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The Last Charge - Andy Hoare

We Are One - John French

Aurelian: An Extract - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Phalanx - Chapter Eleven - Ben Counter

Mountain Eater - Andy Smillie

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The Last Charge

Andy Hoare

At the close of the first millennium after the unification of fair Bretonnia, in the year the men of the Empire measure 1974, the coastal regions of the Old World and far beyond were laid waste by a fell scion of Naggaroth, the beastlord named Rakarth. How many thousands were slain by his monstrous hosts is not written, for few who witnessed his attacks lived to tell the tale. Port after port, city after city was crushed beneath the clawed feet of the vile abominations the beastlord herded into battle, those not devoured by his war hydras and black dragons enslaved and dragged screaming back to the Land of Chill.

Rakarth’s age of destruction culminated in an unprecedented attack upon the fair land of Bretonnia, beloved by the Lady and defended by the stoutest of hearts. Heed the tale of the city of Brionne, beloved of Duke Corentin…

The city of Brionne slumbered fitfully beneath a night sky that seethed with ghostly luminescence. On nights such as these, so the Daughters of the Grail warned, the wastes far to the north of Bretonnia howled with the raw power of forbidden sorceries. The lights, so they said, meant that killers were abroad, men and other, darker creatures, roaming far and wide in search of slaughter.

The people of Brionne knew not to look upwards at the boiling energies, nor to meet the gaze of the eyes that glowered from the actinic depths. They knew from the stories told to them as children not to heed the lies uttered by the unreal lips that formed in the roiling, lambent clouds of balefire. Far better, the people of Brionne knew, to lock the bedchamber doors, shutter the windows, snuff out the candles and take what mortal comfort they could beneath the sheets. And well they might, for none could know for sure if the world would still be standing when dawn came.

But one man refused to take to his bed. Corentin, celebrated, among other titles, as the Paladin of Maelys, the Marcher-Lord of the Silver Plain, Defender of Fort Adeline, Champion of Gaelle’s Virtue and Duke of Brionne, refused to be cowed by what he regarded as nothing more than an unusual storm. Even as violet-hued illumination flickered and pulsed outside his castle walls, Corentin stalked the dusty, candle-lit passages, long past the hour when any servant or courtier would be about to attend him. Wearing but his breeches and his sword belt, Corentin approached the inner sanctum of his castle, the Grail Shrine deep within its stone heart. Pausing to appreciate the solidity of the centuries-old, oak doors, he set a hand upon each handle, bowed his head, and entered.

The shrine was lit by golden light, cast by filigreed lanterns that had never been allowed to burn out since the day the city of Brionne had been founded. In the half-light, Corentin saw the familiar scenes carved in stone across every surface. Miniature architecture, impossible to render in true scale, reared overhead, populating the shrine with fantastically intricate tabernacle palaces. Tomb chests lined the walls, topped by stone effigies of long-dead knights in saintly repose, every one of them kin to the duke.

Corentin drew to a halt before the high stone altar, upon which was mounted a golden cup with deep, twinkling rubies mounted on its flanks. The vessel glowed with a light that was nothing to do with the lanterns all about, for it shone from within the very metal of this holy relic of times long gone. Even after so many years in service to Bretonnia, Duke Corentin was humbled before the symbol of all that he and his fellow knights fought for. It was not the grail, of course, but a grail, one of many sacred embodiments of the land and the people who dwelled within its borders.

The duke drew his gleaming sword and grunted as he went down upon one knee before the altar, the sword set before him point down. He was a powerfully built man, but he was far from young. In his youth he had been lithe and agile, in his majority as solid as an ox. Now, his muscle was softening and his former vigour deserting him, a little more each day. But still, he refused to cower like lesser men, regardless of what powers might be abroad this strange night.

When finally he was down, his good knee pressed hard into the cold flag stone of the chapel floor, Corentin looked upwards towards the grail. How many times had he done so, he pondered? How many battles had he begun by entreating the Lady of the Lake for victory? Dozens, he mused. Scores. Perhaps even hundreds. Truth be told, the battles Corentin had fought had started to blur into one another, as if his whole life had been but one long, bloody war against the innumerable enemies of Bretonnia. He supposed it had been, but he knew it must soon come to an end.

‘Not yet,’ Corentin said, his voice low and gruff, and somehow out of place in the sanctity of the grail shrine. The lanterns cast dancing light across the intricate architecture, the stone effigy of one of his ancestors seeming almost to stir as the light and shadow shifted across its surface. ‘Let not the glory of service be done yet…’

The lanterns flickered once more, and the duke felt the air stir about him. It was as if a gust from the chill night without had found its way through the winding passages, through the heavy oak doors, and into this most holy sanctum at the heart of his castle.

A heavy sense of foreboding settled over Corentin’s heart. The duke feared no enemy, whether man, beast or abomination, for he had faced all in battle and cut them down with equal contempt. Rather, he knew dread, the notion that soon he might be forced by the advance of years to put up his lance once and for all, and to surrender himself to infirmity or senility. Anger waxed inside him as that thought took hold, and he grit his teeth in denial.

‘No,’ he growled, his voice far too loud for his surroundings. ‘I implore you…’

The light upon the altar redoubled, and through eyes misted with tears, Duke Corentin watched in stunned awe as the grail flared into pure, white illumination. Faith and adoration swelled within his chest as he knew that the Lady heeded his words and that, in some manner, she was here with him now, inside the chapel.

Knowing that the Lady of the Lake would hear him, Duke Corentin aloud spoke his heart’s most secret desire.

‘Lady,’ he implored, his head filling with visions of past battles. ‘Grant me one last, glorious moment. One last foe to banish in your name. One last battle to fight before the night draws in and claims me.’

The lanterns flickered once again, and the chapel grew chill. The cold seeped through the very stones, and into Corentin’s body.

‘Grant me an enemy to face,’ he pleaded, the clamour of battle audible, if faint, over the crackle of the candles burning in the lanterns.

Screwing his eyes tightly shut as he bowed his head in abject supplication to the Lady, Duke Corentin felt the air stir at his back and he knew without doubt that another had entered the shrine. A scent met his nostrils, a rich and intoxicating mix of heady perfume and untouched skin.

‘My lord,’ a sweet, lyrical voice sounded from behind him. ‘Do not ask this.’

A stab of anger flared in the duke’s heart, but it was dulled by the presence at his back. He lifted his head and opened his eyes, immediately averting his face from the blazing white light streaming from the altar.

‘Who…?’ he stammered, scarcely daring to dream that he might be in the presence of…

‘I am not her, my lord,’ the voice said, and Corentin detected a familiar accent, if one made lilting by an alien manner. ‘Please,’ she insisted. ‘Face me, my lord.’

The duke did as he was bid, rising on legs made unsteady by more than just age. Before him stood a woman, or a girl, he could not tell which for her features were truly ageless. Quite beyond that, her face was all but impossible to fully perceive, as if its details would be forgotten seconds after looking away, and so he dared not risk doing so. He recognised her as a damsel, a Daughter of the Grail, one of the blessed handmaidens of the Lady of the Lake, and as such a prophetess, miracle wielder and holy woman beyond compare. To the people of Bretonnia, such women – for no male ever returned having been called to serve the Lady – were but a step away from their patron deity, and their words were those of the Lady herself.

‘Then who?’ the duke stammered, unable to comprehend how this stranger had walked into the shrine at the very heart of his castle. ‘Who are…’

‘I come in answer to your prayer,’ the damsel said, starting towards the altar. As she walked, the long, girded, white shift that was all she wore ghosted behind her as a gossamer mist evaporating in the morning sun. He averted his eyes as her soft form was silhouetted through material made transparent by the silver glare. At the altar, she turned to look back upon him.

But the gaze that shone from her ageless eyes was ill matched with the gentleness of her body. Of a sudden, those eyes were fathomless and dreadful, regarding Duke Corentin as a god standing in judgement over a mortal soul.

‘You would answer my prayer?’ he said, scarcely able to believe that it could be true. ‘You would grant me one last glory before I die?’

The damsel did not answer straight away, but turned her face towards the shining grail, her long, dark hair stirring as if caught in a gentle breeze. Her fathomless eyes stared unblinking into the white light, before she turned to regard him once more.

‘I come not to grant your heart’s desire,’ she stated. ‘But I would warn you of the consequences of what you crave so.’

‘Consequences, my lady?’ the duke replied. ‘I care not for consequences. I have fought every foe this cruel world has set before me,’ he continued. ‘I have defeated them all. What warning have you for me?’

The ghost of a smile touched the damsel’s delicate lips, and she regarded the proud duke as if he were some boastful, callow and inexperienced youth bragging of the glory he would win upon the field of battle. Her eyes softened, and in an instant the dreadful power that had shone from them was gone, replaced by mortal, and very human, sorrow.

‘I can offer you no counsel, my lord,’ she said. ‘For the Lady knows that you, above all others, are truly wise in matters of war and state. But any man would be wiser still to know what not to ask.’

Frustrated, the duke replied, ‘Mock me not, my lady, for I am not one for riddles like those who treat with the fey. Am I to have that which I so desire?’

The damsel sighed, and replied, ‘Would you have your prayer answered, my lord, even if it spelled your doom?’

‘I would.’

‘Then you shall have it. You shall have that which you most desire.’

That night, Duke Corentin dreamed such dreams as no man could imagine. He relived every one of the battles he had fought over a lifetime of war. For a while, he was back at the Deliverance of Quenelles, following Master Joffre on that first, mad charge into the greenskin horde. Then he was bearing the standard at the Siege of Trantio, then cutting down the traitors as they turned against the River Tarano, the crossing suddenly impossible thanks to the blessings of the Lady. Then it was Castle Darkheart, the sight of the dead rising before the King’s lines striking dread into his old heart just as it had three decades earlier. Deep in the Irrana Mountains, Duke Corentin had saved Carcassonne from the largest Skaven swarm witnessed in living memory, though the lord of that dukedom had uttered scarcely a word of thanks.

For what seemed like hours, the battles flashed and boiled through feverish dreams, most blurring together, others standing out above the rest. The Battle of the Lagoon of Tears; the Siege of the ruined fortress of Vorag; the ill-fated Errantry War that scoured the Plain of Bones but in the process lost the king’s war banner. Battles against every foe known to man, and some of which man had no knowledge, came to him. Barbarous greenskins, cruel dark elves, the savage and blasphemous men of the north, the pernicious mercenary-princes of Tilea and the petty barons of the Border Princes. All of these foes and more he had faced upon the field of battle, and whatever foul magics or cunning stratagems they had employed, Corentin knew that every one of them could bleed, and therefore die. And all the while, the blessed presence of the Lady of the Lake stood by, just beyond perception, watching over the bold deeds performed in her name and that of her land and all its people.

The duke awoke with a start, the silken sheets damp and cold with sweat. His bedchamber was dark, the candles long burned down, but the wan light of dawn edged the heavy shutters on the lancet windows. The clamour of war still echoing in his ears as the dreams receded, Corentin rose from his bed and crossed the stone floor to the windows. Opening the shutters, he looked out across the city of Brionne, his heart filled with the foreshadowing of something dreadful.

The morning sun was barely over the horizon, and its golden rays turned the pale sandstone of the city’s soaring spires into shining needles made of glowing precious metal. From his window, the duke looked down upon the densely clustered rooftops, which were punctuated by dozens upon dozens of the impossibly delicate spires, the sharp conical roof of each one adorned with long pennants that fluttered in the morning breeze blowing in from the Great Ocean. Corentin’s gaze followed the towers as they marched towards the distant city walls, a sea mist making the most distant ghostly pale in the morning air. Beyond the high walls, the sea was barely visible at all, and the horizon all but invisible.

A flash of nightmare strobed across the duke’s mind, a spectre from the fevered dreams that had haunted him throughout the night. He heard once more the distant roar of some mighty wyrm-lord from the dawn of time, and pictured its writhing form skewered upon his blessed lance. The roar grew louder, resounding not from the mists of time and nightmare, he realised, but from those creeping in from the Great Ocean. His breath catching in his throat and his blood freezing in his veins, the duke realised that the fog was not the remnants of the nighttime sea mist, yet to burn off in the morning sun. It was, in fact, a fresh mist, its tendrils creeping in from the ocean, writhing and questing like the tentacles of some vast, sea-spawned kraken…

‘To arms!’ Duke Corentin thundered from his bedchamber window as he leaned outwards over his castle. ‘Muster the household!’ he shouted into the marshalling yard below as the low droning of some ancient horror blared from the creeping fog. ‘Call out the militia!’

‘War is come!’ he bellowed, his blood pumping with a heady cocktail of battle lust and horror. Let them come, he prayed as he turned at the sound of his attendants entering the bedchamber. Whoever they may be, let them come, and know the cold taste of Bretonnian steel.

‘The elves of Naggaroth,’ said Duke Corentin’s chancellor as the two men stood atop the walls of Brionne, the city’s army mustered at the ramparts. The duke was resplendent in his ornate battle armour, its every plate burnished to a silvered finish and adorned with golden grail and fleur-de-lys icons. Nearby attendants bore his helm, his lance and his shield, while a groom in the yard below struggled to control his mighty steed.

The duke did not need telling just who this foe was or where they had come from. He had faced them many times and knew well their cruel ways. Indeed, the fine lattice of scars etched into the flesh of his belly told of the cruelties the dark elves, as they were known, were wont to inflict upon those they captured in battle. Those who had tortured Corentin in the aftermath of the Battle of the Deeping Moon had paid gravely for their sins, the duke turning the tables upon them having escaped captivity and returned with a vengeful army.

The enemy had come from the sea, stalking from the creeping ocean mists to surround the walled city of Brionne. That mist lingered still, and the dark form of a Black Ark loomed in the distance like an iceberg made of solid rock or a mountainous island thrown up by the sea overnight. From the cavernous sea-docks of the vast city-ship, hundreds of landing vessels had delivered thousands upon thousands of dark elves to the shore, the black-clad warriors forming into regiments and taking position on the plains surrounding the city. For miles all about, the lands were covered with the dark, serrated forms of the dark elf cohorts, vile banners snapping in the breeze and shrill horns blaring.

But the ranks of warriors were just one part of the host and, though the most numerous, far from the most terrible. Corsairs, kraken-skin cloaks lending them the aspect of devils from the deep marched beside grim executioners, their faces covered and their cruel glaives poised to enact the most wanton of mutilations. Witch elves capered, their bare flesh smeared with the blood of the victims sacrificed to their blasphemous gods, that victory might be theirs. Formations of riders moved in around the flanks to cut off any hope that the city might get a messenger out, some upon steeds as black as night, others riding the reptilian cold ones, their vile stink carried on the wind for miles.

Yet still, it was not even these terrible foes that the duke looked to as he regarded the army of the dark elves that had voyaged from the Land of Chill to lay siege to his fair city. Rather, it was the mighty beasts that towered over the ranks that drew his eye and filled his old, warrior’s heart with awe. Never before had Duke Corentin seen such a number or range of abominations, even when facing the twisted hordes of the northmen. War hydras stamped and snorted as bold handlers struggled to keep each of the many-headed beasts’ fanged maws from attacking nearby warriors or one another. A constant plume of black smoke boiled upwards from the beasts, each of their heads belching great gouts of roiling flame as their necks twisted and darted to and fro. The beasts’ hide was as grey as stone, and the duke knew from bitter experience that it was every bit as hard and as cold. Scanning the horde grimly, he attempted to estimate the numbers of such beasts the dark elves were herding into battle against his city. He lost count after three dozen, the ranks of the beasts swelled by fresh arrivals before he could gain their measure.

A shrill cry, akin to the call of some vile carrion bird, split the air, and the duke’s lip curled in disgust as he located its source. The smoke-wreathed sky overhead was slowly filling with darting shapes which might at first be easily mistaken for vultures or other such creatures drawn to the plain by the promise of freshly-slain carcasses to pick clean in the aftermath of battle. But as they dove and wheeled, it became clear that these were no natural creatures, nor even birds or any other beast. They were harpies, creatures of which the cautionary tales of the Bretonnian knighthood had much to say. Though curved and comely from a distance, the harpies were far removed from the feminine form they wore. Each was a creature as debased as vermin, incapable or any thoughts or deeds other than the most animalistic. They cared only for the tearing of raw flesh between needle-sharp teeth, and were said to be the servants of some vile dark elf god no virtuous knight would demean himself to name.

With a motion like a shoal of darting fish spooked by the approach of a far larger predator, the harpies scattered across the sky and were gone. From banks of mist, made grey by the smoke belching from the gullets of the hydras, came a sinuous black form upon pinions as dark as night. Duke Corentin’s heart thundered as he took in a sight he had not seen in decades. It was a dragon, one of the ebon-scaled wyrms which it was said that the most cruel-hearted and despicable of dark elf lords could command to bear them into battle. Clearly such a tale held something of the truth, for a figure was visible mounted upon the black dragon’s back, a banner snapping in the cold wind behind.

A ripple of fear swept up and down the defenders manning the mighty walls of Brionne, and Duke Corentin tore his eyes from the sight of the ebon beast wheeling through the clouds and looked down upon his men. The ramparts of the rearing curtain walls curved about the extent of the city, towers topped with mighty war machines punctuating them at regular intervals. The ramparts were manned by hundreds upon hundreds of warriors, the squires of the household and the men of the city militia. The former were semi-professional soldiers, trained and drilled to defend their fair nation against foes such as these and equipped with padded armour, shields and a variety of weapons from longbows to billhooks. The latter were only called to fight when sufficiently dire circumstances allowed no alternative, for they were in the main peasants and villains who would only fight when cornered by the enemy or forced to do so by the sergeants. The peasants bore what weapons they themselves could muster, those from the fields about Brionne armed with scythes staffs, those from the city with iron or wooden tools and cudgels.

‘Hold,’ Duke Corentin ordered, his powerful voice clearly audible to hundreds of his troops. Men turned their faces from the limitless horde of malice sweeping steadily across the plains and the nightmare creatures swooping high overhead, to regard their lord and master. The duke looked from face to face of those nearest to him, and it struck him then that he knew not one of the men looking back at him. In years long gone, he had taken pride in knowing the sergeants and captains under his command. The faces of the best of those men flashed through his memory before, sadness welling inside, he recalled how each had fallen in battle. So many brave, virtuous warriors had died at his command, he reflected, and here were more on the cusp of doing so. Forcing the ghosts of long lost companions-in-arms from his mind, Duke Corentin addressed his army from his vantage point high atop the wall tower.

‘Men of Bretonnia!’ he shouted, the assembled ranks falling to respectful silence as he spoke. ‘Our fair city of Brionne is this day threatened by the most despicable of enemies. But shall we submit?’

Turning his head towards the enemy, Duke Corentin hawked, and spat a great gobbet of spittle over the ramparts towards the enemy. The nearest ranks erupted in approbation, cheering their liege’s bold gesture of defiance. Soon, the rallying cry was taken up by those too far along the wall to have witnessed the gesture, and then by every warrior upon the ramparts of Brionne.

None saw that the cold breeze blowing in off of the sea had whipped up moments after the duke had spat into it, and blown the gobbet straight back into his face.

The Dark Elf army continued to deploy upon the plains surrounding Brionne, and by early evening the noose was fully tightened. Numerous messengers had been dispatched to carry word of the invasion, but none who remained had any way of knowing if they had broken through the dark elf lines. Duke Corentin had seen, many years ago, dark elf scouts and assassins, and so he doubted that any man could have stolen through if such creatures were abroad. Nonetheless, he offered pious entreaties to the Lady of the Lake that word might somehow reach the dukedom’s outlying towns and castles, and an army might be gathered to drive the vile dark elves back into the sea.

As the sky darkened, with the approach of night as much as the smoke of numerous burned offerings sent up by the enemy’s sorceresses, a dread silence descended upon attacker and defender alike. All throughout the afternoon, the duke’s knights had marshalled behind the city’s main gates, ready to sally forth against the foe when Corentin judged the moment right. These bold men had barely been able to contain their eagerness to charge through the gates and smite the enemy to ruin. Yet now, even they fell quiet and sullen. Standing upon his tower, looking down at the vast army spread out across the plain between the city and the sea, Duke Corentin felt it too.

The skies darkened still further as clouds the colour of livid bruises boiled in from the horizon. The black dragon appeared once more, diving from the heart of those clouds to swoop in towards the walls, the multitude of war hydras far below roaring as it passed over them. Where before, the appearance of the dragon had caused a murmur of fear to spread along the walls, now Duke Corentin heard terrified outbursts, even sobbing from the ranks. Though the sergeants bellowed for silence and order, the fact was unmistakable. The winged, stygian fiend was death and doom embodied, and men withered before it.

Yet, the duke knew differently. Decades of experience had taught him that such beasts were only tamed, or dominated, by some manner of being an order of magnitude stronger, in will if not in muscle. He knew that, as fearful as the ebon wyrm undoubtedly was, the figure upon its back must be far more terrible to command such a creature.

As if to confirm his thoughts, the dragon swept in closer still, until it was close enough for the defenders to see its rider clearly. Mounted in a saddle lined with human skin, the duke and his men saw a warrior-lord clad from head to toe in jet-black armour worked into the most cruelly delicate forms by the hand of a master far superior to any mortal artificer. The dark elf lord’s tall helm covered his features, but none could miss the balefire light shining from the eyes like coals in the night. In one hand, the lord bore a long, coiling whip, which snaked and writhed as if possessed of some terrible inner vitality, while in his other hand he bore a shield adorned with the fell runes of forbidden magics.

In an instant, the dragon was soaring over the city’s walls, though it made no assault upon the defenders. The peasants of the militia cried out in terror, and many dropped to their knees and covered their heads as if doing so would save them from the beast’s scrutiny. A handful threw themselves from the ramparts in terror, the fortunate tumbling down flights of stone steps to the landings below, the unfortunate meeting the ground in the courtyard with a sickening crunch.

Duke Corentin refused to show but the slightest degree of fear as the huge beast soared overhead, the lung-searing, eye-watering reek of venomous gasses thick in its wake. Instead, he stood tall, meeting the coal-eyed lord’s gaze, an example to every man who looked on.

Within seconds, the dragon had passed overhead and was banking over the city, turning high above the rooftops and spires with a dreadful, stately elegance upon wings that, when fully extended, spanned fifty feet or more. With a burst of black gas from flaring nostrils, the beast completed its turn and the air was filled with the sharp crack of the rider’s long whip.

