written poetry in the manner of Hervel Jho, but doubted that she retained the capacity. Service to the Machine God demanded nothing less than full commitment.

+Naim Morvox,+ she canted in Martian-accented binaric. +Be welcome to Mars. I trust your journey was efficient.+

Few non-Mechanicus personnel could communicate directly with a Magos when they chose to speak natively, instead relying on intermediaries or translating cogitators.

The Iron Hands however, as in so many other ways, were different.

+Most efficient, Magos,+ he replied. +I am eager to learn.+

Mavola motioned for him to join her.

+You wish to become Iron Father,+ she said, walking with him into the colossal hall. Her gait was smooth, giving no trace of the artificial nature of her musculature. +You know the process will be arduous.+

+If it were not, it would not be worth aspiring to.+

+You will be on Mars for ten years. In those years, many of your battle brothers will lose their lives. When you return, Medusa will be a changed place.+

+I know this.+

The Magos stopped walking. Behind her, a vast caldera boiled with molten metal. Servitors, some as large as Sentinel walkers, laboriously tilted it over, ready for the casts below to be filled.

+We will show you mysteries that we show no other Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. We extend this privilege in honour of Manus. Know now that the value of the instruction is almost without price.+

Morvox looked at her carefully.

+Almost?+

Mavola didn’t elaborate. She turned on her heel, and resumed her fluid walk across the hall.

+Come now,+ she said. +To the forges.+

When he returned to Medusa, almost eleven years after he’d left, it was as the Magos had warned him. Clan Raukaan had experienced a decade of near-constant action, and many faces he’d known well had been gathered into the Emperor’s Rest. Iron Father Arven Rauth was now Clan Commander.

To replace losses in the ranks, new aspirants had been inducted from across the planet throughout the decade. Morvox was escorted to his appointment with Rauth by one of them, a raw recruit named Ralech Grond. The youth still had his natural hand intact and almost no sign of augmetics. Morvox couldn’t decide whether he envied that or not.

Once Grond had left them, Morvox and Rauth stood alone in the inner sanctum of the Land Engine Diomedes. Both wore their armour, though the commander’s skull was bare, revealing a pattern of steel markings across the synthetic skin like a circuit board.

‘The training was successful?’ he asked.

‘As I judge it, lord. The Mechanicus reports are on the grid.’

‘Much modification?’

Morvox raised his right arm. The ceramite of his vambrace slid back, exposing a deep well within. It looked like the entire forearm had been hollowed out and lined with nanotronics. Rauth examined it carefully.

‘Unusual,’ he said. ‘What purpose did they have in this?’

Morvox withdrew the arm. As he did so, the covering clicked shut. From the outside, there was no indication that his right limb was anything other than normal.

‘They did not tell me.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘No. I assume it will become apparent.’

Rauth nodded.

‘They do nothing randomly. Anything else?’

‘No. I am ready to serve. It has been too long since I wielded weapons on the field. I’m eager to employ my new aptitudes.’

‘You are not Iron Father yet,’ warned Rauth.

‘I know. On the day I left Mars, I asked for the Magos’s prediction of when that day would come. She gave me a definite answer.’

Rauth’s eyebrow raised. It was a curiously human gesture on a generally expressionless face.

‘She told me I had incurred a debt on Mars,’ said Morvox. ‘They do not give up their secrets for free. A time will come when that debt must repaid. Only then will I earn the rank – at least in their eyes.’

‘Presumptive of them. What kind of debt?’

Morvox looked down at his hands. Both were metal now, as was much of the rest of his limb structure. That ongoing augmentation would only accelerate now. He was beginning to forget his life out on the plains, back when he’d been nothing more than human muscle and blood. All that remained was the process, the long march to perfection, just as he’d been warned.

‘I do not know,’ he said.

V

Time was measured by chrono in the lower hive. There was no daylight to announce the dawn and no nightfall to bring the days to a close – just the endless cycle of artificial light, delivered via grimy lumens and flickering pict screens.

