Table of Contents

Cover

Beneath The Flesh - Andy Smillie

Gilead's Curse - Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett

Torment - Anthony Reynolds

The Pact - Sarah Cawkwell

An Extract from Deliverance Lost - Gav Thorpe

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Beneath the Flesh

Andy Smillie

‘I am His vengeance as He is my shield. I will deliver death to His enemies as He brings deliverance to my soul.’

Noise filled his world. An incessant thrum reverberated under his feet. The metal and ceramite around him squealed as angry thrusters were pushed to their tolerance. Bolts and arc-welded plates rattled as their construction was tested. A thunderous staccato of impacts rang like bolter fire against the hull around him. Yet in his mind, there was only silence: a sanctifying stillness, in preparation for battle. He would not be distracted from the consecration, his weapons would be ready.

‘Brother Maion, ready yourself.’

Maion lifted his head at his sergeant’s command and touched the blade of his chainsword to his temple, finishing the rite. He sheathed his weapon, and pulled the combat harness over his head, activating the mag-lock. ‘Ready, brother-sergeant.’

The Stormraven gunship powered through the void, its crimson hull charred and pitted from hundreds of recent atmospheric entries. The serrated black symbol on the gunship’s wing was almost indistinguishable from the scorch marks emblazoned on its flanks, eroded by the vengeful impacts of dense minerals and debris clusters. Flames licked the Stormraven’s surface, tracing a searing thread along its squat outline. It dived lower, pushing into Arere’s embrace.

The planet’s twin arid continents were turning from the system’s single sun. Had any of Arere’s citizens still been alive to gaze skyward, they would have marvelled at the descending gunship. The brightest light in the sky, Arere’s dead populace would have mistaken the Stormraven for yet another meteor, destined to crash into the desert-earth and forever change the maze of ravines punctuating the landscape.

++Entry achieved++ The pilot-serf’s mechanical voice crackled across the vox-link.

Maion juddered in his harness as the gunship knifed downwards, turbulent crosswinds breaking against the hull. Next to him, Harahel sat immobile, a massive eviscerator held across his lap. Maion smiled; it was a fitting weapon. Harahel was from Taci, a province of their home-world Cretacia. The region was well known for the broad, well muscled and aggressive individuals it bred, traits further amplified when they underwent the physiological enhancements required to transform them into Space Marines. Brother Amaru had replaced Harahel’s harness with one normally used to secure warriors in Terminator armour, in order to accommodate the Assault Marine’s bulk.

‘Bring up the tactical hololith.’ Sergeant Barbelo was on his feet, clasping an overhead assault-rail with a gauntleted hand. His face and shaven head were a mess of re-grafted skin and thick, serpentine scars.

‘A moment, brother.’ Amaru extended a bundle of data cables from his armoured-forearm and plugged them into a control slot in his seat. The Techmarine muttered something to the gunship’s machine-spirit and closed his left eye. The glowing bionic that replaced his right continued to shine like a targeting reticule.

The compartment’s luminators dimmed as a three-dimensional overview of Arere’s primary continent appeared in the middle of the deck, the blue-hued landscape hololithically projected by an optical lens mounted in the ceiling. With a thought, Amaru narrowed the focus on a line of canyons towards the north-east. A series of fortified buildings resolved out of the map.

‘Substation 12BX sits between the two walls of this canyon.’ The area changed colour to a deep crimson as Amaru continued, ‘The approach to the main entrance is overshadowed by a narrow gorge and high spires, landing improbable.’ The Techmarine paused as he calculated an approach. ‘We can land here.’ Amaru manipulated the image again and an octagonal courtyard sprang into view.

‘What of the enemy?’ Barbelo’s brow furrowed as his thoughts turned to battle, turning the deep lines of his forehead into shadowy ravines.

The image oscillated and zoomed out, the substation receding into the distance to glow faintly among the canyons. ‘We do not have real-time data but estimates would place enemy forces here.’ Amaru indicated the black mass surrounding the substation, representing the disposition of the Archenemy army on Arere.

Maion stared at the display, his muscles tensing instinctively at the mention of the Archenemy. Their forces had dispersed from their landing zones like an aggressive cancer, brutalising their way across the globe. The outpost was the last bastion of sanctity.

‘We have less than two hours until they reach the substation,’ Amaru stated plainly.

‘And if the worse has happened and our brothers are as we fear?’ Maion voiced what he knew the others were thinking.

‘That should be time enough to retrieve their gene-seed,’ Nisroc touched his narthecium in emphasis. The Sanguinary Priest’s gleaming white armour was in stark contrast to the deep crimson and black worn by Maion and the others.

Barbelo scowled. ‘That is not our primary mission Apothecary. We must understand what happened on Arere, we must retrieve the compound’s data files.’

Nisroc felt his jaw tighten. ‘The Chapter is on the brink of extinction, recovering the gene-seed is paramount. I am bound by duty–’

‘Brothers…’ Amaru paused as one of the gunship’s many auspexs drew his attention. ‘We are closing on their auger range,’ the Techmarine looked expectantly at Barbelo. ‘We need to do it now.’

Barbelo glared at Nisroc. He knew as well as the Apothecary that the Chapter’s supply of gene-seed was critical. But the data files held vital information. Without them, they risked losing the entire Itan sector to the Archenemy. ‘They are our orders, and you will follow them.’

The Apothecary said nothing.

The sergeant took his seat and turned to Amaru. ‘You are sure this will work, Techmarine?’

Amaru nodded, ‘I sanctified this vessel myself. Its spirit is strong. It will not fail us.’

‘Very well, relieve the pilot.’

The hololith stuttered and dissolved as Amaru disengaged his cables and assumed the cockpit.

‘Prepare yourselves,’ Barbelo activated the mag-lock on his harness and clamped his helmet down over his head.

‘Emperor’s strength be with us,’ to his right, Nisroc locked his own helm in place.

‘Emperor’s strength,’ Maion joined the rest of the squad as they repeated the Apothecary’s words and donned their helmets. He felt his pulse quicken as hissing pressure seals locked his helmet to his armour, readying him for war.

‘It is done,’ Amaru moved at pace, taking his seat next to Barbelo. ‘The machine-spirit has us now.’

The gunship fell.

Amber warning lights lit up across the craft’s interior as the gunship surrendered to gravity. Maion was driven into his harness by the force of the descent, the metal bars gouging into the ceramite of his battle-plate as the gunship plummeted towards the earth. The reassuring rumble of the gunship’s engines was replaced by the frantic chiming of the altitude counter that counted down to their doom. ‘Ave Emperor, stand with me and I shall not fail in your sight,’ Maion mouthed the prayer, banishing the thought that he was about to be crushed to death inside an armoured coffin. By the Emperor’s grace, he would meet his end on the field of battle.

‘Ten seconds,’ Amaru’s voice cut over the vox-link.

The Stormraven bucked violently as it fell. Even with the benefit of his Lyman’s Ear and the myriad of other implants that were working to relieve the stress on his body, Maion struggled to stay conscious.

‘Five.’

Maion redoubled his grip on the harness.

‘Brace!’

The Stormraven’s thrusters fired on full burn, exploding downwards in a hail of fury as they fought to arrest the gunship’s descent. Their tumultuous roar drowned out the angry hum of warning runes and the whining collision siren. For the briefest of instants the world was silent and Maion was no longer falling.

A heartbeat later and the world was enveloped in noise. The Stormraven slammed into the earth, and Maion winced as he was driven up into his harness. The hull squealed in protest as fractures stabbed across its outer armour. The landing supports shattered, their metal struts fracturing on impact. Armoured glass broke from the cockpit and flooded into the compartment as dislodged rock hammered it. The gunship ploughed forwards, tearing a dark trench in the earth until its momentum was spent.

‘Egress!’ Barbelo was on his feet and out of his harness before the hull had stopped shaking, slamming his fist into the door release and motioning for the others to disembark.

The assault ramp lowered part of the way and stalled, its hydraulics spitting oleaginous fluid. Harahel barrelled forward, throwing himself at the stricken ramp. It slammed down into the earth with a dull thud, tossing powdered dirt into the air as the giant Space Marine rolled to his feet.

Maion pushed the catch on his harness. Nothing happened. The locking mechanism was broken.

‘Sit back brother.’ Micos flicked the activation switch on his chainaxe and the weapon roared into life. He freed Maion with a casual downward stroke, his weapon’s adamantium teeth making light work of the harness.

‘You have my thanks, brother.’ Maion unsheathed his blade and followed Micos down the ramp.

Outside, beneath Arere’s starless sky, it was pitch dark and the elements conspired to impair visibility. Howling winds tossed grit and earth into a storm. Torrential rain fell in near vertical sheets. Neither fact mattered to Maion. His helmet’s ocular sensors filtered and illuminated the darkness, allowing him to see as clear as day.

Reams of tactical and situational data scrolled across his right eye, assimilated by his eidetic memory. The atmosphere was breathable. The Stormraven’s engines were cooling and unlikely to combust. His left pauldron had sustained mild damage during the landing but the servos were working within normal ranges. The squad had formed a perimeter around the stricken Stormraven. Their ident-tags and vitals hovered on the peripheral of Maion’s retinal display.

‘Stay alert! We may not be alone.’ Barbelo’s voice crackled over the vox-link.

Maion panned his bolt pistol around, scanning for targets. The outpost’s walls towered over them from all sides. He glanced at them briefly and a new set of data drifted over his helmet’s display. The base was designate Arere Primus. Its walls were an adamantium and ceramite compound, capable of withstanding a full-scale bombardment.

‘Stay in close formation, the storm is restricting comms,’ Barbelo’s annoyance was evident in his tone. ‘Amaru, can we extract in the Stormraven?’

‘Undetermined. I’ll need time to assess,’ the Techmarine’s reply rasped in Maion’s ear.

‘Atoc, secure the Stormraven while Amaru works.’

‘Harahel,’ Barbelo abandoned the hissing comm-feed. ‘Lead us into the strategium.’

The towering warrior grunted in affirmation and sprinted towards the metres-thick blast door that sealed off the compound’s command and control centre.

Harahel ran a gauntlet hand over the access panel, wiping away the dirt.

++Internal Protocol Active++

A command rubric blinked through a veneer of rapidly settling dust.

++Terminal Sealed++

The words blinked at Harahel. Harahel snarled and smashed his fist into the screen. ‘Brother-sergeant, the door has been locked from the inside.’

‘There are melta-charges and cutting equipment in the armoury,’ Maion recalled the information he’d assimilated during the briefing.

‘Apothecary, you and Micos cover our rear,’ Barbelo thumbed the power slide on his plasma pistol. ‘No one comes out of those doors. Maion, Harahel, follow me.’

The doors to the armoury unlocked with a hiss of pressurised gas. The toothed slabs slid apart and disappeared into the recess of the armoured frame. Maion followed Barbelo in, sweeping left as Harahel moved right. Maion grimaced as his helmet worked to filter out the putrid air. Evidence of battle was everywhere. Broken luminators stuttered in the ceiling, throwing jagged patches of light around the entrance chamber. Fist-sized holes studded the walls. Sparks cascaded from exposed cabling that hung in thick bunches. The metal of the floor was scorched and charred. Webs of blood and viscera clung to everything.

‘No bodies.’ Harahel voiced what Maion had been thinking.

‘The dead are not our concern. Keep your eyes open for the living.’ Barbelo aimed his plasma pistol towards the adjoining corridor and advanced to the rear of the room.

Maion nodded. According to the schematics, the passageway extended half a kilometre before a set of stairs would lead them down to the armoury proper. ‘Ideal place for an ambush,’ Maion said as he stared into the darkness of the passageway. ‘Luminators are out.’

‘Harahel, maintain position and assume overwatch.’

‘As you wish,’ Harahel hid his displeasure poorly. Though he knew the sergeant was right – they’d be forced to advance down the corridor shoulder to shoulder; there’d be no room to wield his Eviscerator.

Maion advanced into the darkness.

Harahel stood immobile, panning his gaze around the chamber. He could hear Maion’s footsteps as he moved down the corridor; the other Flesh Tearer was halfway to the stairs, the fizz of the electrical cables as they spat in their death throes… and the shifting of metal – Harahel pivoted left as a grenade hit the ground. His ocular sensors dimmed, shielding his eyes from the piercing flash that flooded the chamber. With a dense clatter, a half-dozen of the ceiling grilles fell to the ground. A cluster of figures in sodden fatigues dropped down after them and opened fire.

‘Contact!’ Harahel shouted into the vox even as a hail of las-fire pattered off his armour.

‘How many?’ Barbelo turned his head as the sporadic flash of weapons fire lit up the corridor behind him.

‘Contact front,’ Maion swung his bolt pistol up, advancing and firing as las-fire erupted from further along the corridor.

‘Micos,’ Barbelo summoned the other Flesh Tearer as he opened fire, following Maion into the enemy ahead, ‘Assist Harahel.’ The sergeant didn’t wait for affirmation, deactivating his comm-link. He wanted no distractions; he wanted to be in the moment, to relish the kill.

Harahel’s attackers bore the Imperial eagle on their filth-encrusted chests. Traitors, he growled, grinding his teeth as a las round struck his helm. Harahel clasped his Eviscerator with both hands, twisting the handle to activate the power core. The weapon’s giant blade snarled into life, a physical manifestation of the rage churning through his veins. He ran at the traitors, heedless of the beads of las-fire that stung his armour.

Harahel grinned; the traitors were holding their ground. He tore the first of them apart with a savage upward swing that cut the man in half from groin to shoulder. Pivoting as the two halves of the man’s torso hit the ground, Harahel bisected another from hip bone to ribcage. A third died as he finished the move, chopping the Eviscerator down through the man’s head and dragging it out through his ribs.

Maion counted fifteen muzzle flashes. The traitors had ambushed them with woefully inadequate numbers. The cowards were nestled behind some overturned supply crates and sheets of metal they’d dragged up from the floor. Maion stitched a line across the barricade with his bolt pistol. His enhanced hearing registered the changing sound as the mass reactive rounds hammered into metal and blew apart flesh. Twelve muzzle flashes. To his left, Barbelo’s pistol hissed as it discharged, sending a flickering plasma round down the corridor. The barricade exploded in a blue flash as Barbelo’s shot struck home. Men screamed as superheated shrapnel perforated their bodies. Others were luckier, dying instantly as the round liquefied them. Maion knew that underneath his helmet, Barbelo was smiling. A dishevelled traitor stumbled over the corpse of his comrade, toppling onto the wrong side of the cordon. He struggled on all fours, scrabbling for a weapon. Maion shot him in the head.

Bathed in blood-spatter and faced with an opponent whose armour bore their comrade’s eviscerated innards, the traitors fell back. One held his ground, staring wide-eyed at Harahel as he pulled a clutch of grenades from a harness. Harahel decapitated the man as he advanced on the others. The grenades fell from the headless corpse’s fingers. A cloud of flame and shrapnel washed over Harahel’s battle-plate as they detonated. A slew of warnings lit up on the Flesh Tearer’s retinal display. Harahel blinked them away; his armour’s integrity was intact.

Ahead of him, the traitors had rallied behind a pillar. He could see the fear on their gaunt faces as he emerged unscathed from the billowing fire. Harahel heard the distinctive click of las power packs locking into place. It was insulting they thought the pillar offered any protection from his wrath. The huge Flesh Tearer growled, the metallic resonance of his helmet’s audio amplifier lending the sound a bestial quality. The stench of ammonia wafted on the air. He smiled, one of the traitors had pissed himself.

Harahel rushed them. He leapt the last few yards, swinging his Eviscerator through the pillar as he landed. The blade showered him in sparks and pulped organs as it chewed through the metal of the column and into the bodies of the two traitors closest to it. The men died screaming, flesh ripped from their bones and tossed into the air by the churning, adamantium teeth. Harahel ripped the weapon free, maiming another traitor as he drew the blade back to the guard position.

A scarred traitor screamed at him, lunging at him with a bayonet. Harahel sidestepped the attack and backhanded the man across his face, smashing his skull and sending chunks of his teeth spearing into the face of a heavy-set warrior who was fumbling with the activation stud of a shock maul. The man cried out in pain, dropping his weapon and clutching his ragged face. Harahel clamped his hand over the man’s head and squeezed, crushing his skull.

‘Cowards,’ he snarled, throwing the twitching body into the press of traitors as they scrambled away.

Five muzzle flashes winked at Maion from behind the barricade. The disorientated traitors’ shots flew wide. He sighted on the nearest of them.

‘Save your ammo,’ Barbelo held his arm out blocking the shot. ‘We are almost upon them,’ he growled as a las-round ricocheted off of his rerebrace. ‘Sanguinius!’ Barbelo broke into a run, enraged by the pitiful attempts to kill him.

Maion stopped firing. Barbelo was lost for the moment, lost to a part of the rage they all shared. Chainsword roaring, he followed the sergeant into the press of traitors.

Barbelo dived over the barricade to land on top of a blood-caked traitor. Ribs broke under the impact, splintering into internal organs with a crunch. Barbelo drove his knee into the man’s face as he rose, crushing the traitor’s skull into the deck.

Maion went straight through the barricade, chopping his chainsword down through a scorched supply crate before reversing the motion and eviscerating the traitor that was using it for cover. Blood and viscera splashed across his helmet. His ocular sensors adjusted, allowing him to see through the flesh-mire. To his right, a stick-thin traitor turned to run. Maion threw his combat knife. The blade shot pierced the traitor’s back and went through his chest. The man pitched forward as the blade clattered to the floor. Maion grinned ferally. He turned, searching for someone to kill but Barbelo had beaten him to it. The sergeant punched his fist through a screaming man’s chest before stamping his boot down on the head of another, pulping it. Maion retrieved his knife as Barbelo stalked past him towards the armoury chamber, vines of intestine and bloody matter hanging from his gauntlet.

Nisroc listened to the exchange of weapons fire over the open vox-channel. With each broken retort he became more envious of his brothers. To be a Flesh Tearers was to be at the vanguard of the assault, to be elbow-deep in the enemy’s bloody remains, not holding the rear like some Imperial Fist strategist. His muscles swelled with blood and adrenaline as his body willed him to engage the enemy. Targeting reticules swam over his display as his helmet translated his mind’s unconscious need to fight. ‘Reclothe my mind, that it may temper the needs of my soul,’ Nisroc took a calming breath. Ascertain why Brother-Sergeant Paschar had not answered the summons to exfiltrate Arere. Locate and secure the squad or retrieve their gene-seed. Rendezvous with the fleet. Nisroc ran through the mission objectives, focussing his thoughts. He could not afford to lose control, too many had been lost to The Rage persecuting the campaign already. He cast a fleeting glance up towards the barren sky; there was something about this sector of space that left him ill at ease, something malevolent that hung in the darkness where the stars should be. Nisroc bit down another burst of adrenaline, he would not allow himself to succumb to The Thirst. He was a Sanguinary Priest, duty demanded he control his rage. Too be lost in the throes of battle was to lose sight of the future. He lived to maintain the gene-seed and through it the Chapter. For without that precious link to their progenitor father, the Flesh Tearers had no future. ‘For the Chapter,’ Nisroc exhaled, emptying the last of the tension from his body – battle would find him soon enough.

Barbelo entered the armoury. Maion was about to follow but stopped as weapons fire erupted from within.

A noise like the birth of thunder filled the corridor as a heavy weapon roared. The sergeant jerked backwards as high-calibre rounds slammed into his armour, pitting the ceramite. His own shot went wide as a round clipped his gauntlet, the plasma blast scorching the ceiling. Barbelo dropped his chin and raised his shoulder as another torrent of rounds hammered him. Even as his pauldron cracked, the icon of the Chapter blasted from his shoulder in a shower of splintered ceramite, the sergeant took a step forward.

Maion recognised the harsh bark of an autocannon as the traitors poured fire onto Barbelo – the sergeant’s armour would not hold. Maion lunged forward, tossed a frag grenade into the room, grabbed Barbelo’s gorget, and pulled him back into the corridor.

‘You dare!’ The sergeant snarled at Maion, back-fisting him across the helm.

Maion staggered cursing. With disciplined restraint he quashed the rage boiling up inside him. ‘Calm yourself brother. To proceed would have been folly.’ Maion kept his voice level, but lifted his gaze to stare Barbelo in the eyes. He steeled his jaw, ready to receive another blow. But Barbelo’s posture shifted, and Maion relaxed as the sergeant regained control of his emotions. The traitors continued to fire, their shots spitting into the corridor to impact on the wall opposite.

‘You waste your time, brother,’ Barbelo motioned towards the doorway as more rounds zipped into the corridor. ‘They are entrenched behind a barrier. Your grenade will have done little more than chip the–’

Maion held up his hand, the firing had stopped. His enhanced hearing had heard the bark of every round as they tore from the autcannon’s barrel. His eidetic memory had catalogued every shell casing that struck the ground. The weapon’s magazine was still half full. The traitors weren’t reloading, they were baiting them.

Barbelo knew it, too. Incensed by their obvious ploy, the sergeant took a step towards the doorway. Maion grabbed his vambrace.

‘Brother…’ Maion knew that behind the red lenses of his helmet, the sergeant’s eyes were redder still, his pupils alight with rage. ‘You will die.’

Harahel knelt among the corpses, blood dripping from his armour, his weapon humming on idle, and watched the last of the traitors run for the doorway. The cowards would not make it. Micos’s ident-tag flashed on Harahel’s helmet display as the other Flesh Tearer approached the entrance from outside. Harahel saw the pilot light of Micos’s flamer as it shone in the gloom. Some of the traitors caught sight of the other Flesh Tearer and stopped running; they slumped to the ground in abject defeat. The others kept running, too lost in panic for rational thought. Harahel smelt their fear as Micos fired, blanketing the traitors in a sheet of burning promethium that washed away flesh and dissolved bone to ash. He watched them burn, frail wicks eaten up by a ravenous flame. The meek and the brave, they all died.

‘Are you injured?’ Micos asked Harahel over a closed channel. He knew his friend would not have wanted his condition shared with anyone save perhaps the Apothecary.

Harahel didn’t respond, his gaze remained fixed on the dying embers of the traitors. His twin hearts hammered in his chest like the pistons of a giant engine, fuelled by the tang of spilt blood that filled his senses. A boiling darkness cloyed at his mind, threatening to overwhelm his restraint. He tore his helmet off and roared, driving his Eviscerator into the armoured floor. Gripping the hilt with both hands, he rested his head on the blade and prayed, ‘Emperor bless me with your temperament. Fill me with a righteousness inferno that I may burn away my bloodlust. Emperor keep me from the darkness of my soul.’

‘Outer room pacified, proceeding to your position,’ Micos’s voice came through the comm-feed in Maion’s helmet.

‘The corridor is clear. Move to our position and assist,’ Maion voxed Micos and turned to Barbelo, ‘Micos is on his way.’ The sergeant nodded, his comm-link still powered off.

The traitors’ weapons had fallen silent as the two Flesh Tearers waited out of sight, their backs pressed against the wall of the corridor. But there was no peace for Maion. His pulse filled his head like the tribal drum his villagers used to attract the roaming karcasaur at High Feast. His hands trembled like the ground beneath the giant reptile as it loped through the jungle. Every genetically-enhanced cell in Maion’s body wanted to rush into the room and tear the traitors limb from limb, to bask in their death throes and drink deep of their blood. Maion clenched his fist and struck the aquila sigil on his breast plate. ‘What nourishes you also destroys you. Either conquer your gift or die,’ Chaplain Appollus had spoken those words to Maion when he was but a noviciate. He focused on his battle gear as the Chaplain had taught him, testing the weight of his bolt pistol, the balance of his blade. Maion needed to be as they were: furious and unyielding in battle, cold and impassive in respite. He glanced at Barbelo. The sergeant would be struggling with his own blood-rage. Over his centuries of service, Barbelo had slain more enemies of the Throne than Maion and the rest of the squad had tallied between them. For Barbelo, the call to violence would be stronger, harder to deny. Maion considered what he would do if the sergeant gave in to his desires, if he–

‘I stand ready brothers.’ Micos’s voice drew Maion’s attention. The other Flesh Tearer glanced at Barbelo’s smashed shoulder guard but knew better than to ask after his sergeant’s wellbeing.

Barbelo nodded towards the doorway.

Maion thumbed the selector on his bolt pistol, switching it to full auto. He stuck the barrel of the weapon into the room and opened fire. A man cried out as the explosive rounds tore across the chamber.

Micos swung low, sending a stream of fire into the chamber. The burning promethium swarmed over the barricade to feast on the cowards behind it. The traitors screamed.