Extending its powerful hind legs and spreading wicked talons as long as a man’s arm, the dragon swooped down upon one of the nearest of the spires rearing high above the city’s rooftops. The spire was needle thin and over two hundred feet tall. Its pinnacle was a tiled roof, and numerous small turrets extended from its flanks, pennants, bearing the black axe on white field heraldry of the duke’s line, waving proudly. The beast descended upon the roof, hind legs first, its frontal claws closing around the finial in an impact that sent roof tiles plummeting to the ground below and the turrets to quake as if they too would fall away. A second great moan of despair went up from the assembled defenders and townspeople in the streets below could be seen fleeing as shattered tiles and detached masonry rained down upon them.

Lowering its glowering head upon its sinuous neck, the black dragon shifted its weight and settled onto its perch. The dark elf lord seated upon his saddle regarded the defenders of Brionne with palpable disdain, his balefire gaze sweeping the ranks before settling upon the duke.

For long moments, the only sound was that of the sergeants bullying their men to order, and then that too faded. To the duke, it was as if he and this vile intruder into his realm were the only two warriors present, his vision narrowing as he met the smouldering eyes of the dark elf lord. The Bretonnians followed a particular form in matters of conducting a siege, a form that Corentin had never strayed from, and never would. That form required that the invader name his terms and that the defender heard them before hostilities were joined. For a moment, the duke wondered if the dark elf would observe such traditions, if he had even heard of them, before the enemy lord spoke.

‘Heed my words, human,’ the dark elf lord spoke, his voice like burning coals stirred in a grate. ‘For you are not worthy to hear them twice.’

The duke bit back an angry rejoinder, determined to observe the proper form despite his foe’s girding. His only response was a low grinding of his teeth and a narrowing of his eyes.

‘I am Rakarth,’ the dark elf announced, his hateful voice boastful and haughty, ‘Called Beastlord.’ Though tempted to quash his enemy’s pride by claiming never to have heard the name, Duke Corentin bit his tongue. Quite aside from the dishonourable nature of such a reply, it would have been a lie. He knew the name of the Beastlord Rakarth well, as did all of those who dwelled along the coasts of the Old World. How could they not, for this fell being was said to have laid waste to countless towns and ports, from Norsca in the far north to the Bay of Corsairs in the south. Not for nothing was he called ‘Beastlord’, as the horde of roaring, smoke-spouting abominations below testified. It was said of Rakarth that in his dungeons he held at least one example of every predatory beast that ever lived, and his ceaseless crossbreeding had led to some of the very worst crimes against nature ever seen in the world.

And it seemed that Duke Corentin was not the only man present to recognise the name of this foe. A wave of despair swept through the defenders, countless men dropping to their knees even as the sergeants set about such cowards with cudgels and whips in an effort to get them back on their feet. Through the corner of his eye, the duke detected movement in the courtyard far below, and knew that the warhorses of his knights, the best trained mounts in all the land, if not the world, were barely holding at bay the terror this being and his fell mount radiated in palpable waves.

‘You shall render unto me one in five of your people,’ the Beastlord continued. ‘In equal number male and female, and of fighting age and fitness. This you shall do by sunrise tomorrow, or face the wrath of the host of Naggaroth!’

‘What say you, human?’ asked the dark elf.

Duke Corentin folded his arms across his broad chest, and angled his head to fix the enemy lord with a gaze of utter disgust. His armour rang as he moved, and he longed to draw his mighty sword and engage this arrogant monster in honourable combat. Yet he could not, at least not yet. His gorge rose as he considered the insult implicit in such a demand, but he fought to control himself, keeping his voice level when he eventually answered.

‘I say,’ he replied, projecting in voice with such force that hundreds, perhaps thousands of his warriors would hear it and take heart. ‘Leave my lands now, elf, while still you are able.’

The black dragon shifted its weight upon the spire’s pinnacle as if it perceived the insult to its master, displacing yet more roof tiles and stones. The defenders upon the walls remained silent, thousands of them steeling their hearts and daring to look upon the enemy lord to hear his reply.

That reply was long moments in the coming, the silence stretching out for what felt like ten times as long. Duke Corentin fought the ever-growing urge to draw his blade and to order every war machine in the city to open fire upon the beast, yet he fought it down with a nigh superhuman effort.

Finally, the dark elf lord spoke. ‘Then all shall die.’

With that, the lord cracked his long, steel whip against the flanks of his mount, drawing a roar from the dragon, which vented roiling clouds of noxious gas into the air through its flaring nostrils. The beast spread its wings to their fullest stretch and flexed its hind legs, bracing to propel itself high into the air. Almost as if in slow motion, the ebon wyrm beat its wings while pushing back and up with its hugely muscled legs. The two hundred foot tower upon which the beast had perched finally gave way, the peaked conical roof shattering into a thousand roof tiles and the entire top half of the spire seemed to bend as a branch in the wind. As the dragon lifted off, the destruction worked its way down the spire, sandstone blocks working their way loose in a rapidly growing cascade. Moments later, the tower collapsed, slowly at first but with mounting speed as gravity asserted itself. At the last, the tower fell across three streets far below, obliterating a score of townhouses in a single instant and sending up a dense cloud of billowing grey dust.

One last battle, Duke Corentin said to himself. One last foe to defeat…

As the sun set on what many feared would be the first day of a months-long siege of the fair city of Brionne, the duke began planning the defence. The manning of the walls was the first priority, and Corentin ensured that the most experienced companies of his household’s squires were stationed at vital points, bolstering positions manned by the less experienced, poorly disciplined, peasant militias. There were a thousand details of logistics to attend to, for the numerous war machines mounted upon the wall towers required constant manning, maintenance and supply. The thousands of archers manning the ramparts would have to be rotated in their duty, and the braziers from which they would light their flaming arrows kept burning. All of this the duke oversaw despite the cold bitterness threatening to consume him, for, ultimately, there was little glory in any of it. Ultimately, it was not the work of a knight of Bretonnia.

‘My lord,’ said Corentin’s chancellor from behind him as he stood upon the highest tower on the wall, looking west across the night-shrouded enemy camp. ‘Will you not take wine?’

Corentin lingered a moment, the plains before him seething with enemy activity. Numerous sounds of unspecified and unidentifiable cruelty drifted up from the enemy camp, mingled with the ever present baying of all manner of monstrous beasts. Hundreds of campfires dotted the land as the far as the eye could see, forming a nigh-continuous ring of fire all about the city, orange cinders drifting upwards on the riotous thermals. At least, the duke hoped they were campfires. He knew from first hand experience that many were likely to be braziers, the searing coals within used to heat the very cruellest implements of torture.

‘No, Erwen,’ the duke replied. ‘I must offer prayer to our lady. Leave me.’

When Erwen did not leave as he was bid, Duke Corentin turned to regard his chief counsellor. For an instant, he failed to recognise the individual stood before him, a part of him expecting to see old Winoc. Then he shook his head as memory reasserted itself. Winoc had fallen at the height of the War of the Giant’s Skull, an ogre’s cleaver having taken both of his legs in a single swing.

‘My lord?’ said Erwin, concern writ large across his patrician features.

‘Speak your mind plainly, man,’ Duke Corentin demanded, reaching out a hand to steady himself against the crenellated rampart. By the Lady, he was tired

‘My lord,’ the chancellor began uncertainly, before ploughing on. ‘You must rest, we feel–’

‘Who?’ Corentin demanded, drawing himself to his full height despite the weight of the full plate armour he had worn all day. ‘Who says what of me? Speak!’

‘Your knights, sir,’ Erwin continued, ‘Your companions, your guardians and your peers. All feel that–’

‘My peers?’ the duke raged, one hand gripping the pommel of his sword. ‘I have no peers! All of them have fallen, all of them have given their lives in service to the land and to the Lady!’

‘Yes, my lord,’ the chancellor said, his arms held out in placation. ‘But you must rest, for tomorrow…’ He let the sentence trail away.

‘Tomorrow?’ said Duke Corentin, knowing now what he must do. Pushing the chancellor away, he spun to face the west and the enemy encamped on the plain before his beloved city. With a ringing of steel, he drew his sword and brandished it before him, before turning it point down with a single motion, and setting it to rest tip-first upon the stone floor. Bracing himself upon his weapon, the duke went down upon one knee as he had the night before in the grail chapel, and he bowed his head in prayer.

‘Go,’ the duke ordered through gritted teeth. ‘I order you… go.’

Six hours later, the sun was rising and Duke Corentin’s armour glistened with dew. Slowly, he became aware that he had been locked in prayer throughout the long, cold hours of the night, and that the city was stirring all about him. Opening gummy eyes, he realised that so too was the camp before the city walls, thousands of cruel invaders busying themselves with preparations for the inevitable battle.

Grunting, the duke braced himself against his sword, and pulled himself upright. Pain shot through his every joint and he staggered to bring himself to his full height. Attendants, who had been lurking out of his field of vision, rushed to him. He thrust out his free arm to push them away.

‘Back!’ he barked, consumed with anger and frustration. ‘I have a battle to win… Erwen?’

‘My lord?’ his chancellor said as he appeared nearby, bent almost double in genuflection.

‘Order my war steed made ready!’ the duke bellowed, flashes of long gone battles strobing across his mind’s eye once again. ‘Gather the knights and prepare to open the gates!’

‘My lord, I cannot…’ Erwen started, before stuttering to a halt, his eyes impossibly wide in his hawkish face. The duke regarded his chancellor with confusion for a moment, before turning as he followed the man’s gaze. High above the invaders’ camp, the black dragon soared directly towards the tower on which the duke and his attendants stood.

With an incoherent roar of denial and pain, the duke drew his mighty sword, its blade flashing in the morning sun. Bracing his legs wide, he raised the sword that had served him so well over so many campaigns, and waited as the dark elf lord approached.

The sound of the oncoming black dragon was as a storm descending from an otherwise clear sky, the beating of its wings a savage, deafening roar. Erwen and the other attendants were buffeted to the stone floor as the huge beast passed directly overhead, but Duke Corentin strained every sinew in his body to remain upright. He yielded to no man, and especially not to an elf.

‘Then this is your answer, old man?’ the dark elf called out as his mount banked over the wall and began a majestic return to the invaders’ lines. ‘This is the fate you choose?’

‘Aye, vile one!’ Duke Corentin bellowed in answer. ‘This is my answer!’

With a final expulsion of reeking, poisonous gasses from its nostrils, the black dragon was away, and every war machine in range opened fire upon it. The chances of even the best crewed trebuchet striking a flying target, least of all one moving rapidly in the opposite direction, was remote at best, but one huge stone projectile did sail dangerously close to the dragon, causing a roar of approval to sound from the massed ranks of defenders upon the city walls. But the cheer was short lived, for even as the black dragon receded into the distance, the countless war hydras upon the plain started forward, the ground actually trembling so heavy and concentrated was their tread.

‘Get every company to the walls,’ the duke barked to an attendant, and the man departed at speed to pass the order on. In moments, the thousands of warriors defending the ramparts were being reinforced by streams of additional defenders streaming up the stone steps. ‘Attendants,’ he shouted. ‘Where is my steed?’

Now the walls themselves trembled to the approach of the massed hydras, yet the duke cared more for the readiness of his own mount. Losing patience, he made for the top of the flight of steps that led down the tower and into the courtyard far below where his knights had marshalled, but was interrupted as Sir Peirrick, the greatest knight of his household, emerged.

‘My lord,’ the knight greeted the duke as he bowed his head and struck a mailed fist across his armoured chest in respectful greeting. ‘I am told–’

‘Peirrick,’ said Corentin. ‘Good. Is my steed ready? Are the knights marshalled?’

‘No, my duke,’ the knight set his bearded face in a grim mask, his intense eyes betraying his concern.

‘Then see to it, man!’ the duke bellowed, flinging an arm wide in a gesture that took in the vast monstrous horde stampeding across the plain towards the wall. ‘We have but minutes, and I would sally forth before it is too late!’

His face betraying his utter horror, Sir Peirrick stood resolute as his liege made to push past him towards the stairs. ‘No, my lord,’ he said with conviction. ‘Your knights shall do as you bid, but you shall not lead them.’

The duke recoiled as if the knight had struck him across the face. Draining of colour, he fought for words to express his outrage.

‘Let others shoulder this burden,’ the knight pleaded, though his mind was clearly decided. ‘Your place is here, my lord, commanding the defence of your city.’

‘My place is leading the charge against the horde of filth even now bearing down upon my realm!’ Duke Corentin thundered. ‘And yours is upon one knee, or else following my banner!’

‘No, my duke,’ Sir Peirrick said coldly, barring the duke’s way. ‘We shall not allow you to take to the field this day, nor any other henceforth, though every one of us would willingly give his life upon your word.’

The duke bit back a cry of anguish, and looked past the knight to his chief advisor who waited off to one side. Erwen nodded sadly, and it was clear that he felt compelled to agree with Peirrick. The thunder of the approaching host of hydras grew ever louder, so that the duke barely heard his own reply.

‘Then go,’ he bellowed over the roaring of dozens of monsters. ‘Lady deliver us all.’

The charge of the knights of Brionne was a feat of epic glory. Hundreds of mounted warriors formed up into squadrons and streamed through the gates and sally ports of the city walls, fluttering pennants and proud banners boldly displaying the heraldry of countless knightly households. Their armour gleamed in the rising sun and their lances were as densely formed as an impenetrable forest. Those lances lowered as the squadrons spread out, forming a thunderous wave of steel and colour as it raced headlong towards the onrushing dark elf beasts.

Seeing this new enemy, the beast handlers cracked their whips and drove their charges forward in a frenzy of bestial savagery. Locking eyes upon their foe, the countless beasts roared in challenge, the air filled with deafening screeches and cries. The Hydras vented thick clouds of noxious fumes and the morning light was tainted with a creeping, stinking fog that threatened to strike man and horse down before battle was even joined.

Yet still, the two waves came on. The knights drove through the billowing clouds of poison, and truly the blessing of the Lady was upon them for not one fell to its effects. The hydras redoubled their charge in response, and seconds later, the two waves slammed into one another.

At the very point of impact, steel-tipped lances drove into stone-hard flesh, even the hides of the monstrous creatures unable to withstand weapons anointed in the holy waters of the font of the Lady. Black blood arced into the air and spattered across shields and armour as beasts fell, yet moments later, the true battle began.

Those beasts not slain outright fought back with snapping maws atop writhing, serpentine necks. Each creature bore five such necks and five sets of ferocious jaws, and only upon the decapitation of the fifth were they finally slain. Bold knights were cut in two by heads that darted in from all quarters, or torn apart as rival heads affixed to the same body fought jealously over the kill. Lances cast aside, the knights hacked and stabbed with blessed swords, and soon the fight was a desperate struggle for life and death.

From his vantage point atop his tower, Duke Corentin raged. His heart ached to be down there, upon the field of battle, leading his brave knights against the countless beasts that assailed his city. Yet, he could see what most down there could not, and he knew deep within his soul that Sir Peirrick had been correct. The knights were being slaughtered, their numbers simply too few to repel the monstrous host. With a pang of sadness, he saw that Peirrick had known this all along, and in his love for his duke had saved him from a fate he was simply too aged and too tired to repel.

Yet, Duke Corentin raged, what right had the young knight to determine the fate of his master? Why should he not meet his end in one final, hopeless charge against such a foe?

Because he had a city to defend, he knew. Thousands of warriors and many times more defenceless innocents relied upon him, for no other would deliver them from the invading host that was even now charging en masse towards the city walls.

The air filled with the blaring horns and shrill, cruel war cries of the foe as the war hydras cut down the last of the bravest knights Duke Corentin had ever had the honour to see in battle. The beasts surged onwards, crushing the remains of the knights into the churned plain, the bright colours of their banners and shields smeared with mud and gore, and the once gleaming steel of their armour and swords dulled with filth. Roaring their bestial victory cries, the beasts came on, closing on the walls even as the hosts of dark elves behind them began their march.

Nothing would stop the beasts, Duke Corentin knew as they reached the walls. Claws and teeth ground into the fair masonry, hauling down brickwork set there centuries before. The tower upon which the duke and his attendants stood shook violently, and the defenders upon the walls fought to keep their footing as more and more of the huge creatures clawed their way upwards, great chunks of masonry discarded in their wake. Flaming arrows arced downwards like screaming comets, burying themselves in beast flesh and causing the hydras to screech in deafening pain, yet still the enemy came on.

A wave of panic passed up and down the wall as a sickening impact caused great cracks to spread throughout its fabric. A beast so large that it carried a howdah bristling with spears upon its back had joined the fray, stampeding its way through the press of monstrous bodies to slam headlong into the walls. Even as the defenders concentrated their flaming arrows upon this new, terrible enemy, the hydra dug its claws into the crumbling wall and began to haul itself upwards.

Only the insane could stand in the face of such a monster. Even as it climbed, it gouted great clouds of black gas up towards the ramparts. Men fell, their skin blistered and their eyes bulging, as five heads reared above the ramparts upon writhing necks. Each darted and snapped, and with every attack a man was snatched from his place at the wall, tossed into the air and swallowed whole by a gaping maw. That was all the remaining defenders could take, and those on the neighbouring sections broke in terror, fleeing from the inevitable.

In an instant, the defending army broke. Men streamed from the walls down flights of steps so choked with bodies that dozens fell screaming to their deaths below. With a sound like a mountain collapsing, an entire section of the walls crumbled, the towers on either side toppling downwards and slaying hundreds in the process. Through the billowing mushroom cloud over the huge breach, the black dragon of the Beastlord Rakarth soared, the beat of the massive wings parting the rising dust so that Duke Corentin could see his foe clearly. As the first of the war hydras pressed in through what the duke knew was only the first breach in his fair city’s walls, the host of dark elves pressed in behind, and soon the cruel enemy was spilling forth into the rubble-strewn courtyard and streets beyond.

‘Attendants,’ the duke ordered, his voice grim and resolute. ‘Arm me.’

None could argue, for there was clearly nothing to be gained or saved from doing so. With silent reverence, the duke’s attendants presented him with his lance, set his shield upon one arm and his helmet upon his head. Though the panoply of war had never felt so heavy, Duke Corentin bore the weight as he bore his duty to the land and the Lady. He descended the stairwell of the tower and emerged into the courtyard before the city’s main gates. The area was strewn with rubble cast from the walls above, and cowards were fleeing in all directions, except towards the foe. Screams rent the air, those of the monsters now rampaging through his city, and those of the first of his people to be overtaken by the cruel dark elves. Even now, as he pulled himself up into the saddle of his war horse, his beloved subjects were being dragged screaming back to the Black Ark waiting out in the sea. He cast the tragedy from his mind as he set his steed in motion, the gates parting before him though he could not see who did so.

As the portal yawned open, blinding light spilled through, light so white and so pure that the duke knew it was natural. Time slowed to a leaden crawl as his steed passed through the gate, its speed building as it bore him onwards. There beyond the gate was the enemy, the dark elf host laying siege to Brionne, the greenskin horde at Quenelle, the heretics at Trantio, the unquiet dead at Castle Darkheart, the stinking swarm of Skaven spewing through the pass in the Irrana Mountains…

One last enemy, the duke’s heart sang. One last battle. One last, glorious charge before death finally claimed him.

We Are One

John French

‘Victory and defeat are a matter of definition’

– from the Axioms of War, Tactica Imperialis

I have grown tired in this war. It has eaten me, consuming everything I might have done or been. I have chased my enemy across the stars and through the decades of my failing life. We are one, the enemy and I, the hunter and the hunted. The end is close now. My enemy will die, and at that moment I will become something less, a shadow fading in the brightness of the past. This is the price of victory.

My fist hits the iron door with a crack of thunder. The impact shatters the emerald scales of the hydra that rears across their width. Inside my Terminator armour, enfolded in adamantium and ceramite, I feel the blow jolt through my thin flesh. Lightning crackles around my fist as I pull it back, the armour giving me strength. I bring my fist down and the metre-thick doors fall in a shower of splintered metal. I walk through their shattered remains, my feet crushing the scattered ruby eyes of the hydra to red dust on the stone floor.

The light glints from my armour, staining its pearl-white surface with fire and glinting from eagle feathers and laurels. The chamber beyond the doors is silent and creeps with shifting shadows. Burning torches flicker from brackets on jade pillars, the domed ceiling above coiling with smoke. Targeting runes and threat augurs swarm across my vision, sniffing for threats, finding only one. The shackled power in my fist twitches like a thunderbolt grasped in a god’s hand.

He sits at the centre of the chamber on a throne of beaten copper. Void blue armour mottled with the ghost pattern of scales, swathed in spilling cloaks of shimmering silk, face hidden behind the blank face plate and glowing green eyes of a horned helm. He sits still, one hand resting on the pommel of a silver-bladed sword, head turning slowly to follow me as I advance.

‘Phocron of the Alpha Legion,’ I shout, my voice echoing through the shadow-filled silence. ‘I call you to justice at the hands of the Imperium you betrayed.’ The formulaic phrase of accusation fades to silence as Phocron stands, his sword in his hand. This will be no simple duel. To fight the Alpha Legion is to fight on a shifting layer of deception and trickery, where every weakness can hide strength and every apparent advantage may be revealed as a trap. Lies are their weapons and they are their masters. I am old, but time has armoured me against those weapons.

He moves and cuts, his blow so quick and sudden that I have no chance to dodge. I raise my fist, feeling the armour synchronise with the movements of my aging muscles, and meet the first strike of this last battle in a blaze of light.

Ninety-eight years ago - The Year of the Ephisian Atrocity

Knowledge can make you blind, some say, but ignorance is simply an invitation to be deceived. I can still see the times when I knew little of the Alpha Legion beside a few dry facts and half-understood fears. I look back at those times and I shudder at what was to come.

The death of my ignorance began on the mustering fields of Ephisia.

Millions of troops stood on the dust plains in the shadow of soot-covered hives, rank upon rank of men and woman in uniforms from dozens of worlds. Battle tanks and ground transporters coughed exhaust fumes into the cold air. Munitorum officers moved through the throng shouting orders above the noise, their breath forming brief white clouds. Above it all transport barges hung in the clear sky, their void pitted hulls glinting in the sunlight, waiting to swallow the gathering mass of human flesh and war machines. It was the mustering of an army to break the cluster of renegade worlds that had declared their secession from the Imperium. It was a gathering of might intended to break that act of folly into splinters and return a dozen worlds to the domain of the God Emperor. That was the intention, though perhaps ours was the folly.

‘Move!’ I bellowed as I charged through the crowd, shoving aside men and women in newly issued battle gear. Helena came with me, pushing people aside with her will. Grunts and oaths followed us, dying to silence as they saw the tri-barred ‘I’ engraved on my breast plate and the hissing muzzle of the inferno pistol in my hand. My storm cloak flapped behind me as I ran, the burnished iron of my segmented armour bright under the sun. Anyone looking at me knew that they were looking at an Inquisitor, the left hand of the God Emperor, who had the power to judge and execute any beneath the Golden Throne. The crowd parted before me like cattle scattering in front of a wolf.