Except that these were all smashed now. In their absence, the deep dark was oppressive and eternal. The troops measured time in shifts, in hours-long assaults on the enemy. Only the chronos, ticking away like heartbeats in the dark, recorded the time they’d been down there.

Four days, Helaj-medium, before they encountered the beast. Four days of back-breaking slog and grind. More men died during those four days than had died in the last month of attritional defence.

The assault was driven by the Iron Hands and there was no respite. They fought their way down the transit shafts, clearing them with flamers before sending grenades down into the squealing hordes. Then the boltguns would open fire, tearing the corroded flesh of the mutant into scraps and strips of bloody pulp. The Iron Hands waded through seas of grasping hands, carving through them with the chainswords. They went in close, using those massive armoured gauntlets to choke the half-life from their prey. They stayed long, using ranged fire to blow out kneecaps or crack open skulls. Whatever the tactic, the result was the same.

In their wake came the lostari, the ragged, exhausted mortal defenders of Helaj, mopping up in the aftermath and killing whatever got around the spearhead. The rotations began to blur and timekeeping slipped, but they kept stumbling onward, deeper and deeper, down toward the heart of the sickness.

Khamed was rarely away from the heart of the action, despite the need for down-periods. The more he fought, the more he watched the Space Marines fight, the more he hated to be away from the front. He could see why myths built up around such warriors. For the first time, the panegyrics on the grid seemed less than ludicrous. All the fear, the terrible fear that he’d suffered since learning that it was to be the Iron Hands responsible for the purging of Ghorgonspire, had gone. It was replaced by a wary awe.

Sure, they looked grim and sounded worse. They fought without pause or pity, but those were the qualities demanded by the task. They spoke rarely and had little patience for mortal weakness, but Khamed couldn’t blame them for that. If he’d been in their position, he’d have felt the same way.

He managed to stay close to Grond. They exchanged few words during the engagements – just enough to keep the linked forces in coordination. Morvox seemed to have delegated responsibility for mortal-liaison to the lower-ranked Space Marine, which suited Khamed fine. Though Grond’s huge presence could never have been mistaken for merely human, at least he sounded slightly like one.

Perhaps that was an illusion. Perhaps what lay under that facemask was nothing but gears and diodes.

But Khamed didn’t believe that. Not entirely.

The purging of a narrow hab-block had been completed and the flames were dying down. The empty doorways of the hab-units gaped like maws. As Khamed and Grond strode toward the far end of the main access corridor, their boots crunched through a floor of powdered bone.

‘My deputy still resents your presence here,’ Khamed said.

Grond didn’t reply. His armour was covered in a thick layer of filth. In proper light, it would have been a dirty brown.

‘He’s heard… stories,’ continued Khamed, knowing he was pushing his luck. ‘He mentioned Contqual.’

Did the Space Marine break stride, just a fraction, then? Maybe not. Hard to tell.

‘He said you killed one in three. After the fighting was over. Is that true?’

Grond kept walking for a while, then stopped. His massive armoured head turned slowly.

‘Suppose it were true,’ said Grond. ‘Would you disapprove, human?’

Khamed looked up at the facemask, guessing he’d pushed things too far.

‘I wasn’t there.’

‘No. You weren’t. You are here. Do not concern yourself with other worlds. They are the Emperor’s concern, and ours.’

The tone was cold. Khamed instantly regretted his question. He felt ashamed and foolish.

‘I’m sorr–’

Grond held his hand up. For a moment, Khamed thought the gesture was something to do with him. Then he realised the Iron Hand was listening to something on his internal comm.

‘Prepare your men,’ ordered Grond, resuming his stride toward the hab-block access corridor.

Khamed scurried to catch up with the Space Marine.

‘What is it?’

‘Objective. Morvox has found it.’

Two levels down, and the air was hot and wet. Rebreathers wheezed against the filmy low-oxygen mix, struggling as particulates clogged the intakes. Slime was everywhere, coating the walls completely and obscuring whatever patterns had once been on the metal. The surface shone pale green where the lumen beams swept across the viscous matter, studded with bleeding sores.

