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The Carrion Anthem - David Annandale

The Gods Demand - Josh Reynolds

The Inquisition - An Interview with Graham McNeill

Phalanx - Chapter Twelve - Ben Counter

Shadow Knight - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

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THE CARRION ANTHEM

David Annandale

He was thinking bitter thoughts about glory. He couldn’t help it. As he took his seat in the governor’s private box overlooking the stage, Corvus Parthamen was surrounded by glory that was not his. The luxury of the box, a riot of crimson leather and velvet laced with gold and platinum thread, was a tribute, in the form of excess, to the honour of Governor Elpidius. That didn’t trouble Corvus. The box represented a soft, false glory, a renown that came with the title, not the deeds or the man. Then there was the stage, to which all sight lines led. It was a prone monolith, carved from a single massive obsidian slab. It was an altar on which one could sacrifice gods, but instead it abased itself beneath the feet of the artist. It was stone magnificence, and tonight it paid tribute to Corvus’s brother. That didn’t trouble Corvus, either. He didn’t understand what Gurges did, but he recognized that his twin, at least, did work for his laurels. Art was a form of deed, Corvus supposed.

What bothered him was the walls. Windowless, rising two hundred metres to meet in the distant vault of the ceiling, they were draped with immense tapestries. These were hand-woven tributes to Imperial victories. Kieldar. The Planus Steppes. Ichar IV. On and on and on. Warriors of legend both ancient and new towered above Corvus. They were meant to inspire. They were there to draw the eye as the spirit soared, moved by the majesty of the tribute paid by the music. The arts in this monumental space – stone, image and sound – were supposed to entwine to the further glory of the Emperor and his legions. But lately, the current of worship had reversed. Now the tapestry colossi, frozen in their moments of triumphant battle, were also bowing before the glory of Gurges, and that was wrong. That was what made Corvus dig his fingers in hard enough to mar the leather of his armrests.

The governor’s wife, Lady Ahala, turned to him, her multiple necklaces rattling together. ‘It’s nice to see you, colonel,’ she said. ‘You must be so proud.’

Proud of what? he wanted to say. Proud of his homeworld’s contributions to the Imperial crusades? That was a joke. Ligeta was a joke. Of the hundred tapestries here in the Performance Hall of the Imperial Palace of Culture, not one portrayed a Ligetan hero. Deep in the Segmentum Pacificus, far from the front lines of any contest, Ligeta was untouched by war beyond the usual tithe of citizens bequeathed to the Imperial Guard. Many of its sons had fought and fallen on distant soil, but how many had distinguished themselves to the point that they might be remembered and celebrated? None.

Proud of what? Of his own war effort? That he commanded Ligeta’s defence regiment? That only made him part of the Ligetan joke. Officers who were posted back to their homeworlds developed reputations, especially when those homeworlds were pampered, decadent backwaters. The awful thing was that he couldn’t even ask himself what he’d done wrong. He knew the answer. Nothing. He’d done everything right. He’d made all the right friends, served under all the right officers, bowed and scraped in all the right places at all the right times. He had done his duty on the battlefield, too. No one could say otherwise. But there had been no desperate charges, no last-man-standing defences. The Ligetan regiments were called upon to maintain supply lines, garrison captured territory, and mop up the token resistance of those who were defeated, but hadn’t quite come to terms with the fact. They were not summoned when the need was urgent.

The injustice made him seethe. He knew his worth, and that of his fellows. They fought and died with the best, when given the chance. Not every mop-up had been routine. Not every territory had been easily pacified. Ligetans knew how to fight, and they had plenty to prove.

Only no one ever saw. No one thought to look, because everyone knew Ligeta’s reputation. It was the planet of the dilettante and the artist. The planet of the song.

Proud of that?

And yes, that was exactly what Ahala meant. Proud of the music, proud of the song. Proud of Gurges. Ligeta’s civilian population rejoiced in the planet’s reputation. They saw no shame or weakness in it. They used the same logic as Corvus’s superiors who thought they had rewarded his political loyalty by sending him home. Who wouldn’t want a pleasant command, far from the filth of a Chaos-infested hive world? Who wouldn’t want to be near Gurges Parthamen, maker not of song, but of The Song?

Yes, Corvus thought, Gurges had done a good thing there. Over a decade ago, now. The Song was a hymn to the glory of the Emperor. Hardly unusual. But Regeat, Imperator was rare. It was the product of the special alchemy that, every so often, fused formal magnificence with populist appeal. The tune was magisterial enough to be blasted from a Titan’s combat horn, simple enough to be whistled by the lowliest trooper, catchy enough that, once heard, it was never forgotten. It kept up morale on a thousand besieged worlds, and fired up the valour of millions of troops charging to the rescue. Corvus had every right, every duty to be proud of his brother’s accomplishment. It was a work of genius.

So he’d been told. He would have to be satisfied with the word of others. Corvus had amusia. He was as deaf to music as Gurges was attuned to it. His twin’s work left him cold. He heard a clearer melody line in the squealing of a greenskin pinned beneath a dreadnought’s feet.

To Lady Ahala, Corvus said, ‘I couldn’t be more proud.’

‘Do you know what he’s offering us tonight?’ Elpidius asked. He settled his soft bulk more comfortably.

‘I don’t.’

‘Really?’ Ahala sounded surprised. ‘But you’re his twin.’

‘We haven’t seen each other for the best part of a year.’

Elpidius frowned. ‘I didn’t think you’d been away.’

Corvus fought back a humiliated wince. ‘Gurges was the one off-planet,’ he said. Searching the stars for inspiration, or some other pampered nonsense. Corvus didn’t know and didn’t care.

Hanging from the vault of the hall were hundreds of glow-globes patterned into a celestial map of the Imperium. Now they faded, silencing the white noise of tens of thousands of conversations. Darkness embraced the audience, and only the stage was illuminated. From the wings came the choir. The singers wore black uniforms as razor-creased as any officer’s ceremonial garb. They marched in, until their hundreds filled the back half of the stage. They faced the audience. At first, Corvus thought they were wearing silver helmets, but then they reached up and pulled down the masks. Featureless, eyeless, the masks covered the top half of each man’s face.

‘How are they going to see him conduct?’ Elpidius wondered.

Ahala giggled with excitement. ‘That’s nothing,’ she whispered. She placed a confiding hand on Corvus’s arm. ‘I’ve heard that there haven’t been any rehearsals. Not even the choir knows what is going to be performed.’

Corvus blinked. ‘What?’

‘Isn’t it exciting?’ She turned back to the stage, happy and placid before the prospect of the impossible.

The light continued to fade until there was only a narrow beam front and centre, a bare pinprick on the frozen night of stone. The silence was as thick and heavy as the stage. It was broken by the solemn, slow clop of boot heels. His pace steady as a ritual, as if he were awed by his own arrival, Gurges Parthamen, Emperor’s bard and Ligeta’s favourite son, walked into the light. He wore the same black uniform as the musicians, but no mask. Instead…

‘What’s wrong with his face?’ Ahala asked.

Corvus leaned forward. Something cold scuttled through his gut. His twin’s face was his own: the same severe planes, narrow chin and grey eyes, even the same cropped black hair. But now Corvus stared at a warped mirror. Gurges was wearing an appliance that flashed like gold but, even from this distance, displayed the unforgiving angles and rigidity of iron. It circled his head like a laurel wreath. At his face, it extended needle-thin claws that pierced his eyelids, pinning them open. Gurges gazed at his audience with a manic, implacable stare that was equal parts absolute knowledge and terminal fanaticism. His eyes were as much prisoners as those of his choir, but where the singers saw nothing, he saw too much, and revelled in the punishment. His smile was a peeling back of lips. His skin was too thin, his skull too close to the surface. When he spoke, Corvus heard the hollow sound of wind over rusted pipes. Insects rustled at the frayed corners of reality.

‘Fellow Ligetans,’ Gurges began. ‘Before we begin, it would be positively heretical of me not to say something about the role of the patron of the arts. The life of a musician is a difficult one. Because we do not produce a tangible product, there are many who regard us as superfluous, a pointless luxury the Imperium could happily do without. This fact makes those who value us even more important. Patrons are the blessed few who know the artist really can make a difference.’

He paused for a moment. If he was expecting applause, the knowledge and ice in his rigid gaze stilled the audience. Unperturbed, he carried on. ‘I have, over the course of my musical life, been privileged to have worked with more than my share of generous, committed, sensitive patrons. It is thanks to them that my music has been heard at all.’ He lowered his head, as if overcome by modesty.

Corvus would have snorted at the conceit of the gesture, but he was too tense. He dreaded the words that might come from his brother’s rictus face.

Gurges looked up, and now his eyes seemed to glow with a light the colour of dust and ash. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the generous patron is to be cherished. But even more precious, even more miraculous, even more to be celebrated and glorified, is the patron who inspires. The patron who opens the door to new vistas of creation, and pushes the artist through. I stand before you as the servant of one such patron. I know that my humble tribute to the Emperor is held in high regard, but I can now see what a poor counterfeit of the truth that effort is. Tonight, so will you. I cannot tell you what my patron has unveiled for me. But I can show you.’

The composer’s last words slithered out over the hall like a death rattle. Gurges turned to face the choir. He raised his arms. The singers remained unmoving. The last light went out. A terrible, far-too-late certainty hit Corvus: he must stop this.

And then Gurges began to sing.

For almost a minute, Corvus felt relief. No daemon burst from his brother’s mouth. His pulse slowed. He had fallen for the theatrics of a first-rate showman, that was all. The song didn’t sound any different to him than any other of Gurges’s efforts. It was another succession of notes, each as meaningless as the next. Then he noticed that he was wrong. He wasn’t hearing a simple succession. Even his thick ears could tell that Gurges was singing two notes at once. Then three. Then four. The song became impossible. Somehow still singing, Gurges drew a breath, and though Corvus heard no real change in the music, the breath seemed to mark the end of the refrain.

It also marked the end of peace, because now the choir began to sing. To a man, they joined in, melding with Gurges’s voice. The song became a roar. The darkness began to withdraw as a glow spread across the stage. It seeped from the singers. It poured like radiation fog into the seating. It was a colour that made Corvus wince. It was a kind of green, if green could scream. It pulsed like taut flesh.

It grinned like Chaos.

Corvus leaped to his feet. So did the rest of the audience. For a crazy moment of hope, he thought of ordering the assembled people to fall upon the singers and silence them. But they weren’t rising, like him, in alarm. They were at one with the music, and they joined their voices to its glory, and their souls to its power. The roar became a wave. The glow filled the hall, and it showed Corvus nothing he wanted to see. Beside him, the governor and his wife stood motionless, their faces contorted with ecstasy. They sang as if the song were their birthright. They sang to bring down the sky. Their heads were thrown back, their jaws as wide as a snake’s, and their throats twitched and spasmed with the effort to produce inhuman chords. Corvus grabbed Elpidius by the shoulders and tried to shake him. The governor’s frame was rigid and grounded to the core of the Ligeta. Corvus might have been wrestling with a pillar. But the man wasn’t cold like stone. He was burning up. His eyes were glassy. Corvus checked his pulse. Its rhythm was violent, rapid, irregular. Corvus yanked his hands away. They felt slick with disease. Something that lived in the song scrabbled at his mind like fingernails on plastek, but couldn’t find a purchase.

He opened the flap of his shoulder holster and pulled out his laspistol. He leaned over the railing of the box, and sighted on his brother’s head. He felt no hesitation. He felt only necessity. He pulled the trigger.

Gurges fell, the top of his skull seared away. The song didn’t care. It roared on, its joy unabated. Corvus fired six more times, each shot dropping a member of the choir. He stopped. The song wasn’t a spell and it wasn’t a mechanism. It was a plague, and killing individual vectors was worse than useless. It stole precious time from action that might make a difference.

He ran from the box. In the vestibule, the ushers were now part of the choir, and the song pursued Corvus as he clattered down the marble steps to the mezzanine and thence to the ground floor. The foyer, as cavernous as the Performance Hall, led to the Great Gallery of Art. Its vaulted length stretched a full kilometre to the exit of the palace. Floor-to-ceiling stained glass mosaics of the primarchs gazed down on heroic bronzes. Warriors beyond counting trampled the Imperium’s enemies, smashing them into fragmented agony that sank into the pedestals. But the gallery was no longer a celebration of art and glory. It was a throat, and it howled the song after him. Though melody was a stranger to him, still he could feel the force of the music, intangible yet pushing him with the violence of a hurricane’s breath. The light was at his heels, flooding the throat with its mocking bile.

He burst from grand doorway onto the plaza. He stumbled to a halt, horrified.

The concert had been broadcast.

Palestrina, Ligeta’s capital and a city of thirty million, screamed. It convulsed.

The late-evening glow of the city was stained with the Chaos non-light. In the plaza, in the streets, in the windows of Palestrina’s delicate and coruscating towers, the people stood and sang their demise. The roads had become a nightmare of twisted, flaming wreckage as drivers, possessed by art, slammed into each other. Victims of collisions, not quite dead, sang instead of screaming their last. Everywhere, the choir chanted to the sky, and the sky answered with flame and thunder. To the west, between the towers, the horizon strobed and rumbled, and fireballs bloomed. He was looking at the spaceport, Corvus realized, and seeing the destruction caused by every landing and departing ship suddenly losing all guidance.

There was a deafening roar overhead, and a cargo transport came in low and mad. Its engines burning blue, it plowed into the side of a tower a few blocks away. The ship exploded, filling the sky with the light and sound of its death. Corvus ducked as shrapnel the size of meteors arced down, gouging impact craters into street and stone and flesh. The tower collapsed with lazy majesty, falling against its neighbours and spreading a domino celebration of destruction. Dust billowed up in a choking, racing cloud. It rushed over Corvus, hiding the sight of the dying city, but the chant went on.

He coughed, gagging as grit filled his throat and lungs. He staggered, but started moving again. Though visibility was down to a few metres, and his eyes watered and stung, he felt that he could see clearly again. It was as if, by veiling the death of the city from his gaze, the dust had broken a spell. Palestrina was lost, but that didn’t absolve him of his duty to the Emperor. Only his own death could do that. As long as he drew breath, his duty was to fight for Ligeta, and save what he could.

He had to find somewhere the song had not reached, find men who had not heard and been infected by the plague. Then he could mount a defence, perhaps even a counter-attack, even if that were nothing more than a scorched-earth purge. There would be glory in that. But first, a chance to regroup. First, a sanctuary. He had hopes that he knew where to go.

He felt his way around the grey limbo of the plaza, hand over his mouth, trying not to cough up his lungs. It took him the best part of an hour to reach the far side of the Palace of Culture. By that time, the worst of the dust had settled and the building’s intervening bulk further screened him. He could breathe again. His movements picked up speed and purpose. He needed a vehicle, one he could manoeuvre through the tangled chaos of the streets. Half a kilometre down from the plaza, he found what he wanted. A civilian was straddling his idling bike. He had been caught by the song just before pulling away. Corvus tried to push him off, but he was as rigid and locked down as the governor had been. Corvus shot him. As he hauled the corpse away from the bike, he told himself that the man had already been dead. If Corvus hadn’t granted him mercy, something else would have. A spreading fire. Falling debris. And if nothing violent happened, then…

Corvus stared at the singing pedestrians, and thought through the implications of what he was seeing. Nothing, he was sure, could free the victims once the song took hold. So they would stand where they were struck and sing, and do nothing else. They wouldn’t sleep. They wouldn’t eat. They wouldn’t drink. Corvus saw the end result, and he also saw the first glimmer of salvation. With a renewed sense of mission, he climbed on the bike and drove off.

It was an hour from dawn by the time he left the city behind. Beyond the hills of Palestrina, he picked up even more speed as he hit the parched mud flats. Once fertile, the land here had had its water table drained by the city’s thirst. At the horizon, the shadow of the Goreck Mesa blocked the stars. At the base of its bulk, he saw pinpricks of light. Those glimmers were his destination and his hope.

The ground rose again as he reached the base. He approached the main gate, and he heard no singing. Before him, the wall was an iron shield fifty metres high, a sloping, pleated curtain of strength. A giant aquila, a darker night on black, was engraved every ten metres along the wall’s two kilometre length. Beyond the wall, he heard the diesel of engines, the report of firing ranges, the march of boots. The sounds of discipline. Discipline that was visible from the moment he arrived. If the sentries were surprised to see him, dusty and exhausted, arriving on a civilian vehicle instead of in his staff car, they showed no sign. They saluted, sharp as machines, and opened the gate for him. He passed through into Fort Goreck and the promise of salvation.

On the other side of the wall was a zone free of art and music. A weight lifted from Corvus’s shoulders as he watched the pistoning, drumming rhythm of the military muscle. Strength perfected, and yet, by the Throne, it had been almost lost, too. A request had come the day before from Jeronim Tarrant, the base’s captain. Given the momentous, planet-wide event that was a new composition by Gurges Parthamen, would the colonel authorize a break in the drills, long enough for the men to sit down and listen to the vox-cast of the concert? Corvus had not just rejected the request out of hand, he had forbidden any form of reception and transmission of the performance. He wanted soldiers, he had informed Jeronim. If he wanted dilettantes, he could find plenty in the boxes of the Palace of Culture.

On his way to the concert, he had wondered about his motives in issuing that order. Jealousy? Was he really that petty? He knew now that he wasn’t, and that he’d been right. The purpose of a base such as this was to keep the Guard in a state of perpetual, instant readiness, because war might come from one second to the next.

As it had now.

He crossed the parade field, making for the squat command tower at the rear of the base, where it nestled against the basalt wall of the Mesa. He had barely dismounted the bike when Jeronim came pounding out of the tower. He was pale, borderline frantic, but remembered to salute. Discipline, Corvus thought. It had saved them so far. It would see them through to victory.

‘Sir,’ Jeronim said. ‘Do you know what’s going on? Are we under attack? We can’t get through to anyone.’

‘Yes, we are at war,’ Corvus answered. He strode briskly to the door. ‘No one in this base has been in contact with anyone outside it for the last ten hours?’

Jeronim shook his head. ‘No, sir. Nothing that makes sense. Anyone transmitting is just sending what sounds like music–’

Corvus cut him off. ‘You listened?’

‘Only a couple of seconds. When we found the nonsense everywhere, we shut down the sound. No one was sending anything coherent. Not even the Scythe of Judgement.’

So the Ligetan flagship had fallen. He wasn’t surprised, but Corvus discovered that he could still feel dismay. But the fact that the base had survived the transmissions told him something. The infection didn’t take hold right away. He remembered that the choir and the audience hadn’t responded until Gurges had completed a full refrain. The song’s message had to be complete, it seemed, before it could sink in. ‘What actions have you taken?’ he asked Jeronim as they headed up the staircase to the command centre.

‘We’ve been sending out requests for acknowledgement on all frequencies. I’ve placed the base on heightened alert. And since we haven’t been hearing from anyone, I sent out a distress call.’

