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Bitter End - Sarah Cawkwell

Aenarion - Gav Thorpe

An Extract From 'The Gildar Rift' - Sarah Cawkwell

The Inquisition - Ben Counter

Phalanx - Chapter Thirteen - Ben Counter

Phalanx - Chapter Fourteen - Ben Counter

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BITTER END

Sarah Cawkwell

For many years, he had made bargains, accords and dark pacts, both with powers he could name and several more that he dared not. He could not remember the last time he had merely requested something and the Imperium had provided it. In the days of his hated and enforced servitude to the Corpse-Emperor, he had but to requisition something and it was his.

Now, whenever he wanted something, Huron Blackheart simply reached out with the might of his loyal Red Corsairs and he took it. His greedy, grasping claws closed around objects, people and entire star systems and stole them away. He looted and plundered, he stole and he murdered. Occasionally though, he would come upon a treasure that he could not simply claim.

When this happened, he would be roused from the shadows in which he now existed and he would hunt down his quarry in an entirely different manner. He would sit down with agents of the most powerful and most influential and he would talk. He would barter and negotiate, bringing his considerable charisma and cunning to the fore and he would make more deals.

His reputation preceded him wherever he went and many wisely shied away from reaching any sort of arrangement with the Tyrant of Badab, fearing for their lives. But there were many more who boldly sealed their agreements with him in blood.

Sometimes, Huron Blackheart even kept his word.

This had been an agri-world once. But in the wake of an exterminatus it had become uninhabitable. Its given name was lost in history, leaving it with the identifier that had been bestowed upon it during the halcyon days of the Great Crusade. Eighty-Three Fourteen was a wasteland. Nothing grew here any more and the only things that lived were the most tenacious of bacteria. The seas had boiled away, leaving vast expanses of arid ground that was cracked and blistered. The ferocity of the bombardment had broken open the crust and disturbed something deep in the planet’s core. Volcanic lava bubbled up through the wounds in the earth and spilled across its ruined surface like blood. There was a constant smouldering heat haze that loaned everything a slightly distorted, unreal appearance.

It was a prime example of an inhospitable environment but the gigantic figures making their steady way across its broken surface were not in the slightest bit bothered by the poisoned air or the excruciating heat. They walked without tiring, keeping up a pace they could sustain for many days if they so desired. They had marched to war in this way many times. But on this day, there was no war to be had. This was a deputation sent to accompany their lord and master to a summit.

Huron Blackheart walked in the midst of half a dozen of his Red Corsairs, the only one not wearing a helm. The countless implants and prosthetics that held his brain within what remained of his skull meant that wearing a tactical armour helm caused him great discomfort. Additionally, for the most part, it was such a laborious and time-consuming process to re-wire sections of his cranial implants to accept a helm that it was little more than a hindrance. The complex, wheezing workings of his replacement lungs and respiratory system filtered the atmosphere in much the same way as a helmet anyway; and thus the choking, sulphuric air had no effect on him at all. Bareheaded, he stood out as unique amidst the group.

He could have made this journey alone but had elected to field a show of strength. He was wily and astute, blessed with cunning and guile like no other. But he did not trust the individual with whom he was dealing.

It had been a tedious process setting up this meeting. Dengesha had not been prepared to travel to Huron Blackheart’s stronghold deep in the heart of the Maelstrom and neither did the Blood Reaver care to board a ship almost entirely populated by warp-witches. He had used sorcerers for his own ends before, of course. Indeed, it had been his own cabal who had suggested Dengesha as the best possible candidate for the task. Increasingly heated exchanges had taken place until an impasse had been reached. Neutral ground was the solution.

On a rocky outcrop overlooking the volcanic plains of a world that had once teemed with life, the shape of another giant could be made out. A baroque silhouette, picked out by the weak rays of the sickly yellow sun, stood alone. One of Huron’s retinue pointed upwards with the muzzle of a bolter, indicating the other’s presence.

‘I see him,’ Huron said, simply. ‘I told you he would come.’ A deep chuckle came from his ravaged throat. ‘He could not help himself.’

Dengesha took no sobriquet in order to convey his greatness. It was not in his nature to embrace an honorific that extolled his deeds to the outside world. He was no Despoiler or Betrayer. He chose instead to let his actions speak for themselves. For centuries he had stood at the head of the Heterodox, a cabal of sorcerers who, it was rumoured, had splintered centuries earlier from the Word Bearers. Dengesha was said to have studied the heart of Chaos Undivided for more than five thousand years and as such, his well of knowledge ran deep.

There was nothing about Dengesha that suggested such great age. His visage was timeless and its individual features unimpressive. He bore several scars on his face but more than this were the countless runes and brands that were seared into his skin. They writhed and twisted now under Huron’s scrutiny, living things that spoke of a true disciple of the dark powers. He felt no discomfort in the sorcerer’s presence. He was fully at ease with his own confidence.

The two Space Marines, the warrior and the psyker, had moved to meet one another within a cave in the rock face. Neither’s attendant retinues were with them as per the terms of their agreement.

The cave had once been a natural wonder and the source of a wellspring that had kept the local agricultural workers provided with water. As high as a refinery tower within, the cave was studded with broken, jagged stalagmites and stalactites that glittered with seams of semi-precious rock. Inside this cave, high above the shattered plains, was the only moisture remaining anywhere on the planet.

The underground spring that had once nourished crops and quenched the thirst of thousands of Imperial workers was now a toxic sink hole, steaming and roiling gently. Periodically, air would escape from a fissure and expand with a rush, spraying boiling water in all directions. It spattered against the armour of the two giants who stood face-to-face. Neither gave ground for some time and then the psyker broke the stalemate with a bitter greeting.

‘Blood Reaver.’

Huron greeted the sorcerer in kind and they considered each other in further mute, candid appreciation for a while. Their eyes locked and the sorcerer’s head tipped slightly to one side. The master of the Red Corsairs felt the faintest brush on his mind as the other attempted a psychic evaluation. The resultant sharp intake of breath brought a smile.

‘Difficulties, Dengesha?’

‘You are no psyker and yet you are warded… what is it that shields your mind from my sight?’

‘Are you so disappointed? Should you not be wary of being so free with the admission that you are invading my thoughts without my permission?’ Huron’s voice was grating and harsh, dragged from replacement vocal cords and a vox unit that had been tuned and retuned until it sounded as close to human as it could. Which was not very.

‘You know my nature, Lord Huron. It is, after all, why you sought me out. Now answer my question.’ Dengesha’s words were demanding, yet his tone remained deferential. Huron approved of the approach. ‘What is it that grants you this protection?’

‘Perhaps you should tell me what you have heard?’ The question was thrown back at the sorcerer who folded his arms across his chest.

‘I have heard,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘in rumours whispered throughout the Eye that the four favour you. You carry a boon they granted you. I have heard that something walks at your side and grants you certain… benefits.’

‘You are very well informed.’ Dengesha took another sharp intake of breath and Huron continued. ‘Does that surprise you, sorcerer? Do you taste envy? Are you curious as to why it is that the dark powers see fit to grant me such a gift? Look closely, Dengesha. Tell me what you see.’

The sorcerer considered the Red Corsair for a few moments. He looked the warrior up and down. A giant clad in desecrated red armour with so many augmetics and implants that he looked more like a blighted tech-priest or enginseer than the scourge of the Imperium. The metal-plated head shook slightly and a quirk of amusement twitched the lipless mouth.

‘No, Dengesha. Look properly. Use your witch-sight.’

The sorcerer looked. And he saw.

The word hamadrya had never been a part of Huron Blackheart’s vocabulary until the day he had been reborn. There had been many deals made in those few days when he had hovered in the grey mists that lingered between life and death. His body had been left all but useless in the wake of the Star Phantoms assault on the Palace of Thorns and without the anchor of its corporeal weight, his soul had been free to wander at will.

Nobody knew who – or what – he had consorted with in those days. But if the thought was never expressed aloud, all of the Red Corsairs knew that their lord and master had to have made some pact. He could not have survived otherwise, despite the ceaseless labours of his most faithful. They could repair the physical damage to their Chapter Master’s body, but that was all.

But none ever asked of the events that had transpired and Huron Blackheart never volunteered the information.

The hamadrya had begun its life as a thought. A potentiality. A tendril of insubstantial warp-stuff that draped itself invisibly across Huron’s mantle. Over weeks, months and years it had become something more tangible. In its earliest stages, it was nothing more than a wisp. A curl of smoky air that lingered around the warrior’s shoulder like a mist snake wrapping itself protectively around him. Huron himself seemed either oblivious or indifferent to its presence, but over time began to notice that he was developing a sensitivity and then a resistance to psychic intrusions.

The more he realised this, the stronger the warding became until the ethereal presence at his shoulder took on a more corporeal form. Sometimes it was reptilian. Sometimes avian. Other times simian. Always animalistic and always no larger than the breadth of the warrior’s shoulder span. Others could see it, but never for long. Most of the time it could only be glimpsed briefly out of the corner of the eye, leaving the viewer wondering if they had seen it at all.

It granted Huron Blackheart an extra layer of power that boosted an already over-inflated sense of ego. But it had limitations. It was a creature of the warp, after all.

The sorcerer looked. And he saw.

‘I confess, my Lord, that I did not believe the rumours to be true,’ he confessed. He had considered the tale of the familiar to be nothing more than a figment of the mad Tyrant’s overwrought imagination. Yet his witch-sight gave him a unique view. ‘I have never seen its like before. Is this what they call the hamadrya?’

‘Indeed it is. And you would do well not to concern yourself further with its origins or its purpose. Consider instead the question my agent put to you.’ Always quick to the point, Huron Blackheart did not care to linger on matters past.

‘Yes, Lord Huron.’ Dengesha bowed from the waist. ‘I consider it a great honour that you seek my assistance in this matter. I understand that your… blessing loses power; that it becomes weaker the further from the heart of the Maelstrom you travel. In conjunction with your own cabal…’ There was unmistakable superiority in Dengesha’s tone as he said the word, ‘I have determined what you need to overcome this limitation.’

‘The hamadrya is a thing of the warp,’ Huron said. He drummed his fingers idly against his armour plated thigh. The noise reverberated through the cavernous chamber, the acoustics oddly distorted. ‘It draws its strength from the powers therein. And the further from its source I travel…’ He broke off and raised his head to study Dengesha. ‘My cabal have told me what I need. A potent soul, shackled by arcane powers. The hamadrya can feed from its torment for all eternity. But my sorcerers, strong as they are… cannot do this one thing.’

Huron’s red, artificial eye whirred softly as it focused. ‘Give me my solution, Dengesha and we will share the spoils of war.’

‘You need a potent soul.’

‘I have found such a thing. Sister Brigitta of the Order of the Iron Rose.’

‘I have heard of this Order and of this woman. The self-proclaimed saviour of her people. She who bears the sins of a generation on her shoulders.’

‘Aye. One of the faithful. A powerful symbol.’

‘You need a suitable vessel. Such a thing will not be easy to locate, my Lord. It could take many long months of searching…’

‘You underestimate my resources, Dengesha.’ Huron’s twisted face distorted in a smile again and he twisted a loop on his belt bringing an object slowly into view.

The bottle was exquisite. Deep, emerald green in colour, it was a fusion of bottle and vial with a wide lip tapering to a long, slim neck that fed into a small oval bowl. It was encased within beautiful fretwork, wrought from copper or brass or some other burnished metal that snaked around its delicate surface.

‘My cabal attached this vessel to my belt,’ said Huron. ‘They told me that only another sorcerer could remove it, that if I were to touch it myself, the power would be tainted.’ He shifted his hip slightly so that it was facing Dengesha, who snapped open the belt loop, taking the bottle in his hands. He could feel its imbued power; a thrum of psychic energy that made his hands vibrate gently as he held it. Huron studied him.

‘On the understanding that you will give me what I ask for, I make a gift of this vessel to you so that you may work whatever fell deeds necessary. Do you accept?’

‘Gladly, my lord. Such an arcane item… such a relic must have cost you dearly. Where did you locate it?’

‘My sources are many and varied. Do not bother yourself with detail. Is it adequate for its purpose?’

‘More than adequate.’ Dengesha studied the bottle in admiration for a while, then with a series of hand movements, caused it to disappear. It was little more than cheap theatrics and it did nothing to change the expression on Huron Blackheart’s artificial face. ‘This Sister Brigitta of yours will be heavily guarded, of course. I will need absolutely no distractions whilst I perform the binding.’

‘Leave that side of the bargain to me, master sorcerer. My Red Corsairs will distract whatever pitiful forces guard her and you will take your coterie and perform your rituals. You will present me with what I want and in return, I give the Heterodox the world in her charge for your chapels and its people for,’ he gave a creaking shrug, ‘whatever you see fit.’ His augmetic eye darkened briefly as though he blinked, a slow, thoughtful thing that was somehow unsettling. ‘Do we have an agreement?’

‘A world and its subjects? My lord, that is… very generous of you.’

Huron shrugged. ‘My Corsairs will still take what spoils we desire, but it is not beyond me to show gratitude and generosity. Now tell me, Dengesha of the Heterodox, do we have an agreement?’

‘We do.’

There were many who boldly sealed their agreements in blood. Dengesha of the Heterodox was one such individual.

Sometimes, Huron Blackheart even kept his word.

The temple burned.

Since time immemorial, the Order of the Iron Rose had been cloistered within their monument to the Emperor of Mankind. A dizzyingly aesthetic building, the temple had stood proudly within well-guarded walls for countless generations. The sisters lived their studious lives quietly, only leaving at times of war when their fierce battle skills were most needed. Then, their comparative gentleness could easily be forgotten in the face of their roaring battle madness.

Sister Brigitta was the incumbent canoness, but had always eschewed the title, preferring to remain on the same level as her sisters. She was dearly beloved by all who knew her. Intelligent and insightful, her words of wisdom on any number of subjects were treated as precious jewels to be collected and admired.

She stood now, clad in her copper-coloured battle armour, her black and silver-flecked hair streaming in the breeze. The armour forced her to stand upright with a grace and dignity that added weight to her command. Her jaw was tightened and her face bore an implacable expression as she stared down from the highest chamber of the steeple at the slaughter taking place far below.

Tears ran down her face, but not of fear. They were tears of rage and regret that the sanctity of the temple had been violated. At either side, her two most trusted lieutenants also wept at the wanton destruction that rampaged below.

They had come without warning. They had struck fast and they had struck without mercy. The loyal Palatine Guard who protected the sacred grounds had done an admirable job of holding the enemy at bay but ultimately, they were only human. What hope could they have against the Adeptus Astartes?

Sister Brigitta surveyed the carnage. Seemingly countless forces of the giant Space Marines pitted against the pitiable wall of humanity. That delicate wall of mortal flesh was the only thing standing between the Chaos forces and the sisters.

From here, she could not see the faces of the brave guardsmen who died in their futile efforts to protect the Order, but she imagined that each shared the same look of zealous ferocity. The Order of the Iron Rose preached that fear made one weak and had no place on the battlefield.

The barking report of bolter fire filled the air and the murderous whine of chainblades was all-pervading. The screams of the dying were agony to listen to and the ground below was already running scarlet with the blood of the fallen. Some of the Chaos warriors fell upon their victims, hacking and dismembering. The sight sickened Sister Brigitta. Beside her, Sister Anastasia murmured a soft litany, commending the souls of the departed to the Emperor.

‘We must meet in the central chamber,’ the Canoness finally said, tearing her eyes from the slaughter. ‘Gather the Order, Sister Anastasia.’

‘Yes, sister.’ Anastasia left immediately to carry out her superior’s command and the Canoness stood for several moments longer, salt-tears running down her weather-tanned face.

‘The Order of the Iron Rose will stand to the last, traitors,’ she promised, raising her voice to be heard above the growing wind.

The Red Corsairs had dealt with the pathetic human threat in short order. Even as the last guardsman died, pierced on the end of a chainblade, Huron Blackheart’s warriors had turned their weapons on the temple walls and gates. They had been erected over the course of many years by master craftsmen and artisans.

What had taken humanity years to perfect and construct was levelled in minutes by four traitor Space Marines and their multi-meltas. The irony of that equation amused Huron Blackheart enough to make him laugh out loud.

He had accompanied his forces to the surface of this world but had taken no part in the battle. He had stood to one side with Dengesha and his cabal of sorcerers, watching with displaced indifference as they butchered their way forwards.

Another direct hit on the wall finally reduced it to molten slag, a huge cloud of pale steam billowing outwards from the destruction and coating the armour of the warriors in a fine film of grit. The Red Corsairs did not wait for their master’s order to proceed. They crossed the threshold of the sacred temple and met the second wave of PDF forces with renewed vigour.

Dengesha moved forwards dispassionately, his cabal moving with him like a flock of birds flittering around their mother. Fighting independently, each warrior-psyker was capable of incalculable destruction. Fighting as a unit, they were imbued with such power that no mortal man could look upon the forces of the warp flowing from them and hope to survive.

Dark lightning flickered from fingertips, fire burst from the palms of their hands and the very earth itself trembled where they trod. The sheer, raw power they exuded was tremendous and Huron Blackheart watched their performance with something akin to raw hunger on his face.

Three guardsmen were incinerated with a blast from Dengesha’s fingers, their bodies catching fire as though they were nothing more than dead wood. They died in terrible agony, screaming and begging for mercy. Huron watched as their ravaged faces slowly melted, like candles burning down to the taper.

Another unfortunate soldier was caught in the mesmerising stare of one of the Heterodox and found himself unable to move. With a press of psychic power, the sorcerer burst the guardsman’s brain like a ripe fruit. The man fell to his knees, blood and grey matter dribbling from his ears before he pitched over, face first into the dust.

The winds had whipped up to a frenzy now, but these were no natural weather conditions. This was the work of the Heterodox and the winds carried maddening whispers, half-heard promises and dire threats. They blew from the very heart of the warp itself and plucked at the souls of men with ethereal claws. Some who were caught in its path went mad in an instant, hacking and slashing at phantasms only they could see or hear. Others stood their ground more firmly, litanies of warding on their lips.

But each was slain. Each pitiful stalk was reaped and the more death and destruction there was, the more powerful the cabal seemed to grow until, with a feverish cry to the dark gods of Chaos Undivided, the Heterodox unleashed the true horror of their collective.

From without, the sounds of battle echoed. From within, the sisters of the Order radiated a calm composure. A small order, barely one hundred Sisters of Battle had gathered together in the central chamber. They were all clad in armour similar to Sister Brigitta’s, although where hers was a burnished copper hue, theirs were a deeper colour, a reddish bronze that glinted in the light cast by the candles and sconces on the walls.

‘Our time here is short, sisters,’ the canoness began when she had Anastasia’s assurance that all were present. ‘Our enemy has breached the gate and they will soon dare to desecrate the most sacred inner sanctum of our beloved Order.’ Brigitta reached up as she spoke and braided her thick hair into a plait that hung like a rope down her back. None of the Order would go into battle with their hair loose. It was an affectation, but an important one. Brigitta’s visual reminder of the very physical pre-battle preparation instilled focus amongst the gathered sisters. In the ensemble, others mirrored her action.

‘We will not stand and allow that to happen. We will hold out against these intruders for as long as the Emperor gives us the strength. We will stand our ground until the bitter end. We fight the gravest of traitors, my sisters. We battle against fallen angels. Traitor Space Marines. And they bring witch-kin with them.’

A palpable ripple of dismay ran through the sisters. They had stood proud against countless enemies. Aliens, cultists, even a preceptory of Battle Sisters who had lost their way, and they had always triumphed. They had fought alongside Space Marines many times. But the Order of the Iron Rose had never fought against them.

Brigitta raised a hand for silence and she got it immediately. From outside the fortified walls of the temple, the muffled sounds of gunfire and terrible, bloody death could be heard, filling in the pauses in her impassioned speech.

‘We are the beloved of the Emperor. We are the Sisters of the Iron Rose. We stand as a reminder that the flower of that name is protected by thorns. We will not allow these foul traitors to reach out and pluck us from existence without exacting our payment in blood first.’

She raised her bolter to her shoulder and cast her eyes around the assembled battle sisters. ‘We will make our stand in the rear courtyard. If we draw the whoresons out into the open, they may exact less damage on our temple.’ It was unlikely, and most of the Order knew it, but they were words that encouraged her sisters. Brigitta was under no illusions; the battle that was coming towards them could well be the last thing any of them saw. But they would die as they had lived, defending the Emperor’s legacy.

The clouds above the temple boiled, swirling together in a dark mass of intangible horror. The wind was now a gale, screaming its unnatural, elemental fury across the surface of the planet and whipping up the detritus from the fallen walls into plumed, choking columns. Lightning coruscated within the cloud and as it moved, it picked up dust and debris, including corpses of the fallen.

The Chaos-driven maelstrom moved with almost agonising slowness across the battlefield. Beneath it, the earth split and wept streams of tar and sulphur. Those who still stood were either knocked from their feet by the quaking of the ground beneath them, or they were caught up in the storm’s passage and sucked, screaming, into its abyssal depths.

From what remained of the temple walls, valiant surviving forces turned the defence guns on the cabal who stood as a pack, their hands raised, palms upward, to the skies that bubbled overhead. Each of the twelve was the perfect mirror image of the others. Whilst all were wearing horned helms, their stance was arrogance itself.

The armoured turrets roared defiance and one of the sorcerers was destroyed, his torso chewed apart by the stream of high-velocity shells. The cabal did not change position but, as one, their heads turned towards the weapons mounted on the wall.

Dengesha made a slicing motion with his hand and the winds changed direction and increased speed, moving with impossible haste towards its new target.

Sister Brigitta stood defiant amidst her battle sisters. She was a woman who had lived a life filled with devotion to the Emperor who she loved every bit as much as she cared for every woman who stood around her. Their honour and courage now, in the face of overwhelming odds, was a reward unlike any other.

From the youngest novice to Sister Anastasia, with whom she had fought in many engagements, she knew each one of them. She knew their life histories. She knew their hopes and she knew their fears. She was no psyker, but you could not live your whole life within an Order and not gain remarkable skills of perception.

She loved her sisters and though she may die here today, that love would bring her faith and the strength to stand her ground.

Her thoughts were wrenched back to the present as she heard the echo of a crashing thump in the distance. The sound of weapons being brought to bear against the gate.

‘They come,’ she said, her voice low and soft, yet carrying such authority that every one of the Order stood straighter. There was the sound of weapons being readied, of magazines being slammed into place, of swords being drawn from sheaths. There were overlaying, incomprehensible litanies and prayers.

Another sickening crump against the gate.

‘We will stand defiant,’ Brigitta said, raising her bolter above her head. ‘Ave Imperator!’

The battle cry was echoed, but was drowned out by the sound of an explosion that blew in the ancient, stained crystal windows as the enemy breached the gates.

‘Be ready! Hold firm! Do not doubt in yourself for one moment. Trust to your sisters and trust to your blessed weapons. A morte perpetua. Domine, libra nos!’

Battle cries were torn from their throats and one hundred Battle Sisters took up arms and prepared to make their stand.

The maelstrom ripped the guns from their mountings as though they were plants placed in dry soil. The guardsmen who had manned them were pulverised by the shrapnel from the destruction as the howling, unholy winds ripped the turrets into nothing more than shards. Mangled pieces of weaponry tore through their bodies, cutting them to ribbons and, in one young soldier’s case, decapitating them. The spiralling morass of metal and ruined flesh added its mass to the storm and above the temple, the skies began to rain droplets of blood.

At the final gate, Huron Blackheart’s traitors had set melta charges against the armoured portal. The blocky devices clamped to the towering hinges with a metallic clang and the Corsairs withdrew. The bombs detonated with a wash of heat and an earth-shattering explosion that rocked the ground.

Slowly, Dengesha’s cabal ceased the link with their powers and the violent, raging winds began to subside. The first obstacle had been overcome. The second – and their objective – lay behind the devastated walls.

The Chaos sorcerer turned his helmeted head towards Huron. ‘You must not kill her,’ he said through the vox-bead in the Tyrant’s ear. ‘If she dies, her soul will be as good as useless to us. Do not let your barbarian horde rip the Order apart without first isolating the mark.’

A twitch of irritation showed on Huron’s face. ‘I am not completely without intellect, Dengesha.’ The fingers that were wrapped around his massive battle axe tightened visibly. The sorcerer’s face could not be seen, but Huron could sense his smirk. ‘I will be taking care of dear Sister Brigitta myself.’

‘My sincerest apologies I did not mean to imply you were anything but knowledgeable in the ways of warp majesty, my lord.’ His sarcasm was biting and Huron turned away from the sorcerer cursing the necessity of their temporary association. It would be over soon. The Order of the Iron Rose would be obliterated and he would take his prize.

He comforted himself with the thought. In due course, his familiar would feast from a soul most worthy of its hunger.

Striding across the courtyard, Huron surveyed the damage with an approving expression. What remained of the gate was barely recognisable as any sort of portal. Broken spurs of plasteel jutted in all directions and the metal composite that had been mixed into the gate for reinforcement was little more than dust. Occasionally, more dust would fall in a pathetic clump from the walls either side of the former door.

