Gilead’s Curse

Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett

Chapter 1

I sat alone with the bard the night the cursed stories came. He was almost as ancient as I am now, and he had not the power to rein in his thoughts nor to staunch the flow of words that tripped over his tongue into my innocent ears.

He had mentioned the cursed stories before, and the calamities that went with them. He was sorry not to tell tales of such daring and bravery that none could doubt the prowess of their elf hero: Gilead te Tuin of Tor Anrok, son, brother, companion, warrior. He was the fiercest and most loyal of his noble race, or so the bard would tell anyone who would listen.

I sat alone with the old storyteller. The delirium had taken him, and the women had worked their medicinal magic. I was to sop his brow with a poultice, rub his hands and arms with sappy oils, and sit awake for as long as I was able, while the women recovered their strength.

I was fearful, and his delirium was loud and fierce; there was no risk of my falling asleep that night. In the morning, he would be dead, and the cursed stories would be circling my brain, but not before the bard had rehearsed the curses, over and over, between the more lucid moments when his eyes stared straight ahead, and the stories came tumbling forth.

He had sworn he would not tell the cursed tales, but he was insensible and driven by unknowable forces. I had not sworn to block my ears against the telling, nor would I have known how so to do for I was no more than a slip of a girl.

I am ancient now and eager for the end to draw near. If I am as bewitched as the old man was, so be it. I would not pass his cursed tales to one unconscious of their significance or of the dangers inherent in hearing them.

I told the tales as a child. I talked of the curses until I was boxed about the ears, beaten black and blue and silenced by anyone scared enough to quiet a child with violence.

Leave now if you cannot stomach hearing these stories recited for the last time since I was an infant, for the last time by me. Someone must keep them in his heart until it is time to pass the baton to a new generation, when, perhaps, a little of the curse will have withered away. When the curse is old and dissipated, man will hear the complete tales of Gilead, and in the meantime, the great elf lord, the compassionate, stoic warrior, will add to this canon of adventures with feats so noble as to be almost beyond imagining.

Three generations of men have been born in my lifetime. I should have been a great-grand-dame, but it was not to be. The cursed bard lived a century through, and many of his stories came from generations of storytellers before him.

They say that elves live forever. I believe that Gilead lives, yet, and I know that he has lived a dozen of our short, human generations, and more besides.

He would have been an old man when the cursed tales began, had he been a man. He was, instead, a tall, slender, fine-boned young elf of grand descent, fallen on the most desperate of circumstances. His home and his family were gone, his brother dead, his lessons in revenge learnt, and his honour restored.

There was never a tale of cruelty or neglect, except when it came to himself. He was the saddest of beings, the most bereft, the least heedful of his well-being. Some said his mind was so tortured that he looked long and hard for death, but that it eluded him, that cruel fate preferred to keep him in rude health while he fought against the fragile nature of his broken heart.

Be not a-feared. My first tale is not cursed. It is a preamble, a setting-up, a prologue. Hear it out, and then I will begin the cursed tales, for my time on the dirt of this realm is short, and I could not desire to live beyond the story’s end.

Gilead fell into the practice of traveling for a little after the sun began to rise, or he began to journey before the sun had set. It was unpleasant always to sleep in the daylight and move through the darkness. It irked him to be always under a lightless sky. The shadows were long and lean, as he was, grey-on-grey in the twilight; that magic time when a thread each of black and white resonate with the same dull sheen when held against the sky. Any shadow was better than none at all, any light a blessing.

He travelled when the earliest risers were beginning their working days, and was aware of their heavy human scents and vulgar vocal tones. He had been alone so long that he was quite used to the meagre sounds of the natural world around him, the sighing creak of ancient trees, the tremulous whisper of fast-growing wild herbs, the fall of all kinds of rain, and the movement of the air. He heard the voices of the few remaining creatures, the hesitant mews of the deer of the forests, the swoops and caws of carrion birds, and even the rustle of insects foraging in the mulch that gathered in the undergrowth.

He did not need or particularly want human companionship, but his path inevitably skirted the more populous villages and towns. He knew better than to move openly among them, for their safety as much as for his own, and so that he avoid distractions from his cause. Humans were creatures of urgent and consuming need, especially in these increasingly desperate times, and if they knew he was close-by they would call upon him to make their pitiful lives more bearable. A thousand small acts of kindness might add weak smiles to some of the human faces that he so readily cringed from, but he had a mission that could change so much more, so much for the better.

‘The shadow... It’s too long. It’s an omen... As bad an omen as you could wish for,’ the woman whispered to her husband, clutching the child close to her skirts.

Her husband bent towards her, her low tones almost inaudible.

‘By Sigmar, you’re a foolish woman, Brigida,’ he said. ‘The sun so low gives us all long shadows. Look at the bairn’s, as tall as a willow switch whip.’

The woman stopped in her tracks, picked up her only child, who was too big to be lifted, but who was glad to be carried, warmed by his mother’s anxious body, and eager to return to a sleep so harshly cut short.

‘Not our shadows, Ignaz,’ she said. ‘The other. Look to the edge of the ditch where the path loses its metal. Look to the shadow there.’

Gilead had not noticed his shadow and he cursed his carelessness, but he had already retreated from the road edge, ducking between the trees that leaned out over the road, windswept in the harsh, northern climate. He had crossed the Middle Mountains weeks ago into Ostland, and Wolfenburg was behind him to the west as he headed into the depths of Ostermark. He had travelled through the night, mounted on the fresh horse that he had procured in Altdorf the previous spring. He was fortunate indeed to get even this moderate palfrey, but the mare was young and even-tempered, and Gilead was spending whatever time he could training the beast. She was a useful horse, clean and sound, not easily unnerved, and habitually quiet.

At sunrise, he had left her in a sheltered glade only a few dozen yards from the edge of the road, which was more-or-less straight and fairly recently metaled, with room for carts and carriages to pass easily, so there must be regular traffic along it between villages and market towns. The air was cold and he could see his breath clouding slightly in front of him. All was quiet. He was tired, but content, and he had allowed himself to drift into memory, not of happier times, for there had been none these many decades, but of his people, at least.

He had been in a place very like this, at the edge of the Forest of Shadows, when the time had come for him to depart for the memorial. The similarity to those other circumstances so struck him that, in his imagination, he was back with his people, hearing the stories told by the women, examining the beautifully woven and embroidered shroud of the lost, casting his mourning cape around his shoulders and saying his farewells. The humans spoke so ignorantly of the elf, of his way of life and the manner of his death. The race was not immortal. An elf could and would die, perhaps not as readily as the human, who chased the narrow thread of his life away so quickly, but with his eyes so rarely facing forwards. A human life was so short that the future was as nothing. No man could rely entirely on being in the future of tomorrow, next week or next year, let alone the next decade or century.

Elves died too. Gilead had travelled a thousand miles, two, to return to the place of departing, to mourn his distant cousin. Death generally came only after a long life, and the fallen elf’s noble deeds were celebrated in the times of departing, of the departed and of mourning. This death had come too soon.

The time of departing was for the closest family and friends. For anything between a decade and a score of years, depending on the elf’s status and the size of his family or retinue, the fallen was in the departing stage of his life and death. He was still close enough to be spoken of in the present tense by those who had loved him the longest and most loyally. During the time of departing, the shroud was spun, woven and embellished with icons of the season and year of falling. When this phase was complete, the wider elf community was brought in for the time of the departed, when the fallen’s career was celebrated, stories told, and the elf’s embalmed, enshrined body finally dressed in his shroud. The second phase was shorter than the first, but equivalent in the hours spent. Ten brethren might spend ten years in the time of departing, one hundred cousins, six weeks in the time of the departed.

The elf population was small, in decline, and spread widely across the Empire and beyond. Intimate family groups were often made up of only two or three elves, and extended groups seldom had more than a dozen members.

The time of mourning was the last of the three phases, and would extend across centuries or even millennia. The time of mourning continued until the last of those present at the time of the departed entered their own time of departing. In the time of mourning, the fallen elf lived on in the hearts, minds and deeds of those who had known him, those fellow elves who had crossed his path.

Gilead had met his cousin, seventh generation removed, in that last time of departing. It had pleased him greatly for Fithvael’s sake, for his old servant, friend and co-conspirator in the events that followed his brother Galeth’s death. That had been the beginning of it, when he had been the age of this young elf, this Laban te Tuin of Tor Mahone. The boy was young and eager, but respectful and gentle, and when the time of the departed was over, every old elf kissed him and smiled to know that, so long as this elf-child lived, their time would not be forgotten. Even Fithvael, among the oldest of them, could expect to live in this boy’s memory for a thousand years.

Gilead’s latest and most significant cause had been cemented in his will during the memorial to his old friend and cousin. It had been cemented with the knowledge that he must ensure Laban live a long life, that he might remember Fithvael for his allotted time of mourning. All hope would be lost if the elves began to fall to the evil that had cursed the weaker species of the world. Gilead would not allow it.

He knew not what was at the centre of all that was happening in the world, but he knew now that it was affecting every life force that inhabited every corner of every continent. How many decades ago had it started? Had it begun with the failing hedgerows and the meagre crops? Had it begun with the hunger that had caused so much fauna to perish? Once upon a time, the calls of the beasts and birds of the fens and woods, prairies and plains that he had traversed had been more than Gilead could stand. The abundance of layered voices, cries, caws, growls and howls had followed him everywhere he had travelled, and at night, a whole vast new array of beastly sounds filled the hours that should have been more restful. At the time, he had been able to find no peace, now he craved the sounds of a healthy and robust environment.

Livestock had been affected once there was not the excess of strong grass and grazing crops to feed them. They had grown tired and hungry, had withered to hide-covered skeletons and had died leaning against trees, walls and buildings, or had lost the ability to stand and had fallen dead to the bare earth.

The humans had struggled on. The very old and very young had died in greater numbers than they would have in times of plenty, but their lives had always been short and lived too quickly. Then the children stopped coming. Suddenly, even the youngest and most fertile of human women began to look drawn and wan and tired. Children came less often and families grew more slowly, and many of those that were born clung to the threads of their lives with quiet desperation.

Gilead’s purpose was set in stone. It led him across the Empire from the Loren Forest, north through Altdorf and on towards the Middle Mountains before his brethren began to suffer. Then his beloved cousin, Benath, had fallen. The time of the departed was spent speculating as to the cause of his death, and when no ready answer came, Gilead began to suspect that the plague that had befallen first flora and fauna, and then the fragile humans, might have taken his cousin and friend.

He returned to the north with renewed vigor, determined to find the source of the evil that was permeating all strata of life. Nothing would sway him from his cause or from the course he must follow to track the evil force.

‘It is gone,’ said Ignaz, ‘if it was ever there. Your imaginings will get the better of you, wife. You will scare the bairn to death.’

He stopped and gave his wife a rough hug. He had been too harsh with her, but he was fearful, too: fearful of losing his wife, and his child; fearful that his sparse and meagre beet crop might yet succumb to some blight or other; fearful that his one remaining milking goat had lost the will to bleat. More than anything, he was fearful that there would be no work for him or Brigida at the labour fair in Bortz, seven miles hence. A shadow, even a shadow so unusual that it had made his wife’s face pale and turned her voice to a whisper, was the very least of his worries.

Brigida leaned her head into her husband’s shoulder, and their child buried himself more deeply into the cocoon that their bodies made. Ignaz swallowed hard as he saw a long, grey shadow stop suddenly to the right of the road, and then ripple and wobble its way over the rutted ditch and disappear into the trees beyond. Apart from the effect of the terrain on the shadow, it seemed to glide as if by magic.

Ignaz held Brigida’s head against his chest until the apparition had passed, and then disengaged, looking down at her, his pale face full of concern.

‘I won’t let any harm come to you,’ he said. ‘I promise you that on Sigmar’s beard.’

‘Don’t promise,’ said Brigida. ‘Don’t dare to invoke the great god’s name. How could you stop it? The harm is already done.’

Gilead was roused from his reverie by Ignaz’s reassuring words. He turned, unconsciously, towards the sounds the human couple were making, and caught sight of the low-slung sun, barely above his eye height, between the trees. He shielded his face for a moment and looked out across the road, a hundred yards or so behind where the couple stood, locked in their embrace. Their long shadows stretched away between their position and his.

Gilead waited for the little family to move away, aware of their heavy footfalls for several long minutes. The watery sun was rising slowly, and the shadows would be long for some time to come.

Tired, his mind dulled by the unravelling of recent memories and with a long night’s journey, Gilead returned to the little glade where he had left his horse. He unburdened the palfrey of the few essentials he carried with him, rubbed her down with a handful of sickly, yellow strand grass, and threw a blanket over her. When his mount was comfortable, he swathed himself in the rough cloak, woven from contrasting threads, that he had bought when his beloved elf cape had become too fragile to wear for any but the most serious or sacred of occasions.

Gilead lay on the ground, sheltered beneath the greying canopy of a tree that was struggling to hang onto the last of its life. He could not sleep. He cast his mind back over the night’s journey. It was a trick that Fithvael, his oldest, dearest, last companion had taught him, that his mind might not return to the darkest of places from which the old retainer had barely managed to rescue him. The night had been without event. He had travelled a long, narrow path through the woods, close to the edge of the road, staying in shadow, hidden from the twin moons that hung in the sky so high, for so much of the night.

Shadows. There had been talk of shadows. It was this morning. His mind was sticking on something that had happened this morning.

Gilead soon realised what it was, and knew that a sleepless day would follow, a day of information-gathering, of listening from the shadows, of moving among the humans, among their scents and sounds. He was loath to do it, but do it he must.

Gilead had not been slack or careless on the road that sunrise. He had not neglected to see his shadow running ahead of him, into the human woman’s line of sight. He cast his mind back. It had been early, the sun low, so everything had been casting long shadows, but he had been moving to the west and south of the couple, and his shadow must have been cast into the woods, not onto the road.

Gilead’s tiredness ebbed away as this clue played on his mind. The palfrey needed to rest, if she was to be useful to him over the days to come, but she could sleep while he scoured the area for whatever had cast that shadow.

He hugged the edge of the ditch to the south and west of the road, keeping his shadow beyond the tree-line, while he reconnoitered the area. There was nothing in the road, no sounds of people or creatures anywhere nearby, and the only shadows were of the tree line on the opposite side of the road. Gilead lifted his head to smell the lightly moving air, but there appeared to be nothing on the breeze. He could faintly sense the three humans that had walked the path before him, maybe an hour earlier, but he knew their scents and sounds, and was content to rule them out; he knew they had passed and moved on to their destination.

Several hundred yards further along, in the direction the little family had taken, the road swerved gently to the left so that the tree line shadows covered its entire width. Gilead crossed quickly, using the shadows to consume his own. His swift, silent feet barely seemed to connect with the hard, smooth surface of the road, and the air around him hardly moved at all. If he smelled of anything, it was of cool air and clean water, of the few food stuffs that he still managed to forage and of the sweet hide of the beast that carried him.

No human would have detected his movement across the path, even if there’d been anyone watching. The few surviving local creatures, a scrawny rat picking at the dry remains of a bird carcass, while its mate plucked sadly at its battered feathers from the low branch of the nearest tree, didn’t so much as blink at his passing.

Within the hour, Gilead knew that whatever had belonged to the shadow that Brigida had shied from, was gone, or else had been a figment of her imagination. Everyone was jumpy. Everyone had been jumpy for a long time.

Gilead spent the next two hours foraging for what he would need to sustain him for the remainder of the day, for, once the mare was rested, he would continue his search for the elusive creature that had blighted the sunrise.

The soil was pale and poor, and would have been blown away on the breeze long ago if it weren’t for the tenacious hold of the woodland trees’ roots. They were stunted and twisted, wore greying or yellowing leaves, and their bark was pitted and sallow, but they clung on, the most ancient of life forms, biding their time until the tide should turn and the world should be rid of the plague that spread insidiously across its lands.

The shoots and leaves that Gilead favoured to flavour his meals and provide aromatic salads had not been seen for a dozen seasons or more, and he had taken to foraging a little below the surface of the earth for tubers, roots and corms that provided some meagre sustenance, though often their flesh was stringy and dry, and he had to pummel and mince them after long cooking to extract any nutrients buried within. He collected enough wood to make a small fire, the smoke from which would be dissipated among the lower branches of the trees, rendering his position undetectable from more than a dozen yards away. He sourced water from an old, shallow culvert, the contents surprisingly fresh and sweet in the otherwise inhospitable surroundings; no doubt because there were neither humans nor animals in any numbers to deplete the stream.

Gilead bathed, ate, and refreshed himself, and, when the time came, he packed his belongings and led the palfrey out onto the road. He followed in Brigida and Ignaz’s footsteps, keeping close to the ditch, crossing the road at its turns to ensure that his shadow was hidden, and he kept his mare relaxed and quiet.

He would be seen, and not seen. He would hide in plain sight, casting no scents nor sounds nor sudden movements into the air. The humans would hardly know he was there, yet, when they had need of him, he would respond.

His senses on full alert, Gilead tracked every sound, every movement, every scent on the air. As he came close to the subdued little town of Bortz, two hundred miles south-west of Bechafen, the natural smells and sounds of the open landscape drifted away, and the stink of fear and the sound of tremulous resentment tripping from the lips of the doleful humans filled his senses.

‘They say Brigida saw a shadow on the road, this morning,’ said one young woman as Gilead listened in.

‘We’re all seeing shadows,’ said the old dame with her, ‘and with good reason. Death casts the longest shadow, and he’s among us now. Sigmar help us all!’

‘Don’t say so,’ said the younger woman, clutching the old dame by the crook of her arm.’

‘I do say so,’ said the dame. ‘I shall say so until I come to Sigmar’s wondrous presence, and I shall be glad to go.’

Gilead moved on. This was only talk, an old woman frightening instead of reassuring the child. This was rumour, not fact.

‘Not much of a labour fair,’ said a young man, dragging a half-filled, tarpaulin-covered cart in his wake.

‘Nothing worth buying labour for,’ said his companion, ‘and the quality of the labour to be had, so weak and poor.’

‘Shall it end, father?’ asked the youth pulling the cart.’

‘Not in my lifetime,’ said his father. ‘Not while Sigmar gives me breath.’

As Gilead approached the main square of the market town that had clearly once been a busy, even thriving centre of commerce, he heard the tentative dull clang of a handbell being lifted by someone inexpert at handling it.

The bell clanged again.

Gilead slid silently off the palfrey as the people around him stopped and turned to see where the noise was coming from.

Gilead watched as an old, bent man took the bell gently from the faltering hands of a tall slender, tired-looking man, the man that the elf had seen on the road. Gilead watched as the old man lifted the bell to an inverted, upright position in his hand and then relaxed his hand away, letting the bell drop onto its clapper, sending a clear, high note resonating across the square and out to the ears of the milling people.

More people stopped and turned, and, one by one, they began to move slowly back to gather in the square.

‘Ignaz has something to say,’ said the old man, inverting the bell and placing his hand over the clapper inside.

Ignaz coughed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, as if he didn’t want to let the words out.

‘I couldn’t admit it before,’ he said.

‘Speak out, lad,’ said a middle-aged woman from the rear of the crowd.

‘I didn’t like to admit it to Brigida, this morning. I didn’t like to say it when there was no one to hear it, and us so vulnerable on the road alone.’

He coughed again.

‘Only we weren’t alone,’ he said.

‘Get to the nub of it, lad, the sun won’t stay up forever, and you know it,’ shouted the woman again, before one or two of the older men around her glared in her direction and shushed her.

‘It’s here,’ he said. ‘It’s among us. Brigida saw it this morning, but I told her nay.’ Ignaz gestured towards his wife whose faced turned an even paler shade of sallow, and the hollows beneath her eyes appeared to fill with greenish-black shadows. ‘I saw it too, but I kept it from her.’

‘Saw what?’ someone called from the crowd in the shrill, tremulous voice of an eager boy or a terrified woman.

‘Brigida saw a shadow. Then I saw it too.’

A murmur began to pass through the crowd. Some believed every word and were frightened of what might come next out of the man’s mouth, others were more sceptical, longer in the tooth or made of sterner stuff, others still could feel their sap rising and their instincts to fight kick in. One or two shook their fists or howled improvised war cries.

‘It doesn’t sound like much... A shadow,’ said Ignaz, ‘but it was like nothing I’ve ever seen. It was too long and too lean, and too... too... It wasn’t human.’

Someone shouted from the crowd ‘What time did you see your shadow?’, brave enough to heckle, if nothing else, ‘Was it at dawn, perchance? ‘Oooh... Loook... Look how long the shadows are! Sigmar save me!’ I’m sooo scared!’ The voice broke into laughter, and Gilead watched, unsurprised as a gathering of cocky boys started pummeling each other, playing at daemons for they knew not what else to do.

‘It’s here,’ said Ignaz. ‘The thing we’ve heard talk of. The rumours were true.’

The scents on the air grew stronger as the sky, filling steadily with clouds, darkened and the lowering sun was swallowed into its grey depths. Gilead could smell their fear on the air.

He tugged ever-so slightly on the mare’s rein and turned into its body as it made a small circle to face the way they had come. The boy with the cart and his father were standing too close, and Gilead had to jink to avoid them. Their eyes were cast across the market square to watch as Ignaz tried to continue.

The palfrey was less lucky, and, as the tightening rein tugged at her head, she whinnied, her nostrils flaring slightly.

‘Watch out,’ said the boy, steadying his cart with the handrails he still gripped as the horse bumped against it. ‘Look where you’re going with that stupid beast.’

The boy was already unnerved by what was going on in the square. They were all in a state of tension from the rumours that were passing from one town to the next about the plague that was in their midst, and the daemon that rode in on its heels.

Once the cart was stable, the lad dropped his hold on the handrails and it bumped onto its stop-feet, leaning slightly. The boy slapped the palfrey hard on the flanks, and it skittered on its rear hoofs.

Gilead loosened his grip on the mare’s reins and turned to the boy, but the space around them was so limited, and the youth so agitated there was nothing he could do to prevent what happened next.

The heckling boys were scuffling with each other, and Ignaz’s voice was drowned out by the commotion that was gradually building. More of the locals were drawing close to see what the fuss was about, or to spread talk of what was happening. Gilead didn’t like it. He was suddenly in the middle of a tight little group of stressed people; the situation was becoming less and less predictable, and he wanted to get him and his mount out of there.

The youth slapped the horse again, and it pulled its head up, extending Gilead’s arm as he reached for a tighter hold, close on the horse’s head. The boy was drawing attention to the mare, and the mare was drawing attention to him. He kept his head low and his grip on the reins steady, and worked his body away from the youth and his cart. There appeared to be no way out as the scuffling boys started to kick and punch at one of their number, falling against the cart, which inched across the paving stones with a squeak and a groan, blocking the mare’s exit.

Gilead stood very close to the horse, his side against her foreleg, his shoulder against her neck. He leaned in gently and made soothing noises close to her ear. There was not room to mount her, and he didn’t want more eyes on him.

Then he heard the odd clang, again, the sound of the bell being mishandled, and the market square was suddenly filled with the ringing of the bell, loud and shrill as someone swung it inexpertly and too fast.

The horse, already jittery and hemmed-in, tried to bolt, but got its legs caught in the hand cart. It panicked and struck out, kicking the boy that was being tortured by his friends, landing a heavy hoof in the victim’s shoulder as he lay with his back on the cart. The boy yelped, and his friends stopped pummeling him, laughed, and tried to help him out of Gilead’s way.

Gilead was impotent to do anything but try to keep his horse under control. He could not allow himself to be seen or recognised. He had to remain slumped under his cloak, his height disguised and his head covered. It was easier said than done.

Finally, the old man intervened. He grabbed the youth’s hand as he pulled it back to slap the mare for a third time, and gave the cart a hard shove out of the way. The scuffling boys skipped off, dancing through the crowd, and Gilead breathed a sigh of relief.

The bell had quietened the crowd for the moment, and Gilead was sure that he could get away. He rubbed the mare’s nose and patted her lightly on the shoulder. He turned the reins over in his hand, adjusting his grip, and clicked his tongue to encourage her to walk on.

Gilead did not see the child.

In the confusion of the busy market square, when things had begun to happen, a diligent father standing a few yards away, had quietly picked up his child, lifted him over his head and sat him on his shoulders.

The child was suddenly the tallest person in the square, and watched, smiling, as the scene unfolded beneath him. He saw the boys arguing and the handcart getting bumped. He saw the skittish mare and the old man. He saw a hand reach up to the horse’s head to hold the reins. He saw the long, tapering fingers, the narrow, elegant wrist. He saw the fine skin and the beautifully turned cuff of a type of garment that he didn’t recognise.

All things are new and wondrous to a child. All creatures are fascinating.

Gilead did not notice the child, but, as he walked past, still soothing the mare, the child reached his hand out and gently tugged at the hood of the elf’s cloak.

As the hood fell back to his shoulders, Gilead turned to see what had disturbed it. His eyes were more-or-less on a level with the child’s, and his cold stare made the colour drain from the child’s face, and his jaw quiver.

The child’s face went from long and pale to red and round, and, before Gilead had time to lift his hood and drop into his knees to reduce his height, the child was screaming.

The child wailed hard, pointing all the time at where Gilead had been standing.

The crowd, hushed by the ringing of the bell, turned to look. The man with the child on his shoulders stared at Gilead for a moment before lifting the child from his shoulders to comfort it. He did not need to take action. He was not the only one who had seen what his child had seen.

One hand still tight on the mare’s reins, Gilead turned his head in a slow circle, his body following. He came up to his full height, placed his feet shoulder-width apart and braced himself for what was to come.

Hours before, he had mistaken his shadow for that of whatever was terrorising these people. Now, they were mistaking him for their nemesis.

The first swing came, as it always did, from the youngest man, the most cocky, the keenest to prove something. Gilead dropped his shoulders back an inch or two, and the blow, which was never going to reach his face, was so poorly timed and imprecise that it failed even to connect with his chest. It did, however, turn the cocky kid and sent him staggering a step or two back into the tight circle that was forming around the elf.

Then a man stepped forward, and the gap in the circle closed behind him. This must be their champion. He was a tall, wiry man, young, but by no means a boy. Gilead weighed him up in a moment or two. He lifted a hand in front of him, not so much a warning as a gesture of retreat. The elf would walk away if he was allowed to do so.

No one was going to allow him to walk.

The champion clasped one fist in the other, briefly, and danced a fast step towards the elf, swinging a left hook low, into Gilead’s body. Gilead moved deftly to the right, and the champion was surprised when his fist connected with fresh air. He swung twice more, and twice more, Gilead ducked, while still managing to hold onto the mare’s reins.

When the next blow came, it came from Gilead’s left and a little behind him. It connected with his side, above his right hip. Gilead turned his head in time to see his assailant pulling a pained face and shaking out his punching hand.

It was two against one, if both the humans were prepared to continue.

Gilead handed his mare’s reins to the old man with the kid and the cart. He took them, without thinking, and then looked down at his hand, not a little surprised by the turn of events. He shrugged, shortened the rein and patted the mare on the shoulder to reassure her; after all, the horse wasn’t his enemy.

Gilead wound his cloak into a long rope and secured it around his waist, lest he trip over it. Before he was finished, a third man had his fists up and a fourth was weighing a length of wood in his hand that looked like some sort of paddle.

The paddle came first, swung out low to take his legs out from under him. Gilead stepped lightly over the paddle and waited for the next attack. The champion tried punching, again, but there were five assailants, now, surrounded by spectators, and the momentum was taken out of his swing when his fist, drawn back, landed in the armpit of the man next to him.

Gilead thought about turning and walking away from the farce, but that was impossible. The crowd was spoiling for a fight. The threat of the plague was bad enough, but to have the rumoured monster in their midst and do nothing was unthinkable. Any man would try to get his hands on the elf, and most of the women and children, too. Gilead must stand and fight.

When the next arm swung at him, Gilead caught it deftly by the wrist, turned it and its owner away, and shoved the man in the back, sending him sprawling into the arms of the crowd. Then he jinked to his left and tripped the youngest and cockiest of his opponents. The boy landed on his face, bloodying his nose.

The man who hurt his hand punching Gilead tried a double-handed swing at arm’s-length, but Gilead turned, and the fists landed in another man’s exposed gut, doubling him over and making him retch.

Several men, watching the fiasco, began to separate from their wives and children, removed hats and jackets, and set pugnacious expressions on their faces.

Over the next few minutes, one or two blows found their targets, but none penetrated the elf’s defences completely enough to cause him any damage, however fleeting. He caught swinging arms and legs, ducked imprecise blows from fists and feet, banged a couple of heads together, and sidestepped one woman who began angrily swinging a bundle that she’d been carrying.

More and more men joined the fight, but soon they were brawling with each other, fighting to get to their mutual enemy, sure that they might succeed where others had failed. Frustration and exasperation overcame them, rendering them useless in the face of the elf’s vastly superior fighting skills.

Gilead had no intention of hurting any of them, and he’d rather not watch while they hurt each other.

The elf was ready when the old man dropped the mare’s reins and jostled the man next to him, who had thumped the youngster on his way into the fray. Gilead picked up the reins, ducked under the mare’s neck, and led her quietly away.

His information-gathering exercise had to be aborted, but it had born some fruit. The locals were terrified. They were afraid of the plague visited on their land and livestock, but they were more afraid of the rumoured creature.

Death was not a ghost, a myth or an idea. Here, now, death came in corporeal form.

Gilead retreated to the woods that bordered the town to the south. He lay low for days and then weeks, moving his small camp at regular intervals and leaving no signs of where he had passed through or spent time. There were hundreds of acres of woodland to forage, and, while food was not in plentiful supply there was enough to sustain him for as long as he needed.

Gradually, he began to weave his way closer to Bortz. He needed more information if he was to change the fates of the people who lived there, but he dared not be spotted again.

He left the mare safely hidden in the woods and made several sojourns into the edges of the town where he would sit quietly in the corners of inns and drinking holes. On market days, he moved silently between barrows and stalls, listening to gossip, and, on the roads between the town and the local farms and villages, he tacked himself onto the ends of larger groups of traffic and listened to the stories that were spreading across the region.

Within a matter of weeks, as the days began to lengthen into a tired, pale form of spring, Gilead started to know who the enemy was and where he could be found. Whoever, whatever it was, clearly lacked Gilead’s skills. It did not avoid detection by tracking. It appeared to return to the same haunts over and over again, approaching the town from the same direction, being spotted, or imagined in a small area close to where Gilead had entered the town for the first time. The best, most reliable of the rumours all came from the same road into Bortz.

The spectre was humanoid, although its dimensions were exaggerated by the hysteria that had grown up around it. Had it been another elf, Gilead would have felt its presence. It had to be human, or some humanoid monster.

There were reports of it drifting away at twilight. It was said to be pale, deathly and ethereal, while being a strong fighter, and there were rumours of an impressive steed of the kind a warrior might ride.

Gilead spent two days in the woods tracking the creature. Its prints were clearly made by feet that were long and slender, large for a human man, but certainly not inhuman. Gilead tracked the horse, too, more often ridden than led, although, in the heaviest, most overgrown acres of the wood, two tracks wove side-by-side between the trees. The ground was otherwise undisturbed; there was no digging for roots to eat. Gilead found only the pale, scrawny carcasses of meatless rodents, bloodless and papery.

It was night when Gilead knew that he was close. It was the smell. It was like the smell of humans, but older and more decayed. There was a smell of dry graves, sepulchral, almost. There was a mingled scent of horse sweat, warm leather and grease. The earth smelled of a fire that had been lit and extinguished more than once, but which had cooked nothing, and of blankets used too often between laundering. Gilead almost mistook the whole for the smell of death, but human death did not smell like this, nor animal death, either. This was the antithesis of the death-smell.

Gilead ducked between the lowest branches of the trees that surrounded the tight, narrow area from which the smell emanated. He saw the horse, first, tethered to a tree, its head at full-stretch trying to reach fresh sources of grass to chew on. The horse looked up for the briefest of moments, and then bowed again to its purpose.

Confident the horse would raise no alarm, Gilead looked through the darkness beyond it to the curl of grey smoke that rose a foot or two above the tiny fire pit that shed the only light for miles. A figure sat, bent before the fire, its back to Gilead, its silhouetted elbow working small circles as its hands performed some monotonous task.

Gilead drew the shorter of his blades. There was little enough room to fight hand-to-hand, and none to wield a sword. He wondered for a moment whether a fight was necessary. Could he not simply kill the man, quietly, while his back was turned? It was not the elf way. Gilead would stand face-to-face with any foe, believing that his greater skill and longer practice would lead to the defeat of any opponent he met in mortal combat.

He ducked under the last of the branches overhanging the space in the wood that hardly qualified as a glade, making no effort to quiet his footsteps. Gilead noticed the gleam of metal in the dim firelight. The creature was polishing a large piece of armour, a cuisse or a pauldron. A helmet, adorned with a battered plume, sat on one side of the figure, and he appeared to be wearing a mail headpiece, although his chest and back were covered in nothing more than a loose shirt.

As Gilead took another step, the war steed’s head came up, and its ears flicked forward. The figure sitting at the fireside turned towards Gilead, stepping swiftly to its feet. It dropped the polishing cloth, and bent slightly at the knees to lower the section of armour that it had been polishing to the ground, keeping its gaze on Gilead.

Their eyes locked, and Gilead knew, at last, that this man had transcended human mortality. It had been a man once, but was no longer constrained by the passage of time or the decaying of the mind or body. This sham of a man, this facsimile of a noble knight, had faced death and been reborn. It was, perhaps, as long-lived as Gilead, and might live longer than any elf, unless Gilead could put an end to it.