Barbelo dived into the room. Maion heard him snap off three shots and the hungry growl of his chainsword as it cut into bone.

‘Armoury secure,’ Barbelo’s voice came over the comm-link a heartbeat later. ‘Apothecary, join us at once.’

Nisroc bent over the Flesh Tearer’s corpse. A gaping hole dominated the fallen Space Marine’s scorched breastplate. The flesh around it was fused with armour, a dark stain billowing out from the wound like a web. ‘Melta weapon or fusion-based explosive,’ Nisroc spoke for the benefit of his helmet’s data recorder, documenting his findings. ‘The high level of penetration suggests close range detonation.’ Nisroc extended a needle-like probe from his narthecium and stabbed it into the wound. Brother Haamiah, Second Company. Lines of biometric and biological data scrolled across Nisroc’s helmet display as the probe analysed the Flesh Tearer’s blood. There were traces of human flesh too, melded to Haamiah’s; a traitor had given their life to plant the charge.

‘Maion, if you would,’ Nisroc stood to give the other Flesh Tearer space.

‘My honour, brother,’ Maion nodded and knelt next to Haamiah’s body. Maion was the closest thing the squad had to a Chaplain. He had studied under the revered Appollus. Most of the Chapter had expected Maion to follow in the High Chaplain’s footsteps. But he could not, not yet. He wasn’t ready to accept that the Flesh Tearers were beyond saving. Maion bowed his head, ‘Emperor, your servant’s duty is at an end. Grant him peace.’ Maion made the sign of the aquila over his breastplate and rose. ‘I’ll wait for you in the corridor.’

Nisroc paused a moment. Of all the duties that were his to complete, this was the most important, the heaviest burden to bear. Only in death does duty end, the axiom may have been true for the soldiers of the Imperial Guard or the Sisters of the Adeptus Sororitas but not for a son of Sanguinius. In death, a Space Marine had one more thing to give. The transformative Progenoids implanted in his body had to be returned to the Chapter, ready to be received by the next generation of aspirants. Only through the harvesting of the glands would the Flesh Tearers continue to survive. Without the precious gene-seed they would be unable to stand against the Emperor’s foes.

The Apothecary extended his reductor and punched the bladed tube into Haamiah’s neck. A jolt of energy rippled along the blade’s length as the moulded end closed around the first progenoid gland. With a wet hiss, the gland was sucked up through the blade into the narthecium. A green icon blinked in the corner of Nisroc’s helmet display. The gland had been recovered safely, and was being frozen for transport to the gene-banks on the Flesh Tearers home world. Nisroc activated his bone-drill; the second gland was harder to reach.

It had taken over thirty minutes to cut through the mag-seals on the strategium’s door and a further ten to fasten melta-charges to the piston hinges. Amaru had abandoned repairs on the Stormraven to oversee the work, directing Harahel as he wielded the industrial laser-cutter with the same ease the others handled their bolters.

‘Ready to detonate, brother-sergeant.’ Amaru turned his back on the huge door and paced back towards the Stormraven. The Chaos forces were under an hour away and he still had much work to do.

‘Prepare yourselves,’ Barbelo’s order hissed in Maion’s ear as the storm continued to hamper vox communication. He checked the ammo-counter on his bolt pistol and activated his chainsword, its roar inaudible over the wind. To his left and right, his brothers were preparing their own wargear. Micos’s flamer hung by his side, its pilot flame would remain extinguished until they were inside. Maion shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, moving his weight forward.

‘Go!’ On Barbelo’s command Amaru blew the charges.

The hinges detonated in rapid succession, like the quickening heartbeat of a colossal beast. The door fell from its housing, slamming into the earth an inch from Barbelo and his squad. Under his helmet, Amaru’s mouth twitched in an approximation of a smile. His calculations had been perfect.

Maion was in motion before the doors had settled in the dirt. Adrenaline flooded his system as he powered into the strategium’s entrance chamber. A warning rune filled his helmet display. ‘Defence turrets,’ Maion’s warning came too late. Two automated weapons burst into life, pumping a stream of high-explosive rounds towards the Flesh Tearers.

‘Cover!’ Barbelo shouted the order even as he realised there was none. Whoever was cowering in the strategium had been waiting for them.

Maion winced, dropping to one knee as a round clipped his thigh. Barbelo threw himself into a roll as the weapons stitched a line towards him. Nisroc spun on the spot, turning his back to shield the gene-seed stored in his narthecium. Explosive rounds slammed into his backpack, knocking him to the floor. Micos’s world went dark as a round tore through his pauldron and broke against his helmet. Atoc bucked, dropping his bolter as his breastplate was pulverised by a fusillade of explosions.

Harahel ground his teeth as Atoc’s ident-tag disappeared from his peripheral display. ‘Forgive me, brother,’ He swung his Eviscerator over his shoulder, mag-locking it to his back, and picked up Atoc’s body. ‘For the Chapter!’ Harahel raised the corpse-shield in front of him and ran flat out toward the guns. Anger drove him on as merciless shells hammered into Atoc’s corpse, the weapons ignoring the other Flesh Tearers to focus on the immediate threat of Harahel. Atoc’s armour broke like glass under the relentless assault, the dead Flesh Tearer’s head spinning from his body as his legs and arms were pulped.

Harahel roared as he closed inside both turrets’ sensor range. Dropping the stump of Atoc’s corpse, he swung his Eviscerator round to shear the barrel off the nearest weapon. The gun exploded as the round in its chamber detonated. Harahel ignored the hail of shrapnel that cascaded over his armour, oblivious to the pain warnings blinking over his left eye. Cursing, he brought his blade down on the other gun, cutting through its ammo feed. The weapon continued to fire, making a tortured grinding noise as it cried out for ammunition. Harahel kicked it over, stamping on it until he’d flattened the firing chamber. ‘Weapons neutralised.’

Maion was on his feet, advancing with Barbelo towards Harahel and the stairwell that led to the inner sanctum.

Nisroc pushed himself up off the deck. A damage alert scrolled across his display. The shots to his backpack had damaged his armour’s power source. He checked the output. It would last an hour, two at best. ‘Micos?’ Nisroc’s vox went unanswered. He turned to the other Flesh Tearer.

‘I am fine, Apothecary,’ Micos snarled, throwing his ruined helmet across the chamber. ‘A flesh wound. ’

The Apothecary cast his gaze over Micos. A blackened hole sat where his right eye should have been and his face was a mess of dark scabs. ‘As you say, brother.’ Nisroc switched to his vox, ‘Orders, brother-sergeant?’

‘We advance on the inner sanctum. Secure the level beneath.’

Lasgun fire stabbed at Maion as he crossed the threshold into the command sanctum and peeled left. He raised his bolt pistol and shot two traitors in the chest. Their bodies snapped backwards, covering diode-encrusted consoles in blood and viscera. A third traitor opened fire, a bolter bucking in his hands and destroying a bank of data-screens as he struggled to adjust for the recoil. ‘The Emperor’s tools serve only his servants,’ Maion pumped two rounds into the man, plastering his innards across the wall.

Harahel entered behind Maion and moved right. Three men blocked his path. He shouldered them aside, decapitating two with a single stroke of his blade, and killing the third with a thunderous head-butt. Ahead, a panicked traitor struggled with a grenade launcher. Harahel tore the skull from the nearest corpse and threw it at the man. The macabre projectile shot into the traitor’s chest, cracked his sternum and stopped his heart.

Barbelo was the last to advance into the chamber. He moved straight forwards, sighting a traitor in a heavy overcoat wielding a plasma pistol. The man fired. The sergeant dropped his shoulder to avoid the shot. The plasma round burnt through the air to melt the wall where his head had been an instant before.

The man fired again. ‘In the name of–’

Barbelo, dodged left and fired, his round vaporising the man’s head and shoulders before the traitor could finish his sentence. ‘We will not hear the name of your heathen god, heretic,’ Barbelo fired again; his plasma round obliterating what remained of the treacherous commissar’s corpse in a crackle of blue energy. ‘Sanctum secure. Nisroc, status?’

‘They were keeping their wounded down here,’ Maion heard Nisroc’s report as it came over the comm-feed. ‘Resistance was minimal. Lower chambers cleansed.’

Nisroc entered the inner sanctum to find Amaru poring over the main data console. The Techmarine had nano-wires and connective fibres plugged into every available data jack.

‘Brother Atoc?’ Barbelo had his back to the door and spoke without turning around, his gaze fixed on a wall-mounted viewer.

‘His duty is at an end.’ Nisroc touched a hand to his narthecium. ‘His gene-seed survives. His death served its purpose.’

Barbelo turned to face the Apothecary, pausing before he spoke. ‘And his body?’

‘His–’ Nisroc faltered. Bodies, where were the bodies?

‘Micos,’ the other Flesh Tearer snapped his shoulders back at the sergeant’s summons. ‘Return Atoc’s corpse to the Stormraven, his weapon too.’

‘Bodies,’ the word tumbled from Nisroc’s lips.

‘What is it, Apothecary?’ the grille mouthpiece of Barbelo’s helmet did little to filter his annoyance.

Nisroc cast his gaze around the chamber. Harahel’s armour was pitted and scared. Maion’s cuisse was fractured. The dismembered bodies of traitors were strewn around the floor, a madman’s mosaic. ‘Where are the other bodies?’ Nisroc repeated the question straining at his mind.

‘What?’

‘There were ten of our brothers stationed here. We have found only one, Brother Haamiah. Where are the others? There was no trace of them on the lower levels or here in the sanctum. They must be somewhere.’

‘I agree with you brother, it is an oddity. But we do not have the time,’ Barbelo turned back to the monitor, ‘the enemy advances from all sides. Their vanguard will contact us in thirty-eight minutes.’

‘Then we must make the time. We must find them. We must retrieve their gene-seed and honour their deaths.’

‘And what if they are not here? What if they are as ash, carried from here by the blasted storm?’

Barbelo’s tone brooked no discussion but Nisroc persisted. ‘Then we shall mourn their loss and the loss of their gift. But we must first check everywhere. We must be sure.’

Barbelo turned to face Nisroc, his poise threatening. ‘The enemy outnumbers us thousands to one.’

Nisroc moved towards Barbelo. ‘Death means nothing as long as the gene-seed survives.’

‘And who will collect our gene-seed when we lie dead beneath the starless sky of this world?’

‘We must–’

‘No!’ Barbelo pressed his forehead against Nisroc’s. ‘Amaru has affected repairs on the Stormraven. Once we acquire the data from the base’s cogitators we are leaving. You have until then.’

‘Very well,’ Nisroc took a step back and made to turn away. ‘But know that I shall take no pleasure in reporting our mission as a failure to the High Priests.’

Barbelo snarled. Never had he failed his Chapter. His grip tightened on his chainsword. He should gut Nisroc. Stain the Apothecary’s white breastplate crimson with his own sanctimonious blood. Out of his peripheral vision he saw Maion and Harahel edge closer. The other Flesh Tearers had remained silent but Barbelo doubted they would stand by and watch him kill the Apothecary. A warning shone on his display as he threatened to crush the chainsword’s handle. He fought to bring his rage under control. Now was not the time. ‘Go then. Look for the others. We will do what we must.’

Nisroc dipped his head, ‘Thank you, brother.’

Barbelo growled, ‘Do not push me, Apothecary.’ His voice was void cold. ‘Harahel…’ The sergeant drew his gaze from Nisroc in an effort to calm himself. ‘Go with him.’

Harahel walked silently beside Nisroc as they approached the chapel annex. It was the only spine of the compound the Flesh Tearers had yet to explore. If any evidence of Haamiah’s squad remained then it had to be there. The chrono display in Harahel’s helmet clicked down to thirty. He turned it off, uncaring as to whether they made it off Arere before the Chaos advance struck. It didn’t matter if he fought here or redeployed to another world, as long as he fought, as long as he killed. Blood, the thought rolled into his mind like an invading army. Saliva began to build in his mouth, his nostrils flaring as they searched for arterial juices. Blood, Harahel hungered for blood.

‘We are here,’ Nisroc’s voice crackled in Harahel’s ear breaking his stupor.

Harahel blinked hard, clearing the fog from his senses.

‘Is something the matter?’

‘No, I am fine,’ Harahel unlatched the Eviscerator from his back.

‘Wait,’ Nisroc held up his hand. Stepping ahead of Harahel, he moved to the chapel door’s access panel and removed one of his gauntlets. He wiped the grime from the console and pressed his palm onto the biometric scanner. The ancient machine chimed green as it recognised Nisroc’s genetic code as that of a Space Marine. With a pressurised hiss, the arched doors to the annex swung inwards.

Harahel grunted and followed the Apothecary inside.

‘The enemy will contact us here first,’ Barbelo spoke as a hololithic representation of the compound rotated in the air between him and Maion.

‘I would have thought here a more likely target,’ Maion gestured to the curving walls that formed the east side of the central courtyard.

‘No, they will expect that area to be mined; more than a handful of detonations would bring the rock face down on top of them.’ Barbelo pointed to the compound’s main entrance way. ‘They will attack from here.’

Maion studied the hololith, the sergeant was right. Had the base been fully manned, then attacking down the wide avenues of the main corridors would have been suicide. Under current circumstances the wide avenues would allow them to enter in force and overwhelm the Flesh Tearers. ‘What is this area here?’ He pointed to a dark spot on the display behind the armoury. ‘It wasn’t on the briefing schematics.’

‘That area…’ Amaru paused as his implants sifted through the compound’s memory banks for an answer. ‘It’s a missile silo. Surface-to-orbit ordnance. No use against ground targets.’

‘We cannot hope to defend the entire complex, we will make a stand here,’ Barbelo indicated a group of passageways that sprung from the main corridors and ran to the courtyard. ‘We’ll collapse these four and split ourselves into pairs to defend the remaining two.’

‘Four against–’ Maion paused, turning to Amaru.

‘Four thousand and seventy-eight separate contacts.’

Maion grinned, ‘Seems there’ll be blood enough even for Harahel.’

‘I think I can help even the odds,’ the hololith changed to show the Stormraven as Amaru spoke. ‘The Stormraven’s hurricane-bolters and missile launcher can be removed,’ the gunship’s weapon systems floated away from its hull, illustrating the Techmarine’s point. ‘It wouldn’t take much to reconfigure them as defensive turrets.’

‘What about the Stormraven?’ Maion’s face hardened. ‘The courtyard is uncovered, even a glancing hit from a siege gun and– ’

‘We needn’t worry about artillery,’ Barbelo interrupted. ‘I have fought this enemy before. They are like us.’

Maion glared at the sergeant, ‘You would liken us to the Archenemy?’

‘You have fought beside our Chapter’s Death Company?’

Maion nodded, his unease growing at the mention of the Chapter’s damned warriors. The Black Rage was a genetic curse that threatened to overwhelm all of the sons of Sanguinius. Once afflicted, a Flesh Tearer would be lost to battle lust, his sanity replaced by a desperate need for violence. Those that succumbed to the madness where inducted into the ranks of the black-armoured Death Company where they’d soon find redemption in death.

‘Like our coal-armoured brethren, the enemy we face is lost to bloodlust. They are fuelled by an insatiable rage, ever hungry for battle. They will want to taste our blood when they kill us,’ Barbelo tested the weight of his chainsword. ‘They will not attack from range.’

With the storm’s howl locked outside, silence permeated the chapel. Harahel moved ahead of Nisroc, his eyes adjusting to the change in light as a string of angular luminators hummed into life along the ceiling, filling the corridor with the hushed yellow glow the Imperial church reserved for religious buildings and the homes of cardinals.

Harahel smelt blood. He touched his thumb to the activation stud on his Eviscerator, ‘Stand ready.’

Nisroc raised his bolt pistol, letting its scope feed targeting data to his helmet display. He knew better than to question Harahel’s instincts.

From the reception chamber, they entered the Hall of Solace, a long corridor with single-occupant prayer cells joining it every few metres. The two Space Marines stopped. Dried blood and fleshy matter coated the metal floor ahead of them, paving the way like the regal carpet of some warp-spawned fiend.

Nisroc knelt and extended a probe from his narthecium, using it to scrape away a fragment of gore. A line of genetic sequence flashed across his display as the probe finished its analysis. ‘Sanguinius gut them,’ the Apothecary slammed his fist into the ground, cracking the metal panelling. ‘This blood belongs to the Chapter.’

Harahel tightened his grip on his weapon as his pulse began to quicken. He swallowed hard in an attempt to stop salivating. ‘Blood calls out to blood,’ Harahel recited the battle mantra as he fought down the urge to tear apart the walls.

‘The main chapel lies at the far end,’ Nisroc spoke as the chrono display flashed a warning in his display. ‘Time is–’

‘Advance behind me,’ Harahel activated his Eviscerator, the weapon’s barbed blades impatiently churning the air as they search for something to rend. ‘If anyone emerges, shoot them.’ Harahel spat the words through a pool of saliva. He dropped his weight and flexed his knees.

Nisroc nodded and slammed a fresh clip into his bolt pistol.

‘For the Chapter!’ Harahel broke into a run, the servos in his armour whirring as he picked up pace. The enhanced musculature of his thighs powered him forward at a speed that belied his bulk, an engine of ceramite and fury. ‘One, clear. Two, clear,’ Harahel looked left and right as he ran, updating Nisroc as his armour’s optical and audio sensors checked and recorded the disposition of each of the prayer cells in a heartbeat. ‘Three–’

Las-rounds stabbed at Harahel from either side.

‘Contacts, five through nine,’ Harahel kept running, ignoring the smattering of fire coming from the cells. Most shots went wide, his powerful strides carrying him past the cell openings before his attackers could take aim. A handful of rounds grazed his armour, picking the paint from his war plate. Harahel growled. The combination of his helmet’s vox amplifier and the hall’s acoustics amplifying his annoyance until it filled the corridor like the roar of some terrible beast.

‘Keep moving,’ Nisroc opened fire. His bolt pistol bucked in his hand as he sent three traitors sprawling to the floor, their heads blasted from their malnourished shoulders. ‘Your rear is secure.’

Harahel blinked an acknowledgement to Nisroc and pushed onwards. He was nearing the last cluster of prayer cells. His targeting overlay lit up with data, tracking the trajectory of the three fist-sized globes that rolled onto the corridor in front of him. ‘Grenades!’ Harahel bellowed a warning to the Apothecary, and threw himself into the nearest prayer cell as the devices exploded, avoiding the wash of flame and shrapnel that billowed out from them. He heard a muffled cry and a wrenching snap as the cell’s occupant’s bones broke under his immense bulk. Harahel snorted and picked the dead man up by his skull.

‘Harahel?’ Nisroc’s voice crackled in Harahel’s ear.

‘I am unharmed,’ Harahel emerged from the cell carrying the head of the dead traitor by the spinal cord, his gauntlet slick with blood.

‘The way is clear brother.’

‘No, there is one left, there,’ Harahel tossed the dismembered head into the cell opposite. A man screamed, firing on reflex as the head landed with a wet mulch.

Nisroc stepped into the cell, allowing his armour to filter out the smell of excrement. The man had the nose of his lasgun pressed inside his mouth. His eyes trembled as they looked up at the Flesh Tearer. The Apothecary growled. The man juddered, reflexively pulling the trigger. The single las-round blew apart his skull, painting the wall behind him with superheated brain matter. Nisroc turned from the corpse to find Harahel on bended knee, his helmet discarded at his side. The veins in the other Flesh Tearer’s forehead were threatening to push through his skin, his brow ran with sweat. Nisroc took a tentative step towards Harahel, his finger resting on the trigger of his bolt pistol.

‘Stay back!’ Harahel held a hand out to the Apothecary.

Nisroc resisted the urge to fire, ‘Control yourself! Now is not the time. The Archenemy has taken the lives of our brothers.’ Nisroc gestured to the arched doors of the chapel, ‘We must know what lies behind those doors.’

Harahel said nothing, saliva dripped from his mouth to burn away at the floor.

‘On your feet, Flesh Tearer! You can report to Appollus as soon as we return to the Victus, I’m sure he’ll welcome you into the Death Company. But right now, you need to get to your feet or, Emperor help me, I’ll put a bolt-round through that thick skull of yours.’

Harahel titled his head to look up at the Apothecary, his eyes bloodshot.

‘On your feet.’ Nisroc proffered Harahel his helmet. ‘Use your rage for something useful, like getting through that door.’

Harahel took the helmet and locked it in place. ‘Never threaten me again, brother.’ He regarded the fusion marks on the chapel doors. Someone had welded them shut from the outside. He took a step back and then drove forwards, slamming his armoured shoulder into the weld-line. The metal buckled. Harahel brought his knee up and kicked out, the doors snapped inwards. A bank of suspended luminators stuttered into life as he stepped into the chamber.

‘Emperor save us…’

The story continues next month...

Gilead’s Curse

Chapter Three

Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett

‘He will come, so he will. He will come. When he comes, for come he will, I’ll live forever. I won’t live for now, not just for now. I’ll live forever,’ the words tripped out over a narrow, dry pink tongue, through V-shaped rows of bright, sharp dentition.

His gleaming black eyes, like onyx marbles lapped to a mirror finish, shone back at him from the many reflective surfaces of the object he held between blackened claws as he gabbled. His words came in a torrent, spoken almost without punctuation, without pausing for breath, fast and uncontrolled.

‘He will come, so he will. He will come,’ he said, but there was no one in the chamber to hear his speech, only the artifact in his hands and the air moving in response to his words.

The scratch of claws and the groans of leather armour creaking around bobbing heads as his attendants sniffed at the foetid air and rotated their ears, listening for the things they must listen for, drew his attention. He ran one soft, pink palm over the vibrating earth wall of his antechamber, and then dropped the artifact on its plaited hair-ribbon back under his coat. It hit the soft short fur of his belly, where it had grown new the last few days, and began to heat and then whither the fur until the smell of slowly burning hair drifted up to his nostrils, making him turn his head this way and that, eyes wide.

The undercrofts throbbed with the movement of hundreds... thousands of his minions, their whispered exchanges creating a susurrus that filled the air and the mind. He could sense it all as they gathered in the vaulted chamber of an ancient crypt, built by man-things a millennium ago, inhabited by his own kind for almost half that time. He would go to them in a few minutes more, go to them, show himself and speak the words that would galvanise them. He did not need to hear the words they spoke to one another in fast, clipped tones; he needed only to feel the air move around him, vibrating the coarse whiskers that sprouted from his brow and maw.

One conversation came to him, and then another and another.

‘The gold is there, the gems, the wealth. Gold and more gold, and gems and gold. Piled, piled high and wide, piled everywhere, the gold and the gems and more gold.’

This was his power. These were his lands, these walls, these tunnels, caves and warrens, these fissures through the earth. All that was sky-less belonged to him, and all those who thrived sunless and moonless in his nether-lands bowed down before him.

They were ratkin in their dirt-lined warrens, tunnels and burrows, living in the warm embrace of the earth, lean and sleek, fast as fast, eager to serve, eager to get closer to their lord, to the centre of things. They were the whisperers, the collectors of information on the movements of men, of beasts, of higher beings. They were the stalkers, the followers, the gatherers of intelligence. Every time man or beast undertook a journey, the whisperers knew about it. They could read the vibrations in the ground. They knew whether a warrior travelled alone by the weight of his warhorse’s hoof-falls, knew how far and how long he had travelled, and how burdened he was. They knew when carts rolled to markets, laden with the new fruits of the surface fields, fruits too young, not ripened to the putrefaction of the flesh they thrived on, not brown and grey and fizzing with fermentation, but bright and clean and anathema. They knew when the dirt was tilled and when it was dug, and they knew the purpose of the tilling or the digging. They knew the difference between deep holes dug for bodies and those excavated for hiding treasures, wealth, things, objects, artifacts, the wonders the air-walkers worshipped them with.

They were ratfolk in their brick-lined burrows, with their dripping moss-covered walls, and low vaulted ceilings, nothing but brick below, around and above them. Their warrens rich in midden-pickings from above, they were closest to the top-worlders, the surface-dwellers, the crust-livers, the air-walkers. They lived so close to the streets, houses, workshops, hostelries inhabited by species that had solid ground only beneath their feet and never above their heads. The rest was air. By contrast, the air-walkers were robust of constitution, slow of wits, hairless and sluggish, and abominable.

They were squatters and vagrants in their rock-hewn fastnesses, stolen away from the ancient race of dwarf masons who had quarried the stone, and built the halls and corridors and vaulted spaces. They were skirmishers and assassins. They had outnumbered the dwarf men, out-manoeuvred them, bested them and stolen from them. They were thieves and liars, wielders of knives and blades, and they were ruthless.