‘Fine,’ Corvus said. For whatever good that call will do, he thought. By the time the message was received and aid arrived, weeks or months could have elapsed. By that time, the battle for the soul of Ligeta would have been won or lost. The singers would have starved to death, and either there would be someone left to pick up the pieces, or there wouldn’t be.

The communications officer looked up from the auspex as Corvus and Jeronim walked into the centre. ‘Colonel,’ he saluted. ‘A capital ship has just transitioned into our system.’

‘Really?’ That was fast. Improbably fast.

‘It’s hailing us,’ the master vox-operator announced.

Corvus lunged across the room and yanked the headphones from the operator’s skull. ‘All messages to be received as text only until further notice,’ he ordered. ‘No exceptions. Am I clear?’

The operator nodded.

‘Acknowledge them,’ Corvus went on. ‘Request identification.’

The soldier did so. Corvus moved to the plastek window and looked out over the base while he waited. There were five thousand men here. The position was elevated, easily defensible. He had the tools. He just had to work out how to fight.

‘Message received, colonel.’

Corvus turned to the vox-operator. His voice sounded all wrong, like that of a man who had suddenly been confronted with the futility of his existence. He was staring at the dataslate before him. His face was grey.

‘Read it,’ Corvus said, and braced himself.

‘Greetings, Imperials. This is the Terminus Est.’

Typhus entered the strategium as the ship emerged in the realspace of the Ligetan system.

‘Multiple contacts, lord,’ the bridge attendant reported.

Of course there were. The Imperium would hardly leave Ligeta without a defending fleet. Typhus moved his bulk towards the main oculus. They were already close enough to see the swarm of Imperial cruisers and defence satellites. ‘But how many are on attack trajectories?’ Typhus asked. He knew the answer, but he wanted the satisfaction of hearing it.

The officer looked twice at his hololithic display, as if he doubted the reports he was receiving. ‘None,’ he said after a moment.

‘And how many are targeting us?’

Another brief silence. ‘None.’

Typhus rumbled and buzzed his pleasure. The insects that were his parasites and his identity fluttered and scrabbled with excitement. His armour rippled with their movement. He allowed himself a moment to revel in the experience, in the glorious and terrible paradox of his existence. Disease was an endless source of awe in its marriage of death and unrestrained life. It was his delight to spread the gospel of this paradox, the lesson of decay. Before him, the oculus showed how well the lesson was being learned. ‘Bring us in close,’ he commanded.

‘At once, lord.’ The bridge attendant was obedient, but was a slow learner himself. He was still thinking in terms of a normal combat situation, never mind that an Imperial fleet’s lack of response to the appearance of a Chaos capital ship was far from normal. ‘We are acquiring targets,’ he reported.

‘No need, no need,’ Typhus said. ‘See for yourselves. All of you.’

His officers looked up, and Typhus had an audience for the spectacle he had arranged. As the Terminus Est closed in on the glowing green-and-brown globe of Ligeta, the enemy ships gathered size and definition. Their distress became clear, too. Some were drifting, nothing more now than iron tombs. Others had their engines running, but there was no order to their movements. The ships, Typhus knew, were performing the last commands their crews had given them, and there would be no others to come.

‘Hail the Imperials,’ he ordered. ‘Open all frequencies.’

The strategium was bathed in the music of disease. Across multiple channels came the same noise, a unified chaos of millions upon millions of throats singing in a single choir. The melody was a simple, sustained, multi-note chord of doom. It became the accompaniment to the view outside the Terminus, and now the movement of the fleet was the slow ballet of entropy and defeat. Typhus watched a two cruisers follow their unalterable routes until they collided. One exploded, its fireball the expanding bloom of a poisonous flower. The other plunged towards Ligeta’s atmosphere, bringing with it the terrible gift of its weapons payload and shattered reactor.

Typhus thought about its landfall, and his insects writhed in anticipation.

He also thought about the simplicity of the lesson, how pure it was, and how devastating its purity made it. Did the happenstance that had brought Gurges Parthamen into his grasp taint that purity, or was that flotsam of luck an essential piece of the composition’s beauty? The composer on a self-indulgent voyage, getting caught in a localised warp storm, winding up in a near-collision with the Terminus Est; how could those elements be anything other than absolute contingency? His triumph could so easily have never even been an idea. Then again, that man, his ambition that made him so easily corruptible, the confluence of events that granted Typhus this perfect inspiration: they were so improbable, they could not possibly be chance. They had been threaded together by destiny.

Flies howled through the strategium as Typhus tasted the paradox, and found it to his liking. Chaos and fate, one and the same.

Perhaps Gurges had thought so, too. He had put up no resistance to being infected with the new plague. Typhus was particularly proud of it. The parasitic warp worm laid its eggs in the bloodstream and attacked the brain. It spread itself from mind to mind by the transmission of its idea, and the idea travelled on a sound, a special sound, a song that was an incantation that thinned the walls between reality and the immaterium and taught itself to all who had ears to hear.

‘My lord, we are being hailed,’ said the attendant.

Typhus laughed, delighted, and the boils on the deck quivered in sympathy. ‘Send them our greeting,’ he ordered.

Now he had an enemy. Now he could fight.

Corvus rejected despair. He rejected the odds. There was an enemy, and duty demanded combat. There was nothing else.

Corvus stood at the reviewing stand on the parade grounds, and, speakers turning his voice into Fort Goreck’s voice, he addressed the assembled thousands. He explained the situation. He described the plague and its means of contagion. And he laid down the rules. One was paramount. ‘Music,’ he thundered, ‘is a disease. It will destroy us if it finds the smallest chink in our armour. We must be free of it, and guard against it. Anyone who so much as whistles will be executed on the spot.’ He felt enormous satisfaction as he gave that order. He didn’t worry about why.

Less than a day after his arrival, Typhus witnessed the apotheosis of his art. The entire planet was one voice. The anthem, the pestilence, the anthem that was pestilence, had become the sum total of existence on Ligeta. Its population lived for a single purpose. The purity was electrifying.

Or it would have been, but for the single flaw. There was that redoubt. He had thought it would succumb by itself, but it hadn’t. It was still sending out desperate pleas to whatever Imperials might hear. And though Typhus could amuse himself with the thought that this one pustule of order confirmed the beauty of corruption, he also knew the truth. Over the course of the next few days, the song would begin a ragged diminuendo as its singers died. If he didn’t act, his symphony would be incomplete, spoiled by one false note.

So it was time to act.

The attack came on the evening of the second day. Corvus was walking the parapet when he saw the sky darken. A deep, unending thunder began, and the clouds birthed a terrible rain. The drop-pods came first, plummeting with the finality of black judgement. They made landfall on the level ground a couple of kilometres from the base. They left streaks in the air, black, vertical contrails that didn’t dissipate. Instead, they grew wider, broke up into fragments, and began to whirl. Corvus ran to the nearest guard tower, grabbed a marksman’s sniper rifle and peered through its telescopic sight. He could see the movement in the writhing clouds more clearly. It looked like insects. Faintly, impossibly, weaving in and out of the thunder of the pods and the landing craft that now followed on, Corvus heard an insidious buzz.

The darkness flowed from the sky. It was the black of absence and grief, of putrefaction and despair, and of unnameable desire. Its touch infected the air of the landing zone, then rippled out towards the base. It was a different disease, one Corvus had no possible defence against. And though no tendrils of the black itself reached this far, Corvus felt something arrive over the wall. The quality of the evening light changed. It turned brittle and sour. He sensed something vital becoming too thin, and something wrong start to smile.

All around him, Fort Goreck’s warning klaxons sounded the call to arms. The din was enormous, and he was surprised and disturbed that he could hear the buzzing of the Chaos swarms at all. That told him how sick the real world was becoming, and how hard he would have to fight for it.

The drop-pods opened, their venomous petals falling back to disgorge the monsters within. Corvus had never felt comfortable around Space Marines, his Ligetan inferiority complex made exponentially worse by their superhuman power and perfection. But he would have given anything to have one beside him now as he saw the nightmare versions of them mustering in the near distance. Their armour had long since ceased to be simple ceramite. It was darkness that was iron, and iron that was disease. They assembled into rows and then stood motionless, weapons at ready. Only they weren’t entirely still. Their outlines writhed.

Landing craft poured out corrupted infantry in ever greater numbers. At length, the sky spat out a leviathan that looked to Corvus like a Goliath-class transport, only so distorted it seemed more like a terrible whale. Its hull was covered with symbols that tore at Corvus’s eyes with obscenities. Around it coiled things that might be tendrils, or they might be tentacles. Its loading bay opened like a maw, and it vomited hordes of troops and vehicles onto the blackening soil of Ligeta.

The legions of plague gathered before Corvus, and he knew there was no hope of fighting them.

But he would. Down to the last man. And though there might no chance of survival, there would, he now realized with a stir of joy, be the hope of glory in the heroic last stand.

Night fell, and the forces of the Terminus Est grew in numbers and strength. The host was now far larger than needed to storm Fort Goreck, walls or no, commanding heights or no. But the dark soldiers didn’t attack. They stood, massed and in the open. Once disembarked, they did nothing. Heavy artillery rumbled out of the transport and then stopped, barrels aimed at the sky, full of threat but silent. The rumble of arrivals stopped. A clammy quiet covered the land.

Corvus had returned to command centre. He could watch just as well from there, and the subaural buzzing was less noticeable on this side of the plastek.

‘What are they waiting for?’ Jeronim muttered.

The quiet was broken by the distant roar of engines. Corvus raised a pair of electro-binoculars. Three Rhinos were moving to the fore. There were rows of rectangular shapes on the top of the Rhinos. They were horned metal, molded into the shape of screaming daemons. Loudspeakers, Corvus realized.

Dirge Casters.

If the Rhinos broadcast their song, Fort Goreck would fall without a shot being fired.

Corvus slammed a fist against the alarm trigger. The klaxons whooped over the base. ‘Do not turn these off until I give the order,’ he told the officers. Still not loud enough, he thought. He turned to the master vox. He shoved the operator aside and flipped the switches for the public address system. He grabbed the mic and ran over to the speaker above the doorway to the command centre. He jammed the mic into the speaker. Feedback pierced his skull, mauled his hearing and sought to obliterate all thought. He gasped from the pain, and staggered under the weight of the sound.

The men around him were covering their ears and weaving around as if drunk. Corvus struggled against the blast of the sound and shook the officers. ‘Now!’ he screamed. ‘We attack now! Launch the Chimeras and take out those vehicles!’

He would have given his soul for a battery of battle cannons, so he could take out the Rhinos from within the safety of the noise shield he had just erected. But this would do. He didn’t think about how little he might gain in destroying a few speakers. He saw the chance to fight the opponent.

He saw the chance for glory.

He took charge of the squads that followed behind the Chimeras. He saw the pain of the men’s faces as the eternal feedback wore at them. He saw the effort it took them to focus on the simple task of readying their weapons. He understood, and hoped that they understood the necessity of his actions, and saw the heroism of their struggle for the Emperor. Gurges had been a fool, Corvus thought. What he did now was worthy of song.

The gates opened, and the Chimeras surged forward. The Rhinos had stopped halfway between their own forces and the wall, easily within the broadcast range of the Dirge Casters. The song was inaudible. Corvus felt his lips pull back in a snarl of triumph as he held his laspistol and chainsword high and led the charge. The courage of the Imperium burst from the confines of the wall. Corvus yelled as he pounded behind the clanking, roaring Chimera. The feedback whine faded as they left the base behind, but the vehicles had their own din, and Corvus still could hear no trace of the song.

Something spoke with the voice of ending. The sound was enormous, a deep, compound thunder. It was the Chaos artillery, all guns opening up simultaneously, firing a single, monumental barrage. The lower slope of Fort Gerick’s rise exploded, earth geysering skyward. A giant made of noise and air picked Corvus up and threw him. The world tumbled end over end, a hurricane of dirt and rocks and fire. He slammed into the ground and writhed, a pinned insect, as his flattened lungs fought to pull in a breath. When the air came, it was claws and gravel in his chest. His head rang like a struck bell.

When his eyes and his ears cleared, he saw the wreckage of the Chimeras and the rout of his charge. The vehicles had taken the worst of the hits, and were shattered, smoking ruins of twisted metal. Pieces of men were scattered over the slope: an arm still clutching a lasgun, a torso that ended at the lower jaw, organs without bodies, bodies without organs. But there were survivors, and as the enemy’s guns fell silent, the song washed over the field. Men picked themselves up, and froze as the refrain caught them. A minute after the barrage, Corvus was the only man left with a will of his own. He picked up his weapons and stumbled back up the slope towards the wall. As he ran, he thought he could hear laughter slither through the ranks of the Chaos force.

The gates opened just enough to let him back inside. The feedback blotted out the song, but wrapped itself around his brain like razor wire. He had lost his cap, and his uniform was in tatters. Still, he straightened his posture as he walked back through the stunned troops. Halfway across the grounds, a conscript confronted him. The man’s eyes were watering from the hours of mind-destroying feedback and his nose was bleeding. ‘Let us go,’ he pleaded. ‘Let us fight. We’ll resist as long as we can.’

Corvus pushed him back. ‘Are you mad?’ he shouted over the whine. ‘Do you know what would happen to you?’

The trooper nodded. ‘I was on the wall. I saw.’

‘Well then?’

‘They look happy when they sing. At least that death isn’t pointless torture.’

Corvus raised his pistol and shot the man through the eye. He turned in a full circle, glaring at his witnesses, making sure they understood the lesson. Then he stalked back to the command centre.

A night and a day of the endless electronic wail. Then another night of watching with nerves scraped raw. Corvus plugged his ears with cloth, but the feedback stabbed its way through the pathetic barrier. His jaw worked, his cheek muscles twitched, and he saw the same strain in the taut, clenched faces of his men. The Rhinos came no closer, and there were no other enemy troop movements. Fort Goreck was besieged by absolute stillness, and that would be enough.

The third day of the siege was a hell of sleeplessness and claustrophobic rage. Five Guardsmen attempted to desert. Corvus had them flogged, then shot.

As the sun set, Corvus could see the end coming. There would be no holding out. The shield he had erected was torture, and madness would tear the base apart. The only thing left was a final, glorious charge that would deny the enemy the kind of triumph that he clearly desired. But how to make that attack if the troops would succumb to the anthem before they even reached the enemy front lines?

Corvus covered his ears with his hands, trying to block the whine, trying to dampen it just enough so he could think. Silence would have been the greatest gift the Emperor could bestow upon him.

Instead, he was granted the next greatest: inspiration.

The medicae centre was on the ground floor of the command block. Corvus found the medic, and explained what was required. The man blanched and refused. Corvus ordered him to do as he said. Still the medic protested. Corvus put his laspistol to the man’s head, and that was convincing. Just.

The process took all night. At least, for the most part, the men didn’t resist being rendered deaf. Some seemed almost relieved to be free of the feedback whine. Most submitted to the procedure with slack faces and dead looks. The men had become creatures of stoic despair held together and animated by the habits of discipline. Corvus watched yet another patient, blood pouring from his ears, contort on a gurney. At least, he thought, he was giving the soldiers back their pride for the endgame.

There wasn’t time to inoculate the entire base contingent against the anthem, so Corvus settled on the best, most experienced squads. That would be enough. They were Imperial Guard, and they would give the traitor forces something to think about.

Morning came. Though one more enemy gunship had landed during the night, the enemy’s disposition otherwise remained unchanged. His eyes rough as sand from sleeplessness, Corvus inspected his assembled force. The soldiers looked like the walking dead, unworthy of the glory they were about to find. Well, he would give it to them anyway, and they could thank him in the Emperor’s light. He glanced at the rest of the troops. He would be abandoning them to their fate. He shrugged. They were doomed regardless, and at least he had enforced loyalty up to the last. He could go to his grave knowing that he had permitted no defection to Chaos.

He had done his duty.

He had earned his glory.

‘Open the gates,’ he roared, and wished he could hear the strength of his shout over the shriek of the feedback. The sentries couldn’t hear him either, but his gesture was clear, and the wall of Fort Goreck opened for the last time.

There are songs that have been written about the final charge of Colonel Corvus Parthamen. But they are not sung in the mess halls of the Imperial Guard, and they are not stirring battle hymns. They are mocking, obscene doggerel, and they are snarled, rather than sung, with venomous humour, in the corridors of dark ships that ply the warp like sharks. A few men of the Imperium do hear it, in their terminal moments, as their positions are overrun by the hordes of Chaos. They do not appreciate it any more than Corvus would have.

The charge was a rout. The men ran into las-fire and bolter shells. They were blown to pieces by cannon barrage. They were shredded by chainswords and pulped by armoured fists. Still, they made it further down the hill then even Corvus could have hoped. A coherent force actually hit the Chaos front lines and did some damage before being annihilated. Their action might have seemed like the glorious heroism of nothing-to-lose desperation. But the fact that not a single man took cover, not a one did anything but run straight ahead, weapon firing indiscriminately, revealed the truth: they were running to their deaths, and glad of the relief.

Corvus was the last. It took him a moment to notice that he was alone, what with the joy of battle and the ecstasy of being free of the whine. He was still running forward, running to his glory, but he wondered now why there didn’t seem to be any shots aimed at him. Or why the squad of Chaos Space Marines ahead parted to let him pass. He faltered, and then he saw who was waiting for him.

The monster bulked huge in what had once been Terminator armour, but was now a buzzing, festering exoskeleton. Flies swarmed from the funnels above his shoulders and the lesions in the corrupted ceramite. His single-horned helmet transformed the being’s final human traces into the purely daemonic. His grip on his giant scythe was relaxed.

Corvus saw just how powerful disease made flesh could be. He charged anyway, draining his laspistol, then pulling his chainsword. He swung at the Herald of Nurgle. Typhus whipped the Manreaper around. The movement was as rapid as it was casual and contemptuous. He hit Corvus with the shaft and shattered his hip. Corvus collapsed in the dirt. He bit down on his scream. Typhus loomed over him.

‘Kill me,’ Corvus spat. ‘But know that I fought you to the end. I have my own victory.’

Typhus made a sound that was the rumble of giant hives. Corvus realized he had just heard laughter. ‘Kill you?’ Typhus asked. His voice was deep. It was smooth as a deliquescent corpse. ‘I haven’t come to kill you. I have come to teach you my anthem.’

Through his pain, Corvus managed his own laugh. ‘I will never sing it.’

‘Really? But you have already. You believe you serve order and light, but, like your carrion emperor, everything you do blasts hope and rushes towards entropy. Look what you did to your men. You have served me well, my son. You and your brother, both.’

Corvus fought against the epiphany, but it burst over his consciousness with sickly green light. The truth took him, and infected him. He saw his actions, he saw their consequences, and he saw whose glory he had truly been serving. And as the pattern took shape for him, so did a sound. He heard the anthem, and he heard its music. There was melody there, and he was part of it. Surrender flooded his system, and the triumphant shape of Typhus filled his dying vision. Corvus’s jaw snapped open. His throat contorted with ecstatic agony, and he became one with Ligeta’s final choir.

