Table of Contents

Cover

Beneath the Flesh - Andy Smillie

Gilead's Curse - Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett

The Shadow in the Glass - Steve Lyons

Redeemed - James Swallow

An Extract from Know No Fear - Dan Abnett

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Beneath the Flesh

Part II

Andy Smillie

The mutilated corpses of eight Flesh Tearers decorated the curved walls of the chapel. Fixed in place by the blades of their chainswords, they hung like nightmare visages of the saints that decorated Cretacia’s Reclusiasms. Their armour was pitted and dented from numerous impacts and lacerations; their helms had been torn from their locking mounts, mangling their gorgets; all that remained of their faces were sunken husks, matted with bloodied hair.

‘Blood of Sanguinius,’ Nisroc fell to one knee, the desecration of his brother’s flesh staggering him.

‘Blood will bring blood,’ with a grunt of effort, Harahel pulled the blade from the nearest of corpses. The dead Flesh Tearer’s remains made a dull thud as they dropped to the ground. Harahel stared at the deep hole in the chapel wall; the blade had been driven through the outer rock into the metal support behind. ‘It took great strength to do this.’

Nisroc nodded, and cast his gaze around the chamber. The plaster finish and faux-brickwork of the walls was undamaged. The flagstones that paved the way to the raised, wooden alter were unblemished save for a single dark spot left behind by an errant blood droplet. ‘They weren’t killed here,’ Nisroc pushed himself to his feet. ‘There’s no sign of battle. Someone brought them here.’ The Apothecary struggled to talk, grinding his teeth in rage ‘After.’

Harahel snarled. ‘Brother-sergeant,’ he summoned Barbelo over the vox. Static filled his ear as he waited for a response. ‘Emperor damn this storm,’ the Flesh Tearer punched the wall, cracking it in a cloud of plaster-dust.

‘Report,’ Barbelo’s voice crackled back.

‘We have cleared the chapel annex.’ Harahel paused as another burst of static shot across the vox-link, ‘Eight of our brothers lie here.’

‘Status?’

‘Dead. All of them.’ Harahel turned his eyes from the corpses, his fists bunching in restrained fury as he glared at the aquila etched on the floor.

‘Show me.’

Harahel closed his eyes. He had no wish to look upon the massacre a second time. Activating his helmet’s visual feed, he panned his head around the room, streaming what his optics registered to the others.

For a long moment, the vox-link fell silent.

‘Nisroc, get what you came for. Harahel, meet us at the Stormraven.’ Barbelo’s voice rasped through another bout of static.

Six minutes. Time continued to count down at the edge of Maion’s peripheral display. The Archenemy’s army was almost at their door. ‘Let them come,’ he snarled, affixing the last of the melta-charges to the crossbeam that supported the ceiling. The charge was directional, and he’d taken care to make sure that the blast would travel down the corridor away from where he and Micos would be positioned.

‘Brother,’ Harahel’s voice rasped over a secure channel, ‘Back in the armoury, we gutted the traitors without incident. The ones in the command centre put up no more of a fight.’

Maion knew where Harahel was headed. ‘Yes, I had the same thought.’

‘How could such, such filth,’ Harahel spat the word, ‘have overcome our brethren? Those weaklings could scarcely have lifted a chainsword, let alone driven it into solid rock.’

Maion brought the percentile counter that recorded the progress of the data-stack download to the forefront of his helmet’s display. It ticked down slow and deliberate, like a dying man’s laboured breath. ‘Emperor willing, we’ll live long enough to find out.’ Maion sighed and blinked the counter away.

‘Jetpack assault troops. Bearing down on the courtyard,’ Amaru’s voice cut across on the main channel, interrupting Harahel’s reply. The Techmarine was still jacked into the compound’s data banks in the inner sanctum and was observing the Archenemy’s advance through a remote-link with the Stormraven’s sensors. The Archenemy’s jetpack squad appeared as solid red blips that drifted over the landscape and grew in size as they neared. ‘I count six of them…’ Amaru’s voice trailed off as he worked a calculation. ‘Harahel, you will not clear the courtyard before they descend.’

Harahel emerged from the chapel annex and growled up into the blackness of Arere’s starless sky, his enhanced eyes searching for the tell-tale flares of jetpacks. ‘I see no enemy.’

‘I assure you brother, they are coming.’

‘They’re a vanguard, nothing more.’ Barbelo growled over the vox-feed, his impatience evident in every syllable. ‘Harahel, ignore them and get to my position. The main force will hit us in less than five minutes. Amaru, cover his advance.’

The Techmarine blinked an acknowledgment icon to Barbelo and concentrated on communicating with the Stormraven’s machine-spirit. The gunship’s sentient mind was silent, almost dormant. It resisted Amaru’s gentle interrogation, blocking his attempts to rouse it.

‘My skin for yours.’ The Techmarine invited the machine-spirit into his armour as he probed deeper into the gunship. The connection sent a spasm through his muscles as he gained access to the Stormraven’s weapon systems. Amaru teased power into the gunship’s turret-mounted assault cannons.

‘Battle,’ the machine-spirit whispered in the Techmarine’s head as it stirred to readiness.

The red-blips pulsed on Amaru’s display as the enemy neared weapons range. He cycled the twin-assault cannons to firing speed, their multiple barrels whirring with a metallic hiss as the autoloader fed them rounds.

‘Enemy.’ The word growled from within the Stormraven’s machine soul, washing through Amaru’s mind like the strained rumble of thruster backwash. It was awake now, wearing the Stormraven like a suit of ceramite war plate, wielding its turret-mounted weapon with the same ease and precision that a Flesh Tearer hefted a blade.

A sound wave spiked across Amaru’s display as the Stormraven’s auditory sensors detected the roar of enemy jetpacks. The Chaos Space Marines were gunning their thrusters, slowing their descent.

‘Purge the heretics.’ the Techmarine urged the gunship to open fire.

The enraged machine-spirit obliged. The twin-assault cannon’s twelve barrels flared into life, lighting up the sky like miniature starbursts as they fired. Caught unaware, the Chaos Space Marines dived straight into the fusillade. The first three died in a heartbeat, their armour and flesh torn asunder by the unceasing hail of armour piercing rounds.

Harahel was two-thirds of the way across the courtyard when the assault cannons opened fire. He risked a glance skyward and saw the visceral red power armour of the Archenemy’s warriors. Their breastplates were shaped like cruel gargoyles and snarled at him from the darkness. A burst of rounds clipped the nearest of the Traitor Marines, blowing apart his thrusters in a shower of flame. The enemy warrior veered downwards towards Harahel, carried by what remained of his earlier momentum. The Flesh Tearer smiled and swung his eviscerator up through the stricken Chaos Space Marine’s ribcage, ripping him in two. Harahel kept moving, tearing his giant weapon through the body of another foe that slammed into the earth in front of him a moment later. The Flesh Tearer bit into his lip, relishing the taste of his own blood as he pounded towards Barbelo and the slaughter to come.

Amaru watched as the Stormraven continued to track and fire. He felt his pulse quicken to the hoarse wheeze of the assault cannon’s barrels as they spun. Several more of the red blips disappeared from his display, shredded by the gunships’ unerring fire. The Techmarine could feel the machine-spirit’s cold rage, its lust for violence and the gleeful abandon with which it massacred the enemy. He gasped, clutching the cables that linked him to the compound’s datastacks, and fought the urge to sever the link. He needed to be outside with the Stormraven, fighting, killing. His body began to tremble as he tried to restrain his urges. The download sequence was in its final stage, any interruption now would corrupt the data. Amaru dropped to one knee, screaming in rage as the machine-spirit’s emotions threatened to overcome him. ‘My work is iron, my will steel.’ The Techmarine held his clenched fist against the machine-cog on his left pauldron as he growled his way through the devotion, ‘I shall not falter, I shall not heel.’ Defend, he forced the order onto the machine spirit and drew his mind away, severing the link to the gunship and the violence outside.

Panting hard, Amaru focused on finishing the protocol. ‘There is no truth beyond the data, it is the muniment of the future. Guard it well.’ Download complete, Amaru unplugged from the datastacks and completed the rites of remembrance, secreting the data-keeper within his armour. The Techmarine let out a slow breath as the after-shadow of the Raven and the compound fell away, and the confines of his world reasserted themselves.

Alone in his armour, he took reassurance from the cold, impassive touch of the bionics and augmetics that punctuated his body. Perfect where he was flawed, the machine components of the Techmarine would continue to function long after The Rage drove his flesh to destruction. ‘Download complete,’ Amaru voxed the update to the rest of the squad and pushed himself to his feet.

‘Nisroc, status?’ Barbelo’s voice crackled over the vox.

‘I need three minutes,’ Maion listened to the Apothecary’s reply as the chrono-counter on his display blinked down to one.

He stood immobile in the darkness. His gaze fixed on the heavy blast doors at the far end of the corridor, as the chrono display floating at the edge of his peripheral vision blinked down to zero. The attack had begun. If Barbelo was right and this enemy did indeed wage war like the Flesh Tearers, then they would have fallen upon the outer walls with all the fury of a scorned god. Maion imagined the scene outside, picturing the Archenemy’s forces as they descended on the compound. Vindicator siege tanks would have lead an armoured charge, unleashing a devastating bombardment as accompanying Rhinos and Razorbacks disgorged frothing assault squads. With the siege shells exploding overhead, the assault troops would use melta weapons and crackling thunder hammers to finish the job, smashing an entry hole into the compound. Right now, the Archenemy would be tearing towards him and the others like a swarm of berserker locusts.

Yet the scene ahead remained unchanged, the blast door intact. The only sound Maion could hear was the gentle purr of his armour and the wash of his rebreather. His muscles twitched. The urge to break from his defensive posture and meet the enemy head on was almost overwhelming.

‘The longer you stand, the more blood you can spill,’ Micos placed a calming hand on Maion’s shoulder guard, reading the other Flesh Tearer’s mood. ‘Save your fury, we’ll be steeped in their entrails soon enough.’ Micos thrust his chainaxe towards the blast door as a trio of sparks dripped to the floor.

Maion nodded, allowing Micos’s words to soften the call to violence that rang in his mind like the summoning gong of an ancient arena. The other Flesh Tearer looked odd in Atoc’s helm. Atoc, Maion’s anger returned in force as he thought of his brother’s death. His knuckles turning bone white inside his gauntlets as he squeezed his weapons, desperate for something to rend. Another burst of super-heated metal flared in the gloom. He blinked away a myriad of tactical icons from his display; he was going to kill whatever came through the blast doors, nothing else mattered.

The drizzle of sparks tumbled into a downpour as the Archenemy intensified their assault on the door. A pulsing, amber line resolved into focus, bisecting the door from floor to ceiling.

‘Here they come,’ Maion crouched down, motioning for Micos to do the same.

The cutting stopped. The weld-line hung in the gloom, glowing and raw like a fresh scar. Silence filled the corridor, threatening to steal the last of Maion’s restraint.

An immense, metallic hand punched through the centre of the blast door. Pneumatic pistons hissed and spat as elongated fingers flexed in search of something to rend. The audio dampeners in Maion’s helmet worked to filter out the torturous screech of metal as the hand reached backwards, gripped the door, tore it from its hinges and dragged it backwards into the darkness. An instant later, the hand and the lumbering body it was attached to, bolted into view.

‘Dreadnought, corridor one,’ Maion warned, resisting the urge to open fire with his boltgun. He couldn’t afford to waste the ammo and even the weapon’s mass-reactive rounds would do little more than scratch the paint from the armoured behemoth bearing down on him. A dread fusion of Space Marine and technology, the Dreadnought was more foe than he and Micos could stop unaided. The towering walker stomped over the wreckage of the door, emerging into the corridor proper, and opened fire.

Maion threw himself flat. ‘For the Chapter!’ he roared, thumbing the control stick Amaru had fashioned for him. On the ceiling above him, one of the missile tubes stripped from the Stormraven’s wings screamed into life, sending its payload burning on a plume of fire towards the walker.

The first of the missiles slammed into the Dreadnought’s sarcophagus and exploded, splintering its armoured hide. The missile’s secondary booster ignited a moment later, driving a tertiary charge in through the weakened armour plating to detonate in the Dreadnought’s core. Flame engulfed the walker, wreathing it like a burial wrap. Autocannon rounds tore across the walls and ceiling as the Dreadnought continued to fire.

Maion fired again, sending another missile towards the metallic beast. A shrill cry resounded from the Dreadnought’s voice-casters as it raised its clawed arm in defence. The second missile’s primary warhead broke against the arm, blowing it apart in a shower of silver shrapnel. The remaining warhead burrowed into the Dreadnought’s flank, detonating with enough force to finish the job, destroying the Archenemy walker.

A blood-curdling roar filled the corridor as a tide of blood-armoured warriors swarmed over the Dreadnought’s corpse towards the Flesh Tearers. Micos roared back, pushing himself to his feet and striding forward to bathe the enemy in a jet of liquid fire. The Archenemy’s warriors ran through the flame, heedless of their bubbling armour and the flesh that ran from it like water.

Maion advanced to Micos’s right, his boltgun flashing in the darkness as he pumped a stream of rounds into the press of enemy. Each time Maion caught sight of a foe it forced a curse from his lips. Their red armour seemed in direct mockery of the sons of Sanguinius. Where Maion’s breastplate was adorned with the holy aquila and his shoulder guard carried the mark of his Chapter, the foe’s armour was inlaid with brass skulls and blasphemous runes.

‘We can’t hold here,’ Micos’s flamer stuttered and died, its fuel tank exhausted. Letting it hang on its sling, he drew his bolt pistol and continued to fire. In the close confines of the corridor he couldn’t miss, each round found its mark. He shot an enemy point-blank in the chest, then two more. At such close range, even power armour offered little protection, his bolt rounds punching out through their backs in a hail of gore.

Maion stood level to Micos’s right, firing his boltgun on full-auto until the round counter flashed zero. There was no time to reload the next enemy only ever a breath away. ‘Micos, down!’

Micos grabbed the nearest corpse as it fell to the ground and pulled it down on top of himself. Maion did likewise. Behind them, the hurricane bolter emplacement they’d fashioned from the Stormraven’s sponson weaponry opened fire. The noise was deafening as the three pairs of linked boltguns pumped a storm of shells into the corridor. Funnelled by the walls of the corridor, and pushed onwards by the press of warriors at their backs, the Archenemy were driven heedlessly into the salvo. They died in droves, their torsos pulped and limbs severed by the vicious onslaught.

Maion lay under the twitching corpses of half a dozen enemy. His pulse was racing, his twin-hearts echoing to the call of the hurricane bolters. The smell of blood and burnt flesh was choking. He was lying in an expanding pool of blood that dripped from all around him, congealing into a puddle of thick, viscous fluid that threatened to swallow him.

‘Emperor, fashion my thirst to your unbending will.’ Maion focused on the data overlaid on his helmet display, turning his thoughts to the tactical challenges that an endless horde of berserker foe presented, and away from the bloodlust burning in his veins. The weapon emplacement’s ammo counter was racing towards zero. ‘Two seconds.’ Maion subvocalised the warning to Micos and slammed his last clip into his boltgun.

With a final thrum, the hurricane bolters racked empty. Maion shot upwards from beneath the corpse-cover. The Archenemy dead were heaped upon one-another like red-armoured sandbags. Yet still they came. He opened fire, sending two more abominations to join the pile of dead that choked the corridor. The smell of promethium and burnt flesh flooded towards Maion as the enemy turned their flamers on their dead, burning a path towards the Flesh Tearers. The damning clack of an empty firing chamber drew a curse from Maion’s lips as his boltgun spat its last round. He discarded the spent weapon and gripped his chainsword with both hands. ‘I am His vengeance!’

‘Harahel!’ Barbelo tore his chainsword from an enemy’s ribcage as he shouted for the giant Flesh Tearer.

Harahel wasn’t listening, his attention fixed on the dismembered bodies of the three Chaos Space Marines he’d just slain.

‘Harahel, fall back!’

Harahel ignored the sergeant, launching himself back into the press of enemy. Ducking a whirring chainaxe, he shouldered an enemy warrior into the wall, pulping his skull between rockcrete bulkhead and ceramite pauldron. Harahel smiled and swung his eviscerator around in a tight arc, hacking into the onrushing press of red armour with a cold fury.

‘Emperor damn you.’ The other Flesh Tearer’s disobedience drew a curse from Barbelo’s lips as a roaring chainblade flashed out towards his neck. He leaned back as far as his balance allowed. The weapon’s teeth sparked as they grazed his gorget. Growling, he fired a plasma round into his attacker’s leering helm, vaporising the Chaos Space Marine’s head and torso. The headless body twitched backwards and disappeared in the press of red armour. ‘Harahel! When they cross the line, I will detonate.’ Barbelo let his smoking pistol drop to the floor, its power pack exhausted, and drew his combat knife. ‘Harahel!’

Harahel snapped his head around, sighting the sergeant. Barbelo was embroiled with two Chaos Space Marines, a blade in each of his hands as he fought his way clear of the melee. A bolt round stung off Harahel’s shoulder guard. He ignored it, snapping the neck of a charging foe with a thunderous backhand and delivering a low kick that broke the leg of another. It went against his every instinct to move backwards. Faced with the immediate need to kill, duty was a secondary consideration. The rage that burned in Harahel’s veins was insatiable. Roaring like a mad-man, he continued into the enemy. Behind him, Barbelo went down under a flurry of blows.

Distressed bio-data filled Barbelo’s display. A stray round had clipped his helmet, dazing him long enough for one of the enemy to rake his midsection with a whirring blade and batter him to the ground. He tried to focus but his head was ringing. Pain lanced through him as a blade dug into his back. Gritting his teeth, he pulled a bolt pistol from beneath a corpse. Twisting, he fired it on full-auto, sending half a clip into his would-be executioner. The Traitor Marine juddered and fell as the rounds slammed into him. Surrounded and badly wounded, Barbelo knew he had little chance of regaining his footing. I am redeemed. Proud that he had remained master of his rage, that his armour had not been daubed in the black of madness, the sergeant clasped his hand tightly around the detonator. The Cretacian symbol for caution flashed across his display, warning him that he was within the blast radius.

‘In His name.’

Barbelo released the device’s pressure-clasp.

The melta-charges ignited, blasting apart the corridor’s support studs in a hail of shrapnel and filling the passageway with an expanding ball of flame. Harahel was tossed like a leaf in a hurricane as the explosion slammed him into the walls and ground. Strobing runes filled his retinal display, as fire washed across his armour, testing the limits of its ceramite plating. The screed of warnings were in vain, Harahel unable to process them before the ceiling collapsed and his world went dark.

‘The gene-seed is secure. Moving to the Stormraven.’

Maion struggled to hear Nisroc’s voice over the pumping of his hearts and the roar of his chainsword as its teeth tore through another enemy. ‘Understood,’ he growled, turning aside an enemy chainaxe. He parried the weapon down to expose his attacker’s neck, driving his combat knife into the Chaos Space Marine’s windpipe. Maion immediately withdrew the blade and buried it in the face of another of the Dark Gods’ minions. ‘If we’re not there in two minutes, leave.’

‘Sanguinius guide you.’

Maion was in no doubt that the Apothecary would be leaving without him. The Archenemy had him surrounded. His armour had been struck clean of paint and insignia. Deep lacerations covered his arms and torso. His muscles ached with exhaustion. It would not be long before even his indomitable constitution gave out, and the enemy killed him. Only his rage kept him on his feet, allowing him to fight on. The insatiable need to rend powering his blows and staying death’s probing touch. In death’s sight, you are fury. In his colours you are reborn a reaper. None shall evade your wrath, Maion recalled the mantra Chaplain Appollus used to rouse the Death Company for war. Until now, he’d embraced only the edges of the beast growling inside of him. Never daring to fully embrace the whispering voices that scratched at his mind. But here, on starless Arere, in the darkness of the corridor, Maion stopped resisting. He invited the red mist to descend to light up his world in a whirlwind of gore. He felt his rage swallowing him, the shadow in his mind–

A staccato of miniature explosions snapped Maion from his morbidity. He felt the press of enemy ease off behind, allowing him to take a step backwards. Risking a glance over his shoulder, he saw Amaru. The Techmarine stood in the centre of the corridor like a vengeful daemon, the quad arms of his servo-harness spitting death from an array of laser cutters and plasma burners. In his gauntleted hands, Amaru carried his power axe, Blood Cog. The Techmarine had forged the weapon himself upon his return from Mars. The axe’s sparking head was shaped like the gearwheel from a giant machine. A weapon of exquisite beauty and terrible power, it was imbued with all Amaru’s artisanship. Blood Cog rose and fell like the levers of an antiquated stenogram, as the Techmarine hacked down the Archenemy in brutal swipes that crackled on impact.

‘Quickly brother, fall back,’ Amaru called out to Maion as he chopped Blood Cog through another Chaos Space Marine, bisecting the unfortunate from shoulder to hipbone. ‘Fall back now.’

‘Micos.’ Maion cast his gaze around. He had long since lost sight of the other Flesh Tearer but his ident-tag still shone. He was alive, for the moment at least. ‘We can’t leave him.’

‘They will rally soon.’

Maion ignored the Techmarine’s caution, and bludgeoned his way past another assailant to where his retinal display indicated Micos should be. With a huge effort, Maion began tossing back the bodies of the Archenemy, until he spotted the familiar ashen helm of a Flesh Tearer. ‘I have him,’ knifing his chainsword into the thigh of an onrushing foe, Maion grabbed Micos’ vambrace and dragged him from under a heap of corpses.

‘Can you carry him?’ Amaru’s question bore no insult.

Maion growled, tearing his blade free and beheading the wounded Traitor Marine. ‘To Cretacia and back.’ With a grunt of exertion, he hoisted Micos over his shoulders.

The Techmarine nodded and hacked the weapon arm from one of the Archenemy, before beheading him. Amaru’s fury was methodical, the aggression of his flesh tempered by the cold efficiency of his machine parts. Maion envied his calm. Though he knew that someday, the Techmarine’s rage would no longer be held in check. On that day, Maion would know pity for the enemies of his Chapter.

Pulling his axe from the chest plate of another Chaos Space Marine, Amaru tossed a glowing canister over Maion’s head. ‘Run.’

Harahel pushed himself off the ground, shrugging a pile of debris and a limbless body from his back. He felt his twin-hearts quicken as they worked with his armour to pump pain suppressors through his bloodstream. Angry runes flashed on his display as his helm’s optics tried and failed to focus. The lenses were cracked. Stumbling to his feet, Harahel spat a curse and unclasped his ruined helmet. The Chapter’s armourers had their work cut out for them. He mag-locked it to his thigh and paused while his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Thick silence hung in the air. It was in almost painful contrast to the cacophonous din of battle that preceded the explosion. Harahel listen for signs of the enemy but could hear nothing beyond his own shallow breathing. The blast had levelled the corridor, chocking it with collapsed rockcrete and the dead. The Flesh Tearer searched for his weapon, picking through the rubble and bodies nearest him. ‘The mists rot you’, he said. Cursing in tired frustration, Harahel kicked a fallen Chaos Space Marine in the chest. The ceramite skull adorning the fallen warrior’s breastplate cracked under the blow. There was no trace of the eviscerator. His weapon was gone. Harahel staggered forwards, steadying himself on a dislodged support beam. There was movement up ahead. Two figures, one crouched over the other. He stepped towards them, unsteady on his feet as he fought to remain conscious.