He had learned about the air-walkers. He had learned so much about so many. He had learned that they were not all alike. The dwarfs were few; an old enemy, irrelevant. The humans were the worst, the ugliest the most stupid. The humans were to be despised and to be pitied. They would fall as the dwarfs had. They were as nothing compared to the Fell people. The Fell people, they were fast like he was, but long-lived, longer-lived than the humans... much longer.

He placed his hand over the smoldering flesh of his belly, filthy black claws extending almost the full width of the spongy swelling below his narrow ribcage. He felt the incessant bump of his blood organ, ticking his existence away.

The vibrations were growing, the waves pervading his senses, intersecting to create patterns in the micro-movements of the air in his waiting room, the antechamber that led directly out onto the mound of earth raised at the near end of the crypt, the mound from which he would speak to his followers.

He smoothed his coat over his chest, pressing the amulet a little deeper into his fur and skin. He clenched his teeth together and rotated his jaw several times as if chewing, and he lifted and bobbed his snout and whiskers.

Timing was everything.

He took the staff in his left hand, and wrapped the ragged ribbons of cloth that clung to it around the flesh of his paw, protecting the soft parts while exposing the black claws. He cast his eyes over the runes that ran the length of the staff, and concentrated for the briefest of moments, almost as if in silent prayer.

He left the antechamber by its only exit, and climbed the short spiral of stone steps that would lead him onto the mound. He tapped his staff down hard on each step, quieting the crowds that could hear his egress and feel the vibrations he was summoning from the staff and the old worn steps. There was menace in every footfall, and more in the deliberateness with which he placed his staff, not to aid his climb, but to instill fear and wonder in the waiting audience, his congregation.

He stood on the dais in the pale ethereal light cast by a hundred lanterns, fed with low-grade vermin-fat, which had been hung, not for their light, for the congregants did not need it to see by, but for their effect. The chattering that had ebbed away as he climbed the steps came to a dead stop as he planted his feet firmly at the centre of the mound. He was surrounded by his bodyguard, the strongest, bravest and most ruthless of his followers, who stood lower on the sides of the mound, their backs turned towards him.

A head, below and to his left, situated almost directly under a lantern that swung lazily back and forth casting its low tremulous light, twitched as if its owner might dare to look over his shoulder, might presume to defy an order.

He took one step off the apex of the mound, one step down and to his left.

The attack was swift and deadly, the blades of his staff whirring through the air, cutting the vibrations into bright new patterns. He destroyed the guard who had dared to twitch, his right-hand man, his captain, his champion, with a series of slices from the long stiletto bound to the end of his staff. Then, he sawed into his remains with the broad, serrated blade that protruded from the haft of his weapon at a twisted but pleasing angle.

No human would have detected a sound as the congregation held its collective breath, but to these creatures, the air was filled with waves of tension and noise, and movement crashing through their numbers, driving them to respond with fear and wonder. Their leader returned to his position at the apex of the dais mound, blood gleaming on the blades of his weapon in the narrow beams of faint lantern-light.

He watched the throng.

Beyond his ring fence of bodyguards closest to the mound, stood his most trusted lieutenants, warriors and fangleaders, beyond them gathered their loyal followers, and beyond those great swathes of young clanrats eager for blood, swarmed in loose groups. It was there, at the edges of the congregation that the violence began.

The blood thirst was upon them as their whiskers, snouts and ears responded to the waves that their leader had sent through them. The stench of blood, the movement in the air as thousands of them exhaled almost in unison, the vibration under their feet as their leader pounded the end of his staff into the earth of the mound, conspired to generate a wave of fear and loathing that roused them to acts of unfathomable violence. When their leader cut down the lieutenant who had been plotting against his reign, reasserting his strength and wisdom, and rightness, the youngest of the congregants, the most eager, the neurotic and most easily influenced turned one upon another, needing no further excuse to wreak a debt of violence on their weaker companions.

The bodies would not lie in their stinking filth and blood for long. The wounded and dead would be consumed with gusto as soon as the niceties had played out.

In the minute or two that their leader allowed to elapse, dozens, perhaps hundreds of the most pathetic, had been hacked to pieces or maimed; ears, eyes and limbs torn to shreds, guts and skulls opened.

In the last moments before their ruler brought the meeting to order, two tribal leaders did bloody battle, surrounded by a heaving crowd of baying followers. They thrust and scythed their weapons at each other, blades clashing and arcing, leaving shadows in the air as they sped to their targets. The smaller, but bulkier of the two, hunched at the shoulders and wide of stance, took the bloodiest wound low in his gut or perhaps high up in his thigh. The resulting spurt of blood probably emanated from the femoral or iliac artery. His opponent stepped to one side and raised his arms in triumph, only to be cut brutally across his narrow belly with the serrated blade wielded by one of his henchmen. The victor took two steps up the side of the mound, and the last place in the circle of bodyguards was won and filled, the ring of warriors completed. Their leader had asserted his strength and power, the scheming right-hand man had been dealt with and replaced, and all had been accomplished in an appropriate bloodthirsty frenzy on the grandest of stages.

His position thoroughly reasserted, the leader threw back his head and squealed with laughter. The sound was high and shrill and filled with breath, like a shriek or a screech. The cacophony erupted in the space and fractured the atmosphere, which was too filled with the sounds of clamouring, skirmishing young ones. The air splintered and trembled as it was cleansed of the sounds of close and brutal combat.

The congregants loosened their grips on their weapons, shrugged themselves back into postures and stances that roughly signified attention to the dais, and, most of all, they fell silent.

He told them. He told them all, his warriors and his workers, his spies and his whisperers. He told them this, as he had told them before, long and often.

‘They love us and loathe us; love and loathe.’

He snickered, and his whiskers wove intricate patterns in the air as he proclaimed this lesson to his gathered masses.

‘They worship and defile us. Worship us. Worship me. They give into the earth all the things they despise on the earth, and all the things they treasure beyond everything. Their treasures are our treasures. They dig our dirt and deposit their treasures in the earth to worship us. My treasures. The gold is mine, and the gems; the gold is mine and ours, and all to my good. The gold and the gems. And the secrets. The dirt holds their secrets.’

The skaven masses hissed their approval as the Rat King laid claim to all that was below the surface in every crevice, nook, hole and grave dug by man or beast.

‘It is the Fell One,’ he said. ‘The Fell One must be mine. The Fell One must be my newest treasure. Behold his powers. Behold how fleet he is, how fleet. The Fell One must be mine. Seek him. Seek him out, and I shall lead him here. The Fell One shall fall at my feet and call me master. The Fell One shall fall, and I shall be his merciless captor. Behold how fleet he is, how fleet. The long-lived one, the Fell One, shall fall. When he falls, for fall he will, I’ll live forever. I won’t live for now, not just for now. I’ll live forever.’

There was movement among the skaven crowds gathered in the crypt before their Rat King. They shuffled and elbowed one another at this strange turn of events. They bared their teeth, and hissed, and kicked. One went down at the edges of the gathering, and then another. They were restless, and their ruler seemed not to know what he was saying. The atmosphere filled first with motes of dust, disturbed into flight by the action of rat-feet on dry, subterranean dirt. Then the air began to move with the breath of the ratkin and the palpable tension among them; their snouts could not help but shrug and twitch, their whiskers tremble and their ears rotate. Their blood organs could not help but flutter and fibrillate. Their energy made the motes dance and weave in intricate, delicate patterns, writing the courses of their fates in the air around them. No mortal man could read the prophesies written there, but the dancing collections of motes began to mesmerise the weakest of the skaven. Only the initiated, the ancient, the leaders and kings of other worlds and other times could truly read the hieroglyphs created in the air, the omens and oracles that spoke of the true and honest states and fates of their kind.

The Rat King looked out over the heads of his followers, out into the depths of the crowd, as whispers approached him. He heard disappointment, disenchantment, impatience and dread. He heard the disaffected whisperings of the very young and the moans of fear from the old.

‘Gold and gems,’ he heard. ‘Gold and gems.’

‘Gold and gems,’ he said, lifting his weapon in his left hand, allowing the runes carved into the surface of its haft to glint in the low, yellow light of the smoking lanterns.

The skaven hordes quietened a little, and he felt rather than heard the whisper come again. He seemed not to be able to speak his own mind.

‘Gold and gems,’ he said again.

And then again, ‘Gold and gems.’

He felt the ache in his belly, and smelt the musky, acrid scent of his body hair singeing and his skin scorching beneath the amulet.

‘Gold and gems,’ he said once more as he thrust his hand under his coat to extract the amulet.

As he lifted the hair-ribbon over his head, the amulet felt dull and cold in his paw, no more interesting than a lump of coal or chalk. He could not feel its facets, nor imagine the reflective qualities that it had possessed only minutes before. It felt dull and soft and crumbly. Fear struck deep in his blood organ as he clenched his clawed paw around the amulet. He felt the power drain out of his hands, and thought he might stagger or fall. His left hand gripped the staff of his weapon more firmly, and he allowed it to take his weight as his right hand rose before him, without him exerting any of his will upon it.

His head was suddenly full of words that he did not understand and could never have annunciated. He wanted to copy the words, say them aloud from his V-shaped maw, but none would come.

He heard a hum, a tune, almost a melody. It was a lullaby, and then it was gone, transformed into a frantic crashing wave of discord that emptied his head of all right-thinking.

Then the motes in the air began to dance to a different tune, to no tune at all, only to the noises in his head.

The Rat King wanted to hold his paws over his ears and over his eyes. He wanted to still the insistent twitch of his whiskers and the rotating of his ears, and yet he had no power over his movements.

Finally, he felt the amulet grow so cold in his paw, so insubstantial that he thought it would fall to dust. He wanted to clench it more tightly, to hold onto it, never to let it go. It sustained him. He knew not how, but it was because of this object that he had grown and thrived and lived so long among his brethren.

He clutched the staff in his left hand, driving its end so firmly into the compacted earth floor of the mound that it made a small, perfectly hemispherical crater that was beginning to radiate odd cracks in the surface of the dais. His weapon took his entire weight for he felt as slow and heavy as death. His blood organ boomed, low, within his body, ponderous as a human’s.

His head turned to watch the movement of his right arm as it stretched out to his side, parallel to the floor. He looked at his paw, glowing and translucent, the veins showing like threads of pink light through the padding of his paw palms. The veins pulsed, long and slow. The involuntary twitching in his snout and whiskers slowed so dramatically that he thought he had been stilled, that this was all some terrible dream-state, or some unasked-for condition that afflicted any hapless being who came into ownership of his amulet; the magical talisman that had shown him his path to great age and even greater power among his kind.

He could do nothing but watch and trust.

At the furthest reaches of the congregation, skaven began to keel over where they stood, falling to their deaths as their blood organs slowed to nothing, or trilled to a frequency beyond the capacities of their bodies to tolerate. There were no signs. There was no way to know which of them would succumb or why they were dying, but die they must, in their dozens and hundreds. They expired staring into space, without a mark or a spot of blood appearing on their bodies.

Then, the air sucked away the swirling motes from around the corpses. The particles grouped and banded together and moved around the crypt in waves until all eyes were fixed on the dancing display of light and dust specks over the skavens’ heads. The spectacle drifted up towards the vaulted masonry high above them, casting shadows and spots of light onto the surfaces of the stones, making them glisten and glitter.

A galaxy of motes and particles, forming an array of symbols in three dimensions settled in a broad halo around the mound with the Rat King at its centre. Then he was bathed in light as the specks reflected and refracted all the illumination they could summon from the lanterns that flickered their smoky flames into the cavernous ceiling space.

The throng was agog, the skaven staring at their leader and at the story that was playing out over his head.

The Rat King watched as his right paw throbbed with the pink light that seemed to be coursing through his veins, and he sucked in a shocked breath as he watched his claws spread and his palm open.

He waited, his blood organ stopping entirely, true silence falling all around him as the motes stopped their merry dance, each coming to a dead halt in the air, all shining their reflected light down on him.

If there had been any capacity for rational thought in the Rat King’s mind, in that moment, he would have believed that he would never take another life-sustaining breath. Indeed, many of his kind would be dead by the time the drama had played out, and he did not doubt, in that moment, that he would be one of them. If he survived, he knew that he would live a longer, more satisfying life than all of his predecessors, perhaps than all of his predecessors combined.

He dreaded dropping the amulet to the earth floor at his feet. He dreaded that it would wither to dust, that it would cease to protect him, cease to strengthen his reign.

He wanted to close his eyes against the sight. He wanted his blood organ to begin pumping again. He wanted to be one of them, one of the horde, a simple skaven without the wit for ambition, without the secret of longevity.

He could neither blink nor twitch a whisker, nor clear his parched throat. The terror and anticipation filled him with wonder and horror and glee. The amulet had woven its magic before in ways that he had never understood, but he had kept it, cherished it, allowed it to burn his hair and brand his flesh, tolerated it filling his mind with unfathomable sounds and words and songs. He had fallen under its spell, and he had benefited and suffered for it in almost equal measures.

The Rat King’s claws peeled away from the charm, and his pink palm throbbed.

He was no longer holding the amulet in his paw, and yet, it did not fall.

The charm hung for a moment in the air, and then brilliant light exploded from it in a million prismatic sparkles, brighter and more ethereal than the dust motes held magically still in the air above his head. He thought that the charm had splintered and broken, its otherworldly elements rending it asunder in a miasma of blinding shards of luminescence.

When all the light had dispersed into the vaulted ceiling of the crypt, and his hand closed again, involuntarily, around the air, he felt something cool and solid and slick where he had expected to feel nothing at all. The amulet felt hard like stone, but greasy like the pelt of a well-fed and well-serviced brood-mother. He could not determine whether it was the faceted mineral that it had appeared to be in its most recent incarnation, and he could not open his paw again to look upon it.

He stared out over the congregation of rats, at their faces upturned to look at the light display whirling above their heads. Then, deep in the gloom at the furthest reaches of the crypt, he saw a pair of pink eyes shining out at him. Their gaze held as the Rat King called upon this, his minion, to do his bidding, to find the Fell One.

Suddenly, there was a picture in his head, a glowing image of the tallest, most slender and upright being that the Rat King had ever seen. The biped stood as high as two, if not three, skaven, and it was straight, without the angles for shoulders and elbows and knees and heels that typified the ratman’s physique. It was more like the hairless, human air-walkers, while being taller than the tallest man-thing, longer of neck, more elegant, half the width and so uncannily upright. The Rat King knew that this was his target, this was the Fell One, this was the creature that would help him to live forever. He knew not why, nor how this could be achieved; he only knew that it was his destiny. He only knew that he had clutched the amulet, and that he had sensed and seen his very being projected into a wondrous future, to a time when he would be worshipped by everything below the ground in the nether-lands, by everything above it and by all that lay between.

At the very moment when he wondered whether he was dead or in some mortal trance-state, the glitter dust that the charm had produced whirled and cycled in the air before him, between his position and that of the skaven who had locked eyes with him. He could no longer see the young pup, for he was blinded by the perfectly realised hologram that the brilliant sparks had generated, the perfect vision of the Fell One.

‘He will come, so he will. He will come. When he comes, for come he will, I’ll live forever. I won’t live for now, not just for now. I’ll live forever.’

He heard the words, both in his head and in the air around him. The voice sounded like his, but he could not remember forming the words, either in his mind or in his maw.

‘He will come, so he will. He will come. When he comes, for come he will, you’ll live forever. You won’t live for now, not just for now. You’ll live forever.’

The words were real, the whisper coalescing around the astounding form of the Fell One that began to change colour and slowly revolve in the air before him.

It was the pup, speaking.

The Rat King’s eyes, open wide in a blinkless stare, could see the suggestion of movement in the pup’s jaw, and sense the tremor in the air caused by his whiskers as he shaped his maw to produce the words.

Then another voice spoke up, and another.

Eyes began to turn towards the figure of the Fell One with its white head-hair cascading from its high crown, with its intricately woven cloak of the strangest iridescent cloth, with its weapon so fine, so light, burnished so bright as to defy usefulness. Unblinking eyes shone pink, whiskers twitched and maws chewed and flexed and whispered.

The susurrus of the thousands of voices moved the air such that the detail the Fell One was wrought in became increasingly profound. It was possible to divine individual hairs on his head and stitches in his garb, to see flecks of a million colours in the bright irises of his almond-shaped eyes and to stare into the eternity reflected back from their fathomless pupils.

The news radiated outwards from the crypt.

The skaven followed their burrows and tunnels back through the nether-lands to where they had come from, all the while monitoring the movements in the earth above them, searching for the sounds of the Fell One, reaching out to feel his alien vibrations in the micro-movements of the dirt around them.

Competition was fierce, and the eager skaven fought one another tooth and claw for the best avenues, the shallowest fissures, the places under the earth that resonated most profoundly with the waves of movement on the surface. They defended the spaces where earth tremors intersected to pinpoint exact locations where the Fell One might pass. Some chose their positions and stayed there, fighting off all-comers, and touching, testing and sniffing the dirt endlessly, confusing their senses and rendering them helplessly insane, often in a matter of hours.

They would begin by trying not to affect the area where they stood sentry, fighting the urge to twitch or move or even breathe. They could not risk hunting, did not dare to leave their posts in search of food or drink, so that when the supplies that they carried ran out, they didn’t think to replace them. Many died of starvation without eating the rations they carried lest they miss some tremor in the air because they disturbed it with chewing.

Others of the skaven scurried back and forth, thither and yon in the dirt tunnels and warrens of the nether-lands, searching for the Fell One by covering too much ground too quickly. They collapsed, exhausted and confused, or fought for access to the narrowest least-used of the tunnels below ground. Their accelerated metabolisms meant they could cover a great deal of ground quickly, but they also meant they needed to eat and drink often. Many were so intent on finding the Fell One, so driven by their Rat King’s mission, so eager to please their lord and to benefit from the capture of so rare and wondrous a creature that they too forgot to feed their bodies.

Violence had been the most common form of death among the skaven for centuries, violence from outside forces and external enemies, and violence from within their ranks. There was no understanding of familial relationships, no sense that they were brothers-in-arms, no loyalties, no ties, and no love lost between them. They fought each other, and killed and died, for any reason and for no reason at all. Now, they died from starvation and insanity, or they were ground down and eaten up by the amulet; that magical device that gathered up souls, devoured them, and distributed their life and longevity back to the wearer.

The Rat King felt it all. Every road, every path, every warren, every space led back to his crypt, back to his anteroom, back to him.

Any skaven that learnt anything, either by good luck or hard work, or by means of stealing from others of his kind, came scurrying back to its master, and the whispers began finding their way back up the chain of command to the Rat King.

He felt their conversations in the air, knew when they were close and when they were on wild-goose chases. He could tell by their manner, their bearing, the way they whispered, as much as by what they whispered, whether they were onto something or not.

Then he heard about the human. He knew from the side-by-side rhythms of the human boy and his master the Fell One, that he had found his quarry. The contrast between the vibrations they caused and the echoes these sent down through the fissures and burrows, down through the dirt and the earth back to the Rat King, was the most telling clue of all. Each vibration was identified by a comparison to its companion.

The boy defined the Fell One.

There was blood on his hands. There was skaven blood on his hands. The boy had killed a ratman. He had killed ratmen. He would kill them again.

The Rat King did not care. The loss of one of his kind was as nothing. He could devour a thousand of them, a thousand thousand and still not consume a life force to equal that of the Fell One. Let the boy kill, let him kill them if it brought the Fell One closer.

Closer he would come, closer and closer.

‘He will come, so he will. He will come. When he comes, for come he will, the Fell One will come too.’

In the dark little antechamber of the crypt, the Rat King sat on a throne cobbled together from the broken staves, hafts and blades of a dozen weapons or more; the rusted, useless, broken blades jutting out at angles in all directions. The joints were made with greasy twists of cloth, ribbons torn from rent and bloodied garments, wound tight, lacing back and forth around the sticks of wood. The hafts and staves were worn smooth, black and shiny by the filthy grasps of their many former owners, the runes crudely carved into them, many years before, honed by time and now silky to the touch.

The Rat King’s refuge was at the centre of his world. It was, so far as he knew, the only space for hundreds of underground miles, the only place in the nether-lands that had only one entrance and one exit, and those two the same opening. He was the only ratman that lived in private, that could not be taken by surprise, whose space was sacrosanct and could not be penetrated by new digs or the re-opening of old tunnels. He lived at the end of the maze, at the vanishing point, and all roads led to his door. He lived at the epicentre of all vibrations, of all movement, and all sounds travelled to him.

The stories of the boy came thick and fast, that he was with the Fell One and then at a distance, then close again. Every time the boy was mentioned the Fell One was felt, his rhythm denser and slower and more mediated, harder to detect, more economical. He was beyond the boy, and then ahead, and then behind him, to his left or right. They wove, together, a beautiful, intricate, crossing pattern with loops and whorls like the subtly winding paths of the pad prints from a skaven’s paw, and their vibrations made intersecting wave patterns of delightful complexity.

Hundreds of sightings over days and weeks came together in the Rat King’s mind. His leaders, his champions, his warriors and his minions each had small pieces of the puzzle, and the further up the food chain the skaven were the more pieces of the puzzle they had, but none could put together a complete picture. None had all the information.

No ratman would share information with another of the same standing in this skaven society. Lower ranking ratmen would share only with skaven of higher standing or status. The minions fed the warriors information, the warriors fed the champions, and the champions fed information to the leaders. Each of the dozen or so of the Rat King’s closest aides collected his own cache of information of sightings, of vibration paths, but none trusted his equals enough to share that information.

Once the Rat King had got what he wanted, he pitted his underlings against each other, filling their heads with stories of treachery, backstabbing, spying and stealing. No one survived for very long with any amount of information.

The strongest of the leaders, those who survived the deaths of their colleagues, came under special scrutiny from the Rat King. He promised them much.

The first of his lieutenants entered his antechamber as he sat on his throne, facing the single portal that kept him the safest and best-protected of them all in his uterine cul-de-sac.

He motioned for the large, red-eyed skaven with the thick covering of coarse dirty black hair to kneel before him.

The skaven did not argue with him, despite being beyond grovelling to anyone, including the Rat King that he would happily conspire to dethrone. Something compelled him to take orders from the wizened old Rat King, whose wrist was adorned with the hard dull amulet that seemed to throb, lighting the kinks and curves of hair in the ribbon that held it in place.

The Rat King held his hand in front of his kneeling lieutenant’s face, the charm suspended from it.

The lieutenant remained still, but the air around him began to bend and throb, vibrating the Rat King’s whiskers and filling his mind’s eye with a hundred images. The lieutenant began to speak, although all of the information was already suspended in the air between them, making his speech redundant. His eyes glazed over and he recounted, in automatic tones, all of the information that had been fed to him through the channels of his command. He had thought to keep something back, not to tell the whole story, but to leave gaps in the tale that might confound the Rat King’s intention to track the Fell One for his own ends. However, as he knelt in the small antechamber, the lieutenant had no choice but to tell it all, and to share the conclusions that he had drawn from the wealth of information that had come his way. With a broad overview, he had seen connections that others with less knowledge had missed, and he added these to his recitation of events.

The Rat King absorbed the account of the Fell One’s movements, along with the lieutenant’s thoughts on their significance, and all of the information that floated around in the air between them, with the amulet as his guide.

When it was done, the lieutenant continued to kneel before the Rat King, unable to move unless instructed to, his gaze caught in the impenetrable depths of the charm stone.

The amulet twisted and rotated on its hair-ribbon, as the Rat King brought his hands down onto his lieutenant’s face, one paw on each of the lieutenant’s cheeks.

The Rat King began slowly to apply pressure with his opposable claws, above the ridges of his lieutenant’s cheekbones. Seconds later, with a pair of quick explosions, there and gone in no time, he caught two pink, wet reflecting flesh marbles in his palms. The Rat King tossed his lieutenant’s eyeballs casually to the earth floor and muttered for him to leave the antechamber.

The lieutenant stood and turned, crushing one of his eyes under a paw as he did so, and stepping on the other as he moved tentatively across the room.

The second of the Rat King’s lieutenants lost his hearing when his master penetrated his eardrums with the same claws that had blinded the first.

The third lieutenant was relieved of his tongue, sliced deeply and cleanly away.

The fourth lieutenant lost his most precious sense when the king excised his whiskers, plucking them one at a time from his maw and brow, and then had his paws burned to thickly scarred stumps incapable of feeling the subtlety of a vibration through any wall made of earth, brick or stone.

The lieutenants relayed their information and, maimed and helpless, were returned to their men. None would last out the day, and, with their deaths, all the information they had gathered was lost back to its sources, sources who could not be induced to share anew.