‘There,’ shouted Helena from two feet to my left. I twisted my head to see the dun-colour of our quarry’s uniform vanish into a knot of troops. She was already moving before I had changed direction, confused-looking troops twitching out of her path as she ran through the parting crowd. I could feel the back eddies of the telepathic bow wave that she projected in front of her as she ran, hard muscles flowing under flexing armour plates, dark hair spilling behind.

I saw our quarry a second after Helena. A thin man in an ill-fitting dun uniform of an Ephisian trooper, his skin pale from bad nutrition and lack of daylight. He looked like so many of the rest gathered on that day, another coin of flesh for the Imperium to spend. But this man was no raw recruit for the Imperial Guard; he was an agent of rebellion sent to seed destruction at this gathering. We had been tracking him for days, knowing that there were others and that our only chance to stop them all was to let one run until he led us to the others. That had been the plan, my plan. But there was no more time. Whatever atrocity they intended was so close I could feel the cold fear of it in my guts.

‘Take him down,’ I shouted. Helena was raising her needle pistol when the man jerked to one side with the agility of a predator. He rolled and came up into a shooting crouch, lasgun at his shoulder. Helena dived to the ground as the lasgun spat a burst of energy in a wide arc around where she had been. People dropped in the crowd around us, shouts of pain spreading like a tide. Dead and dying troops lay on the ground around us while their comrades formed a blind herd without direction or order.

Our man was already up and moving, weaving amongst the panicked troops, using the tide of confusion he had created as cover. I felt a twinge of admiration at the man’s ingenuity. He was good, I had to give him that: determined, ruthless and well trained.

I came level with Helena as she pulled herself off the ground.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘We will not outrun him. I will handle this, master.’ She bit off the last word. I looked at her. She had a face that was too thin and pale to be pretty, and a Scholastica Psykana brand surrounded her left eye with a blunt letter ‘I’ and a halo of wings. She gave me a humourless smile. Helena was my interrogator, my apprentice in the duties of the Inquisition. We did not like each other. In fact, I was sure she hated me on some level. But she was a fine interrogator and a devoted servant of the Imperium. She was also a pysker, and a lethally powerful one at that.

I nodded in reply. She looked away closing her eyes and I felt the air around us take on a heavy burnt sugar texture as she drew power to her. Our quarry had already vanished into the shifting forest of human bodies around us. Hundreds of troops jostled like frightened cattle and I heard officers shouting for order and situation reports in the distance. There was a frozen moment, a sliver of time that for an instant was quiet and still. I saw a young trooper no more than a pace from me, his face frozen in puzzlement, his tan-coloured uniform still creased from storage. I whispered a prayer for forgiveness in that moment.

An invisible shock wave tore out from Helena, ripping bodies from the ground and tossing them into the air like debris in a cyclone’s path. Bodies fell, broken, screaming as the telekinetic storm followed our quarry. It reached him, fifty paces from us, and flicked him off his feet. He hit the ground with a crack of bones. When I got to him he was sucking air in wet gasps, mashed fingers scrabbling at the lasgun just beyond his reach. I raised my inferno pistol and burned his reaching hand to a charred and blistered stump.

I did not bother to ask him how many other saboteurs were hidden in the mustering, or what their target was. I knew he would not give me an answer. It did not matter. He would give me the answers anyway.

‘Take it from him.’ I flicked my pistol at the broken man on the ground. ‘We need to know how many of them there are and what targets they are intending to bomb.’ Helena took a deep breath, closing her eyes for a second before looking down at the man who twitched and gurgled at our feet. He went still and I could feel the cold witch-touch on my skin. Helena’s eyes were closed but as I looked at her she spoke.

‘I have him, but…’ her voice quivered and I saw she was trembling ‘There is something wrong.’

‘Get the information,’ I snarled. ‘We are running out of time. How many have infiltrated the muster? Where are the bombs?’

‘They–’ she began but was cut off by a laugh that bubbled up from the man on the ground. I looked down. He was staring back at me with corpse-white eyes. In that moment I knew I had made a mistake. We are cautioned that assumptions are worse than ignorance, and looking at the man I knew that my assumptions would see me dead. This was no saboteur ring bent on a mundane atrocity. This was something more, something far more. Cold fear ran through me.

‘We are many, Inquisitor,’ he said, his voice a racking gurgle of blood and shattered ribs. Beside me Helena began to spasm, blood running from her mouth and eyes. Her mouth was working, try to form words.

‘Witches. They are witches…’ she gasped, her hand reached to grip my arm, as the psychic storm built around us. ‘I can feel their minds. There are more, many more.’ I could feel a greasy charge lick my skin, a stink of burnt blood on the air. The broken man laughed again, his skin crawling with lurid warp light.

‘We are many,’ he screamed, and he was still screaming as I vaporised his head. The sound did not end, but filled my head, getting louder and louder. I looked up from the dead man and saw the extent of my mistake.

Across the plane, figures rose into the air on pillars of ghost light, their limbs pinned to the air, arcs of lightning whipping from one to another, connecting them in a growing web. Dark clouds the colour of bile and dried blood spilled into the sky. Across the mustering fields, hundreds of thousands fell to their knees, moaning, clawing at their skin, blood dribbling from their eyes. Some, with stronger will, had been able to arm their weapons and fire at the witch chorus. Some found their mark and sent pyskers to their death. But there were many, and the witch storm rose in power with every heartbeat. I could feel the unclean power crawling over me like insects and the witches’ voices pulling my thoughts apart. All I could hold onto was anger, anger that I had failed, that an enemy had fooled me. And all the while their voices grew louder and louder, spiralling around each other as a single word emerged from the telepathic cacophony.

Phocron.

Dozens of minds screamed the name and the storm broke in an inferno that washed across the mustering fields. It turned flesh to ash and scattered it on a superheated wind. Hundreds of thousands died in a single instant, an army to conquer worlds reduced to twisted metal and dust. I watched the fire come for me, and felt something enfold me like a cloak of ice. I realised that Helena still gripped my arm as I fell into darkness.

I woke on a plane covered in ashes. Helena was next to me, her exposed skin burnt and blistered, her breathing so shallow I thought she was dead until I saw her eyes twitch open. The energy needed to shield me still lingered on my skin as a cold shroud. I know now that she had saved us both, but at a price. The power she had channelled to shield us had almost burnt her psychic talent out. She lived, but she was a shadow of what she had been and never became an inquisitor. Amongst an overwhelming tragedy, her sacrifice still lives in my memory like the ghost touch of a lost life.

All around us there was nothing but an echoing desolation beneath a bruised sky. It was quiet, but in my head the name that had created this atrocity echoed in my mind.

Eighty-four years ago

We came out of the iron-grey sky on streaks of blood-red fire. Staccato lines of flak and the bright blooms of defence lasers rose from the fallen city like the claws of a dying god raking the sky. Landing craft and assault carriers were punched from the air. Burning wreckage fell in oily cascades of smoke amongst the cities glittering domes and spires. The air rang with shells fired from orbit and the howl of attack craft engines. The wrath and might of the Imperium fell on the city, and it screamed as it burned.

In the gloom of my valkyrie’s crew compartment, we felt the ferocity of the invasion as shuddering blows that shook the frame around us. It was close inside the assault carrier, the air tinted red by the compartment’s tactical lights and spiced with the smell of sweat. Even in such a confined space, my storm trooper detail kept its distance, even if that distance was only a few inches. I knew each of them by name, had fought beside all of them and personally selected them as my guard during this invasion. We had bled and struggled side by side, but I stood apart from them. To feel the power of the Emperor in your hand is to know what it is to be alone. It is a fact that I had long ago accepted.

‘Lord?’ The voice was raised against the thunder sound of the battle outside. I looked up from the holographic map to see Sergeant Dreag looking down at me, his face framed by oil-black armour. ‘Theatre command wishes to know where you intend to make your landing.’ I smiled, letting careless humour wash over my face.

‘Do they indeed?’ I asked. Dreag grinned back at me.

‘Yes, Lord. They say it is so that they can coordinate to properly support your operations.’ I nodded, pursing my lips in mock consideration. I am not given to humour, but to lead people to death, you must wear many masks. Something exploded close by and the valkyrie bucked. I felt my back pressed against the hard metal of the flight bench as the pilot banked hard.

‘Little late in the day, for a coordinated strike, don’t you think Draeg?’ I gave a small shake of my head. ‘Tell them I will update them shortly.’

‘Yes, lord,’ nodded Draeg. ‘And our actual target?’ I looked back to the holo-display, coloured runes winking in clusters over a plan view of the city, shifting with objectives and tactical intelligence. The city was called Hespacia, a glittering jewel that had fallen to greed and lies and pulled the rest of its planet with it. The ruling guilds had overturned Imperial rule and given their souls, and those of their people, to the Dark Gods. This, though, was not why I had come to see it fall beneath the hammer of Imperial retribution. I had come not because of Hespacia’s heresy but because of the cause.

‘The Onyx Palace,’ I handed the sergeant my holoslate. ‘Assault position marked.’ I watched the thinnest cloud of fear pass over the sergeant’s blunt features. We were heading into the heart of the corruption, and we were doing it alone, without support.

‘Very good, my lord,’ said the Draeg and began to bark a briefing to the other storm troopers. I checked my own weapons: a blunt nosed plasma pistol holstered on the thigh of my burnished battle plate, and an eagle headed hammer that lay across my knees.

The valkyrie bucked again, shaking to invisible blows. We were close. I did not need to see the tactical data to know it; I could feel it in shaking metal around me. In the decade after the burning of the Ephisian mustering I had changed much and learnt more. Suspicion is the armour of the Inquisition, and I had learnt its value in the preceding years. Rebellion had spread, pulling a dozen worlds into heresy and corruption, and with it had come a name, a name I already knew: Phocron. Arch-heretic and puppet master of betrayal, his agents and traitors spread through our own forces like a contagion. Even with the might of crusade at our backs, we bought every victory with blood. Ambushes, sabotage and assassination ate our strength even as we advanced step by bleeding step. So I came to this damned city to cut off the rebellion’s head, I came to kill the enemy I had never seen, I came to kill Phocron.

The side doors of the valkyrie peeled back, and the burnt stink and howl of battle flooded over us. Beneath us, burning buildings flicked past, so close that I could see the pattern work on the blue-green tiles that covered so many of their domed roofs. In the streets, figures moved from cover to cover, the sound of their small battles lost amongst the roar as fire fell from the sky in an unending rain.

Above the burning city sat a tiered mountain of pale stone the colour of dirty ice. A series of ascending domes and balconies, it glowed under the luminous haze of void shields that flickered and sparked with the impact of munitions and energy blasts. This was the Onyx Palace, seat of governorship on this world and the heart of its betrayal. Phocron was there and the Onyx Palace was his bastion. The layered shields sheltered him from the bombardment, but they would not deny us.

The valkyrie hit the void shield envelope, sparks arcing across its fuselage and an electric tang filling the air. The tiered balconies of the palace rose before us, studded with dark weapon turrets that spat glowing lines of fire. We banked and tipped, rounds hammering into the armoured airframe. The engines howled as they thrust us towards the palace summit. Others came behind us, delta-shaped wings of vulture gunships and more assault craft. The air shuddered with the rolling scream of launching rockets and the bellow of explosions. Domes and statue-lined bridges flicked past. I could see figures, some crouched behind sandbags, others already running from the explosions that walked up the flank of the palace in our wake.

We crested the highest dome and I saw Phocron for the first time, a figure in dark armour with a single black clad companion, and a cluster of cowering figures in billowing silk robes. He stood close to the edge of the balcony as if he had been watching the ruin that he had forced the Imperium to bring to this world.

The valkyrie pivoted, its engines screaming as it skimmed the stone slabs of the platform. My storm troopers were already dropping out of the door, hitting the ground one after another. Draeg gave me a grin, hurled himself out, and then it was me tumbling the few metres to hit the tiled platform. The world spun for a second and I was up on my feet, training and instincts doing the work of thought. My armour responded to my movements, thrusting me forward faster than muscle. Behind me, more storm troopers spilled onto the platform.

The robed figures clustered around Phocron died, the hellgun blasts burning through their silk finery. A few ran, swathes of coloured fabric spilling behind them, bare feet slapping on the marble. Phocron stood impassively, his hands empty, the sword at his waist undrawn. Behind him, a figure in a black storm coat and silver domino mask stood equally unmoved. I fired, plasma hissing from my pistol. Others were firing too. Bolts of energy converged on the two figures, but splashed against a shimmering dome of energy.

Draeg and his squad were in front of me, sprinting towards Phocron and his aide.

‘Try and keep up in that armour, lord.’ I heard the sergeant’s grin over the vox. I spat back a very unlordly oath.

As the first shots hit Phocron’s energy field, Draeg drew his sword. Lightning sheathed it with a crackle.

‘Close assault, get inside the shield dome,’ the sergeant spat over the vox. The hammer in my hand sprung to life, its generator making it vibrate with straining power. Draeg was the first through the shield dome, raising his sword for a backhanded cut, muscles ready to unfold the momentum of his charge into an armour cracking blow. Phocron moved at the last instant before the blow struck.

I have fought a lifetime of wars and met many enemies blade to blade. I have studied the business of killing, the workmanlike cut, the parry and riposte of a duel, the nicety of a perfectly timed blow. I have watched men kill each other in countless ways. The art of death holds no mystery to me. Yet I swear I never saw death dealt with more malign genius than at that moment.

Phocron’s sword was in his hand. It was a long, its double edged blade damasked in a scale pattern. A saurian head snarled from its crossguard. It met Draeg’s sword in a thunder crack of converging power fields. Draeg was fast, and conditioned from years of war to react to such a counter, but in this moment those instincts killed him. He shifted his weight to let the Space Marine’s blow flow past and open his enemy to another cut. He did not expect Phocron to drop his sword.

With no resistance, Draeg’s sword sliced down and cut air. Phocron turned around the sergeant’s sword, so close their armour brushed. The gauntleted hand slammed into Draeg’s armour at the throat. I saw the sergeant’s head snap back, his body rag-loose as he fell to the ground.

The rest of Draeg’s squad had not been far behind him and they opened up as they came through the shield dome. Phocron was already moving towards them at a flat run. The first died as he squeezed the trigger. Phocron’s hand closed over the hellgun, crushing the storm trooper’s fingers into the trigger guard. The man screamed. Phocron pivoted, the gun still spewing a stitched line of energy. The hellgun’s fire hit the next two storm troopers at point blank range, burning through flesh and armour. With swift delicacy, the Space Marine looped an arm around the screaming man and gripped the webbing belt of grenades across his chest.

I was a pace from the edge of the shield dome when I realised what was about to happen. Phocron turned and threw the screaming man at the rest of the storm trooper squad. The force of the throw broke the man’s back with a sharp crack. I could see the pins of the grenades glinting in Phocron’s fingers. The dead man hit the platform in front of his comrades and exploded.

The blast sheared through the rest of the squad in an expanding sphere of shrapnel. Fragments of metal, flesh and bone pattered off my armour. I could see Phocron and his storm coated henchman through the pall of smoke and dust. They were running.

‘Target is moving,’ I shouted across the vox. ‘Close and eliminate.’

I fired, plasma burning ionised trails through the dust cloud. I ran after the two figures. Behind me, the rest of the strike force advanced. I reached the edge of the dust cloud. The fleeing pair were at the edge of the platform. Behind them, the city burned. They turned and looked back at the force running past the bloody remains of Draeg and his squad. They ran without looking at Phocron’s sword, left forgotten on the ground.

The plasma charge concealed in the blade detonated, unfolding into a glowing sphere of sun-hot energy. I felt the heat through the skin of my armour as the blast tossed me into the air and slammed me into the paving. Warning chimes sounded in my ears as the armour systems sensed damage. Something wet moved in my chest as I sucked in a breath and found I was alive. For a few seconds, I could see nothing. I tried to raise my head and found that my vision was smeared with blood. I blinked until I could see. Bright light shone from behind me where the sphere of plasma still burned. Phocron stood, his blue armour black in the glare of the plasma bloom.

I pulled myself to my feet with a flare of pain and a grind of servos from inside my armour. My hammer was gone, scattered across the platform by the explosion. Two storm troopers that had been close beside me began to haul themselves up. Phocron shot them before they could stand, the guttural bark of the bolt pistol almost lost in the sound of the battle raging in the city. I was standing, my plasma pistol whining in my hand as it focused its power. The muzzle of Phocron’s pistol pointed directly at me, a dark circle ready to breathe fire.

A valkyrie crested the edge of the platform with a wash of downdraft. Its hull was painted in the storm grey of Battlefleet Hecuba. I could see the worn kill marks and unit tags under the cockpit. For an instant, I expected it to open up with its chin weapon, for it to rake Phocron and his companion with fire. Then it spun, drifting down until its open side doors were level with the platform. A crewman in an Imperial Navy uniform reached down to help the storm coated figure into the side door. Phocron vaulted after and the valkyrie swooped away. I fancied that the Alpha Legionary was looking at me with his emerald eyes until the craft was lost amongst the hundreds of aircraft that swarmed above the dying city.

I breathed, letting pain and frustrated anger spill out. Something did not fit. It had seemed as if Phocron had anticipated our attack, waiting for it to come so that he could slaughter us. No, it was not just a slaughter. It was a demonstration of superiority. I can defeat you in a thousand ways, I can kill you as I choose, it had said. Then this sudden retreat, it did not fit. His forces were being overwhelmed, the city filling with thousands of Imperial troops, but then why not withdraw as soon as this became clear. Unless…

I suddenly felt cold, as if ice had formed inside my armour. I thumbed my vox-link, breaking through clearance ciphers until the voice of the invasion’s commanding officer spoke into my ear. General Berrikade had a thick voice that spoke of his ample waist and heavy jowls. He was no fool though.

‘Lord inquisitor,’ he said, his voice chopped by static.

‘General, all troops are to be withdrawn from the city immediately.’ There was a pause, and I could imagine Berrikade staring at the vox-speaker in the strategium aboard an orbiting battleship.

‘Lord,’ he began speaking carefully. ‘If I may ask…’ He never finished because at that moment Phocron answered the unspoken question. At the same instant, the city’s plasma reactors, promethium stores and chemical refineries exploded.

Across the city, glowing clouds rose into the sky, their tops broadening and flattening as they met the upper air currents. The shockwaves broke buildings into razor fragments and clouds of dust. An instant later, concentric waves of fire and burning gas swept through the streets. The sound and shockwave reached me a second later, flipping me through the air with a bellow of noise. I must have hit the ground, but I never felt it. The blast wave had already pulled me down into darkness.

Later, while I healed, I was told that tens of thousands of Imperial troops had been killed, hundreds of thousands more renegades and millions of civilians had burnt to nothing or crushed under rubble. The rebellion died, but the Imperium had taken a great wound and nothing was left but charred ruins. But the Onyx Palace had survived. Its plasma reactors had not been overloaded, and that had saved my life. When I was told this my first thought was that Phocron had wanted someone to survive to witness him rip another bloody chunk from the flesh of the Imperium. Then I thought again of the dark mouth of Phocron’s bolt pistol and the death that he had withheld. No, I thought, he did not want just anyone to witness his victory: he had chosen me to witness it. To this day I do not know why.

A year ago

The ship drifted closer. Through the polished crystal of the view port, I could see its crippled engines bleed glowing vapour into the vacuum. It was a small ship, barely large enough to be warp capable, and typical of the cutters used by traders and smugglers who existed on the fringes of the Imperium. The ship I stood on was massive by comparison, layered with armour and weapon bastions. It was a predator leviathan closing on a minnow. The Unbreakable Might was an Armageddon-class battlecruiser and mounted enough fire power to break other warships into glowing debris. Against the nameless clipper, it had barely needed to use a fraction of its might. A single precise lance strike had burnt the smaller ship’s plasma engines to ruin and left it to coast on unpowered.

I turned from the view with a clicking purr of augmetics. My eyes focused on Admiral Velkarrin from beneath the cowl of my crimson robe. He was rake-thin, the metal flexes of command augmentation hanging from his grey-skinned skull in a tangled spill down the back of his gold-frogged uniform.

‘Launch a boarding party, admiral,’ I said. Velkarrin pursed his colourless lips but nodded.

‘As you wish, my lord.’ He turned to give an order to a hovering officer.

‘And, admiral…’ He turned back. ‘They are to observe maximum caution.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ he gave a short bow. I could tell he resented my commandeering his command and his fleet. Hunting smuggler vessels and pirates while war washed across star systems must have galled him. Part of me was faintly amused by watching his pride war with fear of the Inquisition. The rest of me cared nothing for what he felt.

‘I will meet the boarding team personally upon their return.’ Velkarrin gave another curt bow in acknowledgement and stalked away, hissing orders at subordinates.

I turned back to watch our latest prey draw closer, my eyes whirring as they focused. They had rebuilt me after Hespacia. My eyes and face were gone, replaced by blue-lensed augmetics and a mask of twisted scar tissue fused onto a ceramic woven skull. My left leg and a portion of my torso had been so mangled that they had been replaced. Ceramite plating, organ grafting and a leg of brass mechanics meant that I still lived and walked, even if it was with a bent back and stutter of gears and pistons. For a while after the disaster of the Hespacia attack, I thought of my injuries as a penance for my lack of foresight, a price for ignorance written forever into my body.

Since that lesson I had done much to address my failing. The war against the rebel worlds had grown many times over, sucking in armies and resources from across many star systems. The Imperium was no longer fighting a war of containment but a crusade of retribution. Under my authority, and that of the Adeptus Terra, it was named the Ephisian Persecution. I had watched our forces struggle for decades as more and more worlds had fallen to rebellion and the influence of the Dark Gods. It was a war we were losing because we were fighting an enemy for whom lies were both a weapon and a shield. Understanding that enemy had been my work in the decades since Hespacia burned.

I had expended great energy in tracking down information on the Alpha Legion. From the sealed reports of Inquisitor Girreaux to half-understood accounts from the dawn of the Imperium, I had reviewed them all. I knew my enemy. I knew their nature, their preferred forms of warfare, and their weaknesses. Sometimes, I thought I knew them better than I knew myself.

Their symbol was the hydra, a many-headed beast from legends born in mankind’s earliest days. It was both a mark of their warrior brotherhood and a statement of methodology. To fight the Alpha Legion is to fight a many-headed beast that will twist in your grasp. As soon as you think you have a part pinned, another unseen part will strike. When you cut off one head, two grow to replace it. They weave secrets and lies about themselves, hoping to baffle and confuse their enemies. Subterfuge, espionage, ambush and the untameable tangle of guerrilla warfare were their specialities. These specialities they wielded through networks of corrupted followers, infiltrators, spies and, on occasion, their own martial skill. They were wrapped in the corruption of Chaos, steeped in betrayal and bitterness since their primarch and Legion betrayed mankind ten millennia before.