They had to fight all the way down. Mutants had clustered tightly in the narrow access routes, and fought with a redoubled fervour. They hurled themselves on the blades of the Iron Hands, perhaps hoping to bring them down through weight of numbers.

The Space Marines maintained the pace as they always did, striding calmly into the onslaught, firing without pause. Bolters blazed, ripping holes in the torrent of diseased bodies. Screams echoed down the long corridors, throaty and gargled with phlegm. Khamed’s men came in their wake, backing up the main advance and picking out anything that somehow escaped the rage of bolter rounds.

Smaller mutant breeds scampered and darted through the hail of fire, eyes alive with feral hatred and teeth bared. Khamed saw one spring from the bile-cloaked shadows and launch itself at one of his men. He took the shot and watched it slam into the far wall. There was a sickening squelch as the diminutive body plunged into the mucous layer and slid down into the bubbling miasma below.

Khamed tried not to notice the residual pigtails clinging to the otherwise clean-plucked skull, nor the tattered remnants of its dress flap weakly before it was swallowed by the filth.

They kept going. Step by step, they carved their way through the mob. And then, finally, they reached the heart of it.

A huge chamber opened up before them. Khamed knew what it was from the schematics – an old Mechanicus bunker, long disused even when the hive had been functioning normally. It was down in the heart of the underhive, one of the many forgotten relics of a distant past. Once, perhaps, there had been Tech-priests there, doing whatever it was they did in their strange sanctums of industry.

Now it had all been changed. The high roof throbbed with pulsating veins of lurid bile-fluid. The expansive hexagonal floorspace swam with lapping slurry. Lines of what looked like saliva hung down in loops and the air drifted with tiny spinning spores.

Ranks of mutants splashed towards them, all distorted into lumpen, bloated bags of stretched-tight skin. They staggered into combat carrying rusted shards of metal or looted lasguns, howling in a mix of lust and agony, stumbling over one another in their haste to reach their foes.

But that wasn’t what held Khamed’s gaze.

‘Hold your nerve!’ he roared over the comm.

Around him, his men lined up and picked their targets. Las-fire cracked across the chamber, prompting fresh screams and gurgling cries.

The mutants began to tumble into the slime as they were felled. But they weren’t the primary target any more. They were so much chaff, so much fodder. The real reason they were there reared up behind them.

It was massive. It filled the far end of the chamber and its vast, blubbery body ran up against the walls. The skin was translucent. Growths were visible beneath it, pulsing in sacs of pus. It was shaped like some obscene grub, warped and malformed into a veritable mountain of trembling, glistening flesh.

A face, sore-encrusted and sloppily fat, perched atop slick folds of blubber. It was still vaguely human, though its features were distorted horribly – a single eye stared out from a muscle-white face, red-rimmed and weeping. The mouth opened far wider than it should have done, exposing concentric rings of teeth and a huge, lashing tongue.

Many limbs extended from the mass of that expanded torso, some shaped into tentacles with grasping suckers, others twisted into claws. As the Iron Hands advanced towards it, the limbs lashed out, grappling for purchase.

It stank. Even through his helmet’s filters, Khamed nearly choked on the stench. With his eyes streaming, he did his best to direct his troops. The creature screamed like its progeny, though the sound was even more disturbing – high and unearthly in a bizarre mockery of a woman’s voice.

Khamed saw Grond go in, flanked by his battle-brothers. There was no hesitation. The Iron Hands plunged in close, firing the whole time from their bolters, stabbing holes in the vast flank of the obese monster. The translucent skin shook and burst as the bolts went off. Yellow liquid shot out from the wounds, thick and steaming. It cascaded down the black armour of the Space Marines, washing off the patina of days like a deluge of acid.

‘Follow them in!’ bellowed Khamed, feeling his heart beating like a drum.

He was scared. He could feel his muscles tensing up, locked into stiffness. Panic welled up in his gullet, and he fought to keep it down. The monster in front of him radiated such a wave of sickness that it nearly dragged him down into it.