THE GODS DEMAND

Josh Reynolds

The gates burst open with a thunderous groan and Hergig’s doom was sealed. For twenty-two days the capitol of Hochland had stood firm against its besiegers, but no more. The gates fell, ripped from their dwarf-forged hinges by the mutated strength of the immense porcine nightmares that had crashed into them. Squealing and snorting, the barn-sized monsters charged into the city, their claws striking sparks from cobbled streets which shuddered beneath their heavy tread, and behind them came the warherd of Gorthor the Beastlord.

Braying and howling, the beastmen poured into the city like a living tide of filth. Of shapes and hues that only a madman could conceive of, they hefted rust-riddled weapons and slammed them against crude shields daubed in the blood and fluids of defeated foes. The heads of orcs and men hung from their savage standards and they hurled themselves forward like a force of nature, hard and wild and unstoppable. As they entered the foregate square, however, the men of Hochland were waiting for them with lowered spears.

The first rank of beasts impaled themselves on the spears, weighing the weapons down enough for the ranks behind to pounce with undiminished vigour upon the spearmen. Soldiers died as the creatures fell upon them and the survivors were slowly pushed back along the square.

‘Hold! Hold position!’ Mikael Ludendorf, Elector of Hochland, bellowed as he brained a beastman with his Runefang, Goblin-Bane. Wrenching the strangely humming weapon loose of the pulped bovine skull, he grabbed the nearest soldier and shook the bloody sword beneath the man’s nose. ‘I said stay where you are, damn you!’

The spearman blanched and scrambled backwards, joining the rest of his unit as they retreated in ragged order in defiance of Ludendorf’s order. Ludendorf turned even as another gor bounded towards him on swift hooves, a crude polearm clutched in its claws. Shrieking like a dying horse, it sprang at him. The Elector Count bent out of the path of the weapon and chopped the creature near in half, dropping it to the blood-soaked ground, where it twitched pitifully for a moment before going stiff.

‘This is my city,’ he said, spitting on the body. ‘Mine!’ Then he turned to face the rest of the horde as it closed in. He shook his sword. ‘Mine!’ he yelled. Fully-armoured and covered in the blood of his enemies, as well as some of his own, Ludendorf stood between his retreating troops and the invaders and pointed at the closest of the approaching beastmen with his brain-encrusted sword. Like all Runefangs, it was not an elegant weapon, being instead the truest essence of a sword and in that it suited its wielder well. ‘Who’s first?’ he roared.

The beastmen hesitated. Snarls ripped across the ten-foot space between them, and spears jabbed the oppressive air. Red eyes glared at him as hooves pawed at the ground. The closest beast shifted awkwardly, coming closer then sidling back. For a moment, just a moment, the Elector held them at bay with only his own stubborn refusal to give ground.

He locked eyes with one of the larger gors. It had antlers a stag would have been proud of and teeth that were the envy of panthers everywhere. ‘You, you look like a likely brute. You first,’ he said eagerly.

The big beast charged towards him with a snort. It had an old sword, the tip long since sheared off, and it swung it with more enthusiasm than skill. Ludendorf’s battered shield came up, deflecting the blow, and he jabbed his sword into the creature’s protruding belly hard enough to pierce a kidney. It screamed and reared back, leaving itself open for his follow-through. His blow caught it in the throat and it toppled backwards, gagging.

Standing over his dying opponent, Ludendorf slammed his sword into the face of his shield, fighting to hide a wince. His arm had gone numb from the force of his opponent’s blow. At the sound, the beastmen shrank back. At the rear of the crowd, he heard the snarls of the chieftains as they tried to restore the wild momentum of moments before.

‘Hergig is mine!’ he roared. ‘This city – this province – is mine!’

‘No,’ a deep voice snarled. ‘It is Gorthor’s.’ A heavy shape shoved through the ranks of beasts, sending them sprawling as it moved to face Ludendorf. The Elector Count took an unconscious step back as the being known as the Beastlord stepped into view.

The creature made for an impressive sight. As big as any three of the largest members of his warherd, he was a creature of slab-like muscle and bloated girth, with hands like spades and hooves like anvils. Tattoos and intricate brands covered his hairy flesh, creating a pattern that seemed to shift with every movement. In one huge hand was the daemon-weapon known as Impaler – a spear with a head of black iron wrought with screaming sigils.

‘It is all Gorthor’s,’ the Beastlord said, eyes alight with un-beastlike intelligence. ‘Every scrap of ground, every chunk of stone; it is all mine. The gods have sworn it.’

‘Your gods, not mine, animal,’ Ludendorf spat. He motioned with his sword. ‘Come on then; dance with me, you overgrown mooncalf.’

Gorthor chuckled wetly, the sound echoing oddly from the creature’s malformed throat. ‘Why? You are dead, and Gorthor does not fight the dead.’

Ludendorf grimaced, his face twisting with hate. ‘I’m not dead. Not by a long shot.’ He cast a hot-eyed glare at the rabble behind Gorthor. ‘I’ll kill all of you. I’ll choke with your own blood. I’ll take your heads and mount them on my ramparts!’ Flecks of foam gathered at the corners of his mouth as he cursed them. Some of the creatures cringed at the raw fury in the man’s voice. Gorthor, however, was unimpressed.

The Beastlord struck the street with the butt of his spear. ‘What ramparts, man-chief? Do you mean these ramparts here?’ He swung his brawny arms out to indicate the walls behind him. ‘These ramparts are Gorthor’s!’ As if to emphasise his point, flocks of shrieking harpies landed on the walls and more spun lazily through the smoke-filled air, drawn by the scent of blood and slaughter. ‘This city belongs to the gods now, man-chief. We will raze it stone by stone and crush your skulls beneath our hooves as we dance in celebration.’ Gorthor made a fist. ‘Bow to the will of the gods, man-chief. Gorthor has no mercy, but they might.’

Ludendorf made an animal sound in his throat and he started forward, murder in his eyes. Gorthor bared sharp fangs and raised Impaler. Before either warrior could do much more, however, a rifle shot rang out, shattering the stillness of the square. Gorthor stumbled back, roaring in consternation as a bullet from a long-rifle kissed the skin on his snout, drawing a bead of blood to mark its wake. His warriors set up an enraged cacophony and stormed forward, swirling around Ludendorf as harpies sought out the hidden marksman and pulled him from his perch. The unfortunate man’s screams turned shrill as the winged beasts tore him apart and showered the square with his blood and the broken remains of his weapon. Below, the Elector Count hewed about him with Goblin-Bane, and after a few tense seconds, managed to cut his way free and stumble away from the beasts that had sought to pull him down.

Blood in his eyes, ears ringing with the sounds of steel on steel and the stamping and shrieking of his enemies, Ludendorf raised his sword. Beneath his feet, the street trembled as something heavy approached. ‘Rally to me! Up Hochland!’ he shouted. ‘Count’s Own, to me!’

‘Here, my Count,’ shouted a welcome voice. Ludendorf swiped at his eyes and saw the familiar figure of Aric Krumholtz, the Elector’s Hound, and Ludendorf’s cousin. He was a lean, lupine shape swathed in red and green livery and intricately engraved armour of the best manufacture. One gauntleted hand was clasped around the hilt of the Butcher’s Blade, the weapon that came with the title. It was a brutal thing, a sword forged in Sigmar’s time, or just before. There was no subtlety to the blade; it was meant to chop and tear flesh and little else. Behind him came the Count’s Own; the heavily armoured swordsmen, clad in half-plate and perfumed clothing, with the hard eyes of veteran soldiers. Each carried a two-handed sword that was worth more than the entirety of a common militia-man’s wage. The phalanx of Greatswords trotted forward and surrounded their Count even as the street began to shake beneath the hooves of the oncoming beastmen.

‘You took your time,’ Ludendorf said, chuckling harshly as Krumholtz stepped around him and blocked a blow that would have brought the Count to his knees. The Butcher’s Blade sang out, its saw-edged length gutting the bulge-bellied beastman and hurling it back into its fellows.

‘Couldn’t let you have all the fun, now could I, Mikael?’ Krumholtz said. ‘Besides, if you hadn’t decided to take them all on yourself, I wouldn’t have had to come pull your fat out of the fire.’

‘Rank impertinence,’ Ludendorf said, using Krumholtz’s half-cape to wipe the blood out of his face. ‘Remind me to execute you after this is over.’

‘You mean if we win?’ Krumholtz said, taking off a gor’s head with a looping cut. Even as it fell, more pressed forward, driven into the narrow street by their chieftains’ exhortations.

‘There’s no if. I’ll not be driven from my city by a band of animals. Not after all this,’ Ludendorf growled. ‘Form up you lazy bastards!’ he continued, glaring at the Greatswords, who were pressed close and finding it hard to wield their weapons in the packed confines of the melee. ‘Prepare to scythe this city clean of those cloven-footed barbarians…’

‘You should fall back, Mikael,’ Krumholtz said. ‘Get to safety. We’ll handle this.’

‘Fall back? You mean retreat?’ Ludendorf grimaced. ‘No. Ludendorfs don’t retreat.’

‘Then make a strategic advance to the rear,’ Krumholtz said tersely. He grunted as a crude axe shaved a ribbon of merit from his cuirass. Ludendorf grabbed his cousin’s sleeve and yanked him back, impaling his attacker on Goblin-Bane.

‘Maybe you should be the one to go, eh?’ Ludendorf said, yanking his weapon free. ‘Not me though. I want that beast’s head on my wall!’ he growled, gesturing towards where he’d last seen Gorthor. ‘I want his horns for drinking cups and his teeth to adorn my daughter’s necklace! And Sigmar curse me if I won’t have them!’ He started forward, but stopped dead as the street’s trembling became a shudder. ‘What in the name of–’

The Minotaurs tore through the ranks of beastmen, scattering their smaller cousins or trampling them underfoot entirely as they hacked at friends, foes and even the city itself with their great axes. They were massive brutes; each one was a veritable ambulatory hill of muscle, hair, fangs and horns.

Ludendorf’s heart went cold. ‘Minotaurs,’ he hissed.

‘Sigmar preserve us,’ Krumholtz grunted. ‘And Myrmidia defend us. We need to fall back. Get to the guns!’

The Greatswords began to retreat.

‘Stay where you are!’ Ludendorf barked, glaring around him, holding the men in place. ‘We hold them here. Form up!’

‘Mikael–!’ Krumholtz began, but there was no time to argue. The Minotaurs drew closer and their snorts seemed to rattle the teeth in every soldier’s head as the Count’s Own stepped forward to meet the stampede, led by their Elector.

A stone-headed maul thudded down, showering the Count with chips of cobble and he stumbled aside, slicing his sword into a titan elbow. Malformed bone snapped and the Minotaur bellowed as it turned. It reached for him with its good hand, leaving itself open for the swords of his men. The creature staggered and swatted at its attackers as Ludendorf swept his sword across the backs of its jointed ankles. His arms shuddered in their sockets, but more bones snapped and popped and the creature fell face down as the Runefang chewed through its twisted flesh. Greatswords rose and fell and the monster’s groans ceased. Ludendorf spun away and slammed his shield into the clacking beak of a bird-headed beastman, knocking it head over heels.

‘That’s one down,’ he said to Krumholtz. The Elector’s Hound, his face painted with blood, shook his head and pointed.

‘And there are far too many to go, Mikael!’ Krumholtz said. Two more of the Minotaurs waded through the Greatswords, slapping the life out of any man who got in their path. One lowered its head and charged. Krumholtz shouldered Ludendorf aside and brought the Butcher’s Blade down between the curling horns, dropping the beast in its tracks. But even as he hauled at the weapon, trying to yank it loose, the second Minotaur was on him.

Ludendorf’s sword interposed itself between his advisor’s neck and the axe. The Elector grunted as his arms shivered in their sockets and went numb. The Minotaur roared and forced him down to his knees. Hot drool dripped from its maw and spilled across his face, burning him. Ludendorf whipped his sword aside and skidded between the creature’s legs as it bent forwards, off-balance. Rising to his feet, he opened its back to the spine and the monster slumped with a strangled shriek. Ludendorf grabbed one of its thrashing horns and twisted, forcing the wounded beast to expose its hairy throat. Arms screaming with strain, he cut the Minotaur’s throat and stepped over it, shivering with fatigue. ‘Aric?’

‘I’m fine. Fall back,’ Krumholtz snarled, lunging past the body of the monster and shoving Ludendorf back. ‘Fall back now!’

‘How dare you–’ Ludendorf began, until he caught sight of what lay beyond his cousin. The Count’s Own were down and dead to a man, and the warherd was advancing over them. Rage thrummed through him and he made to face the beasts, but Krumholtz slapped him.

‘No! Move, Mikael. They died because you didn’t know when to run! Go!’ Hurrying him along, Krumholtz forced the Elector to turn and stagger away, out of the blood-soaked court. Behind them came the hunting cries of Chaos hounds and the louder, more terrible cries of the monsters who had cracked the gate. The air above the city was filled with greasy smoke and shrieking harpies.

Stones hurtled from the rooftops as the citizens of Hergig joined the fray and more than one beast dropped to the street, skull cracked open. But not enough. A grotesque hound sprang at the Elector as he stumbled and landed on his back. ‘Mikael!’ Krumholtz shouted, grabbing the animal’s greasy fur.

‘Get off of me!’ Ludendorf howled, shrugging the growling beast off and grabbing its throat. Face going red with effort, he strangled the Chaos hound as it kicked and thrashed, whining. More hounds closed in and Krumholtz killed two, putting the rest of the pack to flight. Ludendorf hurled the body of the dog at a wall and screamed in frustration as the scent of smoke reached him. ‘They’re burning my city! Damn it, Aric, let me–’

‘Get yourself killed? No! Go, you bloody-minded fool!’ Krumholtz snapped. ‘Just up this street. Let’s– Look out!’

The street groaned as one of the barn-sized monsters charged towards them, its horns and spikes cutting vast trenches in the walls and buildings that rose to either side of the street. Krumholtz grabbed Ludendorf and threw him to the ground as artillery pieces – field cannon and organ guns – entrenched in the surrounding townhouses, coaching houses and stables at the other end of the street opened up. Men in Hochland’s livery reached out to grab the stumbling Count and pulled he and his cousin out of the line of fire. The bounding monster fell, its brains turned to sludge by a cannon ball. Its massive body slid down the street, blocking it and preventing the beastmen that had followed it from reaching their prey.

Ludendorf turned and pulled himself free of his men’s hands. ‘Fire again! Pulverise them!’ he spat. ‘We can’t let them remain within our walls!’ He turned, wild-eyed. ‘Form up! Spearmen to the van! We–’

As the Elector roared out orders, Krumholtz caught him by his fancy gorget and drove a knee up into his groin. Ludendorf sagged, wheezing. ‘Stop it,’ Krumholtz said. He turned. ‘Bosche! Heinreich! Muller! We need to pull back towards the palace. Begin fortifying this street. We’ll block the streets where they’re the most narrow and form a choke point. Organise a spear-wall and bowmen to defend the builders… I want a proper Tilean hedgehog by Myrmidia’s brass bits and I want it now! Bors! Commandeer some wagons from the palace walls! They’ll work well enough to begin ferrying survivors to safety!’

‘You… you hit me,’ Ludendorf wheezed, getting to his feet.

Krumholtz looked at him. ‘For your own good. We’re falling back.’

‘No, we can beat them,’ Ludendorf said. ‘We can drive them out!’

‘They outnumber us fifteen to one, cousin,’ Krumholtz said tiredly. ‘They’ve taken the walls and they don’t care about losses. Look around you,’ he continued. Ludendorf did, albeit reluctantly. The battle-madness that had clouded his eyes faded and he saw the exhaustion and fear that was on every face, and the loose way that weapons were clutched. Hochland had fought hard, but his army was on its last legs. He looked down at the Runefang in his hand and felt the trembling weakness in his own limbs.

Ludendorf’s mouth writhed as a single bitter word escaped his lips. ‘Retreat,’ he said hoarsely.

Gorthor the Beastlord stood in his chariot and watched as his warriors streamed back towards the walls and away from the inner city, battered and bloodied. He snorted in satisfaction. They had taken the outer defences of the town as well as a number of prisoners, as he’d hoped, despite a surprising amount of continued resistance. Even better, he had divested himself of his more fractious followers in the process.

In one stroke he had weakened both the enemy to the front and the enemy within. He knew that he was not alone in recognising that fact. Surly chieftains glared at him from their own chariots. He had insisted that they stay behind, not wanting to waste their lives, merely those of their warriors. He grinned, black lips peeling back from yellow fangs. The expression caused a brief spurt of pain to cross his snout where the bullet had touched him. Annoyed, he rubbed the still drizzling wound. His spear quivered in sympathy and he glanced at it.

The blade of Impaler was sunken haft-deep into a bucket of blood that sat beside him on his chariot. It was crafted out of a giant’s skull and every so often it trembled like a sleeping predator, twitching in its dreams of savagery and mutilation. The blade craved blood and it was whispered by many among the herd that if that craving was not quenched, that Impaler would squirm through the dirt like a horrible serpent, seeking what prey it could find among the warherd. He drew the spear from its rest and ran a thumb along the blade. It pulsed in his grip, eager to taste the blood of the man called Ludendorf, even as was Gorthor himself.

Ludendorf. He sounded out the confusing syllables in his head, relishing their taste. A worthy enough foe, as men went. The man would have made a good beast, had he been born under different stars. Gorthor shook the thought aside. ‘The city is ours,’ he grunted, looking at Wormwhite, where the albino shaman was crouched with the other wonder-workers. They huddled and muttered and hissed. Wormwhite, as their spokesman, was shoved forward and he hopped towards Gorthor. Like all the rest, he was more a prisoner than an advisor, kept close at hand to interpret the dark dreams which sometimes blistered Gorthor’s consciousness with painful visions of the future.

‘No! Walls still stand,’ Wormwhite whined. ‘Gods say attack again!’ He gestured towards the sloping walls that surrounded the inner keep of the city, where the Elector’s palace sat.

‘Do they?’ Gorthor rumbled, leaning on Impaler. The spear squirmed in his grip, hungry for death. ‘Why do they want me to do this?’ he said, fixing a baleful gaze on the shaman. Wormwhite cringed. ‘What is there that is not here? Death? Gorthor has built cairns of skulls along the length of the man-track!’ He leaned over the edge of his chariot, his teeth clicking together in a frustrated snap at the air. His nostrils flared at the scent of blood and fear. ‘They are trapped! Why waste warriors?’

‘Gods demand!’ Wormwhite said, slinking back. The others murmured encouragement. So too did the chieftains. Gorthor growled in frustration.

‘Gods demand,’ he grunted, and shook his head. Black claws scratched at his wounded snout as he considered his options. The gods demanded much… at times, too much.

Visions wracked him suddenly, causing his body to shudder and his jaws to snap convulsively. When the warp was upon him, it was all he could do to keep his body from ripping itself apart. Every hair tingled and stood out from his body like a razor-spike as Wormwhite and the others gathered close, their nostrils quivering as they scented the strange magics spilling off of him. He longed to drive them back, scavengers that they were, but he could only hunch forward and yelp in agony as the images ripped across his mind’s eye. Ghost-memories of the future, where blighted trees of copper and meat burst through undulating, moaning soil and pale things danced continuously to the mad piping of chaotic minstrels. That was the future that Gorthor was charged with bringing to fruition, and though he saw no sign of his people there, he was determined to fulfil that destiny all the same.