The enemy I faced now was a single scion of that heretic brood, but no less formidable for that. Phocron was a name that now ran through the Ephisian Persecution like a coiling serpent. I knew that even before we knew his name he had seeded a dozen worlds with insurgent ideologies and built up control over witch cults and heretic sects. Now he moved from warzone to warzone, plunging worlds into rebellion, corrupting our forces and punishing the Imperium for every victory. The Ephisian Atrocity and the burning of Hespacia were just two amongst the subtle and devastating attacks he had made on the Imperium. Through his coiling dance of destruction, he had stayed out of my grasp, a shadow opponent locked in a dual with me across dozens of worlds.

Beyond the reflective layer of armour glass a shuttle boosted towards the crippled ship on trails of orange flame. Rather than follow Phocron’s trail I had decided to attack him where he was most vulnerable, his mobility. He had no fleet of warships, he did not take planets by orbital invasion or the threat of bombardment. He took worlds from within, moving from one to another unseen. As far as I could tell he had no warships under his control. That implied that he moved using pirate and smuggler craft: small ships that could pass unnoticed and unremarked through the wild borderland of the subsector. A scattered task force of Imperial ships had tracked and boarded nineteen vessels so far with no result. The ship I watched would be the twentieth.

Two hours later, I stood amidst the promethium stink and the semi-ordered chaos of one of the Unbreakable Might’s main landing bays. Bright light flooded the cathedral-like space, gleaming off the hulls of lighters, shuttles and landing craft. Figures moved over them, working on the mechanical guts exposed under servicing plates.

I stood with Velkarrin and a guard of twenty armsmen, their bronzed void armour reflecting the bright light. The admiral stood a few paces away, consulting with two of his attending officers. The away team had reported that the vessel appeared to be nothing but a smuggler, crewed by deserters and outlanders. They had found a cargo of illegal ore destined for some pirate haven out in the Halo Margins. The lexmechanic who had accompanied them had drained the smuggler ship’s data reservoirs for later analysis. As on the nineteen previous occasions no connection with Phocron or his shadow network existed. Still, I wanted to meet the boarding party on their return to search their accounts for details that they might have failed to report. Once that was done, the smuggler ship would be blasted into molten slag.

The armoured shuttle glided into the dock, its passive antigravity field filling the air with an ionised tang. It settled onto the deck with a hiss of hydraulics and a creak of ice-cold metal. The shuttle was a blunt block of grey armour the size of a mass ground hauler, its surface pitted and scored by atmospheric translation. Blast shields covered the armaglass of the cock pit. I heard the echoes of vox-chatter between the pilots and the deck crew as they moved in to attach power lines and data cables. The ramp under the chin of the shuttle hinged open, revealing a dark space inside. Velkarrin and the armsmen looked towards it, expecting the boarding team to appear from the gloom.

Something was wrong. I reached for the plasma pistol at my waist, my hand closing on the worn metal of the grip at the same moment that the docking bay went dark. Complete blackness enfolded us. For an instant, there was silence, and then voices rose in confusion. The pistol was in my hand, its charge coils glowing as it built power with a piercing whine. In the direction of the shuttle, two eyes glowed suddenly green. There was a motorised growl as a chain weapon gunned to life and then the shooting started. Our armsmen guard opened up, shotgun muzzles flaring as they fired into the dark. The noise was like a ragged, rolling bellow. In the jagged light of muzzle flare I saw my enemy standing on the ramp of the shuttle. His armour was dark, mottled by patterns of scales. In one hand he held a toothed axe, in the other a bolt pistol. He stood still for an instant as the shot rattled from his warplate, looking at us with glowing green eyes. Behind him stood a figure in a silver mask and storm coat. In that brief moment I thought that the empty eyes in the silver face were looking into mine.

The armsmen had closed ranks around Velkarrin and I, forming a deep circle of bronze armour. I aimed and fired, but Phocron was already gone, moving through muzzle flash, a whirlwind of slaughter caught through blinked instants.

He hit the first armsmen with a downwards blow. I heard the scream of motorised teeth meeting metal and flesh.

He was two strides nearer, an arc of dismembered dead at his feet. I heard a yelp of fear close by, recognising the admiral’s voice by its tone.

The bolt pistol flared and roared, three armsmen dying in an oily flash of light. He was three strides away. There was a smell of offal and meat in my nose. Beside me, I heard Velkarrin turn to run and thud to the deck as his feet slipped on something slick and soft. The plasma pistol whined in my hand.

I raised my pistol, lightning dancing across its charge coils. Phocron was above me, chain axe raised, scale-patterned armour glistering with blood. He brought the axe down in a diagonal cut. I pulled the trigger and plasma flared from the barrel of my pistol.

I missed, but the shot saved my life. Jerking aside to avoid my shot, Phocron missed his target. The teeth of the chain axe met my gun arm just below the elbow, the back swing slicing through Velkarrin as he tried to stand.

The lights came on as shock hit me. Blood was spilling from the chewed stump of my arm. I staggered a step and my legs gave way, collapsing to the floor in a clicking whir of gears. People moved, shouting. I was aware of a lot of weapons surrounding me very quickly.

I looked around, trying to focus through a pale fog that seemed to be floating across my vision. Blood glistened under the bright light. The ramp of the shuttle was still open. Later, I would find out that none of its crew or the boarding party had returned from the smuggler ship, the voices in the vox-chatter and reports had been perfect mimicry. Of Phocron and the man in the silver mask, there was no sign.

One month ago

The war council overseeing the Ephisian Persecution gathered on board the Unbreakable Might. Generals, war savants, vice-admirals, magos, bishops militant, palatines, commissar lords and captains of the Adeptus Astartes: all came to my call. The strategium of the battlecruiser was a two hundred paces-wide circular chamber of raked seats carved from granite. I waited at the centre, under the eyes of the gathering worthies, and watched.

They came in small groups, looking for faces they knew, judging where it was their right to sit, who they had to avoid and who they had to greet. It was like watching the shifting gears of Imperial politics and power play out in miniature. There a Sparcin war chief in burnished half plate and white fur cloak, trailed by a clutch of tactical advisors. Here a psykana lord, a withered white face within a hood of cables, sat next to a spindle limbed woman in carmine robes, the cog-skull of the Adeptus Mechanicus etched on the brass of her domino mask. Servo skulls moved above the assembling throng, scanning, recording, sniffing the air for threats and spreading incense in thick breaths.

Amongst the crowd I saw some of my own kind, inquisitors or their representatives, moving amongst the rest like imperious masters, or remaining still and silent on the edges. I had invited none of them but they came anyway, my reputation enough to bring them. Some even called me ‘lord inquisitor’. Rank within the Inquisition is a complex matter. No formal structure exists amongst this shadow hand of the Imperium that answers to none but the will of the Emperor. Lordship is a matter of respect, a title of acknowledgement granted by peers to one who has earned it by the power of their deeds. My war against Phocron had pulled respect and renown to me like a flame gathers insects. As the greatest masters of war in this volume of space gathered at my call, I could see why some might call me lord.

I sat on a high-backed chair at the centre of the chamber. A symbolic hammer rested beneath my left hand, my right on the black iron of the chair’s arm, fingers of polished chrome clicking softly on the dark metal. It had been a year since I had lost my right arm in the ambush that had killed Admiral Velkarrin and nearly claimed my life. The bionic replacement still ached with phantom pain.

In that year, I had not been idle. Following his attempt on my life, Phocron had simply vanished. No trace of him could be found on the ship or on the smuggler vessel. This, and the sudden loss of light at the moment of attack, could only mean that his network of traitors extended deeper and higher in our forces than I had considered possible. Trusted acolytes and agents of my own had gone to work, and now I gathered together the leaders of the Persecution to share what I had found. A few knew what was about to happen, most did not.

I watched as black-visored troopers sealed the doors to the chamber and waited for the grumble of conversation to fade. When it had, I stood.

‘There is much to speak of,’ I said, my voice carrying up the tiered seats. I saw some shift at the lack of formal greeting or acknowledgement of the honour and position of those gathered here. I let myself smile at the thought. ‘But first there is a matter that must be dealt with.’ I gave a slight nod as if to emphasise the point, and those waiting for that signal acted as one.

Even though I was prepared for it, the psychic shockwave made me stagger. On the tiered seats, a dozen figures convulsed as the telepathic and telekinetic power enfolded them in a vice-like grip. I felt an oily static charge play over my skin. There was a sound like wind rustling through high grass. The needle slivers hit the convulsing men and women, and one by one they went still as the sedatives overrode nerve impulses. There was an instant of shocked silence.

‘Do not move,’ I shouted as the black-visored troopers moved through the crowd. They clustered around each of the stricken figures. Null collars and monowire bindings slipped over necks and limbs and the bound figures were dragged across the stone floor like sacks of grain. The shock in the rest of the crowd was palpable; they had just seen a dozen of their senior peers, men and women of power and distinction, overcome and dragged away. You could almost feel the thought forming in all their minds: traitors in our midst. The pale faced psykana lord nodded to me and I favoured him with a low bow of thanks. A murmur of anger and fear began to build in the chamber.

‘Our enemy is among us.’ I raised my hammer up and brought its adamantine head down on the granite floor. Silence gathered in the wake of the fading hammer blow. ‘It walks amongst us, wearing faces of loyalty.’ My voice was soft but it carried in the still air. ‘Our enemy has used our strength against us, directed us into traps, mired us in blood and shackled our strength with lies. A year ago, on this ship, that enemy came close to ending my life with his own hand. That such a thing was possible is a testament to his ability and audacity.’ I paused, looking around at the faces watching me, waiting to see what would come next. ‘But I survived, and in that attempt he exposed the extent of the treachery within our forces.’ I pointed to the dozen spaces on the tiered seats. ‘Today I have removed the heads of the hydra from among us.’ I paused as murmurs ran through the audience.

The traitors had been difficult to find without arousing their suspicion. It had been delicate work to find them, and more delicate still to prepare to remove them in a single instant. The twelve taken in the chamber had been the most senior, the most highly placed of Phocron’s agents and puppets. Some, no doubt, had not known what end they served, others, I was sure, were willing traitors. There had been generals amongst them, senior Munitorum staff, an astropath, confessor and even an interrogator. At the moment they had been taken, parallel operations had gone into action throughout the Persecution’s forces, cutting the corruption out from among us. Most of the infiltrators would be killed, but many would be taken and broken until their secrets flowed from them like blood from a vein.

‘The enemy has blinded us and led us by the hand like children. But at this moment he has also handed us weapons with which to destroy him. Knowledge is our weapon, and from the traitors that walked among us we will gain knowledge.’ I stood and picked the hammer up, its head at my feet, the pommel resting under my hands. ‘And with that knowledge, this Persecution will cut the ground from under the feet of our enemy. We will wound and hound him until he crawls to his last refuge. And when he is crippled and bleeding, I shall take the last head of this hydra.’

Twelve hours ago

A hundred warships came to bear witness to our victory. They ringed the jagged space fortress, their guns flaring as they hammered it with fire. The Hydra’s Eye turned in its orbit around the dead world like a prize fighter too dazed to avoid the blows mashing his face to bloody pulp and splintered bone.

In the end, it had been the words of a traitor that had betrayed Phocron’s refuge. One of those taken from the strategium of the Unbreakable Might had known of another agent in naval command. That agent had been taken in turn, and his secrets ripped from his mind by a psyker. That information had been added to fragments gleaned from others, winding together to make a thread that had led to the system of dead planets in which the Hydra’s Eye hid. That it was the current refuge for Phocron was implied and confirmed by many sources once we knew where to look. Once I had the location of Phocron’s base, I ordered an immediate attack.

The Hydra’s Eye was truly vast, an irregular star of fused void debris over fifteen kilometres across at its widest point. Its hull was a patchwork skin of metal that wept glowing fluid as macro shells and lance strikes reduced its defences to molten slag. There had been enemy ships clustering around the irregular mass of the space fortress like lesser fish beside a deep sea leviathan. Most had been pirate vessels, wolf packs of small lightly-armed craft. All died within minutes, their deaths scattering light across the jagged bulk of the Hydra’s Eye. Our guns went silent as a cloud of assault boats and attack craft swarmed towards the wounded fortress. I had not watched as Phocron’s last means of escape died in fire. This was the end of my war and I was ready to strike its last blow myself. When the first wave of attack craft swarmed towards the space fortress I was there, my old body wrapped in armour forged by the finest artisans of Mars.

An animal is at its most dangerous when wounded and cornered. Phocron’s followers did not fail to hammer this lesson home. The forces on the Hydra’s Eye were a mixture of piratical scum and renegades inducted into Phocron’s inner circle. They spent their lives without thought, their only care being to make us pay many times over for each of them that we killed. I could see Phocron’s vile genius in their every tactic. Some hid in ceiling ducting or side passages, waiting for our forces to pass before attacking from behind. Others pulled guardsmen quietly into the dark, strangling them before taking their uniforms and equipment. Dressed as friends, the renegades would join our forces, waiting until the most advantageous moment to turn on the men beside them. The structure of the fortress itself spoke of a twisted foresight. Dead ends and hidden passages riddled the structure. Passages and junctions seemed to split and channel us, portioning our forces so that they became divided. We had bodies enough to choke every passage. We would win, that was without doubt, but every inch cost blood. Those bloody steps had led me here to this chamber and this final battle.

Yes every step had cost blood; every step for a hundred years, from the mustering fields of Ephisia, through the burning of Hespacia to here where I will face my enemy for the last time. I am alone, the rest of the Imperial force lost behind me in the bloody tangle of the Hydra’s Eye. So I will face my enemy alone, but perhaps that is as it should be.

Phocron moves and cuts, his blow so quick and sudden that I have no chance to dodge. I raise my arm, feeling the armour synchronise with the movements of my aging muscles. My fist meets his strike in a blaze of light. For a second, it is his strength against mine, the energies of weapons grinding against each other. I am looking into his face, so close that I can see the pattern of finer and finer scales on his face plate. The deadlock lasts an eye blink. I fire my storm bolter a fraction of a second before he moves. The burst hits him in the chest at point blank range and spins him onto the floor with the sound of cracking ceramite. I spray his struggling form with explosive rounds as he tries to rise.

I take a step closer – a mistake. He is on his feet faster than I can blink, spinning past me. The tip of his sword glides over my left elbow as he moves. The power field sheathing my fist vanishes, the power feeds severed with surgical care. I turn to follow him. His sword flicks out again, low and snake-strike fast. The tip stabs through the back of my left knee. Pain shoots up my leg an instant before it collapses under me. Tiles shatter under the impact. He is gone, moving into blind space behind me. I try to twist around, my targeting systems searching. He is going to kill me, one cut at a time. Despite the pain, I smile to myself. The Alpha Legion do not simply kill, they bleed you one bite at a time until you have no doubt of their superiority. But that pride is their weakness.

A cut splits the elbow of my right arm. I do not even see where it comes from. Blood is running down my alabaster-white armour and dribbling across the crushed tiles. My right arm is hanging loose at my side, but I hold onto my storm bolter through the pain.

He walks into my view. There is a casual slowness to his movements. He has stripped me of my strength, crippled me and now he wants to look into my eyes as he kills me. He stops two paces from me and looks down at me with green eyes. The tip of the blade rises level with my eye. His weight shifts as he prepares to ram the sword into my eye. This is the death stroke, and it is the chance I have been waiting for.

I bring my left arm around in a swing that hits him behind the right knee. The fist has no power field, but it is still a gauntlet of armour propelled by a layer of artificial muscles. It hits with a dry crack of fractured armour and bone.

Phocron falls, the hand gripping the knife splayed out to the side. I pull myself to my feet, gripping my storm bolter with the last of my strength. It does not take much. All I need to do is squeeze the trigger. Fired at point blank range, the explosive rounds shred his arm. Before he can react, I move and squeeze the remainder of the storm bolter’s clip into his left arm.

He flounders in a pool of blood and armour fragments. I put my knee on his chest and grip the horns of his helmet with my left fist. Seals squeal and snap as I wrench the helmet from his head. For an instant, I expect to see the face of a monster, a monster that created me, that drove me to become what I am. But the face under the helm is that of a Space Marine, unscarred, dark eyes looking up at me from sharp features. He has a small tattoo of an eagle under his left eye, the ink faded to a dull green.

I reach up and take my own helmet off. The air smells of weapons fire and blood.

‘Phocron,’ I say. ‘For your crimes and heresies against the Imperium of mankind, I sentence you to death.’

He smiles.

‘Yes, you have won. Phocron will die this day.’ There is movement of the edge of my sight.

I look up. There are figures watching me from the edges of the room. They wear blue armour, some blank and unadorned, some etched with serpentine symbols, others hung with sigils of false gods. They look at me with green glowing eyes. Amongst them is a normal-sized man wrapped in a storm cloak, his face hidden by a silver mask. The image of a figure in a mask stood against the burning backdrop of Hespacia, and caught in muzzle flash on the Unbreakable Might flicks through my memory.

The man steps forward. His right hand is augmetic and holds a slender-barrelled needle pistol. There is a clicking purr of gears and pneumatics as the masked man walks towards me. I start to rise. The masked man reaches up with his left hand and pulls the silver mask away. I look at him.

He has my face.

The needle dart hits the inquisitor in his left eye and the toxin kills him before he can gasp. He collapses slowly, the bulk of his armour hitting the tiled floor with a crash.

We move quickly. We have only a few moments to secure our objective, and we can make no mistakes. The inquisitor’s armour is stripped from his body, piece by piece, the injuries he sustained noted as they are revealed. As the dead man is peeled from the armour I remove my own gear and equipment, stripping down until there are two near identical men, one dead and bleeding on the floor, the other standing while his half-brothers finish their work. My augmetics and every detail of my resculpted flesh match the man who lies dead on the floor. Years of subtle flesh craft and conditioning mean that my voice is his voice, my every habit and movement are his. There is only the matter of the wounds that were carefully inflicted to injure, but not kill. I do not cry out as my Legion brothers cut me, though the pain is nothing less than it was for him, the dead man whose face I wear. The wounds are the last details, and as the blood-slick Terminator armour covers my skin, all differences between the dead inquisitor and I end. We are one, he and I.

They take the inquisitor’s body away. It will burn in a plasma furnace to erase the last trace of this victory. For it is a victory. They take away our crippled brother who was the last to play the role of Phocron. A corpse is brought to take his place, its blue armour chewed by bolter rounds and crumpled by the blows of a power fist. A horned helmet hides his face and a shimmering cloak hangs from his shoulders. This corpse is the final proof that the Imperium will require to believe they have won this day: Phocron, dead, killed by his nemesis. Killed by me. The Imperium will see this day as their victory, but it is a lie.

Phocron never existed, his name and legend only extant in the mind of the Imperium and the obsession of the man whose place I take. Phocron existed only to create this last meeting. Many of the Legion were Phocron, playing the role to create a legend that was a lie. I will walk from this chamber in victory and my legend will grow, my influence and power will spread further. Decades of cultivation and provocation have led to this one moment of transformation, the moment we give the Imperium a victory and transform it into a lie. This is our truth, the core of our soul, the essence of our craft. We are warriors unbound by the constraints of truth, assumption, or dogma. We are the reflection in the eternal mirror of war, ever changing, unfixed, and invincible. We serve lies and are their masters. We are their slaves and they are our weapons, weapons which can defeat any foe, break any fortress, and grant one warrior victory against ten thousand. I am the one who stands against many. I am Alpha Legion, and we are one.

Aurelian: An Extract

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

ONE

FRATERNITY

The Vengeful Spirit
Four days after Isstvan V

Eight of his brothers were present, though only half of them truly stood in the room. The absent four were nothing more than projections: three of them manifested around the table in the forms of flickering grey hololithic simulacra, formed of stuttering light and white noise. The fourth of them appeared as a brighter image comprised of silver radiance, its features and limbs dripping spiral lashes of corposant witchfire. This last projection, Magnus, inclined its head in greeting.

Hail, Lorgar, his brother bred the words within his mind.

Lorgar nodded in return. ‘How far away are you, Magnus?’

The Crimson King’s psychic projection showed no emotion. A tall man, his head crested by a sculpted crown, Magnus the Red refused to make contact with his one remaining eye.

Very far. I lick my wounds on a distant world. It has no name but that which I brought to it.

Lorgar nodded, not blind to the nuances of hesitation in his brother’s silent tones. Now was not the time for such talk.

The others acknowledged him one by one. Curze – a cadaverous, pulsing hololithic avatar of himself – gave the barest suggestion of a nod. Mortarion, an emaciated wraith even in the flesh, was hardly improved by this electronic etherealness. His image faded in and out of focus, occasionally dividing in the bizarre mitosis of distance distortion. He lowered the blade of his Manreaper scythe in greeting, which was in itself a warmer hail than Lorgar had been expecting.

Alpharius was the last of those present through long-range sending. He stood helmed, while all others were bareheaded, and his hololithic image was stable while each of the others suffered corruption from the vast ranges between their fleets. Alpharius, almost a head shorter than his brothers, stood scaled in crocodilian resplendence, his reptile-skin armour plating glinting in the false light of his manifestation. His salute was the sign of the aquila, the Emperor’s own symbol, made with both hands across his breastplate.

Lorgar snorted. How quaint.

‘You’re late,’ one of his brothers interrupted. ‘We’ve been waiting.’ The voice was a graceless avalanche of syllables.

Angron. Lorgar turned to him, dispensing with any attempt at a conciliatory smile.

His warrior brother stood hunched in the threatening lean that characterised his body language, the back of his skull malformed from the brutal neural implants hammered into the bone and wired into the soft tissue of his brainstem. Angron’s bloodshot eyes narrowed as another pulse of pain ransacked through his nervous system – a legacy of the aggression enhancers surgically imposed upon him by his former masters. While the other primarchs had risen to rule the worlds they’d been cast down upon, only Angron had languished in captivity, a slave to techno-primitives on some forsaken backwater world that never deserved a name. Angron’s past still ran through his blood, nerve pain sparking in his muscles with every misfired synapse.

‘I was delayed,’ Lorgar admitted. He didn’t like to look at his brother for too long at a time. It was one of the things that made Angron twitch; like an animal, the lord of the World Eaters couldn’t abide being stared at, and could never hold eye contact for more than a few moments. Lorgar had no desire to provoke him.