The Red Corsairs strode forwards, warriors with a clear objective and purpose. In the eyes of the Imperium, they were renegades. But they were still Space Marines and the regimental mindset came easily to them. Until the fighting started, at least.

‘Listen to me, my Corsairs,’ said Huron across the vox. ‘When we locate the sisters, do not touch their leader. She belongs to me.’ He addressed the entire group, but knew that not all of them would truly hear him. ‘The toys we have despatched thus far have been an easy enemy and they will have sent out the word for aid. By the time that aid arrives, there will be nothing left but a smoking ruin.’

A few scattered roars of approval drew a nod from Huron. ‘What we will come up against in there will be more challenging, but do not falter. We come to take a prize that will make us even greater than we are. The Imperium of Mankind and their pathetic Corpse-Emperor will rue the day they ever named us traitor.’

There were grunts of acknowledgement across the board, some coherent, others less so. Just as his band of renegades were drawn from a vast background of different Chapters, so their levels of sanity varied. Huron cared little for the butchers amongst his followers. They served a purpose in war but when it came to more delicate matters, they were an encumbrance.

Fortunately, he had enough sane followers to keep the borderline berserkers in check.

‘Then we move with all haste to the final stage of our action here. Find the sisters. Kill those you must, but leave the canoness alive.’

Without further hesitation, the Red Corsairs streamed into the sacred Temple of the Blessed Dawn.

They rampaged through the temple without thought for preservation. Marble floors cracked and split beneath their heavy tread. Chainblades chewed through statue and carvings alike, making firewood of huge portraits of sisters and saints. Some riches were left intact. Over the years, the Red Corsairs had all developed an eye for goods that would please their lord and master for, it was said, his collection of Imperial relics was beyond compare. They would retrace their steps before they departed and gather up such treasures, along with the weapons of the fallen. For them, that was the most valuable reward.

Their plundering steps ultimately took them through the central chamber where the sisters of the Order had recently gathered. Dengesha nodded approvingly.

‘This will be a good place for the ritual,’ he said.

‘Then you remain here sorcerer, and make whatever preparation is necessary. We will seek out Sister Brigitta and I will bring her to you personally.’ Huron ran his tongue over his metal teeth in a parody of hunger. He swung his battle axe easily and it chewed its way through a beautifully painted rendition of some long-ago battle at which the Sisters had been victorious. Its shredded remnants dangled to the ground and the memory of the great war was lost after no more than a single stroke.

The first two Red Corsairs to throw open the heavy door that led out to the courtyard were torn apart by incoming bolter fire. The Battle Sisters had kept their weapons trained on the exit and the moment it opened they had pulled the triggers instantly. The explosive rounds buried themselves in the armoured hides of the traitors and burst them apart in a storm of gore and ceramite shards. The bodies disintegrated messily but their sacrifice bought those that followed enough time to bring their weapons to bear and return fire. Four sisters were thrown backwards, unbalancing several more. Before they were back on their feet, the Red Corsairs had flooded into the courtyard and the fight began in earnest.

The Sisters of Battle were greater in number than the Red Corsairs and their armour afforded them a degree of protection. But they were facing an undisciplined rabble whose tactics were unpredictable at best and unfathomable at worst. But the Battle Sisters held their position, clustered around the canoness like a sea of bronze with a copper island at their centre. They formed a circle around where she stood on the rim of a fountain, crying out orders to her warriors.

The initial firefight did not last long. At a word from the Tyrant, the Red Corsairs pressed forwards, chainblades whining, and began to cut their way through the serried ranks of women. The ring surrounding the canoness grew tighter and smaller.

The stink of ruined flesh and spent bolter rounds was strong in the air and so much smoke rose from the detonations that it choked the courtyard with a fog of bloody vapour and fyceline.

‘Courage, sisters!’ Brigitta’s voice was clear, like a bell sounding through the uproar. ‘Remember your teachings! You tread the path of righteousness. Though it be paved with broken glass, you will walk it barefoot…’

Brigitta paused in the recital as she watched Sister Anastasia’s broken body fall to the ground. A grief unlike any she had ever known before passed through her with a shudder. She summoned up every ounce of her considerable inner strength and brought her bolter to bear on the hated enemy. Her voice rose through the noise once again.

‘Though it crossers rivers of fire, we will pass over them…’

Her voice was strong and did not waver, but the strength of her armed guard was failing. Not through lack of zeal or fire; if she were to take any reward from this abysmal horror before her, it was that her beloved sisters died honourably and bravely. But it was failing through sheer loss of its numbers. What had once been a ring that had been several bodies deep now presented a barrier of barely a dozen of her sisters.

A number of the traitor Red Corsairs had been felled, but their armour, better and more intricate than that of the Battle Sisters, deflected more and protected them for longer. Brigitta realised with a sinking heart that they were probably not even dead. That their enhanced physiology would aid their recovery and that they might rise to fight another day. And she despised them for it. She loathed their continued existence. To her mind, they represented the worst kind of faithless traitors the Imperium could have conceived.

She abhorred them for tearing apart the temple, her home, the place where she had grown from a teenage girl to womanhood.

She…

…was bleeding.

Brigitta tasted, for the first time in her life, a tremor of fear. It was seasoned with the coppery taste of her own blood as she bit her lip hard enough to put her teeth through the delicate skin. The flavour of her own mortality gave her enough strength to complete her fervent prayer.

‘Though it wanders wide, the light of the Emperor guides my – our – step.’ She slammed a fresh magazine into her bolter and, letting out a screaming roar of battle rage, unleashed her full fury at the encroaching enemy.

At her feet, dead and dying sisters spilled blood and viscera across the courtyard stones. The image of their defeat burned itself onto her retinas and branded hatred on her heart. Tears of anger and terrible, terrible grief blurred her vision, but she did not – she would not – falter. Not now.

She continued to fire her bolter into the enemy without caring any longer whether she hit them or not. It became an act of sheer venomous loathing.

After a few short moments, she became aware that outside her immediate sphere of awareness the sounds of battle had ceased. Only one weapon continued to fire and that was hers. It did not detract from her focus, however, and she poured ammunition at the enemy until the last bolter shell clattered to the floor.

One of the enemy, bareheaded and terrible, moved from the pack to stand before her.

‘You are Sister Brigitta of the Order of the Iron Rose,’ he stated. It was not a question. She looked up into his inhuman face and drew in a rasping breath. She had seen un-helmed Space Marines warriors before and was used to their over-exaggerated features. But this… creature… that stood before her was so far removed from anything even remotely human that she felt, against her will, the urge to scream in incoherent contempt. A poisonous air of evil came from him and she felt sick to her stomach.

She began to quietly recite litanies of faith to herself, never once taking her gaze from this augmetic monstrosity. She neither confirmed nor denied the accusation of her identity but instead ripped the combat blade from its sheath at her side and plunged it the traitor’s throat. Blackheart sighed wearily before catching her wild lunge on the back of his claw. Then, with excruciating care, not wanting to kill her outright, he backhanded her into unconsciousness.

She was like a rag doll in his arms, limp and lifeless, and as he carried Sister Brigitta into the chamber, Huron Blackheart marvelled as he always did at the papery inefficacy of the human body. He wondered how it was they had any resilience without the enhancements that he shared with all his gene-bred brothers. Brigitta’s face where he had struck her was distorted. He had fractured her cheekbone at the very least and purple bruising was swelling up around her jaw. Her braided hair had come loose and hung freely down.

Dengesha turned to study them. He had removed his helm and Huron was struck once again by the wriggling sigils that marked the sorcerer’s face. ‘You did not kill her?’

‘She is merely unconscious. Allow me a little credit.’

‘Then lay her next to the vessel and I can begin the ritual.’ Already Dengesha had made the preparations for the rite that would bind the potent soul to the cursed vial. The green bottle lay on its side, an innocuous and inanimate object. Around the chamber, Dengesha had marked out a number of unreadable symbols, each one drawn at the point of what formed the eight-pointed star of Chaos. One each of his cabal stood at seven of the points, the top-most remaining free and evidently waiting for Dengesha’s leisure.

Huron moved forward and dumped Brigitta’s body without any ceremony on the ground where the sorcerer indicated. He noted as he did so that the sigils drawn on the floor were marked in blood; most likely from that of the dead soldiers.

‘You should step outside the borders of the mark, my lord. Once we channel the powers necessary to perform the binding, they will be potent.’

From beyond the broken walls of the temple, the distant sounds of shouting could be heard. The assistance that the temple guards had called for was finally arriving. Huron nodded to several of his warriors who moved wordlessly out of the chamber.

‘They cannot be allowed to enter this place whilst I am working. The balance of this work is delicate.’

‘My men will keep them away.’ Huron took several steps back. ‘Trust to their abilities to do that. I, however, will remain.’

‘As you wish.’

Huron Blackheart had witnessed many rituals of this kind in his life, but he had never seen one driven with such determination and single-minded focus. He watched Dengesha closely as the sorcerer moved back to take his point at the tip of the star and listened intently to the words that he recited. It did him little good, as the sorcerer spoke in some arcane tongue that Huron did not understand, though the inflection was clear.

The seven other members of the Heterodox echoed his words, one at a time until the chant was being repeated with a discordant, impossible to follow rhythm. The sound grew and swelled and all the while there was the underscore of another battle taking place beyond the temple walls.

A thick black substance, like tar from a pit, began to bubble up in the space marked out by the points of the star. It rose upwards, never spilling over the edge of its limits and coated first the bottle and then the unconscious Sister Brigitta in a film of inky blackness. Dengesha’s chant became almost musical, as though he were singing. His eyes were fevered and his expression one of pure ecstasy.

The thick, gelatinous substance became more and more viscous and at some point during its creeping encroachment, Brigitta stirred from her unconsciousness. Realising that she was being smothered, she opened her mouth to cry out. The fluid rushed into her mouth and she began to choke on it, writhing desperately on the floor as she struggled to breathe.

As soon as that happened, Dengesha stepped forward from his position and moved to stand above her. Huron watched, leaning forward ever so slightly. This was it. This was the moment. He had made countless pacts and agreements to reach this point and so had his followers. This was the point at which it would all pay off. Or the point at which it would fail.

Outside, the sounds of gunfire had stopped, but the Chaos sorcerer paid no heed.

Dengesha looked down at the wriggling human woman with a look of total contempt, then reached to take her arm firmly in his grip. He guided it to the glass vial and placed her hand upon it, wrapping his gauntlets around her tiny hands. He then spoke the only words that Huron could understand.

‘Be forever bound.’

The oily liquid began to slowly ebb away, draining until all that remained was the faintest slick on the ground. Brigitta, who was in tremendous pain and almost frozen with terror stared at the green vial, then she stared up at the sorcerer.

Then, summoning every ounce of strength and fortitude she possessed, she spat in his face. Dengesha began to laugh, a hateful, booming sound that bounced around the walls of the chamber and resonated in everyone’s vox-bead.

Then abruptly the laughter stopped and a look of utmost dread crept slowly over Dengesha’s face. His fist, which had been ready to crush Brigitta’s skull suddenly opened out flat. His face slackened, his posture changed and he slouched suddenly as though wearied.

And Huron smiled at him.

‘What is this treachery?’ The sorcerer spun around to face the Tyrant of Badab, who stood watching him with an air of amusement. ‘What have you done, Blackheart?’

‘Ah, Dengesha. Your fate was sealed the moment you took the vial from me. You were quite right. I needed a potent soul. And my sorcerers found me one. Yours, in fact. And now, with the ritual of binding complete, your soul and the vial are united. You quite literally belong to me.’

‘This is not possible! There is no way you could have… your sorcerers are nothing compared to the glory of the Heterodox!’

‘Ah, arrogance has been the downfall of many a brother of the Adeptus Astartes over the millennia, brother. My sorcerers may not be as powerful as you and your former cabal, but they are far more cunning.’ Seemingly bored of the conversation, Huron moved around the chamber, occasionally turning over the body of a fallen soldier with his booted foot. He picked up a boltgun, empty of ammunition and dropped it back down with a clang.

Dengesha’s face was fury itself and he reached out to the powers of the warp. But none of them answered him. His black, tainted soul was no longer his to command. He looked to each of his cabal in turn and for their part, they turned from him.

‘You all knew of this,’ he stated flatly. ‘You betrayed me to this cur…’

‘Come now, Dengesha. If you seek to wound my feelings, you will have to try a lot harder than that.’ Huron stooped and picked up a meltagun. ‘My agents have been dealing with your cabal for months. They agree that their prospects with me and my Corsairs are more interesting than a lifetime of servitude under your leadership. It has been vexing, true – but I think you will agree that the ultimate reward is well worth it.’

On the ground, Sister Brigitta was listening to the exchange without understanding it. All she knew was that these two traitors were speaking such heresy as it was almost unbearable to be a party to.

Dengesha stared at Huron’s back with a look that could have killed and perhaps once, before his soul had been plucked from his body, could have done.

‘So you see, Dengesha. In a way, my promise to you is truth. Now that your Heterodox are part of my Corsairs, they will help themselves to the spoils of this world. You, however…’

The Tyrant of Badab crossed the distance between them with uncanny speed and fired the meltagun at the sorcerer. His head was vaporised and seconds later, what remained of his body crashed to the ground. Brigitta gazed up at Huron and there was a look of serene understanding on her face. Her doom was come and it was clad in the desecrated armour of the Imperium of Man.

‘My faith is my shield,’ she said, softly. The words rang hollow in her ears.

‘No,’ said Huron, equally softly as one of the claws of his hand tore through her breast and skewered her. He raised her to eye level. ‘It is not. And it never was.’

She let out a sigh as she died and slid free from his claw to the floor below. Without looking at the two corpses at his feet, Huron reached up and plucked the vial from the ground, reattaching it to his belt.

Sometimes, Huron Blackheart kept his word. But this was not one of those times. He did not care who he betrayed to reach his goals. Loyal servants of the Imperium or those who served the dark gods of Chaos. It made little difference to him. The end always justified the means.

‘Take what we need,’ he said. ‘And then we leave.’

‘It worked perfectly.’

‘Surely you did not doubt, my Lord?’ Valthex turned the vial over in his hand before handing it back to Huron.

‘The curse worked exactly as you said it would. Thanks to your efforts, my familiar now has the strength it needs to grant me the blessing of the four beyond the Maelstrom. Well done, Armenneus.’

‘I live to serve, Blood Reaver.’ Valthex dropped a low, respectful bow and Huron stalked away. Straightening himself up, the Alchemancer absently rubbed at a sigil branded into the skin of his hand.

It was not just the Tyrant who made pacts. The Patriarch would have to wait to see when he would be called upon to deliver his side of the bargain.

Aenarion

Gav Thorpe

The world had been torn asunder. Across the isle of Ulthuan the elves quailed in their towers as the skies burned with purple and blue fire and the fields and mountains heaved. Nightmare voices howled and bellowed while leering faces tortured the dark clouds that swirled around the mountain peaks and snarled in the waves of the Inner Sea.

The daemons came in their thousands; a horde of baying, shrieking slaughter. Against such ferocity and spite the elves had no defence. They fell to infernal blade and savage claw; elder and babe, lords and ladies, dragged screaming to their deaths by the minions of the Chaos Gods.

The world seemed fated to an eternity of torment. Out of the madness arose Aenarion. He would not see his people destroyed and so called upon the gods to deliver the elves from destruction; but the gods were silent. Aenarion could see nothing but doom for the world and so he offered himself to Asuryan, lord of the gods. He strode into the Eternal Flame with oaths of sacrifice upon his lips. The flames burned bright and Aenarion was consumed. Yet the elven lord was spared the wrath of Asuryan and received the blessing of the gods. He emerged from the fire filled with a fey light and took up spear and bow to fight the daemons.

The elves proclaimed Aenarion the Defender, the blessed Phoenix King of Asuryan, and where he led others followed; where he fought, the daemons were thrown back. Great were his victories and many are the tales told elsewhere of the Phoenix King’s battles. Mighty heroes rallied to Aenarion’s banner; elves such as Caledor the Dragontamer, greatest of the elven mages, and Eoloran Anar who first raised the Phoenix King’s standard; names forever entwined with the legend of the first Phoenix King.

After much war, peace settled upon Ulthuan again. Aenarion came to the court of the Everqueen, Astarielle, ruler of the elves from the time before Chaos. The two were wed and lived in happiness, bringing into the world their son Morelion and their daughter Yvraine.

Yet legends are not born in times of prosperity and contentment, but are created in ages of woe and strife. The peace for which Aenarion had fought so hard did not last forever, and so it was that the daemons returned to ravage the land. This time there was no surcease from the bloodshed. For a hundred years the daemons assailed the isle of the elves. Aenarion and his armies were ever hard-pressed, fighting many battles across Ulthuan. It was at Caethrin Gorge that the future of the elves would be changed forever.

Laughter cackled on the unnatural wind that swept down between the slopes of Tir Alinith and Anul Caethrin. The sky was heavy with clouds of purple and green, blazes of black and red flashing across the Chaotic storm. The stench of sulphur and decay carried along the gorge, heralding the daemonic host boiling up from the plains towards the mountains in the south of Ulthuan.

On the dark volcanic slopes stood Aenarion. Gold shone from his armour, his tapered shield and the tip of his long spear. Around him were arranged the lords of elves, swathed in scales of silver, adorned with sapphire and emerald. No less shimmering were the scales of the dragons that circled overhead, watching for the approaching Chaotic horde; red and blue, bronze and ebon.

Aenarion gazed down the long valley, lifting a long-fingered hand to shield his dark eyes against the magical glare above. Black hair trailed from beneath the Phoenix King’s gilded helm and whipped across his scarlet cloak. Behind him stood Eoloran, a golden stave in hand from which flew the banner of Aenarion; the white of death embroidered with a phoenix rising from multi-coloured flames. The lord of the Anars watched in silence as Aenarion turned to his left, where stood Caledor the Dragontamer, mage-lord of Ulthuan. It was by Caledor’s hand that the Phoenix King’s armour and weapons had been forged, in the temple of the Smith-God Vaul, hidden amongst the fires of the volcanoes behind the elven army.

The Phoenix King spoke calmly, showing no sign of apprehension.

‘The time has come for you to unleash such enchantments as you possess, Caledor.’

The Dragontamer turned his gaze upon his king, eyes alight with mystical energy.

‘’Tis a dangerous path to tread; to turn the powers of the foe upon them. That power that keeps your speartip keen and your armour sure is the same that brings forth these abominations. I fear that the more we delve into that well, the greater the horrors we bring forth. This is not the gentle magic that our ancestors learned, but a dangerous sorcery that it would be wise to diminish.’

The Phoenix King replied quickly.

‘It is not the time to speak again of this plan of yours. Battle is at hand and I would no more ask you to keep your incantations unsaid than I would lay down my spear. All that matters this day is that we are victorious. Should we fail, the Anvil of Vaul would fall to our foes. How then will your mages and priests arm us for this war?’

Caledor shook his head and took a deep breath. His blue robes fluttered in the wind as he stretched wide his arms. At the foot of the valley the daemons could be seen; a mass of riotous colour in many sizes and forms.

Creatures with blood-red skin advanced bearing swords of gleaming bronze, their commanders riding upon the back of brazen-horned beasts with bodies of metal and crimson flesh. Hounds the size of horses, with hides of red scales, bounded to the fore, baying and howling from mouths filled with fangs of iron. Loathsome slugs with frond-ringed faces slithered and lurched across the ground, leaving burning trails of acidic slime. Cyclopean daemons brandishing rusted blades advanced in long columns, leaking fluids from suppurating spores, innards bulging from rents in their bloated stomachs, the air seething thick with black flies. In contrast to the mournful carnival of decay, lithe daemonettes with lobster-claw hands and bird-like feet sprang sprightly across the rocks. Others of their kind rode upon sinuous bipedal mounts with long flicking tongues while six-limbed beasts raced alongside, sharp claws clattering and clicking. Buzzing with magical power, smaller creatures cavorted and cartwheeled, pink bodies constantly writhing and changing, sparks of energy flying from splayed fingers. Above them swooped and swerved menacing shapes with barbed lashes for tails, flat bodies edged with teeth and hooks, cutting the thick air with piercing screams.

Against the Chaotic mass, the elves seemed pitifully few; a knot of a few hundred warriors whose gleaming weapons were as a candle in an eternal night, pinpricks of light across the black slope. The light grew in strength, swimming around the warriors, forming in tendrils of energy that streamed from Caledor’s outstretched fingertips. The light turned to a white flame that formed a flickering ring around the elven host, the fires reaching higher and higher into a column that pierced the dark clouds above.

Where the light struck, the storm clouds spun, whirling faster and faster, mixing with the swirling light to form a vortex of energy. Battle raged within the whirlwind, white clashed with colour, light with darkness, sparks and forks of power coruscating across the surface as the maelstrom drew tighter and tighter, speeding until it was a blaze of power.

With a thunderous detonation, the vortex collapsed, earthing itself through the body of Caledor. The mage trembled, light shining through skin, burning from wide eyes, coils of shimmering magic steaming through gritted teeth, his mane of white hair wild in the aetheric gale. All became still for a moment and the mage’s trembling ceased, the air pregnant with expectation.

With a piercing cry, Caledor thrust forward his hands, the magic blazing from his palms. Spears of white fire screamed down the valley, turning and twisting about each other, spreading out into a sheet of blazing flame.

The spell struck the foremost daemons like a hurricane, hurling them through the air, their bodies disintegrating into shards of crystal and streamers of multicoloured particles. Plaintive wails were torn from vanishing throats and then silence fell.

For a moment the daemons halted. Aenarion and his followers glowered down at them, fists tight around their weapons, eyes narrowed.

With a howl the horde surge on again.

‘To me, princes of Ulthuan!’ cried Aenarion, spear aloft piercing the fume-filled air.

In silvered line, the elven lords stood resolute against the encroaching darkness of the daemon host. Smoke and mist was set awhirl by the thunderous flap of wings as the dragons descended from the thermals above. The largest, of silver and blue hide, landed in front of the Phoenix King, black claws sending splinters of rock cascading down the mountainside. The monstrous creature’s long neck bent around and its azure eyes fell upon Aenarion. Indraugnir was his name, older even than the elves, the greatest creature to have ever flown the skies of Ulthuan. Its voice came as a rumble that stirred the hearts of the elves even as it shook the ground.

‘As we have fought to protect your lands, now we fight to protect mine. Take up your spear, king of the elves, and test its sharpness against my claws and fangs. We shall see who claims the greater tally.’ Aenarion laughed and he raced forward to pull himself up to the throne-saddle upon the dragon’s back. ‘Never could I best your ferocity, Indraugnir. If I could wield a dozen

spears I would not match your might!’ The two circled into the heavy skies to join other princes of the moun-

tains riding upon the backs of dragons that dwelt in the caves beneath the volcanoes. Beneath them spread the daemonic army, stretching along the Caethrin Gorge as far as the plains, thousands-strong and advancing swiftly. Behind, the fumaroles and craters of the mountains steamed; the lands of Caledor, named after the Dragontamer who ruled here. Far below, the mage unleashed another spell, bolts of blue lightning springing from his staff, crackling through the ranks of the enemy.

Many princes brought forth bows forged beneath the mountains, and set upon their strings shafts that glittered with mystical light. They loosed their arrows upon the daemons, the missiles arcing far into the valley to descend as thunderbolts that struck down a handful of daemons with every shot.

On came the daemons still, filling the air with lewd threats and snarls of hatred.

Indaugnir circled slowly, wing dipped as he took the Phoenix King down towards the gorge. The daemons were no more than fifty paces from the thin line of elves. At the heart of the nobles of Ulthuan, Eoloran Anar stepped up, the banner of Aenarion held in both hands. With a shout of Asuryan’s consecration that was lost on the wind, he planted the standard at his feet, the rock cracking under the golden haft. A dome of white light sprang forth from the flagbearer, enclosing the elven line. Where it touched the daemons, they were hurled back, their unholy flesh set afire by its touch. Like rabid animals, the creatures of the Chaos Gods launched themselves at the barrier, driving themselves and each other into the wall of magic, crumbling to ashes and dust as they did so.

Aenarion raised his spear to attract the attention of the other dragonriders. He plunged its point towards the rear of the daemon army. The others waved lance and sword and spear in acknowledgement. ‘Dive, my friend!’ cried the Phoenix King. ‘Into their heart like a dag-

ger!’ Indraugnir gave a bellow and folded his wings tight, swooping down

towards the rocks. Around the pair the princes of Caledor and their reptilian mounts descended with fierce battlecries and fearsome growls. The crest of Aenarion’s helm whistled in the wind, his hair and cloak streaming behind him. The Phoenix King gritted his teeth and gripped his spear tight as he felt the reverberations of Indraugnir’s massive heart thumping in the dragon’s chest.

Down and down they dived, wind screaming, the ground racing towards them. From out of the mass the Phoenix King now spied individuals, many with faces upturned, glaring and snarling at their fast-approaching foe.

Just as it seemed that monster and rider might be dashed against the black mountainside, Indraugnir opened his wings. The two of them shot across the daemon army, Indraugnir’s claws raking huge welts through their numbers, leaving dismembered and beheaded remains in his wake.