Breathing heavily as the warp-spasm passed, he leaned on his spear. Amidst the screaming cacophony of the vision he had seen flashes of beasts wandering the ruins of Hergig drunk and careless, and of an avalanche of brass and steel horses falling upon them. Was that what the gods wanted? For his mighty herd-of-herds to be cut to pieces as it squatted drunk in the ruins?

His scouts had reported that forces were mobilising to the north and south. The Drakwald was being razed and while his army yet swelled, it was a tenuous thing holding it together. His people had no taste for prolonged conflict of this kind, and more and more of them would give in to the urge to attack the so-far so-solid walls of the Elector’s palace, or, even worse, they would slink away, glutted on the loot of the city.

Wolfenburg had been easy compared to this. Taken by surprise, the defenders had fallen back from the main gate and from there they’d slowly lost the town. With nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, they’d been easy prey. But this was more difficult. The battle with the humans on the forest road had blunted his momentum and given them time to fortify and make ready. The lands around Hergig had been turned into a killing ground, full of traps and obstacles. Speed had been his primary weapon, and now it was lost. He glanced to the side at his chieftains – they traded looks among each other, grumbling and gripping weapons that might, at any minute, be turned against him. Even the blessings of the Dark Gods could only protect him from so much.

Idly he stroked the tattoos and brands that criss-crossed his hairy flesh, tracing them with one blunt finger. Each mark had been earned in battle with one enemy or another… there, the memory of his battle with a chaos-giant as a youngling. Now he had a half-dozen of the beasts serving him. There, where the razor-fingers of one of the brides of the Goat with a Thousand Lovers had caressed him before she’d tried to devour him. Her sisters danced now at his beck and call. And had he not slain a mighty Black Orc warlord only weeks before, and set an army of the creatures to flight? In each battle, one common factor – he’d known the gods were watching over him. But now, now he wasn’t so sure.

Every rudimentary strategic instinct the Beastlord possessed had screamed at him to ignore the walled city of Hergig and continue on, even as they now pleaded that he ignore the palace. But the gods he served demanded that the sack of this town be complete. Thus, it must be done… but it would be done well. Experience had taught Gorthor there was always a weak point in any defence… a crumbling wall, a fire-weakened gate, loose stones, something. Anything. Like the bared throat of a defeated enemy, the weak point could be torn out and the battle won in one swift blow. He just had to find it. ‘Prisoners?’ he grunted.

‘Many-many,’ Wormwhite said, holding up his claws. ‘Not good though. Not many live long.’

‘Show me,’ Gorthor snarled, slamming the butt of his spear against the chariot base.

A few minutes later a captive screamed shrilly as he was dragged before Gorthor, blood staining his red and green livery. Arms stretched to the point of dislocation between the fists of a Minotaur, he hung awkwardly. His legs were shredded masses of meat and malformed hounds pulled at them hard enough to cause the Minotaur to stumble. With a grunt, a goat-headed gor chieftain slapped the dogs aside with the flat of his axe and kicked the stubborn ones into submission with his hooves. Then he grabbed the dying man’s chin and jerked his head up.

‘Whrrr?’ the gor rumbled, placing the notched edge of the axe against a hairless cheek. ‘Whrrr?’

The man sucked in a breath as if to answer and then, with a shudder that wracked his ruined frame, he went limp, his eyes rolling to the white. The gor shook him, puzzled. Then, with a roar, he swept the corpse’s head from its broken shoulders. The head bounced along the filth-covered ground, pursued by the snapping hounds. The gor spun and shook his axe at Gorthor’s chariot.

Gorthor stroked Impaler like a beloved pet as he eyed the body with something that might have been consternation. Another captive dead was one less who could tell Gorthor what he needed to know. He made a disgusted noise and turned to Wormwhite, crouching nearby. ‘Weak, Wormwhite,’ he grunted.

‘Men are weak,’ the shaman replied, bovine lips curling back from the stumps of black, broken teeth. Wormwhite’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘I talk, yes?’

‘Dd!’ the gor trumpeted, stomping a hoof onto a cobble, splintering it. He waved his axe at the shaman, spattering the latter’s ratty cloak with blood. ‘No tlk!’

‘Talk,’ the shaman said. He looked at Gorthor.

‘Yes,’ Gorthor snorted. ‘Talk.’

Nodding, the shaman hopped towards the body. Grabbing a hound by the scruff of its neck he yanked it up and pried the gnawed skull out of its jaws and flung the beast aside. ‘Make talk easy. Not dead long.’

With that, he drove two stiffened talons into the ragged neck stump and swung the head around to face the herdstone Gorthor had commanded raised two weeks previous, on their first night encamped before Hergig’s walls. Muttering, the shaman raised the head and held it as a chill mist seeped from the surface of the herdstone and crept towards him. The tendrils of mist found the stump of the head and began to fill it. Wormwhite jerked his fingers free and let the head drop. Only it didn’t. Instead, it hung supported by the clammy mist, and slowly it rose, turning the head around. Mist seeped from the punctured eyes and dripped from the slack lips and Wormwhite howled and capered.

‘Ask it,’ Gorthor grunted.

‘Where is weakness?’ Wormwhite shrilled, dancing around the column of mist and the bobbing head.

The mouth moved loosely, as if it were being manipulated by stiff fingers. ‘N-nor-north wuh-wall… s… stones… luh-loose…’ it said in a voice like a whisper of air. Wormwhite cackled and jerked his hand. The mist abruptly retreated and the head fell with a thump. The hounds leapt on it in a snarling pile as the shaman turned back to his chieftain.

‘North wall,’ Wormwhite said, stamping a hoof. ‘Lead attack, crush the hairless,’ he continued, his eyes blazing. The gathered warriors of the herd rumbled in assent, and weapons clattered.

Gorthor’s lips twitched. ‘Attack when I say, Wormwhite. Not before,’ the Beastlord snorted with false laziness. His dark eyes fixed on the shaman and then passed across the muzzles of the half-dozen wargors who made up his inner circle. The gor who had been questioning the dead human was one of their number, a brute named Crushhoof who shook his axe at Gorthor in a vaguely threatening manner. ‘Ttack now!’ he snarled. ‘Gds wnt t’ttack!’

‘I speak for gods,’ Gorthor said, shifting on his throne. ‘Not you, Crushhoof.’

Crushhoof reared back and brayed loudly, foam flying from his jaws. He pawed the ground and his warriors howled and rattled their spears. ‘Ttack! Ttack! Ttack!’ they shrieked in unison. Other herds picked up the chant and Gorthor suddenly thrust himself up out of his seat. Silence fell.

Crushhoof glared up at him, his gaze challenging. It had been coming for a long time now, and Gorthor wasn’t surprised. Crushhoof swung his axe through the air and grunted ‘Defy gods?’

‘Said before, gods speak through me,’ Gorthor said slowly. ‘Challenge, Crushhoof?’

‘Chlnge!’ Crushhoof cried and bounded up onto the dais, his axe swinging. Gorthor stepped aside with an ease that was surprising for one of his size. As he moved, he grabbed Impaler. Crushhoof reacted quickly, twisting around and slicing at Gorthor. The axe scratched across the surface of Gorthor’s patchwork armour, leaving a trail of sparks.

Impaler slid across his palm smoothly and, almost of its own volition, the blade shot into Crushhoof’s belly. He brayed in shock as Gorthor jerked him into the air. Impaler wriggled deeper into the wound and the tip exploded out through the dying gor’s back.

Blood sloshed down onto Gorthor and he opened his jaws to accept the offering. Then, with a grunt, he tossed the twitching body to the ground, jerking Impaler free in the process. The butt of the spear thudded into the dais and Gorthor glared at his army. One big fist thumped his chest. ‘I lord here! Gorthor! Not Crushhoof! Not Benthorn or Splaypaw or Doombite! By this spear, Gorthor rules!’ he roared and hefted Impaler over his head. The gathered beasts howled in reply.

Krumholtz watched as the first volley of fire-arrows were loosed from the walls of the palace. His soul cringed at the thought of what would happen to any of the city’s citizens who were left out there, crouching in cellars or attics. But he said nothing. Mikael had moved beyond wanting to save the city into wanting to deny it to his enemies in the two days since they’d fallen back to the palace. He shared looks with the other counsellors, all of whom had similar looks on their faces. Worry, mingled with apprehension.

Ludendorf had many virtues, among them a savage zeal that made even battle-hardened priests of Sigmar give way. But his flaws were just as fierce at times, and zeal could become blind stubbornness as easily as courage. It had ever been such with the Ludendorfs; Hochland’s nobility were fiercer than almost any in the Empire. Such was the reason that the position of Elector’s Hound had been created. A second head, one to remain level when the Elector inevitably gave vent to the rages of the blood. Of course, the position’s authority rested on the holder’s ability to get the Elector in question to listen.

‘We’ll burn them out like rats,’ Ludendorf growled, glaring at the city as new smoke clouds began to billow up to join those created by the fires that the beasts had already started. Nearby, men poured water drawn from the palace’s cistern onto the walls, to ward against the fire. ‘I’ll not let him have it. Not after all we did to make this place impregnable,’ he continued gesturing to the stout walls that surrounded the inner town of Hergig. ‘We can take back the city from here, Aric, after they’ve been driven out by the fire. We can take back the province. Drive the beasts into the Talabec, even!’ He looked down at the cramped courtyard at the huddled groups of civilians and soldiers without really seeing them. Krumholtz watched him rant. None of the other counsellors met his eyes, and he knew it was up to him.

‘We can’t hold the city, Mikael,’ he began evenly. ‘The North Wall is unstable and the rest of the keep isn’t much better. We have to retreat, and pull that monster and his herd after us. We can give our people – the people of Hergig – time to flee.’ Seeing the look on the Elector’s face, he said, ‘We would not be abandoning Hergig, Mikael… we are preserving Hochland.’

‘Preserving yourself, you mean!’ someone yelled from one of the surrounding buildings. Rotten fruit, broken bricks and the contents of bedpans flew at the men on the wall from the surrounding rooftops. At a barked command from Krumholtz, several men peeled off from a group below and hurried into the cramped buildings, kicking in doors and shattering windows along the way. Krumholtz watched as screaming people, starving and frightened, were dragged out of their homes and tossed into the street. Six in all, five of them labourers by their clothing. The sixth was a boy, thin and fragile-looking. He knew that they likely weren’t the hecklers. It didn’t matter. Krumholtz followed the Elector down into the courtyard towards the prisoners.

‘Cousin?’ Ludendorf said, in the sudden silence.

Krumholtz swallowed and laid a hand on the hilt of the Butcher’s Blade. ‘My lord Elector?’

‘Do your duty,’ Ludenhof said.

The Butcher’s Blade sprang from its sheath with startling speed and five heads rolled into the gutter. The blade halted above the neck of the sixth, the stroke pulled inches from the boy’s neck. Krumholtz stepped back, his face stony. ‘Five is an adequate example, I think.’

‘Do you?’ Ludendorf said, teeth bared. His fingers twitched on the hilt of his Runefang and for a moment, Krumholtz feared he would complete the execution himself. Then his hand flopped limply, draped over the pommel. Ludendorf looked around the courtyard, meeting the hollow stares of his people. ‘Where would you go, Aric?’ he said mildly.

‘Talabheim,’ someone said. The other counsellors murmured agreement.

Ludendorf smiled. ‘Say you make it to Talabheim. And then? There’s little chance of the beasts breaching those walls, no, but they can swarm the land unopposed, which is likely what they want. The Drakwald is cancerous as it stands… imagine it in a season, when the beasts have a province to feed on; it will be a bleeding tumour in the gut of our Empire, Aric. One that will take us years to burn clean, if it’s even possible. Civilisation will be reduced to a few mighty cities, isolated and cut off from one another. Is that what you want?’

‘No, but–’

‘Only the preservation of the Empire matters. And that means breaking them here,’ Ludendorf said.

‘And what about preserving the people of Hochland?’

‘There’s an old hunter’s saying… when you and a friend are being chased by a bear, don’t try and outrun it; instead, trip your friend,’ Ludendorf said, looking up at the smoke. The shapes of harpies soared out of it, wailing and shrieking. Bows and long-rifles spoke, knocking several of the grotesque shapes out of the air. ‘While the bear is busy with us, we can gut it and render it impotent.’ He looked at Krumholtz. ‘There is a method to my madness, Aric. It’s not just stubbornness.’

‘Are you sure about that?’ Krumholtz said, his voice pitched low. ‘Be honest with me Mikael. Is this pride talking?’

‘Don’t presume too much on our kinship, Aric,’ Ludendorf said, not looking at him.

‘Mikael, Ostland has already fallen. Even if reinforcements were coming, it’s unlikely they’ll reach us in time. Especially not with you burning the city out from under us!’ Krumholtz said, his voice growing louder. ‘But we can save our people now. All we have to do is–’

‘What? Abandon the capital? Flee into the wilderness?’ Ludendorf said. ‘And just how would you go about that, cousin?’

‘We parley,’ Krumholtz said. Ludendorf’s face flushed.

‘What did you say?’

Krumholtz took a breath. ‘We parley. That monster out there is many things, but he is not dumb. The more time he takes on us, the greater the likelihood his army will be diminished by desertion, infighting and attack. But if we offer him the city, we could escape! We can escort the survivors out, let them scatter into hiding and then march towards Talabheim to join up with their forces!’

‘Just give him the city? My city?’ Ludendorf said.

‘Better the city than the lives of our people!’

‘Their lives are mine to spend as I see fit!’ Ludendorf shouted. He gestured to the clumps of huddled survivors. ‘I would spill every drop of blood in the province to destroy that animal! That beast that dares think to challenge us! And you want to surrender?’

‘For Hochland–’ Krumholtz began.

‘I am Hochland!’ Ludendorf roared. His voice echoed through the courtyard.

‘No! You are a prideful lunatic!’ Krumholtz shouted back, the words leaving his mouth before he realiSed it.

Ludendorf froze. Then, he pointed a shaking hand at Krumholtz. ‘Give me your sword.’

‘What?’ Krumholtz blinked. He was suddenly aware of the others pulling away from him, and he felt a sinking sensation deep in his gut.

‘Your sword. Give it to me. I’ll not have a coward as my Hound.’

Krumholtz’s face went stiff. ‘I’m no coward.’

‘No? Retreat this, fall back that. Always running, Aric, never holding. Never standing,’ Ludendorf hissed. His hands curled into fists. ‘Run then, Aric. Run right out those gates. Let’s see how far you make it, eh?’

‘Mikael…’

The Runefang slid out of its sheath with an evil hiss and Krumholtz stumbled back, reaching unconsciously for his own blade. He stopped himself from drawing it and let his hands fall. ‘Go,’ Ludendorf said. ‘Go and be damned.’

Krumholtz straightened and unbuckled his sword-belt. ‘As you wish, my Count.’ Without looking at his cousin, he dropped the Butcher’s Blade in the dust and turned away. As he made for the gates, he was aware of the world closing in around him, narrowing his vision to a pinpoint. Outside the gates, damnation waited and capered. At the back of his mind, a tiny voice wondered which was worse, what awaited him outside, or what he’d seen inside.

No one tried to stop him.

No one called him back.

And when he died, no one was watching.

Ludendorf sat in his palace, the Butcher’s Blade resting over his knees, the Runefang sunk into the polished wood of the floor. He heard a distant roar, and knew his cousin was dead. His fury had abated, and there was a bitter taste in his mouth. ‘You have to understand, Aric,’ he said to the empty room. ‘It’s not pride keeping me here. It’s not.’

He waited for a reply. When none was forthcoming, he closed his eyes. ‘It’s not,’ he said again.

The giant was a malformed thing, with jagged curls of bone bursting through its tortured flesh. It moaned as it uprooted another roof and tossed it aside with a crash. Four of the mammoth beasts worked steadily, pulling down buildings and slamming them into pieces even as hundreds of gors crawled across the shattered timbers, lashing them together. It had taken them three days, and the fire hadn’t helped matters. But Gorthor watched, and was pleased. He had enslaved the giants personally, his crude magics binding their weak minds to his own. Their thoughts fluttered at the edge of his consciousness like moths caught in a storm.

‘Waste of time, waste of time,’ Wormwhite muttered.

Gorthor tossed a lazy glance at the shaman. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We will take the town, as the gods want. But we will do it my way. Gorthor’s way.’

‘Stupid,’ one of the chieftains said. It wasn’t the first time that one of his sub-chieftains had commented on Gorthor’s insistence on building siege towers and battering rams, as opposed to simply forcing the gates in the traditional fashion.

Gorthor grunted and reached out. He grabbed the scruff of the chieftain’s neck and jerked the startled gor into the air. Muscles bulging, Gorthor shook the critic the way a hound shakes a rat and then tossed him into the dirt. ‘One gate,’ Gorthor growled. ‘One!’ He glared at them and gestured at the platforms being built. ‘Many,’ he said. ‘Cannot crush with only one finger.’ He made a fist. ‘Must use all at once.’ His lips quirked and he laughed. ‘One herd cannot destroy them, but many – all at once?’ He looked at them, wondering if the lesson had sunk in. He caught Wormwhite looking at him strangely, and Gorthor glared at the shaman. ‘Speak, shaman.’

‘This is not the way of the gods,’ the albino said. He spread his talons and witch-light curled around their tips. ‘We break, we do not build,’ he continued. ‘The gate is there! We should attack!’

‘The gods want the town, Gorthor will give them the town,’ Gorthor said matter-of-factly. ‘But I will not waste warriors to do so!’ He thumped a fist on his chariot. ‘One hole no good. Need many.’

‘Bld fr th’ bldgd,’ another chieftain growled. He slapped his brass-sheathed horn with his axe and set sparks to drifting down. Behind him, the red-stained hair of his followers bristled in eagerness.

‘The blood-god wants man-blood, not beast-blood!’ Gorthor countered, showing them his teeth. After Crushhoof, Brasshorn was one of the loudest grumblers. And Brasshorn’s Khorngors with him. Eager for blood and skulls and souls, and not very particular about where they came from.

‘Blood-god wants all blood,’ Wormwhite said pointedly, eliciting snarls of agreement from Brasshorn and his followers. ‘Gods demand our blood, Beastlord. Demand man-blood! Demand we dance on the cities of men and crush skulls beneath our hooves! Crush, not create! Burn, not build! Smash, not speak!’ Wormwhite’s voice grew ever shriller and Gorthor’s hackles rose. The other shamans joined in, uttering warbling denunciations of his procrastination.

Gorthor had never feared the ire of the wonder-workers. As a blessed child of the gods, he had known that their magic was as nothing to his. But now, now he could feel the warp dancing along the edge of each prickled hair and he made his decision a moment later.