The first blow came fast and cruel as the knight turned, swinging one foot high and wide to connect with Gilead’s shoulder. The knight had not removed his boots and a gleaming spur left a tight row of pinprick holes in the flesh of Gilead’s arm. The elf had expected to land the first blow, but he was quick to react, and blocked the knight’s kick just above the knee with his own foot, before too much damage was inflicted.

The knight was caught off-balance when the side of Gilead’s foot landed squarely against the inside of his thigh, and he had to wheel sharply to bring himself squarely in front of Gilead for another attack. Gilead brought his knife up, and wove quick movements into his assailant’s chest. The knight ducked and backed away from two of the passes, but a third made contact with the mail coif, covering his head and neck, but for which, the blade would have sliced a convenient artery in the knight’s neck.

The knight was strong and agile, and faster than any human, and it had been some time since Gilead had done serious battle. He had spent a considerable amount of time fighting humans, but always from a defensive stance, never intending to mark or maim, let alone kill.

Gilead caught the knight’s wrist as it propelled a roundhouse punch in his direction, but the knight was too quick, and twisted his fist, loosening the elf’s grip. Then the knight turned his back so that Gilead was behind him, at close quarters, and drove an elbow up hard under the elf’s ribs.

If Gilead had been human, that blow would have winded him and probably left him badly bruised with a couple of cracked ribs, but Gilead was not human.

Reflexively, as Gilead bent to lessen the impact of the blow, he thrust his knife-hand out, hoping to make contact with the knight’s hamstring. The knight had taken off most of his armour to clean it, so his legs were clad in nothing more protective than a leather-patched pair of breeches. He anticipated the elf’s move, however, and sat into the knife, so that the flesh of his buttocks took the worst of the injury, leaving his muscle and connective tissues intact.

The wound should have bled, fiercely, but Gilead was not surprised when his knife-hand did not come away slick and hot with fresh blood.

As the knight turned to face Gilead, a weak stream of dark liquid trickling down the back of his leg, the elf flicked his knife deftly from his right hand to his left, and thrust hard into the knight’s side before he had a chance to land another blow.

The knight barely faltered in his lunge towards Gilead, wrapping his arms around the elf’s waist and driving his protected head into his chest, bringing them both crashing hard to the forest floor. The mulch was not rich and thick on the ground as it might have been ten or a dozen years ago, and the pair fell heavily. Gilead, with his wiry frame, the tensile strength of his narrow bones vastly superior to a human’s, felt nothing very much, but the knight, landing hard, was winded. It gasped a stale breath of air up at Gilead, its eyes bulging slightly.

Only then did Gilead see the teeth. They were long and strong and as yellow as old ivory. In the split second the elf had to his advantage, he wondered whether this undead knight would bite him, whether one species could be sustained by the blood of another. Before the split second was over, Gilead rolled the body of the knight, until the elf was sitting on his chest, yanking the protective mail headpiece away to expose the knight’s head and throat.

Rather than resisting the removal of the small amount of protective clothing that might save him from the elf, the knight brought his feet up and dug his heels hard into the elf’s back, tearing Gilead’s shirt, and gouging long scratches to either side of his spine that would need good and careful cleaning if they were not to become infected.

The knight brought his hands up to grasp the elf around the neck. Gilead whipped his head around and brought it towards the knight’s face in a swinging arc, hardly able to believe that he had been driven to head-butting the creature. This was not dignified. This was not how an elf warrior fought.

Gilead jumped to his feet, freeing himself from the knight’s grasp. His shoulder smarted slightly, but adrenaline was kicking in and he felt no pain.

The knight did not stay long on the ground, and the two warriors were soon circling each other, marking out an arena in the tiny clearing.

As he stood, the knight grabbed his discarded mail headpiece and wrapped it around his right fist. Gilead threw his knife from one hand to the other, preparing to strike. His first swing was met by the mail glove, which shrieked with the impact.

Gilead turned, kicked high and then thrust low with his knife, but the knight saw the kick, and countered it with a low, lunging punch. Both combatants were unbalanced, and whirled away from each other to regroup.

Keen to gain some small advantage, Gilead unsheathed his sword. He would have to keep its hilt close to his body, and limit his movement, but he could keep the knight at a greater reach, and perhaps control the outcome of the battle.

The knight’s hand thrust down to the ground and scrubbed around for some kind of weapon. He was close to the fire, and a meagre pile of firewood. He picked a piece up, but discarded it immediately as useless.

As Gilead extended the tip of his sword towards the knight, ready to lunge, the knight’s hand fell on the cuisse that he had been polishing, and he brought it up like a shield, deflecting the tip of the sword, sending it out wide, where it peeled a ribbon of diseased bark from a tree at the edge of the clearing. Gilead pulled the sword hilt back into his body and adjusted his grip, wrapping his fingers firmly around the guard, shortening the weapon’s reach by several inches.

As Gilead worked his knife and his sword, flicking, extending, turning, jabbing, and, from time to time, sending the short knife away in stunning arcs to give it the momentum to do real damage to flesh and bone, the knight lunged with his improvised shield, parried, stopped the blades with his mail-wrapped hand, and sustained no penetrating injuries.

Gilead brought the knife across the knight’s cheek, taking off the tip of his nose, but he missed his eye entirely, and the wounds leaked only a little clear liquid. He brought the sword across the knight’s body at an angle and left a slice in his shirt, and chest, but, again, no real damage was done. Gilead wanted to see pink flesh and white bone, and was a little perturbed when he saw only a greenish-grey flap of skin.

After twenty or thirty minutes of Gilead’s fast-paced swordplay, and the knight’s impressive defensive moves, after battling it out in the clearing for longer than any fight should last, someone had to break the deadlock.

Gilead willed himself to succeed, but the pace and rhythm of the fight had begun to stagnate and the adrenaline in his system was long gone. He found it almost impossible to increase his pace.

The knight wearied of playing the defensive game and finally stepped things up. He let go of the end of the coif and let it drop in his hand so that he was holding one end of it. Without his head to shape it, the links of the mail fell into a rippling length of metal a yard long.

As Gilead thrust with his dagger, the knight swung the coif and brought it skittering against the length of the blade. The momentum of the swing wrapped the mail around the weapon and, to Gilead’s surprise, dragged it out of his grasp.

The knight dropped the coif in favour of the dagger. Both combatants had a blade, and the knight still had the advantage of an improvised shield.

Gilead, in a desperate effort not to lose the advantage, tilted his sword up in front of him and drove at the knight with the full weight of his body. The knight was recovering his footing having bent to pick up the blade, and was not ready for the onslaught. As he tried to remain standing, the knight dropped the heavy cuisse, and it crashed to the ground, tumbling over a pile of firewood.

At the edge of the clearing, the war steed made itself as small as possible between the trees, and lifted its head in a sympathetic whinny.

The elf and the knight fought each other in the tiny clearing for another hour. Blows were traded, blades were thrust and parried, and, once or twice, the knight and the elf were whisper-close to each other, the shorter knight’s glowing eyes, staring up into the elf’s steely ones.

Gilead had flashes of his shadow-fast capabilities, moments when he was everywhere at once, but still he could not best the fated creature that could not or would not die. They both bore wounds, some shallow and haphazard, others deeper and more threatening. The air was full of the grunts and cries of pain and triumph that punctuated their combat, and of a mixture of their scents; the sharp tang of adrenaline, the earthy blend of new sweat and old, and the sweet, clearwater smell that clung to the elf more strongly the harder he worked.

Then the dawn came.

Gilead did not see it, at first; he only heard it in the gentle early movements of the few creatures that still inhabited the woodland. Then he could smell the beginning of a new day, and feel it too. His senses better tuned to all things than a mortal man’s would be, the elf knew that the day was breaking. He also knew that with the new day would come the end of one or other of them. He knew that if he did not kill the undead knight, he would perish at his hand.

For the first time in a hundred years, Gilead wondered whether he could beat his opponent. If he did not, he would die on the blade of his own dagger, the weapon forged by his father’s armourer and given to him in a ceremony by his faithful companion, Fithvael, on the completion of his combat training.

A shaft of light found a low angle between the trees at the edge of the woodland and speared across the narrow clearing. Morning had broken.

Reparation

Andy Smillie

Thorolf coughed, sending flecks of blood and filmy matter onto the dirt. Touching a hand to his aching ribs, he scolded himself for allowing the human to get so close. Human, the term barely applied to the gene-bulked creature growling at him from across the arena. The man’s, if he had been a man, musculature was swollen to insane proportions, his head lost between boulder-like shoulders. His nervous system had been replaced by a network of cables that poked through pallid skin like rusting veins, and his legs were powered by pistons sunk into the meat of enlarged thighs. In a century of warfare, Thorolf had yet to encounter such a nightmarish union of flesh and science. The chrono-gladiator had been quicker than his bulk belied, steaming into Thorolf to deliver a punch to the Space Marine’s midriff that would have killed him if it were not for the hardened bone structure and numerous implants his Chapter’s Apothecaries had gifted him. Even now, Thorolf knew his enhanced physiology was working to heal the internal injuries he’d sustained; his twin hearts pumping fresh blood to areas of trauma while his Haemastamen implant helped filter away dead cells.

‘We must keep our distance.’

Thorolf turned to look at his cell mate as auditory devices fashioned into the walls of the arena translated the lanky, blue-skinned xenos’s words into Gothic.

The chrono-gladiator rushed forward again, steam hissing from metallic vents sunk into its spinal column. Thorolf dived forward, throwing himself into a roll to evade the brute’s charge. The tau side-stepped left, flowing around the gladiator to slash a wide gash in its midriff as it thumped past. Thorolf was begrudgingly impressed; the tau wielded his weapon, a long pole-arm with a curved blade at each end, with enviable dexterity.

Ignorant of the wound, the chrono-gladiator reset itself and came at them again.

‘Aim for the cabling!’ Thorolf shouted to the tau and rushed forward to meet the chrono-gladiator head on, baiting him.

Nodding in affirmation, the tau circled round behind their opponent, whipping his blade up in a tight arc to slash through a host of the putrid tubes feeding the chrono-gladiator’s nervous system. Chemical-laden fluid spurted out from the severed cables, which writhed like pained serpents, spraying onto the tau’s exposed abdomen. Screaming in pain as the chemicals seared into his flesh, the tau dropped his weapon and stumbled backwards.

Pivoting with a speed that belied its size, the chrono-gladiator sunk a hammer-like fist into the tau’s jaw. The blow shattered the aliens mandible, caved the side of his face in, flipping him backwards through the air like a spent round.

Breathing heavily, the chrono-gladiator turned to face Thorolf. It fought to take a step forward as a shudder permeated its body, the vital fluid balancing its tortured musculature spilling out onto the ground.

Thorolf moved backwards, drawing the chrono-gladiator away from the tau, before darting around the walking-weapon to scoop up the tau’s pole-arm. Sticking one of the bladed-ends in the ground and snapping it off, the Space Marine fashioned himself a spear.

‘Your body has suffered enough. It’s time your soul bore some of the burden,’ Thorolf spat, hefting the spear and running full tilt at the chrono-gladiator.

The brute braced itself, flexing its biceps as it prepared to rip Thorolf in half.

A hair’s-breadth outside striking range, Thorolf threw the spear. The weapon hit home before the chrono-gladiator could react, punching into the soft flesh of the brute’s throat. Thorolf followed it in, diving elbow first into the chrono-gladiator and knocking it to the ground.

The Space Marine recovered first, righting himself and driving the spear further through the gladiator’s neck, pinning it to the ground.

Dark ichor ran from the gladiator’s mouth as it reached for the spear but again Thorolf was faster, hammering his fists into the brute’s deltoids and smashing its shoulder joints. With both of its arms disabled, the gladiator’s legs flayed helplessly, its torso twitching in shock as it died.

‘The Emperor protects,’ exhausted, Thorolf rolled off his opponent’s corpse and stumbled to the exit.

‘Space Marine... I live,’ the tau cried out as Thorolf moved past him.

Thorolf stopped and closed his eyes, ‘In His sight.’ Straightening, he turned and walked to the tau. ‘No xenos, you do not.’

The tau looked up, his eyes full of confusion, ‘I... I thought we had a bond, as warriors.’

‘If that were true, I would be as guilty of heresy as those I hunt.’ The Space Marine raised his blade.

Thorolf ran his hand up over the smooth metal of his cell wall, bringing it to rest on a blackened, pockmarked section. Closing his eyes, he traced the contours, his fingers remembering how he’d made each of them. Thorolf’s thoughts turned to the strangled cries of the chrono-gladiator as its retarded throat tried to give voice to its death. He spat on the wall. The metal hissed under the saliva as the acid liquid burned a fresh imperfection into the metal. Satisfied, Thorolf knelt in prayer and offered thanks to the Holy Throne and God Emperor that he yet lived to continue his mission.

Thorolf stared uneasily at the hunchbacks. Their childlike, smiling faces jarred with their weeping skin in a way that made Thorolf wish was able to adjust his eyes the way he could the optic lenses of his battle helm.

He had little way of knowing how long it had been since his fight with the chrono-gladiator, but he was certain it wasn’t time for another appearance in the arena. Perhaps, he thought, this was an oddity of the tournament. Since his imprisonment, he knew that time had flowed strangely. It seemed fragmented and inconsistent, days indistinguishable from hours, seconds stretched out that they might fill eternity. He sighed, through gritted teeth; time was yet another constant that the eldar had taken from him. Running his hand across the black body suit that they had replaced his power armour with, Thorolf visualised the armoured grooves of his sacred breastplate, his fingers able to trace the line of every chink where the reinforced ceramite had been tested in saving his life. Inwardly, the Space Marine promised himself that he would don his armour again.

He looked past his jailors towards the open cell door and waited for the bastardised female to enter. She did not.

A body flew from the darkness beyond the door, hurled like a doll by someone or something far stronger than even the stimm-pumped chrono-gladiator. It landed hard on the floor between the hunchbacks, twitched and coughed up a smattering of blood. Thorolf took one look at the prone figure, immediately recognising the enhanced musculature of a fellow Space Marine. Without a word the hunchbacks turned and exited, the door locking behind them.

Thorolf moved to check the figure’s vitals –

‘Stay back,’ the new arrival snarled through bloodied teeth and pushed his torso off the ground.

‘Easy, brother, we are both playthings of the same captors. I bring no harm.’ Thorolf spread his hands in conciliation and retreated to the far wall.

The Space Marine seemed appeased, and slid back against the opposite wall. ‘Where are we?’

Thorolf looked at the naked Space Marine, studying the tapestry of angry scars that criss-crossed the pale flesh of his torso. Tell-tale puncture marks studded the Space Marine’s body, souvenirs left by the pain racks that had tortured his nervous system. Thorolf felt his muscles bunch as he remembered his own ordeal at the hands of their jailors. By contrast, the newcomer’s face was untouched; baring none of the signs of warfare Thorolf would have expected to see on one of the Emperor’s shock troops. It reminded Thorolf of the hunchbacks, wracked of body and beautiful of visage. His mind recoiled at the twisted work of the eldar surgeons.

‘We are on Damorragh,’ Thorolf spoke with hushed clarity, like a preacher consoling his flock. He sought the beads of his faith as he spoke but they had been stripped from him along with the rest of his wargear when the eldar had taken him. The warrior monk sighed and made a mental note to beg the Emperor’s forgiveness for uttering the xenos word. ‘It is an arena world of the pirate eldar.’

The newcomer was about to speak when Thorolf interrupted him, ‘I think brother, it is my turn to ask a question.’

The other Space Marine nodded.

‘Who do you serve?’

Anger flashed across the Space Marine’s face, ‘And why is it that I should tell you? Which Legion do you serve?’

‘I seek no advantage over you, brother. I am Thorolf Icewalkdr, son of Russ.’

‘Space Wolf,’ the Space Marine spat, doing a poor job of hiding his distaste for the children of Fenris. The newcomer considered the other Space Marine. It seemed at odds with what he knew of Russ’ descendants that Thorolf had spoken so plainly rather than aggrandising his Chapter in a torrent of audacious boasts. ‘You speak well for a berserker.’

Thorolf felt the Space Marine’s eyes on him. He wondered just how bestial he must look to him, his hair twisting in blood-matted locks down to his shoulders, an unkempt beard clinging to his face.

‘Now,’ Thorolf’s voice hardened, ‘I would know who it is that shares this cell.’

‘I am Ecanus of the Dark Angels.’

Thorolf stared the Dark Angel in the eyes; he could detect no taint of Chaos upon him. ‘I fought alongside a Dark Angel once.’

‘What?’

Thorolf lowered his eyes, ‘Ramiel was my first cell mate. He was a mighty warrior. I honour him with each breath I take in the arena, my body a monument to his legacy.’

‘Where are your fangs, wolf?’ Ecanus snapped, distracted.

Thorolf clenched his teeth in annoyance, ‘It would bid you well to watch your tone, son of Jonson.’ He paused and rubbed a hand against his mouth, ‘Their infernal surgeons took great joy in filing away my lord’s gift. A pain and an affront I will wash clean with blood.’ Thorolf let his gaze drift to the kill markings on the wall.

Ecanus followed his gaze. ‘Leave it to a Space Wolf to tally kills. You and your brethren’s idea of honour is more akin to the feudal barbarism of backwater savages.’

Thorolf’s face softened, ‘It is not glory that they recount. Each mark serves to remind me of the penance I must face when this is over.’

‘This will never be over, Wolf. I have emerged champion from two of these infernal games, only to find myself here, at the beginning of a fresh nightmare.’

‘In death brother, in death shall it be over.’

‘Hmm,’ Ecanus sniffed. ‘Perhaps it will be you and I who fight next.’

‘Perhaps,’ answered Thorolf softly. ‘The eldar take great pleasure in watching the arena tear apart the bond of brotherhood.’

‘Ramiel?’

Thorolf nodded, ‘I killed him.’ He met Ecanus’s gaze. The Dark Angel brow was creased with rage, his eyes murderous. ‘Fear not brother, should we make it far enough in this forsaken tournament then I have no doubt that we shall be pitted against one another. You will have your chance to restore Ramiel’s honour...’ Thorolf shuffled down onto the ground and closed his eyes, ‘but for now, there are plenty enough xenos and mutated abominations for us to dull our blades on.’

The grind of gears and rattle of chain-fed levers woke Thorolf. He could have enabled his Catalepsean Node to cut in; allowing parts of his brain to switch off while the others maintained alertness. But in truth he needed to rest fully. The demands the recent past had placed on his body were nothing to what his mind had been forced to endure. He sat up as the brass door to his cell ground open. A lithe figured entered, the symmetry of her long, curved limbs and perfect bosom at odds with the vertical grille that replaced her face. Thorolf stayed on the ground as two of her kin entered, and flanked her to either side. They were badly hunched, the musculature in their chest’s overdeveloped to such an extent it threatened to snap their backs. Their bodies were revolting, sheathed in a sickly skin with pores that dripped with virulent toxins. Yet by the standards of most cultures their faces would have been considered beautiful.

‘Stand.’ The female hissed the command through her grille-face.

The word rasped through the air, both distorted and clear. Had it not been for his Lyman’s Ear, which worked to filter out the harshness of the sound, it would have ripped into Thorolf’s skull like a saw blade. As it was, he felt wetness on his cheeks as blood trickled from his ears. He stood and waited for the hunched males to step forward, keeping his gaze fixed on the perverse ugliness of the female as they shackled his wrists with heavy chains.

‘Follow.’ The female turned sharply, her barbed hair cutting the air as she exited.

Thorolf ground his teeth as he fought against the nausea her voice induced, and allowed himself to be led from the cell by the hunchbacks.

The corridor stank of death. On the battlefield, Thorolf had smelt almost every death imaginable: the acrid taste of dirt mixed with bone as explosive rounds blew men apart; the sharp tang of laser fire as it lanced through their flesh; and the choking smell of promethium that burned them to ash and boiled away the air they breathed. But the death-smell in the corridor was far more putrid than anything a soldier was capable of inflicting on his enemies. The air tasted of depravity, of death wrought for the enjoyment of butchers. Thorolf tried hard not to breathe too deeply, his enhanced senses choked by the reek of dozens of foul toxins and pollutants. Down there, in the depths of an alien contrived hell, you died over a long time, when elaborate tortures had broken your spirit, and decay and rot had wasted your body. Death here was not a means to an end, an acceptable part of winning a war. It was manufactured for its own sake.

The hunchbacks led Thorolf along a snaking corridor of tarnished metal and smooth stone, lit by ghoulish faces that hung from the ceiling like lanterns. The eyes and mouths cast a drab light on the studded panels of the walkway. Each time he’d been led from his cell, Thorolf had tried to get his bearings. He’d tried to keep track of the twists in the corridor by counting the lanterns, then by remembering the shape of the other cells they passed. But it was no use, each time the corridor looked different, turned in a different direction. It was as impossible to fathom as it was for him to deny the hundred years of training and instinct that forced him to continue to try.

At the bottom of a metal incline, the female turned and spoke, ‘Stillness.’

Thorolf remained where he was as the hunchbacks ambled forward and removed his chains.

‘Go,’ the female motioned towards the ramp with an elongated arm that ended in knife-like fingers.

Thorolf fixed his gaze ahead and started up the incline. The surface, which at first had seemed smooth and featureless, was covered in an intricate design and script; carved into the metal with a craftsmanship that Thorolf doubted even his Chapter’s finest artisans could match. Blood ran in the relief between the symbols, tracing a grim outline around them. Thorolf felt his pulse quicken as he realised the arena he was about to enter was of more significance than the ones he’d fought in previously. At the top of the ramp Thorolf was met by an enormous circular metallic door large enough for his Chapter’s holy Land Raiders to drive through two abreast. He waited.

With a whisper, the circular door opened, its petal-like segments peeling apart to reveal an equally massive spiked gate. Light flooded in, and Thorolf was forced to cover his eyes until they adjusted. Then came the noise, a thunderous cacophony of jeering voices calling Thorolf to battle.

‘Within dark and forgotten regions hide the enemies of the Emperor. Be resolute. You have received his gifts so that you may enter such places and cleanse them,’ Thorolf let the mantra slow the beating of his twin hearts, and ease the tension from his shoulders.

The gate vibrated angrily as unseen machines hoisted it up into the vaulted ceiling. Thorolf took a long breath and strode forward; whatever it was that awaited him, he would bring it the Emperor’s forgiveness.

Thorolf stepped onto the arena floor, a steel platform covered in coarse, spiked gravel, to an explosion of noise from the crowd. He ignored them, thankful for the heat of the planet’s three suns as they burned down on him. The coliseum was by far the largest he had fought in. Tiered galleries surrounded the fighting pit, towering up into the blood-stained sky to where even Thorolf’s enhanced eyes could make out no more than a vague outline. No wall separated the crowd from the gladiators, allowing a privileged few to be sprayed with the blood of a combatant as an opponent’s blade opened his flesh. Between each row of seated spectators a pole of spiked iron stood in the ground, the head of a fallen gladiator impaled upon its tip.

At the opposite side of the arena, Thorolf saw his opponent – an ork. He had killed hundreds of the green beast’s kin on the field of battle, given the order to bombard thousands more out of existence from the deck of an orbiting battle-barge. But here, without the protection of his blessed armour, the cleansing rounds of his boltgun or the reassuring weight of the crozius arcanum, the hulking greenskin seemed a far harder proposition. Even hunched, the beast stood head and shoulders above Thorolf. Stood upright, it would have been double his height. The Ork gripped a makeshift mace in each of its oversized fists, metal poles with stone blocks chained to their tops.

Thorolf hefted the saw-blade he’d taken from the armoury in his right hand. ‘Pit the might of your faith against the strength of the foe and you will cease their onslaught,’ Thorolf knelt in prayer, sanctifying his temporary weapon the way he would have honoured his own battlegear.

The air above the centre of the arena sparked and distorted. Thorolf turned his attention upwards as the light folded in on itself creating a dark spot from which an obsidian balcony materialised. The platform was devoid of any thrusters, and Thorolf assumed it was held aloft by the same advanced anti-grav technology the eldar used on their skimming battle tanks. The crowd fell silent as the doors stood in the centre of the balcony swung open.

A single figure emerged onto the platform. Thorolf recognised him by the blood-soaked flesh cloak that hung across his shoulders. The Orator, the grotesque narrator of Damorragh’s arenas, was clad in crimson armour that dripped with thick blood pumped over its surface by hidden nozzles. With the skin of his bald scalp scraped back in a taut flesh-lock, his eyelids pinned back to reveal pallid, weeping eyes, and his mouth sewn shut by barbed wire, he was as frightening a spectacle as anything the arena could muster.

‘Citizens of Damorragh, warriors of the Bladed Lotus, raise your blades and kneel,’ the Orator’s lips stayed sewn shut as he spoke. Instead, the hundreds of ghoulish faces impaled around the arena gave voice to his words, their lifeless jaws moving in unnatural unison.

A hundred thousand barbed weapons glinted in the sun as the assembled masses obeyed.

‘Archon K’shaic,’ the Orator made a sweeping gesture with his arms, flicking blood from his armour into the air. The droplets hung suspended for a fraction too long, a morbid collage painted with the blood of the archon’s enemies. To Thorolf they formed a crimson serpent, and he felt his insides bunch at the unnatural liquid.

K’shaic stepped through the doors to deafening applause; the interlocking plates of his midnight black armour shifting like scuttle beetles. The blood-master of the depraved arena world raised a gauntleted hand and took his seat at the front of the balcony.

Once more, the Orator spoke through the mouths of the dead. ‘Here in Xelaic Prime, most blood-spattered of our inglorious amphitheatres, the tournament of the Razor Vein dawns. Let us greet it with the blood of a lab-grown man-thing and the entrails of a barbarous ork.’

Thorolf tried to block out the voices, but they washed over him in a nauseous wave that flooded his mind. He looked around for some way of silencing them but saw no cables or antenna linking the heads to the Orator. Thorolf dared not think of the debased technology the aliens used to accomplish such a bonding with the dead.

‘Emperor protects,’ he said, turning his thoughts away from the macabre.

From across the arena, the ork bellowed a thunderous roar, its mouth opening wide enough to swallow Thorolf’s head whole. He remained kneeling and closed his eyes. Enraged by its prey’s insensate reaction, the greenskin beat its chest and charged towards the Space Marine. Thorolf felt the ground tremble under the ork’s quickening footsteps. It rushed onward, and his nose picked up the beast’s foul breath. Thorolf shifted his weight to the front of his feet. The Ork’s sweat filled his senses. He heard the crunch of gravel as the beast turned on its foot, swinging a mace at his face. Thorolf sprang up and backwards in a tight arc, his blade flashing out to slice up the ork’s midsection and rip though its eye. The beast howled and stumbled backwards.

Thorolf landed and rolled sideways, away from the ork’s enraged thrashing. On his feet, he darted inside the beast’s reach, chopping its right hand off at the wrist with a downward stroke. Turning in place he brought it back up to block the mace held in the ork’s left, though the force of the blow threw him flat on his back. Thorolf rolled sideways as the ork brought a foot down to trample him, reaching up to cut the tendons behind the beast’s knees. Unable to stand, the ork fell forward, catching itself on its remaining hand. Thorolf leapt to his feet and dragged his blade two-handed through the ork’s neck. Showered in blood, Thorolf tore his blade free, locking eyes with the archon as the ork’s head flopped backwards onto its shoulders.

‘Our stances are not as dissimilar as I would have expected Space Wolf; you fight with more grace than I credited you with.’

Thorolf had no idea how Ecanus had observed his fight with the ork, and he was too weary to investigate further, ‘Ramiel. I fought many bouts alongside him.’ Thorolf eased his body onto the ground, ‘A true warrior must learn from his allies and adapt to his enemy.’

Ecanus said nothing.

He was awake when they came for Ecanus. Though his eyes were shut, Thorolf had allowed his Catalepsean Node to keep part of his brain alert, forgoing a measure of rest to keep a mind on his new cell mate. Judging by the stench, a pair of hunchbacks had entered the cell, though Thorolf didn’t detect the female. He picked up a new scent as a harsh male voice ordered Ecanus to stand. It reminded Thorolf of the deep rumble the deceleration thrusters on a drop-pod made seconds before impact. He felt pressure build in his ears until he was sure they would burst. Fighting the urge to vomit, Thorolf continued to listen as the hunchbacks shackled the Dark Angel, chains rattling as they led him off into the corridor. Thorolf waited for three breaths but the door didn’t close.

Thorolf opened his eyes, and rose to a crouch. Awake, he tensed and relaxed his muscles, bringing his body to combat readiness. Yet he still found himself caught by surprise when the female appeared in the doorway. She fixed Thorolf with her oval eyes, each a single black jewel promising infinite pleasure, and leaned into the cell. Unable to do otherwise, he held her gaze.

The female ran her palm over the wall sending a snaking current across its surface. The metal of the wall shifted like water, rippling away from the current’s touch. Thorolf watched as the energy settled in a pool above his head height. The grey of the wall dissolved and fell away in droplets to reveal a dark, fathomless rectangle. A moment later and a fighting pit swam into view. Through the eldritch lens Thorolf felt the heat of the suns and tasted the outside air. Somehow, the female had opened a portal onto the arena itself.

‘Watch.’

The word drifted from her face-grille like thoughts and seeped into Thorolf’s mind. Despite himself, he took comfort in the warm embrace of her voice. The female retracted her arm, the door springing closed behind her.

‘Emperor forgive me,’ Thorolf bowed his head, ashamed of his weakness. He let a drop of his acid-saliva fall onto his forearm, keeping his lips sealed as it bubbled away his flesh.

Through the portal, Thorolf watched a blue humanoid enter the arena. He had his back to him, a long blade held by his side. Beyond the tau, Thorolf could just make out Ecanus clutching a trident-like spear in both hands. Thorolf had encountered the tau twice in his lifetime; they were exceptional marksmen and employed powerful ranged weaponry, but he doubted they could match Ecanus in combat. The tau stepped forward and Thorolf caught sight of four more of its kin, all similarly armed and pacing towards Ecanus. That evened things up.

Thorolf could see the crowd cheering, willing blood to be spilt, and the Orator floating above the arena his arms outstretched in pantomime. Yet he could hear nothing. Watch, the female voice surfaced in Thorolf’s mind; she was being literal. He stared at the portal as it bobbed within the wall of his cell, and shuddered at the erroneousness of the alien technology.

Thorolf’s captors had never allowed him to watch a match before. Perhaps they wanted him to see what nightmares awaited him, so that they may revel in his fear; or they wanted him to watch his brother Space Marine die, and gorge themselves on his anguish. Even in the darkest corners of his heart, Thorolf knew no fear, and the Dark Angel’s death would be an inconvenience at best – his would-be tormentors would fail on both accounts.

Ecanus’s spear struck the lead tau in the chest and pitched him backwards. Thorolf flinched as a spatter of blood shot through the portal to land on his face.

Thorolf wiped his brow, rubbing the sticky tau blood between his forefinger and thumb, ‘Emperor protects.’

The fallen tau’s body was blocking his view of part of the arena, but Thorolf could make out Ecanus surrounded by the remaining tau. Ecanus sprang into motion, and in a blur of tangled limbs fought his way through the circle of tau, to emerge on the side closest to Thorolf. The Dark Angel was bleeding from several slashes on his arms and back but seemed untroubled. Two more of the tau lay dead in his wake, each missing an arm and a leg. Ecanus now gripped their blades in his hands. The last of the tau approached him cautiously. The Dark Angel strode forward, blocking the tau to his left’s downward stroke with a rising sweep of his own blade. Reversing the motion, he severed the tau’s arm at the elbow, before taking a half step forward and pushing the blade through the alien’s throat. Ecanus left the blade in place and spun on the spot, kicking the final tau in the head as it rushed in to attack. The Dark Angel caught the dazed tau’s weapon hand and muttered something before bending the weaker creatures arm back until it pierced its chest with its own blade.

Blood dripping from him like a macabre sweat, his muscular frame fighting for breath, Ecanus looked more feral than any Space Wolf Thorolf had ever encountered.

Abruptly, the portal closed and the limits of Thorolf’s world reasserted themselves.

‘The lion and the wolf, together,’ Ecanus held out his hand, ‘what would our ancestors make of this?’

Thorolf ignored Ecanus’s jibe and clasped the Dark Angel’s hand.

Surprised that his mention of the rivalry between their two Chapters hadn’t promoted as much as a growl or toothed grin from his opposite, Ecanus clasped the Space Wolves hand for a second too long.

Thorolf was about to speak when a tremor rocked the ground beneath his feat, forcing him to steady himself. The arena floor continued to rumble, giving birth to four obsidian columns that pushed up through the ground like the stems of some infernal plant, dislodged rock tumbling from them as they rose. The pillars stood equidistant from one another, creating a smaller arena within the confines of the larger fighting pit. Each was covered in bronzed spikes and etched with burning runes that spat blood into the air.

‘Citizens of Damorragh,’ the Orator appeared in the air between the four pillars, his arms outstretched like the master of a blasphemous orchestra. ‘Archon K’shaic welcomes you all to the final stages of the Razor Vein.’ The crowd answered the Orator with a screaming roar, several of them cutting their own flesh in honour of the tournament. ‘Two of mankind’s superhumans,’ the Orator swept his arm out to encompass Ecanus and Thorolf, blood flowing from his armour to form a toothed serpent in the air. ‘Those considered the height of human evolution...’ the ghoulish vox-faces conveyed every nuance of the Orator’s mocking tone, ‘...against this monster.’ the Orator pointed a blood-slicked arm at the ogryn.