‘Nisroc?’ Harahel cried out, delirious from the chemicals keeping him alive while his body healed itself. ‘Brother?’

He moved closer, stopping as the crouched figure’s armour resolved into focus. It was not the white of the Apothecary or the deep crimson of Barbelo’s garb, but a vibrant, arterial red. Harahel took a step forwards, and saw Barbelo slumped underneath the figure. The sergeant’s breastplate was peeled open, his organs scattered on the ground. Harahel bared his teeth and snarled.

The hunched figured turned and rose. Fresh blood stained his baroque armour, tracing the outlines of the ruinous brass symbols that adorned it. Skulls rattled on rusted chains as the Chaos Space Marine stood. He was a walking effigy of death. A vicious chainaxe barked to life in his hand.

Harahel gripped his helmet and strode towards his enemy, all thoughts of injury gone as rage invigorated him. He would avenge the sergeant. The traitor would pay in blood.

‘Skulls for His throne,’ the Archenemy warrior roared through the skull-shaped vox-grille of his helmet, and charged at the Flesh Tearer.

Harahel caught his opponent’s arm as he slashed down with the chainaxe, pivoting and smashing his helm into the side of the Chaos Space Marine’s head. He followed with his elbow, folding it into his opponent’s left ocular lens. The Traitor Marine roared as the shattered armour-glass dug into his eye, and threw a panicked hook with his free hand. Harahel felt his jaw break as the gauntleted blow struck his unarmoured face. He struggled to keep a hold of the Chaos Space Marine’s weapon arm, spitting a glob of bloody mucous and teeth as he slammed his head into his opponent’s other lens. Pain shot through Harahel’s skull as his toughened skeleton protested at the cruel misuse. The Archenemy’s head snapped backwards under the blow, unbalancing him.

‘Die!’ Harahel roared and smashed his helmet into the Chaos Space Marine’s head. The enemy warrior’s grip on the chainaxe loosened. The Flesh Tearer struck him again, and again, using his helmet as a hammer, bludgeoning the Chaos Space Marine to his knees. The chainaxe clattered to the ground as Harahel battered his foe into unconsciousness. ‘Die!’ The Traitor Marine’s body went slack but the Flesh Tearer held him upright and continued to batter him. ‘Die! Die! Die!’

Only when his helmet was mangled beyond recognition, and his opponent’s head was nothing but bloody spatter on the wall, did Harahel let the body drop to the ground. The giant Flesh Tearer stood panting, the Archenemy’s blood dripping from his face. He growled, bunching his fists as he fought the urge to smash down the wall. ‘Strengthen me to the demands of blood. Armour my soul against the Thirst.’ Harahel looked down at Barbelo’s corpse. ‘Let me kill those who blaspheme against your sons.’ Calmer, Harahel knelt and unfastened Barbelo’s helm. ‘Forgive me,’ Harahel said as he locked it in place over his head. Both retinal displays lit up with sigils of bonding as the sergeant’s helmet synchronised with his armour. Harahel called up the squad’s ident-tags, thankful that his brothers were still fighting. Slinging Barbelo’s body over his shoulder and picking up the fallen chainaxe, Harahel made for the Stormraven. ‘Come, brother, there’s more blood to spill yet.’

The Stormraven was a burning wreck of charred metal and crumpled ceramite. The courtyard compromised. Enemy assault troops sat perched on the upper gantries like sentry-carrion, their weapons searching for targets. Half a dozen more sat crouched on their haunches, nursing wounds the Stormraven had dealt them before its demise.

‘Wretches! Sanguinius drink you dry,’ Nisroc opened fire, pulverising the nearest enemy with a hail of explosive rounds. There was no place in a Flesh Tearer’s mind for dismay. If he were trapped on Arere, then he would kill his enemies until death came to stop him. The Apothecary dived into cover, throwing himself against a metal container as a slew of bolt-rounds and melta-blasts tore towards him in retort. ‘I’m in the courtyard. The Stormraven’s gone.’ Nisroc’s voice was punctuated with rage as he voxed the update. Movement to the left drew his attention. He opened fire, suppressing a pair of Chaos Space Marines that were trying to encircle him.

‘Sanguinius’s blood. What now?’ Harahel snarled over the vox.

Another torrent of rounds smashed into Nisroc’s cover, forcing him to crouch low as he reloaded his bolter. ‘We fight, we–’

‘I know a way,’ Amaru interrupted.

‘Explain…’ Nisroc trailed off. The enemy had stopped firing. On instinct, he subvocalised the Cretacian rune for haste to the rest of the squad.

‘Apothecary!’ The word rang out in a garbled roar, its syllables tortured by a voice unaccustomed to speech. ‘I will feast on your hearts and savour the seed of your brothers.’

At the corner of his peripheral vision, Nisroc saw four more Chaos Space Marines, their weapons trained on him. He ground his teeth in frustration. His only option was to face the challenger.

‘Not while I draw breath!’ Nisroc drew his chainsword and stood to face his opponent. The Chaos Space Marine was a giant, taller even than Harahel, his bronzed armour covered in egg-shell cracks where it struggled to contain his warped bulk. ‘Tell me,’ Nisroc said in a low growl. ‘Whose blood shall my blade taste?’ The Apothecary activated his visual feed as he spoke, transmitting the locations of the Chaos Space Marines in the courtyard to the rest of the squad.

‘Krykhan, Fist of Khorne,’ the traitor growled as he launched himself at Nisroc.

Amaru sprinted from the corridor firing, Maion close behind him. ‘Fall back to the missile silo.’ The Techmarine dropped to one knee to avoid a plasma round, the arms of his servo-harness whirring as they turned to return fire. The Chaos plasma gunner died in a heartbeat, dissected by the merciless cutting lasers.

Maion ran past the Techmarine, Micos draped over his shoulders. It irked him to be unarmed, but he hadn’t the time to find a weapon. Bolt-rounds barked at his heels and churned up the dirt as he moved. He spat a curse, desperate for a chance to return fire. Angry runes flashed on his display as shell fragments spattered off of his legs. ‘Where?’

‘Back through the armoury.’ Amaru was forced to shout over the din of bolter fire. ‘The rearmost corridor.’

Harahel felt Barbelo’s body jerk as bolt-rounds hammered into it. Growling, he took cover behind a shorn off section of the Stormraven’s wing. The orphaned appendage stood in the ground like a piece of industrial sculpture. A grenade exploded, showering Harahel in shrapnel. The noise reminded him of a Cretacian thunderstorm. Ahead, he saw Nisroc. The Apothecary was about to die. A massive warrior stood over the prone Flesh Tearer, his murderous intent obvious. Harahel growled, standing to throw his chainaxe into the Chaos Space Marine’s back. The towering warrior roared, pitching forwards under the force of the impact. ‘Get up and kill him,’ Harahel snarled at Nisroc.

The Chaos Space Marine turned away from Nisroc, reaching for the axe in his back. The Apothecary summoned the last of his strength, shooting upwards to thrust his combat knife through his opponent’s neck. The Archenemy warrior’s body shuddered as his brain died. Nisroc caught the body before it could fall, pulling it around as a shield against the two Chaos Space Marines who immediately opened fire on him. He drew the dead warrior’s boltgun and put down his attackers with pinpoint shots. ‘Harahel, move! I’ll cover you.’

Too late, Amaru realised a Chaos Space Marine had landed behind him. His servo-harness sparked violently, its arms falling limp as the Archenemy warrior sliced through its control fibres. Amaru hit the release clasp and rolled away, pivoting as he rose to face his enemy. He spun forwards, tearing Blood Cog down through his foe’s shoulder and ripping it from his ribcage.

A round struck Maion’s pauldron as he cleared the threshold of the armoury. Another hit his abdomen. He fell, Micos toppling with him. He pushed himself onto all fours and tried to focus. Everything was faint, murky, as though he were a long way underwater. Pain forced a growl from his throat. His injuries were severe.

‘On your feet.’ Harahel grabbed Maion by his backpack and hoisted him up.

‘Micos…’

‘I have him.’ Harahel pushed Maion further into the armoury, stooping to gather up Micos.

‘Amaru, where now?’ Nisroc backed into the chamber, a boltgun barking in each hand.

‘Enter the third launch annex.’ Amaru pointed to the passageway leading from the rear of the armoury. ‘Go!’

Debris dust drifted into the missile silo, bathing the Flesh Tearers in powdered rockcrete. Amaru had used the last of the melta-charges to bring the corridor down behind them, creating a barricade between them and the Archenemy. He hoped it would give them enough time.

In the centre of the chamber stood a single, towering missile, its base disappearing down into the earth, its tip several stories above the control deck. A laddered gantry snaked around the missile, weaving between vines of cabling and fuel hoses to connect the deck with its upper reaches.

‘We don’t have long.’ Amaru pointed up towards the missile. ‘Quickly, into the nose.’

‘What?’ Maion stopped, unsure if he’d misheard the Techmarine.

‘It is a Mark-XV defence missile, the nose space is relatively empty.’ Amaru detached a plasma cutter from his pack and passed it to Maion. ‘Make entry with this and seal it once you’re inside.’

‘And you?’

‘I will remain here to ensure your withdrawal.’

Maion made to speak, but the Techmarine held up a hand, ‘The missile will not launch itself.’

The other Flesh Tearer nodded grimly and took the plasma cutter.

Amaru grabbed Nisroc’s vambrace as he walked past. ‘Wait.’ He held his axe out to the Apothecary. ‘The Chapter has lost enough this day.’

Silently, Nisroc clasped his hand to Amaru’s vambrace and took the proffered weapon.

The nosecone was cramped, only just accommodating the four Flesh Tearers. Nisroc had removed the gene-seed from Barbelo’s body while Maion had cut them an access hatch. They’d left what remained of the sergeant on the gantry. Maion bent the armoured panelling back into shape, heat-sealed it with the plasma cutter and squeezed his bulk between Harahel and Nisroc. Micos was still unconscious, and was only on his feet because there was no room to fall over.

‘We’re in.’ Nisroc opened a private channel to Amaru.

‘Ensure Tabbris sanctifies Blood Cog. Its spirit is strong; it will serve him well.’

‘It will taste flesh again,’ Nisroc answered. Tabbris was Amaru’s pupil, a novitiate Techmarine. That Amaru would cede him his weapon signified his faith in the novitiate’s abilities. Nisroc would see to it that the Master Artificer knew of Amaru’s wishes. ‘Death find you well, brother.’

Amaru said nothing. Extending a cable from his armour, he plugged into the firing console. Behind him, the forces of the Archenemy had already blasted through the rubble. He could hear them striding along the corridor. There was no time to perform the correct consecration or rites of firing. The missile’s machine-spirit was ancient. He hoped it would not be offended. Launch. Amaru sent the command to the missile. A tremor passed underfoot, rattling a canteen pack off a nearby workstation. Shrill klaxons screamed through the corridor as the warhead powered up. The Techmarine deactivated them. Sensors and bundles of thick cabling detached and fell away from the rocket as pressurised hydraulics moved it into the firing position. More rumbling. Fuel pipes retracted. Exhaust vents ground open beneath the floor of the silo. Amaru interrupted them, closing the grilles. The engines gurgled into life. More alarms rang out as the compound’s safety systems detected the block in the ventilation, Amaru overrode them, silencing the alarms and pushing the missile up thorough the shaft into the final position.

‘For the Chapter.’

A wash of flame erupted from the missile’s booster like the breath of an angry dragon, propelling it upwards on an expanding pillar of fire. Amaru’s world burned away in an instant, the temperature gauge on his retinal display flashing red as the thruster backwash broiled him. A second warning blinked across his vision for the briefest of instants before he, and everything else in the compound, was incinerated.

The maglift whispered to a stop. He stepped off into the corridor, his armoured boots making a dull thud as they contacted the deck plating. He paused for a moment while his enhanced eyes strained to adjust to the gloom. They could not. The walkway floated in complete, impenetrable darkness, shrouded by a long-forgotten technology that defied even the keenest of auspexes. To walk the passageways of this level was to know exactly where to tread or to fall to your doom amid the ancient bowels of the ship. He continued along the corridor, making the turns instinctively, following the pattern imprinted in his eidetic memory. His pace quickened as he felt his ire rise, his warrior blood drumming in his veins at the frustrating tediousness of the journey. He stopped and drew a breath, calming his mind. He did not have the luxury of indulging his baser nature. Such things were his burden to bear and some secrets were not meant for the light.

A door slid open into a darkened chamber. He stepped inside and the door closed behind him. The faint glow of an idling pict-screen cast the face of the room’s single occupant into half-shadow.

‘Where did you find them?’ As always, his voice was dangerous, his pensive demeanour only ever a heartbeat removed from the violent rage that made him such an implacable warrior.

‘The strike cruiser Jagged Blade intercepted them just beyond the Arere system.’ Captain Araton stepped closer, the light from the pict-screen illuminating the crimson of his breastplate. The serrated blade emblazoned on his armour was thrown into menacing relief.

‘Survivors?’

‘Only three, lord. The fourth…’ Araton paused, unsure how to continue. ‘The fourth, Brother Micos, was killed in transit.’

‘Explain.’

‘He succumbed to…a rage. The others were left with little choice.’

‘The curse?’

‘Perhaps, but Nisroc believed it to be something more, something worse.’ Araton turned to a console and activated the playback on the pict-screen. ‘These feeds were extracted from the datastacks the squad recovered from the outpost.’ The captain stepped away from the screen, retreating into the darkness.

++Recorder 3: Sanctum: I808++

The sanctum was alive with motion. Men clambered behind consoles and data stacks as explosions wracked the chamber. A straggler was hit in the back, the force of the blow spinning him through the air, his torso a bloodied mess. The Guardsmens’ fatigues marked them out as the Angorian Rifles, the garrison regiment of Arere. A figure burst into the room, too quick for the pict-recorder to capture fully. It barrelled into a huddle of Guardsmen. They tried to run. A vicious chain-weapon struck out and sent a bodiless head spinning past the pict-recorder lens.

An officer stood up and screamed, motioning for his men to fall back. His battleplate was blackened and pitted, his creased face caked with mire. Shrapnel danced around him as mass-reactive rounds slammed into the console he was using for cover. He shouted again, dragging the man nearest him to his feet.

A jet of super-heated flame blew over the console, incinerating both men in a wash of burning promethium.

++Recording Interrupted++

++Recorder 7: Barracks: I827++

Two squads of Angorian Rifles were taking cover behind a row of overturned kit-lockers. The barrels of their lasguns glowed hot as the troopers poured an endless stream of fire towards the doorway. Two objects flew in from off camera and exploded in front of the lockers. Ashen smoke filled the viewer.

It cleared to reveal a twisted mass of metal, the Angorians’ makeshift barricade in ruins. The corpses of half their number lay slumped lifelessly over the shredded lockers, shards of metal embedded in their flesh. A figure advanced from the doorway, his armoured back filling the viewer. The Guardsmen opened fire. Untroubled, the attacker fired back. The unmistakable muzzle flash of a boltgun illuminated the Angorians as they flipped backwards, torn apart by the mass-reactive rounds.

The attacker turned his crimson breast plate–

++Recording Interrupted++

++Recorder 19: Armoury: I901++

A crimson armoured warrior was sprinting down the corridor into a hail of las-fire, his breastplate scorched clean of insignia by their attentions. A bright muzzle-flash blazed into life up ahead. Heavy calibre, solid-state rounds began churning up the floor and walls as they stitched a line towards him. One struck his right pauldron. Splintered armour fragments struck the pict-recorder as he spun to the ground. The warrior rolled to his feet and continued into the gunfire, his weapon forgotten on the ground behind him as he disappeared from view.

The ruined corridor lay empty, battered ceramite flaking to the ground. The intensity of the gunfire lessened, sporadic rounds zipping down to the corridor. Then it died altogether. Within moments, the armoured warrior emerged from the end of the corridor. Blood pooled in the recesses of his damaged armour, which was pitted and cracked like the surface of a moon. His hands and forearms were thick with gore. Blood dripped from his fingertips, leaving a macabre trail behind him as he strode back towards his weapon.

++I901: Segment Ends++

++Recorder 12: Courtyard: I873++

A Flesh Tearer lay slumped against the wall, one of his brothers bent over him. The brother turned, withdrawing the blade he’d driven into the other’s heart. His helmet was gone, his face contorted into a bestial snarl. He made to rise when a searing plasma round struck his chest.

A shadow fell over the Flesh Tearer’s prone form. He pushed his hands into the dirt and tried to stand when a second plasma round obliterated his head in a stream of sparking gore.

The shadow grew larger until the Flesh Tearer’s executioner was right beneath the pict-recorder. The man looked up, straight into the lens.

The image froze as the viewer’s recog-system analysed the man’s face. The image blinked once as data began to scroll down the screen.

First Commissar Morvant, attached to the Angorian Rifles. Awarded Iron Faith honours for the Ivstyan Cleansing. Last posting Arere, Substation 12BX. Current status: Unknown.

The image blinked again and playback continued.

The man’s passive stare didn’t change as he raised his pistol towards the pict-recorder.

++Recording Interrupted++

The viewer clicked off, emitting a faint buzz of static as it returned to idle.

Silence persisted.

‘Destroy it.’

‘And Arere?’

‘Exterminatus.’ Gabriel Seth, Chapter Master of the Flesh Tearers, turned on his heel and headed back into the darkness.

He had a world to kill.

Gilead’s Curse

Chapter Four

Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett

I dreamt, I think, a strange and brutal dream. I sleep so little now that I am ancient, and when I do, I find myself riding the night horse with a vigor that belies my age and sex. The boy was right, it is always the skaven.

The stories I have heard and told of the skaven cause me to wonder yet if they are not the most damned of beasts, the most cruel and vicious of races; certainly, they haunt me still.

‘Go home,’ said Gilead, mildly revolted by the feel of the human words on his lips. ‘Return to your family.’

‘I have none,’ said the boy. ‘I was the last of them. My brothers, older and younger, and my baby sister... All are dead,’ he said, with a catch in his throat, making the words sound even more guttural and ugly to Gilead’s ears than they might otherwise.

‘You have a homestead, somewhere,’ said Gilead, ‘a village... a town.’

They were more words than he had spoken to another living soul since he had left his brethren at the funeral, more words than he cared to speak in the ugly human tongue.

‘All gone,’ said the boy. The catch in his throat had cleared. He spoke in a matter-of-fact tone without any discernible affect. Gilead turned to the boy, surprised by such composure in one so young and so unutterably related to the coarser species.

Gilead had been sitting before a small fire at the edge of one of the roads that radiated out from the dreadful, defiled town. He had not gone back into the woods; there was no need. The remaining humans were resting and regrouping and mourning their dead. They would not miss the elf, and neither would they travel at night.

Perhaps he had come there on purpose. Perhaps he had made it easy for the human boy to follow him and come upon him so easily and so quickly after the battle. He looked at the boy who stood a little way behind him and to his right, at the edge of the road. He said nothing, and then turned back to the simple meal that he was cooking at his fire. He pushed the point of his knife into the glowing orange-grey embers under the fire, spearing something that nestled there. With a flick of his wrist, the elf sent the object arcing through the air. It landed in the boy’s outstretched hands, but he had to toss it from one hand to the other to prevent it burning his palms. Ash dropped away from the small tuber, and the boy popped it into his mouth, biting hungrily into it. It was too hot, and he spat it out, the two pieces landing unceremoniously in his hands, the bright pink insides, fluffy and steaming.

When the first tuber was eaten, Gilead tossed the boy a second. It was sweeter than the first and dark purplish red in hue. After biting into it, the boy looked from its exposed flesh to Gilead, a question in his eyes.

‘It’s good,’ said Gilead. ‘Almost anything can be made to be edible.’

The boy smiled and took another healthy bite from the tuber.

The tea that Gilead handed to the boy in a horn beaker that looked more like a thimble, even in his small, feminine hands, tasted slightly bitter, but wonderfully aromatic. He did not know what it was made of, only that it was intense and warming, and unlike anything he had ever tasted. Somehow, it quenched his thirst too, despite being so meagre in quantity.

‘It is cleansing,’ said Gilead. ‘A little is enough.’

When he had finished drinking, the boy ran his little finger around the inside of the beaker and sucked on it, eager not to miss a drop of the delicious liquid.

Gilead did not smile; at least, if there was a smile somewhere within him, it did not find its way to his lips.

‘Sleep,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, we shall talk.’

‘Then I can stay with you?’ asked the boy.

‘Tomorrow, we shall talk,’ said Gilead again.

The boy looked at the elf’s face and saw that it was useless to ask his question again. He looked into a face that frightened him a little, but which was also reassuring. He knew what an elf was; everyone knew what one was, but no one that he knew had ever met a member of the ancient race, and he doubted that anyone he would ever know would find himself in the position of being the guest of one.

The countryside was full of them, and yet they went undetected by the human boy, until they were pointed out by Gilead; but the kid was smart and eager, and he soon learned the signs that would lead him underground, into the realms of the skaven.

The ground was often built-up around the entrances, which appeared on the shaded sides of mounds constructed by the rat-kind or in convenient natural slopes. They were generally not to be found in dense or difficult ground, so rarely very deeply into woodland where tree roots would make it difficult to penetrate easily underground.

In open country, it was easy enough to locate entrances to the burrows and warrens that the skaven excavated and then made their homes in, nor was it difficult to work out whether the entrances were currently in use or had been abandoned some time previously.

Gilead was a skilled tracker and was endlessly patient. He would watch and he would wait for clear evidence of skaven movement. He was capable of sitting in hiding, lying in wait for hours or even days at a time, despite cramped or difficult conditions.

The boy, once shown how to identify possible entrances to underground skaven lairs was sent out into the surrounding countryside to locate new positions. He travelled on foot over several miles each day, taking arcing paths in previously determined sectors. Gilead told him where to go, pointing out landmarks, and the boy covered the ground.

He had told the elf warrior his name once, but had never heard it spoken back to him. They did not talk. Gilead tolerated his presence because he was useful.

‘Aargh!’ he cried.

It was dusk and he had quartered a large area of pasture on the north slope of a wide shallow valley. The tree line had been cut back decades or even centuries ago and the land had clearly been used for common grazing. The animals were gone, the livestock long dead, either slaughtered to feed the famished locals, or starved to death for the want of enough healthy grass. The boy had been up to his waist in weeds that were clumping in odd formations and showing small flowers that were almost grey. Hungry, the boy had pulled a handful of the tall, slender stalks, but when he put the plant up to his nose, it stank of putrefaction and he tossed it aside in disgust.