Kor Phaeron had once made mention that the World Eater’s face was a sneering mask made of clenched knuckles, but Lorgar found no humour in it. To his eyes, his brother was a cracked statue: features that should have been composed and handsome were wrenched into a jagged, snarling expression, flawed by muscle twinges that bordered on spasms. It was easy to see why others believed Angron always looked on the edge of fury. In truth, he looked like a man struggling to concentrate through epileptic agony. Lorgar hated the bleak, crude bastard, but it was hard not admire his unbreakable endurance.

Angron grunted something wordless and dismissive, looking back at the others.

‘It has been nine days, and we know our tasks,’ he growled. ‘We are already spread across the void. Why did you gather us?’

Horus, Warmaster of the cleaved Imperium, didn’t answer immediately. He gestured for Lorgar to take his place around the table, at Horus’s own right hand. Unlike his Legion’s sea-green ceramite, Horus stood clad in layered, dense armour of charcoal black, adorned with the glaring cadmium Eye of Terra on his breastplate. This last sigil, the symbol of his authority as master of the Imperium’s armies, had its black core refashioned into a slitted serpent’s pupil. Lorgar wondered, as he met Horus’s pale, elegant smirk, just what secrets Erebus had been whispering into the Warmaster’s ears in recent months.

Lorgar took his place between Horus and Perturabo. The former presided at the head of the table, all pretence of equality done away with in the aftermath of Isstvan. The latter stood in his burnished, riveted war plate, leaning on the haft of an immense hammer with an admirable air of casual disregard.

‘Lorgar,’ Perturabo murmured in greeting. Two-dozen power cables of various thicknesses plugged directly into the Iron Warrior’s bare head, even at the jawline and temples, linking him to the internal processes of his gunmetal-grey armour. Chains draped over the tiered plating rattled as he gave a cursory nod.

Lorgar returned it, but said nothing. His dark eyes drifted across the others, seeking his last brother.

‘So.’ Horus’s indulgent smile was all teeth. ‘We have gathered again, at last.’

All eyes fell upon him, except for Lorgar’s. The seventeenth son’s distraction went unmarked as Horus continued.

‘This gathering is the first of its kind. Here, now, we unite in one another’s presences for the first time.’

‘We gathered on Isstvan,’ Angron grunted.

‘Not all of us,’ Alpharius’s colourless hololithic image still hadn’t turned its helmeted face. The projection’s voice held little in the way of corruption-crackle, and just as little emotion.

The nine Legions had scattered after Isstvan. With a galaxy to conquer and great armies to raise on the long road to Terra, the Legions loyal to Warmaster Horus broke apart into the void, boosting away from a world left dead in their wake.

Angron narrowed his eyes, as if fighting to remember. He nodded agreement a moment later. ‘True. Lorgar refused to come. He was praying.’

Horus, his handsome features lit from the low glow of his gorget, offered a smile. ‘He was meditating on his place in our great plan. There is a difference, brother.’

Angron nodded again without really committing to agreement. He seemed to care for nothing but shrugging the conversation from his shoulders and moving on to other matters.

Horus spoke up again. ‘We all know the costs of the coming campaign, and our destinies within it. Our fleets are underway. But after the, shall we say, unpleasantness of Isstvan, this is the first time we have gathered as a full fraternity.’ Horus gestured with an open palm to his golden-skinned brother. Intentionally or not, the movement was threatening when made with the massive clawed Mechanicum talon sheathing his right hand. ‘I hope your meditations were worthwhile, Lorgar.’

Lorgar was still staring at his final brother. He’d not taken his eyes off the last figure since he’d looked away from Perturabo.

‘Lorgar?’ Horus almost growled now. ‘I am growing ever more weary of your inability to adhere to established planning.’

Curze’s chuckle was a vulture’s caw. Even Angron smiled, his scarred lips peeling back from several replacement iron teeth.

Lorgar slowly, slowly, reached for the ornate crozius mace on his back. As he drew the weapon in the company of his closest kin, his eyes remained locked on one of them, and all physically present felt the deepening chill of psychic frost riming along their armour.

The Word Bearer’s voice left his lips in an awed, vicious whisper.

‘You. You are not Fulgrim.’

TWO

BLOOD AT THE COUNCIL TABLE

Time changes all things.

The son that had never found a place in his father’s empire was not the same soul that drew his weapon now. Lorgar was already moving before even the keenest of his warrior brothers knew what was happening.

Fulgrim had a scarce moment to draw a breath, to instinctively reach for his own weapon in a futile attempt to ward the coming blow.

Lorgar’s crozius mace struck with a bell’s toll, echoing around the war room. Fulgrim crashed into the back wall – a porcelain doll in shattered ceramite – and crumpled to the ground.

The golden primarch turned his fierce eyes upon his other brothers. ‘That is not Fulgrim.’

The others were already advancing, drawing their own weapons. Lorgar’s crimson armour, painted in honour of his Legion’s treachery against the Throne, reflected the stuttering hololithic avatars of the four brothers present only in spirit.

‘Stay back,’ he warned those that still advanced upon him, ‘and heed my words. That wretch, that thing, is not our brother.’

‘Peace, Lorgar.’ Horus approached, his own armour joints purring with low snarls. In times past, the merest threat of a confrontation had been enough to quell Lorgar from any rash action. He’d scarcely ever spoken a harsh word to any of his brothers, nor had he ever relished the many times they’d rebuked him for his perceived flaws. Unnecessary conflict was anathema to him.

As they faced him now, even Horus was wide-eyed in the changes wrought since Isstvan. The Word Bearer primarch clutched his maul in both red gauntlets, defying his brothers with narrowed eye. In the voice of a poet turned to hate, he warned ‘Stay back,’ a second time.

‘Lorgar,’ Horus lowered his voice, softening it to match his brother’s. ‘Peace, Lorgar. Peace.’

‘You already knew.’ Lorgar almost laughed. ‘I see it in your eyes, brother. What have you done?’

Horus gave a brittle smile. This had to end now. ‘Magnus,’ he said.

The psychic projection of Magnus the Red shook its crested head. I am on the other side of the galaxy, Horus. Do not ask me to contain our brother. Keep order on your own flagship.’

Fulgrim moaned as he began to rise from the decking. Blood made lightning trails down his face from the edges of his lips. Lorgar rested an armoured boot on the prone primarch’s chestplate.

‘Stay down,’ he said, without looking at Fulgrim.

Fulgrim’s pale, androgynous features twisted in false amusement. ‘You think you–’

‘If you speak,’ Lorgar kept his boot on the fallen primarch, ‘I will destroy you.’

‘Lorgar,’ Horus growled now. ‘You are speaking madness.’

‘Only because I have seen madness.’ He met his brothers’ eyes in turn, looking from one to the other. The kindest among them looked upon him with pity. Most were merely disgusted. ‘I alone know what the truth looks like.’ He pushed down with his boot, pressing on Fulgrim’s shattered ribcage, driving ceramite armour shards into the broken body. Fulgrim choked on blood. Lorgar paid it no mind.

Horus turned to the others with a melodramatic sigh. Indulgence was plainly writ across his handsome features, as if sharing some old jest between the rest of his family.

‘I will deal with this. Leave us for now. We will reconvene shortly.’

The hololithics flickered off immediately, but for Alpharius, who stood watching Lorgar for several moments longer. Magnus the Red was the last to fade, his projected self nodding to Horus at last, and dispersing like mist in the wind. For several moments, his sourceless voice hung in the empty air. To manifest here requires a significant effort of will, Horus. Bear that in mind next time.

‘The Cyclops is right,’ one of the others objected. ‘We delay over nothing. Let the fanatic claim what he wishes. We will restrain him and be done with it. We have a war to plan.’

Horus sighed. ‘Just go, Angron. I will summon you back from the Conqueror when we are ready.’

In the clash of irritation and amusement that coloured most of their discussions, Perturabo and Angron trudged from the war room; one speaking, the other listening.

With the chamber sealed again, Lorgar aimed the immense maul at Horus’s bare head.

‘So you send them away to protect a secret that should never be kept. Do you think they will suspect nothing? If you believe I will allow you to concoct a tale of my insanity to aid in your deception, you are misleading yourself.’

Horus wouldn’t be baited. ‘That was incautious, Lorgar. Explain your actions.’

‘I can see the truth, Horus.’ Lorgar risked a glance down at whatever was wearing his brother’s skin and armour. ‘His soul is hollowed through. Something nestles within this body, like eggs lain inside a host.’ Lorgar raised his eyes again. ‘Magnus would have sensed it also, had he not been drained from sending his image such a great distance. This is not Fulgrim.’

Horus released a breath. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘It is not.’

‘I know what this is.’ Lorgar rested the mace’s spiked head against Fulgrim’s temple. ‘What I cannot understand is how this happened. How have you allowed it to come to pass?’

‘Is it so different from your own Gal Vorbak?’ the Warmaster countered.

Lorgar’s gold-inked features, ruthlessly similar to their father’s, broke into patient sympathy. ‘You do not know of what you speak, Horus. One of the Neverborn, puppeteering the soulless body of our own brother? There is no balance of human and divine elements here. No graceful alignment of two souls in harmony. This is desecration, blasphemy, not ascension.’

Horus smiled. Lorgar could always be relied upon to seethe with such theatrics. ‘Consider this another unpleasant truth. I did not orchestrate Fulgrim’s demise. I am merely containing the aftermath.’

Lorgar exhaled slowly. ‘So he is dead, then. Another sentience rides within his body. This husk is all that remains of Fulgrim?’

Horus’s reply was preceded by a grunt of annoyance. ‘Why does it matter to you? You and he were never close.’

‘It matters because this is a perversion against the natural order, fool.’ Lorgar spoke through perfect, clenched teeth. ‘Where is the harmony in this joining? A living soul annihilated for its mortal shell to house a greedy, unborn wretch? I have walked in the warp, Horus. I have stood where gods and mortals meet. This is weakness and corruption – a perversion of what the gods wish for us. They want allies and followers, not soulless husks ridden by daemons.’

Horus said nothing. He didn’t even respond to Lorgar’s insult, though his lip curled.

Lorgar cast his eyes down to the fallen primarch. Fulgrim, whatever was within him, stared back with blood flecking the pale skin around his eyes.

Get off me, the voice ghosted through Lorgar’s mind. It wasn’t Fulgrim’s voice. It wasn’t even a close approximation.

+ Be silent + he psychically pulsed back, with enough force to make Fulgrim tremble.

Lorgar… the creature’s voice was weaker, raspier, a tremulous breath of wind. You know my kind. We are kin, you and I.

The primarch of the Word Bearers moved away, his sneer painted plain. The desperation in the creature’s silent voice made his skin itch.

‘How did this happen?’ he asked Horus.

The Warmaster watched Fulgrim rise. Lorgar did not – he spat onto the decking and tossed his crozius onto the table. Its ornate spiked head sent cracks lightning-bolting across the table’s surface.

On his feet, Fulgrim was a slender, willowy figure – svelte even in his contoured war plate. Lorgar saw none of the grace when he turned: he saw only the sickening unlight behind his brother’s eyes, and the intelligence of another being at the body’s core.

Fulgrim smiled someone else’s smile.

‘Lorgar,’ he began, using Fulgrim’s curiously tender voice.

+ I will learn your true name and banish you back into the warp. Perhaps in its tides, you will relearn restraint. +

He held back as he forced the speech into the other’s mind, but it was still harsh enough to make Fulgrim snort blood onto his lips.

Lorgar… I–

+ You have desecrated the flesh in which you ride. Nothing more. This is not the holy union of humanity and Chaos. You violate the purity of the gods’ Primordial Truth. +

Fulgrim sagged back against the wall. Blood was running from his eyes.

‘Lorgar,’ Horus rested his unclawed hand on his brother’s shoulder. ‘You are killing him.’

‘It is not “him”. It is an it. And if I wished to kill it, then it would already be destroyed.’ Lorgar narrowed his eyes at Horus’s restraining grip on his shoulder.

+ Remove your hand, Horus + he sent.

Horus obeyed, though he tried not to. The Warmaster’s fingers shivered as they withdrew, and his grey eyes flickered with unhidden tension.

‘You have changed,’ he said, ‘since crossing blades with Corax.’

Lorgar gathered his crozius and rested the immense maul on his shoulder guard. ‘Everything changed that night. I am returning to my ship, brother. I must think upon this… this foulness.’

THREE

MAGNUS AND LORGAR

He did not wait long, nor had he expected to. Indeed, his brother awaited him in his chamber.

We must speak, you and I.

The phantasm’s form rippled, bright with witchfire, beaming myriad reflections across the angled walls of Lorgar’s inner sanctum. The chamber was cold, always too cold, and the air was forever moist as it ran through the filtration system. The primarch missed the dry climes of Colchis.

He rested Illuminarium, the immense crozius maul, against the wall.

‘Magnus,’ he said to the wraith. The figure formed of silver fire gave a graceful bow.

It has been a long while since we spoke anything of substance.

Once, not so long ago, he would have smiled to see his wisest, most powerful brother. Now, the smile read false, and didn’t reach Lorgar’s eyes.

‘You exaggerate. We have spoken many times in recent years.’

Magnus’s remaining eye followed his brother’s steps as Lorgar moved over to his writing table.

Our last talk of any real worth was in your City of Grey Flowers, almost half a century before. Have anything beyond the shallowest pleasantries passed between us since then?

Lorgar met Magnus’s eye. The silvery form flickered as Lorgar’s voice resonated around it.

+ Times change, Magnus. +

The Cyclops visibly shuddered, though he kept smiling. I felt that, even here. You have grown strong.

+ I saw the truth on the very Pilgrimage you demanded I never make. And after Isstvan, a veil lifted from my eyes. There is no longer any need to hold back. If we restrain ourselves, we will lose this war, and humanity will lose its only chance at enlightenment. +

The distant primarch’s image wavered again. For a moment, Magnus looked pained.

You scream your strength into the warp without care. A vessel must sail with the aetheric tides, Lorgar, lest it break against them.

Lorgar laughed, a gentle, patient sound. ‘A lecture, from you? I have seen your past and future, Magnus. You stand with us only because our father exiled you. You stand as the crowned king of a Legion of the damned.’

My Legion? Of what do you speak?

Lorgar felt his brother’s questing probes, the softest psychic touch within his skull. It took the barest effort to hurl the insidious psi-touches aside.

+ If you ever seek to pry into my thoughts again, I will make sure you regret it. +

Magnus’s smile became forced. You truly have changed.

Yes,’ Lorgar nodded, writing upon a scroll. ‘Everything has changed.’

What did you mean about my Legion?

Lorgar was already distracted as he worked. ‘Watch for the greatest snarl in fate’s skeins, brother.’ He dipped the quill into an inkpot and resumed his scribing. ‘You are not free of the flesh-change your Legion once feared. Beware those among your sons that fail to embrace it as the gift it is.’

Magnus fell silent for some time. The only sound in the room was the scritch-scratch of Lorgar’s quill-tip, and the omnipresent bass murmur of the generators on the enginarium decks.

Fulgrim is dead.

‘So it seems.’ Lorgar stopped writing long enough to look up. ‘How long have you known?’

Magnus moved to the wall, reaching out as if his ethereal fingers could touch the paintings of Colchis hanging there.

I knew it as soon as I reached into Horus’s war room. He withdrew his fingers, curling them back with slow care. Like you, I am no stranger to the entities within the warp. One of them animates his body now.

+ Entities? Name them as they are, brother. Daemons. +

Magnus’s image wavered again, almost discorporated in the winds of Lorgar’s silent voice.

Control your strength, Lorgar.

Lorgar went back to his writing. ‘You should have told me the truth fifty years ago.’

Perhaps. The melancholy bleeding from Magnus was almost strong enough to caress the skin. Perhaps I should have. I sought only to protect you. You were so certain, so arrogant in your beliefs.

Lorgar spoke as he kept writing. ‘I stand at the right hand of the new Emperor, commanding the second-largest Legion in the Imperium. You are a broken soul, leading a shattered Legion. Perhaps I was never the one that needed protection, nor did my arrogance lead to my downfall. You cannot claim the same, Magnus. We both knew the truth, but only one of us faced it.’

And such a truth. Bitter amusement lapped at Lorgar’s senses. The galaxy is a foul place. We are only making it fouler. Have you considered that it might be better to die in ignorance than to live with the truth?

Lorgar repelled his brother’s creeping emotions with a burst of irritation. The spectre shimmered again, almost dissolving into the air.

+ Have you considered it, Magnus? If so, why do you yet live? Why did you not surrender to the howling death that came for you, when Russ broke your spine over his knee? +

Magnus’s ghost-image laughed, but it was a forced sound, barely reaching Lorgar’s mind. Is this what we have come to? Is this the bitterness you have hidden from all of us for half a century? What did you see at the end of your Pilgrimage, my brother? What did you see when you stared into the abyss?

+ You know what I saw. I saw the warp, and what swims within its tides. + He hesitated a moment, feeling his fingers curl, forming fists in his rising rage. + You are a coward, to know of the Primordial Truth yet fail to embrace it. Chaos Incarnate is only grotesque because we see it with mortal eyes. When we ascend, we will be the chosen children of the gods. When– +

Enough!

Three of the paintings burst into flame; the crystal sculpture of the Covenant’s tower palace shattered into worthless glass chips. Lorgar winced at his brother’s psychic release. He had to sniff blood back into his nose.

I am finished with this petty banter. You believe you know the truths behind our reality? Then show me. Tell me what you saw at the end of your accursed Pilgrimage.

Lorgar rose to his feet, extinguishing the small fires with a gentle gesture. Frost glinted on his fingernails as the flames hissed into nothingness, starved of air. For a moment he felt a twinge of regret, that he and his closest brother should be reduced to this.

But time changed all things. He was no longer the lost one, the weak one, the one brother plagued by doubt.

Lorgar nodded, his eyes thinned to dangerous slits.

‘Very well, Magnus.’

PHALANX

Chapter Eleven

Ben Counter

The Phalanx had been designed – whenever it had been designed, before the Age of Imperium – to survive. Any hostiles who boarded the immense ship might find themselves trapped in the tight, winding corridors of the engineering and maintenance areas just beneath the hull’s skin, separated from the ship’s more vulnerable areas by hundreds of automated bulkhead doors and whole sections of outer deck that could be vented into hard vacuum with the press of a control stud.

The hostiles currently on the Phalanx had bypassed every design feature intended to contain them. They had been disgorged directly into the ship’s interior, spilling through cavernous shuttle bays and swarming into crew quarters, riding torrents of blood through automated cargo motivator systems. The Phalanx had no way to stop the daemonic invaders.

So it was up to the Adeptus Astartes instead.

Chapter Master Vladimir stood at the threshold of the Sigismunda Tactica, and looked out across the battlefield. It spanned the barracks deck and was a kilometre and a half wide. This was the vulnerable heart of the Phalanx, the ground across which an invader could charge with impunity from the lost starboard docking bays towards the engines and reactors. The Forge of Ages anchored one end, beyond which was a tangle of engineering areas and power and coolant conduits. The other flank terminated in the Rynn’s World Memorial, an amphitheatre of granite inscribed with the names of the Crimson Fists lost in the infamous near-destruction of their fortress-monastery. Beyond this memorial were the steel catacombs, tight nests of cramped candlelit chambers where generations of crew members were laid to rest in niches scattered with bones. The conduit decks and catacombs would slow down the invaders’ advance, funnelling them through the open areas of the barracks, chapels and hero-shrines rolling out in front of Vladimir.

‘I can smell them,’ said Captain Lysander, emerging from the Sigismunda Tactica behind Vladimir. ‘The enemy are close.’

‘Of course you can smell them,’ said Vladimir. ‘I wonder if we will ever get the stink of the warp off my ship.’

‘Borganor is in position at the Forge of Ages,’ continued Lysander. ‘Leucrontas and the Ninth will hold the memorial.’

‘And everyone else will take the centre,’ finished Vladimir. ‘Can it be held?’

‘Our Third and Fifth are enough to hold anything,’ said Lysander.

‘You realise you will stake your life on that belief?’

‘We all will, Chapter Master. If this line breaks, everyone on the Phalanx will die.’

‘Tell me, captain. Is it wrong that I have dreamed of a day like this?’ Vladimir drew the Fangs of Dorn from the scabbards on either side of his waist - twin power swords, their blades broad for stabbing, their hilts semicircles of glinting black stone. ‘That I have knelt at the altars of Dorn and prayed that one day I would face the enemy like this, in a battle that will decide whether my Chapter lives in glory or is banished to a penitents’ crusade in disgrace? I have begged the Emperor to give me such a battle, toe to toe, no retreat, everything at stake. Is it wrong that I feel some joy in me that it is here?’

‘We all see something else in battle,’ replied Lysander. ‘Perhaps it is a mirror in which we see a reflection of ourselves. I see a grim task to be completed, something ugly and crude, but an evil necessary for the survival of our species. You see something different.’

‘Most Imperial Fists would simply have said “No”, captain.’

‘Well, that’s why you made me a captain.’

Among the complexes of barracks cells and the shrines to long-dead heroes, the Third and Fifth Companies of the Imperial Fists were taking up their battle positions. Low buildings formed the anchoring points beneath the grey sky of the ceiling. Battle-brothers knelt to icons of past captains and Chapter Masters, their home suddenly transformed into a battleground.

The Tactica itself was one of the most defensible buildings on the deck. It was a circular building of black stone, its arched entrances leading to dozens of map tables on which famous past battles of the Imperial Fists had been recreated. The buildings over which Imperial Fists had fought and died were scrimshawed from alien ivories and laid out on miniature battlegrounds of polished obsidian. In the Tactica, named after Sigismund, one of Dorn’s greatest generals and the founder of the Black Templars Chapter, Imperial Fists officers could contemplate victories of the past, dissecting the battle plans the Chapter’s leaders had enacted and the follies of the enemies who tried to stand against them. If the Imperial Fists and the other Adeptus Astartes on the Phalanx could prevail, perhaps the Tactica itself would be recreated on one of those ornate maps.

Lord Inquisitor Kolgo was walking among the map tables, casting his eye over the Imperial Fists history. He wore deep red terminator armour embellished with silver symbols of the Inquisition, giving him the same bulk as a Space Marine in power armour. His Battle Sisters retinue kept a respectful distance, Sister Aescarion waiting patiently with power axe in hand.

‘I take it,’ said Vladimir, ‘that you know rather more about the forces of the warp than can be entrusted to lesser minds like ours.’

Kolgo looked up, as if he had not expected to be interrupted, to see Vladimir walking through one of the Tactica’s lofty archways. ‘It is a burden we Inquisitors must carry, Chapter Master,’ he said.

‘If there is anything we could do with knowing, then now is the time to tell us.’

Kolgo took a set of Emperor’s Tarot cards from a silver case set into his breastplate. On one of the map tables, one which represented a volcanic battlefield where the Imperial Fists had shattered an assault by the xenos tau, he laid out three of them in a row.