Flipping a wing, the dragon turned sharply as Aenarion dipped his spearhead towards the daemons. Trailing a blaze of white, the weapon carved a furrow across the chests of a dozen foes, slicing them in twain. Dark red fire erupted from Indraugnir’s mouth, engulfing the daemons in their hundreds. Aenarion thrust and slashed without respite, every blow of his spear cutting down many foes.

Indraugnir landed, crushing more daemons beneath his bulk. Aenarion leapt from his saddle-throne, pinning another daemon beneath his speartip as he landed on the floor of the rocky valley. Dragon and king fought sideby-side; Aenarion’s spear a white blur of destruction, Indraugnir’s fangs and claws rending and tearing all that came within reach, tail snapping and cracking behind.

Around and about them the dragon princes struck, every pass heralded by a rush of wind from beneath a dragon’s wings and completed with a clutch of bodies cast into the air. Higher up the slope, Caledor and Eoloran led the elven lords down into the melee, swords and spears flickering. As a fire burns across a piece of parchment, the line of elves surely advanced, leaving naught but the ruin of the daemons behind.

From noon ’til the sun was low in the skies the slaughter went on; slaughter, for it could not be truly called battle. Outnumbered by hundreds of foes, the elves were relentless and unstoppable, not a single one amongst their number fell to their enemies. As their numbers lessened, the daemons’ power waned and the Chaotic storm above abated, the clouds driven away even as the army was driven back. As the final rays of dusk cut across the dark mountains, the last of the daemons crumbled and perished, their spirits banished back to the immaterial realm from which they had sprung.

At the centre of the gorge, surrounded by piles of daemonic corpses that bubbled and hissed and dissipated into fog, Aenarion stood proud. Eoloran came up to him bearing the white banner. He handed the standard to his lord, who waved it high overhead to signal the victory. Songs of celebration rang down the valley, the clear voices of the elves giving word to the joy and relief in their hearts.

That night, Aenarion made his camp upon the mountainside, not far from the winding pathway that led up to the ruddily-lit cave that housed the Anvil of Vaul. The happiness of victory had passed and the camp was quiet as the elves remembered that many had been the triumphs over the daemons, and yet still the foe was not vanquished. In the still night, the ring of hammers and the chime of metal sounded as the priests of the SmithGod continued their labours; a timely reminder to all that the war was not over.

Eoloran and Caledor attended to their Phoenix King in his white pavilion. Still clad in his golden armour, Aenarion sat upon a simple throne of dark wood, his cloak tossed thoughtlessly across its back. The favoured lord of Asuryan smiled as they entered, but the Dragontamer did not share Aenarion’s pleasure.

‘None fell today, and for that I am grateful,’ said Caledor. ‘Yet it has not always been the case. The power of Asuryan’s blessing protects you, Aenarion, but it does not make our people invulnerable. Our foe is without number, and they are truly eternal. I have looked upon this devastated world and see that Ulthuan is not just an isle upon the sea, but an island of light in darkness. Our foes cannot be defeated by sword or spear.’

Aenarion gave a weary sigh.

‘You would speak again of your plan to rid the world of magic,’ said the Phoenix King. ‘How many times must I tell you that it is folly to do away with that power which gives us the most strength to fight?’

‘While the gales of magic that sweep our realm may be harnessed to our benefit, without them the daemons could not exist. You saw today what my vortex could do if writ on a larger scale. Without the sustaining properties of this magical wind, the daemons would no longer be able to venture here in numbers. It would take only a little preparation, a number of lodestones carefully arranged around the isle, to ready Ulthuan for the enchantment.’

The Phoenix King said nothing, for the two of them had spent many years arguing the case for Caledor’s plan. It was Eoloran that broke the silence.

‘The risks are too great, Caledor. Should you be wrong, your plan would leave us defenceless. It is only by the touch of magic that these apparitions can be destroyed. Without the magic our swords would be useless, our spears and arrows no more weapons than the branches of a tree.’

‘We cannot prevail,’ argued the Dragontamer. ‘For a hundred turns of the world we have fought, and we are no step closer to victory now than on that first day. For every daemon we destroy, another springs up in its place. You stand in the flooding pool bailing as quickly as you can, while you should dam the spring that feeds it.’

Aenarion said nothing but his look was troubled, brow creased in thought. Eoloran addressed his king, breaking Aenarion from his contemplation.

‘What concerns sit so heavily upon your shoulders, my lord?’

‘I am troubled by the ease of our victory this day. Our enemies are not only great in number, there are those daemons amongst the host that can match the best of us by themselves. Yet where were these greater daemons today? Only chaff and fodder were sent against us. I have an ill feeling about this.’

Caledor pondered this for a moment, stroking his bottom lip with a slender finger.

‘You think that perhaps the greatest daemon warriors are elsewhere?’ ‘Perhaps,’ replied the Phoenix King. Eoloran glanced between his two companions with an expression of

worry. ‘If this attack was a diversion, we have fallen for the ploy,’ said the lord

of the Anars. ‘If the Anvil of Vaul was not the object of our foes’ desire, then where would the real blow land?’

Aenarion growled and clasped his hands tightly in his lap.

‘I do not know what our enemies seek to achieve; it is that which vexes me.’

The night was bitterly chill. Frost crusted the black rocks of the mountainside, a glittering reflection of the stars in the clear skies above. Upon the slopes dragons basked in the pale moonlight, wings outstretched, bodies steaming in the cold air. The wind sighed over the stones, broken by the rasping exhalations of the beasts.

Indraugnir lifted his silver-scaled head, nostrils flaring. The other dragons responded to the movement, rising from their slumber with a scrape of claws and explosive breaths misting the air. All turned their eyes northwards, where a dark shape flitted across the starry sky. It sped closer, resolving into the silhouette of a large eagle, a young elf clasping tightly to its back. The eagle circled once, followed by the predatory stares of the dragons, and descended in a flapping of wings. The rider’s black hair tossed behind him like a veil, his narrow face pinched, eyes tight against the cold

‘I must speak with the Phoenix King!’ declared the new arrival as he leapt from the back of the enormous bird.

Brought forth by the call, other elves came out of their tents, weary from the day’s fighting. The stranger was garbed in smooth black leathers, his shoulders and back hidden beneath a long cloak of black feathers. All recognised him as a raven herald, one of the order of scouts that followed the movements of the daemons across Ulthuan.

The herald was directed to the Phoenix King’s pavilion without delay, and a crowd of elves followed him into the marquee to hear what news he brought. Eoloran and Caledor were first amongst them. The Phoenix King sat brooding upon his throne and looked up at the disturbance.

‘What news brings Telrianir so far south on such a bitter night?’ asked Aenarion.

‘’Tis a bitter night indeed, my king, and not for the weather alone,’ replied the raven herald. His gaze was fixed upon the Phoenix King; his lip trembled as he spoke and a tear formed in his eye. ‘The daemons have fallen upon Avelorn, my king, in a great army beyond counting.’

A disquieted whispering spread through the elves. Aenarion’s fingers tightened upon the arms of his chair at the mention of the Everqueen’s realm. He leaned forwards, piercing Telrianir with his stare. The raven herald continued hesitantly, his voice breaking with grief.

‘The sacred groves have been despoiled and many were slain.’

The whispering became cries of dismay. Aenarion rose to his feet, fear flashing across his face.

‘What of the Everqueen?’ he snarled. ‘What of my children?’ At this, Telrianir fell to his knees, a sob wrenched from his lips. ‘Slain, my king.’ The silence was a deep as the ocean’s depths, swallowing all sound so

that it was not broken by the slightest clink of armour nor scuff of foot. Not even a sigh broke the stillness.

Aenarion slumped back into his throne, head bowed. The wood of the seat splintered between his fingers and the light of Asuryan that forever glowed faintly through his skin grew in brightness. The elves were forced to look away, such was the glare from their king. Then, like a lantern snuffed out, the light disappeared.

Blinking, the elves looked at Aenarion. He straightened and all save Caledor flinched from the king’s gaze. A fire burned in his eyes, each a red ember fringed with darkness, drawing gasps from many that saw it.

‘Slain?’

Aenarion’s voice was hollow as it filled the pavilion. The elven princes, whose lives had been filled with battle and terror, clasped each other in their fright; that one word echoed with grief and rage through the core of their spirits. None dared speak.

Aenarion rose up to his full height, seeming taller than ever before. His fingers curled into fists at his side as he turned his gaze upwards, not seeing the roof of the tent but staring into the heavens beyond. When he spoke next, the Phoenix King’s tone was calm in manner, but carried with it a sharp edge of anger.

‘What a cruel fate it is that Morai-heg has spun for me. When our people were beset, I called upon the gods to harken to our cries of woe, but they did not listen. I called upon Asuryan, lord of the lords, greatest of the divine, and I offered myself to him for his aid. He laid his blessing upon me, and with his light I have battled the darkness that would engulf our world.’

Aenarion’s eyes fell upon the elves and they cowered further, retreating across the rugs strewn over the floor of the pavilion.

‘I did as I was bid. I took up my spear and my shield, and I stood against the daemons. For a hundred years we have shed our blood in defence of our homes, suffered torture of the spirit and bleak nightmares so that we might one day look upon the summer skies again. Many have been taken from us, the innocent beside the warrior, the babe beside the mother. Each was a sacrifice harder to bear than my own pain within the flames, but I bore each and every without complaint. If the gods demand that some must pay for the lives of others, it was a price we had to pay.’

Aenarion snatched up his throne and heaved it over his head. With a wordless shout, he dashed it to the ground, smashing it into pieces.

‘No more!’ he roared. ‘This is a price too heavy for me to pay!’

Aenarion’s gaze next fell upon his banner, hanging limply in its stand beside him. He snapped the pole across his armoured knee and tore the cloth from the gilded wood. Opening the flag, he looked at the emblazoned phoenix for a long time, limbs trembling, lips twisted in a sneer.

The ripping of the cloth made every elf shudder, as if each had been torn apart by their king’s hands. Aenarion let the two ragged pieces of cloth flutter to the ground. He fell to his knees and tore the pieces into ribbons, casting them about himself like streamers. Tears of yellow flame rolled down his cheeks.

‘Asuryan has no love for me,’ he sobbed. ‘He does not care for us. He cannot protect us from the evil that will swallow us whole if we do not fight. I cannot be the Defender, there is nothing left for me to defend. We are lost, destroyed.’

All of a sudden, Aenarion stopped. His eyes narrowed and he tilted his head to one side as if listening to a distant voice. His voice became a feral growl.

‘There is only one course left to me that can ease this pain. I will destroy every creature of Chaos. I will annihilate every daemon, slay every mortal thing that crawls and slithers under the gaze of the Chaos Gods. I will become Death; I will become the Destroyer. The gods have denied us peace, and so I will give them a war that will end all wars or see the world itself annihilated.’

Caledor stepped out of the cowering crowd, one hand held out in appeasement.

‘Be careful, my lord, my friend. Harsh oaths are not soon forgotten.’

Aenarion rounded on the mage and seized him by the shoulders, staring deep into Caledor’s eyes with orbs of fire.

‘Tell me, friend; what is it that you see?’

Caledor could not break from Aenarion’s fierce grip, and could not turn aside his gaze from that unnatural stare. The mage-lord took a shuddering, involuntary breath and his eyes turned to gold, reflecting the flames of his king’s stare. The two were locked together; the king dark and dangerous with his smouldering eyes and black hair; Caledor like the light of the moon, hair white and skin pale. The Dragontamer’s voice came as a distant whisper, lips barely moving as he spoke.

‘The Elven-king wrapped hard in woes, A gifted curse to break his grief, To slay unnumbered his wicked foes, A brightening flame that burns too brief.

To Gods he turned and to Gods he fell, Save One alone of dark divine, In blackest heart rings murderous knell, In deepest shadow where no light shines.

His slaying shall be as the flood, Lets loose the Godslayer’s ire, Drowns the world in seas of blood, Burns it all with waves of fire.

In the North this Doom awaits, Luring like flame to moth, Promising life of endless hate, Bloodshed eternal, uncaring wrath.

And kindled in the fire of rage Born from blood of anger’s womb, Child of slaughter cursed for an age, Bearer of the elf-king’s doom.’

Caledor gave a rattling hiss and fell from Aenarion’s grip. He crumpled like an empty robe, lifelessly sprawled across the floor. Elf lords rushed forward to attend to the fallen mage, but the Phoenix King did not spare his friend a glance. A fey expression crossed his face even as they pronounced Caledor still living. Aenarion stormed towards the pavilion door, scattering those elves before him. He stood outside on the frost-gripped stone and pointed to the stars of the North.

‘Yonder lies the Blighted Isle, where sits the dark altar of bloody Khaine!

There I shall find his gift wrapped in that black shrine; Godslayer, Widowmaker, Doom of Worlds. No weapon forged by mortal hands, not by the greatest priests of Vaul if they laboured for a thousand years, can bring my revenge. So I will take up that blade made by Vaul Himself for the BloodyHanded One and with it I shall destroy the daemons.’

All were too horror-struck to speak out against Aenarion, save for Eoloran Anar,he who had once born the standard now lying in tatters dared to lay a hand upon the Phoenix King’s arm.

‘Did you not hear the words of Caledor? No mortal may wield the Sword of Khaine. It is no gift, but a curse, sent to tempt us to the path of hate and war. No peace can come of such a thing. You doom not only yourself, but all future generations. Do nothing rash, my king, I plead of you! Temper your anger with the wise judgement you have shown before. Do not throw away our future in a moment of rage!’

Aenarion would not listen and threw off Eoloran’s hold, casting his friend to the hard ground.

‘And you do not listen to my words! There can be no future whilst daemons roam free. Yours is counsel of surrender. Peace must be won through war, and if peace be won, that war must be fought by those that wish to fight it. I am your king, not a tyrant, and I release you all from such oaths as you have sworn to me. When I return I shall still be your king, and whether you wish to follow me or your own path I leave to your conscience.’

At this speech, the dragons had gathered, looming over the heads of the elves. Aenarion now turned to Indraugnir.

‘I ask that you bear me North; to the Blighted Isle, that I might take up the Sword of Khaine and forever free both my people and yours from the threat of the daemon. Feel no injunction that you must carry me, for if you do not wish to do so, I shall walk.’

Indraugnir wasted no time in replying.

‘So you seek a fang to match my own, my friend? The Blighted Isle is a long enough journey for one with wings; I would not wish such a lonely trek upon a friend. The Dark Gods that now covet our world are not blind and I fear there will be those that will seek to bar your journey. When I resolved to be your ally, I swore to fight alongside you for good or ill, and my desire has not changed.’

All watched aghast as Aenarion drew himself into the throne-saddle of Indraugnir. Some cried out in fear, believing Aenarion would not return from his dire quest. They wept as Indraugnir soared into the sky with three mighty beats of his wings. Dragon and king circled once about the camp and then turned northwards and disappeared into the night.

For a night and a day and a night they flew, under star and sun, through clear and cloud. The mountains and volcanoes passed behind and the clear plains and fields of western Ulthuan spread beneath them. To the West glittered the ocean; to the East sparkled the Inner Seas, and between rose the ring of mountains that gird the central lands of the isle. Snow covered their summits and through the mists that blanketed the peaks they flew. Aenarion felt no chill, though ice crackled upon his amour. His fury warmed him from within, cold sorrow turned to ashes by the fire of his vengeful desires.

Across the mountains they soared for day after day, until to the East the clouds broke and Aenarion looked down upon the ruins of Avelorn. The foothills of the mountains were still swathed with forest, but the trees were sickly, leaves fallen to the ground in rotted heaps, their branches and trunks twisted and contorted by the passage of the daemons. The stench of death hung about that lifeless realm, and all seemed lost. Yet there remained the heart of the wildwoods, the Gaen Vale surrounded by the Inner Sea save for a sliver of land that joined it to the rest of Ulthuan. Here there still grew the lush woods, green canopy stretching from shore to shore.

The sight of life in the dead did not stir Aenarion’s heart to anything save to punish those that had wrought such destruction. Astarielle, his wife, the life of the Avelorn forest, was dead; so too was Yvraine, their daughter, the future Everqueen. So had ended the long line of the elves’ rulers from the birth of their kind. In peace and harmony had the strength of the Everqueen been found and that strength had faltered. Aenarion knew that where peace failed war would prevail. Sickened by what he saw, he bid Indraugnir to turn westwards and put the mountains between them, turning his back on the dismal sight of Avelorn desecrated.

Weary with grief, Aenarion flew on. That night a strange flame burned in the air, of green and purple and pink and silver. Birds with wings of fire circled about the Phoenix King, their voices a chorus of screeches and mournful cawing. The flock of firebirds surrounded Indraugnir, their harsh cries surrounding the Phoenix King, deafening and incessant.

‘Begone!’ he shouted.

Amongst the cacophony Aenarion discerned a voice, wrought from a thousand avian throats. The words were carried on the wind itself, swirling around him as the flock swooped and soared.

‘Turn back!’ the firebirds cried. ‘We are All-seeing and you fly to your doom.’

‘Begone!’ Aenarion called again. ‘I know you for what you are. Daemons given the form of birds, sent to dissuade me from my quest.’

‘You guess right, but judge us wrong,’ the bird chorus replied. ‘Not elf nor daemon nor god wishes you to draw that which you seek. No mortal hand can wield this weapon, for it was made for Khaine’s grip and Khaine alone controls it. No bloodshed can satiate its hunger; no war can quench its thirst. When every daemon is destroyed, and even the gods themselves have fallen to your rage, what then for you? You shall be kinslayer, the doom of your own people; for in them you will see weakness and cowardice and you will strike them down without thought.’

‘Never!’ said Aenarion. ‘My bloodlust is for daemon and Chaos God alone, and no force in this world or the heavens would raise my hand against another elf. Begone with your lies.’

‘Heed our warning, turn back!’ the flock called, but Aenarion urged Indraugnir on and the two burst into the starry sky while the firebirds fell to smoke behind them.

Dawn broke in full glory, the sun banishing winter chill, casting golden rays upon the land of the elves. Aenarion looked to the east and for a moment his heart was stirred by the beauty of the sunrise. But gladness could take no hold, for he knew that such sights would be forever banished if the daemons were spared. As the sun’s light reflected from his armour, Aenarion could see lithe figures dancing in the glare. Insubstantial, like distant reflections, they leapt and twirled about the king and his dragon, shimmering with the dawn haze.

‘Begone!’ he shouted.

His command was greeted by lilting laughter that poured into his mind like a gentle waterfall.

‘So harsh, so stern!’ the daemonlights giggled. ‘Why so grim, King of the Elves? For one who seeks to end all wars, your mood is sour. Exalt your noble quest and rejoice in the pleasure that will come from destroying your foes.’

‘Save your guile for one that is not deaf and blind to your charms,’ replied Aenarion. ‘Your kind will fall with the others.’

‘And even as you strike us down and relish your victories, you will become forever ours,’ sang the sun-voices. ‘The joy of slaying is still joy, and in that you will be trapped, your life no more than one moment of rapturous slaughter after the other.’

‘Never!’ cried Aenarion. ‘There is no joy left in me; not in head nor heart nor any other part. I shall with a frown upon my brow take no pleasure from it, as the beekeeper drives wasps from the hives or the tree-herd disposes of the mites in his charges’ bark. Your slaying is an unwanted evil that I bear, and I will do it without happiness.’

‘Heed our warning, turn back!’ the sun-daemons called, but Aenarion urged Indraugnir on and the two banked into the shadows of the mountains to leave behind the light of the sun.

At dusk a soupy smog smothered the Phoenix King, its tendrils slipping across Indraugnir’s scales, pawing at Aenarion’s face with wet, slimy fingers. A stench of eternal decay, of charnel morass and rotting swamp, burned Aenarion’s throat and eyes. Through stinging tears with cracked voice, he cried out.

‘Begone!’ he shouted.

Lugubrious voices swallowed him up, words sliding into his ears like moist mud, seeping and slipping through his mind in most disgusting fashion.

‘When all is dead, who shall you slay?’ they asked. ‘When the corpses are as mountain ranges and foetid blood fills oceans, what then? Think you to destroy Death itself ? Think that you are eternal, never to be touched by the flies and the worms? Fodder you are, flesh and bones and blood and skin, and nothing more. When the daemons are gone, would you raise this weapon against disease, and strike down old age, and slice through hunger? Nothing is forever, save us, for in all life there is death.’

‘All things follow their natural course, and I would no more fight nature than try to cut apart the sky,’ snarled Aenarion. ‘But your kind wantonly spread plague and famine in most unnatural cause, and you too shall feel the pain of destruction. You are not Death, nor its servants; merely vassal messengers of putridity and decomposition. Death comes to all mortals, and with the Godslayer in my hand it will come to the immortal also.’

‘Heed our warning, turn back!’ burbled the noxious fog, but Aenarion urged Indraugnir higher and higher, until they breached the rank cloud and flew on through the starlit sky.

The following dawn the crimson sky was filled with rain, so that it seemed as the air itself cried blood. Each drop falling upon dragon scale and link of armour rang as if blade against blade. Every sliding droplet screeched like metal torn or throat slit. As the shower became a downpour, Aenarion and Indraugnir were surrounded by the din of battle, the arrhythmic clashing and wailing overlapping to form words bellowed so fiercely that Aenarion feared for his hearing.

‘Begone!’ he shouted.

‘Foolish mortal!’ the voice roared in return. ‘Think you to turn war against its makers? We will feed upon every blow you land, every drop of blood shed, every bone broken and every skull severed. In battle we were born and for battle we exist. The ringing of your sword shall be a clarion to us, and in hosts uncountable we will fight you. For each of us you fell, another shall be born, into war unending, battle without cease to the end of the world and the universe beyond.’

‘The dead do not feed,’ laughed Aenarion. ‘When you are slain you shall feast no more upon violence and rage. Cold shall be your deaths, for I will be heartless and pitiless, though my rage shall outmatch yours.’

‘The beasts of war cannot be vanquished! Great may be your fury, yet the harder you fight, the stronger we shall become. There is not a blade forged by man or god that does not belong to us. Every life you take shall be a life dedicated to us and your victories will be as hollow as your defiance.’

‘Why would you discourage me from such?’ asked Aenarion. ‘It is fear, I contend! No might of mortal or immortal can stand against Vaul’s darkest creation. No stronghold in the world or in the realms beyond can hold against its power. Bring on your unending war and I will end it. I shall throw down your brazen gates and topple your iron towers.’

‘Heed our warning, turn back!’ the voices growled, but the rainfall grew lighter as Indraugnir flew on, ‘til the Phoenix King flew in clear skies again.

On and on, northwards flew Indraugnir, the Phoenix King silent and resolute upon the dragon’s back. They glided over barren lands, bounded to the East by sheer-sided peaks, bordered to the West by crashing sea. Withered heaths and wide marshes broke the rocky landscape, the foothills covered with desolate moorlands, the rivers cold and rimmed with ice.

Neither rider nor mount had known rest for many days, but Indraugnir flew on with steady beats of his wings. Aenarion dared not close his eyes lest some new obstacle assail him. The cold air became harsher still, Indraugnir’s great breaths each a billowing cloud that swirled in the wake of his wings. Aenarion’s bones ached and his eyes were rimed with frost, but he kept his grip firm on the saddle even as he shook icicles from his long hair.

The Phoenix King heard whispers. Faint and distant, and thought himself in a waking dream. Male and female, high and low, the voices urged him to turn back, seeking to turn him from his quest. With each new entreaty or threat his resolve hardened further, until his heart was as an icy stone. Coldness without and coldness within, the Phoenix King fixed his eyes upon the north and urged Indraugnir to stay strong.

As they neared the northern coast of Ulthuan, all ahead of them was swathed with dark rumbling clouds. From East to West the storm obscured all. Beneath the crashes and flashes the seas were stirred to tremendous violence, smashing and flailing against the rocky shore. The clouds towered upwards to the edge of the sky, and there was no path except through them. Lightning crackled, dancing brilliantly across the high waves. The air reverberated with thunder, shaking Aenarion in his armour. The wind became a fierce gale that whipped the breath from the Phoenix King’s lips.

Aenarion leaned low and slapped an encouraging hand to Indraugnir’s thick neck. He raised his voice above the howl of the wind.

‘The elements themselves would see us fail, my friend. This is the last, I am sure of it. I have no doubts for your courage and tenacity, but have you the strength for this final obstacle?’

Indraugnir snorted with offence and backed up his wings so that the two stayed in place, barely buffeted by the strength of the wind. The dragon twisted his neck to look upon Aenarion, eyes slitted against the gale.

‘You know better than to ask such questions, old ally. I would bear you to the moon and back if you wished it. It is a great storm, I grant you, but I have flown these skies for an age. Upon the fires of volcanoes I have soared, and into the icy vastness of the North I ventured when I was young. I have crossed mountains and oceans and deserts, and you ask if I have the strength to contest with a simple storm?’

‘Well said, my friend, and proudly put!’ replied the Phoenix King. ‘I doubt not that we could fly round the world and back again if needed. Storm or no storm, the Blighted Isle is near at hand, somewhere beneath that scowling sky. When we have dared its wrath and found our prize, we shall be afforded our much-earned rest.’