It was late and he had not found any evidence of excavation, so the boy was hurrying back to the elf, through the last section he was supposed to be examining, convinced that to stop and study the land properly would be a waste of his time. Besides, the elf was bound to have something for him to eat, and it had been several hours since he had almost eaten the weeds that grew in this area.

He was embarrassed by the scream. He had placed a foot without looking, and it had dropped away beneath him, startling him into crying out. He had landed hard on his backside, but his foot had not touched the bottom of the hole, so there was no damage to his leg or ankle. He withdrew the leg and, still seated, began to part the weeds to expose a ragged, almost elliptical hole in the gently sloping ground.

The boy dropped his head closer as he saw the faint twinkle of a light somewhere below the opening, and then he cried out again.

Claws reached up to clutch the boy’s head, dragging him by the neck into the darkness. Then he heard a shriek close to his ear and another fleshy paw, complete with needle-sharp black claws, began to swipe and tear in the general direction of his face.

The boy grabbed the haft of his hoe close to the head, and drove it hard into the hole. He couldn’t see to aim the blow as his face was half-covered in grappling paws, but he could feel the end of his hoe meet the resistance of flesh-covered bones. Something squealed and bucked in a frenzy of movement. The boy could feel the ground beneath him vibrating with the violence of the skaven’s fit. He could not believe that the frenetic shrieking, bucking and clawing was deliberate.

The boy shook his head and neck clear of the flailing claws, but not before he had taken several deep scratches to his face and neck; one, connecting with his mouth had left a flap of skin hanging from his lower lip, exposing the pink of his gums. He backed away from the hole, watching intently for evidence of another attack from the rat.

He saw not one pair of shining eyes, but three. Or, at least, he counted five sparks of light glinting off five eyeballs, suggesting the presence of three of the skaven in the hole . Then he saw the flash of small, bright white claws, when previously he had seen only black talons. The squeals were pitched higher than he thought possible, even for the ratmen, and he could discern very little fur. He reached out to take a tuft of fine hair that had been torn out on the ragged lip of the hole, and rubbed it between his fingers; it was as fine as a baby’s breath, and, when he lifted it closer to his face to get a better look at it in the failing light, the hair was pale and silky and smelt sweet, like overripe fruit.

There was another shriek, and the boy thrust his hoe into the hole once more. He was less afraid for his own life, now, and more concerned about what was happening in the dark shadows of the burrow.

A claw reached up, took hold of the haft of the boy’s weapon and started yanking at it. The boy pulled back hard on his end of the staff, leaning his back against the slope and bracing his feet. After four or five seconds of stalemate, he suddenly let go his grip on the weapon, making his opponent fall abruptly backwards deeper into the hole. Then he renewed his grasp, burning his hands slightly as the wooden haft sped through his grip. Finally, he held it firmly again, close to the end of the long handle, but determined to make ground. The skaven who had fallen back into the hole must be hurt, surely? The boy pulled and thrust on the haft, by turns, knowing that he couldn’t risk letting go of his only weapon and losing it forever.

There was more scuffling and squealing in the hole and more evidence of flashing eyes and claws as the light began to ebb out of the air. Then something was bundled out of the hole onto the slope close to the boy’s feet. He peered at the bloody mess, not sure what to make of it, at first. It might just have been an old fur made into a bundle for storage, but it had new pink blood on it. Then he saw a black claw at the end of a deep gash, ripped out, no doubt, by the force of the blow that its owner had struck, and he knew that he was looking at the victim of vicious skaven infighting.

He kicked, gently at the bundle of fur, and it rolled clumsily over. The boy wanted to gag.

This was not a skaven soldier, an adult that could fight for itself in the scuffles for supremacy that occupied much of their time and thinking space. This was not a warrior being punished for some scheming insubordination. The skaven rat lying in a bloody heap at the boy’s feet was an infant. The skin on its belly had not yet grown hair and was still pink; where its hair had grown, it was soft and downy and a delicate colour. Its brand new claws, not yet the killing weapons that they might have become, were clean and white and almost transparent.

The boy sat dumbfounded for a moment. He knew that they were vicious and evil, but, until that moment, he had not realised just how ruthless the skaven were.

The first skaven to emerge, alive, from the hole in the ground was large and grey, and had only one eye in its misshaped head. The eye glinted blackly at the boy, caught off-guard by the horror of his realisation.

Before he knew what was happening, the boy was pinned to the cold earth beneath him by the handle of his own weapon. He looked into the one good eye that the ratman still owned, and braced himself for the onslaught to his olfactory senses that was bound to occur if he followed through with the thought that was forming in his mind.

He held his breath and kicked out in the direction of the ratman leaning on the handle of his hoe. It was his intention to dislodge the hoe and bring the ratman down on top of him so that he could fight it on his own terms. He had not factored in the possibility of the haft flexing and snapping off a couple of feet from his shoulder.

When the rat landed on him, it did so by impaling itself on the jagged end of the broken hoe handle. Its body thudded down on top of him, expelling in a foetid gust the last of the stale air in the skaven’s lungs.

Pinned to the slope, the boy thought, once again, that he would gag, or even faint at the stink that assailed his senses. Beyond that, he knew that he’d have to dislodge the surprising dead weight of the ratman in order to crawl out from under the corpse. He tried to bring a hand up to cover his face, pinch his nose, and cut off the stench, but both of his arms were pinned down. The corpse was leaching blood from the site of its fatal wound and the putrid, diseased smell of its insides added to the malodorous fog that was threatening to make the boy puke; a most unpleasant prospect when he had no way to turn his head.

Suddenly, the smell had abated, and the cold air hit the boy hard in the chest, leaving the creeping sensation of someone else’s blood cooling and congealing in his shirt.

He heard a yelp as he rose on his elbows to see who had rescued him. The last of the skaven, jaws wide in the midst of a death-scream, was run through on the point of Gilead’s sword, as the elf lunged effortlessly towards the ratman emerging from the hole in the ground. A deft shove, and the newly dead skaven fell back through the hole, folded almost in half, its clawed, hoof-like back feet the last of him to disappear below ground.

The one-eyed skaven was not nearly as dead as the boy had imagined. It yelped as it rolled over, the haft of the hoe clearly visible protruding through its back. It crawled away, grabbing the dead infant under one arm and trying to scurry off down the hole. It was a pitiful sight. Its life-force was all but spent and its blood organ was pumping wildly, desperately trying to enable the skaven’s escape.

Gilead only wiped the blood from his sword. The rat-thing was dead already; he wasn’t going to waste his efforts killing it again.

The elf sheathed his sword and looked at the boy. He did not speak, but it was enough that he had heard the commotion and come to investigate. The boy scrambled to his feet, wiped the worst of the blood off his face with his sleeve and pulled the blood-sodden shirt away from the sucking contact it was making with his skin. It disgusted him for a moment. Then he saw the remaining broken piece of his hoe, and the skaven’s putrid blood was all but forgotten. The hoe wasn’t a weapon, not really, and yet it’s balanced haft and sharpened blade had stood him in very good stead over the days and weeks that he had used it to combat the cursed skaven. Now it was broken and useless. He had not the tools to mend it, and, even if he could, the balance would be lost in the repair. Besides, he didn’t relish going after the one-eyed skaven to retrieve the missing section of handle from its corpse.

Gilead picked up the end of the broken hoe with the head attached and weighed it in his hand. Then he signaled for the boy to follow him, and they walked towards the small camp they had made where the slope of the land met the tree line. The boy thought they must be returning for their supper, and could see the welcoming drifting smoke of the small fire that Gilead had lit some time before. He had become used to the tubers and corms that the elf cooked for them both, looked forward to them, even.

As they reached the tree line, Gilead wove a path among the saplings that grew close to the edge of the wooded area. The woods had clearly been cultivated and used, but coppicing appeared to have stopped two or three years earlier. In these times of famine and plague, the boy was surprised to realise that Gilead had a wealth of young trees to choose from. The elf selected one that was growing straight and true at the centre of a clump that needed to be thinned out if any of the healthier saplings were to grow on unchecked. There were no woodsmen left to thin and coppice and manage the woodland, but there was at least hope that the woodland would survive and even thrive, eventually.

Gilead cut the sapling low to the ground, and examined the wood where it had been sliced into. He discarded the sapling briskly, and the boy noticed that there was rot at its base. Perhaps it was an illusion; perhaps the woodland was not as healthy as it appeared to be. Gilead cut two more saplings from the central growth, but both were equally rotten. Then he selected a sapling from the outer circle of growth. He cut the young tree away above where it curved at the base to accommodate the growth of other branches. He weighed the length of raw wood in his hands and nicked off the one or two side shoots that were developing close to its tapering end. The cut end was clean and white, and the grain tightly packed.

They walked the hundred yards or so back to the camp, and Gilead sat down by the fire. He retrieved what looked like a paring knife from his pack. When he began to strip the bark from the sapling, the boy wondered whether the tool he was using was appropriate to the work, but he had already seen the wonders that could be wrought with an elf-made blade and thought better of questioning Gilead. The boy coughed. Gilead looked up from his handiwork and nodded at the embers of the small fire, encouraging the boy to finish preparing their meal while he worked on.

When the boy woke the next morning, Gilead handed him his hoe. The haft was smooth as silk, glossy almost, and had been finished with some sort of wax that smelt fresh and sweet. The hoe gleamed with a high shine and was almost too sharp to the touch; it had been fixed to the handle with perfect dome-headed pins of a type that the boy had never seen on a farm tool, although he had once seen something similar in the pommel of a greatsword.

The boy didn’t know what to say. He simply looked at Gilead, who stood more than two heads taller than he was, and smiled up at the elf. He didn’t know whether Gilead had slept that night. He didn’t know how long it must have taken to produce something so perfect. To whittle and carve the haft should have taken a mere mortal a day or two, and to clean, straighten and hone a blade on the hoe at least another day. Gilead could not possibly have completed the work and slept, and yet the elf looked rested and alert.

‘We begin today,’ said the elf.

The boy looked at him, an eyebrow raised, questioning.

‘They know we are here,’ said Gilead. ‘We have sabotaged as many of their entrances underground as we were able, and now we attack.’

‘We’re going underground?’ asked the boy, his mouth wide with fear and wonder.

‘If the skaven are to cease their persecution of the humans, we must penetrate to the source of their evil and destroy their leader.’

‘We’re going underground,’ said the boy.

Gilead and the boy had sabotaged dozens of openings in the ground over the past weeks, cutting the skaven off from their prey above ground, and leaving them without escape routes. Gilead knew the lay of the land, knew every inch of hundreds of acres of pasture, scrub and woodland. He knew which entrances underground the skaven used most often and which had been abandoned or were used only in the direst of emergencies. Gilead and the boy had collapsed several of the portals, digging away at the earth around them. They had filled others with vegetation and rocks, and even rotten trees and branches torn from the woodland . Some, they had turned into traps, using tripwires and hidden obstacles that would bring the skaven crashing to the ground and cause lethal injuries.

Gilead and the boy had skirmished at the edges of some of the burrow holes. They had injured some of the skaven, and killed several, but they had never before sent their victims back down their own holes, and, last night, the one-eyed ratman had crawled back into his warren with a hoe handle through his torso.

When they climbed down into the hole in the slope where the boy had seen his first infant skaven, where the one-eyed ratman had retreated to die, they found nothing but a clump or two of grey fur and a broken, rotting leather thong that might have been part of some padded armour. They could smell death, putrescence and corruption, but the scent was hours old and mostly distant.

The boy didn’t care to think what had happened to the corpse of the infant skaven, and there was no time for misplaced sentiment.

It quickly became clear that there was no space underground with a ceiling high enough to accommodate the attenuated height of the elf, but Gilead seemed to lose none of his stealth or speed simply because he could not stand upright. The boy felt clumsy by comparison, even though he barely needed to drop his shoulders, let alone stoop, to walk unobstructed along the skaven-built tunnels and burrows.

It also became only too obvious that the boy could not function in the pitch darkness that soon engulfed them below ground. The skaven were adapted to the lack of light, and Gilead seemed to manage well enough, but the boy soon found himself tripping over his own feet. Gilead handed him what looked like a rush lantern, but on a much smaller scale. It had a brass reservoir in the lower half, shaped like a bowl so that it wouldn’t stand on a flat surface, and a small crystal cover above with a wick between the two that was barely thicker than a strand of strong hair. The boy wondered whether it would show any light at all, and if it did, for how long. Nonetheless, he held the cover open, while Gilead lit the wick, and was soon surrounded by enough soft light to show the earth beneath his feet for a pace or two, the walls at his sides and the ceiling pressing down on his head. The light seemed not to bleed at its furthest reaches, but to stop abruptly at a radius of about a yard and a half.

Gilead was the first to sniff out skaven scum, and he killed the ratmen they came across with consummate ease. The boy raised his hoe only once in the first few hours of their exploration. They had come to a junction, a place where one path forked into two, one tunnel rising steeply away, back to the surface, to an exit that Gilead knew he had booby-trapped with stakes thrust into the soft earth at dangerous angles, should the skaven happen to trip or fall into them. Gilead dealt swiftly with the two ratmen that emerged from the right-hand fork in the tunnel, which led deeper into the earth. He did not see the small, hunched figure of a third skaven as it peered around the edge of the tunnel that led back to the surface. The boy turned in that direction, something catching his eye in the darkness, and he was upon the skaven, thrusting the newly-sharpened blade of his hoe at an angle deep into the creature’s side. It did not cry out, it simply folded in half with the exhalation of a shallow, forced breath, and collapsed at the boy’s feet. The sound that followed could not possibly have been caused by his demise, could it? Was it a sound?

The boy looked to Gilead for guidance, and the elf raised a hand to indicate the boy remain still and silent.

The elf felt it through his feet, like a roll played on an impossibly deeply tuned drum. He felt the faint throb of dozens of scurrying feet thundering along pathways, tunnels and corridors, without knowing what it must mean.

The boy’s eyes grew large.

‘They’re coming,’ he said.

But the noise did not grow louder, and the vibrations did not increase. The skaven were not running towards the elf and the boy, but away from them.

The elf and the boy continued deeper into the labyrinth of warrens and burrows, always taking the path downwards when given a choice.

Once or twice, the tunnels opened out into excavated caverns and caves, which might have been rooms if the skaven lived like any other civilised race. They found crude seats made from mounds of earth with planks placed on top, or from short planks simply wedged into the hard walls of the burrows at sitting height. They saw bundles and piles of leather scraps and cloth, and shallow bowls full of foul liquid grease used to oil leather armour or as fuel for the clay lamps that sat in niches higher in the walls. In the darkest and dampest corners they found foodstuffs stored and piled, fermenting into heaps of unidentifiable vegetation. Once or twice, they saw young skaven foraging at the edges of the mounds for the liquescent treats they clearly craved. Gilead ignored them.

Sentries were posted only intermittently, mostly where the tunnels met or branched out. They seemed to have been chosen from the oldest and youngest of the active rat-warriors, from the sickest and least able. Gilead wasted little effort, simply running them through or cutting their arteries and letting them bleed out where they fell. They were no competition for him.

‘Why are they so few?’ asked the boy. ‘Where are the rest of them?’

Gilead looked at the boy and tipped his head slightly on one side as if in thought. Some of the burrows and tunnels had clearly been deserted for some time, but many of them still held the appalling scents of the skaven, and some even harboured the warmth of their recently retreating bodies.

The ratmen were short-lived and unsubtle, and could not possibly have any sort of plan. They had simply moved on, or were retreating for fear of their adversaries. Their kind had seen what Gilead and even the boy could do with a little brute force and effort and a decent weapon, so perhaps they preferred not to meet them in hand-to-hand combat. Perhaps they were cowards, after all.

They were not cowards. They were brutal, ruthless killers, and, for the only time in any of their short lives, they had a leader who could formulate a plan; they had a leader who could formulate a plan and, having done so, a leader who could compel the skaven horde to carry out that plan.

There were ratmen who could not, would not, concentrate for long enough to hear the plan. There were those who wanted nothing so much as to follow their senses, track the intruders into their tunnels and bring them crashing down at the mercy of their blades and claws and teeth, however unlikely that outcome might be. There were those who could not sit still, but broke away from their tribes and scoured the tunnels for prey. There were those too long in the tooth to leave the posts they had defended for all of their meagre lives. There were those too stupid to live. There were those whose thoughtless acts would lead the Fell One and the human boy ever closer to the heart of the underground compound that they called home. Dozens would die bringing the Fell One to the skaven Rat King, but their deaths would not be in vain, for they were, unwittingly perhaps, doing the better part of his bidding. There were any number that could be sacrificed, any number that would sacrifice themselves.

The remainder of the skaven, the vast majority, had congregated once more in the great crypt. They had fought their ways there, jostling one another, beating a path when the call had come. The traffic through the burrows, tunnels and warrens had been fast and dense and had left bodies in its wake.

Gilead had still been on the surface, mapping the entrances to the burrows, sabotaging them and planning his assault on the heart of the warren. Only the weak, the sick, the young and the disabled skaven remained close to the surface. He had killed the one-eyed old ratman with ease, had run through his companion, and the infant had died only moments after the boy had extricated his foot from the hole in the ground. The skaven Rat King had left traps like this one, close to the surface all over the plot of land that Gilead and the boy had quartered and examined. It mattered not which bait the Fell One took, it only mattered that his boy was a clumsy air-walker of the human kind, and would lead the elf into the snare that awaited. Every hole in the ground, every entrance to a burrow was rigged to bring down the clumsy boy; every hole had a small skirmish party ready to respond when the entrance was breeched. Wherever the boy fell, the Fell One would follow, and he would attack.

Gilead and the boy worked their way deeper and further into the network of tunnels and spaces below the ground. Gilead felt his way through the soles of his boots and the palms of his hands, mapping in his mind all the tunnels he had passed through, which directions they had run in, where they had intersected and what they were made of. The boy kept pace only because of the lantern in his hand, by its faint pool of concentrated light. He remained behind the elf, where he had been told to stay, in touch, but out of danger.

Gilead turned abruptly when the light behind him suddenly went out. He did not need it to see by, and he cast a hand along the passage behind him, marking out the yard, less than his arm’s length, between his position and where the boy should be. He was gone.

The elf heard a gasp, but it sounded as if it was several yards to the left of his position, eight to be precise, and, in his situation, it paid to be precise.

For a split second, Gilead was torn between continuing on his quest to find the leader of the skaven, and any loyalty he might have to the boy. He had not asked the human to follow him, and yet he had been content to use the boy when it suited him. Was the life of one mortal human more important than the lives of thousands, perhaps millions of his species? The Empire was at risk, had been for decades, and in the past few years had been plunged into a combination of plague and famine that seemed impossible to escape. Gilead’s loyalty was to his quest; his obligation was to save the race, not the man.

Almost unaware of what he was doing, Gilead strode the eight yards to his left where he had heard the boy inhale a frightened breath, drawing his sword and assessing the width of the tunnel from the curvature of the earth floor beneath his feet and the echo of his own light breath sounds, undetectable to whoever else might be in the tunnel.

The sound of leather kicking at earth, behind and to the right of Gilead’s position, told him that the boy was being dragged away against his will, but that he was conscious and fighting.

Gilead did not think to question why the boy was not dead. He knew why.

The elf wondered where he had gone wrong, how he could have misjudged the skaven so badly, how he could have underestimated any creature that could successfully lead such a massive horde of unpredictable, infantile, erratic followers.

Gilead had used the boy to halve his workload, and his enemy had used the same boy as bait.

All the elf could do now was walk into the storm that was to come, alert and prepared to fight off a thousand ratmen with their glass-marble eyes and their foetid breath, with their squeals and claws and tearing blades.

He was not afraid for himself, and he cared little enough for the boy.

Gilead followed the sounds of scuffling as they echoed through the tunnels, leading yet further down into the depths of the earth. There was nothing to see, but the elf could smell the anticipation of a gathered army. There was nothing as profound as the aroma of eager expectation in the minutes before adrenaline began to pump and blood began to flow, and a hundred new scents pervaded the battleground.

Suddenly able to stand fully upright, Gilead broke into a measured run, the sword held firmly in the on-guard position in his right hand, his left hand dragging lightly against the tunnel wall, balancing his footfalls and honing his sense of direction. This was no time to trip or fall.

Then there was light.

And there was sound.

The sound was the rapid breathing of several thousand skaven bodies made restless by the passage of time that had brought their foe to them. Their patience, always limited, was being controlled by their sovereign, standing proud at the centre of his mound, a disheveled mess of a boy prostrate before him.

The light was the greenish glow of a couple of dozen lanterns strung around and above the mound, lighting the Rat King of the skaven, not in a spot of light, but in a sickly haze.

As Gilead stepped into the vaulted crypt, the crowds parted. One or two of the skaven were driven mad by the sight of a foe they were not allowed to touch, and they twitched and danced in front of him, frothing at the mouth, chittering and clutching at themselves. Some could do nothing more effective than rend their clothes and pull out clumps of their hair as their eyes spun in their heads and their blood organs burst within their chests.

As they died, the elf stepped over them, walking deliberately towards the mound.

As they died, the boy lifted first his scratched, torn and bloody head, then his shoulders and torso from the ground at the Rat King’s feet. He had no hope of living. He did not deluded himself; the elf was a wondrous being, but there was little enough chance of him escaping death, let alone of him saving the boy, too.

Finding his way to one knee, and then hoisting himself painfully upright, the boy did himself proud, looking across the gap that divided them, out over a sea of mangy grey heads. He nodded to Gilead.

‘Quirin,’ said Gilead, fervently, but almost under his breath.

The boy heard the elf speak his name, and his eyes were suddenly full of life, even though the skin on his face, where it was visible between tears and scratches, was so pale in the greenish light as to be almost grey. Gilead saw that the boy was sweating, too, and knew that he could not live for long.

A score more of the skaven died of shock on hearing the elf uttering a word in his elegant, resonating tones, and hundreds ducked and shoved their ways further back into the crowd.

Every single skaven, including the Rat King, would have stood in abject fear before the Fell One in any other arena, but in this place, at this time, the hive mind had taken over. They were not singular, they were not fighting for their own sakes; the hive mind was greater than any individual, and no one would die in vain. They knew not what they died for, but they were accustomed to the brevity of their lives, and killed and died by instinct, because that is what they’d done for thousands of years; killed and died and made more ratmen, that was all.

Somehow, against the odds, the boy had held onto his hoe during his abduction. It lay on the mound before him, light playing off the blade-edge that Gilead had honed during the previous night.

The boy stooped to pick up the hoe, but was slow and unsteady, and was quickly surrounded by several of the Rat King’s bodyguard.

The Rat King laughed, and waved a hand over the boy as if to suggest that his guard should not defend him against the human.