‘”The Silver Ocean”,’ said Kolgo, pointing to the first card. ‘One who cannot be grasped or comprehended, as subtle as quicksilver. An unknowable foe. The second is “The Altar”, a symbol of majesty and glory. But it is inverted, and followed by “The Plague”. The enemy is inscrutable and majestic, but that majesty is false and conceals an ocean of foulness beneath its beauty. It is a vessel of corruption in the form of something wonderful. I see the hand of the Lord of Change in the enemy we face, but the foe is its own creature, driven by its own desires.’

‘You know what it is?’ said Vladimir.

‘I have my suspicions, which I will not share until they become certainties, especially where the God of Lies is concerned.’ Kolgo gathered up the cards and put them away. ‘This is more than a battle over your vessel, Chapter Master. That is all I am willing to say.’

‘Then keep your own counsel, lord inquisitor, as long as you fight alongside us.’

Kolgo smiled. ‘Have no fear on that score.’

‘Chapter Master,’ came a voice over the vox-net. The rune signifying Castellan Leucrontas pulsed against Vladimir’s retina. ‘The enemy is sighted.’

‘What is their strength, castellan?’ demanded Vladimir.

‘Hundreds,’ came Leucrontas’s voice. ‘They are advancing on two sides. Holding position.’

Vladimir strode out of the Tactica. His own Imperial Fists were in position among the shrines and barracks, and he spotted the colours of the Silver Skulls and Angels Sanguine among them. ‘Lysander,’ he ordered. ‘Be ready to counter-advance on the castellan’s flank. Keep the memorial from being surrounded.’

‘Yes, Chapter Master,’ said Lysander. ‘Other orders?’

Vladimir did not reply. Instead, he was looking past the Imperial Fists positions ahead of him, towards the steel horizon broken by the spires of hero-shrines and the fluttering banners of the mustering grounds.

The daemon army was advancing. The horizon seethed, a mass of iridescence bleeding into view like a bank of incandescent gas. The sound of its music washed over the Imperial Fists lines, an awful cacophony of a thousand shrieking voices. Shapes towered over the lines, winged masses surrounded by mountains of daemonic followers tumbling over one another like insects swarming from a hive.

‘The Emperor has granted you your battle,’ said Lysander. ‘Now is the time to give thanks.’

‘There will be opportunity for that when the victory is won,’ said Vladimir. ‘Kolgo! Get your Battle Sisters to the lines! We are attacked on all fronts!’

From the daemonic horde emerged another winged monster, this one bathed in light as if Kravamesh’s light was falling in a bright shaft onto its pale, haloed form. It was framed by feathered wings and its skin was so pale it seemed to burn, like ivory lit from within. Its perfect face projected its beauty and authority even as far as the Tactica. Even Vladimir found it difficult to tear his eyes away from it, as if it was a vision that originated inside his head and burned its way outwards.

‘Behold, your future!’ the monster bellowed, its voice tearing across the battlefield like a razored wind. ‘I am the end of empires! I am the woes of men! I am Abraxes!’

Sarpedon skidded across the blood-slicked surface, the Axe of Mercaeno smouldering in his hand.

Brother Nephael faced him. Nephael’s bolter magazine was empty, his last few shots fired wildly through a storm of his own battle-brothers, and he had no time to change the magazine. He snatched Brother Kalchis’s chainsword off the ground and swung it as Sarpedon came crashing towards him.

Sarpedon span on a front leg, out of the reach of the chainblade. He swung in low, axe hacking down at Nephael’s leg. Nephael didn’t have the speed of Sarpedon, and he didn’t have the strength. The axe caught Nephael below the knee and flung him head over heels. Sarpedon charged into Nephael as he fell, slamming the Flock member into the ground.

Sarpedon rolled Nephael over so he was face up, Sarpedon’s weight on the Soul Drinker’s chest. He ripped the chainsword from Nephael’s hand and threw it aside.

Sarpedon tore Nephael’s helmet off. The face revealed was more youthful than most Soul Drinkers, the hair cropped close and the eyes set into bruised slits.

‘Where is Iktinos?’ demanded Sarpedon.

‘He is the future,’ spat back Nephael.

‘Where is Iktinos?’ shouted Sarpedon, slamming the back of Nephael’s head into the ground to punctuate each word.

‘Go to Terra,’ said Nephael, ‘when our work is complete. You will find him kneeling at the foot of the Golden Throne.’

Nephael wrenched an arm free and drew his combat knife. Before he could drive it upwards Sarpedon had slithered off him and buried the Axe of Mercaeno in the Soul Drinker’s head, cleaving it in half down to the floor.

Sarpedon got back to his feet. Around him, the mock village was strewn with bodies and blood. He had killed them all.

The members of Iktinos’s Flock who had ambushed him and Salk had fallen either to Squad Salk’s guns or to Sarpedon himself. He had dived among them, these Space Marines who had once sworn to follow him to extinction, and he had cut them to pieces. Cracked skulls spilled red-black pools across the flakboard floor. Limbs torn off lay orphaned from their owners, who in turn lay where Sarpedon had speared them with talons or carved them open with the Axe of Mercaeno. Nephael had been the last of them alive but they had all been men that Sarpedon recognised.

That was not mere blood spattered up against the false chapel and ruins. It was the blood of Space Marine. It was the blood of brothers.

Sarpedon forced his pulse and breathing to slow. It had felt good, he was ashamed to realise, to finally come to grips with the enemy that had manipulated his Chapter towards execution. In the middle of the fight, he had felt a certainty that could only be born of the sure knowledge that the man facing you would kill you if you did not kill him first. Now, he was surrounded by dead brothers, and the doubts came back. He swallowed them down, demanded that he become calm.

Reinez had fled. The Crimson Fist could not be seen among the ruins. Sarpedon could not see any movement among Salk’s positions, either. Sarpedon ran to the ruin in which Salk had taken shelter, its flakboard now chewed up and splintered by bolter fire.

Salk lay on his back in a ruin of torn flakboard. Bolter impacts had broken through the ceramite of his chest and abdomen. He turned his head weakly, and Sarpedon saw that one side of his face was a pulpy ruin, shattered bone poking through a mass of blood that had already coagulated to a crystalline rind.

‘Brother,’ said Sarpedon. ‘Speak to me. Tell me that Salk has not fallen.’

‘Forgive me,’ sputtered Salk. ‘Failure is my sin.’

‘No, Salk. None has been more steadfast than you. There is no failure.’

‘Then this is certainly not victory. I had not thought it would be so bleak. I thought there would be some… heroism.’

Sarpedon leaned down close to Salk, unsure if the sergeant’s drifting eyes were able to focus on him at all. ‘I will kill Iktinos.’

‘I know you will. Not for me, Commander. Do what has to be done. For everyone.’

Sarpedon tried to pick up Salk, thinking perhaps he could get the fallen sergeant back to the archives where the other Soul Drinkers could tend to him. But he felt Salk getting lighter in his arms, as if the life was evaporating from him and leaving an empty body behind. Sarpedon saw the light going out in Salk’s eyes, something impossible to describe changing with infinite subtlety as the Soul Drinker, his friend, turned into just another body.

Sarpedon held Salk for a long moment. Some primitive emotion in the back of his head begged the Emperor to breathe life back into Salk. Salk had been as solid a squad leader as Sarpedon had ever commanded, before or after the First Chapter War. He had earned his laurels on Stratix Luminae and thereafter proved an unsung and dependable lynchpin of the Soul Drinkers’ most desperate moments.

Now, Salk was gone. That was the calibre of man Iktinos and Daenyathos were running down in their charge towards whatever mad future they had concocted.

Sarpedon placed Salk on the ground, and murmured an old prayer. It called upon the Emperor and anyone who served him to shepherd the fallen towards the End Times, to make sure his wargear was waiting for him when he lined up alongside the Emperor for the battle at the end of existence. The fake battleground was a poor burial place for anyone, let alone a Space Marine, but for Salk and the brethren of his squad it would have to do for now. Perhaps the Imperial Fists would give them a basic funeral, dying as they did fighting a mutual enemy.

Sarpedon looked behind him, to the bodies of the fallen Flock. The fact that they had been sent to ambush the Soul Drinkers at all meant Sarpedon was getting close. The Flock meant Iktinos, and Iktinos meant some measure of revenge.

Revenge. That was all Sarpedon had left now to fight for. But everything a Space Marine did was for revenge, and for Sarpedon, as he picked up the Axe of Mercaeno and headed towards the far side of the training deck, it was just enough.

Castellan Leucrontas jumped from cover and led the counter-charge.

It was an insane move against the insane enemy advancing on the Rynn’s World Memorial. A mad show of bravado, a hand played against an enemy where such crazed fury was the only way to shock them and drive them back.

Leucrontas was followed by more than fifty Imperial Fists of the Ninth Company. They vaulted over the carved stone tableaux of battle scenes from Rynn’s World, ducking at a run past the slabs inscribed with the names of the lost. They were framed by the sweeping wings of the stone amphitheatre, as if the battle was a grand stage play and this was the climactic scene.

The daemons surged forwards. A titanic being of rotting flesh, its body a vast bloated sac bulging with torn veins and maggoty slabs of muscle, was hauled forwards by their front ranks. It chortled and moaned as if the whole thing was an enormous joke that only it could understand, a mix of the idiotic and cunning on its wide lolling face. Hundreds of daemons pushed it from behind and a hundred more pulled it forwards on rusted chains embedded in its flesh.

‘I will not wait for the enemy to do as he will!’ yelled Leucrontas as he ran, his storm bolter out ready to fire. ‘If he is eager for our blood, let us onwards and drown him in it!’

Leucrontas opened fire. Fifty bolters echoed him, full-auto fire burning through magazines. The front rank of the daemons disappeared in a mass of foul torn flesh, torsos bursting like bags of blood and maggots, broken corpses trampled underfoot. A tide of black corrupted blood washed forwards around the Imperial Fists’ feet and flies descended, a black haze of them swirling as if controlled by a single ravenous mind.

The daemons were all about Leucrontas now. His storm bolter rattled in his hand, twin barrels glowing blue-hot, until the hammer fell on an empty chamber. Leucrontas dived into the torn mass of flesh around him, combat knife in one hand, bolt pistol in another, laying about him with chop and thrust even as he picked out leering one-eyed heads and put a bolter round into each he saw.

A rusted chain fell to the ground, dropped by the daemons hit by Leucrontas’s assault. The daemons fought to surround the castellan and he resembled nothing so much as a walking fortification standing against a sea of hungry foes, the crenellations of his armour holding off blades of corroded iron and lashing, filthy claws.

The Imperial Fists saved him. Charging on in his wake, they forced the daemons back. Some, with chainswords and combat shields, fought the ugliest sort of battle imaginable, hacking away at the daemonic mass and trusting in their wargear to protect them. Others formed a cordon to keep the daemons sweeping around and cutting off Leucrontas, kneeling to fire disciplined execution squad volleys into the press of enemies.

The greater daemon loomed overhead. Its bloated shadow fell over Leucrontas. The daemons were no longer hauling it forward and its faces creased in frustration. It reached futilely towards the Imperial Fists, flabby claws flapping at nothing. It forced a stumpy leg forwards as it began to propel its own enormous bulk towards the enemy.

It thundered forwards a step. It smiled now, eager to get to grips with the yellow-armoured figures embedded in the melee below.

Among the steps of the amphitheatre and the monumental sculptures, the rest of the Ninth appeared. Armed with the company’s heavy weapons, they picked out their targets under the orders of their sergeants who acted as spotters. They pointed out the slavering beasts being goaded towards the front line, the gibbering daemons bearing icons of the warp on their standards. But most of all they pointed out the greater daemon, the monster shambling one step at a time towards the castellan.

Lascannons and heavy bolters opened fire. The memorial’s grey stone was painted crimson by the pulses of las-fire. Massive-calibre fire hammered into corrupted flesh, and liquefied muscle and entrails flowed so thickly they were a viscous tide flooding around the legs of the battling Adeptus Astartes.

The greater daemon was battered by the weight of the fire. Its skin tore and split, and loops of intestines slithered out in a crimson-black mass. Tiny gibbering creatures spilled from its wounds, gambolling through the battle lines in their new-found freedom. Its lips parted and it bellowed, face creasing in pain, tiny red eyes narrowing further. Its vast throat yawed open, a red wet pit lined with teeth and inhabited by a long, thick tongue that lashed as if it was its own ravenous creature.

‘Now,’ yelled Leucrontas. ‘Onwards! Onwards!’

The greater daemon leaned forwards into the fire. Even as the flesh of its face was stripped away by heavy bolter blasts, it smiled at the yellow-armoured figure battling towards it. It reached down with a flabby arm, fingers spread to snatch up Leucrontas.

Leucrontas saw it coming. He rattled off half the magazine of his bolt pistol blasting off the greater daemon’s thumb. The hand crashed down onto him and his combat knife sliced through tendons. Another finger, as long as a Space Marine was tall, fell useless.

The remnants of the hand closed around the castellan. Leucrontas fought to push the fingers apart, but the greater daemon was stronger, and it was hungry.

Leucrontas fought on as he was picked up off the ground. Imperial Fists dived in around the greater daemon’s feet, hacking at its ankles to bring it down or carving into its titanic belly to cripple it. The greater daemon seemed not to notice them at all.

‘Hello, little one,’ the daemon said as it raised Leucrontas to its face. Its voice was a terrible rumble, the gurgling of its corrupted lungs as deep as an earthquake. ‘What a blessed day is this, my grandchildren! I have found a new plaything!’

Leucrontas’s reply was lost in the hungry howl that roared from the greater daemon as its jaws opened wide. The daemon dropped Leucrontas down its throat and swallowed with an awful wet sucking sound, like something vast being yanked out of a pool of sucking mud. The daemon laughed, a deep, guttural sound that shook the stones of the Rynn’s World memorial.

The Imperial Fists line bowed as the daemons surged forwards once more. Chainblades rose and fell, barely breaking the surface of the fleshy tide surrounding them, and the guns hammered an endless stream of shells and las-blasts into an equally unending mass of enemies. The greater daemon reached down and parted the daemonic sea in front of it, revealing a knot of Imperial Fists fighting back to back, covered in gore.

The greater daemon leered down at them, took in a great ragged breath, and regurgitated a torrent of bilious filth onto them. The crushed and dissolved remains of Leucrontas crashed over them, the acidic torrent flooding through the seals of their armour and digesting them even as they scrambled to get out of the foul sticky mass.

‘Fall back,’ came an order from one of the heavy weapons squads’ sergeants, taking up command in the wake of Leucrontas’s death. ‘We cannot hold.’

In the face of the appalling sight of the greater daemon’s assault, even Space Marines could do little but retreat and retain what order they could, forcing the daemon army to pay for the ground they took with volleys of bolter fire.

The message that reached Chapter Master Vladimir was fragmented and rushed, but its meaning was clear. The Rynn’s World Memorial had been lost. The first victory in the Battle of the Phalanx had gone to the Enemy.

The echoes of the battle reached through the Phalanx. It was not mere sound, although the explosions of heavy weapons fire and the thunder of the daemons’ advance shuddered for many decks around. It was a psychic echo, a cacophony of screaming and cackling that wormed into the back of the skull and rattled around as if trying to find a way out.

Abraxes, it cried. I am Abraxes.

The echo shuddered through the mess halls near the archive, where a rearguard of Imperial Fists and the surviving Iron Knights formed a cordon to keep the Soul Drinkers penned into the ruined library. Sergeant Prexus of the Imperial Fists had to keep the itch for battle in check, for among the Adeptus Astartes under his command he knew there burned the urge to get into the fight unfolding elsewhere.

‘Sergeant,’ came a vox from one of the battle-brothers keeping watch over the expanse of the mess hall. ‘I hear movement, beyond the doors. I think they are advancing.’

‘To arms, brothers,’ ordered Prexus. In a moment the Imperial Fists and Iron Knights were behind barricades of upturned furniture or crouched in the cover of doorways, bolters trained towards the double doors, chained shut, through which the Howling Griffons had advanced into the library just an hour ago.

The doors banged on their hinges, chains shuddering. A second blow wrenched one door away completely and a single Soul Drinker stepped through. He went bare-headed, his hair shaved into a single black strip along his scalp, his hands encased in lightning claws. But the power fields of the claws were not activated and the Soul Drinker was alone.

Prexus held up a hand, belaying any order to open fire.

‘I am Captain Luko of the Soul Drinkers,’ said the newcomer.

‘I know who you are,’ replied Prexus. ‘Are you here to surrender?’

‘No,’ said Luko. ‘I am here to kill Abraxes.’

Imperial Fists trigger fingers tightened. ‘Explain yourself,’ said Prexus.

‘Abraxes is the leader of the force that assails you. You know it and I know it. I have been in its unclean presence before, at the Battle of the Brokenback when Sarpedon banished it to the warp. Now it has returned when we are at our weakest to have its revenge, and kill as many Imperial Fists as it can into the bargain. We have heard your vox-traffic and seen the pict-feeds. We know that Abraxes has brought a daemonic legion onto the Phalanx and we want to fight it.’

‘I have my orders,’ replied Prexus. ‘You will go nowhere.’

‘Then we will go through you,’ said Luko. ‘I see you have perhaps forty Space Marines. I have a few more, but you are no doubt better equipped and you have no wounded among you. Do you think you can kill us all here? It would be little more than the cast of a die to decide between us, I think. And we are going to die here whether it be to Abraxes’s legion or your bolters, so we have nothing to lose. Will you still stand against us, sergeant?’

‘There will be no need for bloodshed here,’ came a voice from behind Prexus. It was one of the Iron Knights, who walked out of cover into the open.

‘Borasi!’ said Luko, his face breaking into a smile.

‘Captain,’ The two Adeptus Astartes approached and shook hands. ‘You will have to trust me that this time we meet, I shall break no bones of yours.’

‘I shall hold you to that, Sergeant,’ said Luko.

‘You know this warrior?’ demanded Prexus.

‘We met on Molikor,’ said Borasi. ‘We were compelled by circumstance to trade blows before we had our facts straightened out for us.’

‘I knew you were a poor choice for the rearguard,’ said Prexus. ‘You could not be trusted to treat the enemy as an enemy.’

‘I think there is another enemy on the Phalanx you should concern yourself with rather more,’ said Luko.

‘Let the Soul Drinkers fight Abraxes if they wish it,’ said Borasi. ‘I will take responsibility. Let them die facing its daemons. That is execution sure enough for anyone.’

‘I am in command here!’ barked Prexus. ‘You are under my authority, sergeant! You are here only at the sufferance of…’

The sudden burst of chatter over the Imperial Fists vox was loud and rapid enough to grab Prexus’s attention.

Chapter Master Vladimir’s voice cut through the chatter. ‘All forces of the ninth, fall back to the centre! All other forces, move up to the front! The Rynn’s World Memorial is lost and Castellan Leucrontas has fallen. Let them be avenged!’

‘You heard, sergeant,’ said Borasi. ‘You have your orders.’

‘The Imperial Fists will shoot you on sight,’ said Prexus. ‘It doesn’t matter if you want to join the fight or not. They will kill you as soon as they see you have left the archives.’

‘They can try,’ said Luko. ‘Although they may decide their ammunition is better spent elsewhere.’

‘Fall back!’ ordered Prexus. ‘Squad Makos, take the fore! Iron Knights, take the centre! Move out, Borasi. Do not follow us, Luko, or we shall see just how that close fight you spoke of turns out.’

Borasi saluted Luko as he returned to join the other Iron Knights. The Imperial Fists kept their guns trained on Luko as Prexus’s force withdrew from the mess hall, the chatter over their vox-channels continuing to illustrate the collapse of Leucrontas’s force and the approach of the bulk of the daemon army.

When the way was clear, Librarian Tyrendian and Sergeant Graevus emerged from the archives to join Luko.

‘It’s bad,’ said Tyrendian. ‘I can feel it. Realspace is screaming in my mind. It is Abraxes, I have no doubt about that, and banishment has given him strength through hate.’

‘What now, Captain?’ asked Graevus.

‘We have to avoid the Imperial Fists lines,’ replied Luko. ‘And the Howling Griffons, for that matter. We head for the memorial.’

‘I wondered,’ said Iktinos, ‘how long you would take. You disappoint me. I had thought a reckoning would have happened long before Selaaca, that you would have seen through what I and my fellow chaplains have been doing, and that some other thread of fate would be needed to bring you to Kravamesh. But it is as if you were an automaton, programmed to do as Daenyathos wrote six thousand years ago.’ He turned to face his opponent, the scar on his skull-faced helmet still smouldering. ‘As if you were following his instructions as precisely as I.’

Sarpedon had found Iktinos in the dorsal fighter bays, three decks up from the training decks. He had followed a Space Marine’s instinct, the best escape routes, the avenues of flight that allowed for the most cover and the best firing angles, and he had emerged in this cavernous place with its ranks of deep space fighter craft, to see Iktinos making his way across the seemingly endless concourse.

There were fifty metres between the two Soul Drinkers as they faced one another down a row of fighter craft. Each craft was enormous, bigger than the Thunderhawk Gunships of the Space Marines, with blunt-nosed, brutal shapes that made no concession to the aerodynamics irrelevant in the void. When the Phalanx went to war, these were the craft that swarmed around the vast ship like hornets, but with the enemy having invaded from within they were silent and ignored.

‘I have asked myself many times how we have come to this point,’ said Sarpedon. He fought to keep his voice level. ‘Now I would like to ask you.’

‘You presume that I know,’ said Iktinos. ‘Daenyathos knows. We follow. That was always enough for us.’

‘For you? The chaplains?’

‘Indeed. Ever since Daenyathos fell on the Talon of Mars, we have followed the teachings he handed down to us in secret. The rest of the Chapter, meanwhile, has followed the commands he laid out in the Catechisms Martial, encoded in his words so that you acted by them and yet remained ignorant of them.’

‘Tell me why we are here!’ snapped Sarpedon. ‘And I hear the name of Abraxes in my head. I hear his pride and his lust for revenge. What has brought him to the Phalanx? You?’

‘Daenyathos knew that one would rise from the warp at his behest. That it happens to be Abraxes is a testament to fate. He must have been lurking beneath the surface of the warp, hungry for any taste of the Soul Drinkers who bested him. Abraxes is just another pawn, Sarpedon, like you, like me.’

‘There are those who have tried to use my Chapter for their own ends before,’ said Sarpedon. His grip tightened on the Axe of Mercaeno. ‘Do you recall, Chaplain Iktinos, what happened to them?’