Wormwhite’s skull made a wet sound as Impaler passed through it and nailed the slop of his brains to a wall. Silence fell, as it had earlier with Crushhoof’s demise. Gorthor could feel the rage of the gods in his nerve-endings, but he ignored it and jerked Impaler free, brandishing it at his advisors. ‘Gods will have blood… seas and messes of it! But Gorthor will deliver that blood! Gorthor will deliver it his way! In his time!’

He looked around, noting with satisfaction that none dared meet his gaze. He stamped a hoof and bounded aboard his chariot. ‘And Gorthor says that time is now!’ he roared, waving his spear over his head. A spasm threatened him, but he forced it aside. He would listen to the gods after. After! Now was only for doing what they demanded.

His chariot rumbled forward, picking up speed as the tuskagors pulling it snorted and chewed the ground with their hooves. The giants stomped past, easily outdistancing the chariots as they slammed the crude bridges down across the wall. And waiting there below were eager gors, carrying improvised scaling ladders and battering rams. They streamed like ants through the streets, some of them surrounding the gates of the inner palace even as one of the giants, peppered with hundreds of arrows, slumped against the weakened wall that Wormwhite’s necromancy had indicated and sent it tottering.

Something flashed behind Gorthor’s eyes as he squatted in the back of his chariot, waving Impaler. Visions of brass horsemen, cutting through his ranks. He shook it off. No. No, it wouldn’t be that way! The gods were watching him. He was doing as they asked! They would protect him as they had always done! He roared and clutched Impaler in both hands, shaking it high as his chariot thundered towards the gates of the palace. A giant was already there, tearing at the door even as oil burned its skin and belching guns found its eyes. It screamed piteously as it fell, taking the great wooden doors with it and only stopped when the iron-bound wheels of Gorthor’s chariot pulped its skull.

The last defenders of Hergig were waiting there for Gorthor and he roared as his chariot crashed into them. Impaler flashed out, lopping off limbs and piercing bodies, staining the stones red. Men fell beneath his wheels and were gored by his tuskagors. More chariots followed him, filling the wide avenue with a rolling wall of spiked death.

And then, in one moment, it all went terribly wrong.

When the horns sounded, Gorthor knew at once what his visions had been trying to tell him, and he felt a brittle sensation that might have been the laughter of the Dark Gods. Beneath his feet, the ground trembled. There were new smells on the wind and he looked up, peering back along the trail of destruction he had left in his wake. Over the heads of struggling combatants, he saw a gleam of something that might have been brass and he heard the blare of coronets. His visions returned, blasting over and through him and a chill coursed down his spine.

Horsemen clad in burnished plate charged towards him, their steeds grinding his warriors into the street as they rode on. Gorthor speared the first to reach him, hauling the man off of his horse. He swung the body of the brass man into the air and tossed it aside in a burst of furious strength. The fear that had seized him upon sighting the warrior faded into confusion. Was this what the gods had been trying to tell him? Was this what they had wanted? He snorted and turned away from the crumpled body. His warriors were locked in combat with the men and the city was burning. His nostrils flared and another spasm passed through him. He thought of Wormwhite’s dead eyes and bit back a snarl.

No, he was blessed. Blessed! Hergig would be his, gods or no. More trumpets blared out and burnt his ears. He spun and watched in consternation as the defenders of Hergig fell upon his forces through the holes he’d made in their defences. The new arrivals crashed into the packed ranks of beastmen, carving through them with ease as the children of Chaos panicked, caught between the hammer and the anvil. Gorthor snarled in rage. He had to rally his troops. He had to re-order them, to pull them back and prepare to meet this new threat. He leapt from his chariot and clambered up a nearby statue with simian agility. Holding Impaler aloft, he issued desperate commands. The armoured shapes of his chieftains and Bestigors responded, cutting a path to him, but too late.

Even as the cream of his warherd assembled, the rest of it began to melt away, caught as they were in the pincers of the two forces. He could hear laughter in his head and knew at once that an ending was here.

The gods had demanded a sacrifice. He had thought it was this town, but he had been mistaken. Or perhaps blind. Those beloved of the gods were often the ones they called home soonest, and the thought filled him with berserk rage. Frothing at the mouth, his mind filled with the mocking laughter of the Dark Gods, Gorthor lifted Impaler and looked towards the palace. His fangs ground together and he dropped off of the statue. Stones buckled beneath his feet and he straightened. Impaler raised, he began to run and his herd followed suit.

The gods demanded blood. And though they had turned from him, Gorthor would deliver it nonetheless.

Ludendorf drew the Butcher’s Blade with one hand and Goblin-Bane with the other. Today, at the last, he would be his own Hound. He hadn’t bothered to find another, and no one had volunteered.

He didn’t blame them. On some level, Ludendorf wondered if he were truly ruthless, or simply mad. Had he sent his cousin to death and doom for causing dissension where none could be tolerated, or for simply speaking the truth?

‘Aric,’ he said softly, examining the Butcher’s Blade in the weak light of day. ‘Why couldn’t you for once have just listened?’ His gaze slid to Goblin-Bane and he sighed. The Runefang of Hochland seemed to purr as he made a tentative pass through the air with it. A weapon passed down from father to son, it lusted for battle with a passion that matched his own. It craved death, and spells of murder had been beaten into its substance during its forging. It longed to split the Beastlord’s skull, and he longed to let it. ‘Soon enough,’ he murmured.

He smiled grimly as he heard the strident ululation of the coronets of the Order of the Blazing Sun. When his men had reported that the knights had arrived, smashing into the rear of the army intent on breaching his gates, he’d scarcely credited it. Now he could hear battle being joined all around him as beast met man in the tangled streets before the palace, even as the walls crumbled beneath the onslaught of the giants.

The arrival of the knights was a sign that he’d been right. That Sigmar had wanted him to hold this place, to keep it from the claws of Chaos. His god had tasked him, and he fulfilled that task, though he’d been opposed at every turn. And now… now came the reward. He grinned and rotated his wrist, loosening up his sword-arm. He’d have the beast’s head on a pike, and toast to it every year on the anniversary of Aric’s death. His cousin would appreciate that, he was sure.

‘Of course you would. Least you could do for betraying me,’ he said, looking at the Butcher’s Blade again. It felt wrong to hold it in his hand, but he was determined that it should shed some blood. He needed his cousin’s sword at his side now more than ever. Aric had always been there for him in life, and it was only fitting he be there in death as well.

‘Plus, you’d hate to miss out on a fight like this, eh?’ he said out loud. If he noticed the looks some of his men gave him, he gave no sign. They hated him now, if they hadn’t before. But they loved him too. Better a ruthless man than a weak one, in times like these. Better a madman than a coward, that’s what they whispered in the ranks when they thought he wasn’t listening.

Beasts bounded through the shattered North Wall, bugling cries of challenge. He’d known they’d get in one way or another, and had fortified the inner keep with whatever had been available. Spearmen and handgunners crouched behind overturned wagons and at a shouted command men rolled uncorked barrels of black powder towards the shattered walls. Trails of fire followed them. Explosions rocked the courtyard, filling the air with smoke, rock and bloody body parts. A giant howled in agony as its legs disintegrated in an explosion and it toppled into the courtyard. It squirmed, trying to push itself upright until a dozen spears pierced its skull.

Ludendorf laughed as the stink of roasting beast-flesh reached him. He would take back his city, or wipe it off the map in the attempt, no matter the cost. His laughter faded as he looked down at the Butcher’s Blade. Frowning, he tightened his grip on the hilt. ‘No pity. No remorse,’ he grunted. He clashed his swords together. ‘Kill them all!’ he roared, and his men hastened to do the deed.

Handguns barked and arrows hissed, thudding into hairy flesh. Creatures howled and screamed as they slipped on their own blood in their haste to close with their foes. His remaining soldiers attacked with renewed courage, yelling out praises to the Emperor and Sigmar. And if no one shouted his name, Ludendorf didn’t care. So long as they fought, he was satisfied.

Beastmen, having managed to avoid his troops, charged up the stairs of the palace towards him. The Butcher’s Blade caught one on the side of the head, killing it instantly. He blocked a spear-point with Goblin-Bane and buried his cousin’s sword in the beastman’s belly, pinning it to one of the ornamental pillars that lined the doors to the palace. Pulling it loose, he met the next, blocking its axe with both swords.

With a grunt he swept his blades apart, cutting the head off of the axe. As the beastman reeled back in shock, Ludendorf kicked it down the stairs where several spearmen were waiting. ‘Finish it off and join the others,’ he said, shaking blood off of his sword. The spears rose and fell, cutting off the creature’s squalls.

He stepped down the stairs and strode through the smoke after his troops, eager to get to grips with the beasts. A moment later, his eagerness was swept aside by surprise as a spear took the man nearest him, pinning the unfortunate soldier to a wall in a shower of brick dust and blood. Ludendorf turned and saw a familiar shape and his lips skinned back from his teeth in a fierce snarl.

Gorthor jerked his spear loose from the brick and swung it over his head like an axe. ‘Ludendorf!’ Gorthor bellowed.

‘Gorthor!’ Ludendorf barked, gesturing with his swords. ‘We were interrupted earlier, animal! Decided to fight the dead after all?’

Gorthor shrieked like a wildcat and the Beastlord began to shake, his whole body rippling with spasms. The Butcher’s Blade looped out, only to be caught with a wet slap in the Beastlord’s palm. Gorthor jerked the weapon out of Ludendorf’s grip and backhanded him, sending him skidding across the cobbles. Ludendorf coughed as he rolled to a stop. He knew his ribs were likely broken and he felt like a punctured water-skin.

‘The gods demand your heart, man-chief!’ Gorthor said, stamping forward. His warriors made to surge towards the downed Count, and the Beastlord twisted, gutting the closest. ‘No! Gorthor’s prey!’ he snorted, glaring at his men. The beasts drew back, their weapons clattering against their shields in a dull rhythm. Gorthor shook himself, satisfied that none would interfere.

Ludendorf coughed and pushed himself to his feet. He was the only man in the courtyard, surrounded by a ring of beasts. There were soldiers on the walls, but they were too far away to save him, if he had even wanted such. He braced himself on his Runefang and waited, grinning madly. ‘Gorthor’s prey, eh? Bit off more than you could chew this time, didn’t you?’ he spat, laughing. ‘You’re caught in a trap of your own making, you stupid animal. And now, like every other animal, you’re wasting time fighting instead of fleeing.’

‘Like you,’ Gorthor rumbled, eyes blazing. Ludendorf’s laughter choked off and the Elector raised his sword, stung.

‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘Shut up and fight, filth. Let the gods decide who’s the fool here.’

Gorthor gave a howl and Impaler glided forward. Ludendorf spun around it, Goblin-Bane chopping through one of his opponent’s horns. Gorthor turned, roaring, and Impaler shot out, nearly taking the head off of his attacker. Ludendorf dodged to the side and his blade flickered out again, eliciting another agonised shriek from Gorthor.

‘This is my city! My territory! And it’s your death-ground, cur,’ Ludendorf said, lunging smoothly despite the ache in his chest. The tip of his blade burned like fire as it slid over Gorthor’s leg and the Beastlord stepped back instinctively. He backpedalled, weaving a wall between himself and that cursed sword. It dove at him like a snake, biting and ripping faster than he could see and its every touch caused him torment. ‘Hergig is mine! Hochland is mine! And I’ll kill any who try and take it from me!’ cried Ludendorf.

Frenziedly, Gorthor lashed out, flailing at his opponent with Impaler, battering the warrior off of his feet. The man slipped on the bloody cobbles and lost his balance completely. Desperately, he tried to haul himself away from Gorthor, who drove one wide hoof into his chest, denting his cuirass and pinning him to the ground. Impaler’s blade swept to the side, cutting armour and flesh with a sizzle. Ludendorf screamed in agony as his belly split open like an overripe melon.

‘Gorthor’s now,’ the Beastlord grunted, kicking him and sending the dying man rolling across the courtyard. The beastmen set up a cacophony of triumphant screeches and barks and Gorthor, breathing heavily, raised his weapon in triumph.

His eyes filled with blood, and his ears filled with the sound of his own heart stuttering, Ludendorf clambered to his feet. His intestines draped loose over the restraining arm he had clamped across his belly and his fingers tangled in the clasps of his armour. He barely had the strength to grip his sword as he stumbled towards the broad beast shape raising its hell-weapon over its head.

With all his remaining strength, he swept his sword out across the beastman’s broad back. Bone blistered at the touch of the Runefang and Gorthor shrieked like a wounded goat. A hairy fist caught the Elector on the side of the head and the ground raced up to meet him. The beastman rose up over him, favouring his side, blood mingling with the foam dripping from his jaws. His body shuddered, as if gripped by fever.

‘Die!’ Gorthor growled. Impaler lived up to its name, nailing Ludendorf to the ground. Muscles bulging, Gorthor jerked spear and man up and raised them up towards the sky. ‘Die for the gods!’ Gorthor howled.

Ludendorf, his teeth stained red, grabbed the haft of the daemon-weapon even as it squirmed in his guts. ‘You first,’ he rasped, jerking himself down the weapon’s length. Agony clouded his vision and his sword-arm felt like lead as it dropped down.

A moment later, Gorthor’s head flew free of his thick neck. Ludendorf fell, his sword sliding from his grip.

The great form of the Beastlord staggered four steps and sank to its knees, neck-stump spraying blood even as it toppled. The spear clattered away, the ugly runes decorating its surface dimming. Mikael Ludendorf crawled towards the head of the Beastlord and clutched it as somewhere, triumphant notes were blown from a hundred horns. The beasts ran then, leaving the two chieftains alone in the courtyard.

Ludendorf, dying, stared into the glassy eyes of Gorthor. His lips moved, shaping one word, but no sound came out. Beneath his body, he felt the stones of Hergig tremble as the knights of the Blazing Sun drove the beasts from his city. He heard the cheers as his people celebrated.

When he died, no one was watching.

The Inquisition

++Open vox-net++

My most esteemed Lord Inquisitor,

At last, the heretic has broken before us. We have eked out answers from the darkest depths of his broken mind, and though the process has not left much of him, there will be sufficient for your purposes.

Interrogator Kerstromm, Ordo Malleus

What are you working on at the moment?

Right this moment, I’m working on a short story called ‘The Iron Without>’, which will appear, unsurprisingly, in the Iron Warriors Omnibus. It’s got some favourite characters, some new faces and some revelations that will surprise people and shed hazy light on one character’s origins that will be further explored in my next Horus Heresy novel. Confused? No? You will be.

What will you be working on next?

After that, I’ll be working on another story for the Iron Warriors Omnibus entitled ‘The Beast of Calth’. Which, surprisingly, features almost no Iron Warriors. Go figure...

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

I’ve used inquisitors in a few books, but I’d love to do something more focused on them. But since the benchmark has been set so high, that might need to wait until folk have forgotten about Eisenhorn. I’ve always had a hankering to get into the nitty gritty of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and at the end of the year, I’m going to get a chance to scratch that itch with Priests of Mars. In fact, any bit of the background I haven’t yet explored is one I’d want to delve into sometime.

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

I’ve just read The Stone of Destiny, which was a great read and made me want to paint my face blue. It’s a story that beggars belief in the many mishaps, coincidences and downright nonsense that went into the Stone of Scone’s return. If it was fiction, you’d never believe it. My favourite authors are, without a doubt, David Gemmell, Clive Barker and Stephen King. In terms of the stories that influenced me and shape me as a writer, it’d be hard to pick any others.

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

Going back to a previous question, the Eisenhorn books are amongst my favourite BL books (Malleus especially), and to have established so much of the lore of inquisitors would have been great. Beyond the realms of Black Library, I wish I’d written The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, as it’s the book that launched me into the worlds of fantasy (as I suspect it did for many kids my age at the time) and made me want to write my own stories. I still have my thirty-one year old copy and had Steve Jackson sign it last year, which was a real high point for me.

PHALANX

Chapter Twelve

Ben Counter

The daemonic horde hit the Imperial Fists line in a tide of flesh.

It broke against barricades and makeshift bunkers, concentrated bolter fire chewing through the daemons as quickly as they could advance.

In other places it swept through in a flood, swamping Imperial Fists in a mass of limbs and bodies. Some defences were denuded by pink and azure flame, blasted from the orifices of misshapen creatures dragged along on the tide of Abraxes’s own incandescent daemons. Others were outflanked by lightning-fast monsters with purplish skin and lashing tongues that swept around firepoints to strike from behind. A massive red-winged daemon, axe in one hand and lash in the other, strode at the head of its bloodletters and with vicious strike cleaved one of the tanks brought up from the Phalanx’s hangars in two, spilling flaming promethium around its feet.

The Imperial Fists line bent under the weight of the assault, Space Marines vaulting their barriers to take up new positions closer to the Tactica before they were overrun. Bolter fire competed with the shrieking of daemons in the din of the battle. The whole deck seemed to bow and buckle under the weight of it, as the monastic cells and chapels of the Imperial Fists disappeared under the flood of Abraxes’s assault.

At the heart of the line, Chapter Master Vladimir stood with the Fangs of Dorn in his hands. One of the Librarium novices stood before him, holding up a huge tome normally bound closed by chains and psychic seals. It contained prayers of purity and strength of mind, of which a commander had to be mindful when facing the corruptive forces of Chaos. Ahead of him, Lysander marshalled the strongest defences, a handful of tanks and several squads of Imperial Fists along with Kolgo’s Battle Sisters, holding position as the daemon army grew closer with every moment.

‘What manner of foe is Chaos?’ mused Vladimir. Beside him stood Lord Inquisitor Kolgo, ready for battle with a power fist encasing one hand and a rotator cannon on the other, each weapon engraved with prayers and wards of destruction.

‘Better men than I have gone mad seeking the answer to that question,’ replied Kolgo. ‘The question of Chaos cannot be answered.’

‘And yet we must seek an answer,’ said Vladimir. ‘For we must fight it. In ignorance, we fight as if in the dark.’

‘Better that than be corrupted by what we see,’ said Kolgo. He flexed the mechanical fingers of his power fist, and they crackled as the power field sprung into life around them.

‘I trust in the strength of my soul, inquisitor,’ said Vladimir. Ahead, Imperial Fists were scrambling into cover beside the second line as the daemons galloped and shambled closer, multicoloured flames dancing over the battlefield. The pale, lithe shape of Abraxes himself was just visible in the rear ranks, watching and controlling his battle, using up the lesser daemons under his command to buy his victory one death at a time. ‘I shall not become one with the enemy by understanding it. The more I learn of Chaos, the more I hate it, and the fiercer I fight.’

‘Overestimating one’s resolve is a more dangerous form of ignorance than fighting in the dark.’ Kolgo span the barrels of his rotator cannon, jewel-encrusted hammers clicking down on gilded chambers.

‘Then let us put our theories into practice,’ said Vladimir.

‘I concur,’ said Kolgo. Shall we?’

‘Brothers!’ yelled Vladimir over the vox. ‘To the fore, my brothers, with me! Through hell and to victory, onwards!’