Gilead’s pace towards the mound increased, and with the movement of his body through the air, the skaven stepped yet further back, forming a wide aisle for him to jog down. The air was overflowing with the stench of the liquefaction of stomach contents as skaven lost control of their bowels and gag reflexes. Several reached filthy claws up to ears and nostrils that had begun to trickle with dirty black blood. Still, they did not seek to attack the elf.

The boy lurched towards the Rat King with his hoe held out in front of him. The King ducked and wove and danced a jig around the boy, laughing and squealing in delight as his guard looked on. The boy staggered, one eye glazing over with the fever in his brow, the other filling with the blood that was oozing from several wounds in his face and head.

As the Rat King ducked and danced, he turned his weapon over in his hands, slicing lightly, rapidly through the air, impossibly close to the boy’s staggering body.

The boy tripped a little over his feet, and took the haft of his hoe in both hands, holding it vertically so that he could lean his weight down on it without falling to the floor.

As the blood began to seep from dozens of shallow slices in the boy’s skin, as the cloth of his shirt began to fall away in long ribbons, exposing the grey skin of his torso and the hundreds of wounds inflicted there, Gilead made a last effort to reach the mound, the boy he could not save and the Rat King he intended to kill.

The elf feinted towards the skaven lining his route, watching for an opportunity. Before they had a chance to retreat, Gilead found a skaven leg joint to step onto to elevate himself, a stooped shoulder for his next step and a head for his last, and he was up and over the bodyguard surrounding the Rat King. His eyes blazed as he confronted the ancient creature, but he held his sword away from his body to the right.

The Rat King did not dance or weave or squeal. He stood before the elf as still and silent as any skaven might be, yet Gilead could feel the creature tremble, despite the bright flashes of light that reflected off the marble surfaces of his eyes.

The Rat King dropped his weapon and fussed with something hanging around his neck, a length of ribbon or leather, perhaps. The Rat King pulled on the length of braided hair and the amulet tied to it. He clutched it in both paws and raised it above his head.

The skaven were fast because they were short-lived creatures. They had no capacity for reasoning, so every action was a staccato reaction, a primal response.

Gilead was fast too.

The attack came from behind Gilead to his left. It was a brutal, badly timed lunge, and Gilead deftly tripped the bodyguard and pierced his chest before he could rise from where he had fallen on the earth mound at the elf’s feet.

A second guard attacked at the length of his staff weapon, a cross between a scythe and a halberd, an ugly hybrid clearly concocted from the blades of two older weapons and the handle of a third. Gilead disarmed him with a flick of his wrist, and the weapon spiralled away into the crowd that was gathering around the focus of the fight. It took out three more ratmen, two of them at the knees, and a third because he was pushed into the fray by the skaven behind him. The last tripped over his feet, falling onto the curved scythe blade that jutted from the weapon’s handle.

Each skaven bodyguard that fell was replaced by another of his tribe, warrior’s all. Gilead found time to unsheathe his short blade, and, a weapon in each hand, cut and sliced his way through skin, bone, flaking leather armour and the putrid strips of rotten, greasy cloth that the skaven wound their hands and feet in.

Gilead blinked and could see it all. He could see the faces of hundreds of skaven on the slopes of the mound below him and out on the floor of the crypt. He could see nothing in their eyes but a lust to destroy. They were jostling and breaking into skirmishes among themselves, since they could neither reach their enemy, nor, if they could have come face-to-face with the Fell One would they have been allowed to kill him. He saw a kind of uncontrolled primal frenzy that he had not known existed, despite the stories he had heard about the rat-creatures.

He also saw the boy. He saw him look at the elf, his hero, and then he saw him close his eyes, involuntary. The bloodshot orbs rolled back into the boy’s head. Somehow, the boy held onto the handle of his hoe, and it kept him upright for what seemed like minutes. It was almost comical, the way the boy’s... Quirin’s… corpse was suspended, half-standing, half-kneeling, propped up by the weapon that Gilead had remade for him. Finally, the moment was over, and the boy was slumped on his face on the dirt mound.

Gilead wanted revenge, not only because the skaven had killed the boy, but because he had allowed it to happen, and his guilt and anger could result in nothing short of devastation to the skaven.

Gilead was shadowfast.

While he ducked and dived and sliced and lunged, and thrust his blade into squealing ratmen one after another, he looked around for the leader of this debauched race. He saw that the sea of rat-faces looking up at the mound had become much denser, those twitching maws and marble eyes closer together. The crowd was surging towards the dais mound, dragging its dead and wounded with it, crushing the weakest among its mass. As it moved in an unstoppable wave towards him, the Rat King rode on an impossible wave of rat-arms away from him, shaking the double-paw in which it clutched its magical amulet .

Gilead thrust with his short blade into the side of a rat that had changed its mind about doing battle with the elf, and was turning tail, attempting to run away. The blade ground on something as it punched through the leather armour, skin and bone of the creature’s torso, and, as the skaven turned, Gilead lost his grip on the weapon, his hands slick with the gore of dozens of the dead.

Without a thought, he scooped up the boy’s hoe and began to turn it over in his hand, weighing its usefulness. Gilead’s second weapon was gone, rendering his primary blade much less useful against so many attackers.

The elf sheathed his sword, grasped the hoe haft with both hands and began to wield it expertly. The handle end broke sternums and winded rats to death, or tripped them off their hind feet, tumbling them to the ground where they met their deaths by trampling. The sharpened head of the hoe cut through limbs and arteries, and even sliced a scraggy grey neck clean through, the rat’s head falling in one direction and its body in another.

They came at him over and over again, barely lifting their weapons to the elf before dying at his hand. Gilead looked around again at the circle of assailants pushing and shoving each other, either to take their turn at fighting him or to get away from his thrusting attacks. They were poorly armed. Many appeared to have broken their weapons deliberately. There were stringy ribbons of greasy cloth where once a blade had been wrapped to a staff, many of the blades looked old and dull and well beyond use, and those skaven with decent weapons turned their blades away and attacked with hafts and handles.

Gilead looked at the mass of bodies around him, which was vast, despite the fact that the ratmen were clearing bodies away from the focus of the battle as fast they could manage. Then he looked out again at the Rat King riding above his followers, relying on their loyalty to keep him aloft.

They did not see him move, they did not feel his footfalls pass over their heads and shoulders as the Fell One found a path out over the crowd towards the skaven sovereign. He could not lose the battle by killing all day and all night, and for as long as it took to decimate the skaven horde. He could not lose the battle when none of the creatures were able or willing to even attempt to kill him. Despite it all, he knew that this was a battle he could not win.

In the blink of an eye, the Rat King, with the help of experience gleaned through years of life that he should never have lived, homed in on the Fell One, and knew what he was doing. He cried out at his followers below him, and, letting the amulet fall to the length of the plaited hair string that it hung from, he began to spin the charm around his head.

The mesmerised ratmen watched as the great vaulted ceiling of the crypt, black and sparkling, filled with thousands of pinpricks of bright light. Some died on the spot; many opened their own veins, driven by wonder and awe to end their lives at this zenith of their sovereign’s power. The Rat King was returned safely to the dais on a wave of rat-paws, where he stood at the centre of the bloody mound. All of his bodyguards were gone, not even their bodies remaining on the mound, although much of their blood had been spilt there . Every tribal leader, every champion, every lieutenant had been killed by the Fell One. Every one of them would add to the Rat King’s longevity, but they were as nothing compared with this great catch. The Fell One was in their midst, and the Rat King had the ultimate power over him.

The Rat King cried out high and loud and long. The rats responded vigorously, sloughing off their mesmeric states to do their leader’s bidding.

As shadowfast as he was, Gilead did not expect the ratmen to know that he was using their heads and shoulders as stepping-stones, but the Rat King was preternaturally fast, too, and he could feel and read every vibration and every movement in the air. He had monitored The Fell One’s every move, and now it was time for him to best him, to capture him and to harness his life-force.

Without warning, the sea of bodies under Gilead’s feet disappeared, the rat’s answering the clarion call to disperse with all haste.

Gilead fell, suddenly, but not far. His drop was almost vertical, and, under other circumstances, he would simply have risen in his knees, his weapon in his hand, and fought on.

As Gilead hit the ground, the ratmen piled on top of him in a mass of sheer numbers that weighed him down, crushing him to the earth floor of the crypt, disabling him. His ability to be shadowfast was knocked out of him as his concentration broke in the fall, and it was as much as he could do to fill his lungs so that he would not be killed by the black mass of stinking bodies that lay on top of him.

Gilead could not move, and the mass of bodies above him did not move.

Dozens of rats died in the scrum that brought the Fell One down to earth and kept him there, hundreds had died in combat with him, and thousands had died in setting the trap and luring Gilead into their midst.

The Rat King looked down on the Fell One as he lay lifeless on the floor of his antechamber, tied every which way with leather thongs from old armour, with the greasy rags that the skaven used in the construction of their weapons and in their sovereign’s throne, and with lengths of strong sinew cut from skaven corpses.

The Rat King did not count his dead. He could not count, but he knew in his thrumming blood organ that if he could, he would take great pleasure in counting the scores, perhaps hundreds of years of life that this great bounty, this Fell One, would secure for him long into the future.

THE SHADOW IN THE GLASS

Steve Lyons

It was a quiet Moon-Day morning when the Inquisition came to Icthis.

Yriel Malechan was woken by the sounds of running footsteps, shouted warnings, slamming doors. She heard the distant snarls of engine-spirits and leapt from her cot.

The floorboards of the old cabin felt cold to her bare feet.

Yriel pressed an eye to a worm hole in the window shutters. It overlooked the little village’s main road – the climbing road – a good distance below.

A convoy of eight tanks was grinding its way along that road. Marching alongside them were red- and black-armoured troops, two hundred of them at least.

The procession was led by the witch hunters themselves: old, grim-faced men with tall hats and dark cloaks who wielded their devotional symbols like blunt weapons.

Yriel caught the eye of one and recoiled with a frightened gasp. She had felt, impossibly, as if the witch hunter was staring back at her, even at this distance, through her tiny spy hole. She had felt like he could see into her.

With a start, she remembered the mirror.

She had slept with it under her pillow. She retrieved it now, her hands shaking. The mirror looked as beautiful to Yriel in the shafts of dawn that pierced her roof as it had in the dusty gloom of the curio shop yesterday.

It was a perfect glass disc, mounted in an ornate frame. The frame was pressed with gold – whether real or not she had no way of telling, but it glistened all the same – and inset at its crown with a small, greenish-black gem.

But it wasn’t just the frame that made the mirror so alluring. It was what the mirror showed her.

The face that Yriel saw in the glass disc was recognisably her own. Somehow though, her pinched features in the glass seemed… distinguished, almost aristocratic. In the glass, she looked older than her seventeen years, but not too much older. Her hair, straw-coloured and lank in real life, was spun from lustrous golden threads in the glass and the mole on her left cheek was no longer a blemish but a beauty spot.

In real life, Yriel was a fisherman’s daughter, orphaned at nine and a washerwoman since then. In the back-to-front world inside the glass, she was a princess.

A harmless glamour, was how the shopkeeper had described it, and it certainly gave Yriel a secret thrill to see herself as she might have been.

A guilty thrill, she recognised.

She let out a little shriek as an armoured fist attacked her door.

She leapt across the tiny room and thrust the mirror back under her pillow. It was a poor hiding place, but she could think of none better.

Her attention had been so taken by the mirror that she hadn’t realised how much closer the engine-spirits of the tanks had come.

Yriel snatched up her rumpled everyday smock. She pulled it over her head, on top of her threadbare shift. She pushed her feet into her sandals.

She eased her door open, cautiously. No one stood on the threshold, but the narrow wynd outside was thronged with half-dressed, bleary-eyed neighbours.

The witch hunters and their army were following the road around, climbing the coastal cliff face into which Icthis was built. As well as their engines, Yriel could now hear an augmented voice booming praise to the God-Emperor and promising that the properly devout need have no fear of His judgement.

The red and black troops were spreading out across the village, into crannies like this one that the tanks were unable to penetrate. They were making sure that everyone was roused to hear their message.

Yriel felt relief that hers hadn’t been the only door knocked on. She saw that same emotion reflected in the faces of the folk around her.

She could hear her own questions echoed in their voices too. ‘Why here?’ they were asking in hushed, fearful whispers. ‘Why us?’

They had known – they had all known – that the Inquisition was on their world. None of them had ever dreamt that it would turn up on their doorsteps.

Yriel couldn’t tell what worried her neighbours more: the possibility that dark forces had taken root in their village, unseen, or the possibility that they hadn’t. She only knew that, at this moment, very few of them were secure in their innocence.

The mirror!

Yriel looked around, checked that no one was watching her. They weren’t. No one ever really looked at Yriel Malechan.

She slipped back into her cabin. She ran straight to her cot, to her pillow, to the mirror. She snatched it up and transferred it to the inside folds of her smock. She had to get rid of it before she was caught with it. What had she been thinking, accepting it in the first place? She had to take the mirror back. Back to where it had come from.

Yriel made her way downwards through the village, towards the docks. She squeezed through fissures in the cliff face and clattered down rough-hewn steps. She knew this maze of back ways well and could avoid the Inquisition’s troops with ease.

She could feel the cold, hard disc of the mirror pressed up against her breast.

She knew there was something wrong as she approached the market plateau. As was usual for this hour, it teemed with shoppers come to intercept the pick of the dawn’s catch before the rest was pickled for transport inland and off-world.

This morning’s crowd, however, had weightier matters on their minds than the freshness of their fish. Something had drawn them to the westernmost edge of the markets. Something that had struck the majority of them dumb.

Yriel’s mind began to form a dreadful suspicion. She elbowed her way through the crowd – she had to see what was happening, she had to know – and that suspicion, that dread, grew until she felt as if its icy grip would suffocate her.

The curio shop stood apart from its neighbouring cabins, on the edge of a precipice.

There were red and black soldiers swarming all over it.

Four soldiers – all women; the soldiers were all women, Yriel noticed – appeared in the shop’s doorway. They were dragging a prisoner between them: the wretched, disfigured shopkeeper. ‘I knew it,’ some people in the crowd were crowing. ‘Didn’t I always say…? …Never fitted in around here… Always something creepy about him.’

The shopkeeper was forced to his knees. His misshapen head was stooped, but then it always had been. A soldier drew her sword and flicked a rune to make it blaze with holy fire. A low gasp was raised from the crowd, part horror, part anticipation.

Yriel missed the moment of the shopkeeper’s execution. She had flinched away as the blade began its downwards swing towards his neck. She had closed her eyes.

She had seen the shopkeeper’s face for an instant. His rheumy eyes, staring out from around the suppurating wart on his nose. He hadn’t looked afraid.

He had almost seemed relieved.

The executioner kicked the shopkeeper’s body over the precipice. It plunged towards the uncaring waters below. The decapitated head was summarily sent to follow it. Before it landed, Yriel was already running. She didn’t know where to. She only knew she had to get away from that place, away from judgemental eyes.

She came to rest, when her heart and lungs could take no more, on an isolated outcrop. She took the mirror out from under her smock. I should throw it into the ocean, she thought. Bury it with its owner… its former owner.

The shopkeeper had been so eager to sell the mirror to Yriel. He had asked only four coins for it, and accepted two. I should have seen it then, she scolded herself fiercely. I should have realised that the mirror could bring me nothing but ill fate.

Yriel looked in the glass a final time. She saw the princess smiling back at her. She heard a soft voice that sounded like her own voice in her own head, and it was saying to her, Why should you feel guilty?

The Emperor knows, you’ve worked hard all your life. You’ve always said your prayers. Don’t you deserve something? Just one nice thing to call your own?

She didn’t want to listen to the voice. She couldn’t help but listen. She held the mirror out over the distant water. Her arms were trembling.

And what harm can a simple mirror do to anyone, if no one even knows you have it?

Why should anyone have the right to deny you this simple pleasure?

No one dared skip temple that morning. The draughty hall was packed from floor to rafters. Yriel had to stand in the gallery, wedged between brawny fishermen whose sea-salt and tobacco reek reminded her of her dead father.

They were addressed by an inquisitor, silver-haired and frail of limb but whose bearing and voice exuded the highest possible authority. The same man, Yriel was sure, whose gaze she had met briefly through her spy hole.

She avoided that gaze as it swept across the congregation.

The inquisitor declaimed against the insidious lures of the Ruinous Powers. He urged the faithful to turn their own gazes upon their neighbours, to recognise the subtle signs that they may have given in to temptation. A blight, he said, had gained a foothold in this village, and it must not be allowed to spread.

Icthis, the inquisitor declared, might yet be saved.

Yriel felt relieved that she had cast away the mirror.

She had only had it for a day, she told herself. Even less: a single evening and a night. And no one had seen her with it. No one but the shopkeeper, and he could tell no tales now. What harm had she done, anyway?

She heard the echo of the princess’s voice in her head: Why should you feel guilty?

They have no right to judge you!

Yriel raised her chin from her chest. When the inquisitor’s eyes next roved in her direction, she met them with her own gaze, defiantly.

She walked home with her head held high. She had no reason to feel ashamed, and even less to fear. She was sure that no one would see the signs of corruption in her. No one ever really looked at Yriel Malechan, after all.

She found a day’s work piled up on her step. She pushed open the cabin door and hauled in the overflowing baskets one by one. She lit a fire in her hearth and filled a pot with the last of her water. She didn’t think about the mirror.

She picked up two empty buckets. By the time she had returned from the well with both filled, the first pot would be nicely heated.

It would take four pots – six buckets’ worth – of water to fill the old tin bath. Then, Yriel would launder her neighbours’ clothes and bed sheets, then her own, then at last she would bathe herself if there was time.

She would have to hurry. If she didn’t return the laundry to its owners – and claim her meagre payment from them – before the markets closed tonight, she wouldn’t eat. Thanks to the lengthened service at the temple, she was already running late.

She hesitated at the door.

There was something under Yriel’s smock. It was a cold, hard disc, pressed up against her breast. Her heart knew what it was even as her head denied it.

But it can’t be… I cast it away… didn’t I?

She pulled the mirror out into the light. Her reflection – the image of the princess – almost seemed to be mocking her as she remembered holding the mirror out over the waiting ocean. Her fingers had felt stuck to its frame as if glued, but she had been determined to shake the cursed thing free, to be rid of it forever.

She didn’t remember letting the mirror go.

But that meant…

She must have had the mirror with her all along. In the temple. In the presence of the stern inquisitor and his retinue. Yriel felt a breathless terror at how easily she could have been exposed. She felt exhilarated too, because she hadn’t been.

She had to find a better hiding place. She dropped to her knees and scrabbled at the cabin’s floorboards until she found one loose that she could pry up with her fingers. Tiny, crawling insects scattered as daylight spilled into their cold, damp under-space.

Yriel wrapped the mirror in tissues to protect its lustre.

She was about to lay it down when a tissue slipped away, and she caught a glimpse of something ghastly underneath. She let out a startled shriek.

The mirror slipped through Yriel’s fingers. It fell through the gap in the floor, landing face-up in the dirt. It was a moment before Yriel dared look at it again. When she did, she saw the face of the princess looking back at her. But she knew…

She knew there had been another face in the glass. Just for the briefest instant.

The face of an old woman, her skin wizened and blemished, her nose a misshapen canker, but her eyes… Her eyes had been like the inquisitor’s eyes, burning deep into Yriel’s soul. Hard, greenish-black eyes. Malevolent eyes.

Yriel reached down. She folded the tissue paper back over the mirror. She replaced the floorboard and moved the tin bath to stand on top of it. She was confident that no one would find the mirror now. It was safe, but close at hand. Her little secret.

She pretended that she must have been imagining things. The only face in the mirror, she told herself, was mine. All else could only have been a trick of the light.

She pretended that, when she had been looking into the glass, looking at the princess, she hadn’t seen the shadow of the crone behind her.

Yriel retrieved the mirror the day the Inquisition left.

Their stay had been a short one, but it had left her village scarred.

Sixteen people, sixteen members of the church, had been charged with vile heresies, tried and executed. Their homes and workplaces had been torched to burn out the Chaos taint that may have clung to them. Families, friends and neighbours of these sinners had been subjected to merciless interrogations.

But, at last, the intangible trail of rumours that the witch hunters had been following had led them away to a more populous town inland.

Icthis had faced its judgement, and the Emperor had not found it wanting.

With almost indecent speed, village life returned to normal – for all but Yriel Malechan, that was. Her life had been forever changed.

It was a subtle change, at first, one that few people would have noticed.

Yriel’s routine, her daily drudgery, went on. Her knees still ached from kneeling, scrubbing other people’s clothes. Her back ached too, from hauling water from the well, and her shoulders from turning the handle of her stubborn old mangle.

But Yriel endured all this with a hopeful heart, because she knew…

She knew that she was special. She took the mirror out from underneath her pillow every hour, and it told her so.

And, because she was special, because Yriel had been chosen, she knew that good things were going to happen to her. And they did.

They were small things to begin with. A market trader who had short-changed Yriel had his stall collapse and much of his produce damaged. A rude old woman who barged past her in the wynd fell over and bloodied her face. A customer who criticised her work and withheld payment suffered a nasty accident.

Nobody could explain what had made his carriage wheel fly off like that.

Yriel took pleasure in every one of these minor victories. After all, the mirror told her, they were no more than a princess deserved. She never wondered why the only fortune she was ever granted was the misfortune of others.

Sometimes, when Yriel looked into the mirror, her eyes strayed past the princess to seek the other face in her shadow. Sometimes, she thought she glimpsed it, but then she always looked away before she could tell for sure.

The thought of the withered crone made Yriel feel afraid. But, on some buried level, she had come to accept the fact of its lurking presence.

There could be no princess, she understood, without the crone.

And, in the meantime, there was another way in which her life had been transformed. One wonderful, breathtaking, heart-fluttering way.

Yriel had met a boy.

She had bumped into Jaresh on her way back from the well.

It had been her fault, but he had apologised anyway. He had refilled her buckets and insisted on carrying them for her.

They had talked on their way back to her cabin. Jaresh, she had learned, was born in Icthis but had left with his grandparents as a child. He had recently returned to help care for an ailing great-aunt. Yriel knew of his family and had seen the plague warning daubed in red on the great-aunt’s door.

At nineteen years old, she had almost given up hope of finding herself a husband. Most of the eligible men of the village had been taken by the draft and were dead by now. The few that remained had been ensnared by grasping hussies, without a one of their heads ever turning in Yriel’s direction.

Jaresh was different. He didn’t only talk about himself. He had asked questions about Yriel too and had appeared to be interested in the answers.

Her heart had pounded as she had watched him receding down the wynd. As soon as he was out of sight, she had run inside her cabin, to seek the mirror’s reinforcement. The reflection of the princess had filled her with high hopes.

Is it possible, she had asked herself, that another might see me as this special glass does, see what I truly am? Might Jaresh be able to see the princess too?

She saw a great deal more of Jaresh in the following weeks and months. She had made sure that she would.