Thorolf stared past the bleeding columns towards their opponent and sighed. The ogryn’s bulk was greater than even his and Ecanus’s muscular frames combined. A particularly resilient species of abhuman, Thorolf had once watched an ogryn stagger from a burning Chimera armoured transport, its skin running from its skeleton like melted rubber as it charged into the fray, bent on exacting vengeance from its would be killers. The abhuman had barrelled into a group of cultists who tried in vain to scrabble away. Using its weapon like a meat-hammer, the ogryn beat them to death with blunt, callous strikes. Concentrated lasfire and small-arms munitions had blasted chunks off the abhuman’s flesh as the cultists rallied, yet still it had fought on, cracking their treacherous bones until a barking heavy weapon round exploded its head in a shower of teeth and bone.

Thorolf studied the ogryn’s confident gait as it began pacing towards him, a massive halberd clutched in one over-sized fist, a flail of chain wrapped around the other like an improvised knuckle-duster. He took one look at the saw-blade in his own hand and found himself longing for the arcing power of the weapon of his office, the peerless relic his captors had taken from him.

‘An abhuman, a bastard flaw of their species.’ the Orator continued, turning in the air to include more of the crowd. ‘Today, we shall see who evolution truly favours – the genetic misfit or this pair of lab-grown dolls.’

‘You do not fight like a wolf.’ As the Orator brought the fight to a start, Thorolf remembered the words Ecanus had spoken three fights ago, after watching him kill a vicious, bird-like xenos. ‘I have fought alongside Space Wolves before and you lack their ferocity. You attack with poise and intent, never with instinct.’

‘You brother, are not the only warrior with a keen eye.’ Thorolf had replied. ‘The eldar are well versed in how we of the Fang wage battle. I would have been slain like a youngling whelp had I not adapted my approach.’ Thorolf hadn’t been sure if Ecanus had believed him. He still wasn’t.

‘Vlka Fenryka!’ Thorolf beat his chest and advanced to the orgyn’s right. He motioned for Ecanus to circle left, knowing full well their best chance lay in attacking from both sides at once. But the ogryn moved with them, side-stepping and turning so that Thorolf always blocked Ecanus’s line of attack and vice versa. Clever, thought Thorolf, what the abhuman lacked in intelligence his genetic disposition for fighting seemed more than capable of compensating for.

‘You are an oddity of creation, a stain on the Emperor’s divine canvas...’ Thorolf spat as he continued to circle the ogryn. The abhuman’s face folded in rage but it didn’t break from the stand-off as Thorolf had hoped. It wasn’t inconceivable that the abhuman had undergone some form of neural enhancement at the hands of the eldar. ‘I will take your life in penance for the sin of your birth.’ Thorolf stepped in to attack but the ogryn was ready, striking out with the halberd. Wrong footed, Thorolf pivoted out the way, the halberd’s blade slicing through the air where his throat had been a moment before, and dropped into a roll.

Thorolf got to his feet as Ecanus’s impaler speared past him and into the ogryn’s shoulder, stopping the abhuman’s advance and giving the Space Wolf time to recover. Untroubled, the ogryn grunted in annoyance, pulling the spear out and tossing it away.

‘We must attack together.’ Ecanus pointed towards the ogryn, ‘From this side.’

Thorolf followed Ecanus’s gaze – behind the abhuman a glistening spike jutted out from the nearest of the columns. ‘I understand, brother.’

Together, Thorolf and Ecanus strode towards the ogryn. Thorolf relaxed his body and lowered his weapon, baiting the abhuman. The ogryn didn’t waste the opportunity, striking out with the halberd in a long-reaching slash that would have been impossible if it weren’t for the abhuman’s weaponised biceps. Thorolf’s blade was raised in an instant. Blocking the halberd, Thorolf rolled along its length, inside the orgyn’s reach. At the same time Ecanus rushed in and pinned the abhuman’s other arm.

‘All-Father, grant me strength!’ Thorolf hammered his shoulder in under the ogryn’s arm and tried to drive him back. The abhuman resisted, his feet fixed in place.

‘He’s too strong,’ Ecanus snarled.

‘Wound it!’ Thorolf swung the ridge of his hand up and into the soft meat of the monster’s throat, bruising its windpipe.

Ecanus followed suit, delivering three swift punches to the ogryn’s body, the punch-dagger clutched in his fist digging deep into the abhuman’s flesh.

Thorolf felt the resistance lessen, the muscles in his legs flexing as they edged the ogryn backwards.

‘Now!’ Ecanus yelled.

Thorolf pushed with every ounce of the holy strength the Emperor had gifted him, the screaming pain in his muscles drowned out by the roar of defiance in his throat.

Together, the Space Marines powered the ogryn backwards, driving him onto the spike. Thorolf felt the abhuman go slack as the serrated metal punched through its abdomen, shredding its organs as it drove through them. Thorolf kept pushing, tearing the ogryn along the length of the spike until its back was against the pillar. Exhausted, Thorolf let go and staggered away from the eviscerated ogryn.

The abhuman glanced down at the spike protruding from his chest. It was sticking out from his midriff like the misplaced tusk of a metal beast.

Thorolf looked round as a guttural sound rumbled from the ogryn’s damaged throat, blood spilling over its lips with every tortured syllable. He watched as the abhuman reached up with its hands and gripped the spike, and strained to hear a rasping curse, as the ogryn pulled its ruined body, hand-over-hand to the end of the spike.

‘Emperor’s mercy,’ Thorolf stared in disbelief as the ogryn inched its way off the spine of metal. ‘Will this abomination not find peace?’ Breathing hard, he turned his blade over and readied himself for another attack.

For the briefest of moments, Ecanus took his eyes off of the ogryn to glance at Thorolf. The elegant piousness of the Space Wolf continued to unsettle him. It was not the way of the Fenrisians. A rising roar from the crowd drew Ecanus’s attention back to the abhuman, his doubts pushed aside by decades of conditioning as he readied his weapon.

The attack never came. Free from the skewer, the ogryn fell to its knees, its midriff torn apart, its shredded entrails spilling to the ground. Twice it tried to rise, gurgling bloodied chunks as it sought to voice its frustration, until even its enduring constitution gave way to the inevitable, the last of its innards escaping through the grievous wound in its torso. With a final grimace, the ogryn fell forward onto its face and lay still, the earth beneath its body stained dark by an expanding pool of blood.

‘His will,’ Thorolf lowered his blade and walked to Ecanus, ‘You fought well, brother.’

‘As did you. Though it seems as well that you don’t give into your more impulsive nature too often, that clumsy abhuman would have had your head had I not intervened.’

Thorolf grinned, ‘Aye, it is as you say, brother.’ He fought to keep the smile from his face. Thorolf had hoped that the Dark Angel would interpret his carelessness as the act of an enraged, impetuous Space Wolf. Thorolf clamped his fist against his chest, ‘You have my thanks.’

Ecanus’s reply was lost in the maelstrom of directional air as a platfrom shot down from the upper reaches of the amphitheatre and threw the two Space Marines flat with a decelerating burst from its engines.

Thorolf was aware of the crowd going berserk, chanting words of hate as he suffered for their amusement. Even with his enhanced hearing, he was unable to tell where the roar of the thrusters ended and their bloodthirsty shrieking began. Pinned to the ground, Thorolf managed to crane his neck round far enough to catch a glimpse of the platform. A discus of sublime metal that was at the same time transparent and pitch black, the platform seemed to blink in and out of focus. Holding it aloft were three monstrous faces that spewed flame downward, each a tortured sculpture of the terrible beasts that stalked the arena. Though Thorolf suspected their purpose was more decorative than functional, the platform likely calling upon the same esoteric anti-grav technology that the rest of the eldar vehicles used to stay aloft. Thorolf felt the pressure on him wane as the thrusters died, the platform drifting to the ground to his left. Able to move, Thorolf sprang to his feet and took up a guard position next to Ecanus.

Two hulking figures stepped off the platforms. Each head and shoulders taller than the ogryn, they gripped two-handed axes in immense fists and left depressions in the ground as they walked. Under ragged robes of dyed flesh, taut translucent skin strived to contain their swollen musculature. Implanted pipes and hoses fed coloured liquids directly into their organs, which glowed with a sickly hue beneath a re-engineered skeleton. Errant cables snaked from sparking backpacks and shocked their nervous system into a constant state of readiness, further increasing their lethality.

Thorolf dropped his guard. He knew with certainty that without the augmentative abilities of their power armour, he and Ecanus were no match for the colossal arrivals. Clearly, whoever else was waiting on the platform was taking no chances that the gladiators might try and kill them.

The lead brute pointed toward the platform, motioning for the Space Marines to board.

Thorolf stepped forward, stopping short as one of the brutes caught his arm. He let out a cry of pain, dropping to one knee as he felt his skin burning beneath the vat-creation’s icy grip. Thorolf dropped his blade and the crushing hand let him go. He tested his arm, splaying and tensing his fingers, checking for broken bones and severed tendons. Nothing; his arm was fine. Where his senses told him that his radius and ulna should have been broken, the tendons severed, his limb useless, reality asserted otherwise. Thorolf glanced up at the brute, inwardly shuddering at the adeptness with which the eldar administered pain, and joined Ecanus on the platform.

The brutes stepped on behind Thorolf and the platform sped upwards, activated by the weight of their immense physiques. The crowd applauded as it roared up past the highest balconies of the arena, carried aloft on pillars of blood-red flame. Thorolf tensed the muscles in his legs, ready to adjust for any pitch or yaw that might toss him over the edge. He needn’t have bothered – for all its seemingly abrupt, crude acceleration, the dais maintained a perfect horizontal alignment as it climbed. Thorolf experienced none of the discomfort he’d have expected from such rapid acceleration, his breathing normal and his feet as steady on the platform as they were on the ground. Confident in his footing, Thorolf relaxed, noticing for the first time the intricate detail forged into the floor. The prostrate bodies of a human, an orc, a tau, an eldar and several creatures Thorolf had never encountered were strewn across the platform, their macabre mouths fixed in a moment of pain, gutted by a barbed vine that looped around the platform and tore through their bodies.

‘Watch,’ the word came from nowhere.

Thorolf spun in place, his eyes searching the platform for... the female. She was on the platform. How? The thought hung in his mind like a slab of ceramite, slowing his wits. How had he not seen her? What unholy alliance of light and dark had worked to keep her from him?

‘Watch,’ the female repeated her command and walked to the edge of the platform, pointing a slender limb down towards the arena.

Thorolf swallowed the temptation to shove her off and followed her gaze to the arena below. Impossibly, he could see everything – the Orator, his arms sweeping the air as he spoke; two eldar, one in pale bone armour wielding a sword that throbbed with eldritch current, the other in hues of green clutching an elegant chainsword; facing them the arena champion, Khalys Dzhar, who was all but naked save for the leather holsters and bandoliers that held her array of knives. Unsurprisingly, Thorolf could hear nothing.

‘You two next,’ the female motioned to Thorolf and Ecanus, and withdraw to the rear of the platform.

The meaning was clear; she wanted the Space Marines to watch Khalys slay the eldar, to quiver as they awaited their own turn to cross swords with the arena’s champion. Thorolf would give her no such satisfaction. He was an instrument of the Emperor, he feared no evil, his faith armour against the horrors of the universe. The wych Khalys was but one more stepping-stone on the path to his quarry. Thorolf turned away from the arena...

‘She is not unbeatable.’

Thorolf turned back, annoyed that Ecanus had mistaken his disinterest for concern.

‘She wastes energy with her flourishes. Her obsession with violence makes her unable simply to strike, to kill. For her there is too much pleasure to be gleaned from the moment.’

Thorolf watched Khalys slip a blade into the green-armoured eldar’s neck as Ecanus spoke.

‘It is slight, minute even, but there is a lull in her concentration.’ Ecanus pointed at the wych’s face and it zoomed into focus. ‘See, as she cuts and tastes blood, she relishes the sensation. We can exploit that.’

‘Warriors of the Bladed Lotus,’ the Orator swept off the Archon’s balcony into the air, a mist of red gore billowing in his wake like a vengeful cape. ‘Much blood has been spilt for your pleasure. Now, it is you who must give yours.’

‘A razor through our veins! A blade through the heart of our foe!’ As one, the warriors of the Bladed Lotus recited the oath. Drawing ceremonial daggers from ornate clasps fastened around their wrists; they slashed their hands, squeezing three drops of blood each into a thin channel that spiralled down through the galleries of the amphitheatre. The crowd fell silent as the blood trickled downwards to pool in the skull of an onyx gargoyle.

‘Drink!’

Khalys bowed to the Orator and walked beneath the gargoyle. The beast’s stone mouth opened, bathing Khalys in the crimson liquid. She opened her mouth wide, relishing the baptism as the blood fell across her face and flooded her throat.

‘And so it begins, the end of the Razor Vein,’ the Orator broke the silence that had descended upon the arena.

Without pause, Khalys turned and paced towards the Space Marines. She had sought no respite after killing the eldar, stopping only to accept a frenzied roar of approval as the crowd celebrated their champion. Droplets of the green-armoured warrior’s blood still adorned her unblemished skin, reminding Thorolf of the tell-tale markings carried by the most venomous snakes of his home world.

Ecanus sensed the other Space Marine’s disquiet, ‘Remember, brother, she can be killed.’ The Dark Angel shook the tension from his body and tested the weight of the impaler he carried in his right hand.

‘As the Emperor wills it,’ affirmed Thorolf adopting an aggressive posture with his blade.

Khalys smiled and stopped. Sheathing her twin blades, she held her empty hands up to the archon. The crowd met her display with ecstasy, eager to see her kill the so called super-humans with her bare hands.

Thorolf thrust his blade at her midsection. She stepped to the side, patting away his arm with her palm before skipping her knee into his jaw. Thorolf staggered backwards, teeth loose in his mouth. Ecanus made to attack Khalys’ exposed back but she was quicker, twisting in mid-air to kick him in the head. The blow flipped him; he landed hard on his shoulder.

Thorolf struck out with a flurry of arcing cuts, but the wych weaved between his blows, stepping inside his guard to strike him in the throat before hooking her hand under his arm and throwing him to the ground. Khalys moved to finish the prone Space Marine, but Ecanus interceded, stabbing the tip of his impaler toward her. She turned just in time and leapt over the weapon. Ecanus pressed his attack but the wych cartwheeled off to the side, whipping her feet into the side of his head as she danced past.

The crowd roared with amusement as the Space Marines flailed around like children, unable to land a blow on the dextrous wych.

Khalys attacked again. Pushing through her toes, she let her lithe calf muscles propel her through the air, the ridge of her outstretched foot aimed at Thorolf’s throat. Ecanus read her move. Pivoting on his back foot he kicked Thorolf hard in the abdomen. The Space Wolf bent double as the blow, robbing Khalys of her target, unbalancing her. Ecanus let the momentum of his strike carry him round, swinging his rear leg up like the blade of a grav-copter to kick the wych in the face as she landed.

Khalys moved with the blow, folding into a roll that took her clear of the Space Marines and up to her feet. She touched a hand to her jaw and licked her tongue around the inside of her mouth, delighting in the metallic tang of her chemical-filled blood. With a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, Khalys unsheathed her knives.

‘No more games wych,’ Ecnaus spat.

Khalys snarled and leapt at the Dark Angel. Ecanus gripped his impaler by the edge of the haft and whipped it out in a long-arcing strike. Khalys bent at the waist, curving her body underneath his swing. Rising, she disarmed Ecanus, slashing a dagger across his forearm and driving the other into the side of his neck. The wych finished with a flourish, kicking Ecanus in the face with the exact same kick he’d struck her with.

Thorolf looked up from all fours. Kahlys had paused to savour the Dark Angel’s blood. It had been for less than a heartbeat, but for an instant she wasn’t in motion.

Khalys was poised to finish Ecanus as he struggled with the wound in his neck.

Thorolf sprinted headlong at the wych. She turned as he knew she would. He fed her blades the outsides of his forearms. Devoid of vital arteries, her blows would not be fatal.

Blood splashed across Khalys’s face. She moved around the charging Space Marine, though slower than she might have, her mouth open as she relished the fruit of his veins. Thorolf twisted as he past her, and spat a gobbet of acid-saliva onto her face.

Khalys screamed as the searing liquid burnt at her flesh. She lashed out like a rabid dog, her twin blades seeking vengeance.

Thorolf swept low, avoiding her desperate attack, and ripped his blade across her abdomen.

He stared at Khalys as she bled out on the ground in front of him. The wych’s once perfect features burned away by his saliva, her lithe body ruined by the vengeful teeth of his blade. Ecanus had been right, Khalys technique was as flawed as her debased soul. Thorolf caught the Dark Angel’s hand as he moved to finish Khalys.

‘The champion of this accursed arena does not deserve the All-father’s mercy. She will die in pain.’

‘As you wish,’ Ecanus dipped his head in acknowledgement.

‘Emperor, eternal saviour and redeemer, it is by your hand and unfailing wisdom that we have been spared this fate.’ Thorolf closed his eyes in prayer.

Ecanus stared at Khalys in silent satisfaction as the last of her life-force ebbed away. The wych’s veins pulsed like flashes of lightning beneath her taut flesh as the cocktail of stimms and combat drugs in her system continued to burn. Khalys’s flesh began to bubble and run as the excess adrenaline and frenzon in her blood melted her organs. Within moments all that remained was a pool of toxic ichor.

Ecanus ignored the jubilant roaring of the crowd and held his hand out towards Thorolf. ‘It has been an honour to fight by your side, brother.’

Thorolf looked Ecanus in the eyes and grasped his arm in a warrior fashion, clasping his hand around the other Space Marine’s forearm. ‘It is my sacred duty to save your soul from the Dark Gods of Chaos,’ Thorolf stared into Ecanus’s eyes as he spoke, feeling the Dark Angel’s grip loosen as realisation set in, ‘and I will save your soul, even if you die in the process.’

The nagging feeling Ecanus had pushed to the recesses of his mind burst to the surface like a blazing comet, illuminating the truth that had until now eluded him. Past the unruly, matted hair, the unwashed skin, and the careful lies, Ecanus saw Thorolf for the first time. The other Space Marine was not a wolf but a lion, a Dark Angel.

‘You...’ Ecanus’s mouth hung open as understanding dawned.

Thorolf brought his knee up and drove his foot into Ecanus’s chest. Ecanus let the force of the blow carry him and rolled backwards to his feet. ‘I am Interrogator Chaplain Ramiel,’ Thorolf spoke, revealing his true identity, ‘member of the most sacred brotherhood of the Inner Circle, son of the Lion and avenging blade of the Angels.’ Ramiel pointed his blade at Ecanus, ‘You are a traitorous cur, a shameful stain upon our Chapter’s honour and I have come to offer redemption.’

Ecanus bared his teeth in a snarl, ‘I will spit upon your corpse, pawn of Jonson.’ Ecanus sprang at Ramiel, unfettered rage dulling the pain from his wounds.

Ramiel stepped off Ecanus’s line of attack, avoiding the punch-dagger that was aimed at his primary heart, and sliced his blade down towards Ecanus’s thigh. The Fallen countered without pause, pivoting away from the blade, swinging his leg up over the sword stroke to kick the Chaplain in the jaw. Ramiel staggered, recovering in time to block the cross Ecanus threw at his nose. Too late, Ramiel realised Ecanus had wanted him to block it. The Fallen rode the momentum of the Chaplain’s parry, folding his arm in on itself and bringing his elbow smashing through Ramiel’s guard and into his face. Ramiel felt the sickening crunch as his cheekbone broke, dropping his blade as he struggled to stay upright. Ecanus allowed him no reprieve, spinning tightly to deliver a powerful back-kick that broke the Chaplain’s ribs and sent him sprawling into the dirt. Ramiel wheezed heavily as his lungs struggled to draw breath.

The crowd erupted in violence-fuelled ecstasy, drinking in the animosity between the two combatants.

‘I have crossed the depths of space and ripped the hearts from warriors far mightier than you before you’d even deemed to crawl from your mother’s foetid womb,’ spat Ecanus as he paced towards Ramiel.

Ramiel felt his strength slipping, he needed to buy some time, recover and then–

Fight now, heal later.

Brother-Sergeant Sariel’s voice filled the Chaplain’s head. Sariel was a member of the Deathwatch, the best of the most elite warriors the Dark Angels could muster. He had helped Ramiel from his knees once before, back on Tervanaous IV when a tyranid bio-weapon had devoured most of Ramiel’s abdomen. Ramiel took heart from his old sergeant’s words, Sariel’s memory surfacing in the Chaplain’s mind to help him once more. Emboldened, Ramiel threw himself at Ecanus.

Caught off guard by his opponent’s sudden resurgence, Ecanus swung a clumsy punch at the Chaplain’s face. Ramiel caught the attack, wrapping his right arm around Ecanus’s left and using his other to hook the Fallen’s neck, pulling him into a headbutt that began when Ramiel had leapt from the ground and ended when it dented Ecanus’s brow and caved-in his right eye socket. Ramiel kept a hold of Ecanus, firing one knee and then the other into his gut, winding him. Grunting with effort, the Chaplain hurled the Fallen Angel across one of the barbed sections the arena floor. The carpet of microscopic blades ripped open Ecanus’s skin as he tumbled over it, leaving him bleeding from hundreds of small lacerations.

‘The will of the righteous cannot be denied,’ Ramiel let the catechism invigorate him.

Ecanus’s head swam, Ramiel’s blow had been severe and his body was struggling to heal the myriad incisions puncturing his body. He looked up and saw the Chaplain, blade in hand, advancing. Behind him, Ecanus could just make out the glint of an impaler in the dirt. Standing, he winced as the damnable arena stabbed into his feet.

‘Time to die, Chaplain,’ Ecanus skipped forward and flipped over Ramiel’s sword stroke. Landing behind the Chaplain, Ecanus scooped up the impaler with his foot; catching it he lunged at the Chaplain.

Ramiel had read Ecanus’s move, his clumsy sword stroke a lure. Turning on the balls of his feet, he side-stepped the impaler’s tip, grabbed its haft and pulled Ecanus onto his outstretched blade. Ramiel felt the Fallen’s body judder and spasm as the blade punctured his primary heart.

‘Let the blood of the unclean act as an offering to the Lion’s shade,’

The Chaplain ignored Ecanus’s desperate hands as they tried to push him away. Ripping the blade across Ecanus’s chest, Ramiel scythed it through the secondary heart and tore it out through the shoulder. The Fallen’s body fell at Ramiel’s feet in a ruined heap.

‘The unworthy shall be crushed from the Emperor’s sight.’ Ramiel stamped his foot down hard on Ecanus’s skull, cracking it into the dirt.

The crowd erupted in a torrent of cheering; their sickening ovation amplified to a numbing crescendo by the distended mouths of the cadaver heads encircling the arena.

Archon K’shaic stood, silencing the applauding masses.

‘Champion of Xelaic,’ the Orator began. ‘Through blood and death you have earned your freedom.’

Ramiel stood immobile and waited for the punchline.

‘You will accompany my master to the depths of Commorragh, where you will fight for even greater glory and perhaps even, immortality.’

The crowd approved. Braying like savages, they banged gauntleted fists against armoured chests and roared in pleasured excitement.

Ramiel’s jaw tightened in anger. He would no more continue to kill for the entertainment of K’shaic and his depraved race than he would have allowed Ecanus to live. The Chaplain closed his eyes for a moment, finding solace in the darkness and offering a prayer to the Emperor for strength. He felt the weight of the impaler clutched in his right hand, it was perfectly balanced. Opening his eyes Ramiel let his enhanced senses filter out the crowd. Their jeering faded away to a wash of noise, like waves rolling onto a distant beach. The army of pendants and the grotesque sheets of flapping skin blurring out of focus until only the archon remained visible – a dark spot at the end of a white tunnel Ramiel formed in his mind.

‘I am the Emperor’s wrath!’ cried Ramiel, and in one fluid motion the Chaplain stepped forward, his arm shooting up to launch the impaler at K’shaic’s chest.

The impaler flew true, covering the distance to the archon in a heartbeat and striking him full in the chest. The blow triggered a burst of light like the shattering of a minute star, momentarily eclipsing the archon and his attendants. In the after-flare, Ramiel saw K’shaic still standing – the archon had used some form of displacement field to swap places with the Orator.

A thousand lifeless mouths cried out in symphony as the Orator looked down at the haft of the impaler protruding from his chest, its spear tip buried in his black heart.

K’shaic watched dispassionately as the mouthless creature collapsed in a pool of thick blood. The cries of the Orator’s familiars tailed off as the last of its blood ran onto the barbed floor of the balcony. The archon nodded in mock respect towards the Chaplain, with a wicked smile that revealed two rows of dagger teeth.

‘His loyal servant unto death,’ Ramiel reached for where his rosarius should be sitting on his chest and awaited eternity.

AN EXTRACT FROM DELIVERANCE LOST

Gav Thorpe

‘Picket ships detected.’ Ephrenia’s announcement stilled the activity on the strategium.

‘Three destroyers, overlapping sensor sweeps, detecting plasma trails of three more vessels, probably light cruiser class,’ she continued.

The Avenger was only two days from reaching translation point, far enough away from the gravitic pull of Isstvan’s star to make a safe warp jump. For the last three days the net thrown up by the traitor ships had been closing in, but this was the closest they had come, only a few hundred thousand kilometres away.

Corax glanced at a screen in the arm of the command throne, showing the relative positions of the vessels. In a moment he had assessed their trajectories and the coverage of the scanner sweeps.

‘Too close to alter course,’ he declared. ‘We will have to make a dash for the translation point. Shut down all auxiliary systems, impose blacklight protocols, divert power savings to the engines.’

A series of affirmatives chorused from the assembled staff and legionaries. The primarch turned his attention to Commander Branne.

‘I want you and Agapito to make a stern-to-prow inspection. Ensure all support systems are at minimal output. Pass the word to Solaro and Aloni to enforce the blacklight protocols.’ The primarch raised his voice. ‘I want full energy balance in ten minutes, no later.’

‘Aye, lord, I’ll see to it,’ replied Branne.

‘Detecting launch, Lord Corax,’ said Ephrenia. ‘Picket ships are firing torpedoes, wide dispersal.’

‘Direction?’ snapped Corax, returning to his place behind the command throne, eyes fixed to the small data screen.

‘Crossing pattern,’ Ephrenia replied. ‘Even at our increased speed they will pass ahead of us.’

‘Clever bastards,’ muttered Branne from behind the primarch. ‘Hoping to get lucky with blind firing.’

‘Save three per cent of energy output for manoeuvring, just in case,’ said Corax. ‘All personnel to attend to battle stations.’

‘Weapons, Lord Corax?’ asked Ephrenia. Her expression was as calm as ever, but the primarch detected the slightest hint of tension in her voice. ‘Shall we reserve any output for the weapons batteries?’

‘No,’ replied the primarch after a moment’s thought. ‘We won’t be able to fight our way out of this one if we are discovered.’

‘And the void shield transformers, Lord Corax? Shall I have them running on standby?’

‘No,’ Corax said. ‘All power to reflex shields and engines, nothing else. If they hit us, it will be too late anyway.’

Taking the shield transformers offline would add almost four minutes to the time required for the reflex shields to revert to defensive void shields; extra minutes during which untold damage might be incurred by the Avenger. For the first time since he had come aboard, Corax noticed hesitation in the controller. It lasted only a heartbeat before Ephrenia nodded and turned to the task at hand. He heard the doors opening and glanced over his shoulder to see Branne departing on his inspection.

He checked the display again. They were two hundred and fifty thousand kilometres from the Traitor picket. Seven more vessels had been picked up by the low-band sensor screen, creating three layers of defence between the battle-barge and the safe translation point. If there was even a momentary blip in the reflex shields, or one of the torpedoes caught the Avenger in its blast, the primarch’s ship would quickly find itself surrounded by enemies.

He could not outpace his foes and he could not outfight them. Corax’s only option was to hold his nerve and stay focused on evading detection. It was something he had been good at since he was a boy, and he was not going to start making rash decisions now.

Blacklight protocols meant the complete shutdown of all non-essential systems. One by one, life support, lighting, heating and other environmental systems powered down to their minimum levels; just enough for the human crew to survive. Even the artificial gravity was lessened to one-half Terran normal, freeing up valuable power for the plasma drives.

In the busy transport compartments in the depths of the hold, nearly fifteen hundred legionaries were packed together as darkness descended. The battle-barge had been designed to carry a fraction of that number.

Space had been made in storage holds, weapon bays, and amongst the gantries and decks of the engine rooms. Squads had found room in maintenance crawlways and in stairwells, and several dozen elevator and conveyor shafts had been decommissioned to provide even more space. Even with such measures, the warriors of the Raven Guard had little freedom of movement. Only the main access corridors had been kept clear, to allow runners easy access between the strategium and other essential stations.

Amongst the throng, Alpharius watched the lights dimming and then going out. Of course, he was not the Alpharius, but by some clever mind-programming and a little psychic intervention by the Legion’s Librarius, he had chosen to forget his real name. To all intents and purposes, he now was Alpharius.

And he was a little concerned. He sat with his adopted squad on a gangway above the plasma reactors, clad in his armour. Environment warning sigils lit up in his display as the air thinned and gravity lessened. Without thought he gave a sub-vocal command to power up the auto-senses of his helmet.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

Alpharius turned his head as Command Aloni’s voice rang along the gantry. He realised the captain was talking to him.

‘You know what blacklight means,’ continued Aloni. ‘Power to minimal. Do you realise what kind of energy signature one and a half thousand power armoured legionaries are going to give off? Everybody pay attention! Everything is to be set to minimum output, lowest cycle. Rebreathing, moisture recycling, locomotion. Everything. No communications, no external address, no movement.’

Nodding his compliance, Alpharius powered down his suit, becoming an immobile statue of ceramite, plasteel and adamantium. His secondary heart began to beat, compensating for the lower temperature outside, and his multi-lung inflated, enabling him to cope with air that had not been properly recycled.

Around him the others were doing the same. Here, out by the reactors, all life support was being withdrawn, leaving each legionary cocooned within his own personal environment. Artificial night descended, broken only by the wink of illuminated gauges and monitor lights on the twin reactors fifty metres below the walkway. Moisture began to ice over the armour of the legionaries, thin trails of vapour dribbling from face masks and backpack exhaust vents.

Locked inside his suit, Alpharius realised how precarious his position was. Discovery was not an immediate problem. What with the reorganisation of the Legion, and the general unwillingness of the others to discuss what had happened on Isstvan, it had been simple enough to take up his new role.

His face was still sore from the grafting surgery, particularly where the implanted flesh of his new face met his original skin at the base of his neck and around his throat. The bone beneath had been remoulded and ached, while tendons and muscles that had been shortened or lengthened felt raw beneath his stolen skin.

Alpharius swallowed, remembering where the body had been found, no more than five minutes dead, leg blasted off by a Whirlwind rocket, spine snapped across a ridge of rock. The Apothecaries had acted as quickly as possible. For decades the Alpha Legion had striven to look alike, modelling themselves on their primarch, glorying in their anonymity. To have black hair, to have distinctive features and eyes that were a pale green, was a new sensation for him.

And the memories lurked inside his mind too. He knew a little about the legionary whose persona he had taken. He had taken in the meat of the fallen Raven Guard, allowing his omophagea to dissect and absorb the information about his prey. Bolstered by the abilities of the Librarians – abilities forbidden by the Decree at Nikaea but still widely practised by the Alpha Legion – he had gathered what fragments he could of the dead legionary’s life.

He could feel them, flashes of images, snippets of conversation. More than that, Alpharius could feel how his new persona had felt. He had been proud, a veteran of the Lycaeus uprising, and had earned distinction with the Raven Guard since they had been united with their primarch.

The memories itched as well, jarring inside his thoughts, confusing him occasionally. Over the time he had spent fleeing across Isstvan V with his new comrades, he had learned their names and faces and the way they fought. The most fraught time had been the first few days, when commands had been issued in codephrases, and formations called out in battle-lingua that he did not know, a language evolved on Deliverance that he had not grown up with. Yet he had been picked for this mission because of his gift with languages, his quick mind and his instinct for adaptation. His deficiencies had been covered by the efficiency and cohesion of the Raven Guard themselves and soon he had managed to blend in during the hit-and-run attacks, avoiding the suspicion of his squad comrades as well as the deadly attention of those pursuing the Raven Guard.

All of that seemed to be poised on the verge of pointlessness now, as he sat immobile over a reactor that would turn into a small star the moment it was breached, aboard a warship ghosting through an enemy fleet protected by nothing more than a few metres of bonded plasteel and adamantium. One lucky hit and he would be incinerated, along with the rest of those aboard the Avenger.

He did not know how many others of the Alpha Legion had been successful in taking their place; he did not know if he was the only one or if there were dozens of them. It did not matter. For the moment he was alone, and had to act accordingly. He had to do all he could to stay alive, remain undetected, observe Corax and get in touch with Omegon once they returned to Deliverance.

As fervently as he had ever hoped for success, he now hoped for his allies to fail. Whoever it was out there chasing the ship – Word Bearers, Alpha Legion, World Eaters, Sons of Horus, Iron Warriors, Imperial Army – Alpharius wished them every disaster that he could imagine: engine failure, outbreaks of disease, weapons malfunction, anything that would stop that one lucky hit from eradicating his existence. He was prepared to give his life for his primarch and his Legion, but not this way, not without a foe to fight and a mission to protect.

It would be such a pointless way to die, he thought, as the sound of a detonation echoed dully through the hull.

‘Nova cannon shell,’ reported Ephrenia. ‘Six thousand kilometres, starboard bow.’

Corax did not react immediately. Two cruisers had joined the destroyers, the growing enemy flotilla saturating the intervening gulf of space with torpedoes, missiles and plasma blasts in an attempt to catch the Avenger in a blanket of fire. It was not a particularly effective tactic.