At Vladimir’s words, the Imperial Fists broke cover and charged. The reserve force holding the Tactica ran from behind its map tables and the shelter of its archways. The Space Marines crouched behind their defences, muttered their prayers and leapt over the defences, bolters blazing and chainblades whirring. Vladimir led the counter-attack right into the face of the enemy.

The twin blades of the Fangs of Dorn were not made for an elegant battle. They were not weapons for duelling or weaving a dance of feint and deception. They were made for this brutal and ugly fight, the press of bodies and the triumph of strength and resolve over skill, where they could rise and fall with every stab piercing a belly or driving up into a throat.

Vladimir slew a dozen daemons in those first few seconds, and Abraxes’s horrors fell before him, opening up a gap in the daemonic lines. Imperial Fists charged in behind him and exploited the gap, forging in further.

Kolgo stood atop a rampart and hammered volley after volley from his rotator cannon into the host. The Battle Sisters formed up around him, Sister Aescarion directing their fire with a gesture of her power axe. A pair of Predator tanks rumbled up from either side of the Tactica, each roar of an autocannon echoed by an explosion of flame and torn daemonflesh deep within Abraxes’s lines.

Without warning the horrors seemed to melt away, dissolving into the rear ranks at a mental command from Abraxes. In the few seconds of respite, the Imperial Fists saw ranks of bloodletters marching out to replace them. In their centre was a greater daemon of the Blood God, allied to Abraxes’s cause by the raw slaughter that battle on the Phalanx promised. It stepped over the front rows of bloodletters and a massive cloven hoof slammed down among the Imperial Fists, crushing a battle-brother under its immense weight.

‘Onwards! Onwards! The warp fears us so, to place such horrors in our way!’ Vladimir’s voice, even amplified over the vox, was barely audible over the foul, shuddering gale of the greater daemon’s roar. Vladmir hacked through the first couple of bloodletters to reach him as he jumped up onto the half-fallen wall of a chapel, tumbled and scorched in the first assault, that brought him up above the level of the swirling combat around him.

The greater daemon turned its shaggy, bestial head towards Vladimir. Imperial Fists were hacking their way through the advancing bloodletters to form up around their Chapter Master, but the greater daemon could simply step over the melee, and in moments its shadow passed over Vladimir.

The Imperial Fist held the Fangs of Dorn out wide, presenting himself as a target to the greater daemon, taunting it with his refusal to flee from the monstrosity.

‘You dare walk into my domain, and shed the blood of my brothers?’ yelled Vladimir. ‘Who do you think you face here? What victory do you think you can win? All the fury of the warp will falter against the soul of one good Space Marine!’

The greater daemon bellowed and raised its axe, already slick with Adeptus Astartes blood. The axe arced down and Vladimir jumped to the side, the blade cleaving down through the ruined chapel. Vladimir stabbed both the Fangs of Dorn through the greater daemon’s wrist and ripped them out again, snapping tendons and tearing muscle. The greater daemon pulled its arm back and howled in anger, following up its axe blow with a strike from its whip.

The whip moved too fast for even Vladimir to avoid. Its barbs lashed around his leg and the daemon yanked him off his feet, into the air, and cast him down to the ground in the heart of the bloodletters.

The Soulspear was still in Iktinos’s hand. Its glowing black blade was being forced up under Sarpedon’s chin, towards his throat, to slice his head off. Sarpedon grabbed Iktinos’s wrist and fought the Chaplain, but death had unlocked some new fortitude in Iktinos and in that moment the two were matched in strength.

Sarpedon could feel the skin on his face burning. Pain meant something different to a Space Marine compared to a normal man, but it was still pain and Sarpedon struggled as much to avoid blacking out as he did with Iktinos.

The Axe of Mercaeno was trapped under Iktinos. Sarpedon tried to wrench it free, but Iktinos would not relent. He tried to roll over so Iktinos would be trapped beneath, but the Chaplain would not budge, as if he was anchored to the deck.

‘You obey,’ hissed Sarpedon. ‘Obedience only comes from one place.’ He saw his own features reflected in the eyepieces of Iktinos’s mask, the blistering wounds creeping up his face. ‘It comes from fear.’

Sarpedon let go of the Axe and reached up to place his hand on the back of Iktinos’s head. He found a grip and tore the Chaplain’s helmet away.

Iktinos’s face was charred and twisted by the heat. The bubbling skin was stretched tight over the skull, the eyes buried in scorched pits, the scalp coming apart. There was no dimming in the hate on Iktinos’s features. The pain made it stronger. There was almost no resemblance to the face that Sarpedon knew, none of the Chaplain’s calm and resolve, just the intensity of his hatred.

‘I know what you fear,’ said Sarpedon. His hand clamped to the back of Iktinos’s burning skull, and he unleashed the full force of the Hell into the traitor’s mind.

The pain helped. Normally Sarpedon unleashed the Hell out wide, capturing as many of the enemy as possible in its hallucinations. This time he focused it until it was a white-hot psychic spear, thrust into Iktinos’s mind like a hypodermic needle loaded with everything the Chaplain feared.

He feared Daenyathos. Fear, in some deep and unrecognisable form, was the only thing that could force a Space Marine to obey with such unthinking, unquestioning ferocity. Everything that Sarpedon knew about the Philosopher-Soldier was forced into the point of fire and turned into something appalling.

Like a god of the warp itself, the form of Daenyathos loomed in front of Iktinos’s mind’s eye. Daenyathos appeared as he had in illuminated manuscripts of his Catechisms Martial, but vast in size and infinitely more terrible. Around his legs rushed a torrent of broken bodies, all the Soul Drinkers whose lives he had spent following his monstrous plan. His armour was inscribed with exhortations to death and torture, words of the Catechisms Martial twisted and devolved. Thousands of innocents were crucified against the armour of his greaves. His chest and shoulder guards were covered with the forms of the betrayed, sunk into the armour as if half-digested. The heroes of the old Chapter – Captain Caeon, Chapter Master Gorgoleon and the victims of the First Chapter War, manipulated into conflict to satisfy Daenyathos’s desire for a Chapter at odds with the Imperium. The dead of Sarpedon’s Chapter, from Givrillian to Scamander, Captain Karraidin, Sarpedon’s dearest friend Techmarine Lygris and all the others who had fallen.

Around the collar of Daneyathos’s armour were clustered his allies in treachery. The cruellest of Inquisitors who had forced the Soul Drinkers into the extremes of exile. Aliens despatched by Sarpedon and his brethren, as Daenyathos watched on, satisfied that they had played their part – the necron creature who had almost killed Sarpedon on Selaaca, the renegade eldar lord of Gravehnhold, the ork warlord of Nevermourn, all gathered in celebration.

Alongside them were the very worst of his allies. The followers of the dark gods – Abraxes, Ve’Meth, a host of Traitor Marines and daemons. The mutant Teturact and his legion of the dead. And Daenyathos himself, his face lit by the fires of wrath itself, laughing with the agents of betrayal of whose wickedness he had been the architect.

Daenyathos looked down at Iktinos, pinned squirming below him like something trapped in a microscope slide. The vastness of his displeasure, mixed with a terrible knowing mockery, hammered into Iktinos’s mind as fiercely as any weapon that Sarpedon could have wielded.

Iktinos screamed. In his mind, the sound was lost among the laughter of Daenyathos, who revelled in seeing one of his most self-important pawns being forced to understand his own insignificance. In reality, the sound was so completely unlike anything a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes should ever utter that Iktinos ceased to be a Space Marine in that moment.

The Chaplain’s grip relaxed. Sarpedon threw him off and rolled out of the flames. He stood over the prostrate Iktinos.

Iktinos’s mind had utterly shattered. Sarpedon’s psychic senses were not sharp, but even he could feel it, a growing void where once the Chaplain’s soul had been, into which were tumbling the fragments of his broken personality.

‘I own you now,’ said Sarpedon. ‘I am the one you obey. Tell me everything.’

The faces of the daemons crowded around, twisted and jeering, the solid mass of their features broken by the black iron blades that cut down to finish off Chapter Master Vladimir.

The Fangs of Dorn were just suited to fighting this close, where they parried and stabbed as if moving in Vladimir’s hand by some will of their own. Perhaps Dorn himself wielded them in those moments, reaching from the Emperor’s side to lend his own skill to Vladimir’s struggle to survive.

It would not be enough. There were too many of them, every one eager to be the one who carried the skull of a Chapter Master back to the warp, to throw it at the foot of the Blood God’s throne.

Vladimir stabbed up into a daemon’s ribcage even as he turned another blade away from his hearts, and prepared to die.

A streak of orange flame burned across his vision, swathing the contorted faced in fire. He was aware of glossy black armour embellished in red, and the blade of a power axe shimmering as it cut in every direction. Hands grabbed him and dragged him out of the mass. Vladimir looked up and saw the unfamiliar face of a woman above him, streaked with blood and grime, teeth gritted.

‘Not while we live,’ she hissed through her teeth, ‘shall they take such a prize.’

She hauled Vladimir to his feet. He recognised Sister Aescarion, the Superior of Lord Inqiusitor Kolgo’s retinue. The jump pack she wore on her back smouldered, its exhaust vanes glowing a dull red, and the path she had carved through the daemons as she dived into the throng after Vladimir was closing as the bloodletters fought to swamp Vladimir again.

‘My thanks, Sister,’ said Vladimir as he found his footing.

‘Through me, the Emperor works,’ she replied.

The two stood back to back as the bloodletters closed. Now Vladimir could let the Fangs of Dorn do their finest work, stabbing so rapidly up into the advancing daemon ranks that every moment another of them fell, ribcage split open or burning entrails spilling from a ruptured abdomen. Aescarion fought with her axe in one hand and a pistol in the other, quickly rattling off the pistol’s magazine and then taking the axe in both hands.

A Sister of Battle could not match a Space Marine’s sheer strength and skill. Few unaugmented humans could approach a veteran Superior’s ability, but even so she was just that – human, without the extra organs and enhanced physiology of the Adeptus Astartes. But what she lacked in their physical superiority, she made up with in faith.

It was not a Space Marine’s mental fortitude that Vladimir witnessed in Aescarion. A Space Marine was a master of his fear, his mind so strong he could face even the daemons of the warp and remain sane. Aescarion was different. It was not conditioning and strength of duty, raw bloody-mindedness, that fuelled her. It was faith. She believed so completely in the Emperor’s hand guiding her, in the place she had in His plan, that it was as plain to her as the enemy closing in around her. She did not fear them, because in her mind she was not a human being with human frailties. She was a hollow vessel that existed to be filled up with the will of the Emperor and used as He willed it. There could be no fear, when whatever end befell not her, but the Emperor.

Vladimir led the way back towards the Imperial Fists lines, opening up a path as the Fangs of Dorn flashed as quick and deadly as the teeth of a giant chainblade. He had to force his legs out of the sucking mire of gore and entrails around his feet. Aescarion’s axe gave her reach and she swung it in great arcs as she followed, smashing falling blades aside and keeping a good sword’s length between her and the bloodletters.

The mass parted and Aescarion’s Battle Sisters crowded forwards, flanking Vladimir and battering the daemons back with bolter fire. Vladimir could see Lysander atop a barricade, swatting aside one of the horrors with his shield and pointing with his hammer to direct the heavy weapons set up around the Tactica. Everywhere he looked, there was carnage. Here, the Imperial Fists launched forwards in a counter-attack; there, the line broke and leaping horrors or galloping fiends poured through the lines like air bursting from a hull breach.

Vladimir made it over the altar of a shrine, used as the lynchpin of a barricade of chapel pews and statues. Inquisitor Kolgo was standing in the chapel, its columns fallen and its nave strewn with the bodies of daemons and Space Marines. With a moment to breathe at last, he turned to help drag the Battle Sisters following him over the altar into shelter. Aescarion leapt over the barricade on the exhausts of her jump pack, the gauntlets of her power armour smoking with daemon blood up to the elbow. Battle Sisters and Imperial Fists manned the barricade, pouring bolter fire into the bloodletters trying to follow.

‘Did it work?’ said Vladimir, catching his breath. ‘Is it fallen?’

By way of answer, Kolgo simply pointed towards the ruin where Vladimir had made his stand against the greater daemon.

The winged daemon was slumped against the wall, its wings in bloody tatters and its armour torn. Another volley of heavy fire slammed into it, punching through its corded red muscles. One of its wings was sheared through and fell broken, tattered skin fluttering like the canvas of a ruined sail. Vladimir had brought the daemon into the open, forced it to stand proud of the daemonic host while it fought him. He had bought his heavy weapons the time they needed to draw a bead on the target and spear it on a lance of concentrated fire.

The greater daemon was taking its time to die. Heavy bolter fire rippled up and down it. The daemon dropped its lash and tried to force itself back to its feet, leaning on the ruined wall for support. A lascannon blast caught it in the chest and bored right through it, revealing its gory ribs and pulsing organs. The daemon roared, blood spattering from its lips, and toppled over into the horde.

The Imperial Fists cheered as the daemon died. Lysander led them, raising his hammer high as if taunting the daemons to respond.

The sound was drowned out by the laughter that rumbled through the Phalanx. It was the laughter of Abraxes, observing the slaughter from the rear ranks. The object of his amusement lumbered into view on the Imperial Fists flank – a greater daemon of the plague god, the enormous bloated horror that had killed Leucrontas and broken the force holding the Rynn’s World Memorial. The daemon’s laughter joined Abraxes’s own as it was herded forward by its attendant daemons, and it clapped its flabby hands in glee at the prospect of new playthings.

‘Can we kill another one, Chapter Master?’ voxed Kolgo.

‘It is not a question of whether we can or not,’ replied Vladimir. ‘We will do so or we will be lost.’

‘Behold this icon of sin!’ shouted Aescarion to her Battle Sisters. ‘Witness the corruption it wears! In the face of this evil, let our bullets be our prayers!’

The expression on the greater daemon’s face changed. Its enormous mouth downturned and it frowned, its eyes widening in surprise, a caricature of dismay and shock. Tiny explosions studded the rubbery surface of its flesh, not from the direction of the Imperial Fists centre, but from behind it.

Vladimir jumped onto a fallen pillar to get a better view. He glimpsed the flash of a power weapon – power claws, slashing through the plaguebearers, illuminating the edges of purple armour.

‘It’s the Soul Drinkers!’ came a vox from the nearest Imperial Fists unit.

Vladimir recognised Captain Luko now, followed by what remained of the Soul Drinkers Chapter. A bolt of lightning arced from the ceiling, earthing through the daemon, burning away masses of charred flesh – Tyrendian, the Soul Drinkers Librarian, marshalled the lightning like a conductor with an orchestra as the other Soul Drinkers ran into the fight around him.

Vladimir paused for a second. The Soul Drinkers were the enemies of the Imperial Fists, rebels and traitors. But the daemons they both fought were a fouler enemy even than the renegade. The legions of the warp were the worst of the worst.

‘All units of the Fifth,’ ordered Vladimir. ‘Join the Soul Drinkers and counter to our flank! Third and Ninth, hold the centre!’

The predator tanks emerged from the barracks they were using for shelter and rumbled towards the growing battle on the flank. Imperial Fists units broke from their positions and followed them. Vladimir watched as the Fifth Company and the Soul Drinkers caught the plague daemon’s force from both sides.

‘Dorn forgive me,’ said Vladimir to himself.

Captain Luko looked into the eyes of the daemon, and he saw there everything that mankind had learned to fear.

Something in those unholy eyes had tormented the sons of Earth ever since creatures first crawled out from beneath the mud. Humans had told tales of it, had seen it in their nightmares, before their species had finished evolving. It was the force that inspired the weak flesh to corrupt and rot away, the purest of fears, of death and pain and the unknown wrapped up into one faceless, malevolent will.

Since there had been intelligent minds to contemplate it, the Plague God had existed, turning vulnerable minds to corruption and evil through the fear of what it could do to their flesh. But now there were no vulnerable minds for it to exploit, no kernels of doubt that could grow into desperation and surrender. A Space Marine did not have that weakness. Now, this avatar of the Plague God had to fight.

The plaguebearers that attended the greater daemon were caught by surprise by the Soul Drinkers, who charged from the warren of the catacombs without warning. The daemons did not scatter or run as mundane troops might, but they did not have enough numbers in the right place and the Soul Drinkers had destroyed dozens of them in the first seconds. Luko had taken a worthy toll with his claws and bolter fire had done for the rest. Now Luko was face to face with the greater daemon, its burning and blood-covered form quivering with rage and pain, and everything they had earned in those moments would be lost if he faltered now.

‘I have killed your kind before!’ yelled Luko, knowing the daemon could hear him even through the battle’s din. ‘But you have never killed anything like me!’

The daemon snatched up one of the chains its followers had used to drag it. It raised the chain over its head and brought it down like a whip, the links of the chain slamming into the deck. Luko threw himself out of the way, the floor beneath him buckling under the impact.

Plaguebearers following the greater daemon shambled to its side. A dozen of them carried between them an enormous sword of oozing black steel, its pitted blade edged with bloody fangs that looked like they had just been torn from some huge beast’s jaw. The greater daemon bent down and took up the sword in its other hand, and the pits in the metal formed mouths that screamed and howled. Luko saw the souls bound into the blade, pitiful souls who had pledged themselves to the daemon in ignorance or desperation.

The daemon raised the blade over its head, point down aimed at Luko. Luko got to his feet and slashed at the plaguebearers who tried to hem him in, the shadow of the blade falling over him as he realised he could not get out of its way.

A bolt of blue-white light hit the sword and the whole weapon lit up, power coursing through it. The daemon bellowed as the flesh of its hand burned off, falling in charred flakes. Its fingers, stripped to bloody bone, let go of the sword and it fell to the deck with a tremendous clang.

Behind Luko, Librarian Tyrendian leapt from the Soul Drinkers ranks. Lightning leapt from his fingers and played around Luko, burning away the plaguebearers who tried to close with him. A bolt struck the greater daemon, earthing in blue-white crackles of power through its skin and leaving crazed burn patterns across its bulk.

Luko leapt over the fallen sword and punched forwards with a claw, spearing through the back of the daemon’s ruined hand. The daemon yanked the hand away and lashed at Luko with the chain again, as if it had been bitten by a troublesome insect and was trying to swat it before it could bite again. The chain whipped into Luko at chest height and threw him back into a pack of plaguebearers. Luko slashed in every direction, hoping that each wild strike would catch one of the diseased daemons closing on him.

‘Brother!’ yelled Tyrendian. ‘Fall back! We cannot lose you!’

Luko flung the last plaguebearer off himself and rounded on the greater daemon again. Too late, he saw the daemon had loped a massive stride closer, the mass of its belly like a solid wall of flesh bearing down on him. Luko turned and tried to run but the daemon moved faster than its bulk should have allowed, hauling its weight off the floor on its stumpy back leg and stamping down next to Luko, bringing its weight down onto the Soul Drinker.

Luko crashed to the deck, his lower half pinned under the weight of the daemon. The foul, oozing mass of muscle and flab was crushing down on him with so much weight Luko could feel the ceramite of his leg armour distorting under the pressure.