The Rat King was all-knowing. He was the repository of all information pertaining to the Fell One and his unlikely companion.

The watched ones, the Fell One and the boy, had nothing in common. They did not sleep nor eat at the same time, nor with the same frequency; they moved at different paces, often in different directions; their bodies had no rhythms alike, nor had they similar needs.

And yet.

‘He will come, so he will. He will come. When he comes, for come he will, the Fell One will come too.’

The words echoed around his antechamber as he awaited more news, more sightings, more information to add to the labyrinthine light map that he cast his black eyes over.

He did not read it consciously. The skaven were a simple, brutal race. They kept smells in their heads and vibrations, they recognised things intuitively. They knew fear when they saw it and the blood thirst. They registered anger and resentment, hunger and mirth. They instinctively knew where they were, underground, at any time, however far they had travelled through the nether-lands, however injured or frightened they were; a skaven could never be lost in his natural habitat. Maps of the nether-lands were redundant, and it was a simple fact that no one had ever seen fit to draw them. Maps of the top-world were known to exist, but the skaven turned their noses up at the thought of them, preferring to rely on the solid evidence of ancient and immovable landmarks.

A three-dimensional map made of dust and specks of light would be as alien to the skaven as flying. And yet, there it was, suspended in the foetid air of the Rat King’s underground lair, a living, breathing, cycling representation of all the routes and paths the Fell One and the boy had taken in their travels.

The Rat King disturbed the air gently with the claw of his left hand, amending the details on the map with hieroglyphic notations, while his right hand swung the amulet from its hair-ribbon in a fast, short pendulum motion that seemed to rearrange the dust in subtle, but important ways. He did not fully understand what he was doing, only that he was responding to the whispers in his head, the urgings and admonitions that he must listen to through all his waking hours, and all of his hours were wakeful.

All the time that the Fell One had been in his sights, all the time that he had been accompanied by the human boy, was time that appeared to have been spent in some kind of search, some quest that led the old being in a tacking course from one point on the surface to another. He was an air-walker, a crust-liver and yet he wove a path from one point of egress to the next across the skaven nether-lands.

Every point of egress from above ground to below, every portal, every burrow entrance from which a skaven might exit onto the dirt or enter under it, was marked by a sighting of the Fell One and the boy.

Other sightings put the boy at the site of an ancient tree or a known well, and still more put the Fell One at the entrance to a basement or the site of an ancient burial; places known to the skaven, landmarks for them in the confusing light and air of the top-world. But whenever the Fell One’s path entwined with the boy’s, wherever they joined forces, they did so where the skaven world met the surface.

The Rat King saw it all. Suddenly, all he could ever want was right there in front of him.

Everything fell neatly into place, and the Rat King clapped his paws together in glee, the claws clacking against each other in a staccato sound that tore tiny holes in the fabric of the air, disturbing the map that shone and glittered before him.

They were hunting. They were searching for skaven to kill. The tiny dull lights, flitting aimlessly in angry little batches, congregating in the dark places on the Rat King’s map were their prey. The skaven were dying, their blood was on the Fell One’s hands and on the boy’s.

The dull lights began to wink out one at a time, and then by twos and threes. Some continued to throb faintly for several seconds before blinking out, and some hurried away, returning to the nether-lands and to safety.

But they were not safe. The skaven were not safe. They were not safe from their Rat King, and they were not safe from the Fell One; they were not even safe from the boy.

The boy was the key, the boy and his companions.

He could have him. He could have the Fell One.

‘He will come, so he will. He will come. When he comes, for come he will, the Fell One will come too.’

He spoke without realising that he was doing so, and as he spoke again, his black eyes clouded a little and his gaze seemed to fall short of the map that was slowly disintegrating back into its component parts.

The amulet, twisting and pulsing on its hair-ribbon, seemed to be slowing down, no longer rocking back and forth like a relentless pendulum marking time, but coming to a gentle rest.

‘I will bring him, so I will. I will bring him. When he comes, for come he will, I’ll live forever. I won’t live for now, not just for now. I’ll live forever.’

The Rat King unwrapped the hair-ribbon from around his wrist, hung it around his neck and dropped the amulet down under his coat. He could feel the flesh of his belly warm with the contact of the charm, and could smell the searing of his hair. His snout twitched slightly, and if his V-shaped maw with its rows of sharp teeth could smile, a smile was what appeared on his face now.

He placed his fleshy palms flat on the walls of his antechamber and felt the vibrations building. They built so fast and with such intensity that his palms curled, involuntary, and his claws dug deep gouges in the mossy stone walls.

He shrugged his coat more comfortably around his shoulders, and took the haft of his weapon in his left paw, using his right to wrap the strips of ragged cloth around the soft parts of his palm while exposing the blackened claws, now sharpened by their recent contact with stone.

The ground beneath his feet throbbed, and he could hear the treads of thousands of pairs of feet as his minions drew closer.

The message had been subliminal. He had not even been aware that he was summoning them, and yet summon them he had, in their hordes. Every tribal leader, every champion, every lieutenant had taken up his clarion cry, and soon they would fill the crypt and stand in awe as they listened to his orders.

He had sacrificed so many of them to his cause, and each of their lives had lengthened his by a breath or two, by half a dozen beats of his blood organ. Their lives were cheap.

It did not matter how many of them he sacrificed to ensure his immortality, there would always be more of them. Every time he killed a champion, every time he slaughtered a leader who knew too much, every time he tore into a warrior who coughed at the wrong moment, or turned his back, or showed the slightest disrespect to the Rat King, another happily took his place. They lived fast and they died young. The brood-mothers, their mothers, the glossy bitches, serviced by all and any who could fight their way through the throngs to get at them, simply produced more. The nurseries were full of them, teeming with the little bastards who would fight and die, even as pups, for the sake of violence.

There would only ever be one Fell One, and he had a plan to take him captive. He had a plan that would decimate his hoards of ratmen, but it would never exhaust their numbers entirely.

He did not know how long he stood in the antechamber, mesmerised by the voices in his head, and by the plot that was forming from the strange words. When his senses returned, the Rat King could hear the sounds of skaven jostling for positions in the crypt. They had answered his call. They had come. He could sense that the lanterns had been lit, and that his bodyguard, none of whom had served him for more than a few days, and none of whom would serve him for many more hours, were in position.

He left the antechamber and climbed the short spiral of stone steps that led to the mound. He tapped his staff down hard on each step, quieting the crowds that could hear his egress and feel the vibrations he was summoning from the staff and the old worn steps. There was menace in every footfall, and more in the deliberateness with which he placed his staff, not to aid his climb, but to instill fear and wonder in the waiting audience, his congregation.

He needed no words to silence them. They stood in rough ranks, facing him. They stopped jostling and pushing. They did not elbow, or shove or trip one another.

The Rat King’s snout twitched slightly in air that felt thick with fear and awe, fear and awe for him, and for the power he was about to wield.

The Rat King spread his arms to his sides, his left clutching the haft of his weapon. He looked down on the backs of the heads of his bodyguard; none twitched. They were still and they were silent.

He looked out over their heads, watching pairs of red and black eyes glinting and throwing light in the great space. The air above their heads was dense and dark and full of presentiments.

The Rat King took hold of the amulet and lifted it out of his coat. He didn’t wind the hair-ribbon from around his neck, but simply tugged on it, and it came away in a small cascade of drifting hairs. He held the amulet high above his head and opened his hand.

The charm spun slowly in the air, and then faster and faster, casting brilliant light into the darkest of corners. Then the voices began, first chanting some strange incantation that made some of the minions furthest from the dais sweat and gag, and fall dead to the earth floor beneath their feet. Finally, the chanting stopped and a single voice echoed around the great hall.

‘I will bring him, so I will. I will bring him. When he comes, for come he will, I’ll live forever. I won’t live for now, not just for now. I’ll live forever.’

The skaven joined in, first singly and in small numbers, and then in groups and tribes, and soon they were all reciting the words.

‘We shall bring him so we shall. We shall bring him. When he comes, for come he will, you’ll live forever. You won’t live for now, not just for now. You’ll live forever.’

As they spoke, the miasma of their breath, finding its way into the vaulted space above their heads, augmented by the ethereal, brilliant light from the amulet, formed shapes and patterns in the air until the entire plot was drawn in stark detail before them. The boy was there – the bait. The Fell One with his sword stood out in stark detail, defending the human boy. Some of the skaven tittered and gurgled odd laughing noises as they witnessed the Fell One’s unfounded loyalty to the ugly, slow, smooth-skinned human boy. They laughed less when they witnessed the speed and savagery of his weapon as it cut down their shadows right above their heads.

The plan was laid out before them. Their mission was etched indelibly on their collective mind. They would obey their Rat King and master, even knowing that they would die doing his will.

A young skaven, maddened by the sights before him, clutched his bladed weapon in both of his hands, like a scythe, and swept through the legs of a dozen of his nearest compatriots before he could be stopped. Another ratman, a frenzied tribal leader with a deep battle scar cleaving his brow, that should have left him dead, drew a thick-edged serrated blade across his own throat until bright pink blood gouted from his carotid, signaling his death.

Many succumbed, but those that remained were galvanised by the experience. It was all before them. They had a mission and they would give their lives in the quest for its completion.

They began to turn from the Rat King as he held his arms aloft and stared deeply into the light show high above him in the vaulted ceiling of the crypt.

Gradually, the amulet, slowed in its spinning motion, and the light began to disperse from it.

The hordes banded together and chose their routes out of the crypt, their feet pounding on the earth floor, and their voices echoing down the tunnels as they departed.

As the last of the skaven made ready to leave and the Rat King’s bodyguard turned to him for permission to fight for his greater glory, the amulet stopped dead in the air. The Rat King did not reach out to take it.

There were no more than a dozen of them in the crypt, standing around and on the dais mound, when the amulet began to revolve in the opposite direction; began sucking light back into its core, began to regenerate, just as the Rat King was revitalised by the losses of the lives around him.

All of the energy in the room was gone, and the darkness turned to something beyond dark, beyond the densest black darkness that the skaven were so familiar with in the depths of the dirt.

The amulet began to suck the light out of their eyes, catching the gleams that bounced off their claws and teeth; sucking the refracted pinpoint luminescences from the drops of saliva that coated their tongues.

It began to suck the light from the air among the hair on their bodies, and from the pores in their skin.

Then it began to draw light from the dressed stone of the crypt, from the vaults and buttresses, from every mason’s cut and mark.

When it was done, the amulet was dull and cloudy, and looked utterly unremarkable, aside from the fact that it sat in the air where there was nothing but necromancy to keep it aloft.

When it was done, the Rat King closed his hand around the amulet and stepped from the top of the mound towards his antechamber. As he left the crypt he turned to look at the desiccated corpses of his bodyguard. Then he turned to look back into the crypt, to take in all that had occurred.

The light was low, but that did not affect his sight, or what he saw.

The crypt was wrought new in obsidian stone, blacker than any stone hewn with a mason’s chisel had any right to be. It was dull and black in an infinite, endless way that would endure beyond anything that the skaven had ever known.

Whatever happened in the nether-lands, whatever became of the Rat King, of his minions and of his kingdom, the crypt would remain forever.

TORMENT

Anthony Reynolds

Death was nothing to be feared. Death he would have welcomed. It was the in-between place that that filled him with dread.

To some it was the Undercroft, Tartarus, or Limbo; to others it was Sheyole, the Shadowlands, or Despair. On old Colchis it was known as Bharzek. Translated literally, its meaning was simple and direct – Torment.

Those condemned to wander its ashen fields were said to be cursed above all others. They lingered there, haunted, confused and lost, suffused with impotent rage, longing and regret. Unable to move on, yet equally unable to move back to the lives they had left behind, they were trapped in that empty, grey wasteland, doomed to an eternity of emptiness.

He knew now that the old stories were wrong, however.

It was possible to come back...

‘Burias.’ That voice was not welcome here. It was an intrusion. He tried to ignore it, but it was insistent.

‘Burias-Drak’shal.’

He awoke to pain. It blossomed within him, building, compounding, multiplying, until every inch of his body was awash with fire. He was blinded by agony, yet he grinned, bloodied lips drawn back in a leering grimace.

Pain was good. Pain he could endure. He was alive, and not yet confined to the hell that the Dark Apostle had promised him. Burias embraced his pain, letting it draw him back from the brink of oblivion.

He knew where he was – deep within the Basilica of Torment, on Sicarus, adopted homeworld of the XVII Legion. He’d been dragged here in chains by his former brothers, but he had no concept of how long ago that had been. It felt like an eternity.

Gradually his senses returned.

The smell hit him first. Hot, cloying and repellent, it was the stink of a dying animal. It hung in the unbearably humid air like a fog, something that could be felt on the skin, oily, clinging and foul. He could taste it. Sickly stale sweat, charred meat and burnt hair; none of it could quite mask the stench of bile and necrotising flesh.

But more than anything else, he could smell blood. The room reeked of it.

He discerned low whispers and chanting, and the hushed shuffle of feet on a hard stone floor as his hearing returned. He heard the clank of chains, the hiss of venting steam, and the mechanical grind of gears and pistons.

This is not your fate.

The words were spoken with the confidence of one who does not need to raise its voice in order to make itself heard. It was familiar, but he could not place it. He tried to answer, but his lips were dry, cracked and bleeding, his throat raw and painful. He swallowed, tasting blood, and tried again.

‘Who are you?’ he managed.

I am the Word and the Truth.

‘Your voice... is inside my head,’ said Burias, wondering if his torture had driven him to insanity. ‘Are you real? Are you a spirit? A daemon?’

I am your saviour, Burias.

The haze of his surroundings was slowly coming into focus. He was staring straight up at an octagonal, vaulted ceiling. It was shrouded in darkness, lit only by a handful of low-burning sconces mounted upon the eight pillars surrounding him. Oily smoke coiled from these fittings, rising languorously.

He lay spread-eagled upon a low stone slab, bound in heavy chains bolted to the floor. The links that bound him were each the size of a Space Marine’s fist and heavy manacles were clamped around his ankles, wrists, and neck. The flesh around these bindings was blackened, raw and weeping, burnt almost to the bone.

The manacles were inscribed with ancient Colchisian cuneiform. Painstakingly replicated from the Book of Lorgar, the potent runic script glowed like molten rock, and the infernal heat radiating from them made the air shimmer. Yet more of the angular ideograms were carved directly into Burias’s tortured flesh, and these too smouldered with burning heat.

His body was a ruin of raw scar tissue, burns, cuts, abrasions and welts. His sacred warplate had been torn away piece by piece, with all the eagerness and hunger of feeding vultures. Where over the years it had become fused to his superhuman frame, it had been crudely hacked off with cleavers and blades that he suspected had been purposefully dulled to make the work longer and bloodier.

Every conceivable torture had been inflicted on him. But he had not been broken.

You are already broken, yet your mind refuses to accept it.

‘You lie,’ Burias gasped.

I do not. I am here to help you.

‘Then help me!’

Look to your left. That is your way out.

With some difficulty, his movement painfully restricted, Burias turned his head. Before him was the reinforced door of his cell. It was closed and bolted, and rust and corrosion was sloughing off its surface like dead skin. The door was massive, thick and solid, and the stonework around the lintel was carved with runic wards.

A pair of hulking executors were slumped in shadowed niches to either side of the door. Huge even compared to a Space Marine and vaguely simian in appearance, these mecha-daemon sentinels appeared completely lifeless except for their eye-sensors which blinked unceasingly in the darkness. They were behemoths of armour and barely-checked fury, mechanical constructs built around a brain and nervous system that had once been human, though daemonic entities had long since been bound within their steel bodies.

When roused, they were easily capable of ripping him in half with their immense powered mitts. Even in his weakened state, chained, tortured and stripped of his armour, Burias stared at them with eyes narrowed; an apex predator sizing up its rivals.

His muscles tensed as his body responded to his desire to fight, yet he was bound securely and he knew that any attempt to break his bonds was futile. There was no hope of escape.

All that imprisons you is your own perception, Burias, and nothing more. You believe that there is no escape, and so there is none.

‘You can hear my thoughts,’ said Burias.

Yes. You are not speaking aloud now, you realise?

‘Who are you?’

Burias’s question was met with silence.

‘Are you Drak’shal?’

Again, silence.

His view of the dormant executors was abruptly blocked as a dark figure shuffled in front of him, chattering incoherently. More of these robed figures moved around him, attentive and whispering, their faces hidden in the shadow of deep cowls. They were loathsome creatures, emaciated and hunched, the definition of their ribs and vertebrae clearly visible through their black robes. Their arms were corpse-thin and grey. Rusting cables and tubes that leaked milky fluids protruded from their flesh, and their bony fingers were tipped with a plethora of needles, hooks, blades and callipers. All were stained with blood. His blood.

Lobotomised cantors were hard-wired into hooded alcoves positioned half way up the chamber’s eight pillars. They chanted litanies of binding and containment in long, monotonous streams, their entire existence focused solely on this duty. Their eyes were wired open, and their grossly obese bodies were the pallid shade of a creature that had never seen daylight. Reams of parchment unfolded endlessly before them, and their mouths bled from the potency of the words they read aloud.

Everything about the cell, from the runic chains to the inscriptions upon the cell door and the drone of the cantors, had been designed with a singular purpose – to ensure that the daemon Drak’shal remained tightly bound, suppressed and quiescent.

With the daemon dormant within him, Burias was as any other warrior-brother within the Host; a demi-god of war in comparison to lesser, unaugmented beings, yes, but nothing more than a shadow of his former self. He could hardly feel the daemon’s presence at all, and this cut him more deeply than any physical torture. It felt like he was missing a part of himself, something so integral to his being that he felt like he had been hacked in two.

The daemon had been bound to his flesh in the early days of his induction into the Legion. He had been one of the special few, chosen for this path with great ceremony and care. Few warrior-brothers were able to survive the rituals of possession. Fewer still were able to master the daemon once joined.

There had been a period of struggle when Drak’shal had fought to gain ascendency, of course, but Burias had won out, asserting his dominance. He had been reborn. Everything of his former life was forgotten.

Drak’shal had given him strength – great strength – as well as speed, cunning, and rapidly accelerated healing that had seem him walk away from injuries that would have killed any other Space Marine. He’d fought in wars across a thousand battlefronts, and yet he bore not a single scar to show for all the countless wounds he had sustained – until now.

Fused with the daemon, his every sense had been heightened beyond anything he could ever have imagined. He could see in total darkness without the aid of his helmet’s optic augmentations. He could taste a drop of blood in the air at a hundred metres. He could run as fast as a Rhino APC and maintain his pace for days on end. His strength was easily that of five of his Word Bearer brothers.

‘You are nothing without Drak’shal,’ Marduk had said, standing over him as the manacles that now held him had been welded shut. Burias and Drak’shal had roared as one, knowing what was to come, but powerless to prevent it. The Dark Apostle had smiled as the runes had burst into flame, pushing the daemon back into enforced dormancy. ‘This is the punishment for your treachery, Burias.’

His muscles tensed at the memory, his lips curling back in a snarl.

It is your choice what path you take, Burias. To your left lies freedom; to your right, slavery.

Somehow Burias knew what he would see to his right, but he was still compelled to look.

For a moment the horror of the sight carried him somewhere else entirely; drowning, blinded, screaming.

The moment passed as quickly as it had come, and he was staring into a cavernous alcove, like the lair of some great beast. Slumped motionless in the shadow was the mechanical prison that would be Burias’s tomb for all eternity.

A Dreadnought.

War machines of colossal power, with a chassis of heavy ablative armour and toting weaponry comparable to that of a front line battle tank, the Dreadnoughts had been conceived early in the Great Crusade. Every time a Legion lost a battle-brother, particularly a captain or veteran, a wealth of hard-won knowledge and wisdom was lost along with them. The Dreadnought was designed to ensure that the greatest warriors and heroes of a Legion might live on even after suffering fatal wounds.

It had been a noble aim, one that seemed to hold great merit, but the machine’s creators on Mars had not foreseen the terrible, tortured existence that those interred within were forced to endure. Denied physical sensation, their existence was hollow, empty, and without end. They were cursed never again to experience physical sensation, and were cut off from everything and everyone.

To these poor unfortunates, the one thing that they had been gene-bred and trained for – war – was now a soulless and dissatisfying experience. They had become living war machines capable of laying waste to entire battlefields, and yet cruelly they were not able to elicit any satisfaction from doing so. Never again would they experience the rush of adrenaline that came from combat, nor feel the kick of a bolter in their hands, or watch the life leave a worthy enemy’s eyes as the shuddering kill thrust was administered.

As years turned to decades, decades rolled into centuries, and centuries became millennia, those pitiful souls condemned to that horrid half-life were driven slowly and inexorably to madness, filled with longing for all that they had lost, and bitterness towards those who had imprisoned them.

It was therefore in an act of pure malice and barbarity that Marduk intended to take Burias, a healthy, living warrior of the Host, and forcibly inter him. It spoke of the Dark Apostle’s vindictiveness that he would rather see Burias suffer for all eternity than have a fatally wounded warrior-brother saved from death’s grasp.

Burias stared at the immense, motionless machine with rising terror.

It stood upon squat, armoured legs, and its massive torso was almost as wide as the machine was tall. Both of its arms ended in immense power talons that hung dormant at its sides. A helmet – one of the early Mark II helms, brutal and archaic – was half-hidden behind a gorget of reinforced adamantium. The lenses of the Dreadnought were dark.

The machine was an ancient relic, a shrine to the dark gods, and its armour plating was a work of peerless artifice. Every centimetre of its deep crimson hide was covered in intricately carved scripture, and barbed metal bands edged each individual plate. Strips of vellum hung from wax seals, each covered in long tracts of illuminated text.

The chest of the Dreadnought was a gaping cavity. That was where the sarcophagus would be secured. That was where Burias would be entombed, and not as a glorious martyr of the Legion – the only injuries he bore were the result of his torture at the hands of the Host’s chirumeks. No, he was being interred within the Dreadnought as punishment for having dared turn against his sworn master Marduk.

Located behind his own was a second altar, mirroring the slab to which he was chained. Upon it rested a sarcophagus. His sarcophagus.

It was filled to the brim with liquid and ribbed pipes, cables and tubes spilled over its edges. Some of them connected into tall glass cylinders filled with murky amniotic fluid; others hung limp and lifeless, like parasites waiting to be affixed to a host.

The casket was not large – his arms and legs would be amputated in order for him to fit within. Cables and wires would be rammed into his nervous system, impulse-needles pushed into his cortex. Feed-tubes, ribbed-pipes and cables would be inserted into him, and oxygen-rich liquid would fill his lungs. Once sealed, his tomb could never be re-opened.

In times of war he would be interred within the Dreadnought and unleashed upon the foe, but at all other times his sarcophagus would lie dormant, collecting dust in the undercroft of the Infidus Diabolus. Denied outside stimuli, he would yet remain conscious, trapped in Torment...

Nothing is real but what you’ve chosen to accept.

‘You speak nothing but riddles!’ Burias snapped. ‘You said you were here to help me.’

I am.

‘Then tell me how to be free of his prison.’

Break your bonds.

Burias paused. ‘What?’

Break your bonds, and you will be free.

As simple as that, thought Burias, mockingly.

As simple as that.

Burias smirked, and shook his head slightly. Humouring the disembodied voice, he pulled against the chains binding him. He gritted his teeth and groaned with the effort, but there was no give in the metal links at all. He gave up. They were too strong.

They are not too strong, Burias. Belief is the path to freedom. Believe that you can break them, and you will.

Burias breathed in deeply, gathering himself. ‘Break, you bastards,’ he whispered, then hauled on the chains with all his prodigious, gene-enhanced strength. His abused, flayed musculature strained, veins protruding monstrously, like bloodworm parasites burrowing beneath the skin. He roared, pulling against his chains with reserves of strength that he did not know he had left.

He felt something stir within him.

The cuneiform runes carved upon his manacles burst into flame, their smouldering power surging. The droning intonation of the cantors lifted a pitch, becoming more strained, and the pair of slumbering mecha-daemon executors set to guard over him were roused, leaning forward on immense metal knuckles, emitting snuffling clicks from their vox-registers.

Burias’s vision was red, and the sound of his blood pumping in his ears drowned out all else. He could not hear himself roaring, though he knew that he still was. The runic wards turned white hot, and Burias dimly registered the smell of burning flesh – his skin around the manacles being seared anew by the heat of the metal. He barely felt it.