She watched him, building up a picture of his daily routine and changing hers to match it. She found a new route to the well that took her close to his great-aunt’s cabin, and always dawdled with her buckets in the hope of seeing him there. She often ‘ran into’ Jaresh at the markets as they shopped for the same things, and each time he had a smile and a cheery word for her.

It wasn’t enough.

Yriel longed for more than just these stolen moments with him. But the more encounters she contrived with Jaresh – the more opportunities he passed up to declare any finer feelings for her – the more futile her fervent hopes began to seem.

You can make him yours, the mirror told her, if you truly wish it.

And Yriel decided that, yes, she was tired of waiting. The next time she saw Jaresh, she would ensure that he saw her, really saw her and heard what she had to say. She would ask him to take her to the tavern, and of course he wouldn’t turn her down, because Jaresh was a gentleman and anyway, who could refuse a princess?

The following afternoon, Yriel saw Jaresh at the market plateau.

Holding hands with another woman.

Jaresh’s great-aunt had been a respected member of the Icthis community. So, her funeral on the clifftop drew a highly respectable crowd.

Yriel stood at the back, where Jaresh was unlikely to see her. She wanted desperately to go to him, but she had no words to comfort him. Anyway, he had Shorea by his side to share his tears. The silhouette of their two bodies entwined was burnt into Yriel’s eyes by incandescent orange flames.

Due to the manner of the great-aunt’s death, her possessions were cremated with her.

After all the elegies were said, the mourners tramped back down the cliff path, headed home. But Yriel stayed behind. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she found it all the same. A small white square, fluttering on the coastal breeze.

A facecloth. She stooped to examine it more closely.

It must have fallen from the bag of the great-aunt’s clothes, unnoticed. The facecloth was nothing special. It was perfectly plain, in fact. Yriel saw three or more like it every day. She had one like it herself.

As did Shorea, she recalled. Yriel had taken a special interest in Shorea’s laundry ever since she had recognised her love rival as one of her customers.

She picked up the facecloth, gingerly. Of the funeral pyre, only embers now remained, so she undertook to take the cloth home and burn it in her own hearth. She dropped it into her pocket, making sure it was the only thing in there.

How terrible it would be, mused Yriel, were somebody to confuse this infected facecloth with another.

A fortnight later, there was a red-paint warning on Shorea’s door.

Yriel didn’t knock. Her coins would have to wait, she thought. She left her basket of fresh laundry on the step and returned home.

She spent much of the following week staring into the mirror. She felt unsettled and she wasn’t sure why, but the princess in the glass offered Yriel reassurance. Perhaps this is just how things were meant to be, the princess said.

Yes. Yes, I’m sure that’s right, she thought. So, why should I feel guilty?

At the funeral, this time, she found the courage to step forward and to take Jaresh’s hand. She stammered something about how he shouldn’t be so sad, the Emperor had a plan for everyone and this was simply his plan for Shorea. He clung to her like a drowning man and, even as she shared his tears, Yriel’s heart sang.

The next morning, outside the temple, she heard Jaresh’s name whispered and looked for him but didn’t find him. She saw that some of his friends were standing in a group, murmuring and shaking their heads in despondence.

She mouthed her way through the first of the morning’s hymns. Her throat was dry and her head pounded with an anxious prayer. She told herself she was being paranoid, but still she held her breath as the village notices were read out.

Yriel ran home with tears streaming from her eyes. It was all she could do to hold her scream inside her breast until she was alone inside her cabin.

Of course, she went straight to the mirror.

She wanted to know how last night’s tragedy could have happened. Hadn’t she been promised – didn’t she deserve – better? She felt betrayed.

She kept thinking about Jaresh, as the fishermen must have found him. His broken body dashed on a jagged reef. Brittle fingers still clutching the ring he had bought for his betrothed as the ocean gently licked the rocks clean of his spilled life’s blood.

It isn’t fair! He was supposed to be mine!

Yriel looked into the mirror and gasped in horror.

The face of the withered crone was staring out at her.

She gaped at it, transfixed. It was the first time the crone had shown herself so boldly, the first time that Yriel had been able to take a proper look at her.

There was an ugly brown patch on the crone’s left cheek. It was a mole, realised Yriel, spreading out of control. A little tuft of wispy grey hairs sprouted from it.

Reflexively, she raised a hand to her own left cheek and the crone mirrored the movement. The crone’s thin, dry lips were twitching at their edges.

She was smirking at Yriel, mocking her pain, and Yriel couldn’t bear it. She felt her horror giving way to a surging, white-hot anger, and at last she wrenched her gaze away from the crone and cast the mirror to the floor with all her strength.

It refused to break.

Yriel’s twenty-third year was a bleak one for the village.

The plague was still spreading, without pattern or reason and despite all precautions. In the year’s third month, it was declared an epidemic and Icthis quarantined.

Exports were embargoed, which at first delighted Yriel because it depressed the price of fish and left her with coins to spare. She felt no sympathy for the fishermen, because at least they could feed themselves.

But soon, because the fishermen had so few coins to spend, the traders began to struggle too and their prices – for all goods – rose. At the same time, Yriel was finding fewer and fewer baskets on her step every day. She lost two long-term customers to the plague, four to suicide and the bulk of the rest to penny-pinching.

It isn’t fair, she complained to the smirking crone in the mirror. Why must I always be the one to suffer most?

The mirror hung on the wall of Yriel’s cabin now. Why not? she had thought one day, a few months earlier. No one ever visited her, so no one would ever see it.

She still saw the princess, sometimes, in the glass, but more often – since the outbreak of the plague – she saw the crone.

She had come to accept this, on the whole. She understood that the crone was better suited than the princess to help her through these difficult days. The crone put food on Yriel’s table every evening, whether she could afford it or not, and not only fish. She never saw where the food came from and chose not to ask.

Still, Yriel missed the princess and often searched for her in the crone’s shadow. An occasional glimpse was enough to reassure her and give her hope that the princess might yet come back for good.

On her twenty-third birthday, there was an altercation at the markets when a stallholder accused her of stealing. An indignant Yriel brushed him off and tried to leave, but the other traders barred her way until a constable could be summoned. He snatched Yriel’s bag from her shoulder and searched it brusquely.

She remembered the necklace. It was pretty and it had drawn her eye. She had dangled it against her chest and fantasised about receiving it as a birthday gift. But then… She hadn’t put the necklace in her bag, she insisted tearfully. It must have been planted by somebody with ill will towards her.

Yriel spent four hours in the pillory at the village crossroads.

Everyone was looking at her now, she noted bitterly. Not only looking; they would spit in her face or encourage their children to pelt her with rotten fish. As if she wasn’t already suffering enough in her uncomfortable chains with her rumbling stomach and her cheeks burning with resentment. It could have been any one of them in my place, she told herself, and she swore that she would make them all pay for this cruelty.

As soon as she was released, she would ask the mirror to tell her how.

The new priest at temple talked a great deal about daemons.

He spoke at length about the dream realm in which these malefic creatures lurked. He warned that they were always seeking, searching for an unguarded mind that they could enter and thus gain substance and power in the waking world.

His words made Yriel shift uncomfortably in her pew.

The old priest had been fond of euphemisms. His sermons had been heavy with blood and hellfire but light on actual detail, and Yriel had preferred it that way.

She began to skip temple services.

It wasn’t a difficult decision to take – or to justify to others if need be – as her health had worsened anyway. Years of hauling laundry baskets and kneeling over the old tin bath had taken their toll on Yriel’s joints. Her chest was weak – she blamed the draughts that sliced through her ramshackle cabin in winter – and her back ached.

She rarely left the cabin now before the early evening, when she showed up at the markets for the end-of-day scraps. She existed in the shadows, keeping her face hidden. She didn’t want to be looked at. She felt ashamed.

One day, she glimpsed herself in a mirror – a normal mirror, on a market stall – and caught her breath in horror. Yriel’s skin was pallid and her flaxen hair had faded almost to white. She was sure that she was shorter than she had been in her teens. She hardly recognised the face that was staring at her from the glass.

It was like she was looking at a ghost. Her own ghost.

She hurried home with an empty bag. She had been eyeing up a rancid joint on the butcher’s stall, but didn’t want to wait for it. Even up to the moment that she pushed open the cabin door, she didn’t know what she would do once she got inside.

She surprised herself. She snatched the mirror from the wall. She threw it under her cot, face – faces – down, where it wouldn’t be able to tempt her.

She buried her own faded face in her pillow and sobbed bitterly.

The mirror lied to me, thought Yriel. It always lied. There was never a princess!

The now-familiar voice in her head whispered in reply. But there could have been…

Time passed, and so too did the memory of Yriel’s humiliation. From the minds of the adults of the village, at least.

The children, unfortunately, were not so quick to forget.

Most mornings, she was woken by the sound of taunting chants outside her door. The first few times this happened, Yriel threw on her cloak and sandals and ran out into the wynd, sometimes with a broomstick in her hand.

Each time, this had the effect of scattering her young tormentors. They would flee from her, shrieking in terror but with excitement too. The next morning, they’d be back – and often in greater numbers and even bolder than before.

They would knock on Yriel’s door and run away and sometimes hurl eggs at her shutters. She tried to ignore them, but that didn’t help either; it only made them braver still, and more determined to provoke her into some kind of retaliation.

She knew how that game was played. When Yriel had been their age, her peers had played it just the same with the keeper of the curio shop. She had even dared knock on the shopkeeper’s door herself one time, although he hadn’t come to answer it and no one at the scholam had believed her when she had told them.

The children’s taunts grew meaner. At first, they had called Yriel a thief and a spiteful bat – until, one day, in an unguarded moment, she unleashed an angry torrent of curses against them and swiped at one of them with her broom handle.

They called her something else after that. Something a lot more dangerous.

You must not let such a rumour go unchecked, the crone insisted.

The mirror was back in its place on Yriel’s wall. She had no memory of re-hanging it there, but it didn’t surprise her that she had.

It could bring the witch hunters back to Icthis, said the crone, and that would be a disaster for us both.

Was the priest right? asked Yriel. He… he said… The priest said…

The priest told you, said the crone, to put your faith in his Emperor. He promised you that the Emperor loves you – but where is that love?

The Emperor took your father from you, Yriel, and left you without love. He sends you to sleep each night on cold sheets, an empty stomach and a pillow of tears. So, by what right does He presume to judge you for doing what you must to survive?

She was right, of course.

The Emperor’s world is unfair, thought Yriel, so, how can it be a sin to look into a simple mirror and wish that things could be otherwise?

And how could it be a sin for other… beings to do the same?

She thought she understood now. Suddenly, it was clear to Yriel that the crone needed her as much as she needed the crone.

Will you do one favour for me? she asked, hesitantly. Will you let me see…? And the crone’s face softened into an indulgent smile, and she agreed.

Yriel took down the mirror. She sat down on the edge of her cot with it cradled in her lap and gazed upon her true reflection in the glass, until the sun rose outside and dispelled the night’s shadows and with them its blissful dreams. Then, with a sigh, she forced herself to stand. She hung the mirror back up on its crooked nail in the wall.

And never once set eyes upon the princess’s face again.

The final seeds of Icthis’s ruin were sewn with the discovery of a book.

It had been mixed up with the bric-a-brac on a stall at the market plateau: an unlabelled journal filled with spidery handwriting that, when deciphered, was found to describe the foulest of blasphemies.

The stallholder – by chance, the same one who had called Yriel a thief – protested his innocence. But his name and the names of his wife and his sons and his closest friends were all recorded in the journal, along with minutes of secret meetings.

It was enough, in the eyes of most villagers, to convict.

They demanded that a magistrate be sent for, but the constables demurred.

There was no dark cult operating in Icthis, said the constables, for certainly they would have known about it. It was likely that the journal was, as the stallholder claimed, a fake. They issued some pointed reminders about the dangers of baseless rumours and, for a time, suspicious tongues were – reluctantly – stilled.

No one wanted the Inquisition to come back, after all.

But then, someone said something – not much, just an idle thought voiced, but someone else saw the sense of it and passed it on – and, within days, a new and even more pernicious rumour had taken root in the villagers’ hearts and minds, although no one could remember what had started the rumour in the first place.

One overcast evening, an inflamed mob fought their way into a constable’s cabin and discovered, in the space beneath his floorboards, exactly what they had expected to find: crude, handcrafted symbols of fealty to the darkest of powers.

The constable, by chance, was the same one who had arrested Yriel.

Like his cousin, the stallholder, he affected blamelessness, and friends and family and fellow constables supported him. But the mob, denied its sense of natural justice once, could not be stayed again. Angry words were exchanged, and punctuated by shaken fists. Lynching ropes were swiftly tied and torches lit. In return, lasguns were drawn and warning shots fired. Battle lines had been drawn.

Yriel played little part in the ensuing events, although she followed them keenly.

She continued to haunt the markets, where factions formed and plans were made in furtive whispers. She listened from beneath her sheets as each night’s peace was shattered by gunshots and raised voices. She watched through her spy hole as weekly funeral processions wound their ways along the village’s climbing road.

The children let her be now, finding more deserving targets for their malice. No one ever really looked at Yriel Malechan, which suited her well.

She felt no sympathy for her neighbours – those who found themselves caught up in an endless spiral of attacks and reprisals, whose lives and livelihoods were under threat – because what sympathy, what love, had they ever shown for her?

Why shouldn’t they suffer, for once?

And soon, a new sound was carried to Yriel on the night air, a new acrid smell to her nose and, through her spy hole, she saw lights flickering in the sky and the moon and stars obscured by a drifting haze of smoke.

Yriel was twenty-nine when Icthis burned.

It was a Thunder-Day morning when the Inquisition returned to Icthis.

Yriel heard them coming, as she had the first time, half her life ago. She had been expecting them for days, but still she felt her stomach tightening at the sound of approaching engine-spirits. She didn’t need to look outside this time. She struggled out of her cot. She dressed with trembling hands. She sat and waited.

It wasn’t long before an armoured fist attacked her door. She levered herself to her feet and shrank against the cabin wall as rusted hinges shattered.

Yriel flinched, whimpering, from the glare of the morning sunlight. It was immediately eclipsed, however, by an inrush of armoured troops. Red and black.

She was seized and held as the soldiers tore through her few possessions. They overturned her cot and the tin bath and the mangle. They pulled down shelves and wrenched up worm-eaten floorboards. They found the mirror on the wall. It hadn’t even occurred to Yriel to try to hide it.

She wondered what the soldiers saw in the glass. Enough, they made it very plain, to confirm the rumours they had been told about her. As if her stooped posture and the hideous growths on her face weren’t proof enough.

Yriel had the aspect of a woman three times her age. Touched by the Ruinous Powers, the soldiers pronounced. Made a conduit for their evil.

They dragged her outside and forced her to her aching knees.

Words of protest spat from Yriel’s tongue, although she knew they were in vain. She had done no wrong, she shrieked, they had no right to treat her this way.

She blamed the mirror. Couldn’t see they the real witch in the mirror?

A small crowd had collected in the wynd: dozens when she had imagined hundreds, but then Icthis was hardly more than a ghost village these days. The spectators were quiet, accepting, almost mournful. They had little fear of the witch hunters, this time, because this time it was they who had invited them into their homes.

Yriel heard booted footsteps ringing ominously off the cobblestones.

She raised her head, with an effort, to greet the figure that approached her, that now loomed over her. She regarded him with a bloodshot gaze.

The figure wore the tall hat and dark cloak of a witch hunter. He looked surprisingly young to Yriel, blond hair dancing on his shoulders. But his eyes were indisputably a witch hunter’s eyes, staring into her soul.

He had the mirror.

He asked if this was the artefact to which Yriel had referred. He asked her where she had come by it and what she had seen in it. He spoke in a quiet, almost friendly voice, and she tried her best to answer him but was choked by shame because under the inquisitor’s glare she found she couldn’t tell a lie, not even to herself.

The inquisitor told Yriel that he could see no witch in the mirror.

He held the mirror out to her, so that she could show it to him.

And, of course, the witch was there. Of course she was. Her misshapen face. The spreading mole on her cheek. Grey, scraggly hair. Of course the witch was there, because what else would one expect to see in a reflecting glass, after all?

What else but an image of oneself?

There was no need for a trial, the witch hunter declared, and no chance of mitigation. It was clear that the accused had surrendered herself to daemon-kind, and therefore sentence could be passed and carried out summarily. He pried the greenish-black gem from the mirror’s frame and ground it under his boot heel. He nodded to one of the red and black soldiers, who unsheathed her sword and ignited its holy fire.

Yriel was surprised to find herself no longer afraid. Perhaps, she thought, it was because she had always known her fate. She had lived this moment in her dreams so many times that it had slowly lost its power over her. She was almost relieved, in fact, that the moment was real at last, because that meant it would soon be over.

She faced her death with equanimity, because it was everything she deserved.

She didn’t even try to struggle as a soldier held her fast, as another pushed her head forwards to fully expose her neck. She heard the crackle of the burning blade as it was poised above its target, and she remembered the first time she had glimpsed the shadow in the glass and how afraid of it she had been. Such a long time ago now. Back before she had come to realise that the shadow was naught to fear.

If Yriel had one regret, in these final moments of her life, then it was this: that no one had ever understood her. No one ever really looked at Yriel Malechan, after all, so no one had ever been able to see her for what she truly was.

Her neighbours, the people who passed her by every day, had seen the face of a plain and awkward teenager, a downtrodden washerwoman, a wizened crone and now, finally – the only face they would remember – that of a convicted witch.

But, inside, Yriel was none of those things.

Inside, she was just a lost and lonely little girl who missed her father. A girl with an aching void in her heart and nothing good in her life with which to fill it. A girl who had only ever wanted to be noticed and respected and, yes, loved.

A little girl who, even now, still wished that she could have been a princess.

Redeemed

James Swallow

A fall of night, red as rust and blood, followed the transporter.

It ranged up high over the scoured, mirror-bright line of the main rail, casting a wall of shadow out beyond the prow of the train as the line of five carriages snaked across the desert. A tokamak reactor in the heart of the engine car at the rear of the coaches propelled them at breakneck speeds, surging down the straightaways, wheels skirling and gushing sparks on the curves as it raced to stay ahead of the storm front.

The razorwinds had come in fast, gathering up sharp dust and stones as large as a man’s fist from the plains of the Oxide Desert. Turbulent and deadly, the sandstorms could flense the flesh from an unprotected body in moments, turning dust into blades and flecks of gravel into bullets. They were a fact of life on the planet Baal, drawn into existence by the complex tidal pulls of its two large moons and their intertwined orbits. Even now, Baal Secundus lurked low in the late day sky, reflecting the ruddy light of the far sun, watching the train run like the eye of a patient hunter.

The rails spread like web threads across Baal’s surface, radiating out from the starport at Arch Rock, connecting to the great Fortress Monastery of the Blood Angels at Mount Seraph, the relical donjons at Sangre, and elsewhere to all the satellite compounds and facilities the Chapter maintained on their homeworld. It was a system borne out of necessity; the cruel weather patterns of the desert planet often grounded atmospheric craft and the sands slowed ground vehicles, while the trains could forge their way through all but the harshest of hurricanes. Still, it did not do to tempt fate, and the Chapter serf driving the engine opened the throttle a little more as the leading edge of the winds buffeted the trailing coach.

Inside the sun-seared bare metal of the carriages, there was little but freight, rows of storage pods and supply modules bound for the terminal at the end of the line. There were just three passengers on this run, and they had been granted an entire car to themselves. For them, and their singular cargo.

They were Adeptus Astartes, all three brothers of the Blood Angels Chapter. The elder two were Sternguard veterans, men of taciturn character who took their duties seriously. Neither had shown their faces since they boarded the train at the Fortress, their crowskull helmets perpetually scanning the interior of the carriage and the item they were watching over.

The third passenger wondered if they had been communicating on a private vox channel that he had not been invited to join. He went unhooded, his helm maglocked to the thigh plate of his armour, just below his bolt pistol’s battered holster. His attempts to engage them in conversation had been met with terse, single-word utterances, and finally he had given up. They had continued on for hours with only the rattle and grind of the wheels beneath them as accompaniment.

Brother Rafen let his attention drift to the scratched glassaic port and the view of the deep desert flashing past beyond it, and he wondered: what did they think of me?

The hard and damning truth about what had transpired on the planet Sabien, the confrontation that almost became a civil war among the Blood Angels, the deaths from Space Marine fighting Space Marine: these things were still ghostly and yet to be fully revealed to the rank and file of the Chapter. And yet, some element of the truth found its way out in barrack-room word and suspicion. Many had seen the Europae return wounded from the engagement against the traitorous Word Bearers, and battle-brothers in similar condition. Men talked – it was inevitable. Rafen had been told that Chapter Master Dante would issue a formal statement within a few days, but in the meantime men talked, and they wondered.

If they knew the truth, would they speak to me then? He asked himself. Or would they distrust me even more than they do now? Rafen pushed the questions away. It served nothing to dwell on such thoughts. He was here because there was one final duty he needed to perform. A ritual, of sorts, although not one that would be found in any books of catechism or battle rites.

His gaze was drawn back, inexorably, to the load that shared the carriage. A steel-grey titanium tube some three metres in length, hinged along its long axis and lined with warding runes, the container was suspended in the air by flexing cables strung from the walls, ceiling and floor of the rail car. It swayed gently with the motion of the train, the lines chiming as they alternately pulled taut and relaxed.

There were three personal seals next to the bloodlock that held the container closed, parchment tapes dangling from them. He could see the golden mark of Dante’s signet next to that of the High Librarian, Mephiston, and Brother Corbulo of the priesthood. There should have been a fourth, the mark of Sepharan of the Sanguinary Guard, but the praetorians had not been present on Baal when Rafen had come home with this prize. He heard tell that Sepharan and his men had been deployed into the Eye of Terror on a mission of great and secret import, but it was only a rumour.

More rumour, he mused. The enemy of fact. Rafen felt the sudden need to be sure of something, and he rose quickly, drawing the sharp attention of the veterans. Without pause, he advanced to the container.

The other warriors exchanged a silent glance, and their hands went to their bolters. They did not raise them; it was not yet a challenge. But when he reached for the burnished steel surface, from the corner of his eye he saw a gun muzzle shift slightly.

‘Step away, brother,’ said a grim voice.

‘You do not give me orders,’ Rafen replied, without looking up. On the forearm of his power armour he bore a recently applied chevron of yellow, designating the rank of brother-sergeant that had been newly awarded to him on the voyage back from Sabien. Despite the seniority of the Sternguard and their laurels, by technicality he outranked them both. He pulled off his gauntlet and laid his bare hand on the container.

Nothing. He wasn’t sure what he had expected to feel – some answering pulse of warmth, perhaps? Some echo of the magnificent power he had briefly experienced on the battlefield? Rafen wanted to open the container, but the veterans would never permit that, even if he could defeat the bloodlock.