The volume of void they were trying to cover was vast and they were trying to get very lucky, or frighten Corax into an act that would betray his location.

That the Traitors knew the battle-barge was in their vicinity was beyond doubt, but the question that now concerned Corax was whether they knew any more than that. The nova cannon detonation had not been so close as to convince him it had been deliberately aimed at the Avenger, but neither had the margin of the miss been enough that it was outside the normal margin of error for such a long-ranged shot. Could he afford to wait for a second plasma explosion to prove things one way or the other?

‘Decline by fifty thousand metres, three degrees starboard,’ he snapped to the men at the helm controls.

‘Navigational shields absorbing plasma residuals and debris,’ announced another crewman. ‘Nearing reflex shield tolerance levels.’

Corax gritted his teeth. The low-power navigational shields were usually in place to ward away microasteroids and other space-borne debris, but now the nova cannon blast was swamping them with more than they were intended to handle. If he increased power to prevent any of the shockwave reaching the Avenger, the energy spike would reveal their position.

‘Ride it,’ he said, as the ship started shuddering around him. ‘Implement previous order.’

The battle-barge made best use of the space available, using all three dimensions to change course away from the point at which the nova cannon had been targeted. It was not an eventuality Corax had expected – the nova cannon was still considered highly experimental by most Imperial forces, and few commanders would allow one to be mounted on their vessel.

‘Can you calculate the launching vessel?’ he asked Ephrenia.

‘Just detecting a third line-class ship, Lord Corax,’ the strategium controller replied. ‘Probably a grand cruiser. Approaching from almost directly astern, broadcasting

Iron Warriors identifiers.’

‘Typical,’ Corax whispered. Give one of Perturabo’s captains the chance to mount a bigger gun and he would snatch your hand off to take it.

‘Detecting another nova cannon launch,’ warned Ephrenia.

In her worry, she had forgotten his title, something the primarch had thought impossible. Corax noticed her face paling and the knuckles of her thin hands whitening, supporting callipers flexing, as she grabbed the edge of the display console, expecting an impact. There was no way a warning could be given to the crew without giving away the battle-barge’s position, and if the nova cannon scored an unlikely direct hit, no amount of bracing and preparation would save lives.

‘Passing to port, fifteen thousand kilometres and increasing, Lord Corax,’ Ephrenia said, smiling slightly and relaxing her grip. ‘Detonation detected. Seventy thousand kilometres away.’

‘It is safe to assume the fire is random. Set in a course for closest translation point.’

Corax had noted the two separate detonation points and filed them away in his memory. It seemed likely the Iron Warriors were using a firing formula to calculate their target points. Three or four more detonations would allow Corax to calculate the formula in retrospect and take appropriate action to decrease the odds of another close call. Other than that, there was nothing else to do except continue to hope for the best.

The Avenger continued on, dipping and rising, zigzagging its way towards the translation point, cutting an elusive path through the net of Traitor ships. At times Corax headed directly towards the enemy, passing within ten thousand kilometres of battle cruisers and frigates, trusting the reflex shields to mask any emission that would betray their presence.

The cordon tightened, the glimmers on the traitors’ scanner displays drawing in more and more vessels, chasing ghost returns that were little more than fuzzy mirages against the backdrop energy haze of the universe.

Sitting in the darkness of his requisitioned command chamber, Corax felt the change in vibrations that signalled another course alteration. They were less than half a day from the translation point. It was tempting to make the warp jump now and take the risk of gravimetric interference, but he stayed patient.

There had been some close calls: torpedoes unleashing their warheads a few thousand kilometres from the Avenger, last moment changes in direction to avoid enemy scans, nova cannon detonations that had pushed the navigational shields to the limit, random reactor spikes that had brought the battle-barge to a virtual halt to compensate for the energy flare-ups.

The primarch had taken all of this without a moment’s fear. There was no room for error, but there was also no room for uncertainty. His situation was very stark: escape and survive or be detected and destroyed. Such extremes made clarity simple, and drove away other thoughts that might have clouded his judgement.

For the moment they were exploiting a small break in the traitor cordon and had had several hours of unopposed travel. Blacklight protocol was still in full operation, and so Corax sat at the large command console staring at the blank screens and dead displays, his eyes picking out the details of the room in the smallest glow from blinking red standby lights and the gleam from the doorway leading to the strategium.

He was used to waiting.

Over long years, he had learned the lessons of patience, of precise timing. During hundreds of battles he had known the moment to act and the moment to pause, and had known victory every time because of those decisions.

The massacre at the dropsite had caught him off-guard. It troubled the primarch that he had perceived nothing of the traitorous intent of his fellow Legion commanders. Sitting in the dark, alone with his thoughts, he wondered if he had been blinded to their treachery by some weakness in himself. Had he been too trusting? Ignored subtle signs of his brothers’ intent? Been overconfident?

What had happened had been unthinkable, and that was part of the problem for Corax. Should it have been so outlandish that he had never considered having to fight his brothers? He had been sent with the others to Isstvan to bring Horus to account – surely he should have wondered whether Horus had acted entirely alone. Had the shock of the Warmaster’s turn against the Emperor befuddled him, caused him to blunder into an obvious trap?

The questions were all the harder because they were unanswerable.

Another vibration, another course change. The hours ticked past. The primarch needed no data-screen to tell him what was happening. He had a picture in his mind of the Avenger and the ships arrayed against it, their courses plotted in his thoughts as accurately as any schematic.

Any notable divergence from the picture he had drawn would be reported, and he had received no such communication from Ephrenia. The complex web being woven to catch the Avenger was not tight enough, there were always gaps.

Patience.

Hours, days, weeks of waiting. Years, in fact, when he had been making his preparations, hidden amongst the prisoners of Lycaeus. There was something of a purity in the stillness; something energising about the solitude.

His wounds still pained him, occasional stabs of sensation that broke through the walls of his semimesmeric state. He would shift his weight to relieve the stress on ravaged ribs, to move pressure away from damaged organs. Corax’s engineered body could withstand incredible amounts of damage, and yet there was something deeper than the physical wounds that afflicted the primarch. The pain was something he forced himself to endure, as a reminder of his failure. He suffered a hurt that no superhuman body could rectify: a grievous injury that the attention of the Apothecaries would not cure. Until he could bring an end to that internal agony, he would not allow his body to heal.

Roused from his contemplation by one such brief burst of pain, Corax activated a data-screen. Analysing the intersecting courses displayed on the monitor, Corax spotted something he had not seen before: a convergence of possibilities brought about by some minor alterations in the enemy’s disposition a few hours ago.

There was a gap. Or rather, there was not a gap, but a coming together of four Traitor ships. The wash from their own plasma drives, the emissions of their reactors, would obscure the Avenger and provide a pathway to the transition point earlier than he had planned, if he dared take it.

Seeing the possibilities unfolding, Corax stood up, re-examining the chart. He was sure he was correct. Passing from inaction to motion in moments, the primarch leaned over towards the communicator activation stud.

He stopped with his finger millimetres from the switch.

Corax weighed up the situation once more, cooling his excitement, ignoring the lure of sudden activity. The manoeuvre would bring the Avenger within range of the guns of at least three enemy vessels. If he changed to the new course, they would be committed. Any significant alteration by the enemy would change the dynamic, revealing the Raven Guard’s position dangerously close to the foe.

He discarded the idea.

Though Corax was eager to reach the relative safety of the warp – eager to do anything proactive – there was more to be said for caution than daring at the moment. He had gone after Lorgar at the dropsite, driven by a thirst for revenge, briefly abdicating his responsibility as a Legion commander. Had that emotive response cost his Legion, more of them falling to the ambush than would have done had he been commanding the retreat? He would not act rashly again.

The most important thing was that he had lived, and that was as true now as then. Half a day was not important; survival was important. That need to survive, that animal instinct to keep drawing breath had driven him on, filled him with purpose. He would not lie down and accept death willingly. Even now, his Legion almost wiped out, his enemies outnumbering his allies, Corax knew that he could not give up. His duty now was to keep the Raven Guard alive, no matter the temptations and instincts to act with resolve and daring.

On Deliverance, when it had been called Lycaeus, there had been true desperation. Weaker men had fallen and lesser men had balked at the task ahead. Not Corax. He had dragged Lycaeus, bloodied and screaming, into freedom, and not once doubted the righteousness of his effort. Why now did he wonder if he had the resolve to triumph?

He sat immobile in the darkness once more. He liked the dark; the shadows had always been an ally. He might spend the last hours of his life like this, waiting, anticipating the next shudder of a course correction, expecting a knock at the door to bring a fresh report of the enemy’s movements, trying not to relive the mistakes and horrors of Isstvan.

Trying, but failing.

The room was dank with the smell of sweat, the air thick with the stench of his own fear. Marcus Valerius was more than happy to face any foe in an open fight, or even to stand firm while battleships destroyed each other with blasting broadsides. This war, the Raven Guard way of war, vexed his nerves and tightened his chest around his heart.

The praefector lay on his bunk, his eyes closed, wishing the ventilators could be activated to siphon away the filth of his perspiration. His hands trembled on his chest, his hair was lank across his brow and the pillow and sheets were soaked beneath him.

All it would take was one warhead to find the Avenger and they would all be killed. Valerius was certain of it; the reflex shields provided no defence against a dozen megatonnes of atomic destruction. The walls vibrated with the shockwaves of distant detonations – thousands of kilometres away, yet all too close for the praefector’s liking.

Pelon was in the antechamber. Marcus could hear his short, panicked breaths and imagined his servant sitting in the corner of the room hugging his knees to his chest. The praefector understood well the dread that gripped his man, because he shared it.

The bombardment had started less than half an hour ago. He had been sent from the strategium by Corax as the first nova cannon shells had erupted, far from the battle-barge yet too close for comfort. As he had hurried down the corridors and descended seemingly endless stairwells, he had felt the ship vibrating beneath his tread, the metal of the handrails quivering under his fingers.

He had tried not to run. The Raven Guard he had passed were unperturbed by their predicament, trusting their existence to power of the reflex shields in a way that Marcus simply could not. He was Imperial Army, a Therion, and he was used to fighting an enemy he could see, his life entrusted to power fields or tank armour or the metres-thick walls of a bunker. He had endured artillery duels and orbital attacks, but nothing compared to the helplessness he felt right now.

The darkness was absolute. No lights could be lit. In a way, he was grateful. It was better that he was confined to quarters, where Lord Corax and the others could not see his cowardly reactions, could not hear his suppressed whimpers with each rattle of a passing shockwave.

Yet it was also a nightmare to be alone. Pride might have helped him master the fear, had he been within sight of others. With just himself to impress, his resolve was revealed to be woefully weak. The darkness was as cloying as the sweaty air. It weighed heavily on his chest, pushing the wind from his lungs, throttling him.

He choked and gasped and swung to the edge of the bed, booted feet touching upon the bare decking, arms hugged tight around his chest as he winced at another vibration that rattled from starboard to port, accompanied by creaks and cracks from the bulkheads around him.

‘This is insanity,’ he muttered.

His words were a whisper, but echoed inside his head. Sanity had been a scarce resource of late for the praefector. At first he had been relieved that the nightmares had ended. The blissful oblivion of sleep had been returned to him and he had embraced it.

The sensation of relief had not lasted long. Barely a few days after the evacuation of Lord Corax and the Legion, Marcus’s empty dreams had started to nag at him. He woke in the middle of the night watches, a void in his thoughts, feeling dragged down into an abyss. Soon he had come to fear the nights as much as when the fires and the cries of dying ravens had haunted him. It was not the searing hot terror, the paranoia that had gripped him before, it was a cold dread that trickled down his spine and sank to the bottom of his stomach.

Alone in the dark of his cabin, that dread had returned, seeping out of the darkness while missiles and shells lit up the firmament beyond the steel and rockcrete walls. The nothing that awaited him was too much like the vacuum of space. In his dread, Marcus was convinced that he was going to die. Just as he had dreamt of the Raven Guard’s predicament, now his sleeping thoughts were bringing him a vision of his doom. He would die alone, freezing in the void, swallowed by the emptiness of the universe.

Marcus let out a whimpering moan and threw himself face-first into the pillows and covers, trying to bury his head, striving to block out the emptiness that was leeching away his existence.

‘That was a little too close,’ remarked Branne as a nova cannon shell blossomed into nuclear life a few thousand kilometres off the starboard bow.

‘Too close is a hit,’ replied Agapito. ‘Anything we survive is far enough away for me.’

‘Hush,’ said Lord Corax. His voice was calm, his features expressionless, as he watched the dull glow of sensor readings on the primary display. ‘I am thinking.’

The primarch had taken over the helm controls as soon as the latest raitor fusillade had started, guiding the Avenger along a safe course that only he himself could see, his mind constantly calculating and adapting with each launched torpedo salvo and nova cannon detonation.

‘Lord, we are heading to danger-close proximity with an enemy cruiser,’ warned one of the attendants at the scanner array.

‘I know,’ replied the primarch, eyes locked on the display.

‘Lord, they will detect our plasma wash if we pass that close,’ Controller Ephrenia added, her tone quiet and respectful, yet tinged with concern.

‘That is not all they will detect,’ Corax replied, turning to smile at the woman. He paused for a moment and then held up a finger. ‘I judge that we have reached safe distance for translation.’

‘Lord?’ Ephrenia’s confusion was matched by Branne’s. A sideways glance at Agapito and Aloni showed that his fellow commanders were tense, eyes narrowed.

‘We will not be fleeing without a last remark to our enemies,’ said Corax.

‘Should we power up the void shields and weapons batteries, lord?’ asked Ephrenia, hand hovering over the command terminal.

‘No,’ said the primarch. ‘I have something more dramatic in mind.’

On the strategium of the Valediction, Apostle Danask of the Word Bearers was finding his latest duty a stretch on his patience. The joyful anarchy and slaughter of the dropsite attack seemed a distant memory after days of fruitless searching for the fleeing Raven Guard. His latest orders were no more exhilarating. For more than a day his ship had been sporadically firing torpedo spreads into the area the Warmaster had ordered, with no result at all. It was a waste of time, and made all the more insulting because his brother legionaries were already en route to Calth for their surprise visit to the Ultramarines. It was hard not to feel that this was in some way a punishment for some breach of Legion rules of which he had not been made aware.

Danask wondered if perhaps he had not been dedicated enough in his devotion to this new cause. He had noticed Kor Phaeron looking at him strangely on occasion, and was sure that the Master of Faith was testing him in some fashion. He had offered no complaint when he had received his nonsensical orders, and had offered effusive praise to the primarch for considering him for such an onerous but essential duty.

‘Energy signature detected!’

The words of Kal Namir came as a triumphant shout from the scanner panels, snatching the Apostle from his thoughts.

‘Where?’ demanded Danask, rising up from the command throne. Sirens blared into life, shattering the quiet that had marked most of the patrol’s duration.

‘Almost on top of us, two thousand kilometres to port,’ announced Kal Namir. ‘Weapons batteries are powering up. Void shields at full potential.’

‘Mask energy signature and get me a firm location. Brace for impact,’ snapped the Apostle, realising that the enemy would only reveal himself to open fire.

He heard Kal Namir mutter to himself, swearing under his breath.

‘Speak up or stay silent, brother,’ rasped Danask. He was in no mood for his subordinate’s grumbling. He punched in a command on the arm panel of the throne and brought up a real-time view of the enemy’s rough location. A shimmer against the stars betrayed the presence of the Raven Guard ship.

‘The scanners must have malfunctioned. This makes no sense,’ Kal Namir said. He checked his displays again and then turned to look at Danask with eyes wide from shock. ‘Signature is a warp core spike, commander…’

On the screen, the enemy battle-barge came into view, dangerously close, black against the distant pale glimmer of Isstvan’s star. Moments later the space around the vessel swirled with power, a writhing rainbow of energy engulfing the ship from stem to stern.

‘Take evasive action! yelled Danask, but even as he barked the words he knew it was too late.

The Raven Guard ship disappeared, swallowed by the warp translation point it had opened. The warp hole roiled wider and wider, washing over the Valediction. Danask felt the flow of warp energy moving through him, a pressure inside his head accompanied by a violent lurching of the cruiser.

‘We’re caught in her wake,’ announced Kal Namir, somewhat unnecessarily, thought Danask.

The Valediction shuddered violently as the spume of warp energy flowed past, earthing itself through the void shields. Tendrils of immaterial power lashed through the vessel, coils of kaleidoscopic energy erupting from the walls, ceiling and floor, accompanied by the distant noise of screaming and unnatural howls.

More warning horns sounded a moment before an explosion tore apart the stern of the ship, the void shield generators overloaded by the surge. Secondary fires erupted along the flanks of the Valediction, detonating ammunition stores for the weapons batteries, opening up ragged wounds in the sides of the vessel.

The shriek of tearing metal accompanied fiery blasts of igniting atmosphere gouting from the massive holes to port and starboard. The Valediction heaved and bucked, artificial gravity fluctuating madly, tossing Danask and the others on the strategium to the ceiling and back to the floor. To the right of the Apostle, a communications attendant fell badly, snapping his neck on the mesh decking.

Then there was stillness and silence.

The shielding of the reactors had held firm and no further explosions occurred. Several minutes of disorientation ensued, during which the strategium staff busied themselves getting damage reports. The scanners were all offline due to the warp wash, the dozens of screens surrounding Danask all grey and lifeless.

‘Get me helm control,’ he rasped.

Anti-damage procedures continued for some time. Danask’s head throbbed, an ache in the base of his skull growing in intensity until it threatened to be a significant distraction.

‘That could have been worse,’ said Kal Namir. ‘At least we survived.’

Blood started to drip from the Word Bearer’s eyes and nose, thick rivulets of crimson streaking Namir’s face.

The blood vessels in his eyes were thickening and his skin was becoming stretched and thin. Danask held a gauntleted hand to his nose as he tasted blood, and saw a drop of red on his fingertip.

One of the weapons console attendants gave a scream and lurched away from his panel, his robes afire with blue flames. The man flailed madly as others tried to help him, pushing him to the floor and swatting at the flames with cloaks and gloved hands.

‘Get them off me! My face! Get them off my face!’ shrieked another serf, tearing at his eyes and cheeks with his fingers, stumbling from his stool.

A subscreen flickered into life at one end of the scanning panel. Danask knew what he would see but looked anyway. Outside the ship the stars had disappeared, replaced by a whirling vortex of impossible energies that hurt his eyes to look at, even through the digitisation of the display.

They were in the warp.

Without their Geller fields.

Unprotected.

As realisation settled in the Apostle’s numbed mind, he felt something clawed scratching inside his gut. He dared not look down.

A detached part of his brain marvelled at what had happened. To engage warp engines close enough to drag the Valediction into the immaterium yet far enough away not to destroy the cruiser was an incredibly difficult thing to do. He wondered what manner of man could do such a thing.

Around him, madness reigned. He felt apart from it all as his serfs and legionaries howled and roared, limbs cracking, warp energy swirling through their bodies, distorting and tearing. He realised he had asked the wrong question. Exposure to the warp was the most horrific death that could be visited upon any living creature. It was not what manner of man could do such a thing, it was what manner of man would do such a thing.

He never got to answer his own question. Moments later, a horned, red-skinned beast erupted from his innards, splaying out his fused ribs and chest, his twin hearts held between fanged teeth.

Danask’s agonised scream, so inhuman, so unlike a legionary, joined with cries of the rest of his crew.

They were safe in the warp. As safe as the warp could ever be, though the Avenger’s Navigators had complained about a roiling tempest as soon as they had translated. The Astronomican, the light that guided them through the immaterial aether, was all but obscured by storms of immense proportions.

Corax had told them to do the best they could. Their goal was simple: head to the source of the Emperor’s light and they would reach Terra.

The primarch stood on the strategium with his commanders, the pick-up for the internal vox system small in the palm of his hand. Blacklight protocols were over, the reactors running at full capacity. The strategium was awash with light, bright after the days of gloom. The primarch’s disposition did not match the brightening of the environment.

Hesitating, Corax wondered what he would say to his warriors. What words of encouragement could he speak when he felt so devoid of hope himself? The Traitors had struck so well, their concealed blow aimed with deadly effect; it seemed unlikely that they could be stopped. He had given many speeches in his life, to rouse the weary to fight on, to inspire his warriors to acts of great bravery; all of the words that sprang to mind now seemed to the primarch to be hollow platitudes.

It did not matter. He drove out the doubt with a surge of will. Now was the time when he needed most to display the leadership for which he had been created. It was at times like this, not in the heat of battle where his physical abilities could sway the day, that his true worth was judged. He was the primarch of the Raven Guard and his legionaries would look to him for guidance and strength. Many had seen rough times before, though nothing compared to the cataclysm that Horus had now unleashed upon them. Some were survivors of the Unification Wars, others the veterans of Lycaeus’s rebellion. All of them were warriors, with the pride of the Legion in their hearts.

‘We leave Isstvan in defeat,’ he said, his words broadcast the length and breadth of the ship. ‘It is not a pleasant feeling, but I want you to remember it. Take it into your hearts and nurture this sensation. Let it flow through your veins and fuel your muscles. Never forget what it feels like to fail.’

He stopped for a moment, taking a breath, letting another emotion replace the hurt and the despair.

‘Do not give in to feelings of desperation. We are the Legiones Astartes. We are the Raven Guard. We have been bloodied but we have survived. Take that sorrow and pound upon it with your anger, until you have forged a new purpose. Those who we once called brothers…’

Corax stopped again, the words catching in his throat as he said them. He glanced at Agapito, then Branne, then Solaro and finally at Aloni. His commanders’ eyes were bright with emotion, jaws clenched with suppressed fury. The primarch let out a growl, giving vent to feelings he had put aside since fleeing Isstvan.

‘Those who we once called brothers are now our enemies. They have betrayed us, and worse still, they have betrayed the Emperor. They are dead to us, and we will not give them the dignity of our sorrow. Anger is all we shall have for them. Anger the likes of which we have never unleashed before. Only months ago we still unleashed our fury in the name of Enlightenment. We brought war to the galaxy in the name of the Imperial Truth. Those days have finished. The Great Crusade has been brought to an end by the treachery of those we now call foes.

‘Hate them! Hate them as you have never hated an enemy before. Loathe the air they breathe and the ground upon which they tread. There is nothing so cowardly as a traitor, nor anything so worthy of our abhorrence. Hate them!’

Pain flared through Corax’s chest. In his agitation he had opened up the wounds he had suffered, causing blood to trickle down his body. A normal man would have been slain by any one of these injuries, but the primarch bore the pain without visible sign, stoically moving the agony to the back of his mind.

Corax’s hands were trembling and he took a moment, trying to bring some peace to his thoughts.

‘They tried to kill us, tried to annihilate the Raven Guard and erase us from the pages of history. But they made one mistake: they failed. We are bowed but not broken, wounded but not slain. I swear by my oaths to the Emperor and by my dedication to you that we will have revenge on those that have so wronged us! They will pay for their mistake with blood and death, and not until the last of them lies dead by our hand shall we know any measure of contentment or satisfaction. We will destroy them wherever we find them, as only the Raven Guard know how.

‘Swear with me now, my children, to follow me wherever this road leads. Swear to show no mercy to the traitors. Swear to slay them with hatred in your heart. Swear to excise this cancer that Horus has nourished in the heart of the Imperium. Swear to bring again the Imperial Truth to the galaxy. Swear that we will never fail again!’

Deep in the bowels of the Avenger, Alpharius listened to the primarch’s words and could not help but feel stirred by them. Such defiance was noble. Pointless, but noble.

Dead Calm

Joshua Reynolds

When the wind died and the mist began to roll in across the Sea of Claws, Hermann Eyll knew the captain had come for his due. From the great bay window in his study, the master of Marienburg’s south dock watched as every billowing sail fell limp and the wine-dark sea became as still as glass. Flags from a dozen principalities drooped as seabirds swooped and screamed, hurtling inland in one vast, raucous cloud. On the docks, men and women stopped and stared upwards, watching in wonder.

Eyll ignored the birds and instead turned to face the thin, olive-complexioned man sitting behind his grandfather’s ancient claw-footed desk. ‘He’s coming. Just as I said, Fiducci. He’s coming for his due and I’m damned if I’ll pay it,’ Eyll said, fear turning his tones savage. A thin man with a whip-like build and clothes of expensive cut, Eyll was every inch the merchant-prince. Pale, manicured fingers did a rap-a-tap patter on the scrimshaw butt of a pistol rising from the colourful sash about his waist, and he began to pace. ‘You’re certain you can deal with him?’ he said.

‘As certain as one can be in these – hmm – these matters,’ Signor Franco Fiducci said, shoving his spectacles further up the bridge of his beak of a nose. ‘Necromancy is not as exact a science as we would wish, hmm?’ The little Tilean bared blackened teeth in a half-hearted smile. ‘But Kemmler made careful records, and the ritual itself is not so far out of the bounds of this sort of thing, eh?’ He waggled worm-pale fingers. ‘A prick of the thumb and something wicked will surely come, as they say.’

Eyll grunted and eyed the necromancer. Fiducci came highly recommended, having performed certain services for certain people under certain conditions that could, at best, be characterised as stressful. He looked like a crow, dressed all in black and bobbing his head alarmingly as he spoke. But he was dangerous for all that. ‘It’s not his coming that worries me... it’s what he intends to do once he gets here.’

‘Ah, just so, yes, eh?’ Fiducci waggled his fingers again. ‘No matter. The captain is old and hard and wild like the sea itself, but Franco Fiducci is an artist of the bones, eh?’ He made a tight fist, his knuckles popping unpleasantly. ‘We will trim his sails back, have no fear.’

‘But his powers,’ Eyll said. ‘My grandfather said he was a sorcerer as well as...’ he trailed off and swallowed thickly, his mind shying away from the thought.

‘Yes. His kind are notorious for their sorcerous abilities. He likely possesses a far greater grasp of the winds of magic than my humble self,’ Fiducci said. His lips quirked in what might have been a grimace. One spidery hand splayed out possessively across a tumble of books, one of several that were stacked sloppily on the desk in haphazard piles. ‘But I am a quick study, eh?’

‘You’d better be, for the price I’m paying you sorcerer!’ Eyll said and lunged, slamming his knuckles down on the desk hard enough to cause Fiducci to jump. ‘I hired you to protect me from that – that thing and I expect you to do it!’

‘Of course,’ Fiducci said. ‘Let it never be said that Franco Fiducci does not have his employer’s best interests at heart.’

Eyll glared at him for a moment longer, and then looked away. ‘Stromfels take me,’ he muttered, shoulders slumping.

‘I have no doubt he will, Signor Eyll. He, or one very much like him, takes us all in the end. Except for your captain, of course,’ Fiducci said, stacking the books neatly. ‘But I will see to that, I think, provided you get for me that which I require.’

Eyll made a face. ‘I’ll have them this afternoon. Tassenberg drove a hard bargain, blasted flesh-peddler,’ he grunted.

‘But you got them? Twelve of them?’

‘Twelve of them, yes.’ Eyll looked away.

‘And pure?’ Fiducci pressed, leering.

‘Tassenberg said they would be, damn you,’ Eyll growled.

‘Oh no, Signor Eyll. Damn you, in fact, if they are not. Only twelve pure souls can save yours, one for each generation the captain has prowled the seas, making you and yours rich.’ Fiducci smiled nastily, displaying his black teeth again. ‘Your ancestor employed him as a privateer, sinking the ships of his competitors until his coffers swelled. And eleven generations since have reaped the benefits of that bargain. Now you want to weasel out of it, like a good merchant. Well, just so, Franco Fiducci will help you.’ He rubbed a thumb and forefinger together. ‘And then you will help Fiducci, eh?’

‘Yes,’ Eyll said quietly.

‘Good.’ The necromancer rose to his feet. ‘I must go and prepare. And you must gather our materials.’

Eyll watched Fiducci leave, his fingertips tracing the patterns carved into the handle of his pistol. Like everything else in his possession, it was a hand-me-down from better times. He imagined putting a bullet in the little necromancer’s back, and then just as quickly dismissed the thought. Like pity, petty satisfaction was something he could ill afford at the moment.

Striding to the bell-rope dangling in the corner near the door, he gave it a yank, summoning a servant.

It was time to collect the captain’s due.

‘Don’t move,’ Erkhart Dubnitz growled. Water trickled from the docks above and ran down the piscine designs engraved on his sea-green armour. Sword in hand, he reached for the back of the priestess’s green robe. ‘Just... don’t... move.’

‘Why?’ Esme Goodweather, novice of the temple of Manann, said from between suddenly clenched teeth. Young and slim, she was a striking physical contrast to the bluff, broad knight reaching for the hood of her robe. Above her head, she could hear the clatter of iron-shod wheels and the babble of voices as Marienburg went about its business, unaware of what went on below their feet on the unterdock.

The unterdock was an open secret... an artificial world beneath the massive docklands that occupied Marienburg’s northern coast. Built in an ad hoc fashion by generations of smugglers, merchants, pirates and beggars, the rickety wooden walkways spread like a massive spider’s web beneath the docklands, cutting between the shallows and the surface. Stairs, ladders, fishing nets and overturned dinghies occupied the spaces between wooden planks, and formed natural landmarks. The air was muggy and thick with sea-salt. Barnacles clustered in patches like moss and things moved beneath the water. Things Goodweather didn’t particularly like to think about.

‘Because it’s watching you,’ Dubnitz said.

‘What’s watching me?’ Goodweather gulped.

‘Don’t worry about it. Go limp,’ Dubnitz said. He grabbed a handful of her robe and yanked her backwards. Something sprang out of the shadows that collected beneath the dock and Dubnitz sent the priestess tumbling unchivalrously to the soggy wood of the unterdock as he lunged forward to meet it. It was an ugly something, all iridescent scales and teeth, like a cross between a frog, alligator and shark. Dubnitz bellowed out a bawdy hymn to Manann as his sword sliced through the gaping mouth, shattering teeth and spraying the water with stinking blood. The creature squealed and crashed into a tangled bed of flotsam and fishing net. It twisted and leapt onto Dubnitz, its claws scrabbling at his armour. Roaring, Dubnitz head-butted it and the bulbous bearded metal face of Manann that served as his visor sank into the malformed flesh, causing the beast to flop backwards into the dark water. It croaked and tried to rise. Dubnitz pinned it in place a moment later with an awkward two-handed thrust.

Giving the sword a vicious twist, he jerked it free and kicked the spasming creature into the water. ‘Back to Manann, you blubbery fiend,’ he grunted, lifting his visor to watch it sink.

‘What was that?’ Goodweather snarled, clutching the trident icon that hung from her neck. ‘What was that thing?’

‘One of Stromfel’s children,’ Dubnitz said. He grabbed a handful of the priestess’s sleeve and cleaned his sword. ‘The Chaos-things breed like roaches down here and no two of them are the same, besides the teeth and the bad attitudes. Incidentally, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it, to ward these buggers off?’

Goodweather jerked her sleeve free of Dubnitz’ grip and grimaced as the barb struck home. ‘Yes. It just surprised me.’ She hesitated. ‘I’ve – ah –I’ve never seen one of them before.’

‘Well, now you have,’ Dubnitz grinned. ‘Who did you annoy to get sent down here on this little expedition then?’

‘No one,’ she said, looking around suspiciously as if waiting to see what else might leap out.

‘It must have been someone.’ Dubnitz scraped blood off of his cuirass and flung it aside. ‘No matter, I suppose. You’ll get used to the Shallows soon enough...’ He looked past her at the motley gang of sewerjacks clustered behind them. Made up of condemned prisoners, mercenaries and disgraced watchmen, the sewerjacks patrolled the unterdock as well as the sewers and under-canals of Marienburg. These looked particularly shamefaced as Dubnitz glared at them. ‘You lot, on the other hand should already be bloody used to them!’ he snarled and several of the ’jacks flinched and edged back from the big knight. ‘By Manann’s scaly nether-regions, are you professionals or mewling infants? How did you miss that thing?’

‘Nobody talks to Big Pudge like that!’ one of the ’jacks growled. Big and bald, Pudge shoved his way through his compatriots, nearly knocking one or two of them off into the water as he forced his way nose-to-nose with Dubnitz. ‘Nobody calls Pudge a baby!’

‘Right. Noted. In fact, you’re far too ugly to be a baby. Maybe you’re an orc instead, eh?’ Dubnitz barked, his beard bristling. A fist the size of a cooked ham swung out, but Dubnitz ducked his head and the blow caromed off of his helmet. Pudge yelped and stepped back. Dubnitz stomped on his instep and shoved him off the wooden walkway into the grimy water. The man howled and thrashed in the water.

‘Stop screaming. It’ll only attract more of the beasties,’ Dubnitz said, sinking awkwardly to his haunches. He cast a glare at the other ’jacks. ‘I hope someone thought to bring a rope. Otherwise I’m leaving him.’

As the ’jacks hauled their fellow up, Dubnitz joined Goodweather. ‘Every day is an adventure,’ he said, smiling.

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Goodweather said, pulling her robes tighter about herself. ‘I hate this.’

‘Probably shouldn’t have gotten yourself sent down here then, eh?’

‘It wasn’t my fault!’ she snapped. ‘And besides, you’re one to talk you great oaf!’ She glared at him. ‘Aren’t you down here because of that stunt you pulled with an uncooked octopus and a drunken goat?’

‘Lies and calumny,’ Dubnitz said, flushing. ‘That goat was hardly drunk.’ He hesitated. ‘You – ah – you heard about that then?’

‘The whole temple district heard about it! Ogg makes enough noise for three men twice his size!’ Goodweather said, her distaste evident in her tone.