The executors were advancing, the rotary-barrelled autocannons mounted in their forearms clicking and ratcheting as they moved towards him. He lifted himself up off the slab, his back arching with the strain.

The first weakening in the wards came when one of the cantors began to spasm, its words faltering as it began to convulse. Blood burst from its nostrils and ears.

Whatever affliction had struck the cantor down was evidently contagious, as those adjacent to it began to shake and stammer. The chant lost all coherence and was suddenly a confused mess of conflicting, stuttering voices. The burning runes that bound Burias flared erratically, and the executor’s rotator cannons began to whine and spin.

With a scream that made reality shimmer, the daemon within Burias surged to the surface, rising like a monster from the deep. The warding runes exploded into blinding, glittering shards, and the chanting cantors’ brains burst in one mass collective haemorrhage.

Drak’shal was unleashed.

The change came over him quickly. Burias’s form shimmered and distorted like the display of a faulty pict-viewer, flicking back and forth between two incompatible images. It was as if two beings of vastly differing physiology were fighting to share the same location and the laws of reality did not know which to give precedence. Instead of a decision being made, the two images blurred together to become one.

Curving horns rose from Burias-Drak’shal’s brow, and his shoulders were suddenly bulging with additional musculature, flesh remoulding like wax. Barbed spines pushed from his elbows and down his spine, and ridges of bone sprouted down the blade of his forearms. His fingers fused to form thick talons, each as long as a mortal man’s thigh. Crimson hellfire burnt in eyes which were suddenly elongated slashes carved into a bestial visage, and thin lips drew back to expose the serrated teeth of a predator.

The whole change occurred within the space of a millisecond, faster than the time it took the guardian mecha-daemons to register the danger and open fire.

With a brutal surge of warp-spawned power, Burias-Drak’shal hauled himself upright. His arms and neck ripped free of the chains binding him, tearing the thick links effortlessly. One of the chain lengths held, and the heavy bracket securing it was instead ripped from the floor, bringing with it a torso-sized chunk of rockcrete.

With his legs still shackled, Burias-Drak’shal swung the chain around like a flail as the executors fired. The swinging rockcrete lump took the first in the side of the head, splattering blood and cancer-ridden brain matter as its armoured cranium crumpled.

The sheer brutal force of the blow almost tore the construct’s head from its servo-thick neck. Knocked off balance, its autocannon sprayed a burst of heavy-bore shells across the room, ripping through the bodies of black-robed attendants and tearing gouges along the far wall. A rain of expelled shell cartridges fell to the floor.

The second executor was spraying wild gunfire at Burias-Drak’shal, but the possessed Word Bearer was already moving, too fast for mortal eyes to follow. He used his momentum to wheel himself off the blood-stained stone slab, ripping the chains that bound his legs free. Detonations chased him as he spun away from the shots.

With a casual shove Burias-Drak’shal sent one of his craven, black-cowled tormentors flying backwards, hurling it ten metres through the air to strike one of the pillars with a sickening wet crack. With the same movement, he brought the weighted chain swinging around towards the executor that still stood.

The mecha-daemon ceased firing and reached up to grab the chain early in its swing. The heavy links encircled the armoured gauntlet of its fist three times, and the rockcrete lump crashed against its armoured forearm and shattered. With a savage yank, the executor snapped the chain, and Burias-Drak’shal stumbled to his knees.

The bestial construct bellowed in triumph and surged forward on all fours, moving with surprising swiftness. It lifted one immense fist high and brought it down hard, intending to pound Burias-Drak’shal into the floor.

The possessed warrior rolled, and the executor’s blow struck the flagstones, sending cracks rippling out from the impact and making the whole room shudder. Burias-Drak’shal scrambled to get away, but the executor managed to grab the short length of chain still attached to his left leg. With a triumphant roar that reverberated deafeningly in the confined space of the chamber, it hoisted him off the ground and swung him first into one of the stone pillars, then into the opposite wall.

Rock crumbled and dust fell as Burias-Drak’shal was pounded from side to side. One of the black-robed attendants cowering in a corner was crushed, brittle bones pulverised under the possessed warrior’s weight as it was caught up in the executor’s wild fury.

Then the Word Bearer was hurled violently across the chamber. He slammed against the far wall, which cracked under the impact, and fell to the floor. He spat blood as he pushed himself to one knee, momentarily blinded by pain.

The executor bellowed and came at him again.

Move. Leap to the right.

Burias-Drak’shal hurled himself aside as the voice commanded, and the executor thundered into the wall with tremendous force. Masonry dust fell from the ceiling, and cracks spread across the wall like veins. The monstrous executor’s shoulder was embedded half a metre into the stonework, and it appeared momentarily stunned by the colossal force of impact.

Kill it.

With a snarl, Burias-Drak’shal scrambled up the executor’s armoured body, climbing onto its hunched shoulders as it struggled to pull itself free of the crumbling wall. An outraged growl of scrap-code burst from its vox-grille and it whirled around, seeking to dislodge him, but Burias-Drak’shal clung on, holding tight to the edge of its armoured shell with one hand, claws digging deep into ceramite.

The executor’s armoured hide was as thick as the frontal glacis of a predator battle tank, but its joints were comparatively vulnerable. Its design compensated for this deficiency with overlapping, sheathed plating and a high gorget to shield its neck, but while this was powerful defence against an enemy facing it, there was little to protect against an enemy standing upon its shoulders.

With his free hand, Burias-Drak’shal began punching his talons into the executor’s exposed neck, hacking into the thickly bunched mass of fibre-bundles, servos and ribbed cables. Oil, milky fluid and stinking synth-blood sprayed outwards, splattering across Burias-Drak’shal’s face. Sparking electrical discharge arced from the wounds, and the executor went wild.

Spinning dementedly, roaring and bellowing, it sought desperately to throw off its smaller foe. It tried to slam him into one of the pillars, driving itself backwards at full force, but he clung on, hacking into its neck, ripping away cables and synthetic muscle-fibres, digging towards the vulnerable neural wiring deeper within.

The mecha-daemon’s data-roars become a pitiful, crackling whine, and it stumbled as its nervous system began to fail. It collapsed to the floor, twitching as its life-fluid pooled beneath it, running freely from its savaged neck. It clung to life, trying vainly to push itself upright, but it had lost all coordination and was unable to rise.

Burias-Drak’shal finished it off by driving one of his talons through the back of its armoured cranium, then turned his feral gaze towards the cluster of lesser creatures cowering in the corners of the chamber, determined to vent his fury on their flesh.

Go now. The others are coming for you.

Snarling, he advanced towards the terrified acolytes.

The immense cell door exploded outwards, wrenched out of shape and torn from its hinges. It slammed against the opposite wall, and Burias-Drak’shal sprang through the gaping doorway into a wide shadowed corridor. Gore caked his arms from talon to elbow, and bright blood was splashed across his chin.

There were four sentinels on guard outside his cell. Burias-Drak’shal did not stop to think why they had not entered his cell at the cacophony of mayhem that had been unleashed within, though if he had he might have guessed that in this place such sounds were not unusual. They came at him with falchion blades that hummed with power, and they died with those weapons still in their hands.

When his flesh was his own, Burias was a consummate and graceful warrior, elegant and poised. When he was one with the daemon, he was pure bestial rage.

He tore the head from one of the sentinels and ripped the throat out of the next with his teeth. The third died with the daemon-talons of his fist through its armoured chest, and the last was hurled away with a backhand blow, its spine shattered by the force of it.

Without pausing, Burias-Drak’shal swung his heavy head from side to side, tasting the air.

The ceiling was high and arched. Katharte daemons crouched high up along spiked buttresses like gargoyles, watching over him indifferently. The darkness hid their skinless forms from mortal eyes, though Burias-Drak’shal saw them clearly, and acknowledged them with a snarl.

Clusters of robed curators and indentured servants fled before him, wailing and falling over themselves in their haste. Penitents, their flesh criss-crossed with self-inflicted wounds, dropped to their knees in worship, crying out to him, skeletally thin arms raised in supplication. He ignored them, cocking his head to one side and listening intently.

Mournful bells of alarm were echoing up through the halls. He could hear raised voices barking orders in the war-cant of Colchis, and the stamp of heavy nailed boots on stone, coming in his direction. The sound reached him of weapons powering up – he discerned the unmistakeable hum of plasma weaponry; the electric crackle of submission whips.

With a snarl Burias-Drak’shal launched into motion, bounding down the hall towards the sounds. Each leap tore up the stonework as his talons dug deep, propelling him onwards, urgency and rage lending him speed. He rounded a corridor at full tilt, his momentum forcing him up onto the wall. Rather than slowing, his pace increased.

He hit the approaching warriors with all the elemental force of a thunder strike, leaping in amongst them and starting to kill before they had even registered his presence or thought to raise a weapon.

They were indentured Sicarus warrior-clan, enhanced post-humans bred by the XVII Legion for devotional combat. Their faces were obscured by clockwork rebreather masks and external optical targeting arrays, and hyper-stimms flooded their nervous systems. Though they could never have matched one of the Legion, they were a highly trained, elite force that was worthy of respect.

Nevertheless, there were children next to the fury of Burias-Drak’shal. Three of them were dead without even raising a hand in defence.

Burias-Drak’shal towered head and shoulders over them and ploughed through their ranks, ripping and killing. He smashed gun barrels aside as they were swung up towards him, and warrior-clansmen inadvertently slew their own brethren with high-powered hellguns and plasma blasts in the frenzied mayhem. He punched heads from shoulders, and ripped arms from sockets. He crushed skulls against the passage walls, and slashed throats with his blood-slick talons.

Writhing submission whips sought to ensnare him, but he was too fast for their touch, and those wielding them died, their hot blood splattering up the walls.

All the while, Burias-Drak’shal kept focussed on one figure at the back of the regiment, the hulking warrior whom he had heard barking orders in the language of dead Colchis. He was one of the Host, a brother Word Bearer that Burias had fought alongside for countless years. His name was Eshmun, and he was of the 16th Cohort.

A respected veteran, Eshmun was a stoic and capable warrior who, Burias-Drak’shal recalled, had been marked out for greater things after butchering three White Consuls, bastard gene-descendants of the Ultramarines primarch Guilliman, in close combat on the Imperial world of Boros Prime. In a hundred wars they had been comrades, fighting across innumerable worlds against all manner of foes. But here in these dark, sweltering corridors those bonds of brotherhood were forgotten.

Eshmun unslung his chainsword as Burias-Drak’shal leapt through the crush towards him, holding the weapon in a two-handed grasp. The blade’s engines roared, adamantium teeth a blur of motion as they spun in combat readiness. ‘Time to die, whoreson,’ growled Eshmun, his voice wet and throaty.

Eshmun was fully armoured in battle plate, yet even it proved unable to withstand Buras-Drak’shal’s fury. The possessed warrior took the swing of Eshmun’s chainsword in his forearm, allowing the whirring blades to rip into his flesh. It bit deep, screaming and spraying gobbets of blood and shards of bone, and then stuck fast.

With his weapon effectively disabled, the warrior was unable to deflect Burias-Drak’shal’s return strike, which punched straight through the front of his horned helmet and drove a half-metre long talon through his skull.

Eshmun died instantly but remained standing until Burias-Drak’shal withdrew, at which point the Word Bearer collapsed to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

Burias thought that killing one of his own Legion would have resonated powerfully within him... but it did not. It was merely another kill.

More of his kinsmen were closing in. He could taste their scent on the air.

It is the Anointed.

A part of him wanted to fight, but it was not a battle that he could win, and he knew that oblivion would not be granted to him; the Dark Apostle was too spiteful for that. He would fight, and a good number of them would die at his hands – Kol Badar included, if the Coryphaus dared face him – but Burias-Drak’shal would eventually fall.

Bloodied and broken, he would be dragged back to the cell, and once again he would be bound and shackled with wards and runes. The cantors would be replaced, their droning intonation would begin anew. Once Marduk grew bored, he would be torn limb from limb and sealed within the armoured sarcophagus that had been chosen for him.

Eternity in a box, going slowly and inexorably mad, was not a fate that he would welcome.

You must move quickly.

He stepped over the corpse of Eshmun and slaughtered a path free of the remaining clan warriors without a second thought.

Then he ran, the voice in his head guiding his every step.

Countless side corridors, hallways and tunnels branched off the main thoroughfares, like so many capillaries, veins and arteries. Each turn revealed ever more; thousands of passages spreading out in a bewildering, interconnected maze like an intricate spider-web.

Always, the voice guided him on.

It was impossible to fathom how many individuals were locked away down here, suffering, tortured and brutalised for all eternity. Still, he gave the matter just the barest moment of thought. What did he care? He was free – everything else was an irrelevance.

He passed by hundreds of heavy doors and cells, most of which were locked and barred. Agonised screams, wails and cries echoed from many. The curators of this hellish place knew their art well.

The corridors seemed to stretch out forever. It would have been possible to wander lost for a dozen lifetimes on any one level and never see the same corridor twice, and there were many hundreds of levels below ground, dug deep into the stifling, burning core of the daemon planet, and yet more were being excavated all the time.

Chained bondsmen, their eyes and mouths sutured shut, paused and raised their pallid heads blindly as he surged past them. Black-clad cenobites whipped them back into subservience, their faces obscured by masks of dead flesh.

Malforms with braziers surgically sculpted into their fleshy backs wandered the darkest corridors, existing merely to bring light where shadow lingered. In hidden alcoves, grinning chasteners scourged the bodies of proselytes, lashing them with barbed whips that grew from their wrist-stumps.

Tens of thousands of penitents shuffled along in endless lines, patiently and willingly awaiting ritual sacrifice, their minds turned to palsied mush by the blaring incoherence of floating Discords. Many of them had been standing in line for weeks on end. Flesh-eating cherubs circled around the weak and the sick, waiting for them to fall.

Burias-Drak’shal met his captors in battle once again at the foot of a majestic, sweeping staircase that spiralled up into pure darkness. Strobing lasfire puckered the air, and autocannons wielded by mono-tasked guardian-slaves tore apart the ornate, frescoed walls as they tried to lock onto his rapidly moving shadow.

He slaughtered everything that stood in his path, and bounded up the great stairs, taking them eight at a time. Up into the higher levels of the Basilica of Torment, Burias-Drak’shal climbed.

The scent-traces of the Anointed pursued him always.

He didn’t know how long he’d been running. Drak’shal had departed for now, receding back within, leaving him drained and aching.

Time was always difficult to judge on Sicarus. It was not a reliable measure here, its flow dictated by the tidal flow of the ether. It ran slower within the basilica than elsewhere on the daemon-world, the winds eddying around its buttressed flanks becoming torpid and slothful. This was no accident – the edifice’s location had been carefully chosen so as to maximise and extend the torment of those within.

Nevertheless, Burias had never been as disoriented as he was now. He might have been running for minutes, or it may have been weeks. Everything that had occurred since his escape from his cell had melded together into one confusing blur.

He vaguely recalled a restless urgency that had driven him up through the basilica. Sometimes he had ascended narrow, spiralling staircases echoing with ethereal wails and screams. At other times he hauled himself up yawning elevator shafts, climbing hand over hand up chains slick with grease and oily grime; he crawled through pipes gushing with liquid foulness, and shimmied up vertical chimneys where corpses were routinely dumped, broken bodies tumbling down into the bowels of the planet. He had fought and killed everything that sought to halt his progress.

Was any of that real? It seemed like a dream.

He tried to focus on his elusive, deceptive memories, but they were as insubstantial as smoke, dissipating like ghosts as he sought to grasp them. It felt like knives were twisting in his mind as he struggled to comprehend what was going on.

He rubbed his shoulders, feeling a ghost-ache there – residual pain from his torture, he guessed – along with a disconcerting recurring numbness in his arms and legs.

There was a heavy, wet feeling in his lungs, making his breathing painful and laboured. He could hear a dull repetitive thumping sound from somewhere nearby, as of metal striking stone. He dropped to his knees, an intense nausea threatening to overwhelm him.

Shaking his head, he struggled to focus on what was real – what he could see, hear, touch and feel. He could not allow himself to slip. Not now.

‘Are you still there, spirit?’ he growled.

I am no spirit. But I am here.

‘What is going on?’ he breathed. ‘What is happening to me?’

You teeter on the edge of Torment. You must keep moving, lest you succumb.

‘I cannot bear this,’ Burias said. ‘How can I know-’

Focus on what you feel. The stone beneath your hands, the ache of your muscles. The blood in your mouth.

Burias did as the voice bade him, and the nausea and throbbing pain in his head receded, along with the metallic pounding.

His strength slowly returning, he rose back to his feet.

Your pursuers are closing in on you once more.

‘Then guide me away from here,’ Burias replied.

After what seemed a lifetime he emerged, blinking, from the darkness.

He found himself upon a section of spiked battlement, high up on the basilica. Immense spires, turrets, towers, and domes soared above him, kilometres high, reaching up into the burning sky. Twin obsidian moons wreathed in hellfire stared down like the unblinking eyes of gods. Kathartes rode the heat-currents and swirling updrafts, circling lazily, descending occasionally to feast upon the twitching bodies of sacrifices.

He’d been guided up into the giant cathedral, driven ever higher by his relentless pursuers. The exits on the lower levels had been heavily guarded by warrior clans, sentry guns, and battle-brothers of the 34th Host. There had been no chance of escape there.

He allowed himself a moment, gazing across the surface of Sicarus, the adopted homewold of the Word Bearers. Vast cathedrals, temples, fanes, and gehemahnet towers stretched out across the scorched world, tightly clustered as far as the eye could see. Many of these grand structures were a dozen kilometres or more in height, yet the Basilica of Torment reared up over them all.

The surface of Sicarus was always changing, climbing ever higher into the heavens and the realms of the gods. Larger and more extravagant temples of worship were constantly being raised, constructed on top of the older, crumbling structures like the trees of a forest straining up to the sun and strangling out their rivals.

Ancient battleships, many of which had served the Legion since the Great Crusade, hung in low orbit like circling void sharks. Beyond them, the maddening heavens whirled.

The warp was alive with burning incandescence and surging, ethereal power. Semi-divine entities that defied description could be half-seen in the roiling fire out there, immense forms coiling and writhing, dwarfing the battleships below them. Their grasping tentacles reached down low in places, stretching toward the rising structures of Sicarus.

Burias leaned out over the battlements, gazing down. Cloying yellow cloud hugged the towers and flying buttresses below, obscuring the firmament and lower structures completely. Immense daemonic faces materialised within the fog, snarling and roaring in soundless fury. They seemed to be straining to rise and devour him, but they could not break free of the cloud bank. He found himself mesmerised by their languid, malevolent shapes.

The Anointed are upon you.

A whickering bolter shot whipped past Burias’s head, and he hurled himself to one side, ducking for cover. The concussive thump of impact reached him a fraction of a second after the self-propelled shell had passed him by.

He cursed himself for not having sensed how close his pursuers had come.

Stealing a glance around the edge of the archway, he saw the Anointed – hulking Terminator armoured Word Bearers looming out of the gloom, striding belligerently toward his position with weapons raised. The lenses of their helms shone red as their auto-targeters locked onto him.

He ducked back behind the corner of the balcony, cursing. A crackling melta blast struck, liquefying the rockcrete and making it drip like syrup.

‘You’ve led me to a dead end, spirit,’ he snapped.

Death is no end for us, Burias.

More gunfire struck the corner at his back, ripping at the stonework.

‘Where now, then?’

Up.

Drak’shal returned in an instant and Burias sprang vertically, talons latching onto a jutting ledge six metres above the balcony. The ledge began to crumble beneath his talons, and he scrabbled for purchase, feeling the dizzying pull of the void below...

Finding a foothold, he leapt powerfully upwards again, and latched onto the underside of a horned statue with one hand. As he hung there, he glimpsed the Anointed emerging onto the balcony below. He hauled himself up the daemonic stone figure as they raised their weapons and unleashed a torrent of fire towards him.

The statue fractured beneath the withering fusillade. Bolter rounds and splinters of rock sliced the thin air around him. He snarled as his blood was drawn.

Burias-Drak’shal pushed off from the head of the statue as it shattered, grabbing onto a jutting plinth and continuing his rapid ascent, bounding up the exterior of the basilica, leaping from handhold to handhold.

He swung out over a deep overhang, climbing hand over hand along stone ribs that formed arches supporting the underside of a protruding wing of the basilica. He could no longer see the Anointed or the balcony he had left below – both had been inexplicably swallowed up by the thick cloudbank that hung beneath him.

With a grunt of effort, he hauled himself up onto a ledge, disturbing a roosting Katharte. The daemon beared its teeth at him and dived off the ledge, drawing its skinless wings tightly in to its body.

Moving swiftly and silently, Burias-Drak’shal slid in through an arched window and found himself in a long shadowed corridor. There was no living soul to be seen, though flayed human flesh was pinned to the walls, hair and fingernails still attached.

As he drew near, fresh ruinous symbols carved by unseen hands were cut into these skins. Blood ran from the wounds, dripping down the walls. The flesh began to ripple and twitch, and a large milky eye slid open to regard him impassively. Mouths tore open, and the dead flesh began to wail and gibber, flapping and twitching spasmodically.

Burias-Drak’shal picked up his pace, loping quickly along the corridor as more mouths opened, adding to the toneless wail.

Outside, a floating Discord descended, drawn to the sound, and hovered several metres beyond the portico’s windows. It turned its brazen vox-grille toward him, a tangle of mechanised tendrils trailing behind it. A deafening blare of sound burst from the thing, a cacophonous wall of sound that made his eardrums vibrate painfully. It was the sound of Chaos itself, filled with ungodly screams, wailing children, pounding industry, and the beating of the dark gods’ hearts.

Amongst the din, a familiar voice spoke his name. ‘Burias.’

In confusion, Burias-Drak’shal stared at the hovering Discord.

‘Marduk?’ he said.

Do not listen. It will speak only lies and falsehoods. The deceiver seeks to draw you back to Torment.

A second blast of noise rolled over him, and he reeled as if struck a physical blow. Blood dripped from his ears. Again he heard the voice of his former lord and master, coaxing him back to… where...?

The choking, drowning sensation rose within his throat once more, threatening to engulf him.

Focus, Burias. All that is real is here.

Stumbling blindly away from the aural assault, Burias staggered through an archway into shadow. It was cooler here in the cloistered darkness, and a rasping wind seemed to pull him eagerly along. Within moments, the blare of the Discord faded away.

He paused in his flight, breathing heavily, until he was back in control of his senses. His ears were ringing from the din.

A familiar scent reached his nostrils, and his lips pulled back in a snarl, exposing his serrated teeth. He spun, lashing out… but too late.

His strike was knocked aside contemptuously, and powered talons clamped around his neck.

‘Hello, Burias,’ snarled Kol Badar.

Burias-Drak’shal was hoisted half a metre off the ground to match Kol Badar’s height, and his feet kicked futilely beneath him. The Coryphaus was wearing his quad-tusked Terminator helm, and his voice was a low, mechanised growl.

‘It is time to go back, Burias,’ said Kol Badar. ‘You cannot keep running forever.’

Burias’s windpipe was being crushed and his arteries compressed, stemming the flow of blood to his brain. Dimly he saw a distorted reflection in the elliptical lenses of Kol Badar’s helmet, but it was not his own face that stared back at him – what he saw was a wasted, grimacing cadaver. Tubes and ribbed pipes emerged from its nostrils and mouth, and its hairless scalp was pitted with plugs, cables and wires. Blood, oil and dark mucus leaked from the crudely drilled holes in its skull.

Burias-Drak’shal cried out, thrashing and striking out wildly, but he could not break the Coryphaus’s crushing grip. Kol Badar laughed at his frantic struggle.

His vision grew hazy and indistinct, his brain starved of blood and oxygen. Whispering shadows danced around the periphery of his vision, like grim spectres awaiting his death. His surroundings faded, the walls melting away, and flames erupted all around him. He gripped the Coryphaus’s talons, straining to loosen them, but his strength was fading, along with his consciousness.

With a sickly crack, a vertical slit opened Kol Badar’s helmet from chin to crown, yawning into a gaping, daemonic maw filled with rows of ceramite teeth. The jaws of this mouth distended impossibly, and Burias was dragged in towards it. Wriggling black worms emerged from deep in the monster’s throat, straining toward his face.

If you surrender now, you will be lost to Torment forever.

‘No!’ roared Burias, straining to turn away. Surging with a last burst of desperate strength, he managed to wrench apart the daemon’s talons, and he fell to the ground at its feet.

He rose fast, lashing out, but he hit nothing. He was alone.

The corridor was empty.