‘Say not!’ said Indraugnir. ‘If we succeed, there shall be no rest nor respite. I know of this thing that you seek. It is a shard of death, a splinter of the freezing void between stars, fang from the world serpent. You ask if I have the strength to bear you to its resting place, but I must ask if you have the strength to bear what you will find there. I heard the words of Caledor. This wicked thing you seek was not meant for the mortal realm. Its touch is a curse, to its victims and its wielder. Its taint shall be in you forever, even past death. Is this truly what you seek?’

Aenarion did not reply for some time. He felt the thudding of his heart and the race of blood through his veins. All the whispering had gone save for one sharp voice; a quiet siren song that called to him through the tumult of the storm. He thought of what he had to leave behind and saw that there was nothing. His land, his people, all would suffer for eternity if he did not do this thing.

‘My heart is hardened to it and my mind set upon this course. If this weapon is to be the doom all claim, it shall be my doom alone, for my wife and children are dead and with my passing its curse will carry on no more. Let us doubt each other no more. Whatever fate awaits me, it cannot be delayed.’

So Indraugnir stiffened his wings, set his long neck and dived down towards the boiling storm.

Wind howled, lightning flared, thunder growled. All was enveloping darkness split by blinding brightness as Indraugnir and Aenarion plunged through the tempest. Despite the dragon’s straining pinions they were tossed about like a leaf on a breeze. Aenarion leaned forwards and clasped his hands around Indraugnir’s neck, laying his cheek against his scaly hide as the wind threatened to tear the Phoenix King from his perch. A swell of air or rasp of lightning would set the pair to tumbling, until Indraugnir righted himself with stentorian growls, his heart pounding so hard it shuddered through Aenarion’s body.

As one they dived down, a silver and gold streak in the blackness. The sea beneath foamed wildly and Indraugnir’s wingtips skimmed the waves as he pulled out of the stoop, battered left and right by the swirling hurricane. Fiercer and fiercer grew the storm as they flew on, ’til Aenarion’s limbs shivered with the effort of his clinging. A mountainous wave surged out of the gloom, forcing Indraugnir to climb swiftly.

Lightning cracked, striking Aenarion. For a moment his whole body contorted. His fingers lost their grip and he fell, tumbling from Indraugnir’s back towards the stormy seas below. With a cry of dismay, Indraugnir folded a wing and turned sharply. He plummeted after the falling Phoenix King, fighting against the torrent of the storm that threatened to sweep both away.

Aenarion plunged into the steep waves, what little breath he had exploding from his body. Surf crashed over him and his armour pulled him down. With a final effort, he splashed to the surface once more, filling his lungs with freezing air before sinking again, dragged down by the current.

Indraugnir hit the water like a meteor, wings furled, raising a great eruption of water. Eyes wide in the bubbling depths, he spied the glint of gold and turned and lunged awkwardly, a clawed foot closing around Aenarion’s spinning body. Legs pumping, churning a froth behind him, the dragon burst clear of the sea’s clawing grip, wings snapping out to carry them back into the clouds.

Turned around and about, the dragon knew not whether he flew north or south or east or west, but carried on as swiftly as he could, Aenarion’s limp form hanging in his grasp. Feeling no movement from his friend, he cast his gaze about, looking for some rock or promontory where he could set down for a moment.

He spied an outcrop of black rock and turned towards it, skimming above the waves, every muscle and sinew in his enormous body a knot of agony. His breath coming in gasps, Indraugnir crashed against the hard shore, shielding Aenarion with his body, the sharp rocks shedding scales, tearing through the skin of his wings. Bloodied and limping, Indraugnir righted himself and gently set Aenarion down on a water dappled rock shelf.

Bending his head low, the dragon let out a breath across the elven king. Stirred by the heat, Aenarion heaved water from his lungs, body shuddering. Bleeding from dozens of wounds, Indraugnir lay down beside the motionless elf and draped a wing across him, shielding the Phoenix King against the surf that sprayed from the wild sea.

So it was that Aenarion and Indraugnir came to the Blighted Isle.

When Aenarion awoke he was sore in limb and numb in mind. Crawling from beneath the protective canopy of Indraugnir’s wing, he looked up to see a dark sky. The storm had abated and the clouds gone, but not a single star could be seen. The cold waters lapped against the rock beside him; in the other direction he could see nothing but blackness. He looked to Indraugnir but the dragon did not stir. His body heaved and fell with massive breaths and his eyes were closed. The Phoenix King saw gouges in the flesh of the beast, and noted the tattered edges of Indraugnir’s wings. He patted his companion gently upon the shoulder and sat down with his back to the dragon’s foreleg.

Here he sat, alert for any danger, and kept watch.

As the first fingers of dawn touched upon the sea to the east, Indraugnir stirred. Blinking his eyes, the dragon yawned wide, puffs of smoke drifting from his open maw. Indraugnir turned towards Aenarion and saw that the king was awake. Aenarion stood as the dragon shifted his bulk and tentatively flexed a wing. Indraugnir’s thick lips rippled with pain, exposing sword-long teeth.

‘I fear my boast has come back to haunt me,’ the dragon said gently. ‘I am undone by the storm and can carry you no further.’

‘No other could have seen me through the tempest, there is no shame in such a feat. We are here upon the Blighted Isle and I can find my way alone here. Rest up, for it will not be long ere we must go south again, and even I cannot walk on water.’

Indraugnir laughed with a deep rumble.

‘With the Sword of Khaine in hand, perhaps you could carve apart the seas and cross the dry wound to Ulthuan.’

‘I would rather be carried by a friend,’ replied the Phoenix King. ‘Fare well, and I shall return soon with my prize.’

The Blighted Isle was lifeless, a barren rock broken by stone spires; home to no plant nor animal nor bird nor the smallest insect. Aenarion set off away from the dawn, picking his way through the scattered rocks. Soon he spied higher ground to the west and set off with purpose. Pulling himself up a steep ridge, the king saw that the morning had all but passed and the sun was not far from noon. Yet the circle of light hung in a dark sky, its light weak, a pale disc that seemed more like the moon.

Crossing the ridge, Aenarion felt a pull to the south, and the sharp, luring whisper returned to his ear. Yet even as he turned in its direction, a mist rose from the naked rock, surrounding him until the sunlight was no more than a faint sheen in the air. Shadows stirred in the fog and Aenarion thought that the daemons had returned. He circled slowly on his heel as the shapes resolved into vague silhouettes, tall and slim, robed with cloud like gowns. They crowded closer, just out of reach, grey figures that stretched towards him with pleading hands, their insubstantial bodies evaporating and reforming.

Dark mouths opened and the fog swirled with hoarse whispers. ‘He walks among us.’

‘The Doom of the Elves hath come’ ‘Spare us!’

‘Mercy!’ ‘Not the blade!’ ‘Free us!’ ‘Give us peace!’ ‘Justice!’ ‘Show us pity!’ Aenarion swiped at the apparitions with his hand and stumbled back

from their advance, only to find more behind him. There were thousands, a great mass of wraiths that grew in number with every passing heartbeat. ‘Leave me be, foul spirits!’ he snarled. ‘The dead have no business with the living. Torment your slayers, not I!’

A quiet female voice beside Aenarion quelled all the others. ‘They are the spirits of the Dead Yet To Be, Aenarion.’ The Phoenix King spun around, recognising the voice. ‘Astarielle?’ he cried.

It was she; a shimmering ghost of white and palest green among the melancholy grey. The Phoenix King looked upon her beauty again and wept. He stepped forwards to embrace her slender body, but his arms passed through air without substance, leaving only a cold sensation that prickled his skin. As the spirit of Astarielle reformed, he saw now that there were rents upon her flesh and silver blood spilled from a wound in her breast. Aenarion gave a wordless moan and fell to one knee.

‘My beautiful wife! What horrors have been inflicted upon you? Is there to be no peace for your spirit?’

‘In peace I lived, but in violence I died. To peace I will return, but not before I have spoken. Give up this quest for vengeance, Aenarion. Shun the lure of war and find it in your heart to treasure the memory of my life, not the haunting of my death.’

‘Look what they have done to you, my beautiful wife. Look at the destruction they have wrought upon your realm.’

‘All things die and then grow again. Even Averlorn has its seasons, though they last longer than the lifetimes of elves. What seems permanent now is but fleeting in the eyes of the world. The future cannot be born out of grief and anger, but is created anew with hope and love.’ ‘My love died with you, Astarielle,’ said Aenarion, regaining his feet. ‘This is your shade, fleetingly here, but soon it will be gone. Only in death will we join each other again, but I cannot needlessly throw aside my life and abandon our people. When the daemons are destroyed and Ulthuan is safe, I will return the Widowmaker to its black altar and let loose my grip on the world. Then we shall be united.’

‘There are things that you are not to know, but you must believe that all is not as bleak as it seems. You sought sacrifice to end the woes of the elves, but there is greater sacrifice to come. Though in times to come we shall spread our gaze across the world and rule the seas, it will be but a brief respite in the dwindling of our people. You now must make that choice. Look to your heart! We must forego that power that makes us strong, that the daemons might be caged again within their terrible prison, and with their passing so too will our glory fade.’

‘Never!’ snarled Aenarion. ‘We will rise anew from this war, greater than ever. Though your entreaty would break the heart of an ice fiend, my mind is set.’

Silver tears rolled down Astarielle’s cheeks as Aenarion turned from her. The Phoenix King stalked away with a whisper.

‘We will be together again, my love, but not yet. There is something yet that I must do.’

It was not long before Aenarion came to a wide expanse near the centre of the Blighted Isle. Here, jagged black rocks marked with lines of red thrust up into the ruddy skies like a circle of columns. The ground within was as flat as glass and black as midnight. At the centre there stood a block of red-veined rock and something only partly visible shimmered above it.

Even as his thoughts touched upon the Godslayer, there came to Aenarion’s ears a distant noise; a faint screaming. The ring of metal on metal, of fighting, echoed around the shrine. Aenarion heard a thunderous heart beating, and thought he saw knives carving wounds upon flesh, and limbs torn from bodies on the edge of his vision. The red veins of the altar were not rock at all, but pulsed like arteries, blood flowing from the stone in spurting rivers of gore. He realised that the beating heart was his own, and it hammered in his chest like a swordsmith working at an anvil.

Aenarion stood transfixed before that bloody shrine. The thing embedded in the rock danced and wavered before the Phoenix King’s eyes, a blur of axe and sword and spear and bow and knife and strange weapons not known to the elves. Finally a single image emerged, of a long-bladed sword, cross-guard curled into the rune of Khaine, its black blade etched with red symbols of death and blood.

Aenarion reached out... and stopped, his fingers a hair’s-breadth from the hilt of the sword. All became silent; not a movement stirred the air as the world and the gods held their breath.

Aenarion knew this would be his doom. All of the warnings came back to him, the words of Caledor merged with dire predictions of the daemons and the pleading of his dead wife. It all mattered nothing to him, for his sprit was empty and only the Sword of Khaine could fill the void within him.

The ground shook and rock crumbled as Aenarion’s fist closed upon the hilt. He pulled the sword free from its stone prison and held it aloft. Blood seeped from the runes etched into the blade and poured in thick rivulets across his hand and down his arm, trailing crimson across his armour.

Godslayer, Widowmaker, Doom of Worlds, Spear of Vengeance, Deathshard, Icefang and Heavenblight. By many names it was called, by mortal and daemons and gods. But one name alone it truly held: Sword of Khaine, the Lord of Murder.

Now it was the Sword of Aenarion. The doom of the elves was sealed.

AN EXTRACT FROM THE GILDAR RIFT

Sarah Cawkwell

‘Incoming unidentified ships.’

The words were spoken in an emotionless, flat monotone by the servitor at the sensor lectern and they cut through Arrun’s mood with all the accuracy and cruel savagery of a chainblade. He rose immediately from his command throne and took the steps down to the pulpit where the servitor stood. It turned its head to him and fixed him with eyes that gave away nothing.

‘Unidentified? No. That is unacceptable. Activate any working augur banks and sweep them for their designations immediately.’

‘Compliance.’ The servitor turned away, a faint hiss of hydraulics audible as it did so. The tech-priests were still chanting their apparently endless blessing and Arrun coolly bit back the urge to banish them from his deck. He turned to a young man seated at one of the control panels.

‘Run the manifests and schedules. Determine what is due into the system today. I checked it myself this morning. There was nothing slated for either arrival or departure. Prepare to send out a response ship. These intruders will answer to me.’

‘Yes, captain.’

Arrun balled his hands into fists at his side, furious at this unwelcome intrusion. These fools would learn swiftly what it cost to cross the path of the Silver Skulls. They would not be the first to learn that lesson.

A few more clicks and the servitor spoke again. ‘Profile fits Infidel-class design. No identifiable livery.’

‘Infidels?’ The word immediately sent the hairs on the back of Arrun’s neck standing on end. Once one of the favoured fighting ships of the Legiones Astartes, but now no longer used. Knowledge of their construction had long been lost and no Chapter of Adeptus Astartes or even the Imperial Navy had any remaining. At least, that was what Arrun had believed. Infidels were almost mythical. Any such vessels still flying were antiquities left over from the time of the Great Heresy.

‘Confirm. Infidels. They are not responding on any known vox frequency codes. They are not transmitting verified data.’ It chattered mechanically, turning to interface with the other console. ‘Augury data confirms identification. Both vessels recorded as Infidel Raiders. Records are incomplete.’

Infidel Raiders. One of the escort vessels commonly favoured by a number of Traitor Legions of the Adeptus Astartes. The servitor made another chattering noise as it calculated distances. ‘They are not yet in weapons range. They are holding position just beyond our ship’s capability.’

‘Clever,’ muttered Arrun. ‘Very clever.’ He moved across the bridge to the schemata that were displayed as a shivering, unstable hololith. Just like that in the strategium, it showed the positions of the fleet currently deployed within the Rift. He turned to the tech-priest maintaining the image.

‘Improve quality.’

The tech-priest nodded and, murmuring words to the Omnissiah, turned a few dials on the console that projected the image. It came into sharper focus and Arrun traced a line across the bottom section of the display. It rippled in the wake of his hand’s passage and the tech-priest shot him an unseen look of irritation as it fiddled again with the dials.

‘They crossed in through the fringes of the Rift,’ Arrun said, more to himself than any of the others. ‘It’s used a lull in augury sweeps. Whoever this is, they planned ahead.’ He turned to one of the humans standing close by. ‘Muren, make a note of that and make arrangements to contact one of our smaller patrols to work that area.’

‘Yes, captain.’

Arrun tapped at a small console, his fingers moving with nimble, practiced ease and on the rendered hololith before him, the flickering representation of the Quicksilver relocated from its current position to the point that it should have been. He similarly moved a number of the other ships to new locations on the plan and scowled deeply.

‘We are the only ship in range should the need arise and unless they make a move from their current position...’

Arrun stood away from the plinth and turned to the occulus. At this distance, the two ships were little more than dots on an endless sea of stars.

If what the servitor stated was correct, they were Infidel-class. The escort ships were well known as being favoured by the Legions who had turned their backs on the light of the Imperium. That, combined with the continued lack of communication and the generally hostile manner of their approach suggested that they were more likely than not perfect fits to that profile. The mathematics needed no further thought. This, more likely than not, was enough to make a decision.

Arrun’s brow furrowed and a surge of hatred bubbled up in the pit of his stomach. Cool, clinical detachment overrode his moment of anger and he began to bark orders. Every bellowed command was obeyed immediately, without question. Daerys Arrun ran a smooth, ordered ship and his crew, Space Marine, human and servitor alike, bowed before his will without hesitation. In a moment, the irksome chanting of the tech-priests had been blissfully drowned out by the overall volume of noise.

‘Enemy craft are accelerating. Augury readings are returning power spikes in their forward lances.’

‘Bring us around. We’ll meet them head on. Run the design through the cogitator. I want every weakness brought up. Whoever they are, they’re unannounced and uninvited. I will not stand for interlopers in my system.’ He clenched his hand into a fist. ‘Alert the gun decks. Load all cannons. Present forward batteries and prepare to fire on my word.’ He paused briefly. ‘Just in case.’

‘Marks are continuing to increase speed, but they are no longer on a direct heading. They’re still holding just on the edge of firing range.’

‘This is the captain. All hands hear this. Take us out of geostationary orbit. We’ll...’

‘Captain Arrun?’ The only questioning tone so far came from the Prognosticator at his side. Arrun turned. The Prognosticator was so quiet, he’d not even noticed the psyker’s arrival. ‘What are you doing?’

‘They won’t come to us, Prognosticator. So I’m taking the fight to them. They’re piloted by traitors. I won’t suffer their kind to continue their mockery of an existence.’

The Prognosticator looked out of the viewport. The two ships were moving ever closer. Brand stared at the screen as though his psychic powers could somehow reach through the womb of plasteel and armaplas that surrounded them. Indeed, having seen what his psyker advisor was capable of, Arrun didn’t rate the chances of the ships had they been a very little closer. Brand’s eyes burned with a momentary fervour.

‘You should use caution,’ he said in his whispering voice. ‘The shape of the future is unclear to me. I should read the signs.’

‘Understood, Prognosticator.’ Arrun felt a moment’s uncertainty at Brand’s words. The Prognosticator’s connection with the Emperor’s will was not a thing to be taken lightly, but he would not permit this sortie to continue without intervention. He hesitated briefly. Protocol demanded that the Prognosticator cast the auguries, that they wait for the Emperor’s guidance in this.

Daerys Arrun, however shrewd and brilliant his strategic mind may have been, was also exceptionally arrogant. He had neither the time nor the inclination to observe protocol in this instance. He took a deep breath and shot Brand a peculiar glance that was somewhere between defiant and apologetic.

‘We don’t have the time, Prognosticator. In this, you will need to trust to my judgement for once.’

If the other was shocked at this blatant disregard for what was undoubtedly the strongest of the Silver Skulls traditions, he did not show it. Instead, he turned away and took a seat to the right of the command throne. His hard green eyes gave away nothing of his reaction to the insult that had just been made to his face.

‘Orders, Captain Arrun?’

Aware that he had just transgressed and that there would be a discussion on the matter later, Arrun turned away from the Prognosticator and nodded.

‘Power up shields and begin loading prow cannons. Cogitator operators, begin calculating firing solutions’ He took a deep breath. ‘Reroute power from the Resurgent banks.’

‘Captain, you will delay the...’ Correlan’s voice snapped over the ship-wide vox, but Arrun ignored it.

‘Yes, captain.’

Scant seconds later, the huge strike cruiser hauled herself free of Gildar Secundus’s orbit and began cutting through space, closing the distance between herself and the Infidels with ponderous majesty.

There had been much trade activity in the Gildar system in the past few weeks. Many cargo vessels had come and gone, each without incident, each without question. Gildar Secundus was the usual destination but there were other, smaller worlds in the sector that received regular shipments from all across the Imperium.

None of them had been suspicious. None of them had raised any call for alarm. All of the ships that came into the system conducted their business swiftly and without lingering too long. It was possibly the presence of the Silver Skulls that encouraged such expediency, but it worked. They came, they transacted and they left.

But the ships did not always leave with the same numbers aboard with which they had arrived. Even this was not by itself cause for misgiving. People came and went all the time. Sometimes, larger vessels travelled through, bringing and removing regiments of young men and women to their assignments with the Imperial Guard in other systems. All these were entirely normal activities. Nobody paid attention when a ship came in with two hundred souls aboard and left with one hundred and eighty.

Had Daerys Arrun scraped beneath the surface, he would not like what lay there.

He would have found tiny things. But tiny things that came together to form a far bigger picture. A team of prospectors returning to the habs of Gildar Secundus from the plains had mysteriously disappeared. Local law enforcement officers reporting a spate of murders that shared no apparent reason or commonality. Mechanical failures that caused system shutdowns and rolling blackouts. All small things that happened with systematic regularity on Imperial worlds. There was nothing unusual in it. But thanks to tireless planning and effortless cunning, on the many worlds of the Gildar system, things were beginning to fall into place.

The wind howled around the comms-tower which served the Primus-Phi refinery. It whipped up and bore the endless red dust with it. It pattered constantly against the armaplas of the window, scoring and pitting it. Not that the panel served much of a purpose; during these storms, it reduced visibility to nothing more than a dark red haze. Officer Evett shivered at the thought of going out into the howling dust storm and thumbed the rune that closed the armoured shutters. The interior lumen-strips flickered briefly as the heavy panels locked into place, but at least the eerie screech of the relentless gale outside was instantly muted.

‘Your turn for the recaff run,’ he grinned at his subordinate who lounged back in his seat with a groan.

‘Is it really my turn? Really? I could have sworn that it was yours, sir. I grabbed us some of those seed bar things from the shipment, remember?’ He raised his eyebrows and gave Evett a hopeful look, about as keen as the comms-officer to venture out into the unforgiving storm.

‘Nope, definitely your turn. I picked up the lho-sticks. Recaff. Now. And don’t forget to close that damn bulkhead properly or we’ll be shovelling dust out of the vents for days.’ Evett threw himself into his seat and propped his boots up on the console, confident that there would be little to disturb him until the weather improved.

‘Fine. Just don’t blame me if it’s cold when I get back.’

Evett replied by stretching out an arm languorously and pointed at the stairwell. The engineer groaned and dragged himself down to the maintenance room. He struggled into an enviro-suit, rebreather and visor. The refinery entrance was only a few hundred metres away, but if he had to go out, he was at least going to go out prepared.

The small barracks on the ground floor that housed the militia detachment assigned to the tower was virtually empty, the troopers no doubt engaged on one of their endless and thankless patrols. The engineer didn’t envy them tonight.

‘Going out?’ The voice came from Trooper Bessin, seated atop his bunk.

‘No, Deeko. I’m all dressed up like this for my own personal comfort and entertainment. Why would you even ask that question?’

‘Great,’ the soldier smirked, unfazed by the dripping sarcasm. ‘Grab me some lho-sticks while you’re out.’

The engineer rolled his eyes, executing a theatrical bow. ‘Anything else you would like while I’m out, Oh Glorious Lord of the Imperium?’

‘Yeah, some dancing girls would be nice. And maybe a large bottle of something relaxing.’

‘Amasec?’

The soldier laughed; a raucous sound. ‘You and your amasec! It’s a big Imperium. Why don’t you find something a little more creative?’

The engineer’s reply was short, crude and garnered another bout of explosive laughter from the off-duty soldier. The bulkhead marking the entrance to the tower was whistling softly in the wind and a few drifts of scarlet dust had blustered over the floor. The particulate matter would need to be swept out soon before it started to clog the atmosphere filters, but the engineer certainly wasn’t about to undertake the onerous task. He stumped up to the access panel and punched a few runes.

A second later the heavy portal groaned and slid to one side admitting a blast of freezing wind and dust. Still grumbling in discontent and keeping his head down to avoid the wind, the engineer moved forward. He took barely five steps before he collided with something.

Entirely filling the entrance stood a hulking figure cast in blood and shadow. Too large by far to be one of his colleagues, the engineer raised his head up. Behind the visor of the rebreather, his eyes widened in shock.

The massive creature in the gloom moved slightly and the engineer caught the faintest glimpse of something shining in the sliver of light that came from the door. Transfixed by the fractal edge of the combat knife, Engineer Schafer felt the first, searing pain of the weapon as it opened his throat from ear to ear. Before he had even hit the ground, his life’s blood had already begun to drain from the expertly opened gash.

He died quickly. He was one of the lucky ones.

‘Starboard mark is accelerating to attack speed – her weapons are primed.’

On the Dread Argent, Arrun had taken his seat in the command throne. He leaned forward, his massive shoulders hunched with the tension of the moment. ‘Focus your attention on that one, but do not lose sight of what her sister ship is up to.’

‘She’s training her guns on us, sir.’

The captain sneered. ‘A genuine shame. I’m sure Correlan and his team would have liked the opportunity to strip that ship bare and expose her secrets. Shield power?’

‘Deployed at sixty-eight per cent, captain. It’s the best we can get.’

The Dread Argent was not without her own design flaws. She was old, but she was reliable. In the decades that Arrun had known her, she had never been perfect. He mused on it only briefly before everything once again became a babble of noise.

‘Unacceptable. Divert more power from the port plasma coils.’

‘Compliance.’

‘Cannons loading.’

‘Get me the Head Astropath. I need a message sending to the fleet.’

‘Compliance.’

‘And don’t lose sight of that port ship. Continue tracking.’

‘Augury glitch!’ One of the human crew applied the ritual blow, slamming the palm of his hand against the end of the gas-lens scope that he was using to track the second Infidel. He swore. ‘Tech-priest, I need you here.’

The tech-priest’s subsequent chant, soft and barely audible underscored everything else that was taking place. Arrun’s senses could separate and ignore it through a combination of years of practise and his own mental acuity. The tech-priest blessed the gas-lens viewer and stepped back. The serf checked its functionality and nodded. The tech-priest moved on to his next duty.

‘Infidel Alpha still holding position.’

‘Target Beta is powering up her weapons.’

‘Shield power?’