Dubnitz couldn’t find the heart to fault her for it. Grand Master Ogg, leader of the Order of Manann, was an acquired taste. The bad-tempered, trident-handed Ogg was famous in Marienburg both for his bull-headed bravery and his political paranoia. His knights were fast becoming figures of familiarity in the households of the mighty of the city; he rented his warriors out as advisors, bodyguards and celebratory decorations alike, and it was said that whatever they heard, so too did he.

Granted, not everyone approved of Ogg’s expansionism. Dubnitz had no feelings either way. He chuckled. ‘He did, didn’t he? I’m hardly old Oggie’s favourite fish at the moment, eh?’

Goodweather snorted and looked away. ‘You deserve to be down here with these cut-throats,’ she said, gesturing surreptitiously towards the sewerjacks as they took turns kicking the water out of Big Pudge’s lungs.

‘And you don’t?’

‘No,’ she muttered.

‘Ha!’ Dubnitz shook his head. ‘Girl, you wouldn’t be down here if you didn’t deserve it for some reason. For now though, lets concentrate on why we’re here... where are they?’

Goodweather sank smoothly onto her haunches and pulled a handful of seashells and shark’s teeth out of one of the pouches dangling from her harness. Like all members of the Order of the Albatross she wore a tarjack’s harness over her robes, with dozens of pouches and reliquaries tied to it, as well as a hooked knife carved from the tooth of some unpleasant deep-sea leviathan and a handful of silver bells. She scattered the shells and teeth across the dock. All of the teeth pointed in the same direction. ‘soutch dock,’ she said, looking up.

‘Hmp. The Eel’s territory,’ Dubnitz said, stroking his beard. ‘He’s a touchy one is Prince Eyll. We’ll have to tread lightly.’

‘Surely our remit extends past his,’ Goodweather said, collecting her shells and stuffing them back in her pouch.

Dubnitz looked at her and grunted. ‘In theory.’ He sighed. ‘In practice, on the other hand...’ He clapped his hands together, the metal of his gauntlets clattering loudly. ‘Well, nothing for it but to do it. Form up you pack of half-drowned rats!’ he said, directing the latter towards the ’jacks. ‘On your feet Pudge, you orc-stain. All of you, get to trotting. soutch dock! On the double!’

The group moved quickly and quietly, save for the creaking of hauberks and the rattle of weapons. The ’jacks, for all their slovenliness, were professionals and they knew their job. At the moment, that happened to be the interception of a shipment of human chattel being delivered by Uli Tassenberg’s men to a buyer on the docklands. Tassenberg was the boldest purveyor of human flesh in Marienburg, taking captives to the water wherever it flowed. They said he could get any hue of flesh or size or build, guaranteed. It was one of the current Lord Justicar’s pet-peeves. Aloysious Ambrosius, the Marsh-Warden and supreme judicial champion of Marienburg, had few bees in his bonnet, but slavery was one of them. The one-eyed former knight hated the practice with a loathing most people reserved for mutants or orcs.

Dubnitz was against slavery as well, in a general sort of way. He had never been one and had no intention of becoming one, but felt that it was a relatively simple state of affairs to change, man or woman, if you really wanted to do so. Simply kill the bugger holding the other end of the chain. No man, no problem. In this case, the man was Tassenberg.

‘I grew up with him, you know,’ he said out loud. Goodweather, following behind him, looked up.

‘What?’

‘Tassenberg the Slaver. I grew up with him. Fat little bastard, even then. Hard too. We boiled horse-hide and made leather and glue like the other orphans in the Tannery.’ Marienburg was like an apple riddled with brown patches, and of those patches the Tannery was one of the worst. Located in the maze of streets that played host to the city’s tanneries, it was a squalid, foul-smelling territory and the gangs of mule-skinners and cat’s meat-men who made it their home were as dangerous as any dock-tough or river-rat. And now that he was powerful, Tassenberg made it his fortress. ‘Me and Uli and Ferkheimer the Mad and Otto Schelp, the Sewer-Wolf. Gods yes, got out as quick as I could too.’

‘I thought you to be of noble birth to be a knight,’ Goodweather said.

‘Who says I’m not?’ Dubnitz said. ‘Maybe I was switched at birth, eh?’ She looked at him, not quite knowing how to respond. Dubnitz gave a belly-rattling guffaw of laughter and clapped his hands. ‘Or maybe Ogg, bless his crusty little heart, wanted fighters first and fops second. He was no nobleman himself. Just a merchant seaman with a love of politics and esoteric Tilean pornography.’

‘What?’ Goodweather said again, her eyes widening in disgust.

‘Of course one has little to do with the other,’ Dubnitz went on, swinging an arm out. ‘At least in Ogg’s case. No, he picked the roughest, toughest, saltiest rogues he could find to form the core of the most holy and violent Order of Manann. And isn’t that what knighthood is about, really? Hitting people so hard that blood comes out of their ears? Of course it is!’

Out in the darkness of the unterdock, something shrieked. Dubnitz roared back. Silence fell. Goodweather scrabbled for the net of bells that hung from her hip and raised it, giving it a shake. There was the sound of something heavy splashing in the darkness of the Shallows. Then it faded.

‘Handy,’ Dubnitz said.

‘Shouldn’t you try to be more quiet, perhaps?’ Goodweather said, lowering the bells. Several of the sewerjacks made noises of agreement.

‘Being quiet only attracts ’em, the buggers,’ Dubnitz said. ‘They equate creeping with weakness, so I’d hurry up the pace if I were you.’ He strode on, one hand on his sword. The group followed at a slightly increased pace.

Behind him, Eyll sensed his bodyguards shifting. One of them tapped him on the shoulder and murmured, ‘They’re here, my lord.’ The two men were the best money could buy. Both were professional killers, skilled with the rapier and the dirk and honed to the peak of excellence in a hundred street-brawls and duels. He touched his pistol where it rested in his sash reflexively, reminding himself that he wasn’t helpless himself. He looked and saw a skiff sliding through the debris of the Shallows towards the unterdock, a hooded lantern marking its dim path through the thick, corpse-white mist.

Seeing the mist, Eyll felt a clammy chill squeeze his backbone with tender fingers. It had permeated the docklands, curling around ships and buildings alike, seeping into the canals and into cellars and hidden jetties. Despite the cool, he felt beads of sweat pop to life on his face. Somewhere out there, in the mist, a daemon waited to take his soul. A daemon with red eyes and teeth like knives and... fiercely, he shook himself.

Fiducci had assured him that he could bind the captain. Bind and break him. It. And once that was done, what? Eyll, like any man of his position, had a mind like quicksilver when it came to ambition. Once bound, what could a monster like the captain be turned to? Maybe his ancestor had had the right idea, to use the daemon to break and batter the fleets of his rivals. That was how the Eylls had made the soutch dock the power that it was today. But what could it become in the future?

‘Let them know we’re here,’ he said, fear momentarily buried beneath eagerness. One of his men held up a lantern and twisted the shutter-cap, sending the signal. The skiff approached and an anchor chain was looped around a wooden post. Five men climbed up onto the dock. One of them, a rangy Norscan, waved cheerily.

‘Hello Eel,’ he rumbled. ‘We brought your wares.’

Eyll ignored the nickname and looked at the skiff. A number of huddled forms occupied the centre of the boat, chained together, their heads obscured by burlap sacks. ‘Where did you get them from?’ Eyll said, trying to ignore the stifled sobs. It was harder than he’d thought.

‘Does it matter?’

‘Would I have asked otherwise?’ he said. It didn’t really matter. But he felt he needed to know, for some indefinable reason. If he was spilling their blood to save his own, he owed it to them to at least know where they had come from.

The Norscan snorted. ‘Here and there,’ he said. ‘Do you have the money?’

Eyll dropped a handful of coins into the Norscan’s hand. The blond brute gave a gap-toothed grin and bit down on one. ‘It’s good,’ he said and looked at his fellows. Eyll grimaced.

‘Of course it’s good.’

‘Only Tassenberg says maybe not always, huhm?’ the Norscan grunted. ‘Uli says maybe you tell us why you need these, hey?’ The Norscan swept his wolfish gaze across Eyll and his bodyguards, sizing them up boldly. ‘Can’t be selling to undesirables, Uli says.’

‘Undesirables?’ Eyll said. ‘I’m a Prince of the Dock!’

‘Blood don’t mean dung,’ the Norscan said. ‘Not to Tassenberg. Got to have standards. Can’t be selling valuable wares to daemon-lovers or sorcerers. Bad for business. Lot of girls,’ the Norscan continued, smiling. The coins had disappeared into his filthy hauberk and he fondled the hand-axe on his belt. ‘Why you need so many Eel? Maybe a party? Or something else?’

‘What?’ Eyll looked at the cut-throat. ‘It’s none of his concern. And certainly none of yours, oaf!’

‘Oh, but it is,’ the Norscan said, pulling his hatchet and gesturing off-handedly. ‘Tell us, Eel.’

‘Don’t call me Eel,’ Eyll said. ‘In fact, do not speak to me until spoken to. I am the Master of the soutch docks and you will show me–’

The Norscan’s fist shot out, and Eyll’s nose popped like an overripe cherry. He fell back into the arms of his bodyguards, his hands clawing at his face. The Norscan grinned. ‘And Tassenberg is the Master of Men, Eel. What he wants to know, you tell him, hey?’ The other cut-throats moved forward, drawing weapons. ‘Tassenberg heard you hired Fiducci the bone-fondler. He heard you’re planning something. Tassenberg wants to know what’s going on,’ he continued, stepping closer.

Eyll blindly fumbled at the pistol thrust through his sash. ‘Don’t come a step closer!’ he snarled thickly, aiming the weapon at the Norscan.

The big man hesitated, his eyes narrowing. ‘Only got one shot, hey?’ he said, after a minute. ‘Best make it count, Eel.’ He raised the hatchet.

‘There they are. And with their fingers right in the pie,’ Dubnitz muttered as he watched the skiff dock and Tassenberg’s men clamber onto the jetty to speak with their customers. He waved Goodweather back. ‘You keep those bells handy. If this gets bloody, the beasts will be on us in a frenzy. The rest of you, fan out. Horst, Molke, get those crossbows ready. Tarpe, Pudge, the rest of you... follow me. But be careful. This blasted mist is as thick as mud.’

‘Wait, what are you doing?’ Goodweather said, as Dubnitz made ready to step out of the shadows.

‘Arresting them. The quicker we do this, the quicker we get back up to the clean air and the quicker I can go to lunch. Fighting that beastie got my belly growling,’ he said, patting his stomach.

‘Listen, this mist... it’s not natural!’ Goodweather hissed, grabbing his wrist. ‘It feels wrong.’

‘Handle it then,’ Dubnitz said, gently pulling his arm loose. ‘That’s why you’re down here. And I’m here to arrest those buggers there.’ So saying, he thrust himself out into full view of the group gathered at the other end of the walkway and smashed a fist into his cuirass with a loud clang. The group of criminals spun, stunned. ‘Hoy! You’re done! Nicked! Nabbed! Give up and we won’t hit you too much!’ Dubnitz bellowed at the top of his voice.

A pistol snarled and one of Tassenberg’s men pitched backwards with a howl. Dubnitz reached the clustered criminals a moment later, the ’jacks just behind him. His sword swung out and crashed against a rapier as a man armed with the tools of a duellist intercepted him. The man was fast, dancing around the big knight, the tip of the rapier carving its signature in Dubnitz’s exposed flesh. Roaring, he managed to catch hold of the blade and jerked the swordsman off balance. He punched him in the face with the cross-piece of his sword and then gutted him with a casual swipe, kicking the body aside a moment later. ‘What part of “you’re under arrest” don’t you people understand?’ he snarled.

He made a grab for the pistol-man, whose terrified features struck him as familiar in the moment before one of Tassenberg’s men struck at him with a halberd. Dubnitz sank to one knee and blocked the strike, then twisted, forcing himself up and his sword down through his opponent’s skull. ‘Don’t run! I hate running!’ he said, as the pistol-man began to flee towards a nearby set of stairs. If he got to the upper level, Dubnitz knew he would lose him in the confusion of the docklands.

Behind him, he heard weapons rattling and a man screamed. The mist was thigh-high and swirling around them like serpents. Dubnitz ploughed through it and made a lunging grab for the fleeing man’s cloak. He snagged it and jerked the man around. He gave an oath as recognition hit him like a brick. ‘You!’

Hermann Eyll snatched the dirk out of his belt and made a desperate stab. The blade broke on Dubnitz’s armour and the knight drove a knee into the other man’s codpiece. The prince collapsed with a shrill scream. Dubnitz grabbed the back of his collar. ‘Oh, Ogg will just love this, won’t he? And the Lord Justicar too!’

‘No!’ Eyll wheezed, clawing weakly at the iron grip that held him. Dubnitz grimaced.

‘Yes. You’re for the yardarm jig, I’m afraid, milord.’

‘A dance of inestimable amusement, I’m given to understand, providing you’re not the one performing it,’ a chipper voice interjected. Dubnitz looked up. At the top of the stairs, a black-clad little form grinned at him.

‘Fiducci!’ Dubnitz rasped.

‘Hello, Erkhart. And, alas, goodbye,’ Fiducci said as he raised a peculiarly shaped bosun’s whistle to his thin lips. As the echo of its unpleasant trill faded, the abominable sound of heavy, slippery bodies splashing out of the mist filled the air.

‘Oh no,’ Goodweather said, rising to her feet, her bells hanging forgotten in her hand. The two crossbowmen looked at her nervously. The rising mist had made it impossible for them to get a shot off and now one of them said, ‘What’s that sound? Is it the beasties?’

‘It’s all of the beasties,’ Goodweather muttered, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling unpleasantly, though whether from the dank touch of the sorcerous mist or the sound of flabby bodies splashing closer. She peered through the mist, trying to spot the man in black she’d caught sight of just a moment earlier. The sound of the whistle had alerted her immediately to the danger. Goodweather was by no means the most experienced member of the Order of the Albatross, nor was she the most popular. Women and boats didn’t mix, or that was the assumption in some quarters. In truth she could haul sail with the best of them, and knew the stars like the freckles on her own hips. And she damn well knew the sound of one of Kadon’s Whistles and what it meant.

Carved long ago by the infamous beastmancer at the behest of one of the first merchant-princes, the whistles could summon or disperse the nastiest inhabitant of Manann’s realm. Sharks, whales, sea-wyrms and other things fell under the power of the whistle. So too, evidently, did Stromfel’s Children. As far as she knew, they were also all locked up in the temple of Manann. How someone had gotten their hands on one of them was a mystery to her, and for another time at that. Right now, survival was the priority.

Cursing, she raised her bells and dug in her pouches for sea-salt. Flinging the latter out in wide curves, she was rewarded by an immediate withering of the mist around her. Whatever was causing it didn’t like the touch of the Blessed Salts, no two ways there.

‘What are you doing?’ one of the ’jacks said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Quiet!’ Goodweather snapped. She pulled a handful of seagull feathers out next and flung them up, hoping she wasn’t going to see what she knew she would. A stiff sea-breeze hissed through the Shallows, shoving the mist aside and revealing a horde of tumbling, savage bodies. Some of them looked like otters or eels, while others looked like sharks and octopi. They heaved and squirmed through the water, forcing their way past the wrecks and small reefs of netting and barnacles towards the far end of the walkway, where Dubnitz and the others struggled. Goodweather froze for a moment, struck dumb by the horror. Bulbous eyes rotated behind filmy membranes and something that was like a frog and a fish and lion scrambled up onto the dock and scuttled towards them, jaws snapping. The crossbowmen screamed and fired as one. The beast snapped forward, jackknifing as the bolts thudded home. It slid across the wet wood towards them, thrashing in its death throes. More of the beasts began to follow its course however.

‘Stay close!’ Goodweather said, and then saw that it was no use. Both men were already turning to flee. She ignored their final moments and concentrated on keeping herself from joining them. ‘Manann bless and keep me from the beasts of the sea,’ she whispered, scattering salt around her and grabbing for her shark’s teeth. The creatures were of Stromfels, and the priests of Manann had long since devised methods for keeping such monstrous afterbirths in check. Squeezing the teeth in her hand hard enough to draw stripes of blood from her palm, she shook them and threw them into the water, hoping that she wasn’t too late.

Even as something that was more jellyfish than cormorant flapped squishily towards her, a red shape tore it into wet rags. Two more shapes joined the first and the phantom shapes of long-dead sharks spun lazily through the air around her, their ghostly teeth reducing even the boldest of the mutant beasts to ruin. She hurried towards Dubnitz and the others, blood dripping steadily from her hand. The spell wouldn’t last long, and there was safety in numbers. Or so she hoped.

As the knight of Manann was bowled over by one of the Shallows-beasts, Eyll found himself hauled to his feet by Fiducci. The necromancer flashed his black teeth and laughed wildly. ‘It works! It works!’

‘What works? What did you do?’ Eyll sputtered, yanking himself free of the little man’s surprisingly strong grip.

‘It is the answer to your prayers, Signor Eyll,’ Fiducci said. ‘But only if we have the bait. Where are they?’

‘In the – the skiff!’ Eyll yelped, turning. The slaver’s skiff rocked in the water as the beasts thundered past it, drawn by the whistle up onto the walkway. For the moment, they were ignoring it, but that wouldn’t last long. ‘Make them go away! We have to get to that skiff!’ he shouted, grabbing two handfuls of Fiducci’s robe.

In reply, Fiducci blew hard on the whistle. The roiling mass of beasts split and fell back as the necromancer began to walk down the steps, Eyll close behind. ‘Did you know that armoured buffoon who attacked me?’ he said, looking around for the knight. ‘Who was he? He seemed to know you...’

‘Dubnitz,’ Fiducci said, giving the whistle another toot. ‘Erkhart Dubnitz. He tried to hang me for practicing my art. Can you imagine? I was only doing as my clients asked, and the girl’s parents were so happy to have her back, when all was said and done. What’s a few maggots between family, eh?’

Eyll shuddered. His eyes were riveted on the beasts as they thrashed over and gnawed on the bodies of Tassenberg’s men and the sewerjacks. Eyll’s surviving bodyguard had vaulted into the skiff, obviously realising that the beasts were ignoring it. He watched them approach wild-eyed, his rapier extended.

‘Good man, Stromm,’ Eyll said as he dropped down into the skiff.

The man nodded jerkily. A moment later, his head disappeared down the gullet of the frog-thing that rose out of the water and grabbed hold of the skiff. Eyll screamed and fell backwards. The monster reached for the closest of the girls, its talons puncturing the poor wretch’s chest like a knife through a water-skin. With a triumphant croak it began to pull the whole lot overboard, the chains that bound them inextricably together rattling. Eyll grabbed on from the other end and a momentary battle of tug-of-war ensued. Then, something red and horrible reduced the monster to squealing wreckage. Eyll gaped up at the spectral sharks as they dove and curled through the air.

Fiducci dropped into the boat and felt for the dead girl’s pulse. ‘Fie! Dead!’

‘She’s the last, bone-licker,’ a voice growled. Fiducci and Eyll looked up. Dubnitz stood above them, his sword extended, his helmet missing, his armour covered in deep scratches and dents. ‘The last one ever.’

Fiducci reacted like a striking snake, grabbing Eyll and pressing a blade he produced from his sleeve to his employer’s throat. ‘Drop the sword or the Signor dies!’

Dubnitz hesitated, and that was long enough. Eyll elbowed Fiducci back and swung his pistol up. He had reloaded on the walk, and the weapon barked. The knight staggered back, a wash of red suddenly covering his face. Fiducci howled with glee and blew on his whistle. Monstrous shapes closed on the reeling knight, diving upon him hard enough to splinter the weakened wood of the walkway. The struggling knot of man and monsters plunged down into the dark water, causing the skiff to bob alarmingly.

Eyll twisted, shoving the smoking barrel of the pistol beneath Fiducci’s nose. ‘Are you mad?’

‘Eccentric, possibly,’ the necromancer said. ‘Grab an oar, Signor. We must go! Now, before there are any more interrup–’

A hand rose out of the frothing water and fastened on the edge of the skiff. Eyll scrambled back, thinking for a moment that it was the knight. But as he moved, he caught sight of more shapes, swimming forward in the mist. The chill on his soul returned, and suddenly, the struggling monsters behind him did not seem as bad as he’d first thought.

The dead man heaved himself up, his puffy, blackened flesh encrusted with algae and barnacles. Mutely, he glared at Eyll. ‘The... bargain... has... come... due,’ the corpse said, in a voice like oil sloshing in a lantern. A rotting hand reached for him. Fiducci interposed himself, teeth bared. Uttering several gurgling syllables, he tapped two fingers to the corpse’s head. It’s unseeing eyes rolled up in their sockets and it slumped back into the water.

‘He’s found me!’ Eyll shrieked. ‘He’s come for me!’

‘Of course he has,’ Fiducci said, wiping his fingers against his robes. He made a face and looked at the dead girl. ‘We will need to be clever, yes? Grab an oar!’ More zombies made their way through the water even as the two men got the skiff moving. Bloated hands reached for them, plucking at the oars and their arms as they made their getaway into the ever-thickening mist.

Dubnitz hit the bottom of the Shallows and silt exploded upwards, blinding him. He’d instinctively taken a breath before hitting the water, but it wasn’t going to save him, he knew. Claws scraped at him and he jabbed an elbow into a hideous face, shattering saw-edged teeth. With painful slowness, he chopped out with his sword, trying to drive off the rubbery forms of his assailants. His armour, a boon on land, was anything but beneath the water. It made his limbs feel as if they were wrapped in anchor chains. He struggled to disengage from the beasts now chewing on his limbs before his lungs exploded. It would be humiliating to drown in less water than filled a rich man’s tub.

Then, there was a flash of crimson and a wafting cloud of blood sprang into being around him. Waving it aside, he saw spinning ethereal shapes drive off his attackers and fade away into nothing. And beyond them he saw... what? Lungs burning, he peered closer, trying to make out the dim, dark figures plodding through the water away and out into the harbour. Finally, unable to stay down any longer, he thrust himself up. The water splashed against his cheeks and throat as he surfaced, and he clawed at the supports of the walkway, trying to haul himself up.

‘Give me your hand!’

Dubnitz looked up at Goodweather. ‘I’m too heavy,’ he gasped.

‘Just give me your hand, oaf!’

He did so, his gauntlet slapping into her hand. With a groan, she helped him clamber back up onto the wooden walkway. Stromfel’s Children had departed as swiftly as they’d come, leaving behind only bodies and the stink of blood and death on the close air. ‘Are they...?’ Dubnitz said.

‘All of them,’ Goodweather said grimly, rubbing at a scrape on her face. Her robes were torn in a dozen places and blood and ichor stained them. Her hands too were bloody, and they trembled noticeably. ‘We’re the only survivors. Other than–’

‘Fiducci,’ Dubnitz growled and thumped the walkway with a fist. ‘That foul little bog-stench.’

‘Fiducci?’ Goodweather said.

‘A necromancer. And a bad one. Why was he here? Why in the name of Manann’s drooping tail would he need a skiff full of women?’ He raised his hand as Goodweather made to speak. ‘Never mind. I know why.’ He growled again and pushed himself to his feet. ‘Did you see them?’

‘See who?’

‘Fiducci’s little friends,’ Dubnitz said harshly. ‘In the water. Dead men by the dozens. Walking along as if they were out for a stroll.’

‘The water-logged dead...’ Goodweather whispered, her face going pale.

‘We have to get after them,’ Dubnitz said, looking around. He spotted the steps and pointed. ‘He came from up there. And I’d bet fifty Karls he’s heading to the soutch dock.’

‘The soutch dock? Why?’ Goodweather said.

‘Because of who’s with him,’ Dubnitz said grimly. Stepping over the bodies of the dead, they made their way to the stairs and then up. There were access points to the docks above strewn throughout the unterdock. Forcing the wooden cover aside, Dubnitz gagged as more of the foul-smelling mist poured down onto him and spilled down the stairs. ‘Gods below, it smells even worse than it did before!’

‘It’s growing stronger,’ Goodweather said, through the torn strip of robe she’d pressed to her nose and mouth.

‘What is? What is it?’

‘An abomination,’ the priestess said curtly as Dubnitz helped her topside. The mist had settled between the structures and buildings of the docklands, obscuring the sight of the few people still about their business. Dubnitz heard the rattle of armour and saw a troop of watchmen hurry past, their faces tight with fear.

‘Something’s going on,’ he said. In the distance, from the direction of the soutch dock, he saw the mist turn orange. He sniffed. ‘Smoke.’ Then, an instant later, an alarm bell began to ring loudly and desperately. He heard the shouts and knew in an instant what it was. ‘Fire... come on!’ he said, hurrying after the watchmen. The knight and the priestess moved as quickly as they were able through the dense mingling of the smoke and the mist. The crackle of flames filled their ears, and people lurched through the mist, fleeing.

Moaning, someone stumbled against Goodweather, knocking her off of her feet. She fell back onto her rear and looked up at a ruined face. Fleshless jaws worked mushily as the dead man reached for her. Dubnitz’s sword sang out, decapitating the zombie. ‘He’s dead!’ she said as she climbed to her feet.

‘If he wasn’t before, he is now,’ Dubnitz said. He used his sword to point towards the harbour. ‘Hear that? It’s not just the fire. There’s a fight going on out there!’

‘Should we get help? Alert the watch?’

‘No time. Besides, they’ll figure it out soon enough!’ Dubnitz growled, taking a tighter grip on his sword. ‘Got anything in that bag of tricks that can clear this blasted fog?’

‘I can try,’ she said, reaching for more gull feathers. Out of the swirling whiteness, awkward shapes shambled. Dubnitz stepped forward, both hands wrapped around his sword’s hilt.

‘Hurry it up!’ he said as the first ambulatory corpse came into view. A rusty cutlass struck out at him and Dubnitz batted it aside and took its wielder’s arm off at the shoulder. The dead man gave no sign he’d noticed and simply reached for the knight with his remaining hand. Dubnitz took that one off as well, and then bisected the stubborn zombie. As the two halves thumped onto the wood, the second and third closed in, followed by the fourth, fifth and fifteenth. More and more of them shambled out of the mist, their blind eyes glowing with an eerie light.

‘Where are they all coming from?’ Goodweather said as she let a handful of feathers loose. Out here, closer to the clean sea, the breeze was far stronger then before and it flushed the mist back out from between the closest structures. What it revealed gave her her answer. There were dozens of the dead things staggering into the docklands from the sea. Not just dead men, either. There were the shapes of drowned horses and fenbeasts, Shallows-monsters, fish, eels, sharks and porpoises. A rotting octopus, missing most of its limbs, hauled itself across the dock, its eyes like poached eggs. They climbed up out of the water and across the docks, jetties and wharfs, striking out at whomever or whatever they came across.

‘By Manann’s foamy locks,’ Dubnitz breathed, his sword point dipping. ‘This isn’t Fiducci’s handiwork. It can’t be.’

‘It’s not,’ Goodweather said, pointing towards the harbour. ‘Love of the Sea-Lord... it’s not!’

‘They’re all over! Swarming like ants!’ the bosun shrilled, ringing the alarm bell. There were more than a dozen ships becalmed in the harbour, and on each of them, the crews were setting up a clamour. Torches were lit and men grabbed for weapons. Cutlasses, boarding hooks and other implements of defence found their way into sweaty palms as every eye watched the mist, which had begun to roil like a hurricane-tossed sea. For hours, neither wind nor tide had touched the keel of any ship in the harbour. Yet now, something was happening. Dead things thrashed in the sea, and boathooks were deployed to shove off the rotting, climbing things that sought to board every ship, including the Nordland merchant vessel that was the closest to this newest disturbance.

When it happened, it happened so gently, so quietly, that no man on the deck noticed until it was too late to do anything beyond stare in slack-jawed awe at the apparition sliding out of the all-consuming mist. With neither wind nor oar to propel it, the ship cut through the water like a shark’s fin. Its hull sagged from the weight of the barnacles that clung to it, and its sails were tattered wisps, the bare memory of once vibrant-coloured cloth. As it glided forward, the water seemed to shudder back from its warped prow, where the skull of some great leviathan had been lashed to the wood by heavy lengths of rusted chain.

It came on with no sound to mark its passage, and it neither slowed nor veered off as it approached the becalmed vessel. At the last moment, the quicker-witted among the crew gathered their senses enough to dive over the side and take their chances in the maelstrom the harbour had become. The others could only stare stupidly as the juggernaut bore down on them and then, with a terrible snapping and splintering of wood, the larger vessel split the smaller in two! The merchant vessel sank and the newcomer surged on, approaching the soutch dock like the hand of some vengeful god. Ancient cannon, crusted over with the filth of the sea, barked out a savage hymn and the soutch dock bucked beneath the onslaught. Docks ruptured and shattered. Bodies were thrown into the air like ragdolls and ships were burst at the waterline.

Eyll watched it all with a horrified fascination. His empire... everything his family had built... was gone in a flash. As burning body parts and wood rained down around him, he looked down at his hand, now bound tightly in a handkerchief of Cathyan silk which was thoroughly ruined by the blood seeping through it. He curled his fingers tight around it. ‘I-I can’t do this...’ he moaned, watching another ship rise up on an explosion and sink.

‘If you want to survive, you must!’ Fiducci said. They stood on the dock, the eleven living women and the one dead behind them. Fiducci had cast a glamour upon them, and they were as listless as the dead things wandering nearby, including the one who truly was dead. Fiducci had animated her, so that her lolling corpse squirmed beside the others. ‘It is a bold gamble, but it will work, and with a bit of luck, your family will again have the services of the captain!’

‘And you?’ Eyll said, still staring at the oncoming ship. ‘You have yet to say what it is you want.’ He glanced at the necromancer. Fiducci shrugged.

‘If we survive, I’ll make my price known eh?’ He gestured to the pistol in Eyll’s sash. ‘Did you load the bullet I prepared?’

‘Yes. Are you sure this will work?’

‘Not in the least,’ Fiducci said. ‘But one can hope, eh?’

The death-ship slowed as it approached the dock and a pitted anchor dropped with a dull splash. Beneath the water the beasts that lurked in the shallows fled the shadow of the ship. Seaweeds and scummy algae turned brown and dead where the shadow fell, and those fish unlucky enough to be unable to avoid its clutches drifted upwards, belly up. Ancient chains squealed like hogs at the slaughter as lifeboats were lowered into the water. Everything was quiet, save for the sound of buildings burning and distant screams.

The captain had returned to harbour at last, and all of Marienburg held its breath. Eyll shuddered uncontrollably as below him, he felt the thud of the prow of the first lifeboat as it connected with the dock. Fiducci stiffened. ‘He’s here, Signor,’ he whispered. Eyll glanced at the necromancer, and his heart sank. The little man’s confidence seemed to have been washed away, and he sagged, his fingers intertwined as if in prayer.

Zombies climbed up onto the dock. These were in better condition than the others, and they carried weapons as if they still remembered in some fashion how to use them. Eyll’s fingers stretched towards the butt of his pistol. ‘Do something,’ he hissed. Fiducci didn’t reply. Eyll spun, and he gave a horrified groan as he realised that the little man was gone.

‘Have I kept you waiting then, young Eel?’ said a voice as deep and as horrible as the catacombs that now contained his family. ‘Forgive me.’

A tomb-cold hand caught Eyll’s own, pinning it in place as he turned and instinctively tried to draw the pistol. The cold crept up his arm and his eyes started from their sockets as he looked up at a face out of childhood nightmares. A spear-point nose, wide-flanged and quivering jutted pinkly from the sickly grey flesh of a beast-face. Teeth that were like triangular arrow-points both pierced and passed over worm-like lips, dappling the scabby thorn-bush beard with black blood. Eyes like wind-tossed torches held his own in a poisonous grip. He could feel tendrils of ancient scents and bad memories slithering through his brain as the eyes bored into him. A flat, tar-coloured tongue slid out through the thicket of teeth and waggled in the air as a fart of laughter made Eyll’s legs go limp.

‘Now, now. No need for that, little Eel. The captain won’t hurt you, no,’ the apparition hissed. ‘Not when you’ve brought him a repast fit for an admiral, my yes.’ The hell-eyes swivelled towards the shadows, where the offerings huddled.

‘I-I...’ Eyll began hesitantly. His mind groped for the words Fiducci had taught him. ‘I want to pay my debt!’ he blurted. The eyes swung back, freezing his tongue in place.

‘Your many times great-grandfather and I had a bargain, young Eel, my yes. And such a bargain it was too. The oldest bargain. Blood for gold. Blood for the sea’s bounty, every glittering morsel. But why would you want to end that bargain? Didn’t I give him enough?’ The cunning beast-eyes glowed like lamps.

‘I want to pay my debt,’ Eyll croaked again, wanting to look away but unable to do so. A chalk-coloured hand rose out from beneath the rotting cloak, and something glittered between the spidery fingers. Eyll’s mouth went dry and he automatically stuck out his hand. Heavy coins plopped wetly one by one into his hand.

‘There are older wrecks beneath the sea by far than Sigmar’s petty kingdom.’ Shark teeth snapped together. ‘Good yellow gold from the Vampire Coast or the far seas that sweep the beaches of Tilea or Ind. All men love gold, young Eel. Just as I love other things...’ The gurgling voice fell to a purr and Eyll shuddered. Clutching the gold to him, he made a motion to the chained women, who were beginning to come out of their stupor. One of them screamed, until a mossy hand clamped tight over her mouth. The zombies clustered around the women, pawing at them idly. He looked down at the gold again and swallowed the rush of bile that burned in his throat. ‘Twelve souls. That’s what the books said,’ he said.