Iktinos drew the haft of the Soulspear from a holster at his waist. His thumb closed over an aperture in the alien metal, a micro-laser pulsed and drew blood through the ceramite of his gauntlet. The gene-lock activated and twin blades of purest, liquid black extended from either end of the haft. ‘I recall it very well, Sarpedon. I recall that they were amateurs. Daenyathos factored them in, as well. Nothing has occurred that he did not foresee and plan for in advance.’

‘Including your death?’ said Sarpedon. He crouched down a little on his haunches, the bundles of muscles in his legs bunching ready to pounce.

‘If that is what occurs,’ said Iktinos, no emotion in his voice, ‘then yes.’

Sarpedon circled to one side, talons clicking on the deck. He passed under the shadow cast by the nose of the closest fighter craft. Iktinos followed suit, no doubt gauging Sarpedon’s stance, weighing up everything he knew about the speed and fighting skills of his one-time Chapter Master.

The air hissed as molecules passed over the Soulspear’s blades and were sliced in two. The sound of distant battle reached the fighter deck as a faint rumble, a shuddering as if the Phalanx itself was tensing up. The blank eyes of the fighter craft cockpits seemed to stare, watching for the first move.

Iktinos moved first.

The chaplain sprinted forwards, Soulspear held back to strike. Sarpedon ducked to one side as Iktinos covered the ground in impossibly quick time, and swung out a spinning, dizzying strike with the Soulspear. The blades of blackness flickered around Sarpedon as he twisted and dropped to avoid them. A chunk of ceramite, sliced from his shoulder pad, thudded to the deck, and a fist-sized lump of chitin from his remaining back leg was cut away.

Sarpedon kicked out and caught Iktinos’s shin, He hooked the chaplain’s leg with a talon and tripped him. Iktinos rolled and came up fighting, one end of the Soulspear arcing up and the other slashing from right to left. Sarpedon, poised to slash down with the Axe of Mercaeno, had to jump back to avoid them.

‘What is left, Sarpedon?’ said Iktinos, the Soulspear held out in front of him like a barrier. ‘What is left when every effort you have made to be free has been at the behest of another? What remains of who you are?’

‘I am not a traitor,’ said Sarpedon. ‘That is more than you can say.’

‘Treachery is meaningless,’ replied Iktinos. ‘There are no sides to betray. There is survival and oblivion. Everything else is a lie.’

Sarpedon leapt up onto the side of the fighter craft behind him, and launched himself from above at Iktinos. Iktinos was not ready to be attacked from above and he fell to one knee, spinning the Soulspear in a figure-eight to ward Sarpedon off. Sarpedon landed heavily, let the momentum crouch him down to the deck, and cut beneath Iktinos’s guard. The Axe of Mercaeno carved through one of Iktinos’s knee guards, drawing blood, but the impact was not enough to discharge Sarpedon’s psychic power through the blade. Iktinos rolled away and Sarpedon charged on, Iktinos slashing this way and that, Sarpedon too quick to be hit.

But the Axe of Mercaeno was too unwieldy to get through Iktinos’s guard. The Soulspear’s twin blades, each a vortex field caged by some technology long-lost in the days of the Great Crusade, would slice through the axe as surely as through flesh or bone. Disarmed, Sarpedon would be as good as dead. He feinted and struck, slashed and wheeled, but Iktinos was just beyond his blade’s reach.

Iktinos had known this day would come. He knew how to fight with the Soulspear – he had gone over this fight Throne knew how many times in his head.

The two passed beneath the hull of the fighter craft. Sarpedon scuttled up the landing gear and clung to the craft’s underside, trusting in the novel angle of attack to keep Iktinos off-guard. Iktinos paused in his counter-attacks, Soulspear wavering, waiting for a blow from Sarpedon to parry.

‘Fate has a hold of you,’ said Iktinos. His voice still betrayed little emotion, as if he was a machine controlled from far away. ‘If you die, Daenyathos has planned for it. If you live, he has planned for that, too. If only you understood, Sarpedon, you would kneel down and accept a quick death for the blessing it is.’

‘And if only you understood, Iktinos, what it means to be Adeptus Astartes.’ Sarpedon hauled himself a couple of steps sideways, Iktinos mirroring his every movement. ‘The Soul Drinkers are nobody’s instrument. We are not here to be wielded and used as Daenyathos or anyone else pleases. He chose the wrong puppets for his plan.’

‘And yet,’ replied Iktinos cooly, ‘here you are, at the time and place of his choosing.’

‘What I shall do to him is not something that he would choose.’

Iktinos darted forward and slashed at the landing gear. The Soulspear sliced cleanly through the steel and hydraulic lines and the craft shifted downwards, all its front-half weight suddenly unsupported. Iktinos dived out of the way and Sarpedon did the same in the opposite direction, yelling with frustration as he scrambled to avoid being crushed by the fighter’s hull. The fighter thudded to the deck and rolled in Sarpedeon’s direction, forcing him to back up further. Iktinos was out of sight.

‘What does he want?’ shouted Sarpedon. ‘If his plan is already fated to succeed, then at least tell me that. For what purpose has he enslaved us?’

‘For the galaxy’s good,’ came the reply from above. Iktinos stepped into view atop the fallen fighter craft, standing just above the cockpit. ‘What is it that you have railed against for so long? The galaxy’s cruelty? The Imperium’s tyranny? Daenyathos saw it six thousand years before it ever occurred to you. He is not just going to batter his Chapter to pieces fighting against it. He is going to cure it.’

Sarpedon began to climb towards Iktinos, up the near-vertical curve of the fighter’s hull. ‘And how?’ he demanded.

‘What other cure is there for all mankind’s ills?’ said Iktinos. ‘Blood and death. Pain and fear. Only through this can the path of the human race be made straight.’

Sarpedon was level with Iktinos now, the two Soul Drinkers facing one another on top of the fallen fighter craft. From here Sarpedon could see the dozens of such craft ranged along the deck, the cylindrical fuel tanks and racks of missiles standing between them. ‘There is too much suffering,’ said Sarpedon. ‘There will be no more.’

‘Not for you,’ said Iktinos.

This time Sarpedon struck first, the Axe of Mercaeno flickering out too quickly for Iktinos to parry. A good blow from the Soulspear would slice the axe in two and make it useless, but Sarpedon was a fraction of a heartbeat too fast. The axe carved not into the ceramite of Iktinos’s armour, but into the hull of the fighter beneath his feet. The hull’s outer skin came apart under the axe’s blade and Iktinos’s foot was trapped. The chaplain fell backwards, unable to arrest his fall. Sarpedon ripped the axe out of the hull and brought it down, but Iktinos forced his head out of the way just before Sarpedon bisected it. The axe was buried again in the hull, the whole head embedded in the metal.

Sarpedon pinned Iktinos’s arm with one of his legs before the chaplain could raise the Soulspear. He bent down and grabbed Iktinos by both shoulder guards, hauled him up into the air, and hurled him down off the fighter’s hull with every scrap of strength he could gather.

Iktinos slammed down into the fuel tank standing beside the fighter. His impact half-flattened the cylinder of the tank and ruptured it. Thick reddish fuel spurted onto the deck.

Sudden pain flared in the leg with which Sarpedon had pinned Iktinos’s arm. He looked down to see the stump of the leg, sliced so cleanly through, a scalpel could have left no neater a wound. The leg itself was sliding slowly down the curve of the fighter’s hull. Iktinos had got off one last strike as he fell.

‘Close, my brother,’ called down Sarpedon. ‘But I can live without that leg. I still have five, and that’s more than I need.’

Sarpedon sprang down from the hull to the deck, just as Iktinos was extricating himself from the wreckage of the fuel tank. Fuel glistened all over him. ‘Your fate is decided,’ he said. ‘What happens here means nothing. Nothing.’

‘You betrayed us and you will die for it,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘That means enough for me.’

Sarpedon raised the Axe of Mercaeno and ran its blade along one of the stubby control surfaces of the fighter. The razor-sharp metal drew sparks, which fell white-hot into the rivulets of fuel creeping towards him from the ruptured fuel tank. The fuel caught light and flame rushed towards Iktinos.

The fuel tank bloomed in a tremendous billowing of blue-white flame. Sarpedon ducked behind the fighter to shield himself from the blast of heat. He caught a glimpse of Iktinos disappearing in the flame, the chaplain’s form seeming to dissolve in the heart of the fire.

The sound was a terrible roar, and the fighter shifted on the deck, pushing against Sarpedon as he crouched. The wave of heat hit and Sarpedon felt the chitin of his remaining legs blistering in it, the paint of his armour bubbling, the side of his unprotected face scalding.

The noise died down, replaced with the guttering of flame. Haphazard shadows were cast against the walls and ceiling of the hangar deck by the fire as it continued to burn. Sarpedon limped out from behind the fighter, his balance uncertain as he adjusted to moving with one fewer leg.

Iktinos, on fire from head to toe, dived out of the flaming wreckage. He crashed into Sarpedon who was unprepared, and fell to the deck under Iktinos’s weight. Flames licked at his face as he stared for a moment into the skull-mask of the chaplain’s helm, like the face of one of the Imperial Creed’s many damned, leering up from a lake of fire.

Mountain Eater

Andy Smillie

The beast emerged into the light and screamed. It was an ugly thing, a creature meant for dark places, for the deep earth, not the radiance of the sun. It screwed its eyes shut, smothering them with malformed claws and fracturing a bone in its left cheek in a vain attempt to kill the pain. Still the world was too bright. Cowed, it stumbled back into the caves where it had spent its miserable life. The soothing darkness returned and it uncovered its face. Crouching, it watched the wind whip icy wash past the threshold of the cave. The baleful sun reflected off the white landscape.

The beast turned its back on the outside and looked down at the mangled ogre carcasses strewn around the cavern. Licking its lips, it remembered raking open their bloated bellies, exposing the juicy innards within. It ripped a piece of cloth off the leg of the nearest corpse and tied the blood-soaked rag tightly around its head. In utter darkness the beast settled.

With the absence of pain, the flesh hunger returned. Its heart beat faster as the beast remembered the carnage, its flesh sickly wet, rimed in the ogre’s blood, the sour tang of gnoblar flesh wedged between its teeth. Its mouth twisted into a horrible parody of a smile. The worthless creature was little more than a morsel. Biting through its tiny ribcage was easy. Its head had cracked like an egg in the beast’s mouth, hot juices flooding its palate.

The wind growled into the cave, disturbing the beast’s remembrance. It carried the same message, the one it had whispered to the gorger for days. Somewhere, up in the mountain where the ice was thick, there was more meat, more blood.

It needed only to climb.

Darhur cupped a hand over his brow, squinting as he tried to see the cave mouth. Fierce crosswinds blustered around him, tossing a deluge of gritty snow into his face. He snarled. The hunter could just make out an entrance, a dark spot at the foot of the mountain. Darhur gauged the distance. It was maybe a few hundred paces away.

‘Snikkit…’ Darhur growled at an ageing gnoblar struggling through the snow in the hunter’s wake. The diminutive creature immediately shrank further into the bear pelt heaped around his tiny shoulders. The ogre snarled. ‘Take a look.’

Snikkit opened his mouth to protest, when a muscled feline beast idled up beside him and silently bared its massive incisors.

For a sabretusk, Golg’s persuasive powers were surprisingly restrained.

‘Yes boss, right away boss.’ Snikkit held up his hands in a vain effort to ward off Darhur’s beast, a mixture of cold and fear turning his green skin grey.

‘And take those other two with you,’ Darhur gestured to Brija and Najkit. He hadn’t survived his years in exile by being reckless. Gnoblars were little good if you couldn’t use them as bait. Watching the three ease their way towards the cavern, Darhur ran his leathern hand through Golg’s coat. ‘Don’t you worry. You can eat ’em later.’

Najkit kept his distance from the other gnoblars. If there was a gorger in the cave, he wasn’t getting eaten by it. Well, at least not before that idiot Brija. Najkit shook his head as Brija shuffled past him, mumbling gibberish as he tried to lick the snow off his knife.

Snikkit dug his hands into his pockets. Shiny things were hidden within that not even Darhur knew about. They were secrets, precious loot for Snikkit, and Snikkit alone. A pity they couldn’t carry a fire or a broth-filled cauldron. His stomach rumbled, reminding him he was hungry. Then he shivered. It was freezing too. He hated the mountains, and had been perfectly happy hunting idiot humans in the lowlands. Darhur must have angered the Great Maw when he killed Skarg Backbreaker and earned banishment from the tribe. Tyrant Grut Face Eater favoured his Ironguts above all, save his own bloated gut. Famously, the Tyrant had proclaimed that he would only eat one of his precious bodyguard if the cooking pots were empty and all else had been consumed. Snikkit cursed his luck, regretting the decision to throw in his lot with the hunter. A butcher’s pot would have been preferable to this slow freezing death. It irked him to be punished for Darhur’s pride. The wind rumbled around in the cave mouth and coughed back out, arresting Snikkit’s wallowing. Fishing his best shrapnel from his pocket, he loaded his favourite sling and approached the entrance. He shuffled inside, flanked by Brija and Najkit, eyes struggling to adjust after the glaring white of the outside.

‘Watcha sees?’ Najkit whispered.

‘Nuffin yet.’ Snikkit kept his eyes fixed on the gloom in front of him. Slowly, the features of the cave resolved through the darkness. Stalagmites colonised the ceiling, several larger ones protruding like talons above his head. The cavern walls were pitted and irregular, as though hewn from the rock of the mountain by giant fists. Snikkit trembled as he thought about the mighty storm giants that once roamed these benighted crags. He took a cautious few steps forwards… the gnoblar let out a grunt of pain as his head struck the ground.

He’d slipped on something.

‘You alive?’ Not waiting for a reply, Najkit threw his knife in Snikkit’s direction.

‘Wotch it!’ The grubby blade missed Snikkit’s scalp by inches and clattered next to him. ‘Sumthin’ on the floor.’ He sat up, rubbing his head and a small cut above his eye, which had already frozen closed. Snikkit ran his palm over the ground where he’d lost his footing. Peering through the darkness, he saw why. He followed the glint of the blood-ice to a pile of mangled bodies. He was already getting to his feet, backing away from the slaughter.

Ogres. Dead ogres. Lots of them.

‘We shud get da boss.’ Snikkit turned to Brija. He had no desire to be back out in the wind and urged the idiot to go instead. ‘I keep watch.’

Brija though, took no notice, engrossed in trying to prise a knife off his tongue.

Snikkit hoped he’d cut it off, at least then they’d have something to eat.

‘I go.’ Najkit was a particularly selfish creature, not given to helping anything or anyone but himself. Survival dictated leaving the warmth of the cave, one that a gorger had only recently made into its lair. Even if the monster was gone, there was bound to be more of them lurking somewhere nearby drawn to the smell of blood, and Najkit wasn’t about to be next on the menu.

The torch flickered in the darkness, casting strange shadows on the walls. Monstrous shapes appeared in the half light: the mastodon of Kruk’s Peak, Gutslaab the slave giant and the winged fiend of Harrowing Crags. Darhur had killed them all and devoured their strength. He held the torch aloft, relishing the warmth of its flames as he followed Najkit further into the cavern.

‘Hurry up,’ Darhur snarled, kicking Najkit in the back to make his point, ‘or it’s somethin’ sharper than my boot next time.’

Najkit muttered a curse under his breath, thinking about all the soft places he could stab Darhur with his knife when next the ogre hunter slept, and headed to where he’d left Snikkit and Brija. Unless, he thought, the gorger had returned and…

Najkit smiled. If the beast was feasting, Darhur could sneak up and kill it. He could rummage through what was left, the sinew and the grease, for Snikkit’s lovely coat. Just imagining this grim turn of events made Najkit feel warmer. But then again, what if…

Picking up the pace, the gnoblar drew his knife and prayed the others were already food.

‘Boss, boss. Over ’ere,’ Snikkit waved Darhur over and let out a sigh of relief. The ogre was a welcome sight. Snikkit was mostly sure that whatever dangers lurked in the mountains, Darhur would kill them before they could eat him.

Darhur ignored the creature and swung the torch low over three ogre corpses. The bodies were dumped one on top of the other, the way Darhur discarded the legs of cave pheasant when he’d picked clean the meat. They’d been dead a good while but the cold had slowed decomposition. A deep incision to their abdomens had killed them. Darhur bared his teeth in anger. The beast had savaged then bled them – they had all died in pain. The bodies were top heavy, their guts and thighs devoid of meat while the tougher gristle around their shoulders and arms had been left almost untouched. A blood trail ran further back into the cavern. There was no spatter on the walls and none of the damage to the stalagmites above that he’d have expected from a fight. The ogres hadn’t died here.

The hunter turned over the remains with his foot, stopping when he saw a cracked gut plate. It was badly mangled and studded with claw and teeth marks but the glyph was unmistakable – Wallcrusher Tribe. Darhur shivered, though not from cold, only too aware that he’d suffer the same fate should he fail to slay the beast. Grut Face Eater had no sympathy for weaklings who let a dirty gorger eat them. He’d sent Darhur after the gorger because it’d eaten something else, something that did matter. Darhur sifted more carefully through the viscera and was rewarded with a small fragment of green rock. It belonged to Grut’s personal gnoblar, Sneejit. The tyrant thought it turned Sneejit into some sort of lucky charm. Darhur thought it made the irritating little creature more so. He was almost sorry he was going to have to kill this beast.

‘Golg.’ Darhur bent down and picked up a handful of ragged cloth, holding it out for the sabretusk.

Golg padded over to the hunter. Burying its snout in the bloodied rags, it took a long sniff, filling its nostrils with the stench of sweat, piss and blood. Its heart quickened at the familiar scents. Sneering as it caught the faintest tang of unwashed gnoblar, Golg turned to Snikkit and growled.

‘Eh, boss…’ Panicked, Snikkit hid behind Brija. The idiot gnoblar was blissfully unaware of the drooling sabretusk, fretting at his flayed tongue. Excising the knife had cost him at least one layer of flesh.

‘Not now.’ Darhur cuffed Golg on the back of the head. Stooping, he pulled a large bone from the half-eaten feast. The hunter turned the femur over in his hand. It had been picked clean, scoured by a tongue so coarse that it had been left unnaturally smooth. Darhur grunted and tossed the bone to Golg. Catching it in his powerful jaws, the sabretusk devoured it, crunching and swallowing without pause.

Darhur snarled. His muscles bunched in anticipation of the fight to come. ‘Find the gorger.’

Weakness was not something Darhur was accustomed too. But this was a foe he could neither crush with a hammer nor skewer with a spear. It was the mountain. It was the earth, and the peaks of endless ice. He braced himself against a large boulder, drawing reassurance from its solidity. This high up, the air was whisker thin. Every breath came quick and shallow, his lungs struggling to feed oxygen to his massive frame. Darhur regarded the mountain. It soared past the limits of his vision, stabbing into the lifeless grey of the sky and disappearing into ugly cloud. He hoped the gorger hadn’t climbed much farther. Darhur had crested Gut Spire, the highest peak roamed by none but the thickest skinned mammoths. Not even the cantankerous mountain carrion circled overhead, their nests confined to lower aeries. Darhur wondered what could have driven the beast onwards into the unknown mists. Even layered in thick hides and pelts, the hunter’s skin was cracked and raw. A dozen times during the ascent, he’d been forced to stop and beat blood back into his aching muscles. He was amazed that the naked gorger, wiry and without a hardy gut, had not simply died from exposure. Truly, it was a resilient beast and worthy of his hammer. Golg growled from up ahead, urging his master to continue.

Darhur summoned the strength to bark at his companion, ‘Take us the right way this time.’

More than once he’d followed the sabretusk to a dead end, the gorger’s trail suddenly swallowed up by the wind and snow. The beast was seemingly a wraith, a figment of Darhur’s fevered imagination given form and allowed to wander the frozen passes of the desolate upper peaks. Even doubling back, they’d found it almost impossible to get their bearings again, as though the mountain itself was trying to waylay them. Passages that had been open were suddenly closed, crags had become denser and caves disappeared only to re-emerge elsewhere.

Darhur knew such things were impossible. Mountains were like the ogre tribes, permanent and unchanging except in the face of cast-iron might. The hunter crushed his suspicions, disregarding them as inane fantasies of his cold-numbed mind. Pulling the pelt tighter around his shoulders, he pushed his feet onwards through the thickening snow. The wind picked up, its blustering howl joined by the faint rumble of thunder from farther up the mountain. Darhur could barely see the ground beneath him anymore. One wrong step and he’d plummet over the edge into ignominious death and oblivion. A jag of lightning tore across the sky, opening a great wound that speared freezing hail down onto the hunter. Chunks of ice the size of fists battered his weary body.

‘Maw!’ Darhur cried out in defiance. A shard bit into his arm as he tried to shield his face from the sudden storm. Another cut his forehead, but the blood was like ice. It hammered into his broad back. It slashed his cheek and he roared, but the elements could not be silenced by his anger. It was as if the very mountain wanted to deny him his prey.

Numb with fatigue, Darhur’s legs gave out. Crawling on all fours, he eked out a few more feet before grinding to a halt. His resolve broken, the hunter lay in the snow, letting the relentless storm batter him. Slowly, he was swathed in a film of white, invisible against the winter landscape. He should have been angry, furious that he would die in frozen shame, but the fire in his belly had cooled with the long climb. The mountain had defeated him after all.

Pain stabbed through Darhur’s shoulder, stirring him from his sorrow. Then he was moving, jerking over the rough ground. Something was dragging him. The hunter’s instincts kicked in in an instant, his mind conjuring images of the fell beast that sought to haul him to its lair and make a meal of his flesh. Fumbling for his hammer, Darhur struggled to see beyond the snow that cascaded over his face. Straining, he glimpsed Golg. The sabretusk’s jaws were clamped around his shoulder. Wincing, Darhur swung his arm up and slapped an open palm against the sabretusk’s head. Growling, the beast let him go. The hunter got to his feet, swearing that he would wring the upstart feline’s neck. Withdrawing, Golg dropped onto his rear legs and waited until the ogre was almost within arm’s reach before skulking behind a bowed rock that concealed the path ahead. Darhur growled in annoyance, rolled his shoulder loose and strode after the impudent beast.

The hunter emerged onto a ledge that had been obscured from view. Thrashing winds tested his balance as he advanced to find Golg waiting for him in the lee of a cave. He let out a rasping laugh as he staggered into the cavern and slumped to the floor. Pulling his legs in against his chest, the hunter fought to rid the chill from his bones, massaging blood back into his arms. Golg dropped down next to him, bowing his head. Darhur considered striking the beast for its insolence but instead moved closer to the sabretusk, eager to share the heat from its pelt. The three gnoblars shivered in moments later, stood almost shoulder to shoulder in a huddle. Darhur snorted. He’d forgotten about them.