‘Shield generators now at eighty per cent, sir.’

Arrun drew a breath. Eighty per cent would have to be enough. They were an Imperial strike cruiser and the odds were heavily in their favour that they could withstand a bombardment from the Infidel and remain intact. But Arrun had seen odds defied before.

‘What is it that this runt is trying to achieve?’ Prognosticator Brand also leaned forward in his seat. ‘Is it a distraction tactic, perhaps?’ The question was entirely rhetorical, but Arrun turned to face him sharply.

‘A distraction from what?’ His tone was ice-cool and the unease he felt at the Prognosticator’s suggestion was not at all welcome.

‘An objective viewpoint, brother-captain. He has made his move and you have responded by deviating from your orbit.’ Brand studied Arrun carefully. ‘Do you think that may be intentional?’ The Prognosticator got to his feet and moved across to the cogitator banks. His eyes scanned the data that was there. ‘Is there anything – anything at all that might have slipped in behind our backs whilst they were turned?’

‘I... haven’t analysed the data yet, my lord...’ The serf at the controls stared up at the Prognosticator anxiously. His eyes flicked to Arrun and back as the captain rose from his command throne and joined his advisor. The look on the captain’s face was bordering on infuriated.

‘What exactly are you suggesting, Brand?’ The two giants towered above the serf and he visibly cringed at their proximity. The tension generated as the warrior faced the psyker was intense and uncomfortable for the others on the bridge. The sheer challenge in Arrun’s tone was enough for the human serf to desperately want to get out of their way.

As it transpired, whatever the Prognosticator may have been suggesting would have to wait.

‘Starboard Infidel has opened fire. I repeat – incoming lance fire!’ The words were screamed out over the ever-present hubbub of noise in the deck.

‘All hands brace for impact.’ Arrun’s brief anger with the Prognosticator was forgotten in the moment and he crossed the deck in several strides to the weapon bank. ‘Return fire, Meron. Blast that bastard out of the stars.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Meron’s hand slammed down on the runic keyboards that operated the cannon launch systems and the Dread Argent spat her deadly forward payload across the vast reaches of space towards the Infidel.

The impact of the other ship’s attack of chance went barely registered beyond a slight shaking of the Silver Skulls strike cruiser. The void shields crackled and rippled alarmingly. Arrun knew his ship well enough to note that a slight shaking meant a reasonable amount of damage had been absorbed. The Infidel would have no opportunity to shoot at them a second time; the missiles that the Dread Argent had launched would reach it and destroy it before that happened.

‘Impact in three... two... one...’

Time stood still as the occulus blossomed with the glaring white light of the Infidel as her plasma engines detonated. A vast shower of metal debris blasted outwards from the ship, some thrown as far as the Dread Argent itself. Arrun watched the destruction of the enemy vessel with ambivalence. They were strong little ships, certainly – but neither had nor never would be, a match for the might of the Imperium.

‘Report.’ Arrun’s voice broke the silence. He knew what the answer would be, but protocol demanded it.

‘Target destroyed.’ The serf tapped his monitor screen as it flickered rebelliously at him. ‘Confirmed. Target destroyed.’

‘What of the port ship?’

‘It’s fleeing, sir. Should we give the order for pursuit?’

Arrun hesitated and turned his head sideways so that he could see the Prognosticator. Brand had resumed sitting back in his chair, his hood drawn over his eyes once again. It was an affectation, certainly, but it had the effect of lending the psyker an extra air of mystery he little needed. The Prognosticator’s head shook. It was a barely perceptible movement, but Arrun knew it for what it was.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. We will let them go. The Fates have decreed that our job here is done. I do not believe they will be returning in a hurry now they have witnessed our capabilities.’ The Master of the Fleet dragged a hand across his jaw thoughtfully. ‘But conversely, we must not allow that to make us complacent. I want security on the Gildar system stepped up. I want regular reports from the main comms officers on those worlds. Arrange for the astropaths to spread word amongst the fleet within the Gildar Rift. Have them remain on full alert.’

Arrun strode across the bridge, orders continuing to fall from his lips. ‘I want vigilance on all vessels into the system. Inform those shipping outbound craft that there are raiders operating in the area. Tell them to be on their guard. And send a further message to the home world. Inform Lord Commander Argentius that our return will be delayed a little longer.’

He turned to Brand. ‘Those traitors are a poison that will not be allowed to spread in this system. You and I may not see eye to eye on some things, but this, I am sure, you agree with.’ There was a burning hatred in his eyes. Arrun knew that Brand, just like him, found traitors amongst their own kin to be anathema. ‘We will run them out of this system and those who do not run fast enough...’ He turned back again to the viewscreen and his face twisted in a grim smile. ‘Then they will suffer the consequences.’

He was a creature of the stars, a creature of bloodshed and glory. His long-ago rebirth into a life of war defined him. It was what he had once aspired to become and what he now embodied. This enforced inactivity had been nothing short of torture. Yet his master had decreed he wait until the optimal moment. Taemar had served under his master’s command for long enough to know that what he wanted, he got.

At least he was not alone. There were several of his comrades on this forsaken rock with him, all of whom were suffering the same effects of inactivity. For now, they were hidden, kept far away from the promethium refineries that dominated so much of the habitable areas of Gildar Secundus. They had put down on the planet several days before and as of yet, had received nothing to suggest the plan had been put into action.

‘What is it that you seek, brother? Up there in the endless dark of night?’

The voice came from over his right shoulder and Taemar turned at the formal words and almost archaic tone. His shaved head bowed in a gesture of deep respect for the other.

‘I merely search the stars for a sign, my lord.’

‘Do you doubt that our master will signal us when the time is right? Patience is a virtue, Taemar. You of all people should know that. He will not rush a masterpiece that he has spent so long creating. It has only been days. It will be worth waiting for. The Silver Skulls are predictable and foolish, slaves to their precious routines. They insist upon allowing themselves to be governed by the skeins of Fate. Have a little faith in our leader’s plans. Never doubt for one moment that he will play them right into our hands.’

Lord Apothecary Garreon of the Red Corsairs smiled. It was a slow, cruel smile that held no humour. He was taller than most of his comrades but with a rangy leanness that would have made him seem thin had he not been a Space Marine. Sharp, angular cheekbones stood out prominently in a scarred face whose most striking feature was the eyes. An impassive, unreadable dark brown, the colour of Garreon’s irises were so dark that his pupils were barely visible. His hair was a tawny brown mane that fell to his shoulders, streaked through with grey that hinted at advancing years. It was a face that was filled with great intelligence but was also underlined with obvious cruelty. It told in the play of the quizzical way he tipped his head in a birdlike manner when he spoke. He always seemed to be questioning, even when he was simply conversing. It told also in the way his tongue would run across his thin lips when he was describing an experiment. One of the many battle scars that he bore pulled his expression into a permanent sneer that seemed to suit his manner.

Taemar had seen that face twist in thought and insatiable curiosity as the Lord Apothecary worked on one of his subjects. He knew how keenly intelligent Garreon could be. He was also acutely aware of how cruel he could be.

The Red Corsairs called him ‘The Corpsemaster’, not because he harboured any desire to see the dead walk, but because he took a pathological interest in the biology of the dying and the dead, both of whom provided him with a harvest of precious gene-seed. He believed, as had many Apothecaries throughout the history of the Adeptus Astartes, that the future of their brotherhood lay in a better understanding of human genetics and xenobiology. He performed regular dissections on enemies and Red Corsairs both – in some cases whilst his subjects were still living. He could keep his victims alive for a phenomenal length of time, reducing them to skeletal, still-living things that begged for a release that was an eternity coming.

Taemar resumed staring up into the star-studded skies of Gildar Secundus. Huron Blackheart’s plans were often impossible to fathom, but that was part of what made him so brilliant. Insane, certainly – but only when viewed from a certain perspective. ‘If I might ask, Lord Apothecary, what is your particular interest in these deluded weaklings?’

‘The Silver Skulls… hmm.’ Garreon ran a long finger over his jaw in a thoughtful gesture. ‘Predominately, their psykers. The particular genetic strain seems to grant them an uncanny ability to perceive the future. Whether it’s a genuine precognition, a true link to the Emperor’s will or simply clever sleight-of-hand and trickery on their part remains to be proven… but history would suggest that they are either well advised, or exceptionally lucky.’

His lips curled upwards into a smile. Taemar, still staring upwards, did not see it. ‘Also, they are dying out. Their numbers grow ever smaller. They are a forgotten, far-flung, distant Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. You don’t recall the Astral Claws, do you Taemar? You were not one of my brothers when things changed irrevocably.’

Taemar made a grunt of affirmation. His roots had not been with the Astral Claws. Once, a lifetime ago, he had belonged to another Chapter. But the less he thought about his own betrayal, the less it bothered him. He’d fought and murdered his way through the Red Corsairs to the lofty position of one of Blackheart’s champions. History suggested that this was no coveted position – death was his only reward and well he knew it.

‘The Silver Skulls are stalwart warriors. They are fierce and savage in battle. I believe they should be...’ Garreon tailed off, considering how best to end the sentence. ‘I believe forming some sort of accord with them would be a beneficial arrangement.’

‘You seek to turn them to our cause?’ Finally, the Apothecary had Taemar’s attention. He looked around. ‘You think there is even the remotest of chances that they will do that?’

‘They are arrogant. Proud. Yes, I believe there is a chance.’ Garreon joined Taemar in seeking the stars above. ‘There always is. Mark well the Silver Skulls, Taemar. You and your men seek to create death and destruction. But they will revisit such behaviour on us in kind. I ask that you try your best to bring me some live ones. I suspect that there is much they can teach us.’

‘As you wish, my lord.’

Another ship sailed the empyrean, its destination fixed and certain.

His personal chambers were always gloomy without so much as a lumen-globe to light the way. He preferred to spend his private hours in the shadows and the darkness.

The messenger, a grovelling, wretched slave by the name of Lem who had lost the drawing of straws, stood in the pitch darkness, trying to stem the quivering in his spine. Despite the fact that he had been sent down to deliver good news, they had still lost a ship. This would undoubtedly incur the master’s displeasure.

It was silent in the chamber. But it was a loaded silence; the calm before the storm. The hesitation right before the explosive discharge from a bolt pistol detonated. The stillness of the air before a torrential thunderstorm. His master’s discontent was a thing denied a voice.

Something brushed past Lem’s cheek in the darkness and he flinched. His imagination. It was just his imagination. He squeezed his eyes closed and tried to control the trembling walls of his bladder.

All the while, the noise. A rhythmic drumming. The ring of metal on stone. One… two… three… four. One… two… three… four… Denied vision and thus unable to relate anything to the noise, Lem found it disconcerting.

After several long, agonising moments, he forced his eyes open again. He could barely make out the shape seated opposite him, nothing more than a bulky outline in the darkness, but now it seemed to move. The sound of scraping ceramite and the buzz and hiss of servos and hydraulics compensating confirmed his suspicion. The master was moving into a different position. He had remained silent during the delivery of the news and Lem had dared to hope that he might leave with his life intact.

‘Excellent. A confirmation that all is as it should be. All our forces are gathered, everything is in order. We will take this ship.’ The master’s voice, a low, predatory growl, was thick with saliva, coming as it did through metal teeth that had long since replaced anything natural that had ever grown in his jaw.

They were only a few words, but Lem could feel the sheer menace implicit in them. He nodded – a futile gesture in this darkness – and backed towards the door. As it slid open on old, grinding gears, a sliver of light from the corridor beyond sliced through the room. It fell on the impossibly huge metal power claw of the leader of the Red Corsairs as he drummed it against the arm of his command throne. Lem caught a glimpse of glinting, razor-sharp teeth as though the master’s mouth bared in a parody of a grin.

Then the door ground closed and left Huron Blackheart alone in his own darkness.

The Inquisition

++Open vox-net++

My most esteemed Lord Inquisitor,

This particular target has slipped through our grasp too many times, hiding in the darkest corners of untrodden space. We tore him from his bolthole, and now he bleeds answers to our many questions.

Interrogator Kerstromm Ordo Malleus

What are you working on at the moment?

I’ve just written a Warhammer short story for an upcoming anthology (Age of Legend). It was loads of fun, as I haven’t written a fantasy story before. There’s lots of magical goings-on in it – it features the Colleges of Magic – and in my head magic in Warhammer is every bit as dangerous and creepy as psychic powers and sorcery in the 41st Millennium. It was a fun new area to explore.

On the Warhammer 40,000 front, there’s a forthcoming novella featuring the Imperial Fists, to appear in the Architect of Fate collection. Captain Lysander is around in this and he was a very welcome challenge to write – making him a big bad Space Marine but also giving him some personal aspects, even some flaws, that set him apart from other Imperial Fists. One of the real challenges to writing for 40K, or anything that’s based upon already existing characters, is staying true to what people know about them while at the same time revealing some new aspect to them.

What will you be working on next?

Who knows? There’s no telling what I might be doing next. It could be that one of the things I’m working on will be the start of a new series, or maybe there’s some other area that the Black Library want to explore.

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’d like to write more Warhammer, especially involving the various flavours of magic in the Warhammer World. They’re all different and all very dangerous. Perhaps the ‘normal’ magic, the magic of the Imperial Colleges, is the most dangerous because the magisters and scholars think they understand what they’re dealing with but in reality they have no idea - the high elves knew it and that’s why they only taught the Empire’s wizards the basic stuff.

n Warhammer 40,000, I love the new dark eldar background and imagery. The models are amazing (I’m a huge miniature painting nerd) and the whole vibe – they’re evil, but also desperate and miserable underneath their arrogance – is very powerful stuff. I like the scourges the best. The idea of a scourge getting his wings and having to ascend all the way from the haemonculus’s lab, up through the various layers of Commorragh’s society, to reach the scourges’ aerie, is such a cool image and has so much potential.

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

I’m currently getting various thrillers on audiobooks to listen to while I’m out and about. It’s a good way to fill that downtime (ie, when you’re getting from one place to another) with something constructive and entertaining. Something with a tight and complex plot, and a glimmer of character and snappy dialogue, is always good. Harlan Coben is my kind of writer.

I’m also playing a bunch of D&D and I’m putting together a Deathwatch RPG campaign in the hope that my group will jump at the chance to be Space Marines and immolate some xenos in the Emperor’s name.

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

Either the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake or Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. Gormenghast is pretty much its own genre and its lush description and absurdist feel is intoxicating. A lot of the way I write is basically stolen from the Gormenghast series. And Sirens of Titan is a book so well-written that it can change your whole outlook on the world without your even noticing. I recommend it to everyone, not just fans of good old sci-fi but anyone at all.

More generally, I love some of the old science fiction, back when it really was a new frontier in fiction. The original Starship Troopers book, anything by Alfred Bester and The Forever War are good examples.

PHALANX

Chapter Thirteen

Ben Counter

It was a dismal thing, killing Chaplain Iktinos.

Iktinos was, by then, a barely sensible wreck. The infliction of the Hell had broken his mind so thoroughly that there was nothing left of the Chaplain save for his physical shell. The man that had once been, the paragon of the Chapter and the hidden traitor, were gone.

Sarpedon had carried Iktinos to a cluster of saviour pods adjoining the fighter craft deck. In the event of the huge hangar doors failing or some disaster befalling the fighter deck, the crew could use the pods to escape the Phalanx. The entrances to the pods were circular shafts leading down from a slanting wall, like the open mouths of steel worms waiting to swallow the desperate crewmen as they fled. Oil stained the walls and ceiling, and the chill of the near-vacuum could not be completely kept out by the hull insulation. It was no place for a Space Marine to die, suited only to a shambolic, almost apologetic excuse for a death.

Should the saviour pods themselves be compromised, an emergency airlock was set into the outer skin of the hull beside the entrances to the pods. A crewman in a voidsuit who took that exit could conceivably survive an extra hour or two in space, and perhaps even be picked up by a rescue craft. Sarpedon placed Iktinos’s limp form on the deck and turned the wheel-lock, opening the airlock’s outer door.

‘If you have anything you wish to add, Chaplain,’ said Sarpedon, ‘now is the time.’

Iktinos did not reply. Sarpedon looked down at him, at his burned face and scorched, dented armour, and regretted speaking. The Chaplain was barely drawing breath.

Sarpedon placed a hand against Iktinos’s charred skull. Sarpedon had never possessed any great talent for diving into the mind of another. Some Librarians of the Old Chapter had specialised in peeling apart another’s consciousness, diving down and extracting secrets the subject himself did not know. Others read minds on a vast scale, divining troop movements from an opposing army as fast as their orders spread. Sarpedon had only been able to transmit, albeit at the tremendous telepathic volume that manifested as the Hell. Nevertheless he had sometimes caught echoes of the strongest emotions, an aspect of the sixth sense that all psykers possessed in some degree. He tried to read something from Iktinos then, to divine some final thought from the man he had once considered his closest ally in all the universe.

There was nothing. Complete deadness, as if Iktinos was an inert object with no mind at all.

Then Sarpedon caught something, faint and intermittent, like a signal from a dying transmitter light years away. It was the howling of a desolate wind, the sound of emptiness more profound that silence. It whistled through the ruined architecture of a mind as empty as a bombed-out city, as alone as a world where life had never evolved. It was as if there had never been a mind in there at all, scoured and scrubbed from the wind-blasted stones by a terrible extinction.

Sarpedon alone had not done this. The Hell was indiscriminate and crude, a force of destruction, certainly, but not accurate or thorough enough to erase the personality of another. Iktinos had done this to himself. The shattered fragments of his soul had gathered themselves into a whole coherent enough only to self-destruct. A logic bomb planted by Daenyathos’s teachings, a way to destroy any compromising memories trapped in a fractured mind. An atrocity quite in keeping with the Philosopher-Soldier’s conviction that everything he did, no matter how obscene, was for a good beyond the conception of lesser human beings.

Sarpedon knew now what Daenyathos planned. It was no less appalling than the betrayal of the Soul Drinkers had suggested. It was entirely appropriate that Abraxes, an icon of treachery and malice, should himself just be a cog in such a scheme. The annihilation of Iktinos’s personality was similarly in keeping with Daenyathos’s way of doing things.

Iktinos had not completed his mental suicide before the unconscious part of him, the one laid open by the Hell, had submitted to Sarpedon’s request. Iktinos had, indeed, told Sarpedon everything.

Sarpedon hefted Iktinos’s body into the airlock. He slammed the inner door shut and turned the wheel to lock it again. Through the thick portholes Sarpedon could see the multicoloured nebulae of the Veiled Region, unknowable and hungry. Sarpedon would give its ravenous young stars something to feed on.

He tried to think of something to say to Iktinos, some powerful parting statement that would both condemn the traitor and express regret that the Chaplain, his old friend, was gone. But there was no point. Iktinos could not have understood anything in his current state, even if the words did reach him through the heavy airlock door.

Sarpedon thumbed the control stud set into the wall beside the door. Pneumatic cables hissed as the airlock was depressurised. A warning light strobed, then the airlock’s outer door opened and the remaining air whistled out. Silence followed and Iktinos’s body, dislodged from its resting place by the final decompression, drifted out of the airlock and beyond the grasp of the Phalanx.

A craft the size of the Phalanx was typically surrounded by a halo of debris and thin gas out to a distance of several tens of metres. Sarpedon watched as Iktinos’s body fell beyond the halo zone, into the pure void. At some point the Chaplain had finally died, but it hardly seemed much of a distinction with his mind already destroyed.

The outer door slid shut again, and Iktinos’s body became lost through the condensation misting on the porthole as the airlock filled back up with air. Sarpedon turned away.

Iktinos was dead. Sarpedon had kept one of the promises he had made to himself. A tough as taking on Iktinos had been, the next promise would be harder to fulfil. Sarpedon knew where Daenyathos was and what he was trying to do, but the way he would stop the Philosopher-Soldier had yet to make itself clear.

It did not matter. The time for weighing up the risks and probabilities of battle had come and gone some time ago. Now, Sarpedon had something to fight for, and there was no deadlier weapon than that in a Space Marine’s hands.

‘Throne behold us,’ whispered Pallas as he set eyes on the Path of the Lost for the first time. ‘Watch over us, my Emperor. Watch over us.’

The Path of the Lost, as recorded in the archives of the Imperial Fists, was a dark place. Its floors were covered with grates to allow the blood to drain out, and a thousand rusting torture devices were piled up as detritus in its shadowy corners as the fashions of punishment changed. An Imperial Fist might have the honour of being interrogated in the Atoning Halls or perhaps brought in chains before the Chapter Master – but those who were outsiders, prisoners of war or condemned heretics would be banished to the Path of the Lost. There would be doled out their tortures or executions away from the eyes of the Chapter down in the Phalanx’s rusting, filthy underbelly.

That would have been bad enough.

The strike force advanced, fire teams covering one another, as they crossed the threshold and entered what the Path of the Lost had become. The horror of the warp’s invasion had bled down inevitably into the Path, some unconscious malice dragging the warp’s dark energies into the torture chambers and execution grounds.

Across the walls and floors shimmered the torn faces of the Path’s dead. Delicate eldar features, each forced into a dying rictus, bulged from the warping metal. Like drowning swimmers struggling to the surface, humanoid shapes broke the surface to sink down again, an endless pulsating mass of bodies. The ghosts of mutant renegades, fouled with horns or sloughing skin, pushed against the fabric of reality, teeth gnashing.

‘There must be a million dirty secrets down here,’ said Luko, casting an eye across the constant parade of the executed and damned.

‘Nothing of your concern,’ said Sergeant Prexus. His squad had been charged with forming the bulk of the strike force, with nine more Imperial Fists under his command.

‘I think it is, sergeant,’ replied Luko. ‘All those dark deeds the Imperial Fists thought hidden from the universe, they might well come back to bite us down here.’

‘If you are finished,’ said Sister Aescarion, walking between the Imperial Fist and the Soul Drinker, ‘time is a factor.’

Prexus’s squad advanced into the cluster of execution chambers that marked the entrance to the Path of the Lost. Pallas, Luko and Graevus followed the Imperial Fists in, Varnica and Sister Aescarion watching the angles behind them.

Several tiled rooms with drains built into the floor, walls crazed with old bullet holes, had seen hundreds of captives executed in the past decades and centuries. Now those walls bulged as if they held veins fed by a vast heart, faces and hands pressing against the surface. The floor quivered underfoot as grasping hands tried to snare the feet of the Imperial Fists.

‘Steel your souls,’ said Sergeant Prexus, his chainsword held ready as he took point. ‘Recall the parables of Rogal Dorn. He walked into the hell of the Vengeful Spirit, and though assailed on every side, he did not fall. Though the Angel fell, the strength of our primarch’s soul did not let him follow. Though the Emperor was laid low, Rogal Dorn did not know despair. Let his strength be your strength, my brothers. Let his strength be yours.’

‘We are watched,’ said Varnica. He slid a hand into his force claw gauntlet, and it snickered shut around his wrist.

A shape flashed through the execution chambers, half-glimpsed through the gaping doorways and holes in the collapsed walls. The Imperial Fists gathered into a battle formation, gathered around Prexus with bolters aimed out in all directions. Pallas was beside Prexus, his own bolter ready.

‘They envy us,’ said Varnica. ‘No matter how grave our situation, it cannot compare to the unfinished business of the dead.’

More shimmering silver-grey forms rippled in and out of sight, flitting from electric chair to injection table to gallows. Quicker and closer they came, the howling of their voices growing, until they were like a tornado of torn souls with the strike force trapped in the storm’s eye.

‘Hold fast,’ cried Prexus. ‘The enemy shows its hand. Its foulness here is manifest.’

Reality bowed and flexed around Varnica’s force claw as he channelled his psychic power into the Hammerhand. Aescarion dropped to one knee, power axe ready, and was taken aback to see Graevus take up the same posture beside her, his own power axe in his mutated hand.

One of the ghosts tore from the mass and arrowed towards them. Varnica leapt, drawing back his force claw. The spirit had the hollow face and alien eyes of the eldar, the inhuman geometry of its frame the very essence of the xenos. The ragged matter of its body echoed the curved shapes of its once-elegant armour, shredded into streamers of spirit-stuff by the ravages of its grim death.

Varnica’s force claw closed on the spirit and sheared it in two. The wall of force generated by the eruption of his Hammerhand power ripped the xenos spirit apart, a sphere of energy bulging outwards from the impact.

Varnica skidded to the floor. With ear-splitting screams, more of the Phalanx’s dead were shrieking into the Imperial formation. Aescarion swatted at one, the blade of her power axe scything through a vaguely human mass of glowing energy. The discharging power field shredded the spirit into a cloud of falling sparks.

‘Open fire!’ yelled Prexus, and ten boltguns hammered in unison. Shapes rippled along the floor and grabbed at their feet, while ghostly hands reached from the floor. Prexus was snared by hands clutching at his ankles, and he cut them through at the wrist with a swipe of his chainblade. Apothecary Pallas speared an apparition through the throat with the needles of the narthecium he wore around one hand, the medical device doubling as a weapon up close.

From the maelstrom coiled a serpentine apparition, terminating in the gnashing face of some foul mutant, its features knotted into a mass of tentacles trailing behind it. Its long gnarled fingers were tipped with metal blades, and shards of bone stabbed from the echo of its form.