Rafen felt conflicted. He was here on Master Dante’s sufferance, and likely then only because Lord Mephiston had spoken in support of his request. That last fact troubled him in a way he found it hard to articulate. The Lord of Death saw things with his witchsight that no man or transhuman could know, and it made Rafen uneasy to think that the Librarian had seen something in him.

But this… this strange, almost funereal obligation that Rafen had imposed upon himself, was the last line of connection between him and his sibling, Arkio.

Poor Arkio, dead upon the steps of a ruined shrine-world cathedral. Poor Arkio, unknowingly corrupted by the forces of Chaos. Rafen’s brother in blood, not just in battle-name, dead at his hand for the price of his Chapter’s deliverance. The promise to their long-perished father to protect his kindred had been broken, while his oath to the Emperor of Mankind remained whole.

Rafen drew back his hand and looked at the scarred, calloused skin of his fingers. For a moment, the red sunlight reflecting off the desert through the window made it appear as if his hand had been dipped in blood. Then the instant passed as he sensed the train making a wide turn, its forward velocity slowing.

‘We are approaching the Regio,’ said the other veteran.

‘Aye,’ Rafen relented, and turned away.

Baal was a world of extremes, from its frozen polar regions, heavy with dense metallic snows, to the searing radioactive belt of the equator, and much of its surface could barely be considered habitable by human standards. It was a landscape of sparse, desolate places, the legacy of a long-ago atomic war only remembered by the stubs of obliterated cities, lying like broken memorial stones in the places where the rust-sands had not engulfed them.

Thousands of years ago, in the deep erg where not even the hardiest of native tribal nomads would dare to venture, the first Techmarines of the Blood Angels had built the complex known as Regio Quinquaginta-Unus. Its High Gothic name drawn from an ancient Terran legend, the Regio was their holdfast outside the great Fortress Monastery. From orbit, it could be seen at the heart of a skein of lines cut into the desert, which traced the twenty-kilometre long design of a droplet of blood. The facility’s uppermost level was a ferrocrete disc dotted with landing bays and portals, ringed with stark battlements and bristling with guns. This was only the face it showed the world, however. The bones of the Regio extended far down and out into the crust of Baal, sprawling into a network beneath the burning wilderness like the taproots of cacti. There were hundreds of sublevels and countless kilometres of tunnels, cavernous chambers and blocks of habitat and research units. Many of the deepest tiers had not felt the tread of human feet for hundreds of years.

Here, the Blood Angels of the Armoury, under the command of Brother Incarael, the Master of the Blade, kept their machine-works where the weapons and vehicles of the Chapter were maintained and sanctified for their eternal service in the Emperor’s name. An army of Techmarines, Chapter serfs and indentured artificers preserved the legacy of the Chapter’s precious wargear. It was the minds of the Regio’s genii who had crafted weapons such as the Angelus boltgun. They sustained the slumber of the Chapter’s Dreadnoughts between wars and preserved the treasured Standard Template Construct device that allowed the Blood Angels to build the unique mark of Baal-pattern Predator tanks. More than once, the rare STC had been the target of avarice from within and without the Imperium, and the Techmarines of the Regio guarded it aggressively.

The complex performed one other function. It was also a trophy house for weapons and technology deemed too important, or too dangerous, to be displayed openly in the reliquaries of the Fortress Monastery; it was said that between fighting alongside their battle brothers and engaging in their sacred duties, the Techmarines of the Armoury conducted works into the study of enemy armaments and archeotech so as to sharpen the combat edge of their kinsmen.

Rafen watched the crenels and watchtowers of the Regio rise from the sands as the transporter drew closer, following the silver rail toward the yawning mouth of an entrance tunnel. Watery shimmers of heat rose off the desert all around, giving the complex a ghostly cast despite the oncoming glower of the razorwind.

A flicker of movement caught his eye. Up on a raised landing disc, a workgang of helots were drawing a segmented dome over a winged vessel parked there, as protection from the approaching storm. It wasn’t a standard craft like the Thunderhawks or Stormravens in use by the Chapter, more like the guncutters favoured by fringer crews and privateers. Rafen was struck by the livery of the ship as it vanished from his sight. The hull had been painted a red so dark it was almost black.

Then the train passed out of the waning day and into the unlit depths of the entrance tunnel. He felt the occulobe implants in his eyes tense as they immediately adjusted for the sharp drop in ambient light. The carriages rattled and growled as speed bled away to nothing. With a final hissing of brakes, the transporter rolled to a halt and great hatches in the walls of the rail cars fell open like ramps to allow servitors to begin the unloading cycle.

The Space Marine took a step toward the platform, looking around, taking it in. Rafen had never visited the Regio before, and it seemed a stark contrast to the ornate interiors of the Fortress Monastery. The complex had a heavy, brutalist ethic to its design, every surface sharply-cut from dense stone, blocky in form and function. There was no lack of regalia, but it was more martial, more practical than the elaborate ornaments of Chapter and honour in the Grand Annex, the great audience hall and the Silent Cloister. The first thing he saw were the twinned insignia of the Blood Angels and the Adeptus Mechanicus; the winged blood droplet of the Chapter was several scales bigger than the cyborg skull-and-cogwheel, and stood placed above it in symbolic recognition of who held superiority over this world.

‘Like battle-forged steel, our loyalty endures,’ said a voice, gruff with the effect of a vox-coder implant.

Rafen turned to see the approach of an Adeptus Astartes in red armour; not the vitae incarnadine of the Blood Angels, but something harsher, like the warning crimson of an alert sigil. Only one part of his wargear, his left shoulder pauldron, was the correct colour. It sported the Chapter’s insignia, but trimmed with a cog-tooth edging that repeated in other places over the other warrior’s armour.

The Techmarine made no move to doff his helmet, but he gave a small bow to the sergeant. The motion seemed strangely elaborate. The other Blood Angel’s power armour was equipped with a heavy, complex array of servo-arms emerging from his backpack, and they moved slightly as he did. Two of them ended in large manipulator claws, while a third sported the thick drum of a tool module. He carried no visible weapons.

‘I am Brother Krixos, warsmith of the Chapter arsenal,’ he intoned. ‘Welcome to the Regio, Sergeant Rafen. The Master of the Blade sends his regards, but I regret that issues of duty compel him to be elsewhere. I will be standing in his stead for the completion of this… this obligation.’

Rafen frowned at that but said nothing. The intentions of the Techmarine cadre were sometimes difficult to fathom. It was not a question of distrust – these warriors were Adeptus Astartes and Blood Angels to their marrow – but more one of dissimilarity. Every battle brother who set foot on the road to the rank of warsmith was first sent to the dominions of Mars, where he was trained by the priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus in the arcane lore of machine-spirits and technologia. They were as much servants of the Emperor upon the Golden Throne as they were adherents to the Cult of the Machine God; the Mechanicus cog-and-skull device on Krixos’s armour signified as such, showing the Techmarine’s dual fealty to his birth Chapter and his teachers. It was true to say that the kindred who called the Regio home stood aside from other Blood Angels because of who they were.

The emerald lenses of Krixos’s helmet stared impassively back at Rafen. His headgear was an unusually modified piece, thick with armour plates and additional sensor pits, lacking the fierce breath grille of Rafen’s Mark VII Aquila-pattern helm. Krixos turned slightly to beckon a heavy-set servitor with lifter blades instead of arms, and the helot ambled past Rafen, up into the carriage where it set to work taking on the weight of the container. The two Sternguard stood warily aside, maintaining their silence. Their job is done, Rafen reflected.

Krixos seemed to sense his line of thought. ‘I take stewardship of the weapon,’ he announced, in a formal, final tone. ‘You may return to the Fortress and rest assured that–’

‘I will see this to its ending,’ Rafen spoke over him. A jag of sudden, sharp emotion lanced through him. A reluctance. Fear, even?

The Techmarine hesitated before finally giving a careful nod. ‘As you wish.’ The hissing, plodding servitor emerged from the open rail carriage with the container suspended between its lifters, and walked away on its pre-programmed course. Krixos fell into step behind it and Rafen followed.

They made the descent into the lower levels of the facility aboard a wide inclinator platform the size of a duelling arena. The slab of steel decking creaked with the resonance of massive wheels turning beneath their feet, falling slowly down the angled shaft on heavy rollers in guide channels cut from the stone.

Standing in the middle of the inclinator, the blank-eyed servitor had the mesomorphic build of one from a heavy-gravity world, densely muscled and stocky with it. The slave stared unseeing into nothing, a punch-card command unit implanted in his chest ticking with clockwork. Rafen watched it for a moment. It seemed wrong that this servile, this commonplace mind-wiped thing, was carrying the weapon to its repose – there should have been ritual and ceremony, great circumstance and chronicles being written of the moment. This was a homecoming, after all.

Instead, the duty was being undertaken almost without note, in the shadows, and that sat poorly with Rafen. So many men had died to bring them to this point, not to celebrate their sacrifice with parades and hymnals seemed like a cheapening of their honour.

But that choice was not his to make. The Council of Angels, Commander Dante’s personal assemblage of advisors and confidantes drawn from the ranks of the Chapter at large, had ordered it so. The Blood Angels had been gravely wounded; this was not the first time such a thing had happened, nor even the worst occurrence, but the circumstances of it were troubling. The shadow of civil war had loomed briefly over the Chapter, a horror not seen since the terrible days of the Horus Heresy ten thousand years earlier. Although the threat to unity had ultimately been exorcised, the shock of the possibility of such an event still resonated, and many of the senior officers among Rafen’s battle brothers wanted all mention of this incident burned away and cast from their history, cut out like a cancer.

Imprudent to deny it, he thought. The battle may have been won but the echoes of the aftermath are yet to fade.

‘Brother-Sergeant?’ He became aware of Krixos at his side. ‘As you are here, there is a question that occupies me.’

Rafen’s lips thinned. ‘I will answer if I can.’

‘What happened out there? At Sabien? We have been told very little. Many of my brother Techmarines did not return with you.’

He immediately thought of Brother Lucion, the eager and dedicated Techmarine he had counted as a kinsman. Dead now, dead because of an allegiance Lucion chose to a falsehood, never knowing it to be so. He banished the man’s face from his mind. ‘We were tested,’ replied the sergeant, ‘and we have endured.’

‘Indeed?’ He could tell that his answer was not enough for Krixos, not nearly enough – but the warsmith did not press him any further.

The platform descended for another kilometre before it ground to a juddering halt, and thick steel doors drew back to give them passage through the twenty-seventh sub-level of the Regio. The servitor ambled on, and Rafen felt his pulse quicken as he took in the sights around him.

They had emerged in one of the great arsenal chambers, where the armourers, swordmakers and gunforgers of the Chapter maintained the weapons of the Blood Angels. Below, though a gridded walkway, he could see workstations where robed figures bent over boltguns and missile launchers, tending to them with the care of a parent nursing a child. On the upper level, displays of venerable armaments lined the passage, many of them sealed away behind panes of bullet-proof ironglass or the shimmer of protective energy fields.

In this age of heretics and mutants, witchkin and aliens, every Adeptus Astartes was, in his own way, a living expression of the Emperor’s wrath. They were Angels of Death, one and all, figures that strode like legends across every battleground to oppose all who would threaten the safety of the Imperium. And where they walked, they were venerated. Rafen remembered worlds where the populace went to their knees to worship them as the Blood Angels passed by. He and his kind were avatars of the God-Emperor of Mankind, and their aspect, their armour, the very guns in their hands, these things were all sacred and holy icons.

He saw weaponry that gave the truth to that ideal. A bolter from the Alchonis conflict, heavily detailed with brass filigree and platinum scrollwork, gold-wired blood drops carved out of red jade dangling on votive chains from the pistol grip and the muzzle. A chainsword with a handle wrapped in tanned orkskin leather, each individual tooth on the blade laser-etched with a single word from the Litany Vermillion. And there, so close that it caught his breath in his throat to be near to them, twinned combat daggers that had been owned by great Raldoron himself, and the thunder hammer that had been in the hands of the battle-martyr Zorael at the moment of his death. He looked about him and saw the tools heroes had used to forge their legends over ten millennia of ceaseless war.

These were not just devices for killing, but works of devotional artistry. In their own way, they were just as virtuous as the bones of a dead saint or a sanctified book of prayer. Everything around him was a museum piece, the least ancient of them dating back to the time of the Scouring, some so old that they might have been from before the Age of Unification. And yet, there were no relics here, not in the true sense of the word. These were not fragile things suspended in time, to be gawked at from a distance and mused upon by the unworthy. Every single martial device here was battle ready, should the need be there to call it to duty. Each gun was loaded and primed to fire, each sword’s edge keen. This was an armoury, a gallery of lethal art – and there could be no more fitting place for the burden he had brought with him.

‘Here,’ said Krixos, halting before an empty alcove. This section of the corridor was deeper in shadow, lit only by a line of lumen strips in the ceiling. Something about the depth and the shade of the gloom troubled Rafen. It was so stygian that even his occulobe implants could not peer all the way into it. Krixos seemed not to notice and Rafen dismissed the thought, listening as the Techmarine transmitted a brief pulse of binaric linguacode in the clear. In response to the sound, a hidden seam in the alcove wall creaked and gave way, shedding drifts of accumulated dust. Beyond was a small, crypt-like space, dressed with a low altar that sported a series of stays clearly designed to fit the titanium container.

‘Brother-Sergeant Rafen,’ said Krixos, beginning the final formal declaration. ‘Your stewardship of this weapon is at an end. In the name of the Regio and by the authority of the Master of the Blade, I stand ready to accept it. Will you yield it to me, in perpetuity for the Emperor’s eternal reign, in honour of Sanguinius?’

‘I…’ Now at last it came time to say the words, Rafen felt the same knot of hard emotion in his chest. Once he had turned his back on the weapon, the last thread of connection between Rafen and Arkio would be cut. It was almost as if to give it up would be to give up his blood-brother’s memory. He frowned; he would never allow that to happen. Let it go, Rafen told himself. You have done your duty. ‘I will yield,’ said the Blood Angel at last, and his hands came up to his chest to form the salute of the aquila.

‘So declared,’ said Krixos, without comment on his momentary pause. He gestured to the servitor, and the helot advanced toward the crypt-chamber.

‘It comes home,’ Rafen gave voice to his thoughts. ‘After so long.’

‘Yes.’ The voice came out of the darkness behind them like an unsheathed blade. ‘The weapon is brought home by the last to draw blood with it.’

Rafen and Krixos both reacted with shock, the sergeant’s hand snapping at his holstered bolt pistol, the Techmarine’s servo-harness turning a lasgun muzzle to point at the source of the sound.

‘Fitting,’ continued the voice, as its owner grew out of the shadows, approaching them with a steady, measured pace, ignoring their unease. Rafen’s eyes met a sullen gaze framed by an ashen face. Black hair fell to the warrior’s broad shoulders and the hint of something – an air of forbidding threat – played around his lips.

‘My lord…’ Krixos’s tone shifted, and Rafen could almost imagine the expression of confusion on the Techmarine’s face.

‘I came to bear witness,’ came the reply to the unasked question. The new arrival halted before Rafen, and the Blood Angel refused to turn away as the other Space Marine’s unflinching gaze bored into his. He found himself looking into the eyes of a legend; or as some of his brethren would have it, a nightmare.

The gene-curse of the Blood Angels, the fatal flaw that was the legacy of their long-dead primarch, manifested in them as the Red Thirst and the Black Rage. Two sides of the same sorrowful coin, both combined to push sane battle brothers into a berserker madness from which no-one could return should their iron self control ever slip. Rafen had touched the edges of the great fury himself back on Sabien, and the recollection of that moment still froze his heart when he returned to it. He had looked into that abyss, deep in his soul, and pulled back from the brink before it was too late – but many were not so lucky. The curse lay in the hearts of every Son of Sanguinius, Blood Angel and successor alike… and some fell far into that madness. Too far even for a last chance at redemption in the Death Company. When that horror claimed the mind and the soul of a battle brother, only the blade of the Executioner’s Axe was enough.

That blade lay at rest upon the shoulder of the warrior standing before Rafen, upon the one they called the Redeemer of the Lost, the High Chaplain.

‘I am Astorath,’ he intoned, and this time he showed his teeth. ‘Your name is known to me, Brother Rafen.’

Astorath the Grim. The name was a death-knell tolling in Rafen’s thoughts. Like the reaper-wraith myth from Old Night, Astorath was the Chooser of the Slain, forever voyaging the galaxy in search of those Sanguinius’s bloodline who had become lost to the Rage. He wore a suit of master-crafted artificer armour in blood-crimson, copper and gold. The plates resembled bunches of muscle, flayed of skin and shorn bare – Rafen had seen a similar design upon the armour of the psyker-lord Mephiston, but there the similarity between the two great Blood Angels ended. Where the Librarian was lit from within by an invisible sense of force, an ethereal aura that spoke of preternatural power, Astorath was bleak and shadowed. It was hard to quantify it, almost impossible to put into words… but it seemed as if there was a darkness clouding the air wherever the High Chaplain stood, a bitter and solemn ambience that stirred sinister memories in Rafen.

Strangely, a bolt of sudden anger raced through him and it took a near-physical effort for the sergeant not to snarl a question at Astorath. How many of my kinsmen have died by your hand?

The High Chaplain gave an almost imperceptible nod, as if something had been confirmed for him, and he turned to Krixos. ‘You wonder why I am here?’ He gestured in the air. ‘My wings. They were badly damaged during a clash on Kascol Trinus. I came to Baal to have Icarael’s Techmarines restore them to full working order.’

Rafen realized that the guncutter he had seen on his arrival could only have been The Fate, Astorath’s personal vessel. Yet it seemed so mundane to believe that the High Chaplain had arrived on the planet for something as minor as repairs to the black-winged flight pack he usually wore. Still, even without the dark arcs hanging over his shoulders, he still cut a formidable and daunting figure. The Blood Angel considered him. In many ways, Astorath was a harsh mirror-image of the ideal of their primarch, the antithesis of the exultant winged glory of Sanguinius. A balance of dark against the light, a living manifestation of the rage he was doomed forever to follow.

‘This matter is not of your concern, High Chaplain,’ the Techmarine was saying.

‘I want something,’ Astorath told them, ignoring Krixos’s words. ‘Before this rite is concluded.’ He nodded toward the container. ‘I want to see it.’

‘The weapon was sealed on the order of Lord Dante himself,’ Rafen insisted. ‘Your authority does not exceed his!’

‘Here and now it does, brother. And who are you to stop me?’ Before either of them could halt him, the High Chaplain pushed Krixos aside and stopped the servitor. Removing his gauntlet, Astorath tore off the seals and submitted himself to the bloodlock. To Rafen’s surprise, the container did not deny him, and slowly it arched open.

Wan, honeyed light spilled from the interior, banishing the shadows and the gloom. Every muscle in Rafen’s body tensed as the warm radiance touched him, gentle like sunlight on his face. The dark memories of Sabien stirred in him as Krixos remained rooted to the spot, still as a statue.

Inside the container was the weapon.

A spear made of golden metal, the haft was sculpted into a winged figure in a sanguinary high priest’s vestments, embossed with an ornate purity seal marked with the Emperor’s personal lightning-bolt sigil. It grew into a hollow-cored blade, shaped like a teardrop, and the metal seemed to emit a steady glow.

Lost in the chaos that followed the sundering of the Imperium during the Horus Heresy, passed into myth and legend for millennia until an expedition set off to recover it once and for all, the spear had finally completed its great journey across light-years, time and war. This was the weapon of a primarch, a weapon that, in defiance of all possibility, Rafen had wielded against the forces of the Ruinous Powers and used to dispatch a daemonic creature. This was the spear that had killed his sibling, a blade that long ago the Emperor himself had forged as a gift to his angelic son.

‘The Hasta Fatalis,’ whispered Astorath, a note of awe in his voice. ‘The Spear of Telesto. By the Throne, what a thing of beauty…’ He reached a hand into the container.

‘No–’ The word escaped from Rafen’s lips before he could stop it. ‘You cannot.’

‘You do not give me orders,’ Astorath replied, echoing Rafen’s earlier words back to him. The High Chaplain gently placed his palm on the haft of the weapon and Rafen saw him tremble slightly at the instant of contact. Astorath did not possess the preternatural insight of a psyker, but some said he had a peculiar gift of his own, an instinct that drew him to places where the curse of the rage and the thirst ran strong. Rafen wondered what Astorath experienced in that brief moment, coming so close to an artefact that had been made for the hands of their primarch and gene-father. Did he feel the same connection that Rafen had? The sound of blood roaring in his ears, like calling out to like? His memory of those feelings was transcendent and terrible, and not something he would dare to repeat.

Astorath’s hand moved to the teardrop blade and found something there, a faint patch of discolouration deposited on the golden metal. But how could that be possible? Rafen wondered. The blade burned off all stain of spilled blood, I saw it happen…

The High Chaplain brushed his fingers over the tiny specks of dried vitae and brought them to his nostrils. He tested the scent, licked at the dry powder; then he turned his gaze on Rafen again, measuring him. Somehow, he knows.

After a long moment, Astorath spoke again. ‘I have what I came for.’ He bowed reverently to the spear and made the sign of the aquila. His hand snapped up and slammed the container closed, the noise echoing like a gunshot. ‘Proceed,’ he said, turning his back on them to retreat into the long shadows.

Rafen watched him go, more uncertain than ever as to where his fate was leading him.

‘The High Chaplain’s presence here bodes ill,’ said Krixos quietly.

‘His curiosity seems to have been sated,’ Rafen offered, but without conviction.

‘Wherever he walks, the Black Rage is close at hand.’

Rafen eyed the Techmarine. ‘It is his duty to seek it out.’

‘His presence brings it to the surface,’ Krixos countered. ‘Astorath causes good warriors to question their own truth wherever he goes. He brings doubt and mistrust in his wake.’ The Techmarine paused, cocking his head; Rafen knew he was listening to a vox channel relayed through his helmet. ‘Even now, word spreads of his arrival here. Every brother in the Regio cannot help but wonder who the executioner has come for.’

‘He said he was here for your skills, not for your heads.’

Krixos made a noise in his throat, a grunt of dry amusement. ‘He need not have come home to Baal for those repairs to be done. Any forge world of sufficient expertise would have sufficed. It is a pretext.’

‘For what?’

‘I dread to consider.’ Krixos looked away.

The servitor placed the container on the rack and backed out of the alcove. Automatically, the thick stone walls ground together. Rafen watched it happen, schooling his aspect to remain impassive. ‘It is done,’ he said aloud. ‘And so am I.’ The sergeant nodded to the Techmarine. ‘Warsmith, my thanks. I will return to the railhead and–’

Krixos held up a hand. ‘I have been informed that the razorwinds have struck the complex with deadly force. All transports have been locked down for the duration of the storm.’

‘How long will that be?’

‘Several hours at the least. A day at most.’ Krixos paused. ‘The Regio can offer you some sustenance while you wait…’

Rafen gave the sealed alcove one last look. ‘A dormitory room, then. Somewhere I can have some peace to rest and meditate.’