Still gasping for breath, Burias staggered down a narrow side tunnel and into an antechamber crowded with robed proselytes. Their heads were bowed as they hurried on their way, paying him no attention at all. The air was thick and cloying with smoke and incense, and the walls seemed to be closing in on him.

At the far end of the chamber, he could see the hellfire glow of the open sky, and he pushed his way towards it. He was battling against the flow of proselytes, and he roughly barged his way through the stinking press of bodies. Still they paid him no mind, not even complaining as he shoved them out of his path. Several fell to the ground and were instantly lost beneath the living tide.

Burias realised he was getting no closer to his goal, and he began to lay around him more forcefully, battering aside those in his path, breaking bones and limbs with sickening cracks. He trampled over those that fell and crushed them with his heavy steps.

At last he emerged into the light to find himself upon a wide bridge spanning the gap between two cathedral spires of the basilica. Statues of Word Bearers, each more than five metres tall, lined the bridge, each with hundreds of prayer papers fixed to their armour. Doleful bells sounded, reverberating across the maddening cityscape of Sicarus.

The flow of the faithful broke upon him, streaming around him like liquid. He was an island, a lone motionless figure in the midst of a migration as the bells called the faithful to worship.

‘Burias.’

Again he heard someone speaking his name and he turned, scanning the sea of downcast faces for its source.

His legs gave way beneath him. They were completely numb, and the same loss of sensation was tingling up his arms. He felt suddenly confined, claustrophobic and trapped in the midst of the crowd. ‘Burias-Drak’shal.’

Shut it out.

Burias clutched his head, confused and disoriented. ‘What is happening to me?’ Bodies pressed in around him, bustling past.

You are being called back.

‘Back to where?’

Torment.

The immense Word Bearer statues began to move, stepping off their plinths with stonework crumbling away from their forms to reveal blood-red armour beneath. They strode through the crowd, moving toward Burias in step with the pealing of the distant bells, giant bolters clasped across their chests.

‘This cannot be real,’ he whispered, dragging himself to his feet.

The crowd turned, as if seeing him for the first time. In a rush they surged forwards, babbling and speaking in tongues. They crowded around him, their eyes burning hot with faith and fever, reaching out to touch him.

‘Bless us, great one,’ a scrawny proselyte begged, clutching at his leg. Burias kicked the wretch away, snapping the man’s bones.

‘This cannot be real!’ he said again, pushing away from the crowd, making his way to the edge of the bridge.

This is all that is real, Burias. Everything else is Torment.

The giant Word Bearers were closing, making the bridge shudder with every footfall, crushing any who did not get out of their way quick enough.

Run. Fight. Kill. Do this, and you can live on here, forever.

Burias laughed at the absurdity of it all, and climbed up onto the edge of the soaring bridge’s low wall and glanced down. The sickly cloud bank below was impenetrable even to his daemon-sight.

‘To hell with this,’ snarled Burias.

‘Burias-Drak’shal,’ said every proselyte in unison, speaking with the Dark Apostle Marduk’s voice. ‘Come to me.’

The immense statues hefted their bolters, closing in all around him. The voice cut through Burias’s mind, tinged with desperation.

Do not do this!

‘And to hell with both of you,’ said Burias, speaking to both the spirit-voice and the voice of his master. He turned away from the crowd of believers.

With his head held high, he extended his arms out to either side. He closed his eyes, and breathed in deeply.

The thunderous fire of gigantic bolters echoed all around, but Burias had already let himself topple forwards.

The proselytes screamed as one. ‘No!’

No!

Burias pushed off hard, and holding his cruciform pose, he plummeted down into the fog. The air rushed past him, yet he kept his eyes shut, giving himself over to the Ruinous Powers.

It felt as though he were flying, soaring the ether with the kathartes. Not the foul, skinless harpies that filled the skies of Sicarus and frequented the Infidus Diabolus, but the beauteous angelic beings of pure light that those daemons became in the deep flow of the warp.

He was drowning.

Thick, viscous fluid filled his lungs, lukewarm and repulsive. He coughed and spluttered, crying out in shock and anger. The sound was muffled by the thick bundles of tubes and pipes that filled his throat and nostrils. All he achieved was to expel what little air he-

‘No!’ roared Burias, kicking and thrashing against his confinement, and then he was falling through the void once more.

Abruptly, the cloud bank parted and he smashed through a great dome of coloured glass. Coming down fast, he rolled and skidded along the length of a flying buttress to rob the fall of its impact, tumbling to the floor and ending the movement on one knee. Shards of coloured glass studded his flesh, and more showered down around him, filling the air with its tinkling music.

He found himself in a tiny chapel. It was a humble, ascetic space, a simple shrine to the dark gods that lacked the grandeur and ceremony that infested the rest of Sicarus. A plain altar was carved into one wall, atop which sat a skull with a simple eight-pointed star of Chaos burnt into its forehead.

Beneath a shadowed arch stood the lifeless, immense form of the Warmonger. Burias’s skin began to itch as he looked upon the Dreadnought, his arms and legs tingling.

‘You should not be here,’ said a woman’s voice, and Burias-Drak’shal snarled, turning sharply. He had not sensed a presence in the room.

He could tell by her manner of garb and bearing that she was a seer. She stood in the shadows, bedecked in robes the colour of congealed blood. Her hood was down, revealing an angular, pale face. Gaping, empty hollows were located where her eyes should have been, yet she seemed to stare at him unerringly. ‘You have gone too deep.’

Drak’shal was raging within him, urging him to attack, to brutalise this witch and be away, but he resisted. He forced the daemon back. It struggled, attempting to gain ascendancy, but it was an old battle, and one that Burias had won long ago. Resentfully, Drak’shal receded, sinking within.

The daemon’s presence had ensured that the wounds of his torture had now healed. All that remained was his dried blood upon his skin.No scars marred his flesh.

For a moment he thought he heard a distant voice speaking his name. He shook his head, clearing it of these errant distractions.

‘There is someone waiting here for me,’ he said. ‘Who is it?’

‘You do not need me to answer that question,’ said the seer. ‘You already know the answer.’

‘I do not have time for riddles,’ muttered Burias, turning to leave.

‘Time is meaningless here,’ she replied. ‘You know this.’

‘Speak plainly, witch, or do not speak at all.’

‘It was he who released you from your bondage,’ she said, her words giving him pause. ‘It was he who brought you here.’

‘Released me?’ Burias snarled over his shoulder. ‘I released myself!’

‘No,’ said the seer, shaking her head. ‘He burnt away the wards holding you, opening the door for you to come here, to come to him. But I see that your mind refuses to accept what your heart already knows is true. You need to see in order to believe.’

The seer stepped away from a simple wooden door, and gestured towards it.

Burias frowned, his anger piquing, but he stepped past her and placed a hand upon the door’s rough hewn panels. It swung inwards easily, revealing a narrow passage. Lowering his head, he stepped within.

He moved up the narrow passage until he came to a circular, windowless prayer-room lit by a single candle in an arched alcove. It was small, the kind of room used by fasting penitents or hermetic recluses. The walls were covered in tiny neat script-work. He recognised the hand-writing. He had seen its like before.

‘Burias. Burias-Drak’shal.’ That voice again...

Burias’s twin hearts began to pound. He could not breathe. He heard metallic pounding in the distance, beating in time to his hearts.

His gaze fell upon a figure kneeling in the centre of the room. Its back was turned to him, and it wore a plain robe of undyed, coarse fabric. Its head was smooth and hairless, the bare scalp glinting like gold in the candlelight.

The figure rose to its feet. It seemed to expand to fill the circular room, as if it were magnifying in volume to gigantic proportions. Then the illusion passed, and Burias realised that the figure stood no taller than he.

As the figure turned, Burias looked upon the golden face of a demi-god.

His eyes began to bleed and his mind rebelled. His soul lurched, and he was driven to his knees, breathless and suffocating.

A veil seemed to be ripped aside, and the walls of the shrine disappeared, replaced with roaring flames and darkness. A maddening cacophony of screams and roars assaulted him from all sides.

‘Urizen? Lord?’ he breathed.

The flames seared his lungs, but he did not care. His mind was reeling. He did not understand. The primarch of the XVIIth had been locked in self-imposed isolation within the Templum Inficio since long before Burias’s creation. How could he be here? Where, in fact, were they?

Burias’s hearts were thundering, beating erratically and dangerously fast. He couldn’t breathe. He was drowning. He was blind.

Look.

The voice was velveteen and smooth, once again calm and measured. It was the same voice that had guided him to freedom, yet it seemed more potent, more vital. There was a controlled intensity to it that was almost painful.

LOOK.

He opened his eyes. The figure that stood before him was not the holy primarch of the XVII Legion. He was staring at himself.

He jolted, and the vision was gone. He was alone in the cold darkness.

‘Burias.’

That voice was not welcome here. It was an intrusion. He tried to ignore it, but its power was impossible to resist. He rebelled against it, but it dragged him back towards consciousness.

‘Burias-Drak’shal.’

He was drowning.

Thick, viscous fluid filled his lungs, lukewarm and repulsive. He coughed and spluttered, crying out in shock and anger. The sound was muffled by the thick bundles of tubes and pipes that filled his throat and nostrils. All he achieved was to expel what little air he had left.

In panic, he registered that he was completely submerged, and as he struggled to rise he struck a hard, unyielding metal surface. He thrashed wildly, smashing against the sides of his containment, desperately seeking escape. There was none to be had. He was sealed in and drowning.

His hands refused to respond to his commands, and he could not move his arms. He could see nothing but darkness. He tasted oil and blood, battery acid and bile. He vomited violently, but the acidic foulness had nowhere to go.

His strength was fading, along with his consciousness. Metallic clangs, hammering and the whine of engines echoed loudly around him. Behind it, he heard the muffled murmur of voices, but could make no sense of the words.

The end was close now, and his struggles weakened. His lungs rebelled against him, causing him to reflexively suck in a deep breath of liquid and his own vomit. He began to convulse, shuddering and jerking violently.

Oblivion came for him then. But it was not to last.

He awoke to darkness. There was no pain. There was nothing at all, and he knew then that he was in hell.

He roared in a voice that was not his voice. He heard that mechanical, grinding, anguished bellow with ears that were not his ears; external sensors translated what they heard into electrical impulses and were transmitted directly into his cortex.

He clenched a hand that was not his hand into a fist, and an immense, blade-fingered power talon clenched. He pounded this great fist into the stone walls of his prison once again. It made a dull sound, metal on stone. That sound...

‘Burias,’ said a voice. ‘Burias-Drak’shal.’

It was the voice that had called him back. It was the voice that had brought him into this hell. He swung towards it, servos whining.

‘Back in the land of the living, finally. In a manner of speaking, at least.’

Optic sensors interpreted what they saw. A figure stood nearby, one that he recognised.

‘You were in deep this time,’ said the figure. ‘I was not sure you were coming out. You resisted my call for the longest time yet. I am impressed.’

Burias lunged at the figure, pneumatic piston-driven legs driving him forward and giant claws reaching out to crush it, but immense chains bound with burning runes held him fast, restraining his mechanical strength.

Dark Apostle Marduk laughed. ‘Now, now, Burias. Mind that temper.’

Hatred surged through what was left of Burias’s body – amputated, rotten and curled foetus-like in the amniotic fluid sloshing within the sarcophagus implanted at the heart of the machine.

Hatred. That was something he was still capable of feeling. His mighty fists were clenching and unclenching unconsciously. With every last remaining fibre of his being he wanted to smash the author of his torment to paste.

‘How long this time?’ Burias managed, his voice deep and sepulchral, the sound of immense rocks grinding together.

‘Not long. Ninety-seven years, unadjusted.’

To Burias it had felt like an eternity. He wondered how he could possibly endure.

‘Why do you rouse me now?’ he growled. ‘There is no torment that you can unleash upon me that would make my suffering any more complete.’

‘Torment, old friend? No, you mistake my purpose,’ said Marduk. ‘I come to you because the Host marshals for war. I am, for now, releasing you from torment. It is time you killed again for the Legion.’

Death was nothing to be feared. Death he would have welcomed. But denied that, the next best thing was the chance to kill once more. Burias ceased his struggles.

‘War?’ he boomed, unable to keep the eagerness from his grating, mechanical voice.

‘War,’ agreed the Dark Apostle.

A silken voice spoke in Burias’s mind.

None of this is real.

The Pact

Sarah Cawkwell

‘And the stolen voices of his venerable kin will welcome him, embrace him and bear him to the heart of our scarred past, the first home of the Argent Order. There, the ashes of the great destroyer lie mingled with the fading embers of our birth, two banners falling as one to call him back. Back to the beginning. Then will the past be revealed.’

– From The Orthodoxy of Varsavia, Author Unknown, 221.M37

Nothing had survived.

Once, according to the records, the planet Lyria had boasted fertile and verdant grassland which generated seemingly endless supplies of food for the people of the Imperium. Agri-habs had dotted the landscape in the south of the single large continental mass and people had worked the soil diligently. The mountains and rockier terrain in the north had been far less hospitable. But as the saying went, where there was a will there was a way and the indigenous tribal people of the world settled wherever they could find flat ground. Thus they had lived and thus they had prospered as was humanity’s way.

Now it was all gone. The combined might of the Silver Skulls fleet as they had unleashed the full wrath of the Emperor’s fury on the surface had made certain of that. Rendered essentially sterile with a hostile, barely breathable atmosphere by the missiles and guns of the fleet, Lyria fell into decay and became a forbidden place; an unsightly mark on the exceptional record of those who consider themselves amongst the Emperor’s most loyal.

Lyria, a world of beginnings; the former home of the Silver Skulls Chapter had become a tomb world, rendered to ashes and dust.

The air was acrid and stifling from the heat that bubbled up through rifts in the ground. Volcanoes that had lain long dormant had been awakened by the orbital onslaught and seismic activity rocked the planet almost continually. It was a world that would have been better left dead.

Six figures picked their way across the broken landscape, ascending a mountain path that would take them to the long-deserted fortress-monastery. For eight thousand years, no Silver Skulls battle-brother had laid eyes on their ancestral home. Now they did so in silence, each absorbing the impact of this horrific sight in their own way.

Five of the figures were massive, clad in ancient Terminator armour. The other was wearing the blue battle plate of a Prognosticator, a psychic hood rising about his bare head and a force axe slung comfortably across his back. It was this warrior who crossed into the entrance first.

By Adeptus Astartes standards, Prognosticator Bhehan was young. Barely thirty solar years old, he had nonetheless acquitted himself admirably upon the field of battle. His ability to divine the skeins of fate had proven itself over and over again. He had served with both Eighth and Fifth Companies with distinction, but had never once imagined that he would end up deployed with the Talriktug; the First Company’s elite squad. Especially following his vision; a vision that had led to Chapter Command agreeing that the time was right for them to return. A vision that had married up unfailingly with words penned in the Orthodoxy millennia before. The two war banners.

He should be honoured to be amongst them, he knew. Led by the courageous, plain-speaking and stalwart First Captain Kerelan, they were heroes of the Chapter. They had been heroes of the Chapter for hundreds of years before Bhehan had even been born. Perhaps it was this last fact which made him uncomfortable and which had led to much of the silence that had accompanied their journey here. Whenever he had spoken, their respect for him seemed disproportionate given their standing and experience.

Such was the way of the Silver Skulls. They valued their psychic battle-brothers highly, no matter their age or seniority.

As the rest of the warriors lumbered into the vestibule behind him, he allowed his senses to roam freely amongst the rubble. A smashed stained glass window stood several metres above his head, admitting the only light that the interior of the place had seen for years. Closing his eyes, he tried to picture it as it had once been. A thousand ghostly echoes rippled through him, clamouring for his notice. Voices that had been desperate to be heard for millennia. It was a near-overwhelming din and Bhehan employed every ounce of his training to keep his calm. The filigree-fine crystal mesh of his psychic hood glowed softly as he walked. The First Captain glanced at him.

‘What are your senses telling you, Brother-Prognosticator?’ The ruby lenses in Kerelan’s helm gave away nothing.

‘No less than I anticipated. This place swarms with memories, First Captain,’ Bhehan replied in his soft voice. ‘So many voices crying out at the horrors wrought upon this world.’ His youthful face creased in a frown. ‘There is more, too. Something… I cannot quite place. I may be able to concentrate more if I make direct contact with the stone.’

‘Do what you must, brother. We will ensure there are no interruptions. Our primary duty is to defend and protect you on this mission.’

‘Aye, First Captain. I warn you, however. This process is not likely to be swift. The echoes here are old and worn by time.’

The warrior glanced from side to side, then shrugged. ‘I see no other pressing engagements demanding my time and resources, brother. Proceed as you see fit.’

A smile flickered over Bhehan’s lips. He had learned that for all his stoic reticence and unshakable pragmatism, Kerelan possessed a dry wit that was frequently startling. He reached down and unsnapped the fastenings of his gauntlet, sliding his hand free. He turned his body sideways to the wall and set his bare palm against the stone.

Amongst the Prognosticators of the Silver Skulls, Bhehan was rare. Not only did he have a staggeringly accurate ability to read the skeins of Fate with the use of his rune stones, but he had discovered an affinity for forging tenuous links with past events, simply by laying hands upon the thing of interest. It didn’t always work. If psychic echoes were not deeply embedded then an inanimate object would remain just that. Inanimate.

But the walls of this desecrated fortress ran thick with tendrils of memory and the moment Bhehan’s hand came into direct contact with them, he was thrown instantly into a thronging mass of bodies. His body stiffened. The psychic hood about his shoulders crackled with energy and the unmistakable ozone-like odour of spilled power joined the aroma of dust and burning ash that filled the air.

He no longer saw the ruined fortress and the five Terminators. Instead, he was…

…somewhere else entirely.

‘…interference. My vox has stopped receiving. Do you have a situation report, brother?’ The voice came from his left. Opening his eyes, Bhehan was mildly startled, but not surprised, to see that the ruined wall he had been leaning against was once more intact. Fires burned in the wall sconces throwing flickering, eerie images against the stone. Above him, the stained glass window was intact once more, but no light shone through it. Beyond, it was night.

This was no crumbling ruin, but a fortress-monastery in its prime. The walls rose gracefully to curve in a high, vaulted arch far above him. A slight breeze lifted the hanging war banners and they swayed gently. But for all the peace, Bhehan recognised a war footing when he saw it.

Chapter-serfs hurried past him – and occasionally through him. In their midst were a number of warriors wearing the steel-grey battle plate of the Silver Skulls. They towered above the humans and Bhehan focused on them.

Two battle-brothers, one wearing the laurels of a veteran and bearing a battle standard at his back were standing close by, their hands tightly closed around the hilts of chainswords. They were rocks of solidity amidst the sea of bodies heading deep into the mountain.

‘I have, Brother-Sergeant Igneus. It is as we expected. The Chapter Master has had no choice but to give the order.’

‘As you say… we expected this news. Still, we must bear it with staunch determination.’ The other warrior nodded vigorously and Igneus sighed. ‘Our world must die. There is little worth in dwelling upon the matter. What of the brothers below?’

‘On their way up from the training level. It is barely a handful, sir.’

‘A handful will be good enough, Varlen. We will hold our fortress against these… things… for as long as we are able. We can only hope that our external defences have prevented an egress. If the xenos scum have broken through, then while we live we will defend our Chapter’s home with our very last breath.’

Such certainty. Such passion. It quite took Bhehan’s breath away as he listened to the phantom veteran sergeant’s voice, coming across the millennia as though he stood only a few feet away.

‘It is no longer the eldar we should concern ourselves with. They are all but defeated. It is the taint we should worry about.’

A loud scream, a male scream, sounded and Bhehan whipped his head the other way. Barely visible at the dark end of the corridor, Bhehan saw the flailing of a man running towards them. He passed through the Prognosticator’s body as though it were insubstantial mist and fell prostrate at the feet of the veteran sergeant.

‘They have breached the outer walls, my lord!’

‘Then we will meet them in battle.’ The veteran sergeant stared down at the cowering Chapter-serf and without hesitation, aimed a bolt pistol at the man’s head.

‘No…’ Bhehan spoke, but no sound left his lips. The echo of the bolt pistol reverberated around the corridor and the man fell dead at the veteran sergeant’s feet. Bhehan’s lips formed the question, but it was Varlen who spoke the words.

‘Why did you do that?’

‘It was necessary,’ he said. ‘He may otherwise have brought the corruption within.’

Corruption. Bhehan knew his history well enough. Invasion and plague had wrung the meagre defences left on Lyria almost dry. The rest of the Chapter had been deployed at war elsewhere, engaged in one of the endless battles that had raged through the galaxy in the years following the Great Heresy. Bhehan knew that the planet had been lost. He knew that in order to prevent the pestilence spreading, they had been forced to take the ultimate step.

‘How can we be sure that the taint has not already reached the inner walls?’ Varlen stared down at the corpse of the unfortunate Chapter-serf, then raised his head to Igneus.

‘How can one ever be sure of anything, Brother Varlen?’

There was a distant sound of gunfire and the ghost of Igneus raised his chainsword.

‘They are coming,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps they are already here.’

Bhehan felt a knot in his stomach and slowly he removed his hand from the wall.

There was a distant sound of gunfire.

Caught momentarily between two worlds, Bhehan was disoriented and confused. He swayed slightly and looked as though he might fall.

‘Prognosticator?’ Brother Djul had stepped forward and rested a steadying hand on the smaller warrior’s shoulder.

‘I am well. Let go of me.’ He snapped the words before he remembered exactly who he was talking to. Djul’s massive, armoured hand released his shoulder immediately. As his equilibrium righted itself, other senses kicked into gear; the senses that had been bred into him. He may have been a psyker of considerable power, but first and foremost he was a warrior. His killer instincts pushed the vision to the back of his mind and every muscle, every nerve and every synapse of his brain switched to alertness.

‘Your timing is impeccable, brother,’ said the First Captain. ‘Whilst you were engaged in your communion, the rest of the squad took the opportunity to scout ahead. We have found more than just ruins here.’

‘There are intruders in this sacred place.’ Djul sounded outraged, as well he should. ‘The captain and I remained behind to protect you during your communion with the Emperor. We would obviously have consulted you on the matter first, but you were distracted. We did not think it seemly to…’

‘How long was I distracted?’ Bhehan interrupted abruptly. Djul’s ponderous response was tinged with the faintest hint of reproach.

‘The time is not of importance, brother. Were you successful? Did you divine anything of use?’ Kerelan intervened.

‘After a fashion. I needed more time.’ Those final words had left a heavy feeling somewhere deep in Bhehan’s gut, but there was no time to linger on the matter.

‘My apologies, brother.’ Djul sounded genuinely remorseful but Bhehan waved it away.

‘No matter. As you rightly point out, there are other more pressing matters that must take precedence. We can study the past in greater detail later. For now, let us deal with the here and now. The Emperor’s Blessing is with us.’

At these words, Djul touched his hand to the Crux Terminatus on his shoulder guard before turning away and heading deeper into the complex to find the battle.

‘You should prepare for combat, Prognosticator.’ The eye lenses on the Terminator helm seemed to bore into Bhehan, weighing and measuring his capability.

Prior to their deployment on the planet, Bhehan had spent several hours in deep meditation and contemplation of the runes. He had decreed that the Emperor’s Blessing was with them on this matter and had added a carefully worded caveat that should the warriors need to engage any enemies on the planet, then they should do so. At the time, he had not believed such a thing would be necessary. Now he felt pleasure at his own foresight.

Kerelan fell into easy lockstep beside the Prognosticator. The First Captain had unsheathed the relic blade that was his favoured weapon. A huge double-handed monster of a weapon, it looked remarkably small in his huge hand. He turned his head slightly towards his companion. ‘Are you ready for this, brother?’

‘I am always ready for battle,’ replied Bhehan and he unsheathed the force axe at his back. He could not imagine a smile on the face of the rugged warrior beneath the helmet but Kerelan’s voice seemed filled with approval.

‘Trouble is here on Lyria,’ he said. ‘Let us go and find it.’

‘Brother Djul implied that we have already found it.’ Kerelan’s gaze lingered on the Prognosticator for a moment. The First Captain was apparently deeply amused by Bhehan’s literal interpretation of his words.

‘Indeed,’ was all he said. ‘And it wears the face of the eldar.’

It was an insult like no other. The eldar, the very xenos whose presence had caused the downfall of this world, had returned. As Kerelan, Djul and Bhehan moved down the spiralling pathway, their infrared lenses detected every disturbance. Air that had lain still for so long was stirred and restless, raising twinkling particles of fine dust into the air.