‘The Vizier!’ yelled Prexus.

The apparition grinned, its face almost splitting in two along a fissure lined with fangs. It dived, too fast for the Imperial Fist in its way to avoid it. The Vizier dived into the Space Marine, its whole length disappearing into the warrior’s breastplate. The Imperial Fist was suffused with a blue-white glow bleeding from between the plates of his armour and shining through the eyepieces of his helmet, and he dropped his boltgun as he was wracked with sudden convulsions.

Varnica ripped one of the ghosts from the swirling mass, impaling it on his force claw, and slammed it into the ground where it dissipated. He turned to see the Imperial Fist in the throes of possession. Shards of bone were bursting from under the Space Marine’s forearms and shoulder guards.

Prexus leaped onto his possessed battle-brother, wrestling him to the deck. Varnica pushed through the cordon of Imperial Fists to Prexus’s side. He withdrew his hand from his force claw, attaching it back onto the holster at his side, and placed his hand against the possessed warrior’s forehead.

Aescarion and Graevus joined the Imperial Fists cordon, slashing at the ghosts that swooped close. Luko was on his own, pivoting and slashing in every direction, his lightning claws perfectly suited to this fight where he was assailed from all sides. Scraps of spirit flesh floated down like shed leaves, faces breaking into ragged scraps of detritus as their distant screams died with them.

‘In the name of the Emperor and His mighty soul that shields us all from the enemy,’ yelled Varnica, ‘I cast thee out. From this good brother’s soul, where you shall find no purchase, I cast thee out!’

Power arced off the Imperial Fist’s armour. The possessed form forced itself to its feet and threw off Prexus with strength beyond even a Space Marine. Prexus crashed into the tiled wall of an execution chamber, sliding down among the rubble and old bloodstains. Varnica kept hold of the possessed Space Marine, his hand still clamped against his forehead.

The faceplate of the Imperial Fist’s helmet became like liquid, rippling and shifting into a face that was an animal mass of tentacles. A forked tongue flickered from its lipless mouth.

‘This spirit tastes good,’ it hissed.

‘Out, daemon,’ shouted Varnica. ‘The Emperor’s light burns you. The iron of this warrior’s soul cages you. Out, out, wither and die!’

‘Do you know how much is left of him?’ slathered the Vizier. ‘He has barely a name. The rest of him I consume. I shall leave him a shell with the mind of an infant.’

‘I said out!’ yelled Varnica. The shape of the Vizier rippled around the Imperial Fist, stretching and deforming as if it was being pulled from the body by invisible hands. Finally, with a shriek, it came away and the Space Marine clattered to the floor, insensible.

Aescarion and Graevus leapt on the Vizier as it writhed, confused for a moment. Aescarion’s axe bisected its face, the power field burning through the spectral matter. The Vizier threw her to the floor with a lash of its long tail, but Graevus’ axe was already descending towards where its neck should be. The axe cut through it and its head was sheared from its body. The serpentine form dissolved into the air, and the head had shimmered away to motes of light before it hit the ground.

The ghosts dissolved away, slinking back into the shadows. The Imperial Fists tracked their bolters through the darkness as Luko watched the rag-like slivers of ghostly flesh erode away from his gauntlets.

Silence fell again, broken only by the plinking of tiles falling from the bolter-scarred walls.

‘What was it?’ asked Pallas, cradling the fallen Imperial Fist’s head and undoing the armour seals around his neck.

Prexus picked himself up from the deck. ‘The Vizier,’ he spat. ‘A mutant warlord. A psyker. Centuries ago he was captured and brought to the Phalanx. He died down here. I do not recall the whole story.’

‘I imagine it was far from unique,’ said Luko.

Pallas removed the Imperial Fist’s helmet. The faceplate was still twisted into a semblance of the Vizier’s tentacled face. Underneath, the warrior’s face was bloodied and battered, with growths of bloody bone poking through the cheekbones and scalp. He drew a shallow breath and winced.

‘Brother Dolonis,’ said Prexus, kneeling beside the wounded man. ‘Can you fight?’

‘No, my brother,’ gasped Dolonis in reply. ‘The pain… is everywhere. It has changed me. My body is not… not my own. I can still hear it laughing…’

Aescarion cast her eye over Dolonis’s body. Shards of bone had penetrated through his armour all over. Knots of it were forcing his shoulder pads away from his body and knife-like growths jutted from his greaves. A pool of rapidly congealing blood was spreading beneath Dolonis.

‘We must leave him,’ said Aescarion.

‘He is a battle-brother,’ replied Prexus.

‘He cannot fight and we cannot take him. And the enemy has been within his mind. He is a moral threat. If he lives, we will be back for him, but for now we must leave him.’

‘I agree with the Sister,’ said Varnica. ‘You have not seen the ruin a possession can make of its victim. The possessor can plant a piece of itself that can continue even after the daemon is dead.’

Prexus stepped back from Dolonis. ‘Brother. I cannot make this decision for you.’

‘Leave me,’ said Dolonis, the words causing him obvious pain. ‘Just put my bolter in my hand.’

Prexus handed Dolonis his gun. Aescarion knelt beside him and took a loop of prayer beads from a pouch at her waist. She pressed them into Dolonis’s free hand.

‘Pray for us, brother,’ she said. ‘We will pray for you.’

Pallas gently lowered Dolonis to the deck.

‘We need to move on,’ said Luko, stepping over the rubble further into the tangle of execution chambers. The feeble light reached to the threshold of another warren, this time of cell blocks of tight winding tunnels lined with steel doors and stretches of manacle-hung walls. ‘If Abraxes’s influence has woken the old dead here, then he probably knows we have disturbed them. We must reach his portal before he sends his own forces down here.’

Prexus did not, or could not, say anything further. With a final glance at Dolonis, he led his squad out of formation towards the deeper regions of the Path.

‘You fight well, Sister,’ said Graevus as he and Aescarion took up their position in the middle of the marching order.

‘You expected otherwise?’ said Aescarion.

‘I did not mean…’

‘We are the daughters of the Emperor,’ she said, ‘just as you are his sons. I may not have two hearts or three lungs, but I have every bit the resolve of a Space Marine.’

‘So I saw,’ said Graevus. ‘You were quick to leave Dolonis to his fate.’

‘As I would with a sister of mine,’ said Aescarion sharply. ‘A sense of brotherhood has its benefits, but taken to extremes, I fear it can become a weakness as much as a strength. The history of the Imperium is a litany of failings caused by brotherhood misplaced.’

Graevus bit back any reply. The Path of the Lost closed around them, the cramped warrens of cells forcing the Space Marines to split up, and it felt for all the galaxy as if the Phalanx was swallowing them whole.

By the fires of the forges they had built, the daemons’ war engines were taking shape. One of them was a huge horned thing, a battering ram with cylindrical cages for wheels in which some of the lumbering daemon-beasts would doubtless be herded to drive it forwards. Another was a catapult with a shield mantlet reaching almost to the deck’s high ceiling, piles of alien skulls being heaped up behind it as ammunition. A machine like a massive mechanical crab was being assembled with tanks of some caustic bilious substance on its back, hooked up to the cannon on its coiling tail. Impish daemon-wrights scrambled over the surfaces of the war machines, while legions of bloodletters stood guard and the shapeshifting horrors of Abraxes swarmed in an endless squirming dance. The remains of the greater plague daemon had been dragged behind the tumbledown fortifications and putrefied into a cauldron of bubbling rot, from which more plaguebearers were being birthed by the minute.

Lord Inquisitor Kolgo watched the flickering fires reflected off the pitted metal of the half-finished daemon engines. His Battle Sisters retinue shadowed him at a respectful distance as he leaned against a fallen wall behind which a couple of Imperial Fists had taken up their position in the line. ‘We will have to attack before they are finished,’ he said.

‘I know,’ replied Chapter Master Vladimir. ‘That is why Abraxes is building them. He wants us to emerge from safety and march towards them, to give them the defensive ground instead of us.’

‘And we will attack,’ said Kolgo. ‘We cannot stand back and give them the Phalanx. It is written in the fate that Abraxes loves to weave so much.’

‘It seems that you have divined the future, lord inquisitor,’ said Vladimir. Any bitterness in his voice was well hidden. ‘Abraxes is not the only one reading the runes.’

‘Fate has us all in its snares, Chapter Master. It is an inquisitor’s duty to perceive it.’

‘And what does fate say will happen to us?’

‘Truly? If you so wish, Chapter Master. Fate has decided that Abraxes shall bring his great cunning to bear and with it, defeat a force of brave but bull-headed Space Marines, bringing a great tragedy to pass.’

‘That is fate?’

‘That is fate.’

‘Then, lord inquisitor, I shall fight fate.’ Vladimir pointed to a knot of rubble in the no-man’s-land between the armies. It was the remains of a hero-chapel that had been toppled by the daemons’ advance. ‘There still stands the statue of Chaplain Pausanias,’ he said. ‘They could not topple him. See? He lacks an arm, and the rest of him has seen better days, but he stands.’

‘Like us?’ said Kolgo.

‘You miss my point. Pausanias was a dark seed. He was brought onto the Phalanx as a novice, recruited like thousands of others. Unlike most of them, he was found worthy as an Imperial Fist. But there was a darkness in him. A pride. He sought the greatest glory in battle, and battle-brothers died for his failings.’

‘A warrior’s sin, rarely acknowledged,’ said Kolgo.

Vladimir ignored the inquisitor. ‘We saw too late what he was,’ he continued, ‘and when his charge against a gunline, seeking to capture the standard of the enemy, cost the life of his squad’s sergeant, he was banished to the Atoning Halls for his paucity of spirit. Fate had decided that Pausanias should be a lesson to us, lord inquisitor. He was destined to be a parable of warning to future novices, a disgrace as a Space Marine to be mourned and despised. But Pausanias was not resigned to accepting that fate. He scourged away his pride in the Atoning Halls. He returned lower than the novices, lower than our crew. He worked in the engines of the Phalanx, until the Chapter welcomed him back into its ranks. He died a Chaplain, a spiritual guardian of our battle-brothers, because he had fought that fate which had bound him so tightly and fought to live beyond it. He defeated his fate and is remembered here for it. I shall emulate him, if the Emperor wills it, and confound the designs of this daemon prince.’

‘It sounds to me, Chapter Master, that an Imperial Fist does not know when to give in.’

‘We do not know, lord inquisitor, what giving in even means.’

From the shadows cast by the daemons’ fires, a Space Marine scout crept towards the Imperial Fist lines. The yellow of his armour was smeared with ash, as was his face, to break up his outline in the gloom.

‘Scout Orfos,’ said Vladimir as the scout got closer, ‘if these old eyes fail me not.’

‘You shame me, Chapter Master,’ said Orfos as he took his place in the line. ‘I should aspire to get within a knife thrust of you before you notice me.’

‘Friend and foe have tried, brother. That I still stand suggests no foe, at least, has succeeded yet. What news do you bring of the enemy?’

‘Within two hours, they will finish building their war engines,’ replied Orfos. ‘They are preparing rituals to possess them with daemons. Heaps of skulls and entrails piled up, and sigils wrought in blood, I have seen. They have brought supplicants through, still human, though barely, and they writhe and chant to gain the attention of their gods. Such rites of the flesh I hesitate to describe, but the beasts they build will have a cunning born of their possession as well as their own raw strength.’

‘Can we survive them, if they are sent against us?’ said Vladimir.

‘I do not know if the Phalanx itself will survive them,’ said Orfos. ‘We counted six of them. The scorpion beast, the battering ram and the catapult are clearest to us from here. A burrowing worm of steel lies coiled and slumbering out of our view, with a contraption of brass and skulls that I suspect will house the spirit of a greater daemon and a beast of flesh knitted together, as if predators of the warp had been butchered and their carcasses divided to be formed into one single monstrosity. All look as if they are nearing completion.’

‘You and your brother scouts have done well,’ said Vladimir.

Orfos saluted and headed back through the lines to join the other scouts arriving in ones and twos from their mission.

‘Then within two hours,’ said Kolgo, ‘we attack.’

‘That is one fate I will not seek to avoid. My Fangs of Dorn have not seen enough blood yet, not quite.’

‘If Luko’s mission does not succeed, this will be the last the Phalanx sees of any of us.’

‘Are you afraid, lord inquisitor?’

Kolgo replied with a smirk and turned back towards the centre of the Imperial Fists position, where his Battle Sisters were waiting patiently for their master.

When Kolgo was out of earshot, Vladimir looked again towards the daemon engines growing more complete by the moment. He took the Fangs of Dorn in his hands, their blades scarred with burning daemon blood and muttered to himself.

‘Is it wrong that I have prayed for this?’

By the time the strike force of Imperial Fists and Soul Drinkers reached the Panpsychicon, two more of Prexus’s squad had been lost. In the warren of cells and tunnels, where the Space Marines were forced to move through each junction and bottlenecks in knots of two or three, unseen foes had snatched at them from the darkness.

Befanged faces had loomed, gnashing and spitting bile. The walls had fallen in, or pits had opened in the floor. Cackling creatures had flitted past junctions ahead, too quick to see or shoot. One Imperial Fist had been dragged into a cell by hands of shattered, bloody bone; by the time his battle-brothers had reached him, there was nothing left in the cell but torn scraps of ceramite and the blood slathered across the walls and ceiling.

The second had been killed by invisible hands as his brothers watched. Even as they tried to haul him down from the ceiling where he had been carried, his head was wrenched around almost backwards and his spine snapped. The forces holding him had dissipated instantly, dropping the corpse to the deck and leaving only silence behind.

So the strike force warily emerged into the wide space ahead of them, leaving the labyrinth behind, only to wonder where the next threat would come from.

‘What is this place?’ said Luko, the first to step out of the cell block tunnel.

‘The Panpsychicon,’ said Prexus behind him. ‘An experiment.’

‘Was it successful?’ asked Luko.

‘It had lain down here unused for two hundred years,’ replied Prexus. ‘Is that answer enough?’

The circular expanse of the Panpsychicon was bounded by smooth walls inlaid with mosaics. The names of a hundred great battles from Imperial Fists history were depicted there in patterns of brightly coloured stone shards, surrounded by complex heraldries that spiralled into an unbroken pattern. Even the name Terra was picked out among the heraldry, commemorating the part the Imperial Fists had played in the battle for the Emperor’s Palace ten thousand years before.

In the centre of the Panpsychicon was a device of steel and crystal that reached the ceiling, something like a set of interlocking spider’s webs in which were suspended cut slabs and chunks of crystal like giant gemstones. A rainbow of colours reflected from every surface, creating a maddening nest of shapes and light that refused attempts to view it as a normal object in three dimensions.

Luko’s foot disturbed a manacle set into the floor. It was one of dozens set in concentric circles around the central device.

‘Some enemies resist traditional interrogation techniques,’ said Prexus. ‘Psykers amongst them. The Panpsychicon was built to rid them of their mental barriers.’

‘It is a machine,’ said Sister Aescarion, ‘for grinding down men’s souls? The Inquisition makes use of such things, but with varying success. And never have I seen one on such a scale.’

‘These are matters of the past,’ said Prexus. ‘We must press on. We close on the cargo sections, but we must not allow ourselves to be slowed further.’

The whole room shuddered. Handfuls of dust spilled from cracks in the ceiling and the mosaiced walls shed their tesserae. The Panpsychicon’s device shone and glimmered as its crystals shook and, with a grinding sound from beneath the floor, began to rotate.

‘How many died down here?’ asked Luko, crouching to keep his footing as the room shuddered with greater strength.

‘That depends,’ said Prexus, ‘on what you mean by “die”.’

Shapes of captives, manacled to the floor, flashed in the strange colours of light emitted by the spirit-grinder device. Crackles of light played across the walls.

‘Go,’ said Luko. ‘Go, get through. Do not give it the chance to…’

Luko’s sentence was cut off by the burst of energy that tore across the Panpsychicon. The Space Marines were picked off their feet and slammed into the wall, shattering the mosaics beneath them. Shackles of lightning held them there, struggling against the force. Graevus’s mutated arm pushed free of his restraints but the rest of him was held fast.

Luko tried to shut his eyes, but the same force holding him in place was prising them open. He forced himself onto his side and pushed with an arm and a leg, feeling some give in his bonds.

‘Resist!’ he yelled over the growing sound, a rumble combined with a skull-shuddering whine, emitted by the spirit-grinder as it opened up into a mass of articulated arms dripping with shimmering crystals. ‘Resist it. Fight back!’

Luko’s bonds snapped. He slid to the floor, still pushed back by the wall of psychic power pulsing from the centre of the room. He could see Sister Aescarion screaming as her body, without the strengthening augmentations of a Space Marine, was battered against the wall like a plaything in the hand of a spiteful child.

Luko took a painful step towards the centre of the room. The apparitions manacled to the floor were writhing, contorted impossibly, as he stepped through them, forcing himself forwards.

All I want is peace, said a voice in the back of his head.

‘No,’ said Luko. ‘No. Get out! Get out!’ He pushed forwards another step.

He caught sight of his hands. The lightning claw gauntlets were gone. His hands were pitted and rotten, dead flesh peeling away from bone eroded by disease.

He forced himself to see the gauntlets and they crackled back into view, the illusion banished from his mind.

‘Do not believe it!’ he shouted, not knowing if anyone could hear him. ‘We are Space Marines! We shall know no fear!’

The force was gone. Luko fell to the floor. But it was not the deck of a spaceship – it was mud, wet and deep. The hand he threw out to steady himself sunk into the mud up to his elbow and he felt it cold against his face.

Something whistled overhead. An artillery shell. Gunfire crackled from all directions.

Luko was surrounded by war. Mud and trenches, battalions charging to their deaths, armies locked face to face in dense jungles and shattered cities. Burning fighter craft fell like comets overhead. Battleships overturned, spilling thousands into an ocean covered with burning oil.

Luko had been in wars before. He had spent his life in them. But this was different. This was every war he had ever seen, every one he had ever heard of or imagined, all layered on top of one another in an awful mass of solid conflict and death.

He could see billions dying. He could see the face of every man and woman, no matter how distant or confused the slaughter, as they died. They struggled along the gore-filled trenches holding their guts in, laser burns all over their bodies, begging for the Emperor to deliver them death. A legion of them crawled on their bellies, blinded by clouds of corrosive gas, vomiting up a bloody torrent as their insides were eaten away. They screamed in silence, the sound robbed from their voices as they fought against the mudslides and building collapses that entombed them, their lungs crying out for breath they could not draw, limbs and organs crushed. They fell from the sky and were driven mad by the blind horror of a thousand battlefields hurtling up at them. They drowned. They burned alive.

The endless battlefield spread out as far as Luko could comprehend in every direction, and some monstrous trick of dimension told him that it went on forever. It was above him, where the embrace of the void snatched the breath and life from crewmen thrown from ruptured spacecraft. It was below him in the intense heat and pitch darkness where armies fought like rats, ignorant of friend or foe, reduced to terrified animals murdering one another with bare hands and teeth.

The weight of it, the certainty of its unending malice, slammed down on Luko and he could not get to his feet. He was in a filthy trench choked with bodies, a carnivorous jungle humming with disease and the bloating foulness of the dead, a ruined city where men died over a bullet-ridden room or a deathtrap crossroads, the hull of a dying spacecraft where all was darkness and fire. He was at the heart of every war that had ever been fought or ever would, and before him was played out every violent death that the galaxy would ever see.

His body was rotting away because he was dead, and yet he could not die. Death itself was not an escape. He would be here, witness this, forever.

It was not real. Luko knew it was an illusion. But it was not something projected into his mind – it came from inside him.

‘Captain!’ yelled someone very far away, with the unfamiliar cadence of a woman’s voice. ‘Captain, focus! Drive it out! Hear me!’

A hundred layers of war were piled up on top of one another. Luko forced himself to look at the bloodshed and the suffering, to go through every incarnation until he found one that didn’t fit. A single circular room, haunted and tortured, on a spaceship. He saw himself lying on the floor, convulsing at the mercy of the Panpsychicon’s spirit-grinder. He pushed himself to his knees, and so did the Luko he saw. He looked around and saw the face of Sister Aescarion ghosted over the trenchworks and burning fortresses.

Luko lunged drunkenly towards the spirit-grinder. His lightning claw sliced through the tangle of struts and wiring. Crystals rained down and shattered.

Sister Aescarion followed him in destruction. She buried her power axe deep in the machine’s core, and grimaced as she tried to wrench it out. Luko was unable to judge distance or direction properly and slashed around him with abandon, scattering components of the psychic machine.

The thousand wars peeled away and fell apart. Fortresses turned to dust. The mud dried and blew away, leaving a desert devoid of battle. The Panpsychicon became the dominant reality, then the only one, and Luko was able to shake the confusion from his mind.

The Space Marines lay in various stages of consciousness. Varnica was on his feet, too. The Imperial Fists were scattered, groaning and shifting as their own realities returned to them.

One did not move. Pallas, holding his own head in pain, knelt beside the Imperial Fist and read his lifesigns off the fallen warrior’s armour.

‘He is gone,’ said Pallas.

‘What was his name?’ asked Graevus, who forced the words out in between coughs as he knelt, bent double.

‘Gorvan,’ replied one of the other Imperial Fists.

‘Prexus?’ said Luko. ‘Sergeant?’

Aescarion tapped Luko on the shoulder guard and pointed to the wall near the cell block warren. Prexus sat against the wall, his bolt pistol in his hand, his chainsword discarded on the floor. His head lolled, revealing the massive exit wound in the back of the skull. Prexus’s brains were spread up the wall behind him, thrown across the mosaic in the characteristic pattern of a bolter wound.

No one said that Prexus had shot himself. They didn’t need to.

‘What must he have seen?’ said Pallas.

‘Think not on it,’ said Varnica. ‘Let us move. Sister, commend their souls.’

The strikeforce crossed the Panpsychicon, armoured feet crunching through the remains of the psychic machine. Aescarion, head bowed, followed the Space Marines towards the double doors at the far side of the room, murmuring a prayer for the departed.

Sarpedon braced his remaining talons against the floor and put all his strength into forcing the bridge doors open. The blast doors, automatically sealed in the event of boarders entering the Phalanx, creaked and gave way a little. Hydraulic lines split and the resistance lessened, and the door slid open wide enough to admit the bulk of a Space Marine.

‘Daenyathos!’ shouted Sarpedon as he stepped onto the bridge of the Phalanx.

The bridge was a palace, built to glorify the captain who had once held court there – Rogal Dorn, primarch of the Imperial Fists Legion, the first master of the Phalanx. Under him, this ship had darkened the sky of Terra herself when Horus laid siege to the Emperor’s Palace. A mighty throne, three storeys high, dominated the bridge, plated with gold. The flight of steps leading to the oversized pulpit-throne was flanked with displayed weapons captured from enemies or discovered during the Great Crusade.

The vast viewscreen facing the throne, taking up most of the curving from wall of the bridge, showed a panorama of the Veiled Region, with the star Kravamesh glowing along one edge. Kravamesh had turned dark and smouldering, black swarms scudding across its burnt orange orb, as if the star was drained of power to fuel the gate across to the warp that had brought Abraxes into realspace. Below the screen were dozens of command helms, each controlling one of the Phalanx’s many vital systems, and even when stationary they should have been bustling with crewmen and Imperial Fist overseers. Now, only a few slumped dead crewmen remained, felled by bullet wounds where they had sat.

One body was piled on the floor beside his chair. In the chair, at the communications helm, sat a hunched elderly figure, bony fingers playing across the controls. The man turned at Sarpedon’s voice, revealing an ancient, lined face broken by a smile.

‘Lord Sarpedon,’ said the old man. ‘For so long I have waited for this. Of all the pieces of Master Daenyathos’s future, you are the one that shines the brightest in his plan. I am Father Gyranar, honoured to lead my congregation.’

Sarpedon stalked warily through the bridge, casting his eyes over the monumental sculptures looming in the shadows around the edge of the bridge, the suits of ancient armour gleaming and polished around the foot of the throne-mount. ‘Where is Daenyathos?’ he said.

Gyranar stood up, his bent frame meaning he was barely taller than when he sat. A trembling finger pointed as the old man took a few steps towards Sarpedon. ‘So blessed am I that I lived to see this. I dared not hope it might be during my lifetime that the threads would come together, that the one Daenyathos wrote of would lead his Chapter to the fulfilment of our dreams. But you stand before me, Lord Sarpedon. And we all stand at this confluence of fates.’

Sarpedon hefted the Axe of Mercaeno and scuttled within a lunge and a strike of Gyranar. ‘I said, where is Daenyathos?’

‘Threaten not those who are merely carried on the eddies of the fates we weave,’ came an artificial voice, amplified from somewhere behind the throne-mount. ‘Men like Father Gyranar are ignorant of their fate and impotent to change it. But you and I, Sarpedon, we are different. We are the authors of our fates. It takes men like you to forge the channels into which the future will flow. And men like me to decide what that future is.’