‘This way,’ said the Techmarine, leading him back to the inclinator.

The chamber they gave him was a sparsely-furnished cell on one of the habitat levels, little more than a stone box with a lumen globe in the ceiling, a bed and an icon of the Golden Throne impact-welded to the wall. Like everything else inside the Regio, the air within was dry in a way that seemed to deaden all ambient sound.

Rafen placed his helmet, weapon-belt and holster on the pallet, and took to one knee on the floor. There was a chapel a few levels above, as Krixos has informed him, and the offer had been made for him to remain there in prayer if he so wished it. Rafen did wish to pray to his Emperor and his primarch, but not in the sight of others. He wanted some privacy in which to consider the questions that plagued him.

There was nothing in the cell to mark the passage of time, only the Blood Angel’s internal reckoning, and he did not glance at the chronometer embedded in his helmet display. Instead, Rafen let himself come adrift from the moment. Minutes or hours passed as he tried to find a point of tranquillity from which to observe himself and weigh his own concerns. He had limited success.

His thoughts continued to return to Sabien, and before that the war-grave world of Cybele and the Forge at Shenlong. The blood that had been shed by him on those three planets seemed distant, the idea of it like a story that had been told to Rafen by someone else, by some other Space Marine who was him, who had experienced these things.

He reached for the memories, drilling down into his own recollection, but he was reticent. Did he really want to relive those moments, now that the threat to his Chapter was ended? Would it not simply be better to just… move on?

‘No.’ The word was raspy, and it sounded as if he had not spoken in days. ‘No,’ he repeated, with force, saying it aloud again for any ethereal beings who might be turning their eyes toward him. ‘I will not forget.’ Rafen would make sure that the brethren who would rather ignore the hard lessons he had bled through would not be given the chance.

It is not over. The shadow of blighted Chaos that dared to try and corrupt the Chapter had been purged by the light of righteous souls, but the wounds left behind had yet to heal. Many battle brothers had perished in the insanity of it all, lives snuffed out and glorious futures cut short – but the Chapter would ever endure, just as Rafen had told Krixos. In thousands of years of war and history, there had never come a time when the Blood Angels had been cut so deeply that they had faltered. Not at Signus Prime, when the treachery of the primarch’s errant brother Horus Lupercal had thrown the entire Legion into a meat grinder; not at Holy Terra during the final siege of the Heresy when Sanguinius himself had died and left his sons without their father; not in the wars at Al-Khadir and the Kursa Ranges, or even in the aftermath of the Secoris Tragedy centuries past, when the Chapter had been reduced in number to less than a hundred warriors after a catastrophic space hulk intervention.

The Blood Angels would never be allowed to die, and while Rafen’s existence and that of his brothers in arms would come and go across the march of time, the essence of the Sons of Sanguinius would endure until the day the final victory came. He nodded to himself, holding on to the insight, taking comfort from it.

‘Blood endures,’ he told the dry, silent air.

As he bowed his head, the sirens began to wail. Rafen reacted instantly, shaking off the drag of his inaction and springing to his feet. The weapon belt was first, secured and then checked, his bolt pistol cocked and loaded. He grabbed his helmet and wrenched open the cell’s steel hatch.

Out in the narrow corridor, chaser lights strobed red and white, extending away in to the distance. He saw figures moving along a junction to the right, Chapter serfs by the look of them, sprinting away.

‘You!’ he called. ‘Heed me!’

None of them stopped, and he wondered if they had heard him over the sirens. Frowning, Rafen donned his helmet and activated the power armour’s internal vox unit. The monitor glyphs returned a steady No Signal display, and the Blood Angel felt the first real inkling of genuine concern. The heavy rock and ferrocrete of the Regio was what made it virtually impregnable, but it also had the effect of making vox communications difficult. Still, even with the attenuation caused by the strata all around, Rafen should have been able to pick up another Adeptus Astartes nearby. He gave up the attempt and went to the closest intercom unit. Wired into the Regio’s grid, it should have been able to connect him immediately to the command centre. Nothing but dead static answered him.

He drew the bolt pistol and thumbed off the safety catch, and for the second time that day he heard the voice from the shadows.

‘Rafen.’ From ahead, a broad-shouldered figure was framed against the glow of the alert lights. Astorath advanced with urgency, and he had the Executioner’s Axe in his hand.

‘My lord.’ The Blood Angel’s hand tightened on the pistol grip. If the High Chaplain had come to take his head, Rafen would not go easily.

Astorath did not seem to notice the gun. ‘My vox is nulled. Yours?’

‘The same.’

He nodded gravely. ‘They must have done something. Blanketed the zone with a jamming field.’ He looked back the way he had come. ‘I did not think there were any of us on this level. Follow me.’

But Rafen did not take a step. ‘They?’ he repeated.

‘You have been here all along.’ Astorath sounded it out. ‘Of course. Word did not reach you.’

‘I do not understand.’

The High Chaplain’s cold eyes studied him. ‘We are under attack, brother. I suspect that they came in under the cover of the razorwind storm.’ He looked away. ‘Raptors, brother-sergeant, by the hundredfold. Sent by the traitor Sons of Lorgar.’

‘The Word Bearers?’ It seemed like blasphemy to say the name of the Chaos warband aloud. ‘Here, on Baal? They would not dare to strike at our homeworld!’

And yet, even as he said it, Rafen knew that such a deed was not beyond them. He had fought the Word Bearers and seen the fury and insanity that drove their freakish, corrupted zealotry. But such an attack would be suicidal, and any gains they made would be wiped out once the shock of the surprise assault was dispelled.

‘I have heard no gunfire… and how could they reach our soil? Our battle barges are in orbit, our defence platforms fully manned…’

‘There is more than one way to thread the labyrinth,’ said the High Chaplain darkly. ‘Extreme-range teleportation from a stealth vessel in far orbit, a warp gate conjuring… an entire planet can never be completely secure.’

Rafen thought it through. Attacking the Regio from without was madness. The Raptors would dash themselves against the battlements and perish under hails of gunfire from the weapons at the walls…

Unless…

Astorath nodded again, pre-empting his train of thought. ‘They may already be inside. The doors may have been opened by treachery.’

A cold rush spread through Rafen’s blood. ‘Then the Word Bearers have come to loot this place, not to hold it. They must want–’

‘The spear, aye. No doubt to assuage the hurt that was done to them.’

Rafen’s heart was hammering in his chest. That could not be allowed to happen. ‘We have to protect the weapon. We have to get to the reliquary.’

Astorath beckoned him. ‘The inclinator is this way.’

The platform was in place in the throat of the shaft, and Rafen cast around as they crossed to it, looking for signs of life. Despite glimpsing the Chapter serfs moments earlier, there seemed now to be no sign of them. Perhaps they had gone to ground in one of the other chambers. He wanted to be sure, but the High Chaplain urged him on.

Astorath moved swiftly to the control podium on the far side of the platform, and Rafen looked up. The inclinator shaft stretched away above, rings of warning lights growing progressively smaller as they receded. He set his helmet’s audial sensors to maximum perceptive range, trying to filter out the sirens. Rafen listened for the sounds of combat, for gunfire or detonations, but he detected nothing.

‘We should try to find Brother Krixos,’ he said, turning back to the other Blood Angel. ‘If he-’

The rest of his words were lost in the flat report of an explosion, as a blast of smoke, fire and noise erupted out of the inclinator’s controls. Astorath caught the discharge at point-blank range and it blew him back across the wide elevator deck, ceramite screeching on metal as the High Chaplain skidded and tumbled.

Rafen ran toward him, just as the platform gave off a howl of tortured metal. One of the roller guides stuttered and slipped, and suddenly the deck was canted at a steep angle. Untethered cargo modules spilled across the inclinator, and Rafen threw himself aside, narrowly avoiding a collision with a hulking steel crate the size of a Dreadnought. Grabbing at a guide rail for purchase, Rafen moved as quickly as could toward Astorath’s prone form. He saw the High Chaplain move, heard him groan. The chestplate of his armour was smoking but the damage seemed minimal.

Then all at once, the guide rollers holding the platform in place slipped their moorings, and the inclinator shuddered and fell. Rafen lost his grip and rolled out across the decking, slamming into a quad of heavy storage tanks. The decking vibrated like a drum skin and Rafen could not regain his balance or his footing. He experienced the giddy, vertiginous rush of the headlong fall, strings of warning lights flashing past, racing away as they plummeted into the deeps of the Regio. He saw the tier counter rotating wildly, wooden ticker slats turning inside a brass cage, moving so fast he couldn’t read them.

The autonomic brakes finally snapped on, but it seemed to do little to slow them. Instead, great fountains of yellow sparks gushed from the smouldering rollers and the hot stink of burning metal filled Rafen’s nostrils. The platform crashed through ancient barrier plates erected to seal off lower levels, obliterating them in its headlong plunge. Some part of the Blood Angel’s mind was marvelling – how deep could this complex go? The indicator lights ceased, the last ring of them pulling away, and the inclinator dropped into a black chasm.

Then the impact. Rafen was thrown into the air, spinning through the darkness in the midst of the crash of splintering metal. His head smacked against the inside of his helmet and, mercifully, he fell again, this time into a different kind of void.

He dreamed of rain on his face.

Rafen dreamed of a ruined cathedral on a mausoleum planet, under weeping skies slashed by stark lances of lightning. He dreamed of falling without motion, of shadows and pain.

The scent of blood brought him slowly back to wakefulness. His cheek was wet, and he could feel fluid pooling. Rafen blinked, scanning the visible glyphs across the line of his field of vision. His helmet had been damaged, along with some of the actuators in his legs, but the cowl of ceramite and steel that surrounded him had taken the brunt of the crash.

He took stock of himself, feeling for injuries. Some minor breaks in his bones, contusions and the like, things that would have been deadly to a common human but little more than an irritant to a Space Marine. Rafen sat up and cast around. The preysight setting of his helm was non-functional, so with an exasperated grunt he removed it and secured it at his waist. The wetness on his face was blood from a wound across his temple that even now was staunching itself as the gene-engineered cells from his Larraman implant scabbed over the injury. He wiped the excess fluid away and peered into the gloom, shifting spars of twisted metal that had fallen across him. ‘Chaplain?’ he called into the shadows.

‘Here,’ said a voice close by.

Rafen rose to find Astorath standing behind him, his pale face corpselike in the dimness. ‘How long…?’ He winced at a jolt of pain from his scalp.

‘You can walk,’ said the High Chaplain. ‘So we walk.’ Astorath removed a chemical lumen stick from a pouch on his belt and waved it before them. ‘Look, there.’ He indicated a tunnel mouth not far from the wreckage of the inclinator platform.

Rafen took a step and then halted, looking up. Wreaths of smoke and wedges of debris made it hard to see far up the ascent shaft, but he estimated that they must have fallen several kilometres before colliding with the end of the passage. ‘What happened to the controls? The explosion?’

‘My armour protected me,’ said Astorath. ‘It was a small charge, less powerful than a frag grenade. Concealed inside the podium.’

‘Sabotage?’ Rafen scowled at the word.

‘It would seem so.’ The High Chaplain pushed past him. ‘Come. This way.’

The command came with such force of authority behind it that Rafen almost obeyed immediately and without question, years of ingrained training leading him to default to the orders of a senior officer. Almost.

He halted. ‘We should hold here. This is where our brothers will search for us.’

Astorath did not turn back to look at him. ‘This is where the Word Bearers will come looking when they learn their trap was sprung.’

The mention of the traitors made Rafen reach for his bolt pistol. By the Emperor’s grace, the gun was there and still intact. ‘Where are we?’ he wondered.

‘The deeps,’ Astorath replied. ‘The lowest levels of the Regio, isolated and left derelict.’

‘How do we get back?’ He looked up again.

‘As I told you,’ said the other warrior. ‘This way.’

Reluctantly, Rafen fell in step behind the High Chaplain, following him into the tunnel as his unease grew.

The warrens were cut from the living rock of Baal itself, reinforced by pillars of ancient ferrocrete that had become cracked and shot through with rust over countless centuries. The air was full of agitated dust particles, kicked up by the concussive arrival of the inclinator, and they filled Rafen’s mouth with a taste like bonemeal, sapping the moisture from his lips. Astorath deigned to give him one of his lumen sticks, and together the two of them navigated the aged corridors by the weak greenish light of the chemical lamps.

The walls were thick with oily lichen that seeped out of every crack, and in the midst of the fungal masses he saw tiny grubs writhing. There were shapes that fled before the edges of the lumen-glows, into boltholes and broken pipeways, and here and there thick curtains of web dangling from the ceiling, woven by fat, pale arachnids. An entire food chain of scavengers existed down here, living in the gloom.

The tunnel emptied out on to a rusted metal gantry and Astorath halted, sniffing at the air like a hunter canine.

Rafen eyed him. ‘You know where you are going. How is that so?’

The High Chaplain spared him a glance. ‘The accessways are all linked, Rafen. There are exhaust shafts sunk into the desert that reach down this far. All we need do is find the closest one and ascend… If we do not tarry, we could make the surface by daylight.’ He moved to walk on.

‘You are well informed, my lord,’ Rafen added.

Astorath made a noise in his throat that might have been a growl of irritation. ‘I was not always Astorath the Grim, brother-sergeant. There was a time, before my calling took me to other duties, that I served the Chapter as a line warrior in a tactical squad.’ He gestured at the walls, the lumen stick in his hand casting warped shadows. ‘I stood upon the battlements of the Regio as a sentry many times. I learned of its lore and history from men like Krixos.’ He gave Rafen a hard look. ‘By all means, if you wish to question everything I say, continue to do so. But you may find my answers become sparse as I direct my attention towards our egress.’ He strode away and did not wait for Rafen to go after him.

The Blood Angel grimaced and fell in step again. The shock of the alarms, the fall, all that was fading away now, and in its place remained Rafen’s growing disquiet. He could not shake a sense of wrongness about everything that was happening around him.

They navigated fallen sections of the rusting gantry, collapsed by the weight of time and neglect. In places where the path was broken, Rafen was forced to leap into the dark, praying to his Emperor for the certainty of a platform on the other side. Astorath navigated the hazards in silence, with only grunts of effort as he helped Rafen shoulder aside rubble or slice away debris with a swing of his axehead.

But for all his indifference, the High Chaplain was not ignoring Rafen. In fact, the reverse was true. Rafen slowly realized that the other warrior was scrutinising him at every turn, but taking great pains not to be seen to do so.

When a moment of pause came, as they stood at the bottom of a catchshaft damp with brackish moisture, Rafen’s patience reached its limit. ‘What do you wish to say to me?’ he demanded, squaring off before the High Chaplain. ‘I grow tired of your pretence.’

‘Do you?’ The reply was hard and brittle. ‘Perhaps I should ask if that blow you took to the head knocked the respect out of you, sergeant. Remember who it is you address.’

‘I know who you are,’ Rafen shot back. ‘There is no Blood Angel, no Son of Sanguinius that draws breath who does not know the face of the executioner!’

Astorath’s eyes narrowed. ‘That is my burden. And if you dare to think you could judge me for it, I will bleed you for your audacity.’ He pushed past and kept moving, stepping up on to a walkway that circled the inside of the vertical shaft like the thread of a screw.

Rafen’s temper flared. ‘Answer me! It was not fate that brought us together in this! Why else would you have been down on the habitat levels? Were you there for me? Or for some other reason?’

‘Do not ask questions you do not wish to have answered.’

The catchshaft joined an angled tunnel that rose up at a steep slant, and they began to ascend. Rafen advanced after the High Chaplain. ‘This is about the weapon. The spear.’

It was a long moment before Astorath replied. ‘It is so much more than that.’

‘I have nothing to hide,’ said Rafen.

When the High Chaplain spoke again, there was a challenge in it, his words severe. ‘You took the Spear of Telesto. You, a common Adeptus Astartes. You took up a weapon forged for a primarch’s hands and made it live. Such a thing should not have happened.’

‘It did,’ Rafen admitted. ‘I do not know how.’

‘A lie,’ snapped Astorath. ‘Who held the weapon before you, Rafen? What was his name?’

‘Arkio.’ He let out a sigh. ‘My blood-sibling.’

Astorath snorted, throwing a look over his shoulder. ‘Arkio the traitor. Arkio the corrupted. A puppet of the Ruinous Powers, created to cause a fatal schism in our Chapter!’

Rafen’s hands contracted into fists and his anger smouldered, but the High Chaplain was right. Arkio had betrayed his Chapter, he had been tainted by Chaos. ‘True enough. But I forgave him.’

This time Astorath gave a mocking laugh. It was an ugly, chilling sound. ‘You did? How generous of you. Was that before or after you ended his life?’

‘He knew of it,’ Rafen bit out the words. ‘I sent him to the Emperor with that.’

‘If there is justice in this universe, then He Upon The Throne sent your errant kindred’s soul into the hells.’

Rafen’s jaw stiffened but he refused to rise to the bait. They walked in silence for a few moments before Astorath spoke again.

‘Very well. Here is what I wish to say to you. It is a question, and if you do not answer, what I suspect will be proven true.’

‘I am not afraid of your words, executioner!’ Rafen snarled.

The High Chaplain looked back at him. In the lumen-glow, he resembled a monstrous apparition from some ancient fable, come to claim the Blood Angel’s immortal soul. ‘What happened when you wielded the spear, Rafen? What did you feel?’

Powerful, heady memories flashed in his thoughts. He felt the divine radiance of the spear on his face again, the light shining off the blade. ‘I…’

‘I know,’ Astorath growled. ‘The spear can only speak to the Black Rage and the Red Thirst. You touched that darkness within, didn’t you? That primal force Sanguinius left behind in all of us. You cannot deny it was so! It was the only way to activate the weapon!’

Rafen lost himself in the moment and he saw–

–the scarlet path unfurling about him in a storm of seething crimson, a fog of bloodlust madness descending upon him. The raw energy of his primarch a flash-fire in his veins, the traces of Sanguinius’s genetic code engorging with preternatural power–

Astorath nodded coldly. ‘I have seen hundreds of my battle brothers hollow of eye and fallen within. Are you any different from them?’

Rafen’s hands curled as if the Spear of Telesto lay across them, and he saw–

–golden fire, shards of lightning dazzling like fragments of suns, ripped from the air, collecting at the hollow heart of the teardrop blade–

He closed his eyes, and in the depths of his soul, he felt the mark of his eternal liege lord, indelible and bright as a star. ‘My life and my soul for the God-Emperor, for Sanguinius,’ he whispered. ‘For the Blood Angels.’

‘Your life and your soul,’ repeated the High Chaplain. ‘Are you ready to pay that price, Brother-Sergeant Rafen?’ Astorath rounded on him, and prodded him in the chest with an armour-clad finger. ‘Tell me, does the echo of that fury still resonate in you, even now? The gene-flaw overwhelmed you when you fought Arkio on Sabien, for how else could you have defeated him? My duty is clear, if any brother should fall to the Rage, then I–’

Rafen’s shout thundered down the tunnel. ‘I did not fall to the Rage!’ He shook his head. ‘You do not understand! The spear… it protected me.’

Astorath’s expression made it clear he thought little of that explanation, and he turned away, continuing along the tunnel. ‘How convenient.’

‘There have been those who looked into that abyss and did not end their days in madness,’ Rafen insisted. ‘Lemartes, who you yourself gave authority to live on and fight for the Chapter! And Mephiston, the Lord of Death!’

‘You compare yourself to them?’ grated High Chaplain. ‘Such arrogance. You are a pale shadow of the Guardian of the Lost, boy. And as for the Librarian… Mephiston may have spoken for you at Master Dante’s side, but I am not swayed by the words of a witchkin, even one as great as he!’

Rafen’s expression soured. ‘I speak only the truth.’

‘As you see it,’ Astorath shot back. ‘I know what you think of me. You see this–’ he brandished his axe and spun it in his grip ‘–and nothing else! I do not want the blood of my brothers on my hands, but I accept it.’ For a moment, there was sorrow in the other warrior’s voice; then it was gone. ‘I know my duty and I will never shrink from it. I have my curse and I keep it.’ He pointed at Rafen once again. ‘You have spoken of responsibility, of obligations. What if yours is to die?’

Rafen’s blood ran cold. ‘Only in death does duty end, and my duty has not yet ended. I am certain of that.’

‘Indeed?’ growled Astorath, cutting through a heap of fallen masonry with his blade. ‘And who are you to make that choice? Other Sons of Sanguinius, veterans all and learned warriors with centuries of experience upon their shoulders, see things differently. There are those voices on the Council of Angels that would see the duty of Brother Rafen to come to an end. Your blood kinship with the corrupted one is reason enough.’

‘I…’ The words came hard to him, but Rafen persisted. ‘I will not walk the same path as my sibling. Arkio was flawed, he was led astray. If I had been there before it happened…’ He trailed off and took a breath. The air was different here. He tasted changes in pressure and temperature that indicated they were nearing the desert surface. ‘I am not him,’ Rafen said firmly.

‘Your word is not sufficient,’ Astorath told him. ‘And now the Chapter finds itself rising from the aftermath of what your sibling wrought upon it. We are wounded, and hard choices must be made if we are to go forward. Secrets kept… and truths expunged for the good of the Blood Angels.’

‘The Sons of Sanguinius have endured far worse,’ Rafen persisted. ‘This… this trial will not break us.’

‘We have endured, aye,’ Astorath admitted. ‘But how? Through insight and pragmatism, by strength of our blood and the willingness to do what we must. The primarch taught us that when he left us.’

Rafen shook his head. ‘And so, what is to be done? Shall we excise my sibling’s insurrection from our chronicles as if it never took place, wipe the minds of the men who witnessed it? You would have the Blood Angels strike this incident from history?’ His lips twisted in disgust. ‘We do not hold our honour so cheap!’

‘Our numbers are depleted, our forces scattered to maintain the illusion of strength. Worlds have been burned in the wake of this. Tell me, Brother Rafen. What would you have us do?’

‘I would not embrace silence instead of truth!’ he spat. ‘That is not what the Great Angel would wish! He knew the truth better than any living being!’

‘What truth?’ demanded Astorath.

‘That we are imperfect!’ Rafen dared the High Chaplain to deny him. ‘We are not like the whelps of Fulgrim, professing that we are faultless and infallible! To pretend we are incapable of error is a weakling’s way, it is foolhardy and arrogant.’ He nodded fiercely, his temper rising. ‘The insurrection must not be forgotten, the lesson of it must live with us forever so that it will never come to pass again. We are our history, the best and the worst of it. That is what Sanguinius knew!’

Astorath paused and gave him a long look. The High Chaplain’s dark axe glittered in the gloom, the wicked edge of the weapon still sharp despite the many rocks it had cut aside during their ascent. ‘You are exactly what I thought you were, Rafen,’ said the High Chaplain, at length. He turned away. ‘Now, come. We are close to the surface.’