He gritted his teeth, knowing his men would all be feeling the same. This was what the Iron Hands had come to show them. The horror could be fought.

‘For the Emperor!’ he cried, swinging his lasgun round and cracking off another beam. It hit an oncoming mutant in the face and ripped its cheek away, exposing rotten sinews and bone. ‘Fight, you dogs! Fight!’

The Iron Hands had closed in by then, and the swords came out. The blades shone in the darkness, lit up by disruptor fields. For the first time, the Space Marines’ movements broke from uniformity. They span on their ankles, shifting to evade the lash of the tentacles, before chopping through the curtains of flab. They remained silent, working with cool expertise, moving their limbs with exactitude.

The beast was the first opponent capable of truly contesting their will. It raged against them, flailing and whipping. One of the Space Marines was slammed back on to its back by a lightning jab from the claws. It crashed to the floor, rolling across the slime before coming to a halt. The mutants were on it in a second, hacking and chopping.

The Iron Hand powered back to its feet, scattering the corrupted bodies around it as it rose. The bolter juddered as it was drawn around in a tight arc, blasting the mutants to slivers. Then he charged back into contact with the beast, just as silent as before, just as implacable. By then two more of the Iron Hands had been forced on to the defensive, rocked by the furious response from the bloated horror before them.

Khamed advanced cautiously, maintaining a steady rate of fire. His entire platoon was in the chamber, and the flicker of their las-beams lit the walls up. For the first time, it felt like his contribution might make a difference. The horde of lesser mutants began to thin out, exposing the monster at their heart.

‘Aim for… that!’ he roared, striding through the clinging fluid and feeling it slop over the lip of his boots.

The thicket of las-beams concentrated, cracking against the beast’s hide and puncturing the wobbling epidermis. It wailed under the barrage. The las-beams alone would have done little to trouble it, but combined with the fury of the Iron Hands bolter fire and bladework, they had an effect.

The downed Space Marines cut themselves free. One of them – Morvox, perhaps – fought his way up to the folds of neck-flesh, slicing and plunging with his crackling energy weapon. Another took the killing claws off the end of a tentacle with a savage swipe from his sword.

Slowly, purposefully, they were killing it. Barbs snapped out, wrapping around necks and limbs, but they were snapped off. Bile streamed from the beast’s mouth, acidic and searing. It splattered against the hard armour and cascaded to the floor in fizzing lumps. The heavy bolter kept up its drumming, thunderous roar, punctuated by staccato bursts from the sidearms.

The residual mob of lesser mutants was beginning to lose cohesion. They blundered around, no longer advancing with any purpose.

‘Pick your targets!’ shouted Khamed. ‘Headshots! Maintain barrage on the beast! Do not give–’

Then it happened. The skirts of flesh shrunk back, withdrawing into a shivering kernel. The screaming reached a fresh crescendo of hate-laced desperation. The beast thrashed around in its death-agony, jaws splayed and bleeding, tentacles writhing. It bled from a thousand wounds, each of them pouring with jelly-like tumours. The bolts kept punching into it. The blades kept biting, crackling with disruptor energy.

Its face went white. Its eye stared wildly, straining from the single socket. Veins stood out from the white skin in a lattice of purple, throbbing and tight with incipient destruction.

For a second longer, it still burned in agony.

Just a second.

Then it exploded. The beast blew itself apart, rocking the structure above and around it to the core. A tide of rubbery flesh rolled out like a breaking wave, surging across the chamber and rushing up the walls. Greasy, fist-sized hunks of gristle peppered the chamber. Flaps of skin sailed into the air, trailing long lines of sputoid blood and plasma. Semi-formed organs sailed high, falling apart in mid-air and breaking into slabs of quivering muscle.

Khamed was knocked from his feet by the storm, just like the rest of his men. He crashed on his back, felled by a rain of slapping body parts. He hit the filth hard and body-hot fluid ran through the chinks in his armour.

Repelled, he staggered back to his feet, shaking himself down. He wiped his visor and dirty streaks of red ran across it.