‘Vrakos, report.’ Kerelan activated the vox and spoke to one of the advance group. Weapons continued to discharge below them; a storm bolter’s unmistakable sound, but there was no answering report to be heard. Bhehan willed the two Terminators to move more swiftly. The time spent with the fast-moving battle-brothers of Eighth Company had spoiled him, he mused. The Talriktug were admirable. But speed was not amongst their assets.

‘We have counted ten xenos moving to the lower levels of the fortress,’ came the calm and measured reply. ‘All heavily armoured and loaded with weaponry… but they have not acted in a hostile manner. Neither have they made any attempt to communicate with us.’

‘That hardly matters, Vrakos. Those vermin are transgressing in the halls of our ancestors. That in itself is a blatant act of war. They will pay the price.’ Djul made his displeasure known and began to recite a litany across the vox. Bhehan was well aware of Djul’s reputation as a deeply zealous warrior. He had heard the Catechism of Hate recited many times before, but never with such passion as the words that filled his ears now.

‘We have picked off two of them,’ said Vrakos, ‘but the cowards are fleeing deeper into the fortress-monastery.’

‘Then we go with them,’ responded Kerelan. ‘Hold your position for now, Vrakos. We are on our way.’

‘I can go on ahead and join with the others,’ said Bhehan. ‘I mean no disrespect First Captain, but I move far more swiftly and my talents may be of use to Vrakos and the others.’

‘Your eagerness does you great credit, Prognosticator. However, I am charged with your wellbeing. As such, you remain with us.’ Again, there was an underlying hint of amusement in Kerelan’s voice. ‘Do not concern yourself with missing the fight. Where would they go, after all? We will corner them and deliver our retribution for this transgression.’

‘Yes, First Captain.’ Bhehan fell silent once again and listened to Brother Djul as he recounted more litanies and prayers across the vox. The Terminator’s zeal was infectious and the Prognosticator felt a great swell of pride. He allowed his psychic senses to extend once again, reaching downwards this time.

His exploratory range was considerable and as his attention drifted into the depths of the fortress-monastery he pulled up short with a loud gasp. Fortunately for him, Kerelan had been several paces behind, otherwise the First Captain would have ploughed straight into him.

‘Brother? What do you see?’

‘It is less what I see and more what I sense, First Captain,’ Bhehan replied. Something had brushed against his consciousness; something inexplicably alien. Over the few comparatively short years he had lived, he had honed his mental bulwarks until only the most accomplished could get around them. He had stood in the company of the Chapter’s most powerful psyker and received a softly-worded compliment on the strength of his defences. Then Vashiro had broken them in order to complete the lesson.

He had fought against numerous foes since he had ascended to the rank of battle-brother. He knew what their minds felt like. He had mentally sampled the flavour of the tyranids; a never-ending and insatiable hunger. He had touched the mind of a tau and had been surprised by the driven, single-mindedness. Every eldar mind he had encountered was cruel and twisted. This was not. This was unknown to him.

The thoughts and presence of his own battle-brothers were like shining beacons amidst the xenos thoughts that had brushed his psyche in the past. It was his mind, his sanctuary and he knew it better than he knew the back of his hand. No psyker could afford anything less than complete control over their power. Countless enemies had attempted to break his considerable will and, one by one, they had all died when he had lashed psychically back at them.

Now, though, this new consciousness had bypassed those defences with all the ease of a spectre and was probing his mental landscape. Its presence was unwanted and he held it back easily.

You are… mon-keigh. You are not one of my people.

I am human. And I am coming for you. I will not allow this violation. Be gone.

You have great strength for one so young… you could help us.

The voice that came was undeniably female. Summoning up every ounce of mental strength he possessed, Bhehan visualised closing a fist around the presence in his mind and flinging it away.

Wait! Help us. We need your power… do not… at least allow me...

With a concerted effort, Bhehan cast the alien presences from his mind. The second it was gone, he immediately got to work fortifying his psychic barriers. It was only then that he realised that Kerelan was practically shouting at him.

‘Prognosticator!’

‘My apologies, First Captain. Something was trying to break through my defences. A mind was attempting to infiltrate my consciousness.’

‘Are you compromised, Brother-Prognosticator?’ The question came from Djul and Bhehan realised immediately that the Terminator would have no compunction about dealing with such a matter in the way he best saw fit.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘My wards can withstand anything the xenos throw at me.’ He forced himself to hold his head proud and stared defiantly at Djul for a few moments. The warrior shrugged slightly and continued onwards. The skulls chained together and looped as a decoration around his belt clanked together as he moved, a gory herald of his arrival.

Djul’s reputation amongst the Chapter was well-deserved. There were those who said Brother Djul was more fearless even than the Lord Commander.

‘Do not mind him,’ said Kerelan as though clarifying the rumour. ‘Djul was born spoiling for a fight. What did you learn from your divination?’

‘Very little,’ admitted the Prognosticator. ‘Regardless, I recommend extreme caution here. The xenos female who spoke to me seemed a little distracted. She suggested that she needed assistance of some kind. Those of her kind we are pursuing… perhaps they have been summoned to her aid. Thus, we would do well to presume we are being led into some kind of trap.’

Kerelan nodded. ‘As I said… where would they go? Once we corner them, once we get to the heart of the monastery, they will be ended. Have faith, brother.’

‘I have more faith than you could imagine, First Captain. When you place yourself at the mercy of the warp, a little faith goes a long way. Imagine how far a lot will take you.’

The taciturn Kerelan was silent for a moment, then he laughed warmly. ‘I like you, boy.’

Strange how that pleased him more than he could have expected. Bhehan inclined his head graciously in acceptance of the compliment and fell in beside the Terminator.

The weapons fire had ceased and the silence was loaded with ominous portents.

‘They have begun a descent,’ Vrakos reported. ‘We are in pursuit, but they can move a lot faster than we can.’

‘And they still have not returned fire?’ Kerelan exchanged a look with Bhehan. A trap, the Prognosticator had suggested.

‘Not a shot, Kerelan. Although we have taken down a few of their number, they have not even so much as thrown a rock at us.’ Vrakos sounded disappointed by the fact.

‘We are almost with you,’ said the First Captain grimly. ‘If they are about to lead us into a snare, we will walk into it together.’

‘And we will end it together,’ added Djul.

The lowest level of the fortress-monastery was as black as the depths of night. The air here was sour and stale and Bhehan’s physiology worked hard to compensate. But no matter how astonishing the Adeptus Astartes implants were, they could not work to clear the overwhelming stink of the death and decay. The combined scents of rotting meat and vegetation were strong and overlaid with the pervading musty smell of old, stale air.

The walls were sticky, with ichor that oozed from pustules growing like tenacious fungi along their length. Whatever it was that they produced was drab olive in colour and it pooled on the ground, creating sticky puddles that sucked at their boots as they advanced.

But the foul liquid was the least of their concerns.

‘Xenos!’ The roar of triumph came from Vrakos who was advancing ahead of the others. The tone of his voice altered slightly as he added to his report. ‘And worse.’

‘The only thing generally worse than xenos is more xenos,’ said Kerelan, his relic blade ready. ‘Talriktug, on my mark, advance. Prognosticator, you remain behind us. Extend a shield, if you would.’

The squad needed no further encouragement than those words. As a unit, they advanced, keeping their line tightly held. Bhehan fell into place behind them and drew on his psychic might, projecting a force shield that extended the length of the battle line and was wide enough to ensure he remained within its area of effect as well.

What they saw as their infrared lenses filtered through the darkness was quite horrific. A number of eldar warriors of various castes, different armours marking the one from the other, were engaged in combat with what looked on first sight like human figures.

‘What in the Emperor’s name…?’ Djul left the question half asked as another figure suddenly sprang up directly in front of him. His reactions were lightning-fast and he brought up his arm. The chainfist that snarled at the end of it was cumbersome and slow to bring down, but he was grimly resolute. His weapon chewed through the creature before he had even managed to get a direct look at it. It splattered more of the ichor-like goo in every direction and it was with some obvious difficulty that Djul dragged his chainfist free from it. The humanoid creature, sheared in half, fell to the ground and began to immediately decompose.

‘Assessment of enemy forces,’ said Vrakos who had been taking in the scene. ‘Fifteen eldar warriors engaged in battle with… whatever these things are.’ Djul dropped slowly to a crouch and studied what remained of the thing he had killed.

‘Bio-matter,’ he said, his voice terse. ‘Similar in some ways to the tyranid biomass pools that we have encountered. Only these appear to be spawning these creatures. Or…’ He peered more closely and stood again, disgusted. ‘They are corrupted in some way.’

Bhehan’s brows feathered together at Djul’s words and he brushed his senses across the room, attempting to ignore the anxiety and fury that was coming from the eldar minds. The psyches of the things that they were fighting were disturbingly blank with no spark of intellect coming from them at all. They were psychically arid and seemingly without life.

‘They can be killed,’ began Kerelan.

‘No,’ interrupted the Prognosticator. ‘You cannot kill what is already dead. You can merely slow it down.’ He stepped forward to crouch down where Djul had recently been. ‘Look.’ He scooped up a handful of the jelly-like matter and held it up. They could all see what he meant; there, in his hand, were fragments of bone just like those that they had trodden underfoot. ‘These are… animated things that have been created by something greater. They are created in a human image. A memory, perhaps, of what they once were? It is hard to say.’

There was a lingering stench of the warp, a scent he was well accustomed to. But although Bhehan was familiar with the ozone taint of warp power as it leaked from every psychic being he had ever encountered, it rolled from this stuff in a near-overpowering wave.

He let the stuff slide from his gauntlet with a foul slurp and stood once again. ‘This place is filled with decay and death. There is…’

He broke off again as he felt a sudden battering at the wall around his mind. He stepped backwards and renewed the surge of psychic energy. Whatever it was that was trying to break through would not succeed. And yet still there was a trickle of a thought, that worked its way in through the small cracks with a skill and deft precision the Prognosticator would not have believed possible.

Help us. Alone, we cannot do this thing. Together…

Get out of my head.

‘Kill everything that moves,’ said Kerelan grimly, noting the Prognosticator’s sudden distraction. ‘The eldar and these things. We can work out the specifics when there are no xenos scum standing between us and them.’

‘As the First Captain commands,’ chorused the Talriktug. They fanned out, equidistant from one another. Brother Djul’s voice began to once again recite the Catechism of Hate.

‘While vile mutants still draw breath, there can be no peace. While the hearts of obscene heretics still beat, there can be no respite. While faithless traitors still live, there can be no forgiveness. In the name of the Emperor, in the name of Argentius, in the name of all Silver Skulls… brothers, we fight!’

Three storm bolters immediately opened fire as the line of Silver Skulls began to advance towards the enemy, their staccato reports echoing in the vast caverns of the fortress-monastery. Smoking shell cases dropped to the ground at an incredible rate and the muzzle flares briefly lit up the darkness. The orange and white glow from the flamer in Asterios’s hand burned brightly and served as an effective weapon against the enemy.

Djul and Kerelan moved in closer. The First Captain swung his relic blade in a murderous arc towards the closest eldar warrior. It raised a blade of its own to fend off the attack, but Kerelan’s superior strength and skill served him well. He pressed back with all his power and the eldar warrior crumpled beneath his assault. Kerelan raised his blade again and let it come down against his opponent. It did not penetrate on the first blow, instead tearing a ragged gouge across the alien’s segmented armour. The eldar staggered back.

‘You do not know…’ it began, but Kerelan cut short its words with another swing of his blade. The eldar’s head rolled clear of its shoulders, blood fountaining from the stump of the neck. The warrior crashed heavily to the ground.

‘I know enough,’ retorted the First Captain, his voice barely audible above Djul’s zealous declarations. He had already moved onto the next challenge. To his right, Djul carved his way through more of the faceless humanoid golems with his chainfist. The warrior never ceased his recital as he fought, hardly even pausing to draw breath. Bhehan let the words wash over him, let them fill his hearts with more strength and he began to draw his power to him.

This was the moment that he would open his mind up to a psychic onslaught if the owner of the female voice was so inclined. It was a chance he was going to have to take.

Something thudded into the shoulder guard of his armour and he turned reflexively. A sharp-bladed disc had embedded itself into the ceramite. He tore it out and flung it to the ground with a clatter. Then he stood straight and pointed his force axe at the eldar who had dared attack him. A crackling bolt of lightning burst from the end of the weapon as he channelled his power through it. The bolt struck the unfortunate target squarely in the chest, flinging him back into a knot of three of the monsters. They bent and buckled under the impact and then sprang back into shape.

Almost immediately on making contact with them, the eldar began to struggle to free itself, but it was caught fast. The three creatures switched attention to their captive and even as Bhehan watched in macabre fascination, the eldar’s armour began to disintegrate before his eyes. The shreds of fibre that came from the intricately wrought battle gear seemed to be absorbed into the golems and they grew noticeably larger.

The eldar, now without his armour continued to struggle, but the unnatural force that animated these things continued without remorse. The flesh of the xenos was devoured even as the eldar still lived and his screams echoed throughout the corridors until finally nothing was left but the bones. Then they too were consumed. The entire process had taken only seconds. The three golems congealed and came together to form a single, larger creature which began to slowly lumber towards the Silver Skulls.

Revolted by the foulness of the entity, Bhehan unleashed another torrent of psychic force at it. It burst apart in a thousand flaming pieces, returning to a liquefied state.

‘When they are animated, do not touch them. Do not let them keep hold of you,’ he voxed to the rest of the squad. ‘If you are trapped by them, it…’

Follow the corruption.

It was her voice again.

Follow the corruption and it will lead you to the source. Hurry. There may not be much time. Look down. Look at your feet. You will see…

Despite his determination to ignore the voice, Bhehan’s lowered his eyes to stare at the ground. The floor, which was coated in a fine film of ooze and now a veneer of blood from the eldar warriors who were dying swiftly beneath the guns and blades of his battle-brothers, was moving. It carried the very visible shreds of armour, chunks of blood and muscle and even recognisable internal organs. They slid in a sticky mess down the tunnels.

‘First Captain!’

Kerelan did not respond immediately, engaged as he was with the battle. Bhehan called to him again, a little more urgently than before.

‘Prognosticator, a moment if you would.’

Another round of shells disgorged with a resounding clatter from Vrakos’s bolter and Kerelan nodded with satisfaction before turning towards the agitated psyker.

‘The daemon calls to its own, First Captain! The source of this evil is at the end of this flow.’

‘Then we will finish our work here and we will move on.’

Bhehan did not mention the voice in his head. Instead, he caught a tight hold of his force axe and threw himself with easy confidence into what remained of the battle.

Eliminating the remaining eldar afforded no hardship. They were struggling to survive the onslaught of the vile creatures. Two more of them suffered the same fate as the one Bhehan had sent flying into their clutches and their screams as their bodies were dissolved were horrific. Yet Bhehan could not help be feel satisfaction. Ancient enmity between the races ran deep.

‘What are these things, Prognosticator?’ The question came from Vrakos who had fallen into step next to Bhehan, the weapon in his hand still spitting out shell after shell.

‘I am not sure, brother,’ replied Bhehan, swinging his axe round in a neat arc, severing another golem in two. Like the others, it simply seeped into the greater flow and moved slowly down the corridor taking pieces of flesh, bone and armour with it. ‘But there is the touch of the warp at work here. Of that I am sure.’

‘Daemons, do you think?’

‘Aye. I suspect.’ Bhehan pointed down at the ground, at the slowly snaking river of debris. ‘I cannot think of anything else so powerful as to be able to manipulate matter in this way. Wherever this flows… it will lead us to our answers.’

The two warriors fell silent as they executed one of the few remaining eldar. They worked in harmony as though they had fought together on many occasions before. Vrakos fired his weapon into the chest of an eldar who flew backwards. The xenos’s armour soaked up most of the initial damage, but before the alien could even get to his feet, Bhehan had unleashed psychic hell on it. He thrust his hand forwards, the axe held tightly in the other. Jolts of psychic and electrical energy found their target, frying the enemy’s brain. It slid down the wall, far from the pools of ooze.

From somewhere further down, the Silver Skulls heard a sudden roaring. It was a deeply unnatural sound, somewhere between rage and pain. The two warriors exchanged glances.

‘That was not a noise made by any xenos I have encountered,’ observed Vrakos in a mild, almost conversational tone. ‘I would say it lends weight to your daemon hypothesis, Prognosticator.’

The last remaining eldar let out a bellowing phrase in its own language and turned, hurtling at full speed down the corridor in the direction of the sound which was still echoing along the walls.

Raking fire scraped down the rock behind the fleeing eldar and the six Space Marines formed up as a single unit once again. The saving grace was that in the wake of the bestial roar that had resounded down the tunnels, the golems had collapsed. The stream of debris continued to flow.

‘Pursuit,’ said Djul, breaking off from his endless litanies to speak the word. He was almost visibly trembling with zealous fury. ‘It is our only choice. We cannot stand here in idleness whilst the xenos still desecrate our ancestral home.’

‘Aye, brother. At least one remains and I fancy we will find more at the end of this tunnel. More than eldar too if that noise was anything to go by. Brother Prognosticator? The Emperor’s Word, if you would?’

‘Aye, First Captain.’ Bhehan reached down to the rune bag at his waist and drew a stone at random. It was his preferred method of divination in fraught situations. He studied the beautifully carved stone as he raised it to his eyes. ‘This rune symbolises death,’ he said.

‘Ours?’

‘Nothing so obvious, First Captain. Merely a suggestion that something is coming to an end. It can also suggest success, that we reach our goals.’ Bhehan dropped the rune back into his pouch. ‘The rune is a positive one,’ he said. ‘We should proceed. With caution, obviously. These are eldar we are dealing with. As I observed, this may be some elaborate trap on their part.’

‘This is something that had not escaped my own consideration,’ replied Kerelan. He glanced around his squad and nodded. ‘The Prognosticator has spoken. It is the Emperor’s will that we pursue.’

Djul had already started walking.

‘Your helmet, Prognosticator?’

‘In due course, First Captain. Whatever it is that is trying to invade my thoughts, I want to look on its face properly when I kill it.’

‘Spoken like a true Silver Skull.’

There were three minds at war.

The female voice still whispered at the edges of his awareness. He could sense its sheer desperation and that bothered him. If she was powerful enough to insert herself into the highly defended mind of an Adeptus Astartes psyker, then what could possibly cause her such anxiety?

Then there was his own mind. Young, but gruellingly trained to deal with this kind of invasion. He had expended some considerable psychic energy during the altercation with the eldar and the daemonic beings, but he was still more than in control of his faculties. He was keeping the woman at bay – for now at least – and he still had plenty to give.

But the third presence was new, as though it had only lately become aware he was there. An insidious, creeping presence that sought to break through the first gap in his defences that it found. Where the alien’s voice was like a constant hammering on the door of his mental fortress, this new consciousness was like a noxious gas attempting to seep in.

Despite not having replaced his helmet, Bhehan was not struggling to see where he was going. Barely any light reached this far down into the tunnels but Bhehan had long ago learned to compensate for lack of vision with other, preternatural senses. He felt the shape of the room around him and was able to pinpoint his battle-brothers with accuracy. A soft blue glow from his psychic hood and the silvery thread of power that rippled around the head of the force axe loaned a little light to the proceedings but the squad forged ahead mostly in darkness.

‘There is a chamber up ahead.’ Asterios spoke from the front of the line of Terminators. ‘Bodies. Movement. Something I cannot quite…’

Another roar sounded, this time so close that they could all feel the shifting air that accompanied it. Death. Disease. Rot and plague.

‘Replace your helmet, Prognosticator,’ Kerelan began as red warning runes began to flash across his eyes. ‘There is poison in the air.’

The young psyker had already begun the task of putting his helmet back on. It was not a quick thing to do to manipulate it around the psychic hood, but he managed it. As the seals hissed into place, he blinked heavily to adjust his eyes to the infrared. Taking note of the analysis of the air, he was confident that he would not have suffered any undue harm.

‘First Captain!’

The shout from Asterios dragged Bhehan’s attention away from the scrolling data and they moved as fast as their armour would allow them towards the chamber. Not heeding Kerelan’s order about remaining by his side, Bhehan accelerated his speed and moved ahead of the others, arriving at the mouth of the chamber before they did. Asterios shot him a glance. He said nothing. He did not need to. What was visible in the chamber spoke for itself.

A swift scan of the inhabitants of the vast, high-ceilinged room revealed eight eldar warriors, including the one who had fled from the previous battle. All wore segmented, form-fitting armour apart from one. The second Bhehan’s eyes rested on her, he knew at once that this was the source of one of the two voices in his head. She was clad in flowing robes of deepest purple that draped around her slender frame, protected by an ornate breastplate and pauldrons. She stood firm and defiant, her hand out before her and was shouting words in her own language at a monster of unimaginable proportions. Her voice was muffled by the rebreather mask that protected her from the poisonous air.

‘In the Emperor’s name,’ breathed Asterios through the vox. ‘What horror has been wrought in this place?’

It was massive, fully four metres in height and at least that across. It had no real form and seemed to be nothing more than a huge, shapeless mass of vile and putrid decay. Its skin spilled in rolls that rippled as it moved and the slimy trails of corruption that had led the Silver Skulls here flowed directly beneath it. Occasionally, whenever an eldar weapon or projectile made contact with it, a great gash that approximated a screaming mouth would open up. Bhehan stared for a few moments, realising what it was made from. Its epidermis was entirely transparent and beneath its roiling surface the young Prognosticator could pick out bone fragments. He saw skulls, torn strips of flesh and muscle… all the living matter that had been torn from the eldar in the previous chamber. Organic matter that had been absorbed over the millennia.

It is a spawn of the Unclean One. A lesser daemon of Nurgleth. It was the eldar woman’s voice in his head and this time, Bhehan did not reject her presence. We came here in response to a vision and we seek to defeat it. It has fed for so long on the decay and death that infects everything on this world. Please, mon-k… human. Please, you must aid us in this venture. We cannot succeed without your help. It may only be a minor creature but this place is so strong in decay that it thrives.

‘A creature of Chaos,’ he responded to Asterios’s question. He chose carefully not to reply to the eldar. Her pleading tone disgusted him. ‘A daemonic entity that thrives on atrophy and decay…’

‘I do not purport to understand the nature of daemons,’ said Kerelan. ‘But I do understand how to fight them. Concentrate your fire on that thing first. We will deal with the eldar later.’

‘How do we know that the filthy eldar witch is not controlling it?’ Djul’s response was startlingly predictable and he raised his storm bolter, levelling it at the eldar woman’s head. ‘If we kill her then it will die.’

Do not let this happen, human. A slightly sharper psychic probe that made Bhehan gasp. She turned from what she was doing, lightning or some other, unknown force dancing from her hands and stared at the Silver Skulls directly.

Our goal is shared, she said to Bhehan and the desperation returned. Surely you can see that? There is a time for animosity between our species, but it is not now. Now is the time for us to combine our strength, to join together. I felt your presence the moment you arrived on this world. We must do this thing together.

‘Please,’ she said aloud.

‘Do not even speak, alien,’ said Djul and prepared to fire. But Bhehan moved to stand between him and his target.

‘Stay your hand, Brother Djul.’

There was a tone of command in the young Prognosticator’s voice that brokered no argument. Kerelan nodded but said nothing, allowing Bhehan the moment he needed to take control of the situation.

‘The witch is right,’ he said, not elaborating on the fact that his communication with the woman had been mostly private. ‘There is only one way we are going to defeat this thing. The eldar and I have to…’ He swallowed, the words struggling to leave his lips. ‘We have to combine our powers. We have to work together.’

‘What you say is dangerously close to heresy, brother.’ Djul’s face was hidden behind the skull-faced Terminator helm, but Bhehan could easily picture his wild-eyed fury.

‘What I say is what I see,’ he retorted. ‘Do not believe for one second that I am in favour of this course of action, of forming this unwelcome alliance. But if I do not, then the rest of us are dead.’

‘Better death than cooperation with the xenos…’

‘Brother Djul, I agree with you. But this is the sacred home of our ancestors. Or have you so soon forgotten? We do not fight to save ourselves. We fight to preserve what we were. What we are.’

‘The Prognosticator speaks wise words, Djul. I do not agree to this pact at all, but the boy is right. Stay your hand. Concentrate your weapons on that… thing. Do not fire upon the eldar.’

Every member of the squad picked up his mental addition.

Yet.

‘The guilt and blame for this action will be mine to bear, brothers,’ said Bhehan and he moved towards the eldar woman.

‘Bhehan.’

It was the first time Kerelan had addressed him directly by name rather than rank. He turned to look at the First Captain.