The captain laughed. ‘Ha. Yes. Twelve innocent souls for one black one.’ A moment later, black words dripped from his gnawed lips and there was a sudden rush of effluvium – a foul stink like Eyll imagined that the ocean’s bottom must smell of. Bloated faces glared mindlessly at Eyll and then at the prisoners. ‘Twelve pure souls for twelve generations of service, aye. Yesss. Let us have ’em, lads,’ the captain said, shifting slightly. In the moonlight, Eyll caught a glimpse of tattered finery and rusted armour coated in barnacles and other things, some of which moved in an unpleasant fashion. ‘Twelve good and true, my yes. I–’ The captain broke off and spun suddenly, his cloak snapping wetly. Eyll heard him sniff and he cringed as the captain clawed at him with a narrow gaze. ‘What is that I smell, young Eel? Got rot in the pork, have you?’

‘No. No! No!’ Panic tore through Eyll like a knife.

The captain seemed to ripple and bend like shadows beneath the surf. One moment he was there and the next... gone. Hastily, Eyll dropped the coins and tore the pistol from his sash. He cocked it with the edge of his bandaged palm and winced. The zombies hesitated, as if unsure of what to do. The captain reappeared next to one of the women... the dead one, Eyll realised with sickening dread.

‘What’s this? What’s this?’ The horrible eyes pinned Eyll. ‘This one’s no good, young Eel. Gone all overripe she has.’ Teeth snapped together. ‘Trying to flimflam me, are you?’

Eyll levelled his pistol. ‘Just trying to survive, really,’ he said weakly, and fired.

Dubnitz beheaded another zombie and charged towards Eyll and the thing that had come off the monstrous ship. His breath rasped hot in his chest as he ran full tilt, battering aside the dead in his haste to reach the living. Behind him, Goodweather hurried to keep up, her ragged robes tangling around her legs. As soon as he saw the creature, he knew what it was, if not who. Dubnitz had fought its kind before, with Ogg and the others, on a Sartosian expedition.

He cursed as Eyll fired at it, knowing it would be no good. The black manta-shape of the vampire lunged over the heads of the chained women and flowed through the soupy air towards Eyll. ‘Free the women!’ Dubnitz shouted at Goodweather. ‘I’ll handle the rest!’

Before the priestess could reply, Dubnitz had barrelled into the slinking shadow-shape and knocked it sprawling. Eyll gawped at him, the smoking pistol hanging forgotten in his hand. ‘You? But you’re–?’

‘Still planning to arrest you!’ Dubnitz snarled, backhanding the prince and sending him sprawling. ‘But not just yet.’ The zombies moved forward, weapons raised. Dubnitz tore into them, hacking them to pieces even as he bellowed a rough seaman’s prayer. But even as the last of them slumped, fingers like bale-hooks sank into the back of his gorget and he was summarily jerked from his feet. He was thrown hard into a pile of crates, which shattered and covered him in fish.

‘Come to challenge the captain, have you?’ the vampire growled. Talons flexed and then, with a wet chuckle, it drew the cutlass hanging from its hip. The blade was big and worn, but not rusty in the least. ‘Come on then,’ it challenged.

Dubnitz crawled to his feet, head ringing from the force of his landing. Black blood dripped sluggishly down the creature’s face from a circular hole in its temple. Evidently Eyll had left his mark. The vampire touched the wound and snarled loud enough to rattle Goetz’s teeth. He stomped forward and the cutlass sprang to meet him. Every parry and reply stung his arms to the root. The vampire was far stronger an opponent than Dubnitz was used to, and it well knew how to use its strength. Also, the mist seemed to curl and tighten about his limbs, hindering his movement.

‘The captain has spread red waters from here to Ind, little warrior,’ the vampire said. ‘He has butchered elven corsairs and broke the hump-backs of sea-beasts. You think you can stand against him?’

‘That depends, are you him?’ Dubnitz muttered through gritted teeth. He had only just blocked a blow that would have taken his head off and now he strained against the uncompromising weight of the vampire’s fell blade. Snarling, the vampire jerked its sword to the side, pulling the knight off balance and punched him in the chest, sending him skidding back across the dock.

Dubnitz rolled to a stop with a clatter and gingerly felt at the fist-shaped dent in his cuirass. Breathing heavily, he pushed himself up and glanced around, looking for Goodweather. The mist, however, was too thick for him to spot anything but the loping shape of his opponent, trotting forward unhurriedly, black tongue caressing the tips of his dagger teeth.

‘You fight well for a landlubber,’ the vampire said. ‘You’d make a fine bosun, strong lad like you.’

‘Flattery won’t save you,’ Dubnitz wheezed, bringing his sword up. The vampire laughed and darted forward so swiftly that Dubnitz couldn’t track him. The cutlass blade stopped inches from his face and the knight staggered back in surprise as the vampire suddenly dropped the weapon and clapped both hands to its skull. It shrieked and Dubnitz’s ears throbbed.

‘Scream all you want, captain,’ Fiducci said, stepping out of the mist, holding up a strange sigil composed of writhing shapes. ‘It will avail you nothing. Not with a shard of warpstone embedded in that corrupt brain of yours. And not when I hold this!’

‘What-what-what?’ the captain croaked. Green and black serum flowed down the vampire’s craggy face as its fingers clawed at the wound in its skull.

‘A little something I picked up in the East. Old Kemmler created it, according to its former owner. Made it to control your kind, which, apparently, it does. It harmonises with the warpstone, you see, creating a bond between this and thee,’ the necromancer chuckled. ‘You’re mine, captain.’

‘I think you mean mine,’ Eyll said, stepping out of the fog, his pistol cocked. His jaw was purpling already from Dubnitz’s blow. ‘Forgetting yourself, Signor Fiducci?’

‘I never forget myself, Signor Eyll. Merely my employer, once our business is concluded,’ Fiducci said. He smiled nastily. ‘You asked me what price I would demand. Well, there it is... the captain.’

‘You promised me–’ Eyll began.

‘I promised you that I would save you from the captain. And I have. But I said nothing about myself,’ Fiducci said. He pulled the sigil close. ‘captain, be so kind as to tender my resignation, eh?’

The vampire whirled and with a frustrated snarl, dove upon Eyll. Eyll fired his pistol and then fell beneath the pouncing shape, which reduced him to a ruinous mess in mere moments. Above the sounds of bones snapping and flesh tearing, Fiducci howled with laughter. The necromancer danced a little jig, stopping only when his eyes settled on Dubnitz, who glared at him.

‘You are annoyingly persistent, Erkhart,’ Fiducci said. ‘Like a wart that keeps coming back.’

Dubnitz straightened, trying to keep an eye on both the necromancer and the vampire. ‘I won’t pretend to know what was going on here, but I’m guessing it’s another of your little schemes, corpse-eater.’ He gestured with his sword. ‘And I’ll be damned if I let you get away with it.’

‘Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,’ Fiducci giggled. ‘Oh, captain...’

Dubnitz threw himself to the side as the vampire dove for him, its talons scraping grooves along his back. Rolling to his feet, he caromed off of another stack of crates and spun, hoping to land a blow. The vampire seemed to ooze around the edge of the sword and then its claws were at his throat and he felt himself being bent backwards. His gorget was ripped free and tossed aside, baring his throat to the greedy lamprey mouth that descended moments later.

The vampire stopped as an immense shadow spread across them. Fiducci’s giggles died away into stunned silence as the wide crest of water rose above them and then summarily slammed down! Dubnitz was torn from the vampire’s grip and tossed back up against a wall as the wave covered that section of the soutch dock and dissolved into puddles and foam.

Sputtering, Fiducci clawed around in the water. ‘Where is it? Where–’

‘Looking for this, are you?’ the captain hissed, hefting the sigil in one talon. As Dubnitz pulled himself erect, the vampire crushed the device as easily as another man might crumple paper. ‘Control me, would you? Better to attempt to control the tides.’

Fiducci fell onto his backside and began to splash away as the hulking shape of the vampire stalked towards him, clawed fingers flexing in eagerness.

‘I know your kind, necromancer... remoras, clinging to king sharks. Thought you’d twist this sacred debt to your benefit, eh? Thought you’d make the captain your play-pretty, your cabin boy, eh? I’ll give you a taste of the lash...’

As Dubnitz retrieved his sword, he saw Fiducci’s hand dart into his robes and felt a sinking sensation in his gut as he realised just what the little man was after. ‘No!’ he said, darting forward. The vampire, between him and Fiducci, turned and caught him, wrenching him into the air.

‘I’ll settle our account first then, shall I?’ the captain gurgled, eyes blazing. Behind him, Fiducci stuffed the scrimshaw whistle between his lips and blew a wet melody. Dubnitz, desperate, thrust his fingers into the leaking wound in the vampire’s skull. The creature shrieked and released him, and Dubnitz dropped heavily to the dock. He could feel the wood trembling and hear the smashing of great bodies through the Shallows. The wood cracked and burst abruptly as a number of horrible shapes thrust their way up in response to Fiducci’s summons.

Cutlass in hand again, the captain swung it as the first of Stromfel’s Children dove for the vampire, wide mouth gaping. The vampire cleaved the thing in two and met the next, matching it snarl for snarl. Dubnitz barely reclaimed his own sword in time to fend off his own attackers. As they fought, Fiducci blew on the whistle again and again, until the becalmed harbour waters fairly boiled with heaving piscine nightmares. Where only moments before the sea had given up its dead, it now gave forth every monstrosity that stirred in the deep silt. Krakens with clashing beaks and frenzied sharks made mad war on the floating dead and the monstrous offspring of the storm-god. Alarm bells sang out as the docks came under attack.

Dubnitz stabbed something with entirely too many flippers and stepped past it, reaching for Fiducci, who seemed enraptured by the chaos he had caused. Dubnitz grabbed the necromancer around the back of the neck and flung him to the ground. ‘You! Send them back!’ he snapped.

‘I think not! If Franco Fiducci is to be thwarted, the city itself shall pay!’ the necromancer yowled. ‘And you with it!’ He yanked a dagger from his robes and stabbed wildly at Dubnitz.

The knight caught his arm and bent it back, forcing Fiducci to drop the blade. Driving his sword into the dock, he made a grab for Fiducci’s other hand, where the whistle lurked. ‘Give me that!’

‘Get off of me you oaf!’ Fiducci shrilled, struggling. The whistle slipped out of his grasp and Dubnitz batted it aside, into the thick of the confusion. Fiducci screamed and scrambled after it even as the shark-shape of the captain cleaved its way towards them.

‘I’ll have my due one way or another, necromancer!’ the captain roared.

Dubnitz jerked his sword up and the cutlass scraped sparks the length of the interposed blade. Berserk, the vampire slashed at him, all pretence of humanity now gone from its form and feature. It hammered at him as if seeking to pound him flat, and he was in no shape to prevent it. It was only stubbornness keeping him upright and even that was fast fading.

‘Dubnitz!’

He looked down as something skittered across the dock and saw a medallion emblazoned with Manann’s sigil. He gave a furious shove, pushing the captain back long enough to clear enough room for him to snatch the medallion up. As the vampire swooped down on him again, he shoved the sigil into its face. The captain screeched and stumbled back, covering its eyes. Dubnitz’s flush of victory faded quickly; he could only keep the beast at bay so long.

The trill of a whistle cut the air. Large shapes blundered out of the mist like hounds on the scent, and Dubnitz tensed, preparing for the attack. Only it was not be. The Shallows-beasts leapt on the captain, one after another, dogpiling the vampire beneath a mound of mutated flesh. The captain’s angry shriek was cut abruptly short as the dock gave way in a fashion reminiscent of Dubnitz’s earlier plunge.

Dubnitz hurried to the edge of the hole, his whole body aching. The captain glared up at him, jaws working, bloody foam bubbling from between ragged lips. A jagged spear of wood had been shoved up through the vampire’s back and out through its chest. A claw stretched out towards Dubnitz with hateful intent and then sagged as the hell-light faded from the creature’s eyes. The body slumped and began to dissolve like seaweed in the morning tide. Dubnitz sank back and sat down, his body shuddering with exhaustion and not a little relief.

‘I’ll have my medallion back now, if you please,’ Goodweather said. The priestess picked her way carefully through the debris. Dubnitz looked at her wearily.

‘The women?’

‘Safe with the watchmen. Are you unhurt?’

‘Yes. Yourself?’

‘As well as can be expected,’ she said, taking her medallion back and hanging it around her neck. ‘My intervention appears to have been timely.’

‘It’s becoming a habit with you,’ Dubnitz said. ‘That wave–’

‘You’re welcome.’ Goodweather opened her hand and showed him the whistle. ‘And this will go back in the vault where it belongs.’

‘I don’t see Fiducci anywhere. I suppose it’s too much to ask that the little rat got eaten by one of his own monsters...’ Dubnitz sighed and stood. The mist was beginning to clear with the captain’s demise and the fires were being put out. ‘How in the name of Manann’s trident am I going to explain any of this to Ogg?’

‘I’m sure you’ll think of something. As long as it’s better than your explanation about the goat and the octopus,’ Goodweather said, scattering salt over the bodies of the dead and beginning the rites of her order.

Dubnitz laughed, and the sound was echoed by the cries of the returning seabirds. The birds swooped and dove and followed the retreating mist back out to sea, as the wind picked up once more and the calm faded at last.

LESSER EVILS

Tom Foster

As the lander cut through the last few layers of cloud, Lucan Vaughn checked his lasgun again.

Twenty years with a gun in my hand and I still don’t trust my weapons. A sudden blast of turbulence rocked the crew compartment, and his backpack thumped against his shoulders.

Nietzin, Vaughn’s second-in-command, had been standing by the door, watching their journey through the tiny window. As the turbulence shook them he staggered, staying upright with an effort. From his seat opposite Vaughn, Andus ‘Fane’ Garren laughed. Nietzin glanced at him, eyes bitter and hard. The engines rumbled around them.

Time to take control, Vaughn thought. He leaned round and pressed the intercom. ‘How long, Lao?’

‘Let’s see...’ Cornelius Lao sounded refined and bored. Vaughn knew it was a pose, picked up in his old career in a Navy fighter wing. ‘Just over ten minutes, I’d say.’

Vaughn closed the intercom and looked around the darkened cabin. ‘All right, ten minutes. Everyone check their gear and look ready. Anyone got any prayers to say, then now’s the last chance to say them.’

The flyer hit a fresh batch of turbulence and shuddered as if it were afraid. Opposite Vaughn, sitting next to Fane, Salia Tashac had screwed her eyes shut. There was a stripe of black soot smeared across the lids. Old habits die hard, Vaughn thought, his hands moving over his gun again. The Tallarn 43rd would probably have hanged Tash if they could catch her, but she still wore their warpaint. He wondered if she was praying or just bracing herself in case they fell out of the sky.

Vaughn unclipped his harness and stood up. He stepped to the door, and Nietzin leaned in to talk. The lieutenant was several inches taller than Vaughn, and his white hair brushed the roof. ‘All set?’ Vaughn asked.

Nietzin hefted the team’s plasma gun. ‘All set. Look, Lucan,’ he added, and the lines on his face seemed to deepen, ‘we’ve broken some laws before, but nothing like this.’

‘I didn’t think you’d mind.’ Vaughn glanced left, down the length of the cabin; Tash and Fane were not listening.

‘Nor did I.’ The ship rocked and Vaughn grabbed a strap hanging from the roof. It was all he could do not to fall on his comrade. ‘Not to begin with. But this is serious blasphemy, friend.’

‘Well,’ Vaughn said, ‘what do you want to do, go back and tell Harsek we were overcome by a sudden outbreak of mercy? You know I can’t do that.’

‘That’s not what I’m saying.’ The older man paused. He seemed to realise that there was no point. The edge fell out of his voice. ‘I just wanted to say that I’ve got qualms.’

‘Me too. But what Harsek says, we do. It’s either us or them, you know that.’

‘It always is,’ Nietzin replied, his voice grim, and he drew back and checked the power dials on the side of his gun. ‘Never any other way.’

The intercom crackled. ‘One minute!’ Lao announced.

The flyer sank low, trembling. Through the window behind Nietzin’s shoulder, Vaughn saw the orange canyons and outcroppings of Rand XXI, and then towers and domes clinging to the rocks like spines on a monster’s back. As the flyer approached he made out individual buildings, then great stained-glass windows. At last he saw a round, landing pad, white as a plate, decorated with a huge fleur-de-lys. And then the flyer banked, twisted, and the legs struck the landing pad with a lurch that sent Vaughn reeling. The door dropped open in front of him and he cried, ‘Let’s move!’, and the strike team ran into the thin mountain air.

His boots hit the plascrete and suddenly he was in the open, ducking out from under the roaring engines of the flyer. Vaughn took in the fortress-priory before him, running along the ridge like a grey crest. In that same moment he saw the mountains in the distance, barren and red, and felt terribly exposed. Time to get to cover. He glanced back, saw the team behind him, and heard the engines start to rise into a roar.

At the far end of the landing pad, steps carved into the mountain led down towards the priory itself. A figure rose into view as it climbed the last few steps, robes and hair whipping in the breeze, the red bulk of a bolter held across an armoured chest.

A Sister of Battle. Vaughn was not sure he’d ever seen one before – at least, not at this range. She looked tougher than he’d expected, hard-eyed and callous. She was calling out something about landing clearance that she’d started to say on the steps, her voice raised above the engines and the wind.

‘You,’ Vaughn yelled, ‘Drop your weapon!’

It was pointless, of course. As soon as she saw them properly, the bolter was swinging up in her gauntleted hands, and as soon as she moved Vaughn’s men fired. Their guns were rigged for just this purpose, wired to hotshot power packs: a set of vicious cracks came from the right, and the Sister folded. She stood at the edge of the landing pad, doubled over. As Vaughn approached she looked up, and the blood running from her nose and mouth was shockingly red against her pale face. Then she fell onto the ground.

Vaughn reached the edge of the landing pad and looked down. It was a long climb on the stairs, and an even longer drop onto the mountainside. He’d never liked heights.

The dead woman’s armour had been polished until it shone like black marble. One of the lasgun shots had punched straight through her chest. The hole in her armour looked like a tiny stone thrown through a plate of tinted glass.

For a long moment Vaughn looked at her. Death had made her face as pale as a porcelain doll’s, the skin smooth and pallid as candle wax. There was a little prayer-scroll woven into her dark brown hair.

Then he but his boot against the dead woman’s hip and shoved her off the landing pad and into the abyss.

‘That’s a long way down,’ Fane said. He’d grown up in a hive city, where sunlight had been a rarity.

Vaughn ran onto the steps, and as he did the roar of the engines swelled up and Lao’s flyer heaved itself into the sky. The dirty white ship swung in the air, turned to the north and dropped out of sight behind the mountainside, following the canyons.

Vaughn began to climb down the steps, as quickly as he could without losing his balance. The thought of falling made him queasy, of bumping down a hundred hard stairs before dropping into the canyon. He heard his men hurry down after him, in a rattle of kit and armour plate.

Well, Vaughn thought, one thing’s for sure, there’s no going back now.

Two hundred steps so far. A slow fire was burning in his calf muscles. Behind him, Tash was the first to curse. Vaughn ignored her. As ever, he knew that it wasn’t her fault that she was hard to like.

The priory grew closer. He saw the details of the stained glass and the flapping banners. He made out the words ‘Imperator Deus’ in gilt lettering above the nearest pair of double doors.

By the saints, we’re exposed. A few bolter shells, one missile, and we’d be done for.

It wouldn’t even have to hit them, he realised. The force from a frag shell would knock the whole team over the edge. Despite the ache in his legs, he sped up.

As he ran Vaughn took out his monocular and studied the side of the priory. He wondered how the Sisters of Battle brought in their supplies: they wouldn’t make their own armaments, surely. Perhaps there was another landing pad, one he hadn’t been briefed about. That didn’t bode well. Or perhaps the Sisters carried all their gear down these stairs – backbreaking work, even if you didn’t fall into the canyon below. They’d probably think it was good for the soul.

The team kept up a good pace, even Nietzin. ‘You need me to carry you, old man?’ Fane demanded. Nietzin puffed out a curse in response. Vaughn’s gun bumped against his side.

As they approached the fortress, it occurred to Vaughn that he really didn’t know much about the Sisterhood at all. His knowledge was limited to awed rumours, a couple of mission briefings, and some dirty, heretical jokes he’d picked up in the Guard, the sort of thing that would get you into serious trouble with the commissar. He had no idea what to expect. He remembered his old company commander’s adage: When you don’t know the enemy, go in hard. You’ll either terrify them into surrender, or–

Or you’ll die serving the Emperor. Great.

‘Come on, people, pick it up!’ Vaughn snarled over his shoulder, and he quickened the pace once more.

If Harsek’s information was right – and Vaughn had his doubts about that – it would be ten standard minutes before anyone checked the landing pad. He visualised the little diagram, sketched with a blunt pencil on scrap paper like most of the best battle plans he’d made. To the east was the main body of the priory, the buildings rising in sanctity as they rose in height: domitarium, then scholarium and training chambers, and finally the dome of the Chapel Santissimus on the peak of the ridge. To the left, the lower buildings squatted on the rock: the refectorium, storehouses and hospital, where the less important matters of the body could be taken care of, overshadowed by the buildings of the soul.

The stairs flattened out. Together the team ran over a stone bridge broad enough to take a Baneblade tank, a sanctified banner flapping at either end. There were skulls on the banner poles, with letters scrimshawed into the bone. Vaughn didn’t stop to see whether they were the skulls of heretics or saints.

The building before them was grey stone, quarried off-world and barely decorated. A path ran around the edge, lashed by wind, its handrails little more than metal spikes linked by old rope. Vaughn jogged into its shadow, and the team followed him. His breath was still tight from running, but his body seemed to sigh. They were out of view of the main buildings now. It should be a bit further down the wall, he thought, remembering his sketch. Just a bit further – please, let it be here...

There it was. A metre across, hardly more than a bulkhead adorned with a plain fleur-de-lys of tarnished steel, the edges brushed shiny silver by generations of howling wind. Beside the door, to Vaughn’s relief, was a little keypad under a metal skull. The skull’s left eye shone red.

He looked back at Nietzin. ‘You know what to do,’ he said, stepping aside. ‘Fane, Tash, watch the sides.’

The older man took a plain grey data-slate from his thigh pocket. Nietzin turned it over in his hands, his lips moving. Then he leaned in and pressed the slate to the keypad. Slowly, he drew it down the lock.

Nothing happened. Vaughn checked his watch. By now, according to Harsek’s information, the guard from the landing pad ought to be checking back in at the dormitarium. Any moment now, the Sisters of Battle would begin to wonder where she had gone.

With a loud click, the skull’s red left eye went dead. Its right eye flared into bright green life. The door slid back, and they were looking into a tiny lift, just big enough to hold four men.

The lift shuddered and rattled as it descended, as if it had detected the presence of intruders and was trying to shake them out. Vaughn stood pressed against Nietzin, with Fane on his left and his lasgun held up beside his head as if presenting arms on parade. It occurred to him that if the lift jolted hard enough, the gun would probably go off and blast his ear away. These things were custom models, bought by Harsek’s dealer through some complex, back-alley arrangement: still, they couldn’t be much less reliable than the Departmento Munitorium versions he’d hefted back in the Guard.

‘We’ll come out in the storerooms,’ Vaughn said. ‘Once the lift stops, blast the controls and seal the doors shut. We’ll take the access stairs on the way back. There shouldn’t be anyone around – nobody to set off the alarms, that is. Then we make our way to the main cogitator. Once the main cogitator is out, we’ll head down to the cells. The cells will have powered doors – besides, each section of this place is probably airlocked. The last thing we need are the Sisters trapping us.’

And who knows what we’ll find waiting for us down there?

They nodded.

Fane said, ‘Seal off the sector, then make it ours. Like how we used to do it in the hive.’ His skin had always had a pallid, greenish tint, the result of years of living off synthetic food in a warren of bad light and polluted air. The weak red glow of the lift made him almost spectral.

The lift banged to a stop, shaking them against one another. Tash banged into Fane’s breastplate and she muttered a curse in some Tallarn dialect.

‘Keep sharp,’ Vaughn warned, and he hit the door button.

The door rumbled open and the team jabbed their guns into the aperture. Wordlessly, they scurried into the room, fanning out to cover the entire hall. Tash smashed the lift controls with her gun-butt and ran to catch up with the others.

The room was large, high-ceilinged, functional rather than sanctified. The metal walls looked scuffed and greasy. Four huge hoppers hung down from the roof, each three times Vaughn’s height. Only a glowing holo-image in an alcove looked more than just industrial. It showed a saint that Vaughn didn’t recognise giving a blessing, a power sword in her free hand.

They crept across the room, past the hoppers. No doubt they were for preserved grain or the like: even the pious had to eat sometime. The holographic saint cycled through her program, giving the same looped blessing as they hurried past, as if trying to mime a warning.

As they reached the door on the far side, Vaughn heard boots. He made a quick fist to halt the team, and they rushed to the door, two to each side. Vaughn glanced at Nietzin. Very quietly, the older man crouched down, laid his plasma gun on the floor and drew his knife. The sound of the boots rose, ringing on the metal floor, and a figure stepped into the room.

It was a girl, perhaps seventeen. She wore a wide-sleeved robe like a farm-worker’s smock, the hood down and the sleeves rolled up and pinned for practicality. She walked straight past them, muttering to herself as if trying to remember something.

She seemed extremely young to Vaughn – no, he realised, it was not her age as such, but the fact that she didn’t look very tough at all. He glanced left. Nietzin hadn’t moved.

Across the doorway, Fane waved his hand. Tash caught Vaughn’s eye and raised her eyebrows, as if to ask, Well, what now?

Fane pulled his knife. Vaughn raised his gun, took two long steps across the room and brought the butt down on the novice’s head.

She made a small Oof! sound from the air being knocked out of her. The girl dropped like a body cut down from a gallows.

‘Watch the door,’ Vaughn said. He crouched down and put his hand to the novice’s head. There was a little blood there, but no serious wound. He was surprised at how relieved he felt. When he stood up, Nietzin was looking at him.

‘Knocked out,’ Vaughn said, and Nietzin nodded as he sheathed his knife.

‘That was soft, old man,’ Fane said quietly. ‘You get soft, and then you get slow. You get slow, and then you get dead. Remember that.’

Nietzin stepped back. He had a family of his own somewhere, Vaughn knew. Harsek had rescued them from the same prison camp as Nietzin, making the old soldier his for life.

‘Tash?’ Vaughn said.

‘Sir?’

‘Gag her. Get her into the shadows. Come on, move!’

Tash pulled a couple of restraining ties from her pack. She looked only slightly older than the woman on the floor. Nietzin stooped to help her move the novice. Vaughn pulled his map out of his pocket.

‘Soft,’ Fane said as Tash and Nietzin laid the novice down.

‘If I want your opinion, I’ll let you know,’ Nietzin replied. ‘Let’s go.’

Below the storerooms, in a tiny chapel of its own, they found the cogitator. Saints and martyrs glowered down from the walls as if challenging the machine to betray them: there was no great love between the Sisters of Battle and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus, whose cog-and-skull symbol stood out on the control panel.

‘You know how to make it work for us?’ Vaughn asked.

Nietzin smiled. A candelabra hanging down from the roof brushed his ruff of white hair as he approached the controls. He set his pack down and took out a small portable terminal, sheathed in red leather like an old book. ‘Data-djinn.’ He patted the terminal.

‘One of Harsek’s finest, I’m sure.’

Nietzin pushed wires into their ports. He mouthed a quick prayer. ‘And a little of mine. Forgive my less than total trust. Now, the machine spirits need to link...’

Vaughn stepped back and watched the chapel door. Nietzin knew his tech: it was detailed inquiry into old heretech that had got him sent to a penal colony in the first place. That and the things he’d started teaching his staff, ideas about free thought he’d learned from ancient, censored texts. But the old man knew his stuff. He’d soon have the facility under their–

A siren howled in the room above. Three pairs of eyes flicked to the roof. ‘Throne!’ Fane spat. The sound pumped on and on, a steady blast of sound.

Tash checked the settings on her gun. ‘That’s not good.’

‘That wasn’t me!’ Nietzin called over his shoulder. ‘We’re still making the connection. I just need a little while longer.’

‘You don’t have it!’ Vaughn snapped back. They know we’re here. They must have picked up the flyer, sensed us somehow. Maybe the lift was alarmed.

The siren roared on, muffled but furious, as if some monster was raging in the room above.

‘We’re in,’ Nietzin called. ‘The link’s sealing all emergency doors, cutting primary power to the defence lasers. It’s sending a message reporting fire in the dormitarium. That ought to confuse them. Right,’ he announced, pulling the terminal away, ‘The airlock to the cells is open.’ Nietzin pulled the plasma gun into his hands. If the siren bothered him, he didn’t show it.

Vaughn nodded. ‘Let’s go get our girl.’

They hurried down two flights of emergency stairs. As Vaughn stepped out, a figure leaned around a buttress, bolter in hand, and let rip.

The wall beside him cracked and as he dropped the shells detonated, blasting chunks out of the rockcrete. He fired, hit the woman’s shoulder and saw the beam ricochet off her polished armour. Something roared behind him, and a pellet of superheated plasma blew straight through the Battle Sister. She fell dead. No amount of faith could override a wound like that.

A narrow window let a slit of sunlight into the corridor. Vaughn stepped over, tilted his head and saw little dark figures spilling out of the buildings further up the ridge. Voices carried on the wind. They must have caught the Sisters at morning prayers, for most of them were running out of the domed chapter-house at the far end of the complex.

‘We’ll use the connecting tunnels.’ It’ll be murder, he thought, but preferable to what’s outside. He thought of the narrow walkways on the mountainside, the long drop into the canyon if he slipped, and reflected that he’d rather take a bolter round to the chest than fall into the abyss.

Together they ran into another storeroom. A hulking figure lurched out of the shadow, metal arms raised. Vaughn put three las-shots through its chest, and as it dropped he saw that it was just a menial servitor. They left it lying on its back, broken but still moving. Its legs still paced the air like a fallen clockwork toy, its bloodless head turning from side to side.

Vaughn stopped and looked around the corner. A vaulted corridor had been carved into the rock, twice his height and seemingly endless. He recalled the map and Harsek’s briefing. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘The Custodium Penetentia is down here. Tash, have you got the things?’

She nodded. ‘Medicae’s all ready, sir.’

‘Good.’ He peeked around the corner again. Fifty yards up the corridor, a Sister ran from one side to the other, her robes flapping behind her. ‘This is going to get nasty,’ he said. ‘Follow me and keep going. And if you can avoid being taken alive...’

Fane loaded a fresh power pack.

‘Right.’ Vaughn took a deep breath. ‘Let’s go!’

He ran out. bent over to present a smaller target. Vaughn reached the far wall and threw his back against it as gunfire roared down the passageway. He raised his gun and sent half a dozen las-rounds back in return, hardly bothering to aim. A tapestry fell from the wall, smouldering. ‘Iconoclast!’ a woman screamed over the gunfire. ‘Blasphemer!’

The vaults stood out slightly from the wall at the base. They gave about twelve centimetres’ worth of cover. The team worked their way forward, each firing across the corridor to pin the Sisters back up the corridor. The air was a lattice of bolter shells and searing hot beams. One of the Battle Sisters fell into the corridor clutching her gut and was dragged into cover by the ankles, howling as las-shots burned the floor around her.

Vaughn pointed. Ten metres further up, a doorway lead off to the right. ‘Down there!’

Tash was first. She sprinted out, weaving as she ran, and Fane and Nietzin covered her way with suppressing fire. Vaughn crept forward until he was nearly opposite the doorway, then leaped. He landed awkwardly, rolled and was inside.

Tash grinned at him. She was holding a grenade. She leaned around the doorway and hurled it back into the corridor. There was a loud, echoing bang. Plaster filled the corridor. Vaughn glimpsed a Sister carrying some huge gun, a heavy bolter perhaps, stumbling from the force of the explosion. Nietzin ran across the corridor and inside. Fane ducked in after him.

The room was little more than a landing over a set of stairs. They ran down the staircase into a bare, whitewashed room. A monitor unit stood at one end. Half a dozen screens flickered over the console, showing the cells of the penetentia.

‘You’re bleeding, old man,’ Fane said.

Nietzin ran a hand across his forehead. ‘A stone chip must’ve caught me. I’m all right.’

Tash was at the far end of the room, before a massive door. ‘Problem,’ she said, turning. ‘Bad problem.’

‘Like we didn’t have any before,’ Fane said.

‘The door to the cells is code-locked. We can’t get in.’

Nietzin cursed. ‘It must run off a different system to the main controls. Damn it!’

Vaughn glanced at the stairs. It would be a matter of seconds before the Sisters gathered their forces and resumed the attack. ‘Well,’ he snapped, ‘can’t you make it open?’

‘I’ll have to,’ Nietzin replied. ‘Otherwise we’re trusting on the Emperor to send us a miracle.’ His expression told Vaughn how likely he thought that would be.

There was sudden noise on the staircase. Tash ducked into the stairwell, and the flash of her lasgun turned the stairs into a blaze of strobing light. A voice cried out and an armoured body crashed against the wall.

‘There’s a load of them,’ Tash said. ‘It looks like they’ll – grenade!’

Something small and cylindrical bounced hissing down the stairs. Tash lunged, grabbed it, lobbed the cylinder back up the stairs and threw herself onto the ground. Vaughn ducked, raising his plated forearms across his face – and nothing happened.

Tash got up, blinking. Vaughn opened his eyes and saw a cloud of thick grey smoke spilling down the stairs. He smelt burning chemicals tinged with incense. The stuff seemed to clog his nose and mouth. ‘Smoke!’

He yanked his rebreather up, shoved it over his mouth. He saw Tash stumble back, retching as she pulled her mask on.