Ahead of him was a crater of gelatinous meat, laced with sticky globules of nerve-endings and lymph-nodes. It shivered as the fluid cascaded over it, running over the floor and swaying with the current.

And amid the ruin of the beast, the five Iron Hands stood. Their armour dripped with sludge. Their guns were silent. For the first time in days, the howls of the mutants were gone. The only sound was the echo of the explosion and the slap and gurgle of the gore-tide as it ran against the walls.

Khamed watched them, feeling the weakness in his overtired limbs.

‘Throne,’ he whispered, hardly daring to believe it. ‘Throne of Earth.’

Khamed looked around him. His men – those that had survived – were dead on their feet. All were exhausted. A few had collapsed into the foul water and stayed there. Despite that, despite everything, most of the rest carried themselves with more pride that at any time over the past six months. They knew what they’d achieved.

Khamed let a smile crease across his grimy face.

‘Namogh,’ he voxed, hoisting his lasgun over his shoulder. ‘Get your grunts down here.’

‘Progress?’ came the reply. He sounded worried.

‘Pretty good. Fast as you can.’

Khamed killed the link and limped over to where the Iron Hands were congregating. All five of them were still standing in the centre of the beast’s gigantic cadaver. Four of them, Grond included, were calmly reloading their weapons. The fifth, Morvox by the look of his armour, had waded deeper into the slough of burned flesh and was rummaging around in the heap of entrails and fluid.

‘You have our thanks, lord,’ said Khamed, coming up to Grond and smiling broadly. ‘We could not have done this without you.’

Grond didn’t turn to face him. He was looking intently at Morvox. They all were. Intrigued, Khamed followed their gaze.

After some more searching, the Sergeant seemed to find what he was looking for. He straightened up, clutching something in his left hand.

It was a tube, formed from dark metal. Khamed couldn’t make much out in the dim light – it was less than twenty centimetres long, blunt and rounded at the ends. There were markings on it, but nothing he could make out clearly.

Morvox turned back and strode toward them. As he did so, the armour of his right forearm opened. The vambrace panel came apart in two halves, exposing an empty space where the limb should have been. Morvox stowed the tube inside the receptacle and closed the shell of ceramite over it again.

Khamed frowned. For some reason, he felt suddenly worried. There had been no mention, at any time, of a mission to retrieve an object from the underhive.

‘What is this, Grond?’ he asked.

The Iron Hand didn’t reply. Morvox spoke instead.

‘Our task is complete, mortal,’ came the metallic voice, as eerily thin as ever. ‘Our ship has been summoned from orbit. The cleansing is over.’

For a moment, Khamed didn’t believe what he was hearing. He stumbled over his response.

‘But, with respect, lord–’ he began. As the words left his mouth, his earlier euphoria was replaced with a cold dread. ‘There are hundreds of mutants left alive. We have cleansed less than half of what we came for. There may be more such beasts. We need you.’

Morvox’s dark facemask loomed over him. Khamed suddenly realised that the other Iron Hands were all facing him. They said nothing. They were like images in a cathedral, cold and dead.

‘You make demands on us now, human?’ Morvox asked. There was no emotion in the question, but somehow it conveyed a sense of absolute, utter menace.

Khamed swallowed, and felt his fists clench uselessly. He felt ridiculous, like a child stealing in on some adult affair and demanding attention. Stubbornly, from somewhere, he found the will to protest.

‘No demands,’ he said, disgusted at how timorous his voice sounded. ‘But, lord, we cannot defeat the enemy that still remains. You cannot leave us now.’

‘You speak as if your battle here is the only concern we have. You know nothing of the war that burns across the galaxy. You know nothing of the demands on us. If you wish to be worthy of preservation, then guard this ground. The Emperor protects those who resist.’

Then Morvox pushed past him and began to stalk back the way he’d come, back through the thousands of shafts and chambers and up into the inhabited zones. One by one, his squad turned to follow him.