Luko twisted around as best he could, lightning claws held in front of him in the best guard he could manage. The greater daemon’s face loomed past the curve of its belly, and it was smiling. Luko could feel the deep rumble of its laughter as it saw its prey trapped beneath it.

‘Here!’ yelled Tyrendian. ‘Here! You want to eat?’ Tyrendian put his hands together, as if in prayer, and thrust them forward, a twisting bolt of electricity lancing into the greater daemon’s shoulder. It bored through the flesh, charred layers flaking away to the bone.

Tyrendian was walking forwards, every step flinging lightning into the greater daemon. He passed into its shadow, his face edged in hard white and blue by the power playing around his hands.

‘Tyrendian! No!’ shouted Luko, but Tyrendian did not back off. As the daemon’s gaze fell onto him he stood his ground, casting another lightning bolt up at the daemon’s face.

The greater daemon dropped the chain, and reached a massive flabby hand over Tyrendian. Tyrendian did not move. Tyrendian had never picked up a scar in battle - never, it had always seemed, even been afflicted by the patina of grime and blood that covered every soldier. He always appeared perfect, less a soldier and more a sculpture, a painting, of what a Space Marine should be. Framed by the battling plaguebearers and borne down upon by the greater daemon, there could be no more powerful symbol of purity facing the very embodiment of corruption.

The daemon’s hand closed on Tyrendian. Tyrendian gritted his teeth as the daemon lifted him off his feet, and the air thrummed with the power gathering around his hands. Crackles of it arced into the deck or into the daemon’s hand, but it did not seem to feel them. It licked its lips and its mouth yawned wide, showing the multiple rows of teeth that led down to the churning acidic pit of its stomach.

‘No!’ yelled Luko, his words almost lost by the force with which he shouted them. ‘Tyrendian, My brother. Do not do this, not for me. My brother, no!’

The greater daemon flung Tyrendian into the air, and the Soul Drinker disappeared into its mouth.

Luko screamed in anger, as if by doing so he could force the grief down and bury it.

The daemon laughed. So pleased was it by its kill, that it did not notice for a few seconds the blue glow growing in the centre of its belly.

Luko rolled back onto his front and covered himself with his lightning claws. He saw plaguebearers approaching to butcher him, or perhaps hack his legs off to free the rest of him so he could be fed to their lord. He had never seen anything so hateful as their one-eyed, horned faces split with rotten grins, gleeful at their master’s kill and the prospect of feeding him another Soul Drinker.

The rising hum from inside the greater daemon told Luko he had only moments left. That was all the plaguebearers needed to get to him.

‘Come closer,’ he shouted at them. ‘Let us become acquainted, my friends. Let me show you an Adeptus Astartes welcome.’

The hum turned to a whine. The greater daemon noticed it now. It groaned, and placed its hand to its belly, face turning sour and pained. It roared, and the terrible gale of it drowned out Luko’s voice as he yelled obscenities at the plaguebearers.

The daemon’s belly swelled suddenly, like a balloon inflating. The daemon’s eyes widened in surprise. It was the last expression on its hateful face – surprise and dismay.

The daemon’s belly exploded in the tremendous burst of blue-white power. Luko was slammed into the floor with the force of it. The plaguebearers were thrown backwards, battered by the wall of force that hit them. A great cloud of torn and burning entrails showered down, covering Soul Drinker and daemon alike. Lightning arced in every direction from the shattered body of the greater daemon, ripping into the plaguebearers surrounding it, lashing across the ceiling, boring through the floor.

In the old Chapter, some had speculated on just how much power Tyrendian could gather. If collateral damage and his own survival were no issue, it was guessed by the Librarium that their bioelectric weapon could detonate himself with massive force, as great a force of raw destruction as a whole artillery strike. They had never been sure, and never sought to find out, for Tyrendian was too valuable a weapon of war to risk him finding out how much power he could concentrate within himself.

Now, the question had been answered. Tyrendian could gather inside himself enough electric power to destroy a greater daemon of the warp. He had detonated inside the daemon’s belly with such force that all that remained, tottering above Luko, was a thick and gristly spine on which was still mounted the ragged remnants of the greater daemon’s skull. The shattered stumps of its ribs and a single shoulder blade, clinging by tattered tendons, alone suggested the bulk of its chest. Green-black brains spilled from the back of its ruptured skull, and across the front of it was stretched the daemon’s face, still wearing that expression of surprise.

The daemon toppled backwards, the ruin of its upper body slapping to the deck. The weight on Luko relaxed and he dug a claw into the deck in front of him, dragging himself out from under the daemon. He looked back and saw that only the lower portion of its once-vast belly remained, its legs connected only by skin, the many layers of entrails and organs now just a charred crater.

The plaguebearers nearby had been blasted back off their feet. Many had been burst apart by the lightning unleashed by Tyrendian’s detonation. The whole deck surrounding the daemon’s corpse was buckled and burned. Luko’s own armour was charred and bent out of shape, giving him only just enough free movement to walk away from the destruction towards the Soul Drinkers lines.

Luko’s ears rang, and the sound of gunfire barely registered through the white noise filling his head. He looked around, dazed, trying to blink away the fog that seemed to smother his mind. There was no sign of Tyrendian. Quite probably he had been vaporised by the force of the power he unleashed. There would be nothing to bury.

Sergeat Graevus ran forwards and grabbed Luko, dragging him away from the reforming plaguebearers and thrusting him behind a fallen pillar for cover.

Yellow-armoured figures came into view, approaching from the direction of the Imperial Fists centre. Without the greater daemon to anchor them, the plaguebearers wheeled in confusion, running in ones and twos into the bolter fire of the Imperial Fists, cut down and shredded into masses of stringy gore.

Graevus held his power axe high and yelled an order that Luko couldn’t quite make out through the ringing. The Soul Drinkers vaulted from cover and advanced, bolters firing, even as the Imperial Fists did the same. Caught in a crossfire, leaderless, the plaguebearers seemed to dissolve under the weight of fire, as if in a downpour of acid.

Luko’s senses returned to him as the whole flank of the daemon army collapsed, the servants of the Plague God ripped to shreds by the combined fire of the Soul Drinkers and the Imperial Fists.

The two Adeptus Astartes forces met as the last of the plaguebearers were being picked off by bolter fire. Luko found himself looking into the face of Captain Lysander.

‘At last, we meet as brothers,’ said Lysander.

‘Thank the Emperor for mutual foes,’ replied Luko without humour.

‘Vladimir has requested that we fight now as one. Will you take your place in the line?’

‘We will, Captain,’ said Luko. ‘There are but few of us, and one of our best was lost killing that beast. But whatever fight we can offer, the enemies of the warp will have it.’

Lysander shouldered his power hammer, and held out a hand. Luko slid his own hand out of his lightning claw gauntlet, and shook it.

‘They’re falling back,’ came Vladimir’s voice over Lysander’s vox. ‘But in order. All units, withdraw to the centre and the Forge and hold positions.’

‘Abraxes would not abandon the fight,’ said Lysander, ‘even with their flank collapsed.’

Luko watched as the last few plaguebearers fled through the ruins of barracks and shrines, as if responding to a mental command to give up the fight. They were cut down by bolter fire, sharpshooters snapping bolts into them as they ran. ‘He has a plan,’ said Luko. ‘His kind always do.’

‘What are they doing?’ asked Kolgo.

Sister Aescarion, crouched among the ruins of the front line’s barricades, watched through her magnoculars a moment longer.

‘They are building something,’ she said.

The daemons had retreated a little under an hour before, but not all the way back to the cargo holds. Instead they had formed their own lines a kilometre away, almost the whole width of the deck. They had cut power to as many of the local systems as they could, resulting in the overhead lights failing and casting darkness across the battlefield as if night had fallen. Fires twinkled among the daemons’ positions, illuminating hulking shapes of iron with designs that could only be guessed at in the gloom.

‘Building what?’ said Kolgo.

Aescarion handed him the magnoculars. ‘War machines,’ said Aescarion. ‘At a guess. It is impossible to tell.’

Kolgo focused the magnoculars for himself. Daemons danced around their fires and tattered banners stood, fluttering in the updrafts, casting flickering shadows on the engines they were building. ‘Building them from what?’

‘Perhaps they are bringing parts through from the warp,’ said Aescarion.

The Imperial Fists had rebuilt what defences they could and were now holding their makeshift line again, watchmen posted at intervals to watch for any developments among the enemy. The Space Marine losses had been tallied, and they were heavy. Leucrontas’s command had almost been wiped out, only a couple of dozen stragglers now joining the centre. Most other Imperial Fists units were little over half-strength. Borganor’s Howling Griffons, in the Forge of Ages, had fended off skirmishing forces that tested their strength, and were mostly intact save for a few felled by shrieking flying things that swooped down among them, decapitating and severing with their snapping jaws. The Imperial Fists now holding the line in front of the Tactica were crouched, much as Aescarion was, scanning the daemon lines for the first signs of an assault. The sound of metal on metal drifted across, along with strains of a grim atonal singing.

‘Come,’ said Kolgo. ‘Vladimir has called a council of war. We shall not have to settle for sitting and watching for much longer.’

Aescarion followed the inquisitor through the darkness. On every side were Space Marines who had suffered wounds in the battle but returned to the fray. Many were missing hands or limbs, or had segments of their armour removed to allow for a wound to be cast or splinted.

The most severely wounded were laid out in the Tactica itself, on or around the map tables. Apothecaries worked on chest and head wounds, with healthy brothers rotated in to serve as blood donors for transfusions. As Aescarion and Kolgo entered, another Imperial Fist was lifted off a map table by two of his battle-brothers and carried towards the archways leading to the building’s rear, where the dead were being piled up. A lectern-servitor with a scratching autoquill was keeping a tally of the dead in a ledger.

Officers were gathered around one of the central tables, which represented the canyon walls and xenos settlement of some ancient battle. Vladimir was there, along with Lysander, Borganor and Librarian Varnica of the Doom Eagles. With them stood Captain Luko and Sergeant Graevus of the Soul Drinkers.

Aescarion stood apart as Kolgo joined them.

‘Lord inquisitor,’ said Vladimir. ‘Now we are all present. I shall dispense with any formalities as time is not on our side. We must decide our next course of action, and do it now.’

‘Attack,’ said Borganor. ‘I cannot say why Abraxes withdrew his army, for it is unlike the daemons’ manner of war, but it is certain that we shall not get any such respite from them again. We must lead a counter-offensive as soon as we can, before they finish whatever infernal contraptions they are building. Therein lies the only chance of defeating them.’

‘I agree, Chapter Master,’ said Lysander. ‘We have borne the brunt of their assault with greater fortitude than Abraxes expected. They regroup and perhaps reinforce as we speak. Attack them and destroy them. It is the only way.’

‘They outnumber us,’ countered Librarian Varnica. ‘A full assault will result in defeat for us, every tactical calculation points towards it.’

‘Then what would you have us do?’ said Borganor. ‘Wait for Dorn’s own return? For Roboute Guilliman to appear amongst us?’

‘Attacking would make the most of what advantages we have,’ said Luko. ‘We are at our best up close, charging into the face of the enemy.’

‘So are daemons,’ said Graevus.

‘True,’ said Luko. ‘Very true.’

‘There must be other ways,’ said Varnica. ‘We fall back to a smaller, more defensible part of the Phalanx and force them to attack on a narrow frontage. Lure them in and kill them piece by piece.’

‘That would give them the run of the Phalanx,’ said Vladimir. ‘Abraxes would do with this craft as he wished. His daemons could surround us and perhaps render the whole section uninhabitable by introducing hard vacuum or radiation. With Abraxes in charge they certainly would.’

‘The question is,’ said Varnica, ‘does such a scenario promise our deaths with more or less certainty than walking across the barracks deck and into their arms?’

‘So,’ said Vladimir. ‘We give Abraxes my army or we give him my ship. Any other suggestions?’

‘There is one,’ said a newcomer’s voice. The officers turned to see Apothecary Pallas. He was attending to one of the wounded nearby, using a cautery iron to sear shut the stump of an Imperial Fist’s severed left arm.

‘Pallas,’ said Luko. ‘I had not realised you let lived. I did not think I would speak with you again.’

‘Chapter Master,’ said Pallas, continuing to work on the wounded warrior. ‘What was to be our manner of execution?’

‘We have not the time to waste listening to this renegade,’ said Borganor.

‘Execution by gunshot,’ said Vladimir, ignoring Borganor. ‘Then incineration.’

‘On the Path of the Lost?’

Vladimir folded his arms and stepped back a pace, as if some revelation was growing in his mind. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘You were to walk the Path.’

‘It is traditional,’ continued Pallas, ‘that the condemned among the sons of Dorn be forced to walk the Path of the Lost. It runs from the Pardoner’s Court, just a few hundred metres from this very building, and across the width of the Phalanx along the ventral hull. It emerges near the cargo holds, where our incinerated remains could be ejected from the ship. Is this not correct?’

‘It is,’ replied Vladimir. ‘You know much of this tradition. So few executions have been held on the Phalanx that few give it any mind now.’

‘I read of the ways in which we would die after I refused to join my brothers in their breakout,’ said Pallas. ‘It seemed appropriate for me to do so, that I might counsel my brothers when the time for execution came.’

‘And what,’ said Borganor, ‘is your point?’

‘My point is that Abraxes has at his command more than a mere army,’ said Pallas. The cautery iron had finished its work in closing the wound and Pallas now wrapped the wound in gauze as he spoke. ‘He brought his army onto the Phalanx somehow, and he brings components for his war machines and no doubt reinforcements for his troops. He has a warp gate, a way into the immaterium, and it is stable and open. Only this explains his capacity to attack the Phalanx at all.’

‘And the Path of the Lost,’ said Luko, ‘leads from here to the region of the warp gate.’

‘Among the dorsal cargo holds,’ said Pallas. ‘A sizeable force could not make it through the Path, certainly not without alerting Abraxes to divert his forces to defending the portal. The majority of the force must stay here to face his army and keep it fighting. A smaller force, a handful strong, takes the Path of the Lost and strikes out for the warp gate’s location. As long as Abraxes possesses a gate through the warp any attempt to defeat him here is futile, for he will just bring more legions through until we are exhausted.’

‘Insanity,’ said Borganor.

‘Captain Borganor,’ said Vladimir. ‘I have no doubt that your hatred for the Soul Drinkers is well deserved, for they have done your Chapter much wrong. But what Pallas says has merit. It does not matter if we shatter Abraxes’s army, he still has a means to conjure a new one from the warp. Remove that, and we buy ourselves a thread that leads to victory.’

‘You are not seriously considering this?’ said Borganor.

‘I will go,’ said Luko. ‘The Soul Drinkers have suffered at the hands of Abraxes before. If we are to die on the Phalanx, then let it be in seeking revenge against him.’

‘And none but the Soul Drinkers have faced Abraxes before at all,’ added Graevus.

‘You will need a Librarian,’ said Varnica. ‘And since they are in such short supply, I had better go with you.’

‘Varnica?’ said Borganor. ‘You were among the first to condemn the Soul Drinkers!’

‘And if you are correct in your mistrust, I will be among the last to be betrayed by them,’ said Varnica. ‘But the Chapter Master is right. There is no other way. Thin as the thread is, unwholesome as the Soul Drinkers reputation might be, I must follow that thread for it is all we have.’

‘And I,’ said Sister Aescarion, stepping forwards. ‘The Inquisition must have a presence. My lord inquisitor is most valuable here, leading the defence of the Phalanx. In his stead I offer myself to accompany the Apothecary’s mission.’

‘I shall appoint an Imperial Fists squad to accompany you,’ said Vladimir. ‘I can spare no more. The rest of my warriors must remain to hold the line.’

‘I wish Apothecary Pallas given leave to join us as well,’ said Luko.

‘You have it. Kolgo, Borganor, Lysander and myself shall continue to command the defence. These are the wishes of Chapter Master Vladimir, and hence are the wishes of Rogal Dorn. Go now to fulfil your orders, brothers and sisters. Should I see you after the battle, then all shall be joyful. If not, I shall await you at the end of time, at the Emperor’s side, when we shall have our revenge for everything the enemy has done to us.’

The officers departed to organise the defence of the Tactica and the Forge of Ages. Across the cavernous barracks deck, the war machines of the daemon army grew higher.

SHADOW KNIGHT

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

The sins of the father, they say.

Maybe. Maybe not. But we were always different. My brothers and I, we were never truly kin with the others – the Angels, the Wolves, the Ravens…

Perhaps our difference was our father’s sin, and perhaps it was his triumph. I am not empowered by anyone to cast a critical eye over the history of the VIII Legion.

These words stick with me, though. The sins of the father. These words have shaped my life.

The sins of my father echo throughout eternity as heresy. Yet the sins of my father’s father are worshipped as the first acts of godhood. I do not ask myself if this is fair. Nothing is fair. The word is a myth. I do not care what is fair, and what is right, and what’s unfair and wrong. These concepts do not exist outside the skulls of those who waste their life in contemplation.

I ask myself, night after night, if I deserve vengeance.

I devote each beat of my heart to tearing down everything I once raised. Remember this, remember it always: my blade and bolter helped forge the Imperium. I and those like me – we hold greater rights than any to destroy mankind’s sickened empire, for it was our blood, our bones, and our sweat that built it.

Look to your shining champions now. The Astartes that scour the dark places of your galaxy. The hordes of fragile mortals enslaved to the Imperial Guard and shackled in service to the Throne of Lies. Not a soul among them was even born when my brothers and I built this empire.

Do I deserve vengeance? Let me tell you something about vengeance, little scion of the Imperium. My brothers and I swore to our dying father that we would atone for the great sins of the past. We would bleed the unworthy empire that we had built, and cleanse the stars of the False Emperor’s taint.

This is not mere vengeance. This is redemption. My right to destroy is greater than your right to live.

Remember that, when we come for you.

He is a child standing over a dying man.

The boy is more surprised than scared. His friend, who has not yet taken a life, pulls him away. He will not move. Not yet. He cannot escape the look in the bleeding man’s eyes.

The shopkeeper dies.

The boy runs.

He is a child being cut open by machines.

Although he sleeps, his body twitches, betraying painful dreams and sleepless nerves firing as they register pain from the surgery. Two hearts, fleshy and glistening, beat in his cracked-open chest. A second new organ, smaller than the new heart, will alter the growth of his bones, encouraging his skeleton to absorb unnatural minerals over the course of his lifetime.

Untrembling hands, some human, some augmetic, work over the child’s body, slicing and sealing, implanting and flesh-bonding. The boy trembles again, his eyes opening for a moment.

A god with a white mask shakes his head at the boy.

‘Sleep.’

The boy tries to resist, but slumber grips him with comforting claws. He feels, just for a moment, as though he is sinking into the black seas of his homeworld.

Sleep, the god had said.

He obeys, because the chemicals within his blood force him to obey.

A third organ is placed within his chest, not far from the new heart. As the ossmodula warps his bones to grow on new minerals, the biscopea generates a flood of hormones to feed his muscles.

Surgeons seal the boy’s medical wounds.

Already, the child is no longer human. Tonight’s work has seen to that. Time will reveal just how different the boy will become.