A buzzing, ripping sound came from above. Boots clattered on metal stairs. A Sister of Battle charged through the smoke like some furious spirit, holding a long metal shield in front of her. Nietzin’s plasma gun blasted straight through shield and woman, and the hail of fire from Fane’s lasgun tore the soldier behind her apart. Then a great bull of a woman, almost Nietzin’s height and far broader, rushed them. A brazier on her backpack threw coals out behind her; inscribed skulls hung around her neck. In her hands was a roaring chainsword more than a metre long.

‘Die!’ she bellowed. Fane leaped back, lasgun forgotten, grabbing for his lucky pistol. Nietzin peered down the plasma gun, struggling to get a sight.

‘Die, filth!’

The sword was too big for the room, perhaps too big even for her. She swung the blade as if to hurl it away, and Vaughn ducked low and the sword whipped over his head, smashing out half the monitor screens in a shower of sparks. The shock jarred the woman’s arms. She staggered back, swinging the weapon up like a fisherman hauling in a net. Tash dropped and rolled out of the way, and as the Battle Sister swung her ponderous weapon, Nietzin fired.

He missed her. The plasma shot caught the chainsword halfway down the blade and blew it apart. Fragments tore across the room like shrapnel. Fane dived onto the floor. Like a thrashing snake, the chain whipped through the air, hit the wall, flicked back and struck its owner in the thigh. She bellowed, dropped and Fane pounced on her.

The room was almost silent then. Fane looked up. His pistol, an ornate, flashing thing worthy of a hive-gangster, was pressed against the woman’s head.

‘You want me to kill her?’ Fane’s rebreather distorted his voice.

Beneath him, the woman struggled and gasped. Her own mask had fallen down, but she seemed at least partly immune to the gas. She was muttering between her teeth, snarling out some catechism that Vaughn couldn’t understand.

She didn’t look like any soldier he’d ever known. Back in the Guard, he had encountered occasional commissars with the rabid look that she now wore, like an enraged animal caught behind bars. But not many of them. The Sisters knew how to fight, he thought – they were experts – but they made him think more of lunatics than soldiers.

‘Not yet,’ he replied. He pulled his rebreather down. ‘We’ve got the prioress!’ he shouted up the stairs. ‘Stay back or we’ll kill her!’

The woman on the ground managed to control herself enough to speak. ‘I have no fear of dying,’ she proclaimed. Her voice was deep and loud, a preacher’s voice. ‘The Emperor shall shield me!’

It was the prioress herself. Vaughn glanced at the doorway. Tash was watching the stairs. A voice, surprisingly high and feminine, called down, ‘Touch the prioress and you’ll die!’

‘Tash?’ Vaughn said, ‘Throw me the cuffs.’

He looked down at the prioress. ‘Now,’ he said, snapping a pair of excruciators closed over her wrists, ‘it’s time to act like a martyr and endure.’

She was silent for a moment. All the rage seemed to have gone out of her. Perhaps, Vaughn thought, she was gearing herself not to dish out pain, but to receive it silently. ‘I did not expect to be taken alive,’ she said.

Fane shoved the barrel of his pistol into the flesh of her thick neck, and she pulled away from him; as much from his leering face than his gun. ‘Woman, who cares what you think? If I pull this trigger, your brain will be so much red mist, understand? All of your holy talk, it’s all the same to me. You don’t become a martyr unless you’re dead.’

‘Leave it,’ Vaughn said. He met the ex-ganger’s eyes for a moment, and there was something in them beyond casual viciousness and amusement in snuffing out life. For a moment Vaughn wondered if Fane had some deeper argument with the Ecclesiarchy. Whatever it was, it was getting in the way of the job. ‘Fane. I said leave her be.’

‘Whatever you say,’ Fane replied, making it sound a threat. He holstered the pistol and stood up. ‘Don’t think I won’t shoot you, holy or not.’

The prioress looked back at him as if he was not quite human. ‘You’ll burn,’ she replied, and the calm in her voice worried Vaughn more than her anger.

‘Go and help Tash cover the stairs,’ Vaughn said. ‘Well, what’re you waiting for?’

‘Right,’ Fane said. He sounded disgusted at having to obey.

Tash waited by the stairs, crouched down to get a better view. She would have looked sullen and morose even without the black soot across her eyes. She looked round, met Vaughn’s glance, then scuttled over as Fane took her place. Tash ducked down beside the prioress, tiny next to her armoured bulk, and reached into her pack.

‘Keep this woman away from me,’ the prioress declared. ‘She is... tainted.’

‘Sedative,’ Tash replied, filling a syringe. ‘This won’t hurt you, but it’ll slow you down.’ She pushed the syringe into the prioress’ neck. The woman simply glared at her, as if challenging her to do worse. ‘If it makes you feel any better,’ Tash added, ‘I don’t like you either.’

Vaughn looked at the prioress. ‘We need you to open the doors,’ he said.

The prioress shook her head. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’ she replied. ‘What’s down there in the cells has to stay here. I suppose you’re looking for treasure,’ she added. ‘Relics to sell to some seedy prelate, or to melt down for gems. I can tell you that what’s down there won’t get you rich, that’s for sure. You’ll be lucky if she only kills you.’

‘A possible emergent psyker,’ Vaughn replied. ‘I know.’

‘You know?’ The prioress glared at Vaughn, as if her stare could burn him. ‘And you came to liberate her? She’s open to the warp. If a daemon was to possess her – Thor protect us–’ Understanding crept across her face. ‘You’re cultists, aren’t you? Servants of the Ruinous Powers.’ As best as she could with her wrists tied, she made the sign of the aquila across her chest. ‘Salvate me, Imperator.’

‘No. That’s not us.’ The accusation stung Vaughn. He knew about the renegades on Tranch and the Siege of Vraks, about the murders and rituals they were said to have carried out. The idea of being mistaken for such creatures disturbed him. ‘Listen to me. We’re not cultists and we’re not traitors. But we’re taking her with us, understand? I don’t care how much that seems like sacrilege to you. Once we’re gone you can atone for losing her all you need. But she comes with us, and that’s that.’ Vaughn drew his bolt pistol. ‘Get the doors open. Now.’

For a moment she looked uncertain, and then a sort of hard calm came over her features. ‘No.’

‘I’m warning you–’

‘You’ll get nothing.’ She raised her chin, as if she was about to spit. ‘You can do with me as you want. I belong to the Master of Mankind. Better that I should die a thousand times than let you in there. In the name of the saints, I shall endure as Lord Thor endured the agonies of Vandire–’

‘Hey!’

They looked round. The prioress stopped in mid-rant, like a broken vox-caster. For once, Nietzin was smiling.

‘Ladies, gentlemen: one miracle,’ he said, and the door to the cells slid open.

Sister Cerra, 22, entered the Sisterhood at 14. Completed Novice and Cantus stages, in the process of Constantia training in preparation to become a full Sister.

Vaughn marched down the dark corridor, turning the words over in his mind. Down here, with the cells and rats, you needed something else to think about.

Reports of minor psychic phenomena towards end of Cantus training. Suspected psychic anomalies intensified over past year: four months ago, removed for spiritual reclamation and purgation of the soul.

The walls were rough and damp, the air clammy. At his side Nietzin, who knew more about the Emperor’s penal system than Vaughn, looked tired and grim.

Four months down here. I’d rather be shot.

Chanting came from ahead. The low drone made Vaughn’s skin prickle. He checked his gun without breaking stride, then glanced over his shoulder. Behind him, Fane shoved the prioress along. Despite the shot of pacifier serum that Tash had given her, she seemed hardly less alert than before. No doubt about it, the Sisters of Battle were tough.

‘This is not for you,’ she said. ‘You should not look upon our work here.’

‘Shut up.’ Vaughn stopped before a broad door. The view-slit was padlocked shut, sealed with a prayer-text and a red lump of wax.

Tash came forward to the door, tugging her medical bag into her hands. Vaughn glanced at Nietzin, and nodded.

The big man kicked the door as if to stamp it down. It burst open and Vaughn ran in, gun up. ‘Nobody move!’ he shouted, and he stopped, horrified.

A figure stood at the far side of the room. It wore a loose white gown, the arms raised like wings. The head lolled: the hair was cropped. There were symbols painted onto her scalp in what looked like blood. Two hooded figures knelt before the girl: one read from a book, the other swung a small censer as she chanted. Neither looked round.

Vaughn stared at the scene for a moment, taking in details. The room reeked of incense. He saw that the girl’s arms were raised by chains; that her skin was pale and raw; that the wall on the left was covered in a mass of parchments. Devices hung from pegs on the wall: whips; saws; long pins attached to sacred parchments; a thing like a mixture of a stylus and soldering-iron; and other items that, even after years in the worst parts of the Imperial Guard, Vaughn had never seen before.

One of the robed figures started to rise.

‘I said don’t move!’ Vaughn yelled.

Nietzin blasted the first chanter. Superheated blood spattered the wall, hissing on the parchments. The second robed figure took a step backwards. The older man sidestepped, so as not to risk hitting the girl. Then he blew the second chanter’s head into steam. The censer clattered on the stone floor.

‘Torturers,’ Nietzin said, as if that explained everything.

‘It’s a ritual, you fool,’ the prioress spat. Vaughn could see the effort in her face, fighting down the effects of the sedative. ‘Her powers have to be locked inside her to stop them getting out – sealed with fire. A creature like that draws the warp. The right sigils need to be cut into the flesh, to trap the power of the warp inside–’

‘That’s enough,’ Vaughn said. ‘Get her down.’

Tash hurried past, syringe in hand, and sank it into the girl’s neck. Then she started to help Nietzin unfasten the chains.

‘I called it in,’ Nietzin said. ‘Ten minutes to extraction.’

Nobody moved in the corridor. ‘Careful,’ Vaughn said. ‘Careful...’

He crept back down the passage, his eyes flicking from wall to wall. Nobody stood behind the buttresses, waiting for the moment to attack. They can’t have gone, he thought. The Sisters of Battle would never give up like that.

Tash followed, then Nietzin, watching the two prisoners. A dose of torpor had rendered Sister Calla drowsy and confused, but at least compliant. If she did have psychic powers, she didn’t show them. Saints be praised for that, Vaughn thought. He glanced back as they hurried down the corridor. The prioress glared at him through a haze of drugs like a furious drunk.

As they drew near to the cogitator-chapel, a set of harsh metallic coughs broke the air, rising into a single, massed roar. Fane yelled, ‘Chainswords!’

A figure dashed around the corner, hardly armoured, only half-clothed, waving a whirling blade over its head. Smoke belched from the weapon’s exhausts. A voice screamed from behind a mask of parchments wrapped bandage-styled over the face.

Tash shot her dead, three las-blasts straight through the chest. As the Sister fell, her saw nicked her unarmoured leg and threw gore across the wall. More devotees ran out, whirling chainswords and yelling praises and threats, and Vaughn’s men cut them down.

Someone howled behind him. He spun round, expecting a trap, and saw the prioress leap at Sister Cerra. Even half-drugged, her hands tied, the prioress could fight. Cerra was down in a second, clubbed by two heavy fists. The prioress locked her thumbs on Cerra’s windpipe.

Vaughn didn’t hesitate. He emptied half his gun’s power pack into the prioress’ side.

He turned and fired down the corridor, covering Nietzin as he reloaded. Someone screamed and fell by the chapel doorway. A novice armed with an autogun leaned around one of the buttresses. Fane snatched his pistol from his belt, raised it and aimed in one motion and put four rounds into her chest.

The corridor was suddenly quiet, full of smoke and blood. Nietzin hauled Cerra to her feet. ‘Quickly,’ Vaughn said, and they picked their way between the bodies, towards the stairs. One of the Sisters, hit in the leg, was slowly crawling towards her gun. Vaughn kicked it out of reach.

The prioress lay on her back behind them, dead eyes staring upward. She had joined the long list of martyrs of the Imperium.

The lift was fast, but it was too much of a risk. They took the access stairs instead. It was hard, slow going. Vaughn’s knees soon ached from climbing. Their boots seemed to ring out an invitation to be ambushed on the metal stairs. Sister Cerra staggered beside Tash, a thin strand of drool hanging out of her mouth, until Fane, muttering about having to do the hard work, grabbed Cerra and hauled her along after him, half-carrying her up the stairs. Nietzin paused, puffing, met Fane’s eyes and started up again before the inevitable mockery began. They kept on, covering the way forward and the stairs behind, winding their way towards the surface. ‘Come on,’ Vaughn snapped, ‘Come on!’

He tried to remember how many Sisters the briefing had said there would be. By now, everyone capable of bearing arms would have been called in to fight. Surely there couldn’t be many more power-armoured Sisters. They’ll be waiting, he thought. It’s what I’d do: set a trap. Somewhere between here and the landing pad...

At last the stairs ended. They looked out onto a small hall, empty except for a door on the far side. Vaughn tore it open, Nietzin covering him, and they stepped out into fresh air and strong wind.

They crept down the side of the building. Vaughn glanced around the corner. The landing pad was empty. Vaughn peered towards the chapel through his monocular and saw small dark figures moving down the ridge; some robed, some armoured. He saw staves, censers, heavy bolters and meltaguns. The whole damned priory had turned out to fight.

The moment we step out, we’re dead.

The landing pad was wide open, and covered by a dozen big guns. For a moment he wondered if the flyer would turn up to rescue them at all.

Thrusters roared beneath him. The flyer rose up beside them, its engines setting the ropes on the handrail flapping wildly. A hatch dropped open in the flyer’s battered flank, and Lao’s voice came droning out of the speakers mounted under the wings.

‘Climb in – come on, hurry up! If you think I’m landing here you must be bloody joking.’

The flyer tore up through the sky. Vaughn watched the atmosphere thin out and darken as they reached its upper limit. Flames licked at the window as the ship left Rand XXI behind for good.

He looked over at Tash. As team medic, she was sitting beside the girl they had rescued, monitoring her status with a device somewhere between a narthecium and a psi-tracker. The novice herself sat with her mouth slightly open, gazing at a point behind Vaughn’s head. She looked like a doll, or a broken servitor.

Sister Cerra. Vaughn wondered if that was her original name: a lot of the Sisters of Battle changed their names when they joined the Adepta Sororitas. He felt too tired to care.

‘Watch her,’ he said. ‘Wake me up if anything changes.’ Then Vaughn rested his head on the wall, and the rumble of the engines coaxed him into sleep.

The others woke him up in the docking bay. The Solar Tradewind still looked like a merchantman inside. In truth, it was something between a Q-ship and a research vessel. Aching, Vaughn unbuckled himself and followed the others down into the bay.

Petarmus waited for him. His clothes were creased and his hair ruffled, as if it was he who had only just woken. He was Vaughn’s equal and opposite, the leader of Inquisitor Harsek’s other team of acolytes, the one the crewmen of the Tradewind called the left hand. The left hand watches the right, Vaughn thought, as a pair of medics wheeled a stretcher into the bay.

‘Welcome back,’ Petarmus said. ‘Good to see you’re alive.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You can tell your team they’ve got six hours. There’s a crate of amasec in the mess.’

‘I’ll let them know.’

‘Lord Harsek wants to see you in an hour. He says to make yourself presentable first.’

‘I will.’

Petarmus nodded. ‘He’s up in his garden, tending the spinethorns or whatever he does up there.’ Vaughn made to leave. ’Good work on getting out alive, by the way. There’s not many that cross the Sisters and walk away.’

Vaughn checked in his gear, washed, changed his clothes and slept for twenty minutes in his quarters. He sat on his bed and looked the room over. It didn’t seem like much for fifteen years of military service, of one sort or another. Travel the galaxy, serve the Throne. I could have missed the Guard tithe, worked out my time in a weapons factory instead of ending up here. Still, I did do something worthwhile; for once, I saved a life. If I’d have left her down there, she’d be dead by now; staked out and burned as a witch when the exorcism failed to take hold. For once, there had been no balancing out, no trading of a few lives to save many more. He had done the right thing, without doubt.

He walked down the corridor, to the mess room.

‘Hey, Vaughn,’ Fane said, working at the bottle top of an amasec flask with his knife, ‘Vaughn!’

‘What?’

‘Guess what I prayed for last night. Go on, guess.’

Vaughn shrugged. ‘The good grace to keep your mouth shut.’

‘I prayed for the saints to send me to a planet full of women. And you know what? I got what I asked for! The saints have a sense of humour, that’s for sure!’

Vaughn was surprised how much Fane’s blasphemy angered him. Nietzin shook his head and muttered something about people getting what they asked for.

Fane was in the first stage of drunkenness. Later on, he’d be wildly pious, ready to fight anyone he suspected of doubting the sanctity of the Blessed Quivvar Nog. Then he’d pass out. He might be trash, Vaughn thought, but at least he was predictable.

Vaughn caught the lift up to the main garden. The servitors knew all of Harsek’s acolytes by sight, but they still scanned his iris. The lift carried Vaughn away from his men, into Harsek’s private domain. Gears ground under him, until the lift stopped smoothly and the doors rattled apart.

He stood at the edge of a huge, domed room. The ceiling glowed with turquoise light. Vaughn walked into warm air alive with the chirruping of alien insects. Xenos plants covered the ceiling, crawled up the walls towards the dome. A floater-seed as big as Vaughn’s head bobbed past.

He walked in carefully. The garden was beautiful, at a distance. Close up, he saw poisonous plants, strangling vines and worse: Catachan brainleaves, spikers, even a massive creeper-tree tethered to the side of the dome. As it felt Vaughn’s footsteps it flexed its roots like a thug cracking his knuckles.

In the centre of the garden stood a bespectacled old man . He came towards Vaughn with a smile on his face, wearing a plain brown robe. Inquisitor Harsek, whose word had burned entire worlds, had no great aura of power. There was nothing obviously sinister about him, but as ever, Vaughn fought down the need to retreat, the need to hide from Harsek’s calm, knowing eyes. ‘You’ve done an excellent job,’ Harsek said.

Vaughn did not relax. He bowed, quickly and formally. ‘Thank you, my lord. My men did well.’

‘No need for formality,’ Harsek replied. ‘Or false modesty. This girl is ours now. Thank you.’

‘Will they cure her?’ Vaughn asked. No doubt, he thought, Harsek would have his men probe around in Cerra’s mind, digging out whatever they required in furtherance of their master’s plans. Then, once they acquired what they needed and made the rest of her safe, they would dump her on one of the more stable-minded civilised worlds, to eke out a safe, boring existence with a trillion other nobodies. That was much the way Vaughn himself hoped to end up, once his service for the Inquisition was done: comfortably anonymous, a billion kilometres from here. After all, he reflected, if they had wanted Cerra dead they could simply have left her with the Sisters of Battle.

‘Cure her? Goodness, no.’ Harsek whipped a pair of pruning shears from his belt and flipped them open like a butterfly knife. He stooped over a bush, snipping at the fronds. ‘One doesn’t cure a psyker. But they can be contained, put to good use. Only the Emperor can perform soul-binding, but there are other ways. The risk of a psyker drawing the attention of the Ruinous Powers never goes, of course, not entirely, but the danger can lessen a little, depending on how she’s used.’

At the mention of the Ruinous Powers, Vaughn made a quick, instinctive aquila across his chest.

‘But you managed to get her at her prime,’ Harsek added. ‘Just how we need her.’

For a moment, Vaughn thought he might just nod, salute Inquisitor Harsek and walk away. How did the saying go? A servant’s greatest contentment is the knowledge that his master’s task is done. But he had never quite followed that mantra. ‘How do you mean? If you don’t mind me asking, my lord.’

‘Of course. You’re always free to ask. And I’m always free not to answer.’ Harsek dropped the shears into a pocket in his robe. ‘She is an emergent psyker, undoubtedly. The presence of such a person draws warp entities the way blood in the water draws sharks. But there are some sharks worth studying, yes?’

Vaughn strained his memory to remember what a shark was. Ah, yes. ‘So, she–’

‘Would draw the attention of more interesting prey.’

‘Isn’t that dangerous?’

‘For her, yes. Fatal, probably. But for us... vital.’

Vaughn felt his face harden. ‘But she’s innocent, surely.’

‘Innocent?’ Harsek looked rather surprised, as if he had not expected to encounter the word in these surroundings. ‘Hmm. That’s not really a term I tend to use. I find it rather unhelpful. I prefer to think in terms of... purity of motive. Yes, that’s the best way of putting it.’

Vaughn made no attempt to hide his expression. There was no point in doing so. Harsek wouldn’t need to read his face to know what he was thinking.

‘Don’t be like that,’ the inquisitor said, his voice still gentle. ‘You didn’t waste your time – quite the opposite, in fact. She’s innocent, you’re innocent – so am I. We may do awful things sometimes, but our motives remain pure. The galaxy has yet to find a way to sully them.’ He smiled and took off his spectacles.

Vaughn knew that he would not tell his men any of this, especially Nietzin. For all they would know, Sister Cerra had been healed and set free.

‘I’ll remember that, my lord,’ Vaughn replied, and he turned and walked away.

AN AUDIO EXTRACT FROM THE OUTCAST DEAD

Graham McNeill

Included with this issue is an audio extract of The Outcast Dead

Hunters

Braden Campbell

Mihalik was recalling his first encounter with the devil when the wind shifted slightly, rippling the tall grass in which he and Covone were lying. They took the opportunity to move forward again. Glancing to the sky, he noted that clouds were slowly rolling in, obscuring the stars. That meant the wind would continue to pick up and the two of them would be able to cover substantial ground. If the grass stopped moving, then they would have to as well. Although the cammo cloaks they each wore would make them all but invisible, the tau sentries wore helmets with amplified vision and their perimeter drones were equipped with motion trackers. To stay completely hidden, he and Covone had to move in conjunction with their cover. When the brush moved, they moved. When the world was silent, so were they. Adapting oneself to the environment; that was the Catachan way.

The way of their enemy, on the other hand, was very different. The tau had arrived on Cytheria weeks ago, thinking it to be largely undeveloped and unpopulated; a perfect world for them to colonize. The Catachans, who for generations had used its vast grassy plains and dense, lethal jungles as training grounds, begged to differ. They mustered nearly every piece of armour they had, and threw it at the interlopers. When it was over however, the tau’s accuracy and superior range prevailed. Had the planet been occupied by a different regiment, things would have likely ended in capitulation. But this was a Catachan world. The struggle to evict the tau was devolving into a series of guerilla actions, and although such a prospect would have seemed grim to most other soldiers, it was one the Imperium’s famed jungle fighters relished; how the aliens would deal with it was the big question.

Something pulled at the leg of Mihalik’s pants. He froze and looked over his shoulder. Behind him, Covone tapped the minicomp on his wrist, and then held up a pair of fingers. Mihalik understood the gesture. They had two hours until the sun would rise. They had to be in position and ready to fire by that time, or the entire mission would be a failure. He nodded to Covone, responded with a hand signal of his own that said they were very close to their target, and continued snaking his way forward.

Throughout the night, their goal had been to reach a particular tree that stood two hundred feet inside the overgrown park. It had a wide trunk to hide behind and a large burl of roots that would make an excellent rifle rest; and, it had a car smashed into it. At some point during the tau’s occupation of the town, one of the local civilians had apparently driven his ground car up over the curb and ploughed it right into the tree. The front end had crumpled horribly and the chassis was angled sharply upwards, creating a sheltered area better than any duck blind either Mihalik or Covone could have ever built for themselves. Had the hand of some benevolent god reached down and placed the wreck there for them, it couldn’t have made a more perfect firing position.

Thirty minutes of hard crawling and they finally arrived. Their clothes were damp. The skin on their chests and elbows was raw from constant contact with the ground. Their faces and hands were covered with insect bites. They dragged themselves underneath the wreck, and rolled over on to their backs, staring up into the dark.

‘I knew what time it was,’ Mihalik hissed. They were the first words he uttered all night.

‘What?’ Covone was panting.

Mihalik didn’t know if the other man was short of breath because he was out of shape or because of the gaping wound in his chest where the tau had stabbed him earlier. A bit of both, he suspected bitterly. ‘I said, I knew what time it was. You didn’t have to stop and tell me.’

‘I just… thought I… should remind you.’

‘Well you didn’t have to. I need a spotter, not a babysitter.’ There was a moment of quiet between them before he asked Covone how he was feeling.

‘My ribs are on fire,’ he said. ‘I think… I think this wound has opened up again. My bandages are soaked.’

‘That complicates things,’ Mihalik groaned. ‘We haven’t got any more replacements. Can you hang on ‘till we’re on our way back out of town?’

‘You just worry about yourself,’ Covone growled.

Mihalik’s fuse was running as short as Covone’s. ‘I will then,’ he snapped. ‘Get me my ranging info.’

‘Don’t order me around. I know my job.’ Covone began pulling out his equipment. From a tubular case hooked to his belt, he pulled out a battered macro-lens and a short computer cable. One end he snapped into his minicomp, the other into the electronic viewer. Mihalik wondered, not for the first time, how ancient and revered these two pieces must have been. Then he focused on his own gear.

Many snipers across the Imperium swore by the long-barrelled lasgun; it had pinpoint accuracy and covered the distance from shooter to target almost instantaneously. However, its major drawback was that the searing, white-hot beam of light could be easily traced back to its source by even a casual observer. Mihalik had no intention of making things that easy for the tau, and so he had instead decided to use a bolt-action rifle and solid slugs. In his mind, bullets more than made up in reliability what they lacked in technological extravagance. For days, his rifle had been cocooned in a camouflaged, waterproof sleeve. Now, he unwrapped it carefully, attached a suppressor to the end of the muzzle, and checked the ammo feed. He had five rounds in the magazine, with six more clips on his bandoleer. It was more than enough, an orgy of munitions in fact, but he had no intention of being killed this day for lack of firing back.

The quiet of the night was soon disturbed by an explosion, far off in the distance. Mihalik and Covone both paused in their preparations and lay in frozen silence. A minute went past. A second detonation rolled through the air from the most distant corner of the town. Then a third and a fourth.

‘Paskow’, Covone whispered.

‘Give ‘em hell, brother,’ Mihalik muttred. He would have toasted the man’s success had there been anything to raise a glass with. But his canteen was long gone now, lying drained and destroyed in the hallway of a filthy hab block. He suddenly remembered how thirsty he was. Golden Throne, he thought; even Covone’s detestable homebrew would have tasted like a sweet nectar right about now.

‘This stuff is terrible,’ Mihalik said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Why does it taste minty?’

Covone shrugged and took a sip from his own tin cup. His head shook reflexively as the contents worked its way down his gullet. ‘Probably because I made it out of fermented firepine needles. It’s all I could find. You don’t like it, don’t drink it.’

Mihalik looked over his shoulder. Beyond the open tent flap he could see the rest of the camp. The jungle foliage here was not so thick as to completely block out the rain, and small waterfalls poured down through a canopy of red leaves. Catachan soldiers, some under Mihalik’s command, some under Covone’s, huddled beneath tarpaulins and waxed canvas sheets strung between the trees. The ground was a thick soup of mud and rotting leaves that clung to their boots and trouser legs. They sat quietly cleaning their weapons, or sharpening their combat knives. A few cooking fires burned low and smokeless. There was no complaining. They were jungle fighters after all, every one of them. This type of environment was where they were most at home. Still, Mihalik could clearly see that there were no sparring contests, no racist or bawdy jokes being told. The men were quiet, dour, joyless. Weeks of constant retreat, and defeat at the hands the tau were dragging morale into grim and dangerous depths. Mihalik’s included.

He turned back to Covone. ‘Oh, I’ll drink it’, he said, and poured the remaining contents of his cup down his throat in a single swig, concentrating so as to not throw it back up. ‘Beats going sober in this place.’

Covone pointed and said, ‘Here he comes. Finally.’

Outside, Catachan soldiers were arriving, streaming in from a half a dozen narrow pathways in the otherwise unbroken foliage. Their heavy boots were caked with mud; their battle fatigues were filthy and torn. Each of them wore a green armoured plate over their left shoulder, emblazoned with a white winged skull and the number XXVI. Several of them, upon entering the clearing, collapsed down to sit in the muck, lacking even the energy to stumble or crawl underneath a shelter.

Among them was a tall figure who wore a red scarf tied around his forehead,as well as a secondary one on his right bicep. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his cheeks were hollow. He spoke briefly with one of Covone’s men, who by comparison looked as fit and energetic as a first-season recruit; and then, he entered into the tent.

Covone extended his hand to the newcomer. ‘Paskow,’ he sighed. ‘I was getting worried.’

‘Couldn’t be helped,’ the man replied slowly. He clasped Covone’s forearm in familiar greeting. ‘We’ve been falling back from the plains for a week now. On foot. We managed to hold the blues up as long as we could, but it cost us all our transports.’

‘Well, we sure as hell owe you one,’ Covone said. He poured a fresh cup of his homemade alcohol and offered it. ‘You bought us the time we needed to relocate up here to the mountains. Ezra, have you two ever actually met?’

Mihalik shook his head. ‘Mihalik, leader of the Catachan 51st, the Black Vipers.’

Paskow nodded. ‘Leader, Catachan 26th, the Lurking Cobras.’ He drank from the cup slowly and unflinchingly; its burning aftertaste affecting him not in the least.

Covone and Mihalik exchanged a glance, both wondering how burnt out their compatriot might be.

When he was done, Paskow exhaled slowly and said ‘The Black Vipers. Heard you took a real pounding in the initial assault wave.’

‘I lost a lot of good men, yeah,’ Mihalik muttered. He hated to recall the ease with which the xenos invaders had overrun one position after another. His sniper corps had never shirked their duty though, never wavered in their resolve. They kept on shooting enemy squad leaders and identifying important personnel right up until the last second when some alien weapon barrage engulfed them in a fiery blast.

Covone sat himself on an empty ammo crate, and motioned for Paskow to do likewise. ‘So here we are,’ he said, ‘The last remaining leaders of Cytheria’s defense force.’

‘Risky to have us all meet in one place,’ Paskow muttered. His weariness radiated out through every part of him, including his voice. ‘The tau could end us right here and now if they wanted.’

‘Risky? Stupid is more like it,’ Mihalik grumbled.

Covone spread his hands in apology. ‘I had no choice. Four days ago, the last of the satellites went down. The planetary comm lines all belong to the tau now. If we’d done this over the air, even short-range radio, they’d have able to listen in. Besides, they can’t come into the jungle. Their forces are all geared for fighting in open country.’

‘You certain of that?’ Mihalik raised his eyebrows and looked at Covone sternly. Since the day of their first arrival, he had seen the foe employ a wide variety of military hardware, most of it so advanced and alien that it hurt his brain to even try and consider it. ‘I’ve seen them hit a target with a volley of missiles launched from beyond visual range. Beyond visual range, Covone. It’s not natural.’

‘Robots, too,’ Paskow said. ‘Like a big dinner plate turned upside down, and with some kind of pulse weapon attached. Not much on their own, but they field so many of them…’ His eyes lost focus for a moment as he relived some previous disaster known only to him.

‘They’re crafty alright, I’ll give them that,’ Covone said. ‘But I think I’ve figured out how to stop them dead in their tracks.’

Paskow sat forward intently. All the depression was suddenly gone from his voice, replaced with vitriol. ‘How?’

Covone leaned in and spoke in a low voice, as if afraid that, even here, the enemy might be eavesdropping. ‘The tau have a chain of command that’s totally inflexible. Every soldier looks to his squad leader for orders and obeys them without question. Every squad leader looks to his company commander for guidance, and the commanders…’

‘Who do they answer to?’ Paskow asked eagerly.

‘That’s just it. We had no idea. For all we knew, they operated like we do, with senior officers conducting their own operations, working largely on their own initiatives. But…’

Mihalik snickered. ‘Headless snakes.’

Covone and Paskow looked at him, and after a second, he elaborated.

‘Back on Catachan, when I was just a kid, I apprenticed under this old veteran, Kirsopp. He used to say that we were headless snakes; that a Catachan army couldn’t be crippled by taking out a single, all-encompassing leader because we had none. Some ancient expression about a serpent’s head and its body.’

‘It is the smartest way to run things,’ Paskow agreed.

‘Which is why it’s so surprising that the tau don’t do it too,’ Covone smiled now and reached for a brown leather carrying bag that lay near his feet. From it, he withdrew several grainy, black-and-white picts. They had obviously been taken at a very long range, but in each of them, the central figure was a tau. He wore complicated-looking, multi-layered robes with a laughably tall collar piece that stretched up behind his head. Around his neck was a clunky medallion. He carried a thin staff in one hand that was crowned with an apparently purposeless, asymmetrical design. His face was completely alien – no discernable nose, beady little eyes, and a wide slit for a mouth.

‘Some of my men snapped these while doing long-range recon,’ Covone handed the picts to Paskow, who squinted at them intently. The alien’s bearing and attire struck some chord of familiarity within him.

‘A priest?’ he guessed.

Covone nodded. ‘They call them Ethereals. Near as we can tell, they’re the tau’s ultimate authority on this world. We take this guy out, and their whole army will drift like a rudderless swampboat.’

Mihalik looked at the other two. They were both smiling now, swept up with the promise that the war for Cytheria might actually turn in their favour with one quick stroke. Yet, he was apprehensive. He plucked the pictures from Paskow, and scrutinised them.

‘Covone,’ he said, ‘I must’ve sniped a dozen priests in my life, and not one of them whose passing caused a whole army to freeze up. Can this… guy… really be so important?’

Covone’s eyes narrowed as he regarded Mihalik. ‘Two platoons died bringing me this intelligence,’ he said coldly. ‘I trust it.’

‘Where were these taken?’ Paskow cut in.

‘Bloedel Park, in one of the civilian colony sites. It’s tau central now. Their engineering teams have put up a landing field and command post there. I guess they thought it was better to build on empty land instead of demolishing half the town.’ Covone shrugged. ‘More efficient, maybe.’