Khamed watched them go in desperation. He knew, just as they surely did, that for them to leave now was little short of murder. The mutants would rally. Mortal troops alone were no match for the horrors that still squatted in the underhive – something that had been proved time and again over the past six months.

‘Grond!’ he cried, reaching out to clutch at the Iron Hand who had saved his life. ‘You cannot mean this! The Spire can be cleansed! Do not leave us. Mercy of the Emperor, do not leave us!’

Grond looked at him just once. Khamed stared up into the softly reflective surface of the helm’s lenses. He realised then that he had no idea what kind of creature existed behind that mask. No idea at all.

‘Can you fight?’ asked the Space Marine.

The question needed no answer. Khamed knew what the responses were. Perhaps Grond had tried to warn him of this the first time he’d asked it. The Iron Hands only cared about strength.

Namogh had been right. Old, cynical Namogh.

Khamed hung his head, and let his hand slip from the Space Marine’s arm. He could already hear scrabbling from the levels below. The mutants were stirring again.

Grond strode off to join his battle brothers, not giving Khamed another glance. All five of them walked past the lostari in the chamber, ignoring the looks of disbelief from the human troops. Their heavy footfalls gradually receded as they passed through the connecting chambers and headed on up.

Khamed only raised his head when Namogh’s squad burst into the chamber.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ demanded the deputy. ‘We just marched past your beloved Space Marines, and they’re all going the wrong–’

He stopped short. Perhaps something in Khamed’s empty expression told him all he needed to know.

‘We’re on our own,’ said Khamed, and his voice was hollow.

For a moment, Namogh was lost for words. He looked at Khamed, then back at where the Iron Hands had gone, then back at Khamed.

‘Those… bastards,’ he spat. ‘Those damned… bastards.’

The troops in the chamber, all of whom had heard the exchanges with Morvox, began to disintegrate. Some collapsed, empty-eyed and limp. Others started weeping. None of them ran. They knew there was nowhere to go.

Namogh managed to get a lid on his fury, and fixed Khamed with an urgent glare. His indignation made him speak too fast.

‘What are we going to do, Jen?’ he blurted. ‘What are we going to tell Tralmo? What the hell am I going to tell my men? Holy Terra, what are they thinking, running out now? Why the hell come here, if they didn’t intend to finish this thing off? What’re we going to do?’

Khamed only half listened. He had no answers. He could hear the first screams of fury and lust from the tunnels below. The mutants were coming already. Soon they would be in the chamber, rushing through the slime, eyes shining with hatred.

Khamed felt a deep, horrifying weariness suffuse his limbs. His whole body ached. He’d pushed himself to the limit, and there was nothing left to give.

We’re nothing to them. Just spare parts.

‘Gather your men,’ he said, unhoisting his lasgun and checking the charge. ‘We’ll make a stand three levels up. Call in the reserves – if we can get the siege doors closed, we might hold some ground for a while.’

Namogh looked at him as if he were mad.

‘You think we’ll hold them? You really think we stand any kind of chance? What’s different this time?’

Khamed shook his head grimly.

‘Nothing’s different, Orfen,’ he said. ‘Nothing. Except, perhaps, for one thing.’

He looked away, past the stinking morass of the beast’s carcass and down the tunnels beyond. He could feel the tide of unreasoning madness building down there. He knew it would not respect defiance. It respected nothing. It would just keep on coming.

Can you fight?

‘I now know how the universe operates, my friend,’ he said bleakly. ‘For a while, I had dared to hope otherwise. I believed that this place might have some significance for them. That we might.’

He laughed bitterly.

‘Better to die knowing the truth, do you not think?’

VI

The probe made a 98-percent efficient descent from orbital platform 785699 to the receiving station in sector 56-788-DE of Forge 34 Xanthe manufactorium-schola-astartes. The statistics were logged on the grid and interpreted by the usual team of lexmechanics, after which three anomalies were corrected and allowed for, resulting in a two percentage point increment, to the satisfaction of all involved.

From the docking claw, the contents of the probe were conveyed by servitor nineteen levels down, past the major foundry zones and into the dense ganglia of shrines known colloquially in the sector as 1EF54A.