Until that moment, there had been doubt in Rafen’s mind. The possibilities existed in a kind of half-state, a chance that his future would unfold in one way or another, the path of his life crossing here with that of Astorath the Grim. Until that moment, he had not been certain.

But no doubts shrouded the understanding now. The look in those fathomless, bleak eyes, the iron in the words. Whatever he may have said or done, Rafen knew in his blood and bones that the Redeemer of the Lost had come back to Baal and to the Regio for him.

Astorath was here to judge him.

It took both of the Blood Angels to shoulder the hexagonal grille up from the stays that held it in place. Rafen spent a bolt shell on the lock, the mechanism coughing out sparks. With a skirl of rusted, elderly hinges, the hatch came open and they finally emerged in the desert.

The High Chaplain’s estimate had been correct. The cold night sky was changing colour toward the distant Chalice Mountains, shading away from deep black toward purple hues. Eventually it would push toward orange-red as the Baalite sun made its slow advance, but that was hours away yet. Baal’s night was long and slow.

Seamless drifts of rusty sand ranged off in every direction, settled in dunes and wavelike patterns by the passage of the razorwinds. Like the night, the storm had passed and only the faint breath of its trailing edge could be felt. Rafen turned in place and found a smudge of grey on the opposite horizon. The storm cell was advancing toward the westerly canyons, where its lethal energy would be expended in the endless, echoing arroyos.

Still turning, he got his bearings and found the distant lights of the Regio. They had emerged several kilometres from the outer keep walls, at the very edge of the perimeter zone. He squinted, cursing the damage to his helmet’s optics. He wanted a closer look.

The sight seemed wrong – or more accurately, the sight seemed right, as if nothing were amiss at the Regio. Even at this distance, he expected to have seen plumes of smoke, weapon flashes. Rafen strained into the wind to listen, trying to pluck out the sounds of combat from the susurrus of desert noises.

He heard nothing, and went tense with concern. Had the enemy assault been so lethal, so swift that it had passed like the razorwind and left no survivors? Rafen took a step toward the distant complex. ‘The attack… The Word Bearers…’

‘Even they are not overconfident enough to attempt so gaudy a suicide,’ rumbled Astorath. ‘The Sons of Lorgar, spite curse them, are not here. They never were.’

Rafen rounded on him, all his suspicions ringing in his mind like a clarion. ‘You.’ He pointed at the High Chaplain. ‘You lied. There was no assault on the Regio.’

‘A ruse on my part,’ admitted the other warrior, watching him steadily. ‘A small piece of theatre so that I might have what I needed.’

‘The explosive, the inclinator… you did that yourself. The charge was enough to damage the platform but not enough to penetrate your armour…’ He shook his head. ‘Why would you do such a thing, executioner? You could have killed us both in the fall!’

Astorath’s dead eyes locked with his. ‘That was not your time to die, Rafen. I did what I did to isolate you. I wanted to learn your character… and it is easier to divine the nature of a warrior’s soul if his attention is elsewhere.’

Rafen’s expression soured, annoyance rising in him. ‘Is your little game concluded, then? Have you got what you wanted from me?’

‘I have made my decision,’ said Astorath, as his axe dropped into his waiting hands.

In the next second he was charging, a feral snarl splitting his lips.

Combat reflexes took over and Rafen drew his bolt pistol in a fraction of a second, his other hand snatching at the hilt of the battle knife resting in a sheath along the line of his spine. He fired a single shot at the High Chaplain, aiming low, aiming to wound, to slow him down.

But he might well have called out his intentions in a shout. Astorath swept his blade aside and intercepted the bolt mid-flight with a crack of sound, the round blasting harmlessly into the dirt. Rafen dodged to one side as the weapon’s fast, fluid arc bisected the space where he had been standing, and he rolled, tumbling over red dirt and half-buried rocks.

The High Chaplain lost no momentum at all, pushing off a broken boulder into a shallow leap, leading with the Executioner’s Axe. Rafen knew he couldn’t deflect the blow, and feinted away, desperately trying to extend his distance. Astorath’s axe split the rock where he had been standing in two – and still the other warrior came, without missing a beat.

Rafen managed to cross the axis of his opponent’s blade with the battle knife and there was a grating screech of metal on metal as their fractal-edges met violently. The impact was so great it resonated up the bones of the Blood Angel’s arms and lit lines of pain through every joint.

He had the bolt pistol, and he had a shot to take. At close range, if he was clever and if he was lucky, Rafen might have been able to put a kill-shot into Astorath’s face – but he could not bring himself to do so.

‘Cease this!’ he spat.

The other warrior grunted and shoved the axe forward. The sickle-blade head smacked Rafen across the jaw and staggered him. He felt blood froth in his mouth and fragments of teeth in his throat.

Astorath finally paused, shifting his grip in an almost leisurely fashion. Preparing to strike the death-blow. ‘In a moment,’ he replied.

‘You have no right to do this,’ said Rafen, spitting out gobs of bloody spittle into the dust.

‘I have the right,’ Astorath replied coldly.

‘I will not die for the sake of those who doubt me!’ Rafen roared his defiance. ‘You may not share the weakness that tainted your sibling,’ said the High Chaplain, ‘but the rage lurks in you, as much as you deny it. I see it. I can smell it on you.’ He swung at the air, the axe humming. ‘Do not fear. I will make it swift. You will end with honour.’

‘You’re wrong.’ Rafen shook his head. ‘I am the master of my own will! The rage and the thirst do not command me!’

Astorath attacked again, cutting at him, a tornado of axe blows falling across him. Once again, Rafen could only react to the assault and try to stay alive for a few more seconds. His anger built inside him like a floodhead.

‘I see it,’ Astorath growled. ‘You cannot hide it from me, brother. Stop pretending you are in control and submit to the fury!’

And for a moment, that was all he wanted to do. It would have been so simple to release, to open the gates to the anger. To let the fire build and build until it consumed him. He wanted to fall into the fight.

But I have looked into that abyss and my future does not lie there.

Rafen raised his head and, very deliberately, he tossed the bolt pistol away. Then, with a flick of the wrist, he threw his combat blade into the sand, where it buried itself up to the pommel.

‘You want my anger, my rage?’ Rafen shook his head. ‘I will not give it to you, Astorath. I will not let you comfort yourself with the lie that you ended my life to save me from the gene-curse. If you want to end me, you will do it in cold blood.’ He dropped to one knee and adopted the position of a penitent at prayer, head bowed, hands crossed in the sign of the aquila. Rafen looked at the ground, losing himself in the myriad grains of red sand. Sanguinius, I put my trust in you as ever I have. My fate is yours to choose.

At first, silence, then the rush of the air as the axe fell towards the bare flesh of the back of his neck. Rafen did not close his eyes. He wanted to see, right to the very end.

The axe blade fell slowly, and by the prickling of his skin, Rafen felt the impossibly sharp edge touch his flesh, resting there. A line of icy cold as nerves were severed, then the hot pain of spilling blood – all this from just the merest touch of the Executioner’s Axe upon him.

A shadow moved across the red sand, and after a long moment Rafen dared to look up.

He was alone.

It took an hour or so for Rafen to walk the distance back to the walls of the Regio, and not once along that path did he see another soul. The wound on the back of his neck began to heal as the Larraman cells did their work, but the sting of it told him that from this day forward he would forever have a scar there, a perfect line of damaged flesh below his skull.

Dawn had come as the sentries saw him emerge from the desert, and it was Brother Krixos who met him at the Wanderer’s Gate.

‘Rafen!’ The expressionless eyes of the Techmarine’s helm studied him. ‘We feared you had perished in the accident in the inclinator shaft!’

‘The accident,’ Rafen repeated. ‘Yes.’

‘How did you survive?’

‘The old tunnel network, the catchshafts…’ He paused, thinking through what he would say next. ‘I was guided.’

‘Praise the God-Emperor and Sanguinius,’ said Krixos.

‘The primarch watches over me.’ He paused, glancing around. ‘The High Chaplain’s ship, the guncutter… Is it still here?’

‘The Fate?’ Krixos gave a nod. ‘The hangar dome was being opened as I left to come to the gate.’ He looked up. ‘It was about to lift–’

Rafen was already running for the iron spiral stairs that would take him up to the landing platforms.

He sprinted on to the elevated disc as the guncutter’s thrusters gave off a low thrum of power. Exhaust vents along the ventral fuselage chugged fire and a hot wash of spent promethium stink washed over him. The Fate rocked as the engine note shifted, rising as the motors gained power with each passing second.

Rafen raised a hand to shield his eyes, searching the portals along the sides of the ship, the cockpit canopy for signs of life but, like the dark-toned hull, all the windows of the guncutter were tinted black-red.

‘Astorath!’ he said, but his cry was snatched away by the noise.

Then the wound on the back of his neck prickled, and he spun around. The Redeemer of the Lost stood before Rafen, night-black wings rising up from behind him. His blade was still lined with crimson. ‘There are few who have felt the kiss of this weapon and lived to speak of it.’ The High Chaplain regarded him gravely, raising his voice so he might be heard. ‘But I have never once come to regret the moments when I pulled my terminal blow.’

‘I know the Black Rage and the Red Thirst lie within me.’ The words spilled out of Rafen’s mouth. ‘They are part of all of us. When and if that fury will return to me, I cannot know.’

‘It will,’ Astorath told him, and once again there was a moment of regret in his voice. ‘It always does.’

‘But I will not yield to it. This I swear, on our primarch’s name.’

The High Chaplain walked silently past him toward the guncutter, and from beneath the ship a ramp dropped down to accept him. Astorath paused at the foot of the gangway, and he pointed his axehead at Rafen. ‘You are not what I expected, brother. And so you live. For now.’ He sheathed the weapon. ‘But know this. After what happened on Sabien, you are being watched. And if you should give me cause, when we meet again I will not stay my hand.’

The Fate’s engines howled, and Rafen backed away as the guncutter’s hatch sealed shut. With a roar, the winged craft powered away into Baal’s sky, leaving the Blood Angel to watch it recede to a dark, distant speck.

He sensed Krixos approaching. ‘If you are ready, I have been informed that the rail transporter is cleared to depart the Regio for the return journey.’ The Techmarine looked up, studying the sky. ‘Now that the storm has passed.’

‘Has it?’ asked Rafen, staring into the distance.

An Extract from Know No Fear

Dan Abnett

[mark: -1.01.20]

The fleet tender Campanile passes the inner Mandeville Point of the Veridian System, outer marker ring 16, and the local picket. It broadcasts full and correct anchorage codes to the watch ships at ring 14, and to the Veridius Maxim Star Fort. The Star Fort retracts its target acquisition lock and signals the tender to pass.

The ship appears to be decelerating.

[mark: -0.55.37]

Teleport flare. The crackle of the energy burst shivers across the open hillside, and ozone taints the cold northern air.

Erebus, Dark Apostle, becomes flesh, and emerges from the scratch of light. He is not clad in ceremonial armour, he is wearing wargear that has been stripped down to fighting weight, darkened with ashes and inscribed over its entire surface with tiny, spidery script.

A strike team is waiting for him. Its leader is Essember Zote of the Gal Vorbak, a warrior of the most incendiary fury. His sword is already drawn. His armour is the colour of blood.

This is how their enemies will know them. Blood red, the colour of fire, the colour of hell, the colour of gore, the colour of the Octed.

Zote has a work party of the Tzenvar Kaul with him, seventy men, all childless. They have been working since they arrived at dawn on one of the first ships.

The Satric Plateau, two thousand kilometres north of Numinus City, is a lonely place. The hard winter has already arrived. Because of its size and terrain, the Satric region was chosen as one of the sixty-eight staging fields for the operation. Landers are parked all along the line of the slope, cargo hatches open to the grey sky.

Erebus inspects the work.

This particular area of the Satric Plateau, sheened with frost, is especially perfect. It took several days of comparative study with the orbital scans to determine its perfection compared to other potential sites. It is consistently flat in relation to sea level. It is aligned according to magnetic north and the tidal process, and has favourable moonrise on the day of the conjunction. It possesses other qualities too, other qualities that could not be disclosed by standard Imperial physics. Immaterium vectors are in alignment. The skin of the empyrean is thin here tonight.

This is the true conjunction. Erebus reflects upon how remarkably perfect it is. Not just workable or suitable or acceptable. Perfect. From today, for the next sixty days. It is as though some power somewhere manufactured the perfection at exactly the right time.

The men of the Kaul have laid the circle. Polished black rocks, each taken from the volcanic slopes of Isstvan V and marked with a sigil, are arranged in a perfect circle a kilometre in diameter.

Erebus takes the last rock from Zote. They are summoning stones. The latent power in them makes him feel sick, just taking one in his hand.

He places it in the gap in the circle. It clacks against the stones on either side as he sets it.

‘Begin,’ he tells Zote.

The men of the Tzenvar Kaul approach, carrying other offerings from the Isstvan system. In procession, they bear along portable stasis flasks like censers in some Catheric worship. The fluid in the stasis flasks is murky with blood. Harvested progenitor glands. Harvested gene-seed. The lost life of betrayed souls now offered for the final blasphemy. There is Salamanders gene-seed here, Iron Hands, Raven Guard. Erebus knows that the Ruinous Powers make no distinctions, so there is other gene-seed here besides: Emperor’s Children, Death Guard, Night Lords, Iron Warriors, Word Bearers, Alpha Legion, even Luna Wolf. Any that fell during the secret abominations of Isstvan III or V are suitable.

Erebus stops the first man in the procession, and strokes the glass of the stasis flask. He knows what’s in it, the mangled tissue in the cloudy suspension.

‘Tarik…’ he whispers.

He nods. The Kaul start to carry the flasks into the circle. The moment they cross the stones, the bearers start to whimper and retch. Several pass out, or suffer strokes, and fall, smashing the flasks.

It doesn’t matter.

The moon is rising, a pale curl in a mauve sky already busy with lights.

Zote hands Erebus a data-slate, and the Apostle checks the approach timings. He is data tracking using anchorage codes.

He hands the slate back and takes the vox-link in exchange.

‘Now,’ he says.

[mark: -0.40.20]

‘Acknowledged,’ replies Sorot Tchure.

He walks back to join the others. His men are mingling with the men of Luciel’s company on the company decks of the Samothrace. They have finished the formal dinner that Luciel had arranged. None need to eat, certainly not the fine foodstuffs that Luciel provided, but it is a symbolic gesture. To dine as allies, as warrior-kings. To bond ahead of the coming war.

‘Problem?’ asks Luciel.

Tchure shakes his head.

‘Some question about loading platforms.’

Tchure looks at Luciel.

‘Why have you changed your markings and armour field?’ asks Luciel.

‘We are remaking ourselves,’ Tchure replies. ‘A new scheme to celebrate our new beginning. Perhaps it is down to the character of our beloved primarch, may the cosmos bless him. We have never quite found ourselves, Honorius. Not like you. We have struggled to realise a proper role for ourselves. I do not believe you appreciate how fortunate you are. The clarity of your purpose and position as Ultramarines. From the start you had a reputation that never needed to be questioned, and a function that never needed to be clarified.’

He pauses.

‘For years, I have despised Lorgar,’ he says quietly.

‘What?’

‘You heard me.’

‘Sorot, you mustn’t–’

‘Look at your primarch, Honorius. So singular in aspect. So noble. I have envied you, envied the Imperial Fists, the Luna Wolves, the Iron Hands. And I am not alone. We struggle with a mercurial mind, Honorius. We labour under the burden of a brilliant but fallible commander. We no longer bear the word, my friend. We bear Lorgar.’

‘Some fall into their roles quickly,’ says Luciel firmly. ‘I have thought about this. Some fall into their roles quickly. Others take time to evolve, to discover what their purpose is to be. Your primarch, great Lorgar, is a son of the Emperor. There will be a role for him. It may turn out to be far greater than any that falls to Guilliman or Dorn. Yes, we’re lucky to have clarity. I know that. So are the Fists, the Hands, the Angels. Terra above, so are the Wolves of Fenris and the World Eaters, Sorot. Perhaps the lack of clarity you have laboured under thus far is because Lorgar’s role is yet unimaginable.’

Tchure smiles.

‘I can’t believe you’re defending him.’

‘Why can’t you?’

Tchure shrugs.

‘I think we may be finding our purpose at last, Honorius,’ he says. ‘Hence our new resolve. Our change in scheme and armour colour. I… I was asked to join the advance.’

Luciel frowns, quizzical.

‘You told me that.’

‘I have things to prove.’

‘Why?’ asks Luciel.

‘I have to prove my commitment to the new purpose.’

‘And how do you do that?’ asks Luciel.

Tchure doesn’t answer. Luciel notices how the Word Bearer’s fingers stir, tapping the tabletop. What agitation is that? Nerves?

‘I learned something,’ Tchure says suddenly, changing the subject. ‘A little piece of warcraft that I thought you would appreciate.’

Luciel lifts his cup, sips wine.

‘Go on,’ he smiles.

Tchure toys with his own cup, a straight-sided golden beaker.

‘It was on Isstvan, during the fight there.’

‘Isstvan? There’s been fighting in the Isstvan system?’

Tchure nods.

‘It hasn’t been reported. Was it a compliance?’

‘It’s recent,’ says Tchure. ‘The full reports of the campaign are still being ratified by the Warmaster. Then they will be shared.’

Luciel raises his eyebrows.

‘Guilliman won’t appreciate being left out of the loop for any length of time. Is this how the Warmaster intends to conduct the Great Crusade from now on? Guilliman insists on sharing all military data. And Isstvan was compliant–’

Tchure holds up his hand.

‘It’s recent. It’s fresh. It’s done now. Your primarch will hear all about it in due course. The point is, the fight was bitter. The Imperium faced a foe that had discovered the mortal power of treachery.’

‘Treachery?’ asks Luciel.

‘Not as a strategy, you understand. Not as a tactic to surprise and undermine. I mean as a property. A power.’

‘I’m not sure I know what you mean,’ smiles Luciel. slightly disarmed. ‘It’s as though you’re talking about… magic.’

‘I almost am. The enemy believed that there was power in treachery. To win the confidence of your opponent, to mask your animus, and then to turn… Well, they believed that this actually invested them with power.’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘Don’t you?’ asks Tchure. ‘The potency, they believed, depends on the level of betrayal. If an ally suddenly turns on an ally, that’s one level. But if a trusted friend turns on a friend. That was the purest kind of power, because the treachery ran so deep. Because it required that so many moral codes be broken. Trust. Friendship. Loyalty. Reliance. Honesty. Such an act was powerful because it was beyond belief. It achieved a potency that was akin to the most powerful blood sacrifice.’

Luciel sits back.

‘Interesting, certainly,’ he says. ‘For them to believe that. Culturally, it speaks a great deal to the strength of their honour codes. If they believed this invested them with power, then it seems like an act of superstition. It has little strategic merit in terms of warcraft or technique, of course. Except, I suppose, psychologically.’

‘It certainly worked for them.’

‘Until you crushed them, of course.’

Sorot Tchure does not reply.

‘What’s the matter?’ asks Luciel.

‘It’s like a sacrifice,’ says Tchure. ‘You identify and commit the greatest betrayal possible, and it is like a sacrifice to anoint and begin a vast ceremony of victory and destruction.’

‘I still don’t understand. It has no tactical methodology.’

‘Really? Really, Honorius? What if it does? What if there is an entirely other kind of warfare, one that extends beyond all practical techniques, one that defies and eclipses all the martial law codified by the Ultramarines and recognised by the Imperium? A ritual warfare? A kind of daemonic warfare?’

‘You say that as if you believe it,’ Luciel laughs.

‘Think about what I’m saying,’ says Tchure quietly. He looks around the chamber, at his men talking and drinking with Luciel’s. ‘Think of this… If the Word Bearers turned against the Ultramarines, wouldn’t that be the greatest betrayal of all? Not Lorgar turning on Guilliman, for they dislike each other anyway. Here, in this chamber, between two men who have actually managed to become friends?’

‘That would be the most atrocious deceit,’ Luciel agrees. ‘I concede it would have some power. As shock value in the Legion. We are immune to fear, but horror and surprise might unman us briefly at the unimaginable nature of the act.’

Tchure nods.

‘And it would be the centrepiece,’ he says. ‘The sacrificial spark to ignite the ritual war.’

Luciel nods gravely.

‘I suppose you’re right. It would be well to understand, and allow for, an enemy who carried such conviction in the power of infamy.’

Tchure smiles.

‘I wish you understood,’ he says.

[mark: -0.20.20]

The Campanile crosses the inner ring, its codes accepted by the defence grid. The mass of the fleet disposition lies ahead of it, the yards. The bright glory of Calth.

As it passes within the orbit of Calth’s moon, it begins an abrupt acceleration.

[mark: -0.19.45]

‘Understand what?’ asks Luciel.

‘I was asked to join the advance,’ says Tchure.

‘And?’

‘I have to prove my commitment to the new purpose.’

Luciel stares at him.

For just a second. A second. And in that second, he finally realises what Sorot Tchure has been trying to tell him.

That in order not to betray one impossible bond, Sorot Tchure is required to betray another.

The goblet falls from Luciel’s grip. His hand is already moving, through instinct alone, for his sidearm. Only sheer, disfunctioning shock is slowing him down.

Tchure’s plasma pistol is already in his hand.

The goblet hasn’t even hit the tabletop yet.

Tchure fires. Point blank, the plasma bolt strikes Honorius Luciel’s torso. The bolt is as hot as a main sequence star. It vaporises armour plate, carapace, reinforced bone, spinal cord. It annihilates meat, both hearts, and secondary organs. It turns blood into dust. The shot’s hammer blow impact knocks Luciel down, through the table, smashing the tabletop up to meet the falling goblet, spinning it into the air in a semi-circle of wine.

Luciel’s men are turning, caught by surprise, not understanding the noise and motion, not understanding the weapon discharge or the violent collapse of their captain. Tchure’s men simply draw their guns. They are not distracted by the gunfire. Their eyes never leave the men they are talking to, men who are turning away in confusion.

Luciel rolls on the deck, limbs thrashing, as the smashed table falls around him. The goblet bounces off the deck plate beside his head. His eyes are wide, straining, staring. The plasma shot has burned a massive hole clean through him. His body is cored. The deck plating is visible through his twitching torso. The edges of the gaping damage are scorched and cooked by superheating. His armour is likewise punctured, the cut edges glowing. Larraman cells cannot hope to clog or close a wound quite so catastrophic. Tchure is on his feet, his chair tipping backwards behind him, toppling. He swings the plasma weapon down, aims it at Luciel’s face, and fires again.

Around him, the chamber shakes with a sudden storm of gunfire. Twenty or thirty boltguns discharge almost simultaneously. Armoured bodies, blown backwards, fall. Blood mist fills the air.

The goblet lands on the third bounce, rolls in a circle, and comes to rest on its side next to Honorius Luciel’s seared and shattered skull.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Neil Roberts

© Games Workshop Limited, 2012. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 978-0-85787-984-4

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