He is a teenage boy, standing over another dead body.

This corpse is not like the first. This corpse is the same age as the boy, and in its last moments of life it had struggled with all its strength, desperate not to die.

The boy drops his weapon. The serrated knife falls to the ground.

Legion masters come to him. Their eyes are red, their dark armour immense. Skulls hang from their pauldrons and plastrons on chains of blackened bronze.

He draws breath to speak, to tell them it was an accident. They silence him.

‘Well done,’ they say.

And they call him brother.

He is a teenage boy, and the rifle is heavy in his hands.

He watches for a long, long time. He has trained for this. He knows how to slow his hearts, how to regulate his breathing and the biological beats of his body until his entire form remains as still as a statue.

Predator. Prey. His mind goes cold, his focus absolute. The mantra chanted internally becomes the only way to see the world. Predator. Prey. Hunter. Hunted. Nothing else matters.

He squeezes the trigger. One thousand metres away, a man dies.

‘Target eliminated,’ he says.

He is a young man, sleeping on the same surgery table as before.

In a slumber demanded by the chemicals flowing through his veins, he dreams once again of his first murder. In the waking world, needles and medical probes bore into the flesh of his back, injecting fluids directly into his spinal column.

His slumbering body reacts to the invasion, coughing once. Acidic spit leaves his lips, hissing on the ground where it lands, eating into the tiled floor.

When he wakes, hours later, he feels the sockets running down his spine. The scars, the metallic nodules…

In a universe where no gods exist, he knows this is the closest mortality can come to divinity.

He is a young man, staring into his own eyes.

He stands naked in a dark chamber, in a lined rank with a dozen other souls. Other initiates standing with him, also stripped of clothing, the marks of their surgeries fresh upon their pale skin. He barely notices them. Sexuality is a forgotten concept, alien to his mind, merely one of ten thousand humanities his consciousness has discarded. He no longer recalls the face of his mother and father. He only recalls his own name because his Legion masters never changed it.

He looks into the eyes that are now his. They stare back, slanted and murder-red, set in a helmet with its facial plate painted white. The bloodeyed, bone-pale skull watches him as he watches it.

This is his face now. Through these eyes, he will see the galaxy. Through this skulled helm he will cry his wrath at those who dare defy the Emperor’s vision for mankind.

‘You are Talos,’ a Legion master says, ‘of First Claw, Tenth Company.’

He is a young man, utterly inhuman, immortal and undying.

He sees the surface of this world through crimson vision, with data streaming in sharp, clear white runic language across his retinas. He sees the life forces of his brothers in the numbers displayed. He feels the temperature outside his sealed war armour. He sees targeting sights flicker as they follow the movements of his eyes, and feels his hand, the hand clutching his bolter, tense as it tries to follow each target lock. Ammunition counters display how many have died this day.

Around him, aliens die. Ten, a hundred, a thousand. His brothers butcher their way through a city of violet crystal, bolters roaring and chainswords howling. Here and there in the opera of battle-noise, a brother screams his rage through helm-amplifiers.

The sound is always the same. Bolters always roar. Chainblades always howl. Astartes always cry their fury. When the VIII Legion wages war, the sound is that of lions and wolves slaying each other while vultures shriek above.

He cries words that he will one day never shout again – words that will soon become ash on his tongue. Already he cries the words without thinking about them, without feeling them.

For the Emperor.

He is a young man, awash in the blood of humans.

He shouts words without the heart to feel them, declaring concepts of Imperial justice and deserved vengeance. A man claws at his armour, begging and pleading.

‘We are loyal! We have surrendered!’

The young man breaks the human’s face with the butt of his bolter. Surrendering so late was a meaningless gesture. Their blood must run as an example, and the rest of the system’s worlds would fall into line.

Around him, the riot continues unabated. Soon, his bolter is silenced, voiceless with no shells to fire. Soon after that, his chainsword dies, clogged with meat.

The Night Lords resort to killing the humans with their bare hands, dark gauntlets punching and strangling and crushing.

At a timeless point in the melee, the voice of an ally comes over the vox. It is an Imperial Fist. Their Legion watches from the bored security of their landing site.

‘What are you doing?’ the Imperial Fist demands. ‘Brothers, are you insane?’

Talos does not answer. They do not deserve an answer. If the Fists had brought this world into compliance themselves, the Night Lords would never have needed to come here.

He is a young man, watching his homeworld burn.

He is a young man, mourning a father soon to die.

He is a traitor to everything he once held sacred.

Stabbing lights lanced through the gloom.

The salvage team moved slowly, neither patient nor impatient, but with the confident care of men with an arduous job to do and no deadline to meet. The team spread out across the chamber, overturning debris, examining the markings of weapons fire on the walls, their internal vox clicking as they spoke to one another.

With the ship open to the void, each of the salvage team wore atmosphere suits against the airless cold. They communicated as often by sign language as they did by words.

This interested the hunter that watched them, because he too was fluent in Astartes battle sign. Curious, to see his enemies betray themselves so easily.

The hunter watched in silence as the spears of illumination cut this way and that, revealing the wreckage of the battles that had taken place on this deck of the abandoned vessel. The salvage team – who were clearly genhanced, but too small and unarmoured to be full Astartes – were crippled by the atmosphere suits they wore. Such confinement limited their senses, while the hunter’s ancient mark IV war plate only enhanced his. They could not hear as he heard, nor see as he saw. That reduced their chances of survival from incredibly unlikely to absolutely none.

Smiling at the thought, the hunter whispered to the machine-spirit of his armour, a single word that enticed the war plate’s soul with the knowledge that the hunt was beginning in earnest.

‘Preysight.’

His vision blurred to the blue of the deepest oceans, decorated by supernova heat smears of moving, living beings. The hunter watched the team move on, separating into two teams, each of two men.

This was going to be entertaining.

Talos followed the first team, shadowing them through the corridors, knowing the grating purr of his power armour and the snarling of its servo-joints were unheard by the sense-dimmed salvagers.

Salvagers was perhaps the wrong word, of course. Disrespectful to the foe.

While they were not full Astartes, their gene-enhancement was obvious in the bulk of their bodies and the lethal grace of their motions. They, too, were hunters – just weaker examples of the breed.

Initiates.

Their icon, mounted on each shoulder plate, displayed a drop of ruby blood framed by proud angelic wings.

The hunter’s pale lips curled into another crooked smile. This was unexpected. The Blood Angels had sent in a team of Scouts…

The Night Lord had little time for notions of coincidence. If the Angels were here, then they were here on the hunt. Perhaps the Covenant of Blood had been detected on the long-range sensors of a Blood Angel battlefleet. Such a discovery would certainly have been enough to bring them here.

Hunting for their precious sword, no doubt. And not for the first time.

Perhaps this was their initiation ceremony? A test of prowess? Bring back the blade and earn passage into the Chapter…

Oh, how unfortunate.

The stolen blade hung at the hunter’s hip, as it had for years now. Tonight would not be the night it found its way back into the desperate reach of the Angels. But, as always, they were welcome to sell their lives in the attempt at reclamation.

Talos monitored the readout of his retinal displays. The temptation to blink-click certain runes was strong, but he resisted the urge. This hunt would be easy enough without combat narcotics flooding his blood. Purity lay in abstaining from such things until they became necessary.

The location runes of his brothers in First Claw flickered on his visor display. Taking note of their positions elsewhere in the ship, the hunter moved forward to shed the blood of those enslaved to the Throne of Lies.

A true hunter did not avoid being seen by his prey. Such stalking was the act of cowards and carrion-eaters, revealing themselves only when the prey was slain. Where was the skill in that? Where was the thrill?

A Night Lord was raised to hunt by other, truer principles.

Talos ghosted through the shadows, judging the strength of the Scouts’ suits’ audio-receptors. Just how much could they hear…?

He followed them down a corridor, his gauntleted knuckles scraping along the metal walls.

The Blood Angels turned instantly, stabbing his face with their beam lighting.

That almost worked, the hunter had to give it to them. These lesser hunters knew their prey – they knew they hunted Night Lords. For half a heartbeat, sunfire would have blazed across his vision, blinding him.

Talos ignored the beams completely. He tracked by preysight. Their tactics were meaningless.

He was already gone when they opened fire, melting into the shadows of a side corridor.

He caught them again nine minutes later.

This time, he lay in wait after baiting a beautiful trap. The sword they came for was right in their path.

It was called Aurum. Words barely did its craftsmanship justice. Forged when the Emperor’s Great Crusade took its first steps into the stars, the blade was forged for one of the Blood Angel Legion’s first heroes. It had come into Talos’s possession centuries later, when he’d murdered Aurum’s heir.

It was almost amusing, how often the sons of Sanguinius tried to reclaim the sword from him. It was much less amusing how often he had to kill his own brothers when they sought to take the blade from his dead hands. Avarice shattered all unity, even among Legion brothers.

The Scouts saw their Chapter relic now, so long denied their grasp. The golden blade was embedded into the dark metal decking, its angel-winged crosspiece turned to ivory under the harsh glare of their stabbing lights.

An invitation to simply advance into the chamber and take it, but it was so obviously a trap. Yet… how could they resist?

They did not resist.

The initiates were alert, bolters high and panning fast, senses keen. The hunter saw their mouths moving as they voxed continuous updates to each other.

Talos let go of the ceiling.

He thudded to the deck behind one of the initiates, gauntlets snapping forward to clutch the Scout.

The other Angel turned and fired. Talos laughed at the zeal in his eyes, at the tightness of his clenched teeth, as the initiate fired three bolts into the body of his brother.

The Night Lord gripped the convulsing human shield against him, seeing the temperature gauge on his retinal display flicker as the dying initiate’s blood hit sections of his war plate. In his grip, the shuddering Angel was little more than a burst sack of freezing meat. The bolt shells had detonated, coming close to killing him and opening the suit to the void.

‘Good shooting, Angel,’ Talos spoke through his helm’s crackling vox-speakers. He threw his bleeding shield aside and leapt for the other initiate, fingers splayed like talons.

The fight was mercilessly brief. The Night Lord’s full gene-enhancements, coupled with the heightened strength of his armour’s engineered muscle fibre-cables, meant there was only one possible outcome. Talos backhanded the bolter from the Angel’s grip and clawed at the initiate.

As the weaker warrior writhed, Talos stroked his gauntleted fingertips across the clear face-visor of the initiate’s atmosphere suit.

‘This looks fragile,’ he said.

The Scout shouted something unheard. Hate burned in his eyes. Talos wasted several seconds just enjoying that expression. That passion.

He crashed his fist against the visor, smashing it to shards.

As one corpse froze and another swelled and ruptured on its way to asphyxiation, the Night Lord retrieved his blade, the sword he claimed by right of conquest, and moved back into the darkest parts of the ship.

‘Talos,’ the voice came over the vox in a sibilant hiss.

‘Speak, Uzas.’

‘They have sent initiates to hunt us, brother. I had to cancel my preysight to make sure my eyes were seeing clearly. Initiates. Against us.’

‘Spare me your indignation. What do you want?’

Uzas’s reply was a low growl and a crackle of dead vox. Talos put it from his mind. He had long grown bored of Uzas forever lamenting each time they met with insignificant prey.

‘Cyrion,’ he voxed.

‘Aye. Talos?’

‘Of course.’

‘Forgive me. I thought it would be Uzas with another rant. I hear your decks are crawling with Angels. Epic glories to be earned in slaughtering their infants, eh?’

Talos didn’t quite sigh. ‘Are you almost done?’

‘This hulk is as hollow as Uzas’s head, brother. Negative on anything of worth. Not even a servitor to steal. I’m returning to the boarding pod now. Unless you need help shooting the Angels’ children?’

Talos killed the vox-link as he stalked through the black corridor. This was fruitless. Time to leave – empty-handed and still desperately short on supplies. This… this piracy offended him now, as it always did, and as it always had since they’d been cut off from the Legion decades ago. A plague upon the long-dead Warmaster and his failures which still echoed today. A curse upon the night the VIII Legion was shattered and scattered across the stars.

Diminished. Reduced. Surviving as disparate warbands – broken echoes of the unity within loyalist Astartes Chapters.

Sins of the father.

This curious ambush by the Angels who had tracked them here was nothing more than a minor diversion. Talos was about to vox a general withdrawal after the last initiates were hunted down and slain, when his vox went live again.

‘Brother,’ said Xarl. ‘I’ve found the Angels.’

‘As have Uzas and I. Kill them quickly and let’s get back to the Covenant.’

‘No, Talos.’ Xarl’s voice was edged with anger. ‘Not initiates. The real Angels.’

The Night Lords of First Claw, Tenth Company, came together like wolves in the wild. Stalking through the darkened chambers of the ship, the four Astartes met in the shadows, speaking over their vox-link, crouching with their weapons at the ready.

In Talos’s hands, the relic blade Aurum caught what little light remained, glinting as he moved.

‘Five of them,’ Xarl spoke low, his voice edged with his suppressed eagerness. ‘We can take five. They stand bright and proud in a control chamber not far from our boarding pod.’ He racked his bolter. ‘We can take five,’ he repeated.

‘They’re just waiting?’ Cyrion said. ‘They must be expecting an honest fight.’

Uzas snorted at that.

‘This is your fault, you know,’ Cyrion said with a chuckle, nodding at Talos. ‘You and that damn sword.’

‘It keeps things interesting,’ Talos replied. ‘And I cherish every curse that their Chapter screams at me.’

He stopped speaking, narrowing his eyes for a moment. Cyrion’s skulled helm blurred before him. As did Xarl’s. The sound of distant bolter fire echoed in his ears, not distorted by the faint crackle of helm-filtered noise. Not a true sound. Not a real memory. Something akin to both.

‘I… have a…’ Talos blinked to clear his fading vision. Shadows of vast things darkened his sight. ‘…have a plan…’

‘Brother?’ Cyrion asked.

Talos shivered once, his servo-joints snarling at the shaking movement.

Magnetically clasped to his thigh, his bolter didn’t fall to the decking, but the golden blade did. It clattered to the steel floor with a clang.

‘Talos?’ Xarl asked.

‘No,’ Uzas growled, ‘not now.’

Talos’s head jerked once, as if his armour had sent an electrical pulse through his spine, and he crashed to the ground in a clash of war plate on metal.

‘The god-machines of Crythe…’ he murmured. ‘They have killed the sun.’

A moment later, he started screaming.

The others had to cut Talos out of the squad’s internal vox-link. His screams drowned out all other speech.

‘We can take five of them,’ Xarl said. ‘Three of us remain. We can take five Angels.’

‘Almost certainly,’ Cyrion agreed. ‘And if they summon squads of their initiates?’

‘Then we slaughter five of them and their initiates.’

Uzas cut in. ‘We were slaying our way across the stars ten thousand years before they were even born.’

‘Yes, while that’s a wonderful parable, I don’t need rousing rhetoric,’ Cyrion said. ‘I need a plan.’

‘We hunt,’ Uzas and Xarl said at once.

‘We kill them,’ Xarl added.

‘We feast on their gene-seed,’ Uzas finished.

‘If this was an award ceremony for fervency and zeal, once again, you’d both be collapsing under the weight of medals. But you want to launch an assault on their position while we drag Talos with us? I think the scraping of his armour over the floor will rather kill the element of stealth, brothers.’

‘Guard him, Cyrion,’ Xarl said. ‘Uzas and I will take the Angels.’

‘Two against five.’ Cyrion’s red eye lenses didn’t quite fix upon his brother’s. ‘Those are poor odds, Xarl.’

‘Then we will finally be rid of each other,’ Xarl grunted. ‘Besides, we’ve had worse.’

That was true, at least.

‘Ave Dominus Nox,’ Cyrion said. ‘Hunt well and hunt fast.’

‘Ave Dominus Nox,’ the other two replied.

Cyrion listened for a while to his brother’s screams. It was difficult to make any sense from the stream of shouted words.

This came as no surprise. Cyrion had heard Talos suffering in the grip of this affliction many times before. As gene-gifts went, it was barely a blessing.

Sins of the father, he thought, watching Talos’s inert armour, listening to the cries of death to come. How they are reflected within the son.

According to Cyrion’s retinal chrono display, one hour and sixteen minutes had passed when he heard the explosion.

The decking shuddered under his boots.

‘Xarl? Uzas?’

Static was the only answer.

Great.

When Uzas’s voice finally broke over the vox after two hours, it was weak and coloured by his characteristic bitterness.

‘Hnngh. Cyrion. It’s done. Drag the prophet.’

‘You sound like you got shot,’ Cyrion resisted the urge to smile in case they heard it in his words.

‘He did,’ Xarl said. ‘We’re on our way back.’

‘What was that detonation?’

‘Plasma cannon.’

‘You’re… you’re joking.’

‘Not even for a second. I have no idea why they brought one of those to a fight in a ship’s innards, but the coolant feeds made for a ripe target.’

Cyrion blink-clicked a rune by Xarl’s identification symbol. It opened a private channel between the two of them.

‘Who hit Uzas?’

‘An initiate. From behind, with a sniper rifle.’

Cyrion immediately closed the link so no one would hear him laughing.

The Covenant of Blood was a blade of cobalt darkness, bronze-edged and scarred by centuries of battle. It drifted through the void, sailing close to its prey like a shark gliding through black waters.

The Encarmine Soul was a Gladius-class frigate with a long and proud history of victories in the name of the Blood Angels Chapter – and before it, the IX Legion. It opened fire on the Covenant of Blood with an admirable array of weapons batteries.

Briefly, beautifully, the void shields around the Night Lords strike cruiser shimmered in a display reminiscent of oil on water.

The Covenant of Blood returned fire. Within a minute, the blade-like ship was sailing through void debris, its lances cooling from their momentary fury. The Encarmine Soul, what little chunks were left of it, clanked and sparked off the larger cruiser’s void shields as it passed through the expanding cloud of wreckage.

Another ship, this one stricken and dead in space, soon fell under the Covenant’s shadow. The strike cruiser obscured the sun, pulling in close, ready to receive its boarding pod once again.

First Claw had been away for seven hours investigating the hulk. Their mothership had come hunting for them.

Bulkhead seals hissed as the reinforced doors opened on loud, grinding hinges.

Xarl and Cyrion carried Talos into the Covenant’s deployment bay. Uzas walked behind them, a staggering limp marring his gait. His spine was on fire from the sniper’s solid slug that still lodged there. Worse, his genhanced healing had sealed and clotted the wound. He’d need surgery – or more likely a knife and a mirror – to tear the damn thing out.

One of the Atramentar, elite guard of the Exalted, stood in its hulking Terminator war plate. His skull-painted, tusked helm stared impassively. Trophy racks adorned his back, each one impaled with several helms from a number of loyalist Astartes Chapters: a history of bloodshed and betrayal, proudly displayed for his brothers to see.

It nodded to Talos’s prone form.

‘The Soul Hunter is wounded?’ the Terminator asked, its voice a deep, rumbling growl.

‘No,’ Cyrion said. ‘Inform the Exalted at once. His prophet is suffering another vision.’

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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

Cover illustration by Cheoljoo Lee

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