The cargo was transferred to Tech-Priests after a soak-test for data contagion and wrapped in three layers of soft dust-repelling cloth. The mark of the Machine God had been embroidered on the material in gold thread.

Thus clad, it went through six further pairs of hands, only two of which had any organic flesh left on the bones. More tests were performed, and ledgers filled out, and records made for the core lists.

Then, finally, the cargo reached its destination. It came to rest on an obsidian tabletop in a room lit by dark red tubes. For a long time, it lay there alone, untroubled and untouched.

Several local days later, Magos Technicus Yi-Me, once called Severina Mavola, entered the chamber and carefully unwrapped it. A tube lay at the centre of the cloth, its glossy surface reflecting the light of the lumens.

Yi-Me studied it for a long time. She use her basic optical replacements, as well as seventeen additional sensors built into her plasteel cranium.

Deep within her, in a part of her body that had remained relatively unchanged throughout all the years of biosurgery, a sensation of deep pleasure blossomed. If she’d still had lips, she would have smiled.

The artefact was powerful. Powerful, if the initial readings were confirmed, beyond even her expectations. It would certainly suffice for the task she had in mind, and perhaps for many more in the years ahead. Lucky, that it had been discovered. Lucky, also, that it had proved possible to retrieve.

She bowed her head, silently acknowledging the service rendered by the one who had once been her pupil.

+Debt paid,+ she canted, knowing he couldn’t hear her, but enjoying the irony of addressing him nonetheless. Such tropes were a staple of the Jho school, something she still appreciated. +Naim Morvox, Iron Father: debt is paid in full.+

A hundred worlds. All different, all the same.

As I bring the light of the Emperor to each of them, knowing that every foe I face could me the one that ends me, a single encounter remains prominent in my thoughts.

Helaj V, the Ghorgonspire. I remember the mortal there, the one named Raef Khamed. Even in sleep, sometimes, I see his face.

He expected much of us, once he had forgotten to fear. We could never match that expectation, not if we had eternity to accomplish the task and infinite resources to bring to bear.

Even so, I left the planet troubled. I never discussed it with Morvox. He would not have tolerated dispute from me, and that was before he was Iron Father. It seemed to me that our task was not finished, even though the objective was secured and our goals satisfied.

I remember how the mortals fought. I remember how they rose up when we were with them. Back in the warp, where dreams are ever vivid, I heard them plead for us to return. Or perhaps I heard their screams.

We never went back. I do not know what fate befell them. Maybe they prevailed. Maybe they were lost.

For many years, that troubled me.

Now, it does not. I understand what Morvox was doing. He had been purged of sentiment by then, just as I will be. He saw the greater pattern, and followed it. Such is the galaxy we inhabit. Resolve will preserve us; sentiment will see the light of humanity extinguished.

And so we allow ourselves to become this thing. We allow ourselves to become the machine. We are the result of a necessity, of the process.

The alternative is weakness.

I see this now. I see the truth of what I have been told by Morvox. Perhaps Helaj was the last time that I doubted. I am stronger now. I feel the imperfection within me, and long to purge it. In time, Emperor willing, I will go to Mars and learn the mysteries, just as he did.

Not yet. For now, there is too much of my old self, my old corruption. The flesh remains, impeding the progress of the machine.

I still feel the ghost of my old hand, the one they took away to mark my ascension into Raukaan. Far less, it is true, but I feel it nonetheless.

I wish never to feel it again. I wish to forget the face of Raef Khamed, to forget that there is hope and disappointment in the universe.

This is my task, the reason for my existence, and nothing else will suffice. I will work at it. I will persevere. I will purge the weakness of the flesh.

I will be Ralech Grond, Iron Hand, or I will be nothing.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Winona Nelson

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Table of Contents

Cover

Manbane - Andy Hoare

The Last Remembrancer - John French

The Inquisition - An Interview With Darius Hinks

Phalanx: Chapter Eight - Ben Counter

Flesh - Chris Wraight

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