The shape of a Space Marine Dreadnought stomped from behind the throne-mount. The colours and heraldry of the Soul Drinkers were polished and gleaming now, as if it had just stepped from the forges of the old Chapter. A missile launcher and a power fist were mounted below its massive shoulders and purity seals fluttered from the blocky mass of the sarcophagus.

‘Iktinos told me everything,’ said Sarpedon. ‘I know why you are here. You will take the Phalanx across the galaxy and disgorge Abraxes’s armies everywhere you go.’

‘That is true,’ said Daenyathos. ‘But did he tell you why?’

‘He tried,’ said Sarpedon. ‘But I could not believe such a thing spoken from the lips of a Space Marine, even one as corrupted as Iktinos. So I would hear it from you first.’

‘It is simple, Sarpedon,’ said Daenyathos. The chassis pivoted so that the dreadnought’s head, shaped like an oversized Space Marine helm, looked up at the huge viewscreen and the stretch of void it showed. ‘The galaxy is corrupt. Its people are damned and its rulers are cruel. This is the same conclusion as yours, is it not? The Imperium is a dark and savage place, a breeding ground for the desperation that gives the forces of the warp the chance to do their wickedness in our universe. It is through suffering that the Imperium will be remade. Great suffering, on a scale beyond the imaginings of lesser minds. Thanks to the plan crafted by me and executed by many, including you, Abraxes and the Phalanx will combine to spread such suffering that the Imperium will be remade stronger and more just.’

‘And you will rule it?’ said Sarpedon.

‘Of course,’ replied Daenyathos, the green-lensed eyes of the sarcophagus focusing on Sarpedon again. ‘Who else could?’

‘You understand,’ said Sarpedon, ‘that I must try to stop you. I may die, for no doubt you have included this very eventuality in your plan. Nevertheless, if there is the smallest chance that the people of the Imperium can be spared that fate, then I must take it.’

‘Of course,’ said Daenyathos. ‘I would expect nothing less. You have been a loyal servant to me, Sarpedon, though you played your part unknowingly. It pains me not a little to have to kill you. But you will fight to the death to protect the same Imperium you profess to despise, and so I must ensure you hinder me no further.’

‘It is the Imperium I hate. Not its people. Its people are innocent.’

‘Innocence is a falsehood created by weak and fearful minds,’ said Daenyathos.

‘Well, then. I do not think there is anything more to say.’

‘Indeed, Chapter Master Sarpedon. I would finish this without delay.’

‘And I would oblige you.’ Sarpedon crouched down on the five legs he had left, Axe of Mercano held low ready to charge.

Daenyathos’s targeting auspex flickered as it registered Sarpedon, feeding information into the dreadnought’s internal cogitators.

Sarpedon yelled and sprang to one side as a volley of missiles shrieked from Daenyathos’s launcher, and the bridge of the Phalanx was suddenly full of fury.

PHALANX

Chapter Fourteen

Ben Counter

The scouts brought back word that the daemons were loading their war engines with ammunition, heaps of smouldering skulls and ballista bolts of ensorcelled brass. The scorpion machine was being filled with boiling venom, biomechanical poison sacs swelling in billows of steam, daemons scrambling across its lacquered carapace.

Word reached the Imperial Fists lines. Chapter Master Vladimir made his decision instantly, for there was, in truth, no decision to be made.

Lord Inquisitor Kolgo stood proud of the defences, his Battle Sisters gathered around him, the fires of the daemons’ forges flickering against his polished Terminator armour. He watched the daemon masses swarming into formation in response.

‘Lackeys of the warp!’ yelled Kolgo. ‘This is what you begged for. This is why you were spewed from the guts of the Immaterium. To face us, the Emperor’s own, the shield of Mankind! Well, now you have your wish. Rejoice as we cleave you apart. Give thanks as we shoot you down. This is what you wished for. Come, rush onto our blades!’

The daemons leapt over the barricades of wreckage, shrieking in response. The heralds of their gods bellowed and keened the songs of the warp, and darkness gathered around like the eclipse of a distant sun.

Into the darkness charged the Imperial Fists.

On the map tables of the Tactica Sigismundi were dozens of battlefields rendered in stone miniature, some of them depicting meticulous surgical strikes with every element of an Imperial Fists force working in harmony, perfectly coordinated, each squad shielding the next while catching foes in a lethal crossfire. Others were battles of attrition, the Imperial Fists relying on their enhanced bodies and wargear to keep them fighting when the enemy were breaking down. But some of them, the fewest, were headlong charges, frontal assaults into hell which only a Space Marine could hope to survive. It was written in the Codex Astartes that a Space Marine should never be used in such a way, that his value to the Imperium was too great to be thrown away in a pell-mell slaughter in the teeth of an entrenched foe.

But the Codex Astartes could not cover every possible battle. It could not predict that one day the Phalanx itself would be invaded, and that between its survival and its destruction stood a last-ditch battle where the enemy could only be fought face to face in the open, with no strategy in the Chapter Master’s arsenal to change it into anything other than a pitched battle, a duel to the death.

Vladimir and Kolgo led the charge. The weapons already operating on the daemon engines opened up and flung burning comets into the midst of the Imperial Fists, throwing armoured bodies into the air. Daemons surged forwards, heedless of organisation or rank, overcome with a lust for the fight that spread like a fire.

This was the way it had to be. Vladimir drew the Fangs of Dorn and dived into the mass of daemons. Kolgo followed him in, rotator cannon hammering, the barrels glowing hot.

The rest of the Imperial Fists crashed into the enemy. If they were to die, it would be in defence of their Chapter. Few of them gave any thought to the chance they might live.

Sarpedon skidded along the floor of the bridge as the missiles streaked over him, the sound of the air ripping behind him as scalding rocket exhaust billowed around him. The sound of the impacts behind him was so loud it wasn’t even a sound, just a white wall of noise that blocked out all hearing except for the alien echo rippling around the Phalanx’s bridge.

Sarpedon was ready for the shockwave. He took the worst of it on his shoulder and let the impact throw him into the foot of the throne pedestal, front legs collapsing beneath him to absorb the impact.

Father Gyranar disappeared in the mass of smoke and flame. Shattered components from consoles rained down, chunks of burning metal and cabling. Cracks ran up the viewscreen, marring the view of the Veiled Region with black jagged fingers.

Sarpedon dragged himself into the dubious cover of the nearest statue, an Imperial Fists apothecary plated in gold.

‘Did you think, said Daenyathos’s artificial voice from the throne, ‘that I had not thought I would face you one day? You, or someone like you. Why do you believe I selected a dreadnought as my vessel?’

Sarpedon hauled himself up the nest few steps, crouching down behind a statue of an Emperor’s Champion from some campaign of distant legend. His nervous system seemed struck out of kilter by the missile impacts, his legs uncoordinated, his head ringing.

‘If you know the future,’ said Sarpedon, forcing his mind to keep up with his surroundings, ‘then you know how this ends.’

The response was another burst of missiles, triple contrails spiralling towards Sarpedon. The Space Marine flung him across the steps leading up to the throne. The Emperor’s Champion disappeared in a burst of golden shrapnel, and the other two missiles howled past to impact against the viewscreen. Sarpedon dug in with claws and fingers, clinging to the side of the throne pedestal. Bursts of pain against the side of his face registered, in a detached, soldierly way, as shards of shrapnel embedded in his skull. One eye suddenly shut down, his vision cut in half, depth gone, the scene in front of him becoming ever more otherworldly.

Massive shards of the viewscreen fell away like black glass daggers, shattering against the floor. Chunks of the Veiled Region seemed to have fallen away with it, the galaxy turning dark piece by piece, a broken mosaic of decay.

Sarpedon’s nervous system caught up and the wrenching pain from his hips told him he had been hit worse than he realised. He looked down at the pulpy mess of fibrous muscle and broken exoskeleton. He had three legs left, and chunks of mutated limb lay straggling down the steps behind him. No wonder he had felt out of control. He was trying to push himself forward on legs he didn’t have.

Sarpedon scrambled forwards a little further, to the shadow of the throne. Daenyathos was in silhouette, the light from the viewscreen having died, and looming over Sarpedon he looked less like a dreadnought and more like the vision that Sarpedon had forced into Iktinos’s mind – vast, monstrous, toweringly powerful, invulnerable to the efforts of a mere man.

‘It could have been anyone,’ continued Daenyathos, the missile ports on his arm closing. ‘Caeon could have led the Chapter astray. Gorgoleon. Iktinos. It could have happened centuries earlier or later. Whoever it was, I always knew I would have to face one of you. For you, this is the end. For me, this is just another footnote.’

The storm bolter on Daenyathos’s power fist arm clicked its action and Sarpedon was suddenly looking down its barrel. Daenyathos couldn’t fire any more missiles – Sarpedon was too close, the shrapnel too dangerous. Daenyathos could not risk damaging his dreadnought chassis now.

Sarpedon tried to take cover again but Daenyathos’s aim was too good. The first volley of bolter fire shredded the step in front of him, gold plate and granite dissolving under his hands. The second slammed two shots into his torso, the bolter shells penetrating the ceramite and bursting against Sarpedon’s breastplate of fused ribs.

He felt the bone breaking. The sensation was clear among the shock that hammered through him. Twin craters were blown open in his chest and the air touched the mass of his lungs, the pulsing surface of his heart. Sarpedon fell onto the steps and rolled onto his back, gasping as his body recoiled.

He was a Space Marine. He would survive this. He could survive anything. Before, he had doubted. But now, so close to death, his certainty was complete. He would survive this. He was Sarpedon, Chapter Master of the Soul Drinkers, a man the galaxy had sought to kill, yet who had survived long enough to breathe the same air as the only enemy he had ever really had.

Sarpedon planted a hand on the step in front of him and turned himself over. His remaining legs fought to push him up onto his talons. He looked up, blood running down his face, thick gobbets of it pumping from the wounds in his chest. The Axe of Mercaeno was still in his hand.

‘There is no future,’ he said through blood-spittled lips. ‘There will be others like us. They will break out of this cage of a galaxy, they will bypass everything you have engineered to stop you. Human beings cannot be kept caged by fate. Not all of them. Someone will remember us, and someone will follow.’

Daenyathos took careful aim and blasted another storm bolter volley into Sarpedon. This one hit the wrist and elbow of his right hand, the one in which he was carrying the Axe of Mercaeno. The bones of Sarpedon’s forearm shattered and his arm fell useless, the Axe of Mercaeno clattering down the steps.

The pain did not come. Sarpedon did not let it. He forged forwards a few steps more, so the massive armoured legs of Daenyathos’s dreadnought were just a couple of metres from his face.

Daenyathos’s power fist reached down and snatched Sarpedon up off the floor, the articulated fingers closing around his shoulders and waist. Sarpedon’s head lolled like that of a rag doll, his legs dangling uselessly under him, as he was held immobile up in front of Daenyathos.

Sarpedon could see, through the eyepieces of Daenyathos’s armoured helm, the eyes of the man inside. They were full of amusement, as if Sarpedon was an animal or a child playing at being a soldier, something to be pitied and taught its place, something to be mocked.

‘Did you truly think something like you,’ mocked Daenyathos, ‘could kill me?’

‘I didn’t have to kill you,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘I just had to get you close.’

Sarpedon’s one good hand reached into the ammo pouch at his waist. Daenyathos registered what Sarpedon was doing and the servos in his power first whined.

The massive fingers of the fist closed. Sarpedon could feel the ceramite around his torso tensing and buckling, massive pressure crushing down. The seconds stretched out and he imagined, in precise detail, how his organs would look being forced out of his chest under the pressure, hearts bursting, tatters of lungs oozing out, entrails following, the awful wrongness of his distorted body filling him in the moments before death.

It seemed an age before his fingers closed around the haft of the Soulspear.

The artefact’s twin blades speared outwards, caged vortex fields consisting of anti-space where no material substance could exist.

The pressure forced Sarpedon’s right arm out of place. His shoulder blade split and the joint crumbled. Each segment of the destruction registered like stages in a scientific experiment, observed with calm and detachment in those moments before the pain receptors fired and reached Sarpedon’s brain.

Sarpedon whipped the Soulspear up, one blade swinging up through the sarcophagus that made up the armoured centre of the dreadnought. Sarpedon’s wrist flicked and the other blade arced up to complete the cut, two slashes of blackness that between them formed a plane separating the front of the sarcophagus from the body of the dreadnought.

The pressure relented. The power fist fell inactive, the energy no longer focused through its servos to crush Sarpedon’s torso.

The energy finally went out of Sarpedon. The weight of the Soulspear, negligible as it was compared to a boltgun or the Axe of Mercaeno, was too much. The weapon fell from his fingers. The blades disappeared and the short metal length of its haft tumbled down the steps before the throne.

The front of Daenyathos’s sarcophagus followed. It clanged as it fell end over end down the steps, the sound echoing off the walls of the bridge, the final sound as it hit the floor like the tolling of a bell.

Sarpedon’s breaths were shallow. The ruination of his shoulder hit him and the pain was like a sun burning where his shoulder had once been, a ball of fire surrounding the mass of ripped muscle and cracked bone.

He forced the pain down. He had suffered before. It meant nothing. His eyes focused, and he was looking into the face of Daenyathos.

The whole front of the sarcophagus was gone, and the life support cradle was revealed in which Daenyathos had spent the last six thousand years. It was a biomechanical tangle of cabling and artificial organs, pipes and valves hissing cold vapour, blinking readouts mottled with the patina of centuries.

The Philosopher-Soldier hung among the cabling, restrains locking him in to the life support systems. He was pale and withered, his limbs atrophied, the skin shrunken around his skull and ribcage. Red welts had swollen up where pipes and wires pierced his skin, carrying the mental signals that moved the dreadnought body around him. His eyes were squinting in the sudden light, pupils shrunk to nothing.

Sarpedon had never seen such a pathetic example of a Space Marine. The musculature was gone, the skin stretched around a body starved of movement for six millennia. Daenyathos gasped in shock, the feeling of outside air alien to him now.

The grip of the power fist relaxed. Sarpedon clattered onto the steps of the throne mount. Daenyathos was in shock, unable to function, and for a few seconds he would be unable to know where – or even what – Sarpedon was.

Sarpedon, one arm hanging limp and useless at his side, clambered up the front of the dreadnought until he was level with Daenyathos. He tore out handfuls of cabling, wires slithering out of Daenyathos’s stick-thin limbs. Dribbles of watery blood spattered onto the gilded steps. Sarpedon grasped Daenyathos around the neck – his hand easily encircling the scrawny throat – and pulled Daenyathos out of the sarcophagus.

The Philosopher-Soldier’s body came away easily, Daenyathos unable to put up a fight. Sarpedon carried him down the steps to the deck of the bridge, his remaining talons kicking aside chunks of smouldering debris. The dreadnought chassis remained standing before the bridge captain’s throne, gutted of its occupant, silent and unmoving.

‘Wait,’ gasped Daenyathos in a voice that could barely struggle above a whisper. ‘You are a part of this. You can be something great. Imagine the role you could play in a galaxy remade by me. Imagine it.’

‘I have a better imagination than you realise,’ said Sarpedon, grimacing as he dragged himself towards the blast doors at the back of the bridge. ‘I have seen it, and it is no place for me.’

‘Where are you taking me?’ hissed Daenyathos, a desperation in his voice that had never been there before.

Sarpedon did not answer. Daenyathos’s protests were lost in the sound of the flames licking up from the ruined bridge.

‘Forge on,’ cried Luko as he forced himself another pace through the sucking mire of gore. ‘Just a few paces more. Onwards, there he stands, our prey. Onwards!’

The daemonic cyst had responded to the strike force like an organ threatened by infection. It had filled back up with blood, its fleshy walls erupting in tentacles to snare the intruders and drag them down into the gore. Attendant daemons had uncoiled from the filth and leapt to attack.

Abraxes stood up from his throne of twisted corpses, the spectral image of the battle on the barracks deck fading around him as the newcomers grabbed his attention.

‘You are beneath my notice, and yet I must stoop to kill you,’ he said, his voice like a bass choir. ‘Your presence offends me.’

The remnants of Squad Prexus crashed into the horrors forging through the lake of blood. The Imperial Fists wrestled with things that grew new limbs and fanged mouths at will. One Space Marine was dragged down into the blood and half a dozen horrors leapt on top of him. Spiny hands ripped him apart. An armoured leg was thrown between them, a trophy of the hunt, and the warrior’s head was pitched against the fleshy wall.

Sister Aescarion and Graevus fought like one individual, the axe of one parrying while the other struck. The two whirled in a dance that took them through the assaulting daemons, cutting mutating bodies open and shattering horned skulls. Luko followed in their wake, stabbing the surviving daemons with both lightning claws, lifting them proud of the blood and thrashing them into shreds.

Behind Abraxes burned the portal. It was a shimmering circle, edged in blue fire. Beyond it could be glimpsed something that resembled the void of space only in its darkness. The masses of power, like mountains of seething energy, loomed in that darkness, and carried with them a sense of appalling intelligence. They were watching, these powers of the warp, eager for the last obstacles to be removed so they could force the whole potential of their chaotic hatred through into realspace.

The sight of them could drive men mad. The Astartes had to force their eyes away, for they could become lost in contemplation of that towering evil. Even this slight glimpse of the warp could corrode the mind. On the shore in front of the portal were still engraved, on the rotten remains of the cargo bay deck, the sigils that had called the portal into beings, and they burned blood red with anticipation.

Abraxes strode into the gore. A blade appeared in his hand, a sword of frozen malice, and he cleaved it down into the battle around his feet.

Luko felt his gut tighten as he saw Apothecary Pallas in the blade’s path. Pallas tried to yell something in defiance, but Abraxes was pitiless and did not grant him the chance. The blade carved down through Pallas’s shoulder and came out through his abdomen on the other side, slicing him in two across the torso.

The two halves of the Apothecary’s corpse flopped into the blood. Daemons pounced on them to tear the remains apart.

Luko realised he was yelling, a cry of horror and anguish. Pallas was his friend, in a galaxy where friends were rare.

Aescarion reached the shore where Abraxes’s throne stood. Graevus was still waist-deep in the blood, fending off the daemons that sought to drag them both down.

‘What means your strength?’ shouted Aescarion over the cackling of daemons and the thrumming of the gate. ‘That your arm can lay low a Space Marine? What does this mean laid against the might of the God-Emperor’s children?’

Abraxes turned to look down at the Battle Sister. ‘It means that you die, whelpling girl,’ he replied, shaking Pallas’s blood from his sword.

‘Destroy my body if you will,’ shouted back Aescarion. ‘But you cannot break my spirit. A prince of daemons might claim the heads of every enemy he faces, but he will never count the soul of a Battle Sister as a trophy!’

Abraxes raised a hand, and purple-black fire flickered between his talons. ‘You do not challenge the warp, child,’ he sneered. ‘I shall keep your mind as a pet, and you will worship me.’

Fire lashed down at Aescarion. The Sister of Battle was driven back by the force that hammered into her, and a halo of flame played around her head as Abraxes’s magic tried to force open her mind.

The Battle Sister screamed, but she did not fall.

Luko realised what Sister Aescarion was trying to do. He threw aside the body of the daemon he had killed, and pushed on through the gore.

Librarian Varnica reached the metallic shore. The portal howled above him, the winds of the warp tearing at him as he tried to keep his footing. He clambered out of the blood, kicking free of the sucking limbs that tried to ensnare his ankles.

He had to force himself not to stare up through the portal. He could feel the vast intelligences beyond probing at his mind, pushing against the mental shield that every Librarian built up over years of psychic training. They were whispering to him, promising him power and lifetimes of pleasure, or threatening him with such horrors a human mind could not comprehend.

Varnica snapped himself free of their influence. He could not let them trick him, not now, not when he was so close, when the means for closing the portal were right in front of him.

He broke the fascination with the portal just in time to register the power hammer arcing towards him.

Varnica brought up his force claw to turn the hammer aside. The hammer’s head slammed into the ground, throwing shards of metal everywhere. Varnica rolled back, shrapnel pinging off his armour.

Reinez stood over him. The Crimson Fist was a hideous sight – scorched and battered, his helmetless skull little more that burns and new scars. The deep blue and crimson of his armour was almost lost under the grime of battle. Reinez pointed his hammer at Varnica.

‘You,’ he said. ‘You spoke against them. Now you fight alongside them. You fight to take the gate for yourselves! You are one with them in perdition!’

‘Damn you, Reinez!’ retorted Varnica. ‘Have you become so blind? The warp has played us all; you, me, the Soul Drinkers, all of us, and we have to put it right!’

‘Lies!’ yelled Reinez.

Anger made him careless. The hammer blow was a haymaker and Varnica dodged back from it easily, raising his claw ready to snap it forwards. But Reinez had strength on his side, born of a desperate hatred. If Varnica was caught, he would die.

Varnica’s muscles tensed for the strike. But it felt like he had hit a wall, as if something invisible was holding him fast.

His enemy was a Space Marine. Varnica had never raised arms against a brother of the Adeptus Astartes before. The wrongness of it stayed his hand. He could not shed a brother’s blood. Even now, with all hell erupting around him, he could not do it.

Reinez jinked forwards and drove the butt of the hammer into Varnica’s midriff. Varnica stumbled back, almost pitching into the blood. Varnica kicked out at Reinez’s legs and the Crimson Fist was caught, stumbling a half-pace onto one knee. Varnica rolled out of his way and used the second he had bought to jump back to his feet.

‘Think, Reinez!’ said Varnica. ‘The warp has used your anger. It has turned you against your brothers! Join us and help end all this!’

Reinez’s reply was a wild swing that almost took Varnica’s head off. Varnica forced his eyes away from the hellish vastness of the portal overhead, channelled a torrent of psychic power into his claw, and prepared to take a Space Marine’s life for the first time.

Sister Aescarion felt her mind pried from her head and crushed in Abraxes’s claw.

She fell to her knees. The screaming agony in her head blocked out everything save the shadowy image of Abraxes, edged in black fire, and the wicked bone-white slash of his grin.

She felt a million vicious hands reaching through her soul and clawing at the inside of her head. She heard a million voices cackling about what they would do to her when she was broken. Place her in the body of a monster, rampaging through the warp’s enemies, fuelled by her pain. Rend her into a thousand pieces, each one imprisoned in some maze of torment. Send her shrieking through the immaterium, a formless ghost driven mad by the warp’s malice. Turn her into one of them. Use her as their slave and visit a million indignities upon her.

The tiny sliver of Aescarion that remained scrabbled at the walls of her skull, trying to find some purchase to keep herself from falling into nothingness. Then, she found it.

A golden figure, his armour burning with the fire of faith, in his hand a blade that was justice. He was crowned with dominion over Mankind. The Emperor, the protector of the human race. Though Aescarion might have nothing left save that which was in Abraxes’s hand, she still had her faith. That was something the daemon prince could never have. That was what she had taunted him with – that core of her, the armoured and inviolate place that all the powers of the warp could never hope to breach.

Abraxes roared. He wanted it. He wanted to shatter that faith. But he could not. She denied him, and in his rage he forgot everything else unfolding around him.

Luko scrambled up the pinnacle on which Daenyathos had stood to watch the opening of the portal. The spire of corroded metal still stood proud of the gore, its pitted surface affording enough hand and footholds for Luko to reach the top. From here he could see the whole cyst, and the sheer futility his strike force faced.

Three Imperial Fists remained. Graevus fought off the daemons trying to rush Sister Aescarion. Aescarion was on her knees, screaming, linked to Abraxes by a torrent of black flame pouring from the daemon prince’s hand. Varnica was wrestling at the threshold of the warp portal with Reinez, the Crimson Fist kneeling on Varnica’s chest and pounding down at the Librarian with gauntleted fists.

Each Space Marine was an island in a sea of daemons. More of the things were emerging from the gore with every moment, and it would take seconds for them to overwhelm the warriors.

One part of Luko told him that they had done well to get this far, that to die facing Abraxes toe-to-toe was as good a death as any of them could have hoped to drag back from fate.

But the rest of him, the greater part, was driven only by rage. The Soul Drinkers had destroyed Abraxes once already, and lost many of their battle-brothers in doing so. Now he had returned as if he had a right to walk in the same universe as the Soul Drinkers, as if the lives lost to banish him had meant nothing.

Sarpedon had impaled Abraxes on the Soulspear, an image still burned into Luko’s mind. It had been the moment that the warriors of the Chapter realised what they must truly be – slave to neither the Imperium nor the warp. Abraxes’s return had undone that moment. That he had dared, that he had sought to make the Soul Drinkers very existence meaningless, sent anger pouring through Luko that he couldn’t have stemmed if he had wanted to.

And he didn’t want to. It felt good. This was what warriors spoke of when they talked of the glory, the rush, of battle. This was what Luko had never truly felt; now it was impossible to resist.

He crouched and drew back both claws, an animal ready to pounce. Abraxes’s attention was focused on Sister Aescarion and the daemon prince had no idea Luko was even there.

It would be a difficult leap. There was nothing easy about what he would have to do if he made the jump. But the anger in him swallowed up those useless facts and bade him dive from the pinnacle towards the twisted grin on Abraxes’s face.

Aescarion saw through her haze of pain as Luko dived towards Abraxes. The Soul Drinker thrust his twin lightning claws into the daemon’s face.