‘Make sure there’s nothin’ back there,’ Darhur snapped, the layer of frost riming his eye lids hindering his ability to see in the gloom of the cave.

Snikkit took a few cautious steps towards the back of the cavern, silently wondering how long it’d be before Darhur or Golg got hungry enough to eat him. Brija was beside him, muttering nonsense between chatters of his gnarled teeth.

‘I’s watch front,’ Najkit took a swig from his flask and sat down opposite Golg. He wanted to keep the sabretusk where he could see it.

Snikkit muttered a curse and turned his attention to the cave. He wasn’t afraid, just desperate to do as he was told and then get some sleep away from Brija. The ceiling was irregular, sloping down and then suddenly reaching up into the mountain. The ground was wet where the freezing cataracts from above had pooled. Snikkit sniffed the air – it was fresher than the choking grit of the blizzard, and there was something else…

‘’Ere, ’ere,’ Brija had wandered ahead and was pointing at what looked to Snikkit like a pile of rocks.

On closer inspection, the rocks turned out to be bones. Snikkit kicked a few of them, the way he’d seen Darhur kick a body to see if it was still breathing. ‘Ain’t nuffin but bones ’ere boss,’ he called to Darhur, ‘Sum animal musta crawled in an’ died.’

The hunter was only half listening, his exhausted body beginning to slip into the great sleep, his mind already dreaming.

In his delirium, Darhur saw Skarg, laughing as Golg lost an eye to the irongut’s upstart gnoblar. He relived the moment that his hammer had crashed through Skarg’s gutplate to pulverise his organs, his ironshod boot trampling the irongut’s head into the ice fields.

The hunter’s frostbitten lips twisted themselves into a grin.

Darhur’s joy was short lived, Tyrant Face Eater’s words of admonishment rising in his mind like a dark cloud. Thoughts of home filled the hunter’s head. He watched himself stand by his tribe’s roasting fires, the smell of fresh human wafting from the butcher’s pot, the cooking flames reflecting off the butcher’s outsized cleaver–

A shadow fell across Darhur’s face. His eyes opened to a hulking figure. It filled the mouth of the cave, a sliver of hardened ice in each clawed hand. Instinctively, Darhur drew his knife, its sickle blade deflecting a downward blow meant to sever his head. Before the attacker could strike again, Golg sprang into its chest, knocking it backwards. The hunter got to his feet, fighting to shake the malaise that had taken hold of him.

‘Yhetee!’

Darhur ignored Snikkit’s yelping. He was wrong anyway. The creature was too large to be a yhetee, its hide too dark. It was a greyback, a larger and far more dangerous foe. The beast was fully a head taller than Darhur, and underneath its layer of insulating hair lay tight bunches of sinew and dextrous muscle. The greyback recovered in an instant, issuing a malevolent roar from a mouth lined with dagger teeth. It caught Golg with a backhanded blow to the head as the sabretusk pressed his attack. Scolding himself for falling asleep in the beast’s lair, Darhur unhooked the hammer from his belt and attacked. The greyback blocked the hunter’s opening swing, its blade snapping against his hammer. Moving in, Darhur slipped inside its reach and shot his forehead into its face. He felt teeth splinter as his stony brow smashed apart its jaw. Moist fur that reeked of stale blood and piss filled his face. Darhur fought down the urge to gag and shouldered the beast against the cave wall.

Snikkit tried to load his sling, but his fingers were too cold. At least he tried, he thought, retreating to the far end of the cave where Brija sat, holding his knees against his chest, head bobbing nervously. Snikkit envied Najkit, who was still lying on the floor, blissfully unaware of the mortal danger he was in. The mixture of the yhetee piss he’d been drinking and the thin air had rendered the snide gnoblar unconscious.

Together, Darhur and Golg pinned the greyback against the wall. They moved for the kill, but the creature avoided them. Leaping to the ceiling, it used its claws for purchase and swung over their heads. Dropping behind Darhur, it raked its talons down his back. The hunter let out a snarl of pain and spun around, lashing out with his hammer. The beast stepped back out of range, as Darhur had expected it to. Continuing his turn, the ogre threw the blade from his other hand. The knife cut through the air and sliced into the greyback’s chest, burying itself up to the hilt. The beast roared, blood bubbling from its mouth, and rushed towards Darhur. Brushing aside the greyback’s desperate thrashing, the hunter clamped his hand around the knife’s handle. Bellowing a curse, he lifted the beast into the air and slammed it down into the ground.

Sweating, Darhur fixed the greyback in place with his foot and pulled his knife free. ‘The Great Maw provides.’

The hunter began carving up his prize. The greyback was no different from the dozens of rhinox and mountain bears Darhur had slain before. Though, unlike the great mammoth whose horn adorned Darhur’s gutplate, the beast would not take a week to pare. With practiced precision he cut away the pelt and sank his teeth into an artery before the blood could run cold. Piercing the larger artery on the beast’s leg, Darhur bathed in the warm blood as it spat onto his face and thawed his features. With his bare hands, he ripped off chunks of muscle and fat, gorging himself on chunks of raw meat. Blood and viscera spilling from his mouth, Darhur ripped off an arm and tossed it to Golg. The sabretusk wasted no time in consuming the flesh and devouring the sweet marrow from within the beast’s bones.

As the sun climbed in the sky and pushed needles of light through the dense cloud, Darhur was reinvigorated. The greyback’s meat had silenced the ache in his belly and lent new strength to his limbs. He’d fashioned an extra cloak from the beast’s hide, the layer of dried blood matting the pelt acting as further insulation against the cold, and used the thick tendons to bind it firmly around his shoulders. Filled with renewed purpose, the hunter continued up the mountain.

‘Maw!’ Darhur roared in frustration and slammed his forehead into the mountain. Blood burst across his brow, freezing instantly as icy winds scraped across his face. He glared at the wall of rock and ice in front of him.

‘I am Darhur Beastkiller of the Wallcrusher Tribe,’ Darhur beat his chest with clenched fists, dislodging the layer of snow that had settled over his clothing. ‘I higher up your peaks than any Wallcrusher ever go.’ He tugged at the heavy pelt around his shoulders, ‘I ate the greyback you sent to kill me.’ He gripped his hammer as tight as his cold-sapped fingers could muster, ‘I will not be beat by a pile of rock!’

Darhur attacked the rock face. Again and again he struck out, his pride rendering him proof against the shards of rock and ice that stabbed out at him as he smashed apart the snowdrift. In response, the mountain shuddered and threw a blanket of snow down upon his head. Darhur winced as the freezing shrapnel cascaded over his shoulders.

‘Master Darhur, boss?’ Snikkit had to shout to be heard over the winds.

‘What?’ Darhur spat, his gaze still locked on the wall of rock blocking his path.

‘Rhinox,’ Snikkit pointed a shaking finger towards a giant beast as it disappeared from view. ‘See boss, they not stuck. We follow?’ Snikkit nodded with such vigour that the snot-icicles that had formed around his nose snapped off.

Darhur stared at him for a moment. ‘Maybe I won’ts let Golg eats you after all.’ The hunter turned to the sabretusk, ‘Find a path.’

At his master’s command Golg took his paw off Najkit’s chest and bounded after the rhinoxen.

Darhur had been surprised to see a rhinox so high in the mountains, shocked to have encountered entire herds of them. Most were thin and weak from exposure, suffering from a climb they weren’t bred for. There had been others too, packs of skeletal sabretusks and ice cougars, clinging to life as they headed north. The crags were beset with the corpses of creatures that hadn’t the constitution to complete the climb. Darhur patted his gut. Even his burly frame was fading under the strenuous ascent. Without an answer to why the cavalcade of beasts weren’t attacking one another, the hunter had been careful to keep his distance, unwilling to count on it continuing.

The tide of beasts led Darhur up the mountain to the bottom of a sloping plateau. The storm had grown worse as he climbed. The hail was constant, punishing him for every step forward. Fierce crosswinds sped across the open plateau to topple him. Lightning stabbed from a fell sky and lit up the ground in arcing flashes that boiled the snow. On three sides the mountain had all but disappeared. To the front it continued to rise like a titanic monolith with no end, but to the sides it vanished, dropping away into the mist below. If he had believed his eyes and not the dizzying pain in his head, it would have been easy for Darhur to forget that he stood higher than the clouds his tribe followed to war. He watched as the beasts marched to the base of the mountain upon a mountain and stopped. They were not alone - hundreds more creatures had gathered there, heedless of the lightning that periodically reached down and cremated one of their number.

‘Poof,’ Brija clapped his hands together as another creature burst into flames.

The gorger appeared from nowhere barrelling into Darhur, knocking him to the ground. Caught off guard, the hunter lost his footing. He recovered quickly, dropping to one knee for balance and raising his crossbow. But the gorger was quicker, fed by momentum; it was upon Darhur before he could fire. It batted away his weapon and thundered its malformed skull into his jaw. Dazed, the ogre staggered backwards, slipping over on the ice and tumbling downhill towards the edge of the pass. Darhur struggled in vain to arrest his fall, hands trying scrabbling to find purchase. The ground lacked even basic vegetation and the wind had long since filed the rocks smooth. In desperation Darhur drew his knife and stabbed it into the mountainside. He felt the muscles in his shoulder tear as they battled gravity to arrest his fall. Grimacing, he punched the rock face with his free hand. The impact broke his knuckles but rewarded him with a hand hold.

Golg bared his fangs and leapt at the gorger, intent on ripping out its throat. The beast turned, lifting its left arm in defence. The sabretusk’s jaws closed around the limb, its over-sized incisors puncturing the bicep. The gorger let out a snarl of hate, turning with Golg’s momentum to avoid being bowled over. Golg’s grip loosened as the gorger’s fist connected with his ribs, splintering them. Sensing its foe weaken, the gorger threw its arm towards the edge of the ledge with enough force to wrench it from its socket. Gasping for breath, Golg was thrown free from the arm, his teeth raking its length and tearing off strips of flesh as he spun away over the edge.

Pain shot up the gorger’s leg, a rusted bear trap locked around its left foot and ankle.

‘Got ’im, got ’im.’ Brija was still grinning when the gorger’s other foot connected with his face, broke his nose and sent him skidding across the plain.

‘Nuffin big enuff for this. Ain’t nuffin.’ Seized by panic, Snikkit dug around in his makeshift pockets for something to fire at the gorger. ‘Wot Snikkit do? Wot boss do?’ Desperate, the gnoblar raised his arms in the air, spreading them wide to make himself as big as possible, and ran screaming at the gorger.

Bemused, the gorger caught the undersized warrior by the waist and yanked him into the air.

‘Don’t work, don’t work,’ Snikkit cried out as he struggled to free himself from the gorger’s clawed grip.

With the gorger distracted, and with the aid of several more handholds, Darhur pulled himself back onto the plateau. Scrabbling to his feet, he drew his knife. With a shout, the hunter charged the gorger, his heavy strides leaving deep furrows in the snow as his legs powered him towards his prey. The gorger tossed Snikkit aside, opened its mouth and roared. Every muscle on the creature’s swollen torso rippled to attention, veins threatening to burst through its pallid skin. Clawing at its chest with maddened vigour, the gorger ran at the ogre. They slammed into each other, two titans of sinew and hate. The gorger howled as the tusk protruding from Darhur’s gut plate impaled it, the sharpened ivory spearing through the beast’s abdomen and out through its back. The gorger bit down into Darhur’s neck, severing tendons and drinking deep of his blood. Darhur gritted his teeth and fought to stay conscious. He brought his arm up to grab the gorger’s head, but the beast was quicker, catching his arm in an unyielding grip and snapping it at the elbow. Darhur’s mouth dropped open as he cried silently in pain, his strength all but exhausted.

Najkit weighed up his options – run now or join the fight. If Darhur died, the gorger would likely eat him. There was a chance he could convince Brija to have another go at slaying the beast, which might just give him enough time to scamper. He cast his gaze at Brija, who was even now preparing to rush the gorger. No, that idiot would be dead far too soon to be of any use. Running, then, seemed like the best option. He looked around for Snikkit. The gnoblar was unconscious, his prized coat torn and smeared in blood. Najkit kicked a pile of snow in frustration – he didn’t want the coat now, he’d never get rid of Snikkit’s wretched stench. He turned to go and stopped. What if…?

He took a few steps and paused. What if somehow he managed to help the hunter kill the gorger? He might get a coat of his own. There were plenty of rhinoxen around, and Darhur could easily skin one for him. Resolved, Najkit took a swig of yhetee piss for luck and loaded his sling. Squinting through one eye, he tried to take aim through the blizzard. Snow washed into his face and filled his eye faster than he could blink it way. Giving up, he closed both eyes, muttered a prayer to the Great Maw that he didn’t hit Darhur, and fired. The shard of metal shot through the air and struck the gorger in the mouth.

Coughing blood through splintered teeth, the gorger released Darhur’s arm. Seeing his chance, the hunter shouldered the beast away, the horn from his gut plate inflicting more damage as he ripped it out of the gorger’s abdomen.

Najkit punched the air in triumph. Remembering himself, he looked around to make sure no one saw and went back to looking sullen.

The gorger swayed unsteadily on its feet, its warped physiology straining against numerous grievous injuries. Allowing the beast no respite, Darhur swung his hammer into its face and finished what Najkit started, the gorger’s teeth exploding through the air like a hail of bloodied ice slivers. The gorger stumbled, its claws clumsily raking the air as it blindly lashed out. Darhur sidestepped and brought his hammer up into the beast’s midsection, cracking its ribs before driving his forehead into its ruined face. The gorger crashed to the ground, defeated. Tearing the bear trap from the beast’s ankle, Darhur opened the trap’s metal jaws and thrust it over the gorger’s head. With a snap, the trap clamped shut, severing the head at the neck. The hunter watched for a moment as the headless body spasmed through its death throes, before kicking it off the slope.

‘Feast well,’ Darhur offered a prayer to Golg as he watched the gorger’s body fall through the mist to join the sabretusks in the crags below.

Snikkit picked himself up out of the snow, frantically patting himself down in search of injury. There was a long cut on his ribs where the gorger’s claws had gripped him, and numerous nicks and scraps on his exposed arms and face. Relieved to still be in one piece, the gnoblar shuffled over to Darhur. The hunter was in bad shape, one arm dangling lifelessly at his side.

‘What’s now boss?’ Snikkit asked, careful not to stand too close to the edge.

Darhur wasn’t listening, his attention fixed skyward.

Snikkit looked up. Stumbling backwards in shock, he hunched his back in an unconscious effort to be further from the sky. A fulgurant web hung in the air. Its arcing strands spat and crackled as incandescent fire erupted along their length. Converging, the sparking flames erupted, detonating the web in a thunderclap that hammered Snikkit to his knees. A string of tumultuous booming followed as the clouds wrenched apart.

‘Run!’ Darhur bellowed as bolts wreathed in flame tore down and struck the earth, sparking off the ice to form jets of steam.

There was no cover on the plateau. Darhur cursed his luck and headed for the nearest great mammoth, his tired legs fuelled by the desire to survive. Ducking under the beast’s enormous torso as another hail of fire stung the earth, the hunter caught his breath. The mammoth didn’t move, its four colossal legs set upon the ground. Darhur watched from the creature’s shadow as all around, the other animals stood immobile. Even as another of their number was ignited by the fire-lightning, they remained oblivious to the destruction raining down on them.

‘Boss…’ Snikkit ventured.

Darhur growled. He had no idea what to do next.

The ground growled back, a tremor shivering out from the base of the mountain across the plateau.

‘What now?’ Darhur snarled as the mountain flung him into the air, the earth cracking apart as fissures opened up all around him, stone and ice breaking and forming at random. Landing on his broken arm, the hunter cried out as pain fought to rob him of consciousness. The tremor was followed by a teeth-jarring noise, like the grinding of an ancient, rust-strewn cog. It scraped at Darhur’s ears and threatened to drive him mad. Lying on his back, deaf from the constant noise, Darhur stared in disbelief as this mountain upon a mountain shifted and reformed. Rocks bunched and unfolded, throwing off their blanket of snow in rumbling swathes. A tower of rock stepped forward, cracking the ground. Another column followed, bringing with them an immense torso, two arms unfolding from behind to fall in below hunched shoulders. Caves mouths dotted the… thing like a disease. The dark spots moved together, sliding to the summit of the mountain-thing to form a single dark lens. The thing opened its mouth, wisps of onyx fog drifting from its eye, and bellowed a heartless war cry to the world it would tear asunder.

Darhur stared up at the stony construct. ‘By the Great Maw,’ he murmured. Transfixed by its enormity, the hunter watched as the mountain-thing snatched up a great mammoth. The mammoth, which was large enough to carry most of Darhur’s tribe to war, looked insignificant in the giant’s gargantuan fist. The construct stuffed the mewling mammal into its mouth whole. The other animals gathered on the plateau seemed not to notice, remaining rooted to the spot, awaiting their turn to be eaten.

Darhur, however, was not on the menu, He swung his crossbow up and fired. Over two dozen strands of iron-sinew, wound tighter than a Marienburger’s purse, snapped forwards and propelled the iron bolt with enough force to punch it through layers of the finest dwarf plate mail. Darhur grinned in grim resignation as the bolt impacted harmlessly off the giant’s rock-skin. It seemed that the Great Maw had not finished testing him. Drawing his hammer, the hunter beat his fist against his chest twice and charged the stone colossus. Each step Darhur took fanned the fire in his belly. He was a raging inferno, the Great Maw’s instrument of destruction. He would–

The rock-construct raised its right foot and thundered it down into the ground. The mountain trembled beneath Darhur’s feet, throwing him to his back. The hunter landed hard on the rock and lay still, his shoulder and hip smashed by the impact.

Seeing Darhur cast aside like a human child, Snikkit stood immobile, gripped by fear and uncertainty. Najkit was running before Darhur hit the ground, moving as fast as his legs would take him to the far side of the plateau. For once, Snikkit agreed with his inebriated companion and sped off after him.

Brija rubbed the side of his face as he watched the two gnoblars run off. He had no idea what the big deal was. The stony giant was huge, bigger even than Tyrant Grut, but it was made of stone and probably very slow. Yes, judging by its size, it would be very slow indeed. Brija drew his knife and started towards it. All he needed to do was climb up to its head and stab it in the eye.

Najkit rounded a snow drift and stopped to catch his breath. He was about to set off again when a hand pulled on his shoulder.

‘Najk-’

Snikkit. Najkit knew that sniffling excuse for a gnoblar would try to kill him one day. He spun round and drew his knife, levelling the blade at the older gnoblar’s face.

‘Wait, wait,’ Snikkit held up his hands in protest. ‘Looks.’

Najkit slashed Snikkit’s cheek for good measure and then turned to see what the old-timer had been pointing at. Sighting a lone figure at the far end of the plateau, Najkit questioned his sanity and cursed the thin air. Wiping his eyes, he looked again. The man was still there. A purplish glow traced his outline, robes blowing against the direction of the wind. Curious, Najkit crouched low and shuffled forward. The figure was wearing a pelt. Najkit smiled – this was his chance, he’d slay the wandering fool and keep the pelt for himself. Whipping out his sling, Najkit unleashed a salvo of teeth and bone at his quarry. To his horror, the projectiles fell from the air a hand’s width in front of the man’s face. Diving for cover, Najkit narrowly avoided the hail of purple lightning his would-be prey sent lancing towards him. Maw be damned, he needed Darhur’s help.

Darhur rolled over, letting the blood that was filling his mouth run to the ground. Pushing himself up, he began to clamber to his feet, shaking his head in an effort to clear his senses.

‘Boss, boss. This way, this way,’ Snikkit said, tugging on Darhur’s pelt.

‘I will not run!’ Darhur pushed Snikkit away and looked around for a weapon. Finding nothing but a panting Najkit, he considered for a moment using the useless creature as a club.

‘No, no. Not run. Win yes. Come,’ Najkit motioned for Darhur to follow him.

‘There,’ Najkit pointed towards the hide-covered man.

Darhur glared at the figure, sizing him up. Judging by his puny build and weakling bone structure, he was clearly human. The hunter took a whiff of the air and snarled, the man stank of magics. Pulling a charm from under his furs and wrapping his fist around it for luck, Darhur offered a prayer to his tribe’s Slaughtermasters for protection. Reaching down to his gut plate he grabbed hold of the mammoth tusk and with regret, snapped it off.

‘By Maw, I will slay!’ Darhur swore his oath, hefting the tusk in his hand. It was poorly weighted, but would suffice. The sorcerer kept one hand aloft, working his enchantment, as Darhur ran towards him. Lowering the other one, the human unleashed a ball of flickering fire towards the ogre. Darhur kept an even stride as the fireball struck the ground in front of him, tossing splintered ice into his path. He powered on, striding through the sorcerer’s second blast as it struck him full in the chest, thankful for the warm glow of the charm against his skin as he emerged unscathed. Tendrils of dark lightning leapt from the sorcerer’s outstretched fingers and enveloped him. Darhur felt their icy touch against his skin. Like devious blades they sought a way to his innards. With blood seeping from his pores, Darhur struck – wrapping the charm around the tusk and throwing it at the sorcerer. End over end it spun, covering the distance in a heartbeat and smacking the human across the shoulders. Knocked to the ground, the sorcerer was unable to defend himself as Darhur locked a meaty hand around his neck. The ogre squeezed until the man’s eyes shot out from their sockets, the snap of the human’s neck inaudible over the wind. Darhur dropped the sorcerer to the ground, stamping on his face to be sure.

The rock-giant shuddered and bellowed an inhuman roar, a thousand birds screeching in disharmony. Its body trembled, mini avalanches of snow and rock dropping away from its torso at an increasing rate. The construct tried to turn, to back away but succeeded only in tearing off one of its legs. It stumbled and fell forward, catching itself on an outstretched hand. Turning its other massive palm upwards, it stared at the rocky appendage as it crumbled to pebbles and fell away. The rest of the titanic creature followed, breaking apart into rock-powder and dust.

Darhur stared at the packs of sabretusks, rhinoxen and worse that blocked his path back down the mountain. The creatures were milling around, confused, but a few of the larger ones seemed to have reverted to their baser instincts, sizing the others up, circling them with intent. Soon the rest would shake off whatever spell the sorcerer had placed them under and descend into a feeding frenzy. Darhur didn’t want to be there when that happened. The ogre’s heart sank. He could barely stand. His arm was broken badly, his bones brittle from the cold and his insides felt like they’d been trampled by a giant. Pulling his pelts tighter around his shoulders, Darhur did the only thing he could. He turned away and started off in the opposite direction. He had a head to deliver, and it would be a long walk back to the tribe. His tribe.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Neil Roberts

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ISBN 978-0-85787-990-5

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