‘At the first hint that you are losing control, you oust this creature from your mind.’

‘Such a severance could kill me, First Captain.’

‘I am aware of that. It is either that or die at my hand afterwards when I believe you to be compromised.’

The certainty was oddly reassuring. This was the only chance they had of destroying the daemon. If it failed, Kerelan would not allow him to suffer for long. He inclined his head in obeisance to his commander.

So be it, he told the eldar mentally and the walls of his defences lowered, letting her in.

Her unwelcome arrival in his mind was like a malignant tumour, its presence spreading to fill what little space he had granted her. Yet it did not feel malevolent. They were sharing their power. She was not stealing it. She had spoken truth. Psychic tendrils curled deeper into his mind, seeking the strength that he bore.

You are powerful for one so young. Her surprise was insulting.

Yes. So I am told.

You must release the power. Our strengths must meld or we will not be strong enough. You must trust me.

I do what I do because I must, Bhehan responded and his anger flared as a red spot on the landscape of his thoughts. I will never trust you and your kind. Memories of engagements against the eldar rose, unbidden to the surface and Bhehan tried to quell them but it was too late. The farseer’s brow rose.

Curious. I said before that we are not all the same. These warriors you have battled against are those who Fell. We will talk more of this when the matter at hand is dealt with. Now are you ready, human?

Bhehan did not respond immediately. Was he ready? Was he ready to commit the atrocity of working with this xenos filth? Was he able to prevent her from doing as she pleased with his mind?

Trust me, she had said.

He had blocked out all the ambient sounds in the dark, dank chamber but now it slowly crept back into his awareness. Gunfire was sounding; discarded shells ringing against the stone floor as they were spewed from the heavy weapons that were being discharged. His battle-brothers were holding the enemy at bay, but it would take more than physical damage to deal with the threat. The weight of expectation was heavy and the young Silver Skulls warrior stood straight and bore it with the stoic pragmatism of his ancestors.

A sudden memory of Brother-Sergeant Igneus, the warrior he had seen in his vision flashed before his eyes and he remembered the ancient hero’s words.

We will defend our Chapter’s home with our very last breath.

He released the self-imposed restraint he had placed around his full psychic might and it burst into his psyche like an unstopped river. The farseer gasped at the sudden influx of strength and elsewhere, in the corporeal world, he felt her hand close tightly around his. The touch made his skin crawl, but he tolerated it. For the sake of his brothers. For the honour of the Chapter.

The two psychic forces duelled briefly for supremacy and finally they joined together. Without ever understanding how he achieved it, Bhehan subsumed the power of the eldar woman into that of his own and she did likewise.

For the briefest of moments, post-human warrior and eldar farseer were as one. They knew all there was to know about each other. Her memories were coloured with images of a youth and young manhood spent in endless study; of years of unforgiving training in increasingly harsh environments. A youth who had known anything but war. His memories were interspersed with those of the farseer and what he saw would change his perspective forever. He discovered that the Silver Skulls had been incorrect in believing that all eldar were the same. Despite the pressing nature of their situation, curiosity drove him to dig deeper.

He saw her vision, that which had driven her kind to Lyria. That were this thing allowed to continue its existence, the time would come when the followers of the corpulent god would free it from its prison. That the traitor once known to the Imperium as Typhus would come here, to this holy place and unleash its horror on unsuspecting worlds.

In return, the farseer saw his vision. She saw the entwined war banners and she saw them fall, burned and ruined. He felt her grief at the sudden understanding of what that meant and he knew no pity.

Everything happened fleetingly. Their powers burst forth in a rush of white flame that spread like a ripple from where they stood. The corridor funnelled the psychic burst, channelling it directly towards the vile creature. It was bleeding black ichor from countless wounds, its ability to repair itself severely impaired by the sustained fire pouring down upon it and the roaring breath of the heavy flamer. At Kerelan’s order, the Talriktug continued fighting, firing into its gelatinous form. If it was weakening at all, it gave no sign.

The first wave of energy touched it seconds later and the noise it made was other-worldly. It was not pain; the psychic burst had not apparently hurt its physical body, but something had happened. The formless daemon shifted its massive bulk and turned towards the psykers, its attention taken from the other warriors.

Again, the farseer said and Bhehan complied without hesitation. He could not afford the risk of doubting her. Not now he was this deeply invested in the outcome.

Another flare of energy and this time the daemon did scream. So did the farseer. Bhehan felt her body start to crumple and grabbed hold of her shoulder dragging her back upwards.

Again, he told her in the same way she had spoken to him. One more and we will defeat it.

I… cannot…

You must and you will, witch. You will take my power and you will complete what you have started here.

Her plan was exquisite. The creature was a daemon of death, rot and decay. She was defeating it with life. Too much life. She was taking her own life-force, combining it with the purity of the young Space Marine and she was using their joint powers to amplify it.

The daemon fed, unable to stop itself. The desperate need to take any sustenance it could from everything that lived or died around it took over and it absorbed the energy into itself. But such purity and faith, amplified at such vast power levels was the antithesis of everything it was.

Silver Skulls and eldar warriors continued to pound away at the flesh of the thing whilst Bhehan and the farseer burned at its ties to reality. The harder the two psychic beings pressed their attack, the more damage the weapons of the warriors was doing. Bolter rounds embedded themselves beneath the surface and exploded, spraying an acidic substance across the room. It damaged eldar and Space Marine alike, eating into Djul’s pauldron. But it did not go far. Whatever organisms or whatever warp magic gave it its power seemed to be fading.

‘Whatever you are doing is working, Bhehan,’ bellowed Kerelan. ‘Do not stop.’ He was slicing strips of gangrenous flesh away from the daemon as though he carved a beast. His relic blade glistened, coated with the once-lethal substance that had devoured countless men, women, children and xenos across the years. This thing stood on the sacred, holy ground of those who had come before and his fury was unmatched.

When the daemon finally stopped moving, when all the fight went out of it, Bhehan was surprised. He had anticipated it bursting like an overripe fruit. He had been ready to seek cover to avoid the inevitable rain of acid that would come with its destruction. But instead, it merely wailed as it began to lose size and cohesion. Where once a gelatinous giant had stood, now there was only a quivering lump the size of a Space Marine.

It continued to diminish, spreading across the chamber floor and littering the ground with splinters of bone and rock. One object stood out as different, unusual; glancing more closely at it, the Prognosticator felt a shock of recognition. The last time he had seen that war banner, it had been worn at the back of the noble Brother-Sergeant Igneus, the warrior he had seen during his earlier flashback.

And he understood how the plague had come into the fortress-monastery. He realised what the creature they had just destroyed had been. It sickened him almost as much as what he had done to defeat it. One of their own, twisted and distorted into something so…

Do not linger on what was, came a weary voice in his mind. Instead, give thanks for what is no more. See? It dies, Bhehan.

The psyker was utterly exhausted and drained by his mental exertions, but it was as to nothing compared to the dying spark of the woman who stood beside him. For the first – and only – time, he felt admiration for her.

When the creature finally dissolved into nothing more than a lingering smell and a fading death wail, a harsh silence descended. The sounds of gunfire died away, their echoes fading to nothing. The eldar woman fell to her knees, her breath coming in a low rasp.

She had withdrawn her presence from Bhehan’s mind; he could sense that and it was a welcome relief. He snatched his hand from her, stepping backwards.

‘Prognosticator.’ Kerelan’s voice was quiet and filled with concern. ‘Speak to me. Is it over?’

Bhehan knew that the First Captain was not just referring to the battle with the daemon. He nodded his head. ‘It is done. My mind is my own once more, First Captain.’ He was calm and controlled and Kerelan grunted his satisfaction. The farseer raised her head with obvious effort.

‘I want to thank you…’ she began, but Bhehan shook his head.

‘I did what I had to do. Do not thank me for exposing my mind to you.’ He unclamped the bolt pistol he wore at his thigh.

‘Listen to me, Bhehan,’ she said, reaching a hand up to him. He winced at her use of his name, the insult cutting him deeply. ‘I know what you must do. I always have known how this must end. But you have seen, now. You have seen that we are not all that you believe us to be. That even though there cannot be peace between our two peoples, there can surely come some tolerance.’

‘Heed my words, xenos. I have purged your taint from my mind already,’ was the reply. ‘When I return to my ship, I will cleanse my soul of this experience. By the time I return to my home world, you will not even be a memory. I promise you that much.’

Tears filled her eyes. ‘I had hoped…’ she said, simply and then held her head high. The pride in her expression was worthy of Bhehan’s respect even if it… if she was not.

‘In time,’ she said, ‘I hope you remember what you saw here.’

‘Do not count on it,’ he replied, pressing the bolt pistol against her head.

The killing shot echoed loudly through the fallen fortress. Bhehan stared at her fallen, broken body without expression. Reacting to their leader’s death, the few remaining eldar prepared to attack, but despite their bulk, the Terminators were faster. Within seconds, the enemy were destroyed. Not one of the eldar remained alive.

‘I would say that this place is now purified,’ rumbled Djul. ‘Let us give thanks for the Emperor’s hand in this.’

Another litany began and Bhehan joined in wholeheartedly. Kerelan moved towards the war banner and crouched to look at it. ‘That thing destroyed almost everything that remained here,’ he observed. ‘But this artefact held true. It held firm across the ages. A precious relic indeed. Vashiro will be pleased.’ He carefully gathered it up and stood. ‘For eight thousand years, this war banner has stood as a testament to the tenacity of our Chapter. Imagine, brothers. Imagine the heroes who have carried this into war. Imagine what we can learn from it…’

He glanced at Bhehan. If the Prognosticator let his talent extend to the banner, many of the Chapter’s lost secrets could be divulged. But from the expression on the youth’s face, it was the furthest thing from his mind. Kerelan changed tack.

‘Brother Prognosticator, the honour of taking the witch’s head should fall to you in recognition of the part you…’

‘First Captain. I put myself in your custody.’ Bhehan raised his head, pride and conflicting guilt warring on his expression.

‘What are you talking about, Prognosticator?’

‘I allowed myself to become tainted. I am… impure. There will be penance to pay for my heresy and I welcome it gladly. I know my duty.’

‘Your duty, Prognosticator…’ Kerelan’s tone changed slightly. ‘Listen to me, Bhehan. Do you sincerely believe that we are all free from guilt? Look around you, boy. This very place is a guilty mark on our entire Chapter’s record. This whole mission, everything that you have done today should teach you that there will come times, during your service to the Golden Throne, when you will be forced to take uncompromising action. The ends in this instance more than justified the means.’

‘But I…’

‘When we return to the ship, commune with the Emperor. Put your future in his hands. Our entire Chapter holds by that tenet. What would it be if our own Prognosticators did not trust to their own readings of fate?’ He reached up and for the first time, removed his helmet. Beneath, his face was fearsome. A full skull had been inked into the skin from chin to forehead and gave him a ghastly appearance. But his eyes held the wisdom of the years.

‘Your actions were not questionable,’ he said, laying a hand on the young psyker’s shoulder. ‘You did your duty. Nothing more.’ His face contorted in what Bhehan could only presume was a smile. ‘Now take her head and let us depart with our prize.’

‘Aye, First Captain,’ said Bhehan.

An Extract from Deliverance lost

Gav Thorpe

In a darkened chamber close to the strategium of the Vengeful Spirit, a meeting was being held. The room was large, big enough for several dozen occupants to be seated, the light of the single great lantern hanging from the centre of the ceiling barely reaching the banner-hung walls. A few data stations blinked with ruddy lights on the far wall, beneath an embroidered standard depicting the Eye of Horus in gold on burgundy. The floor was plain plasteel mesh, scuffed to a dull grey by the countless footfalls of booted feet.

As the door closed behind Alpharius, the primarch’s eyes instantly adjusted to the gloom. The space seemed cavernous, occupied by only three others. Alpharius was surprised; he had been expecting several of his brother primarchs to be attending the council. As he stepped forwards he realised that this was not a war council, it was an impromptu interrogation. Perhaps even a trial.

The thought did not sit comfortably with him as he regarded the chambers’ other occupants with what he hoped was an impassive expression. Alpharius knew that he tested the patience of the Warmaster, and here at the heart of his lair there was no telling what he might do.

Horus, Warmaster, Primarch of the Luna Wolves – the Sons of Horus, Alpharius corrected himself – sat on a broad, high-backed throne, robed in heavy black and purple, hands on his knees. His face was heavily shadowed, eyes hooded with darkness with just a glint at their core. Even seated, the Warmaster’s presence dominated the room. Alpharius had spent time with Horus before – when loyal to the Emperor and since – and never before had he felt threatened. This time was different. Horus seemed bigger than ever.

Alpharius was the smallest of the primarchs, but had not allowed this to undermine his confidence. Now that he looked at Horus, tree-trunk-thick arms stretching the fabric of his robes, Alpharius realised that his fellow primarch could crush him, tear him limb from limb, without warning.

Their relationship had changed, that much was clear. The primarchs had once been brothers, equals. When Horus had been made Warmaster he had been treated as the first amongst equals. Looking at Horus now, Alpharius was left with no doubt that Horus considered himself master, a lord to whom fealty was owed. The obedience of his co-conspirators was no longer demanded, it was expected.

There was also no mistaking the Warmaster’s perception of his role in the coming meeting. He was the judge at a trial. His eyes remained fixed on Alpharius as the primarch walked to the centre of the room. The gloomy surrounds, the half-lit shapes at the edge of vision, were a crude trick, Alpharius told himself, only capable of intimidating lesser individuals. For all that, the primarch of the Alpha Legion felt a cold trickle of uncertainty creeping through his gut.

At the Warmaster’s right shoulder stood First Captain Abaddon, fully armoured and with a power sword at his hip. He had a look that matched his reputation: his hard eyes were those of a stone-hearted killer. At the Warmaster’s left was the Word Bearer Erebus, his armour painted a lavish crimson, adorned with golden sigils and hung with fluttering pieces of parchment covered with tiny scrawls of Lorgar’s meandering litanies. The Word Bearer leaned closer and whispered something in Horus’s ear, so quiet even Alpharius’s superhuman hearing could not detect it. The Warmaster looked sharply at the primarch of the Alpha Legion, eyes narrowing.

‘It would be unwise to take my name in vain, Alpharius,’ said Horus, fingers tightening with anger. ‘You claimed my authority and misled Angron and his World Eaters, allowing Corax and his Legion to escape.’

‘Perhaps your conversion to our cause is less than complete,’ added Erebus, before Alpharius could reply.

The Alpha Legion’s primarch held his tongue for the moment, quickly adjusting his demeanour in the face of Horus’s hostility. He stood in front of the Warmaster, helm under one arm, head bowed in obeisance, the picture of the diffident servant.

Abaddon put his hand to the hilt of his sword and growled.

‘Your duplicitous nature is well known,’ said the captain, teeth bared in anger. ‘The Warmaster saw fit to bring you into the light of his plans, I hope you have not made a mockery of his fair judgement.’

‘I seek to place Horus on the throne of Terra, the same as you,’ replied Alpharius, lowering to one knee in deference. It was an instinctive reaction, though such submission grated at the primarch’s pride. ‘If I acted out of turn it is only because circumstance forced me to make a decision quickly.’

‘I have not yet heard an explanation for your actions,’ said Horus.

The Warmaster’s gaze was piercing, as if trying to bore into the primarch’s mind to see his thoughts. Alpharius matched the stare without fear. Horus knew nothing of the Alpha Legion’s true aims. If he had any inkling of the part made out for him by the Cabal, Alpharius would already be dead. ‘I consider it a grave crime to usurp my authority, a crime compounded by the severity of the consequences.’

‘The Raven Guard have not yet been apprehended,’ said Erebus, a sneer twisting his lips. ‘Though but a shadow of their former strength, it was foolish to allow them to escape.’

‘You must trust me,’ said Alpharius, ignoring the two legionaries, his attention focused on his brother primarch. It was the Warmaster’s will, or whim, that needed to be swayed to Alpharius’s cause. ‘The military potential of the Raven Guard has been expended, they are no physical threat. Their survival, Corax’s escape, will play a greater role in this war we have unleashed.’

‘Will it?’ Abaddon spat the words, his scorn etched into the creases in his brow. ‘What greater role?’

Alpharius kept his gaze on the Warmaster, noting that his displeasure did not seem so deep. It was clear that he did not have Horus’s full trust, but Alpharius did not care for that. His brothers had always been wary of the Alpha Legion, always suspicious of their methods, if not their motives. Horus was no different. He had consistently underestimated the power of subterfuge, eschewing the subtler weapons of espionage and misdirection in favour of overt action. Alpharius had not answered the Warmaster’s summons to excuse his actions, he had come to persuade Horus of their merit. That he could do so without the interference of the other Legion commanders was an advantage.

‘The Alpha Legion have infiltrated the Raven Guard,’ Alpharius said bluntly.

He saw Horus’s eyes widen slightly with surprise, and suppressed an expression of pleasure at the Warmaster’s nonplussed moment. Far from an admission of guilt, it was a declaration of strength; the unveiling of a weapon that the Alpha Legion kept hidden.

Alpharius could see the calculation behind the Warmaster’s eyes. If the Alpha Legion could infiltrate the Raven Guard, they could have done the same to any Legion. The Warmaster cocked his head to one side, momentarily perturbed, his eyes flicking away from Alpharius for the first time since he had entered, glancing at Abaddon.

‘To what purpose?’ asked Horus, recovering his composure, his stare returning to its previous intensity. ‘Had they been destroyed, what would be the point of spying on corpses?’

‘You allowed Corax to get away from the World Eaters to protect your operatives.’ Erebus levelled the accusation with a pointed finger, pushing Alpharius’s patience beyond its limit.

‘I am a primarch, genetor of the Alpha Legion, and you will show me due respect!’ snapped Alpharius, standing up.

He took two steps towards Erebus, eyes glittering. Abaddon moved to intercept him, half-drawing his blade

‘Don’t make the mistake of letting that sword leave its scabbard,’ said Alpharius, fixing Abaddon with a venomous glare. ‘I may prefer to work in subtle ways, but if you continue to insult me, I will slay you here and now.’

Horus held out a hand, waving Abaddon back, a thin smile on the Warmaster’s face. He seemed pleased at Alpharius’s anger. ‘You are somewhat defensive, my brother,’ he said, gesturing for Alpharius to seat himself on one of the chairs arranged around the throne. ‘Please explain to me the benefits of allowing Corax to escape.’

Alpharius sat down, reluctantly accepting the Warmaster’s invitation, darting a warning look at Erebus just as the Word Bearer opened his mouth to speak.

‘Save your posturing for those that are swayed by it,’ said Alpharius. ‘Your change of loyalty proves the vacuity of your proselytising. You are privileged to stand in the presence of your betters, and should know not to speak until spoken to.’

The primarch enjoyed the contortions of anger that wracked the First Chaplain’s face, but Erebus heeded the warning and said nothing.

‘I have good information that Corax will attempt to return to Terra,’ Alpharius said, turning his attention back to Horus. ‘He will entreat the aid of the Emperor, and be given access to some secret of Old Night that we can use to our advantage.’

‘From where does this “good information” come?’ asked Horus, affecting disinterest though Alpharius could see that the Warmaster was intrigued.

‘We each have our own means and sources,’ replied Alpharius, flicking a meaningful gaze towards Erebus. The Alpha Legion had made it their business to know as much as possible about their fellow conspirators, and Alpharius was well aware of the strange rituals that Lorgar and his Word Bearers now indulged in. The Alpha Legion’s allies in the Cabal had furnished them with much information concerning the Primordial Annihilator, the Power of Chaos. It would not hurt to pretend that the Word Bearers were not the only Legion who had influence with the powers of the warp. ‘I am not of a mind to share mine with you at the moment.’

‘Are you not?’ said Horus, irritated. ‘Why would you keep secrets from me?’

‘Perhaps it is just my nature to do so. Secrecy is my best weapon.’ Alpharius smiled apologetically and gave a slight shrug. ‘Also, I do not believe myself or my Legion indispensable in your endeavours, so it would be unwise to surrender the few small advantages I possess. I know that my behaviour in the past and in recent times does not engender trust, but I assure you that this information is not only legitimate, but accurate.’

‘I will accept your assurances,’ said Horus, ‘for the moment.’ He leaned back in his throne, visibly relaxing as if to back up his words. Alpharius knew not to be lured into a sense of security. The Warmaster’s temper might change at a wrong answer from him or a sly word from Erebus. ‘What is your intent?’

‘We will allow Corax to obtain whatever it is he seeks, and then take it from him, turning it to our purpose.’

‘How do you think your operatives will remain undetected?’ Abaddon asked. ‘Our reports show that less than four thousand Raven Guard fled from Angron. New faces will be easily spotted, your legionaries exposed.’

‘That is why they wear old faces,’ Alpharius told him. He smiled and explained further when the others’ frowns deepened. ‘The Raven Guard were scattered as they fled the massacre at the dropsite. It was several days before they convened their strength again, during which time many were cut down in pursuit and anarchy reigned through their organisation. It was no simple matter for my Apothecaries to transplant the facial features of several fallen Raven Guard onto volunteers from my Legion, but they have had a lot of practice. As you may have heard, such facial surgery is not uncommon in the ranks of the Alpha Legion. My warriors are skilled and experienced, able to blend in without attracting attention. Even now they are with the Raven Guard, waiting for the opportunity to report.’

‘You stole their faces?’ Abaddon’s expression was a mixture of incredulity and disgust.

Alpharius nodded and looked for Horus’s reaction. For a moment the Warmaster had the same guarded look as earlier, but his aggression swept it aside as he leaned forwards, brow furrowing.

‘You are sure of their success?’ asked Horus, the words laden with accusation. ‘You have heard from them since they began their infiltration?’

Alpharius hesitated at this question, not sure of his reply. There was no point lying at this stage, even though the truth might upset the Warmaster further.

‘They have not yet been in contact,’ Alpharius admitted. ‘It is possible that they have been discovered, or perhaps slain in the fighting, but it is unlikely. They will send word when there is something of note to report.’

‘That will be a feat in itself, considering how far away they might be,’ said Abaddon.

‘As I said before, I have my means.’

Saying nothing, Horus regarded Alpharius for some time, his shadow-hidden eyes never leaving the face of the Alpha Legion primarch. Erebus bent down to say something but the Warmaster held up a hand to stop him.

‘You should have come to me with this intelligence before you interfered with the World Eaters,’ Horus said, his voice quiet. Alpharius chose not to repeat his point that he had had no such time to seek the Warmaster’s authority, and certainly didn’t voice his view that permission would not have been given. The judge was about to pronounce his judgement and Alpharius could not tell which humours held sway over the Warmaster. He held his breath, trying not to tense lest his anxiety was seen as guilt. ‘Angron has been given further cause to doubt my commands, and he is not shy in voicing his displeasure. I do not appreciate your scheming, brother, and I will be watching you closely.’

Which meant that no action more imminent would be taken against the Alpha Legion. Alpharius breathed out slowly, still on his guard.

‘We have a possible contact with a Raven Guard vessel heading out-system from Isstvan IV, Warmaster,’ said Abaddon. ‘Should we call off the pursuit, if it is your desire to let them escape?’

Horus looked to Alpharius, one eyebrow raised, seeking his opinion, though Alpharius sensed he was still being tested.

‘I would humbly suggest that the pursuit continues as normal for the moment,’ said the primarch. ‘Corax may already be suspicious of the events that allowed him to elude the World Eaters, any further deficiency in our attempts to bring him to battle might cause him to act with greater caution and ultimately thwart the reasons for allowing the Raven Guard their freedom.’

‘I concur,’ said Horus. ‘I have every confidence in Corax’s ability to escape my clutches without further help, and it will cause further consternation and questions amongst our allies if I am seen to interfere again.’

‘A wise decision,’ said Alpharius, bowing his head. ‘If there is nothing more to discuss, I must return to my Legion and continue the operation.’

Horus signalled for Alpharius to depart and the primarch felt the Warmaster’s heavy gaze on his back as he walked towards the door. The hydraulically-locked doorway remained closed to him, but Alpharius did not turn around.

The murmur of Erebus hovered on the edge of Alpharius’s hearing as the primarch waited for the portal to open.

‘If I thought for a moment, brother, that you were working against me, I would destroy you and your Legion,’ Horus declared.

Alpharius looked over his shoulder at the Warmaster and his two advisors.

‘I have never doubted that, brother.’

The door hissed open in front of Alpharius and he stepped out of the star chamber, trembling at the experience.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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

Cover illustration by Hardy Fowler

© Games Workshop Limited, 2011. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 978-0-85787-985-1

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