Mihalik furrowed his brow. True, using the colony’s largest open area was the fastest way for the blues to establish a principal command. On the other hand, it also meant that their most important leaders and decision makers were hemmed in on all sides by pre-existing buildings, any one of which would make excellent cover for snipers or heavy weapon teams. For a supposedly intelligent species with a highly disciplined army, it struck him as being a really stupid move.

‘What exactly are you proposing, Covone?’ Mihalik asked, though he already knew the answer.

‘That we go in and get him.’

Paskow’s thirst for revenge was suddenly tempered by caution, a trait shared by all experienced Catachans. When a man spent his entire life fighting where the environment could kill as easily as an enemy’s weapon, if not more so, he either took the time to consider everything before acting, or he died in vain. ‘This is no simple undertaking,’ he said slowly. ‘How will we even get there?’

Covone held up a finger. ‘We have exactly one Valkyrie left, stashed nearby under a mountain of cammo sheeting. It can take us to an insertion point outside the town, well beyond their anti-air defenses. If we survive, it’ll be there to ferry us out.’

‘We’ll have to infiltrate through the occupied portions of the colony site, and only the Emperor knows what kind of security they’ll have in place.’

‘That’s why it’s got to be just us three. Any larger a party will be caught for sure, but three men, three highly experienced men, with cammo cloaks and essential gear only, might just be alright.’

‘What makes you think we’ll ever catch him out in the open?’ Mihalik asked Covone bitterly. ‘If this priest is so precious, what’s to say the blues don’t move him into a bunker a mile below the ground, or some such place?’

‘He gives daily sermons, out on the landing field, for all the tau to hear. Draws quite the crowd, I’m told. All about the glory of the Greater Good.’

‘The what?’

‘The Greater Good. It’s their little version of the Ecclesiarchy.’ Covone reached back down once more into his carrying bag, and withdrew a data slate. He tossed it to Mihalik, who caught it with one hand. ‘I got it from this. Xeno archives. Most of it is two hundred years old or more, but there’s a fair amount of stuff in there we can use.’

Mihalik looked up coldly. ‘You keep saying ‘we’. Who died and made you planetary governor?’

Covone rose to his feet. ‘If you have a better idea how to turn things around, by all means, let’s hear it.’

Mihalik wished like hell at that moment that he had an alternative plan, but he didn’t. Like all the others, he was tired of falling back, sick of being beaten by the blues. He wanted nothing more than to kill every last one of them, but Covone’s mission was a one-shot, all-or-nothing, stab in the dark based on centuries-old data and some sketchy field intelligence. It was like walking into a blind alley, and Mihalik hadn’t reached the ripe old age of thirty-six by allowing himself to be railroaded. He was a Catachan sniper, who led a regiment of other Catachan snipers. Hit and fade was the mantra he lived by, and he always made certain that he had an escape route in everything that he did.

He shook his head, and began to skim through the data slate. ‘There’s just something that bothers me about this,’ he muttered.

‘Like what?’ Paskow asked.

‘I don’t know. Something. Maybe I just don’t like having only one option.’

Covone sat back down again and started planning with Paskow as to what specific equipment they should be taking. Mihalik in the meantime, began reading the data slate in earnest. It was nearly an hour later when he finally found what he was looking for, and when he showed it to the others, they couldn’t help but agree with him.

In the hour before sunrise, they were nearly caught.

Covone was busy with his spotter’s duties; surveying the area thoroughly, identifying potential problems, and taking measurements of the wind and weather. Mihalik lay very still, listening to the various sounds beyond their hiding spot. It had been nearly an hour since they had heard the last of Paskow’s demo charges rumble through the streets like distant thunder. The colony was now deathly quiet, save for a pair of venomdoves cooing softly in the branches above them.

Covone coughed. Compared to the quiet that preceded it, the sound was like the cracking of a whip. Mihalik’s head snapped around, his eyes wide and ferocious. He saw his spotter, face down, his right arm wrapped tightly in front of his mouth and nose. Covone’s body shook with another, more muted cough. Several moments went by until he was certain the fit had passed. He pulled his arm away slowly, opened his mouth, and let a stream of mucusy blood rain out. Then he nodded to acknowledge that he was alright.

Mihalik’s eyes narrowed. He was about to whisper something when there came a sudden flapping of wings. The venomdoves had been spooked away, and not by the spasming of Covone’s punctured lung.

Together, they peeked out through the knotted roots of the tree. At first, they saw nothing; but then the clouds began to break, and in the gloomy indigo light that preceded the dawn, Covone and Mihalik could just barely make out the silhouette of a tau patrol. There were twelve of them out there, standing perfectly still in grass that came up to their shoulders. Their rifles, held at the ready, looked long and flat and lethal. Tense minutes went by, until the aliens apparently decided they hadn’t heard anything unusual after all, and continued on their way.

Mihalik slowly released the breath that he’d been holding and counted to ten. Then, he stared at Covone, who was once again draining blood from his mouth onto the ground. His fury turned to genuine concern, and he asked to see the wound.

‘It’s nothing,’ Covone hissed, and returned to his information gathering. Mihalik could hear the other man’s breathing though - raspy, gurgling, and getting worse.

Things had started out well enough. The Valkyrie had landed in a jungle clearing far outside the range of any tau defense. Paskow and Covone descended the rear ramp briskly, and took a few moments to make a final check of their gear. Mihalik walked the perimeter of the landing zone, ensuring that everything else was in place. Then, the three of them made their way to the outskirts of the colony. For as long as they remained in the jungle, they didn’t encounter a single tau. However, as soon as the trees gave way to fields of grass, it all changed.

Crouching within a thorny bush, the three men looked across a freshly ploughed field. Fifty or more humans, backs bent, were planting yellow stalks into the copper-coloured earth. Their faces looked joyless. High above them floated several of the dinner plate robots that Paskow dreaded so much. From a large speaker mounted beneath, it spoke in oddly accented Gothic.

‘Embrace the Greater Good. Do not complain about your work, but consider its benefit to all of society. There is unity between tau and man, between the higher and lower ranks, and between military work, political work, and rear service work. It is imperative to overcome anything that impairs this unity.’

‘What the hell?’ Mihalik breathed.

‘They’re enslaving the civilians,’ Paskow spat into the dirt.

Covone grunted. ‘They call it cultural assimilation.’

They skirted around the field, uncertain of whether the robots would identify them as enemy soldiers, or simply see them as three more humans in a town filled with humans. The afternoon was growing late when they finally entered the colony proper. They crept along back alleyways, their cammo cloaks making them appear as sections of crumbling brick wall or heaps of trash. Every so often they would risk looking out onto the streets, where throngs of people went about their business. As they got closer to Bloedel Park, the number of tau standing about increased.

Finally, as the shadows grew long, they crossed a parking lot filled with derelict ground cars, and slipped through a metal door set into the back of a hab block. It was dark and cool in the hallway beyond, and all three men took a minute to gather themselves. Mihalik drank deeply from his canteen. Covone tapped at his arm-mounted computer. Paskow stuck a hand into one of his deep pockets and withdrew a small bottle. He snapped the lid off using only his thumb, and dumped a cluster of four white pills into his mouth. Mihalik watched him swallow the lot.

‘Stay awakes,’ Paskow said lowly. He held the bottle out.

‘Can’t,’ Mihalik said, shaking his head. ‘They make my hands shake.’

Covone looked at the two of them. ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘This place is occupied. Minicomp counts three hundred life signs. But, the other side of the building faces directly onto the park.’

‘I counted five stories from the outside,’ Paskow said as they began to walk down the hall. ‘I’m thinking the fourth floor?’

‘Should work,’ Mihalik agreed. ‘The top floor is too obvious a choice, and there’s no way we’re going up to the roof with no cover overhead.’

The climbed a stairwell littered with garbage. On every landing the three of them took note of several large posters, recently applied. One showed a tau in full combat armour, his head tilted up and away in a heroic pose that rang across all cultural lines. DO NOT FEAR was printed in blocky Imperial gothic across the top, and beneath it, THE TAU ARE YOUR FRIENDS.

‘Some friends,’ Covone said. He was pointing at a second poster the read, REPORT ALL SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOUR.

They emerged on the fourth floor. The halls were empty, but from within the apartments they could hear the sounds of people preparing their evening meals. The smell of boiling cabbage in the air was oppressive. Covone pressed his ear to one of the plain, brown doors and whispered, ‘This one faces the front, but it’s occupied.’

‘Screw it,’ Mihalik kicked it down, and the three of them strode into the shabby space beyond. There was a tiny kitchen to their immediate left and past that, a single large room furnished with well-worn couches and cots. Tattered blankets served as curtains. In one corner, a family of four cowered suddenly before the intruders.

Mihalik and Covone ignored them completely and crouched down by the window. They pulled back the corner of one of the blankets and peered outside. Paskow, on the other hand, pushed back the hood of his cloak and held up his hands.

‘We’re not here for you,’ he told the family. ‘We just need some space. It’d be better if you went into the kitchen and stayed there.’

Wide-eyed and trembling, they scrambled away as they were told. Paskow joined the others.

‘Aren’t you the community hero,’ Mihalik jibbed.

Paskow didn’t so much as smile, but tightened his jaw and ground his teeth as he bit back a response.

Covone glanced at his minicomp. ‘It’s sunset now. That gives us about ten hours until the Ethereal makes an appearance,’ he said.

‘This is a good spot,’ Mihalik replied. ‘Might be a bit windy this high up, but I can compensate. Let’s get set up.’

Paskow had been carrying the heaviest bag, and he dropped it to the floor with a deep thud. Mihalik carefully took the large bundle that contained his sniper rifle from off of his back, and leaned it against the window frame. Covone glanced over his shoulder, then rose and walked to where the apartment door still hung open. He was in process of closing it, when he realised that something was missing. He had just enough time to look around and ask, ‘Where’d that family go?’ before a squad of six tau soldiers barrelled in.

Things happened very quickly after that. The apartment was cramped and offered limited fields of view, but Mihalik could see Covone dive sideways into the kitchen while somewhere off to his right, Paskow opened up with his lasgun. Two of the alien soldiers ran into the main room, their long rifles blazing. Mihalik and Paskow were couched low however, and the pulsing blasts missed them entirely. The window and wall behind them, burst into shards of glass and chunks of plaster. Mihalik’s rifle was still in its waterproof cocoon. He drew his fang, and with a loud gasp, hurled the short sword-sized knife at the closest tau. It punched clean through the alien’s armoured chest plate and embedded itself up to the hilt in a fountain of blue gore.

There were more shots from Paskow, and the sound of a struggle in the kitchen, but such things were happening outside of Mihalik’s tunnel vision. He dove forward, grabbed the dead tau’s rifle, and began spraying the doorway. Through the brilliant flashes of white, he could see the remaining blues pitch forwards and die. He stood up, the xenos gun still in his hands, and then realised what he had done. He dropped the rifle with a sharp cry, and furiously wiped his hands on his pant legs. He had touched a xenos weapon. No, worse, he had actually used one. His hands felt dirtied, and his stomach heaved.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he stammered. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’

Paskow laid a hand on his shoulder sympathetically. Occasionally, terrible things had to be endured in the course of a war.

From the kitchen came the sound of body hitting the floor. The two men rushed around the corner to find Covone leaning against the counter top. He had a laspistol in one hand, and his fang in the other. He was panting heavily. There were two gutted tau sprawled across the cracked tile.

Paskow pointed. ‘You’re hit.’

Covone looked down at his chest. There was a knife sticking out of his lower ribs. It was long and flat, and had an ornate handle wrapped in black leather and adorned with golden studs. It looked more ceremonial than practical.

‘Aw, damn!’ Covone sagged to the floor among the bodies.

Mihalik crouched down next to him. He whipped the red scarf from his forehead, wadded it up into a ball, and stuffed it in Covone’s mouth. Their eyes met, and when Covone nodded quickly, Mihalik yanked the tau blade out in a single, fluid motion. Covone kept quiet, to his credit, and bit down hard on Mihalik’s scarf. Paskow appeared and began to dress the wound with a roll of sterile bandages.

Mihalik dropped the weapon in disgust. ‘That’s twice now,’ he gasped.

Covone spat out the scarf, and tried to make light of things. ‘Report all seditious behaviour,’ he said between gritted teeth. ‘I find those people again, it’s Catachan neckties for the lot of them.’

‘We’ll help you,’ Paskow said. He tied off the field dressing with a sharp jerk that made Covone wince. ‘I can’t believe that our own people are buying into this ‘Greater Good’ nonsense.’

Mihalik stood and glanced at the other bodies. Each of them wore a knife similar to the one that had stabbed Covone.

‘And I’m getting tired of being right all the time,’ he said. ‘You know, when these guys don’t report in to their home base, we’re going to be up to our eyeballs in blues. We have to scrub the mission.’

Paskow stood up and crossed to the blasted window without a word. He picked up his heavy bag, and walked to the door. ‘No,’ he said, not meeting their eyes, ‘this is too important. I’ll head as far away as I can and make the biggest distraction possible. It should draw most of the patrols away so that you can do what you have to.’

‘Are you sure?’ Covone asked as he staggered back onto his feet.

Paskow opened the bag. It was packed with a variety of explosives from fist-sized frag grenades to monstrous demo charges. He smiled. ‘I’m sure.’

‘Leave us one of those,’ Mihalik said. ‘Just in case.’

Paskow handed a demo charge to Covone, then turned without another word and ran down the hallway. The two remaining men gathered up their equipment. Mihalik happily wiped his knife clean, but was enraged to find that his canteen had been hit during the firefight and was now nothing more than useless, twisted metal. He left it where it lay, and headed back down the stairs with Covone.

‘We need to find a new position,’ the wounded man panted. ‘Any ideas?’

Mihalik crossed the ground floor lobby to where the main door hung partially open. Across the empty street he could see Bloedel Park, and beyond that the curving, alien buildings of the tau. With no one to keep up a constant maintenance on Cytheria’s native plant life, the park was rapidly becoming wild. Already the grass was as high as his waist in some places. Then he saw the tree – the tree with the wide trunk; the tree with the large burl of roots; the tree with the car.

‘One,’ he replied.

Seconds later, they had dashed across the street and began crawling through the park towards the shelter beneath the wreck.

Now, as he lay there staring up at the underside of the car, with one partner puking up his lungs and the other most likely dead in the streets somewhere, Mihalik began to seriously consider that this might be the end for him.

‘Close your eyes,’ Kirsopp told him. ‘You get this stuff in them, and you’ll go blind.’

Mihalik did as he was told, and felt gruff hands smear the paste all over his brow, mouth, cheeks, and nose.

‘Emperor, this stuff reeks,’ he groaned.

‘Not to the baby devils. They love it. To them, you’ll smell like corn-fed grox steak cooked just right.’ The old man stepped back to survey his work.

Mihalik looked down at himself. He was naked from the waist up, dressed only in a pair of canvas pants and a pair of jungle boots. On every inch of his exposed skin, Covone had plastered a pungent mixture of animal blood and gluey toxvine sap. It was already beginning to harden in the infernal heat of the jungle.

‘I look like a giant scab,’ he said.

His mentor gave him a withering look and said, ‘It doesn’t matter what you look like. It doesn’t matter what you have to endure. All that matters is how effective you are.’

Mihalik lowered his eyes and gave a weak ‘Yes, sir’. He was ten years old, and Kirsopp was an ancient forty-five. It was an honour and a privilege to tutor under such an accomplished veteran, but the man had absolutely no sense of humour.

‘I didn’t hear you,’ he snapped.

‘Yes, sir!’ Mihalik barked.

Kirsopp folded his arms angrily across his chest. ‘Better,’ he growled. ‘Now, let’s go over it one last time. What’s your objective?’

Miahlik waved his arm. All around, Catachan fighters were finishing their preparations. Half were stationed up in the twisting trees, armed with a variety of rifles and heavy weapons. The rest were on the ground, hacking at the foliage with their machete-sized knives, or pouring barrels of thick, black tar all around the perimeter of the cleared area. ‘To draw the target out from hiding and into this kill zone, sir,’ he said.

‘And how will you do that?’

‘Sir, when everyone is ready, the fastest runners will go down that cleared path,’ he pointed to a break in the jungle’s vegetative wall, ‘to the cave where the devil’s nest is. They’ll have buckets of this same stuff I’m covered in, and they’ll start smearing the trees with it, making a trail that leads back here. When one of the baby devils gets a good whiff of it, it’ll come charging up, see me, and move in for the kill. That’s when all of you will light the oil, trapping it. Then the shooters can kill it.’

‘What’s your exit?’

‘I’ll climb out on a rope ladder lowered down to me by one the senior fighters, sir.’

Kirsopp nodded with satisfaction and then, with nothing more to be said, turned and walked away. Mihalik watched his teacher scramble up a tree to a safe height. One by one, the older Catachan fighters did likewise until he was alone in the centre of the circular clearing. For days, there had been men out here preparing the ground by clearing away the brush and cutting down the undergrowth. Only one path had been left, ensuring that the gunners up in the trees would know exactly where to place their shots. Despite this however, the success of this hunt all came down to him, Mihalik.

The Catachan Devil, when fully grown, was as long as a freight train, had multiple sets of legs, huge pincer-like claws, and a gigantic barbed tail that dripped lethal poison. It was an absolute monstrosity, and worse, it lived in nests. Each nest would usually contain half a dozen fully grown adults and twice as many ‘devilspawn’. They had to be culled each season, lest the population become so great that they take over the planet, and old Kirsopp had, at some point in the distant past, decided that he might as well make use of this annual event. Every young Catachan had to thereafter endure this test of worthiness if they wanted to study under him.

It was suicide to simply attack the devilspawn where they sheltered. The adults would boil up from out of the ground and kill everything that moved. Therefore, the jungle fighters had evolved a means of luring the young devils away from their parents where they could be killed singularly. The foul mixture that Mihalik was covered in smelled sickening to adult devils, but when mixed with human sweat, proved intoxicating to the spawn. The creatures would follow the trail laid out for them, but had the uncanny ability to sense a trap. Mihalik’s job this day was to present himself as an irresistible target, a morsel so tasty that it would override the spawn’s cautionary instincts, and run headlong to its death.

If he succeeded, his bravery would be proved, and he would be gifted with a red head scarf of his own. If he died, well, it would be just another day on Catachan.

Mihalik looked back up into the trees. The other jungle fighters had vanished in the intervening seconds, camouflaging themselves seamlessly into the background. Suddenly, the ground began to rumble. Somewhere nearby, a flock of swamp herons took flight, squawking madly with fear. Then, the devilspawn appeared in the middle of the cleared path.

It was the biggest spawn that any of them could remember seeing, and afterwards they all agreed that the creature was one year shy of becoming a full adult. It focused its enormous, coal black eyes on the defenseless, half naked child in front of it. Thick drool began to fall from its clawed and tentacled mouth. It reared up, like a venomous snake might do, and then drove the entirety of its bulk at Mihalik.

The boy leapt as far to one side as he could. The monster plowed into the earth, burying its head and sending chunks of mud flying. Mihalik knew he had to stay in the circle long enough for his elders to ignite the oil. Tough as they might be, immature devils had a fear of fire, and once the barrier was set alight, the monster wouldn’t dare try to break out through the flames. He rolled up out of his dive and into a fighting crouch. A wall of fire erupted suddenly, filling the air with hellish heat and an unbearable stench. There was gunfire too, but he hardly noticed. The braided vine rope, his sole escape, dropped down from an overhanging limb. His impromptu dive however, had taken him too far away from it. The spawn was in the way, and he couldn’t get around it. He looked desperately around for one of the elders, for Kirsopp, for anyone, to come to his rescue, but there was no seeing beyond the flames. He was trapped and completely alone, and his choice was a blunt one: stay here and surely die, or climb out.

The devil pulled its massive head from out of the soil, and shook it from side to side. Clods of dirt whipped into the trees. It fixed its mad gaze on Mihalik again, and bellowed. Then it reared up just as it had before, and dove.

Mihalik dodged to his left. The abomination’s head slammed down into the ground again. Then, instead of moving to distance himself from it, Mihalik bolted straight forwards. While its face was buried in the soil, the boy ran up the creature’s back and launched himself into the air. He caught the vine rope half way up its length, and climbed hand-over-hand with all his might. Kirsopp appeared, a long piece of red cloth clenched in his meaty fist. He handed it to Mihalik.

Now that he was clear, the other Catachans were free to shoot the spawn with abandon. Mihalik took the headband, held it to his heaving chest, and listened. Below him, the devil rampaged in its cage of fire until it was finally felled.

‘There’s our boy,’ Covone whispered.

Mihalik’s wandering mind snapped back to the present. He inhaled sharply and shook his head. Twice now, the memory of his initiation day had been dredged up by his subconscious to be splattered across the forefront of his mind. He knew why, of course; understood of what it was that his instincts were trying to warn him. The tau would never be able to go into the fetid swamps and dark places his fellow Catachans were now falling back into. And, since they couldn’t take their fight to the enemy, the blues would have to draw their enemies out to more favourable ground.

‘Trapped with the devil in a circle of fire,’ he muttered.

Covone’s looked at him questioningly.

Mihalik rolled over onto his belly. ‘Forget it,’ he said as he nestled the muzzle of his rifle amidst the tree’s burly roots. He settled his cheek into the stock, and peered through the scope. The sky was lightening as the sun crept up over the horizon. ‘Let’s have a look’.

The enemy base, which at a distance looked like a tumble of featureless white blocks and domes, leapt into clarity. Covone hadn’t been exaggerating when he had called it tau central. There were nearly a dozen different buildings in various stages of construction. From the reports he’d read, he was able to identify a few of them; a low, rounded barracks, a cluster of glowing pillars that were power generators, and an arched structure with four angled towers attached to it that could only be the command centre. Of the others, he was not so sure. Three tall towers of differing heights were still being erected; their bases hidden behind a mesh of scaffolding and their tops crowned with cranes. There was also a fourth, crescent-shaped building he assumed to be some kind of massive communications array. In the middle of all this was an open courtyard, large enough to act as a landing field for a fleet of orbital dropships. It was filling up now with tau soldiers, all of them in identical suits of ochre-coloured combat armour. They were kneeling in perfect rows and columns, preparing themselves to receive whatever inspirational wisdom their leader was about to bestow on them.

‘There sure are a lot of them,’ Mihalik said.

‘Only have to kill one,’ Covone replied.

Covone began reading off the numbers and coordinates displayed on his minicomp. Mihalik adjusted his angle to match. Finally, he settled his sights on some kind of floating platform. It was round and white, with a podium moulded into the front. Behind this was a high-backed chair with over-sized arms, and seated within was the tau priest.

‘You locked on?’ Covone asked.

‘Sitting behind his flying pulpit?’

‘That’s him.’

Mihalik flicked off the weapon’s safeties with his little finger. ‘We’ll wait until he stands up,’ he said. He swallowed in a dry throat and then asked, ‘Wind speed?’

Covone glanced down to his sensory readout. ‘I read four knots, blowing from the west.’

In his cross hairs, the priest rose up from his seat, and shuffled slowly up to the pedestal. Mihalik moved his rifle imperceptibly to the east, and adjusted a fraction upwards to compensate for the way in which his bullet would drop during its long flight. ‘I’m zeroed in,’ he murmured.

‘Then let’s see if you were right,’ Covone said.

Mihalik listened to the blood rushing in his ears, and in the fractional space between one heartbeat and the next, where an exhale finishes but the next intake of breath has yet to begin, he pulled the trigger. Thanks to the suppressor, there was no flash, and no retort. The only sound was a soft chuff as the bullet leapt forward. A little more than a second later, it had flown over the tall grass and above the heads of all the assembled tau warriors, where it promptly mushroomed and bounced off the invisible forcefield that surrounded the Ethereal.

Mihalik looked over at Covone, whose face had become a pale, slack-jawed mask of disbelief. ‘I told you so,’ he said. He withdrew his gun from the tree roots and rolled out from under the smashed car. ‘Now comes the hard part. Let’s move.’

Covone rolled onto his side, stared back at him, and shook his head. He gazed down at his chest to where the bandages were stained deep red. A pool of blood had formed underneath him all the while he had been scanning and observing. ‘I’m not coming, Ezra. I won’t make it across the street, never mind the Valkyrie.’

From his leather bag, Covone pulled out the last of the demo charges. He popped the protective seal off of the detonator, and placed his thumb over button. Mihalik felt a wave of regret crash over him. He opened his mouth to say something encouraging or comforting, but Covone spoke first.

‘Don’t try to patronize me,’ he grunted. ‘You know what you have to do.’

Mihalik started back towards the street, bent low with his rifle in his hands. He constantly fought the urge to look back. Enemy soldiers would be massing on the wrecked car within seconds, and as much as he disliked Covone, the man was still a fellow Catachan. Those who wore the red scarf rarely left a brother behind.

He quickly reached the entryway to the hab block. He slipped past the still-open door, went to one of the front windows, and wiped away enough dirt with the back of his hand that he could look back out onto the park.

Cytheria’s sun had not yet crested the tops of the other buildings, and the park was a swirling mix of deep red shadows. An alarm was wailing somewhere, and scores of tau soldiers were spilling out from their base. A cloud of robot drones swirled in the air above like a swarm of robotic bees, stirred to angry life by a solitary bullet.

The demo charge erupted moments later. A massive, glowing fireball consumed Covone, the car, the tree, and more than two dozen tau who had been moving in to capture or kill the would-be assassins. Chunks of wood and twisted, burning pieces of metal rained down everywhere. The grass in the park was set alight, and the concussion wave shattered every window that faced the street. Mihalik stood unphased as a hundred jagged shards of glass sliced into his bare chest. He could have used this diversion to make good his escape, he knew, but what would that accomplish? No, he thought, it’s up to me to light the fire. He hoisted his rifle, and pressed the scope to his eye.

For a moment, there was nothing save for muffled screams and shouts in the apartments above him. The scene outside was one of destruction and shocked stillness. Then, he saw one of the blues rise up from where he had been sent reeling into the tall grass. Mihalik exhaled as he pulled the trigger, and the faceplate on the alien’s helmet folded inwards with a spray of blood and bone. His right hand flew up the bolt even as he scanned for another target. The spent cartridge dropped to the floor, and he reloaded with an almost supernatural calm and speed. Another tau appeared only to go down again with a shot centre mass. Again, he reloaded. He found a fresh target and let a third round fly. A fourth. A fifth. He dropped the spent magazine to the floor and slapped in a fresh one. Search, acquire, fire, reload. Again. Again. Again. Relentless.

Within a minute, he had hit and killed a total of ten tau, and exhausted two of his ammunition clips. It was more than enough to get their attention.

He was turning to go when he caught something out of the corner of his eye. They weren’t lasers per se. They were more like beams of pale blue smoke, discernable only because of the way they played over the powdered glass that covered the floor of the lobby. He had no idea what they were, but it couldn’t be good. He dashed forward, diving over a couch. Behind him, a volley of small missiles detonated across the building’s façade. The door turned into splinters. Bricks and mortar tore through the room. Part of the ceiling gave way with the impact, and plaster rained down on Mihalik’s back. A searing pain tore through his left arm. He remained crouched behind the sofa, his head down; and he cursed. The missiles suggested the presence of a light artillery battery, or worse yet, a vehicle. Cheaters, he thought. This is supposed to be a contest between infantry.

Mihalik knew he couldn’t stay here. Sprawling on the floor, he began crawling away. His multiple cuts smeared themselves across the carpet leaving a trail of blood, but it couldn’t be helped. As he rounded a corner, he took a second to see why it was exactly that his arm hurt so much. With a start, he discovered that a large piece of steel window frame had impaled itself right between his radius and his ulna. He stood up, and yanked it from his flesh. A jet of blood the same colour as his headband painted a dripping curve along the wall.

He ran down a back hallway, bashed a metal fire door open with his shoulder, and emerged into a parking lot. He had only jogged a few steps when one of the tau trackers, moving at a full run, emerged from a side alley. The tau skidded to a halt, apparently surprised to encounter Mihalik outside of the building already. For the briefest of moments, the two stared at each other. Then, the alien began to raise his carbine. Mihalik, with his longer reach, swung his rifle like a club, and bashed the tau upside the head. Then he closed the distance, dropped his gun, and yanked his fang from its sheath. He swung the blade in a horizontal, decapitating arc, but at the last second, the tau blocked the attack with a forearm. Mihalik, who had assumed that the fight would be over as soon as it had begun, was taken aback, and doubly so as he was kicked fiercely in the shin. The two of them grappled for a moment longer before Mihalik was finally able to twist his opponent’s arm behind his back, and stab him through the chest. The tau started to spasm and then went limp. Mihalik withdrew the blade to find it covered in thick, cyan-coloured gore, and even though time was of the essence, he stopped to wipe it clean on the alien’s pant leg. No filthy xeno’s blood would be allowed to stain his fang.

He was off again, moving down the narrow, twisting streets of the colony. The remaining tau trackers were close behind him, of that he was certain. It was a race now, a true contest to see which species had greater skill and fortitude. Before long, he was outside the town and weaving his way through the thickening jungle. He was trying to take the most convoluted path he could think of, but his head was beginning to swim. He sagged against a tree, breathless. The cuts on his chest were minor things, but the hole in his forearm was near crippling. Blood poured from the wound. His right hand looked as if it had been dipped in red paint. He used his headscarf as a makeshift bandage, and carried on.

It was nearly noon by the time Mihalik neared the extraction point. For the rest of the morning, he had managed to catch a few signs that he was still being pursued – a snapping branch here, an alien scent on wind there. However, all was quiet now. Through the trees, he could see the Valkyrie that that had ferried himself and the others in. Its rear hatch was open and looked as inviting as a mother’s embrace. He was far gone, he knew that; he was exhausted, starved, dehydrated, cut, bled out, and burned. Still, it was almost over. He stumbled out into the open and towards the transport.

Mihalik was steps from the boarding ramp when the tau energy blasts hit him. They came from all directions, striking his chest, back, arm, thigh, and head. The world vanished in a succession of white flashes, and he collapsed on the jungle floor. He was dimly aware that a portion of his left leg was now missing, but it seemed somehow inconsequential. He could hear the little aliens moving through the grass towards him, coming to either confirm the kill, or finish him off. He lay there for a moment, face down in mud, thinking to himself how perfect an ambush it had been. Then, he painstakingly raised himself up, because when this happened, he was determined to be on his feet for it.

There were five of the alien trackers standing in a rough circle around him, their weapons raised. Their armour, nothing more than a protective chest plate and reinforced gloves, was red, not ochre; the better colour to blend into this planet’s native palate. A few had black scorch marks across their combat vests that he guessed was a result of Covone’s heroic last stand. The crests of their helmets were very tapered, with a single, red eye lens that regarded him impassively. Their rifles appeared short and stubby. Mihalik nodded with subconscious approval. Light armour for greater mobility and a carbine so as not to catch on foliage or rubble. These blues obviously weren’t run of the mill soldiers; they were specialists. He’d finally found his alien counterparts.

‘Nicely done,’ he croaked. ‘I used every counter-tracking trick I know of, and you still trailed me. Outmanoeuvred me, too. You guys are good, no question. You must be the best in your army.’

One of the tau said something. To Mihalik’s ears it sounded short and choppy, like the crackling of a log in a bonfire. He didn’t speak their language and so had no idea whether he was being praised or damned. It didn’t matter regardless.

‘Take ’em!’ he shouted.

The tau all died. Some of them were shot through the chest, others in the head. Their bodies hit the ground simultaneously, and the fittingness of that made Mihalik break out into uncontrollable laughter. Unity was important to the blues, after all.

All around him, a dozen Catachan snipers were jumping down from their treetop perches. Three of them raced over to Mihalik, eased him back to the ground, and began applying aid to his wounds with medipacks and cloth bandages.

‘Did you get them all?’ Mihalik managed to ask. His fit of hysterical laughter had left as suddenly as it had come on.

‘Every one,’ the youngest of his attendants replied. ‘You led them right to us, sir. Just like you said would happen.’

Mihalik closed his eyes. The drugs were not only taking away all his pain, they were making his body a dim and distant thing. He was only half aware as his combat brethren rolled him onto a stretcher, and carried him into the Valkyrie. Then they were in the air, flying low over the canopy of the rainforest. The young attendant leaned over him to check his pulse.

‘Sir, can I ask you something?’

Mihalik’s voice was a raspy slur. ‘What is it?’

‘The blues. Will they come after us for what we did?’

‘I’m sure they’ll try. But they won’t find us. They won’t be able to get to us. We killed the best they had.’

The kid nodded, and then asked ‘How’d you know? I mean, how did you know that the whole thing was a trap?’

Mihalik struggled to focus on the boy. He was not more a few years past initiation, Mihalik thought. His skin was still relatively free of scars, and his beard stubble was downy. He wore the red head scarf, but obviously still had much to learn.

‘It was in the files,’ Mihalik said. ‘Under military doctrine. Do you know what the tau call their battle companies?’

The young man shook his head.

‘Hunter Cadres. They see themselves as being descended from great hunters. When I read that, I knew that they were just setting out bait to catch the best of us.’

‘But you turned it around on them,’ the boy was grinning with newfound understanding. ‘You left us at the landing site to nail them when they came far enough away from their headquarters, and made bait of yourself.’

Mihalik was suddenly reminded of old Kirsopp’s words to him; that whatever he had to endure was irrelevant so long as his actions were, in the end, effective.

‘I’m used to it,’ he said coldly.

Mihalik closed his eyes and began to drift away. He would sleep for just a few hours, he told himself, and then it would be right back to work. He was the senior-most officer in the resistance now, and he had an insurgency to organise.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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

Cover illustration by Jon Sullivan

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