The claws punched through Abraxes’s skin around his left eye, sinking up to the knuckle. Luko braced his feet against the daemon’s upper chest and yelled as he pulled, muscles of his neck standing out as sharp cords as he put all his considerable strength into it.

Abraxes had not seen it coming. He had been savouring peeling apart Aescarion’s mind, and the shock of Luko’s assault stunned him for a moment. That was all the time Luko need to wrench Abraxes’s eye out of its socket, a flourish of his claws throwing the orb down to the bloody shore like a comet with a tail of ragged flesh.

Abraxes screamed. Wrapped up in his howl was a strangely human sound, a note of pain and shock. It was the first sign of weakness Abraxes had shown, an echo of some frailty that a human could recognise. He took a step backwards, scattering bodies from the foot of his throne as he stumbled towards the portal.

Luko hit the ground hard beside Aescarion. She still knelt, one hand on the floor, hair clinging to the sweat on her face. She was pale and blood ran from her nose and ears.

Luko looked away from her. The momentum he had bought would not last for long. Aescarion would have to fend for herself.

Luko ran forwards, rolled past Abraxes’s cloven foot and slashed at the back of his ankle. His claws bit through daemonic flesh and severed tendons whipped from the gash. Abraxes fell back another half-pace, his screams turning to anger.

Graevus leapt from the gore to join Luko. His axe hacked down into Abraxes’s knee and the leg buckled, Abraxes putting a hand down to steady himself.

Abraxes, falling back, had passed halfway through the warp portal behind him. His hand pushed down against a silvery island of power that gathered in the warp, the dark intelligences of the immaterium buoying him up. They would force him forwards again, expel him from the haven of the warp to finish the job of killing the Space Marine standing between the dark gods and an eternity of slaughter.

Graevus leapt up onto Abraxes’s chest.

‘We killed you once,’ he snarled, swinging his axe up high. ‘And this time, we’ve had practice.’

Graevus drove the axe down into the daemon prince’s chest. The blade carved down through muscle and bone. From the cavernous wound burst a fountain of light, raw power unleashed like blood from an artery. It caught Graevus square in the chest and threw the Soul Drinker to the ground, armour smoking.

Abraxes got onto one knee and held his sword up, point first. Glowing blood poured from his ruined eye as he measured the blow and stabbed the sword down into Graevus’s right hip, impaling the Space Marine through the meat of his leg and pinning him to the ground.

‘Killed me?’ hissed the daemon prince. ‘Soul Drinker, you did nothing that day but bring your own death a moment closer!’ Abraxes twisted the blade and Graevus’s leg came apart, a welter of blood mixing with the gore spattered across the metallic ground in front of the portal. Graevus screamed and his axe fell from his mutant hand.

Luko charged at Abraxes, knocking the blade aside with a swipe of both claws. Abraxes’s remaining eye narrowed as it focused on Luko.

Reinez kneed Varnica in the midriff hard enough to dent his armour. The Librarian fell to the ground and Reinez straddled his chest, bringing his hammer over Varnica’s skull head-down, ready to piston it into the Doom Eagle’s face.

Reinez’s gaze fell on the lump of seething putrescence that a few moments a go had been Abraxes’s eye. It lay in a whiteish mass, dissolving its way through the cargo bay floor, its pupil breaking up in its corrupt substance.

Beyond the eye, Luko was battling the daemon prince, fending off a swipe of the daemon’s claws with his own gauntlets.

‘We’re trying to kill it,’ said Varnica, following Reinez’s gaze. ‘It’s the only real enemy here. No matter what you think of us, Reinez, killing Abraxes goes beyond it.’

Reinez said nothing. Varnica rolled out from under him, struggling to one knee. He was battered and broken, bones fractured all over his body, bruised organs bleeding inside. Reinez was a better warrior than Varnica. If he made the decision, the Crimson Fist would kill him.

Varnica saw, as Reinez did, that Abraxes was halfway through the portal, straddling the gap between reality and the warp.

‘We have to close it,’ said Varnica. He pointed to the sigils on the floor beneath the feet of the two warriors. ‘The blood of Dorn opened it. The same blood will close it.’

‘You spoke against them,’ said Reinez, breath heavy. ‘You… you wanted them dead.’

‘No one is leaving this place alive, Reinez,’ said Varnica. ‘The Soul Drinkers will die. You have your wish. Now kill this blasphemy. Guilliman’s blood runs in my veins, and Throne only knows what runs in the Soul Drinkers. Only Dorn’s blood will seal the gate. Only yours.’

Varnica couldn’t be sure if Reinez understood. He certainly couldn’t be certain that the Crimson Fist, as he stepped back and dropped his guard, was inviting him to strike. Perhaps Reinez left himself undefended as he absorbed the realisation that Abraxes was the true force for destruction, that the Soul Drinkers, the Phalanx, the carnage around him were all parts of what the Daenyathos and the daemon prince had orchestrated. Or perhaps he really did understand that his blood alone would seal the gate, just like N’Kalo’s had opened it.

Varnica did not wait for clarification.

He forced every drop of pain in him into the pit of his mind, and channelled it, ice-cold, into the psychic circuits built into his force claw. He lunged and punched the claw into Reinez’s chest.

The Crimson Fist’s mouth opened and a breath escaped him, the shock to his body too much for him to form words.

Varnica yelled and the psychic power discharged like a massive electrical surge through the claw, the Hammerhand snapping the blades open and tearing Reinez’s chest almost in two. Organs glinted for a moment in red light bathing the cyst.

Reinez fell back and the wellspring of blood inside him burst up through his ruined chest. The blood of a Crimson Fist, spiced with the gene-seed taken from the genetic print of Rogal Dorn, washed over the glowing symbols on the floor.

Varnica placed a palm on the floor, Reinez’s blood lapping around it. He had unleashed a great deal of his psychic reserves in killing Reinez – Reinez, as hard to kill as he was, had needed a massive burst of psychic power to ensure his death. Varnica would have to use everything he had left, drain himself past the limit of safety – and sanity.

Varnica wrapped his mind around the unreality of the portal above him, drawing on the power that surged through the sigils on the floor, and began to crush the warp portal closed with the force of his will.

Luko leapt over the stricken Graevus and slammed into Abraxes. He speared both claws into the sides of the daemon’s jaw and headbutted Abraxes in the nose. Gristle split and blood sprayed. Abraxes shook his head and threw Luko off.

Luko skidded along the blood-slick ground. Graevus was trying to get to his feet nearby, one leg buckling under him, his thigh a bloody ruin of pulpy flesh and shattered bone.

‘What matters this effort?’ said Abraxes. ‘Why must you fill what remains of your lives with such toil?’

‘Think on what remains of your life, daemon,’ spat Luko. ‘My toil will go on. Yours ends here.’

‘Pitiful,’ sneered Abraxes. ‘Which one of you can face me that will not pay for it with his life? What mere man stands my equal, to fence words with me?’

‘I seem to remember,’ said Luko, ‘that it was a mere man who speared you through the chest and threw you back to the warp to begin with. It was men who brought you back. You should be kneeling to us.’

Abraxes bellowed in rage. He snatched up his fallen blade and charged. Luko met the charge with his own, shoulder down, sprinting at the daemon prince. Luko dropped to the ground and rolled, just as Abraxes’s sword sliced towards him at chest height. The blade passed over him and Luko sprang up, driving both claws through Abraxes’s foot.

Abraxes bellowed and wrenched his foot off the ground, Luko’s claws sliding from the flesh. The daemon prince took another step back, and blinded for the moment by his anger, he did not see that once more his back foot passed beyond the boundary of the warp gate.

The circumference of the gate shrunk. Varnica was closing it, metre by metre. Luko ran forwards and speared down through Abraxes’s other foot, pinning it to the ground. The power field discharged in a staccato of noise and light, energy arcing to the floor.

The warp gate’s uppermost edge closed down on Abraxes, like a slow-motion guillotine. Abraxes saw, perhaps a second or two too late, what Luko was trying to do.

A single Space Marine could not kill Abraxes. Sarpedon had managed it, but he was a mutant beyond a human’s strength and speed, and he had wielded the Soulspear. Luko couldn’t do it on his own. But he didn’t have to.

The edge of the shrinking gate bit down into Abraxes’s shoulder. It sliced through tendons and bone, and daemonic blood dribbled glowing from the wound. Abraxes’s face creased in agony and shock.

He tried to force himself out from the gate, but Luko kept him pinned in place. The gate bit down further into Abraxes’s upper chest, and blood sprayed now from sundered arteries.

From beyond the portal, from the endless masses of hatred that boiled there, a terrible wave of scorn burst out. The warp’s evils saw their servant trapped and dying, and saw all that he had promised withering away. The strands of fate he had woven, which would take him across the galaxy disgorging the warp’s malice in the form of torrents of daemons, were snapping. The future galaxy where the Phalanx travelled the stars bringing chaos everywhere it went, that dark tapestry Abraxes had concocted with the human Daenyathos, was unravelling.

They were disappointed. Whatever they truly were, whatever passed for emotions in their godlike souls, the powers of the warp were most disappointed in Abraxes’s failure.

The daemon screamed, but the sound did not last long. His lungs and windpipe were severed. His body reformed around the damage, echoing the mutability of the horrors he commanded, but it was not enough. Tentacles slithered from his wounds and bony growths burst in every direction, but the force was too great.

Luko pulled his claws out and stumbled backwards. The portal was closing, and it was cutting the daemon prince in two. Abraxes was wedged in, the sides of the portal slicing into him – he didn’t need Luko keeping him in place now.

Luko knelt beside Graevus. ‘Come, brother,’ he said.

‘Where?’ said Graevus, watching the portal slicing down through Abraxes’s sternum into his abdomen. ‘There is nowhere left for us.’

‘There is one place,’ said Luko. ‘Let’s go.’

Captain Borganor’s Howling Griffons smashed into the daemonic host, joining the Imperial Fists in the wild melee seething around the daemon engines.

But the daemons were legion. Tens of thousands had gathered, and every one now dived into the slaughter. The scorpion-like daemon engine rumbled and raised its segmented body up on eight armoured legs, the tail coiling over its back.

On columns of fire, the Angels Sanguine leapt through the air onto the daemon engine. The engine shuddered and its tail swept them off its back. Commander Gethsemar was thrown to the ground and the engine’s insectoid head loomed over him, bronze mandibles dribbling liquid metal.

‘Not yet, brother!’ shouted a voice, and Siege-Captain Daviks plunged out of the daemon throng to grab the Angel Sanguine by the gorget. He dragged Gethsemar out of the way of the engine, even as it vomited molten metal from its fanged mouth.

A hundred similar stories were playing out amid the butchery. Men were dying for their brothers, or killing all around them in revenge for seeing their friends fall. But there would be no one to remember them.

The daemonic army was too big. The war engines were being completed even as daemon blood swamped the deck, ankle-deep. The Imperial Fists and the Howling Griffons, and all the souls who had come to the Phalanx for the trial of the Soul Drinkers, were going to die there.

A terrible scream erupted from every direction at once. It was a strong as a gale, and it shuddered the fabric of the Phalanx. Space Marines stumbled, stunned by the force of the noise. But daemon hands and blades did not take advantage of the distraction to cut the Space Marines down.

The daemons were howling, but not with rage – they were struck with a terrible anguish, dropping to their knees or just standing and screaming. Iron swords fell from bloodletters’ hands. Horrors turned in on themselves, liquid flesh imploding constantly as if trying to escape to some place inside.

Vladimir shook the bedlam from his head. It was a sound of abandonment and death, the dying cry of something tremendously powerful, something that had not believed it could die.

‘Abraxes has fallen!’ yelled Vladimir, barely even to hear himself over the echo in his ears. ‘The head of the beast has been struck off! Brothers, sisters, sons and daughters of the Emperor! Call down death on what remains!’

The Fangs of Dorn seemed to flash of their own accord in his hands, stabbing through the crush of daemons around him. Gethsemar and Daviks got to their feet, pushing back the horrors that had closed in over them, and fought side by side as the warriors of their Chapters carved through the mass to reach them.

Lord Inquisitor Kolgo shouldered his way into the shadow of the daemon engine. His rotator cannon hammered volley after volley into the bronze skull of the engine, and the machine reeled as if in shock, the daemons possessing it unable to strike back. The Battle Sisters accompanying the inquisitor lent their own fire, and heavy weapons from Imperial Fists at the back of the battlefield sheared its legs off and bored bleeding holes in its carapace. A burst of lascannon fire severed its tail and the weapon toppled to the ground without firing a shot. Stricken, the daemon engine let out a metallic groan as it sunk to the ground, accompanied by the shrieks of the daemon spirits inhabiting it.

Lysander led the way. His thunder hammer was a beacon that the other Imperial Fists followed. It rose and fell, leaving mountains of torn bodies and lakes of daemon blood in its wake. The Imperial Fists rampaged over the barricades and stormed through the daemon forges, clambering over the unfinished war engines to batter back the warp spawn that tried to regroup to face them.

The daemons fought with no coordination or intelligence. Many collapsed, flesh discorporating as the warp-magic that sustained them in realspace failed. The Imperial Fists gathered in firing lines to shred their enemies with bolter fire, or launched massed assaults with chainblades and glaives. Siege-Captain Daviks and the surviving Silver Skulls directed the heavy weapons towards the largest daemons, the warp-heralds, before they could organise a resistance.

It was grim, bloody work. There was no joy in this victory. It was a crude and brutal business, wading through the remains of the enemy, as the Imperial Fists passed through the forges and pushed on towards the cargo bays where the heart of the infestation had been planted.

Varnica picked up the semi-conscious Sister Aescarion and carried her clear of the collapsing portal. Abraxes was dead, his physical form split almost in two by the shrinking portal, and his spirit ripped out and thrown back into the cauldron of the warp to be punished. Luko and Graevus knelt by the portal and Varnica followed their gaze as they looked across the cyst to where the first of the Imperial Fists were entering.

Lysander was the first to wade towards the collapsing portal, through the blood which was choked with the bodies of daemons and the strike force’s Imperial Fists. The captain cast an eye over the carnage, over the unnatural warping of the ship around him, at the sorry remains of Apothecary Pallas, Reinez, and the last of Prexus’s squad.

‘Brother Varnica,’ said Lysander. ‘Is it done?’

‘It is done,’ said Varnica. ‘I and this Battle Sister, and these two Soul Drinkers, are the only survivors. But it is done.’

Lysander stepped up onto the ground that broke the blood surface around Abraxes’s throne. The throne of corpses was withering and flaking into dust, as if years of decay were piling on them at once. ‘Captain Luko. And Brother Graevus, if I am not mistaken.’ He held out a hand. ‘There is nothing left for you to fight for. I am sure that many will argue for leniency, but you are still in the custody of the Imperial Fists. Come with me.’

Luko stood up, and hauled Graevus unsteadily onto his feet. Beside him, the portal had shrunk to just over head height, and Abraxes’s body was cut all the way down through his abdomen, leaving the half outside the portal completely severed.

‘Captain Lysander,’ said Luko, ‘there is no place in this galaxy for the Soul Drinkers. Not in the cells of the Phalanx, or in the grip of whatever punishment is decided for us. Not even in freedom. The whole galaxy has been against us for so long that there is nowhere we could go and nothing we could do. So no, we will not hand ourselves over to your custody.’

‘I’m ready,’ said Graevus.

‘As am I, brother,’ said Luko. He looked back towards Lysander, and the other Imperial Fists making their way into the cyst. ‘Wish us luck. You are our brothers, in spite of everything. I have one thing to ask of you. The inquisition tried to delete us from history. Please, make sure that we are not forgotten.’

Luko helped Graevus limp towards the portal. Lysander watched them go, and with a wave of his hand stayed the guns of his Imperial Fists.

Luko and Graevus walked through the portal, into the warp, into whatever waited for them there.

The portal closed completely, cutting off the madness of the warp from realspace, and the cyst fell dark.

It was some time later, as the Imperial Fists and Howling Griffons were killing off the last of the daemons running loose around the cyst, that a blade of black energy sliced through the fleshy growths on the walls. Behind the growth was a doorway from one of the other cargo holds, in the direction of the Phalanx’s bridge. The blade was that of the Soulspear, and it was in the hand of Sarpedon.

The Chapter Master of the Soul Drinkers was near death. Torn stumps of legs dripped ichor. Half his face and one eye were a torn mess, shredded by shrapnel still poking from the pulpy flesh. Open bullet wounds, plugged by congealed blood, were livid against his chest, and one arm hung shattered from a twisted shoulder joint. Sarpedon seemed barely able to walk on the three legs that remained – but the Imperial Fists did not see a defeated man. Wounded, near death, but not defeated.

Sarpedon placed the Soulspear’s haft back in an ammo pouch and picked up a pale, tangled shape at his feet – a body, atrophied with age, which had once been that of a Space Marine.

The Imperial Fists gathered without an order, their bolters levelled at Sarpedon. Chapter Master Vladimir stood to their front, both Fangs of Dorn in hand.

Sarpedon limped to where half of Abraxes’s corpse still lay, his blood drying on the sigils scorched into the floor. They were all that remained of the portal that had opened there. The Imperial Fists saw the wounds on Sarpedon, the torn stumps of severed legs, the twisted shoulder and dented armour. Sarpedon looked like he had gone through enough to kill any other warrior of the Adeptus Astartes twice over.

Sarpedon held up the body in his hand, carrying it by the scruff of the neck. It was alive, and it looked across the assembled Imperial Fists with fear on its face.

‘This is Daenyathos,’ said Sarpedon, ‘This is the man who brought Abraxes forth from the warp. This is the man who manipulated my Chapter and yours, because he believed that mankind had to suffer to make it stronger.’

Imperial Fists took aim along their bolter sights at the mutant.

‘Hold your fire, brothers,’ said Vladimir.

‘But he was wrong.’ Sarpedon dropped his arm and let Daenyathos hang down, dragging along the floor. ‘He thought mankind did not suffer enough. But it suffers too much. Men like Daenyathos, like the powers of the warp themselves, are symptoms of humanity’s misery. But we can put it right.’

‘Just as you did, Sarpedon?’ said Vladimir. ‘You are the only one of your Chapter remaining. Even if your path could redeem the Imperium, how can it be walked when you yourself could not walk it?’

‘Because I was a fool,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘I did not see that Daenyathos was pulling the strings. I walked into the role he had prepared for me, and I almost played it to the end. But you have seen my failings. You know the pitfalls. And when you fail, those who follow you will learn from you, too. And we are the only ones who can begin it. We, the Space Marines, we have the closest thing this Imperium has to freedom.’

Lysander stepped forwards. ‘And what is to say that one of us will take up this torch, Sarpedon?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘If you can ignore your conscience. If you can see the Imperium in the new light the Soul Drinkers have shone on it, and yet still do nothing to stem its suffering, then I suppose there is nothing to say that. If you are content to continue witnessing the death throes of the human race, that is. If you can think your work complete when the Imperium devours itself day by day. If you can do all that, then the light will die out here, with me. But if the conscience of a single battle-brother here, or of any who even hear of us, is inflamed as ours was, then it will burn on.’

‘You have said your piece, Sarpedon, ‘said Vladimir. ‘We must take you back in. Your case will be decided anew. Daenyathos must be punished. Cast down the Soulspear and let Lysander place you back in custody. It’s over, all of it.’

Sarpedon looked down at the sigils branded on the floor around his feet.

‘I understand,’ he said, ‘that only the blood of Rogal Dorn could open the Eye of Kravamesh. And whatever flows through me, it is not Dorn’s blood. Correct?’

The floor beneath Sarpedon glowed and smouldered. The thrum of caged power reverberated through the cyst.

‘Sarpedon,’ croaked Daenyathos. ‘What are you doing?’

Light gathered and crackled, sending haphazard shadows across the cyst.

‘Stop!’ shouted Vladimir. ‘We will open fire!’

‘The blood of Dorn,’ shouted Sarpedon over the growing sound, ‘flows through those who fight his fight. When he marched in the Great Crusade, it was to save humanity in unity, not to unite it only to cast it back into the dark. This was the Emperor’s goal. Though His road has not been travelled for ten thousand years, you can put the human race back on it. If you choose to. If you dare.’

Light crackled, flaring across the cyst like a tongue of flame from a star. A crack in reality re-opened, the impossible colours of the warp seething beyond.

‘Sarpedon! Screamed Daenyathos. ‘No! You do not know what lies beyond!’

‘But you do,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘And I see how you fear it. Perhaps I should fear it too. But I can fight it, and you cannot.’

Daenyathos’s last words devolved into a scream as Sarpedon carried him through the portal, dragging the Philosopher-Soldier over the threshold and out of reality.

The portal slammed shut behind them, its fires darkening again, leaving only an echo of its power.

Sister Aescarion blinked in the light, her eyes struggling to kill the glare. She had been asleep for a long time, and her head still pounded.

The last thing she remembered was Abraxes standing over her, his grin turning to a scowl of frustration just as Luko dived into him, ripping out the daemon’s eye. Everything after that had been a blur of noise and fury.

She sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed in which she had awoken. She was in the apothecarion of the Phalanx. Dozens of Imperial Fists lay comatose in the beds around her, their armour piled up beside them, lifesign monitors blinking and beeping. A spindly medical servitor trundled between them, reading off vitals and administering doses.

Aescarion was a little unsteady on her feet. She was wearing the shapeless under-robes that Battle Sisters wore when not in armour. Her wargear was piled up beside her bed, and from the scars on her armour and the blade of her power axe she wondered that she could walk now at all.

She wandered through the apothecarion. All was cool and quiet, the wounded tended by servitors or lying in suspended animation induced by their catalepsean nodes. Aescarion felt the cold metal of the deck on her bare feet as she walked out of the apothecarion and into the great lofty passageway, one of many running most of the length of the Phalanx.

Scaffolding stood against the walls, servitors and crew members working at the dark stone that clad the passageway. Statues and inscriptions lined the passage and a great panel of plain stone could be seen between the scaffolds. The servitors and masons were working at one of the lower corners with chisels and granite saws, a drift of stone dust building up at the base of the wall.

Chapter Master Vladimir approached. His armour was clean and repaired, but he still had the minor scars of the recent battles on his face. The crew saluted and bowed their heads as he approached.

‘Sister!’ he said. ‘It is good that you are again among us. Varnica explained to me your actions at the portal.’

‘They are not something I wish to revisit,’ replied Aescarion. ‘I shall meditate on them myself. Such things should be considered in private.’

‘An Imperial Fist would be lauded as a hero,’ said Vladimir.

‘I am not an Imperial Fist. A daughter of the Emperor cannot be prideful.’

‘Perhaps the same can be said of a Space Marine,’ said Vladimir. ‘Though even a Chapter Master must be careful to whom he says it. Our next journey is to the Segmentum Solar, Sister. Lord Inquisitor Kolgo suggested that we take the Phalanx to Saturn, where his colleagues from the Ordo Malleus can assist in cleansing the deamonic stench from this ship. It will take time, and no little negotiation with the daemonhunters, but the Phalanx will fly as holy ground again.’

‘That we stand her now tells me that Abraxes was defeated,’ said Aescarion. ‘But what of our own? How many were lost?’

‘More than half those who fought,’ replied Vladimir. ‘A terrible blow. But we will recover. We have done so before.’

‘And the Soul Drinkers?’

‘None remain,’ said Vladimir.

‘Then it is over.’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Vladimir. He turned to continue up the corridor in the direction of the bridge. Aescarion watched him go, not sure what to make of his parting words.

She turned back to the wall, where the masons were starting to work again. She walked between them, running a hand over the surface, the still-rough letters awaiting detailing and polishing.

TYRENDIAN, read the letters that passed under her fingers.

LUKO.

GRAEVUS.

The next column bore the names of Imperial Fists – Sergeant Prexus, who had died in the Panpsychicon, Castellan Leucrontas, all the Imperial Fists who had died. And alongside them, listed as brothers in death, were the Soul Drinkers.

SARPEDON, read the last name to be inscribed.

In a manner of speaking, it was over. The Soul Drinkers were gone. Abraxes was destroyed. But the idea of them remained. Their names were listed among the fallen, and in the Tactica Sigismunda the battle in the cyst would be recreated. Generations to come would live in a galaxy where the idea of the Soul Drinkers existed, an idea that had so nearly died in the execution chambers of the Phalanx and the book furnaces of the Inquisition.

It would live on among the Sisters of Battle, too. It was not Aescarion’s place to judge the right or wrong of what Sarpedon had stood for – but it would not die when she could keep it alive. Even if only as a warning, the cautionary tale of Daenyathos who pulled puppet strings that almost threw the Imperium into a new age of darkness, she would remember.

She turned away from the inscriptions and walked back towards the apothecarion, still unsteady. At Saturn, in the Inquisitorial dockyards of Iapetus, she could try to put her thoughts in order and decide how the story of Soul Drinkers should be passed on so it would remain intact among the currents of the future. But there were wounds that needed to heal first. She would decide that another day.

The masons continued their inscribing as Aescarion walked away, carving the story of the Soul Drinkers into the stone among the lists of the dead.

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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ISBN 978-0857-879-882

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