Vermilion

Ben Counter

It had the humanoid shape common to many intelligent xenos, but its four limbs and head made up the totality of its resemblance to a human being. The inner layers of its skin were bioluminescent, while the outer layers formed black flaps and ridges running along the front of its head and body. From the back of its torso and limbs hung thousands of half-metre-long cilia, quivering tendrils that, it was surmised, propelled it through the oceans of its home world much like the flagellae of single-celled Terran organisms. Its strange gnarled skin created hundreds of gills all over it, and gaseous respiration was achieved through twin pulsing air sacs in its throat.

It had no eyes. Its sensory input came from the pits along its arms and legs, which absorbed scents from its surroundings. It therefore knew exactly what was going on around it. It knew it was a prisoner.

The Imperial Fists had shackled the xenos in a drop-pod. The drop-pod stood in the centre of a shattered plain of crystal that reflected the rose-pink sun through a million broken facets. Bullet scars scattered multicoloured sprays of light, refracted further through the translucent pools of blood that had yet to dry.

Several other drop-pods, in the red and yellow livery of the Imperial Fists, stood, still smouldering. The twenty Space Marines of the strike force were grouped up around the landing site, keeping a watch in all directions.

And a short distance away was the Ordo Xenos Field Research Outpost, draped in bodies both human and xenos. The metal and flakboard watchtower made up the head of an installation that punched deep into the crystalline surface. Its doors had been blasted open and most of the bodies were heaped up around the scorched entrance. Jumpsuited tech-orderlies had been dragged out and butchered on the crystal plain. Gun-servitors had shot down dozens of xenos – one servitor was still trundling back and forth, training its autoguns across the battlefield.

‘We were too late,’ said Sergeant Ctesiphon. Two of his battle-brothers were hauling bodies out of the outpost and laying them out. Two more were heaping up the dead aliens, ready for immolation. ‘Scout Nemeidos reports that none living remain inside.’

‘Did Carmillas keep any live specimens?’ asked Librarian Deiphobus, the force’s commanding officer.

‘It seems not,’ replied Ctesiphon. ‘Nemeidos’s squad will do a full sweep, but it looks like there are only tissue samples, not whole organisms.’

Deiphobus knelt beside the body of a woman whose long blonde hair was half-scorched black. She wore carapace armour, tailor-made for her slight figure, and emblazoned with the stylised ‘I’ of the Inquisition. One of her eyes was a fascinatingly complicated bionic, multi-faceted and apparently controlled by intricate clockwork. In life she must have been very striking.

‘We need to get the body to the apothecarion,’ said Deiphobus. ‘Some inquisitors conceal datavaults inside their bodies. Back of the skull, base of the spine. Perhaps she saved her research.’

‘Is there anything you can do?’ said Ctesiphon.

Librarian Deiphobus took off one of his gauntlets and held his hand over the dead inquisitor’s face. He closed his eyes, and concentrated for a moment. ‘The body is fresh,’ he said. ‘Sometimes some consciousness remains. But not here. She is gone. All of her.’

The other bodies were Ordo Xenos researchers. Most of them had some augmentation – a bionic eye, or obvious cranial implants under a shaven scalp. Many had hands plated in heat-resistant ceramite, to help them handling dangerous samples. They had been killed with a mixture of small arms fire and blade wounds.

‘The xenos struck quickly,’ continued Deiphobus. ‘It does not take a psyker to see that. We arrived but an hour after we received Carmillas’s distress signal and yet the battle was cold when we got here.’

‘How did these aliens even know she was here?’ said Ctesiphon.

Deiphobus glanced behind him, at the sealed drop-pod.

‘There is a place,’ he said, ‘where that very secret waits for me.’

They staked out the xenos like a sacrifice on some primitive world. Each limb was fixed to a post driven into the crystal ground. Its head was restrained, so it could not look away from Deiphobus as the Imperial Fists Librarian stood over it. The pink sun glared down into its face.

Squad Ctesiphon surrounded the alien, their boltguns ready.

‘These heathens slaughtered an inquisitor’s entire personal staff,’ said Sergeant Ctesiphon. ‘At the first suggestion of danger, you will each put two rounds into this alien’s central mass.’

‘I doubt that such will be necessary,’ said Deiphobus as he knelt beside the alien. ‘But if I give the order, execute it.’

‘Emperor’s luck be with you,’ said Ctesiphon.

‘The first thing we learn in the Chapter Librarium,’ replied Deiphobus, ‘is that there is no such thing as luck.’ He took off his right gauntlet and placed his hand against the alien’s forehead. Creatures with approximately human form tended to keep their brains in what passed for their heads. Deiphobus felt an unyielding cranium under the layers of rubbery, spongy skin.

He closed his eyes. He let his mind sink back away from his senses, imagining his consciousness draining out towards the hind-brain where the instincts of a human still remained, not quite erased by a Space Marines training.

He imagined a black ocean, torn by storms and endlessly deep. He fell, as if from the deck of a ship, and plunged into that ocean. The input of his senses – the faint whining wind of the crystal plains, the smell of gunsmoke and dried blood from the battlefield, the feeling of the armour encasing his body – fell away, separated by an increasing stretch of liquid darkness.

Down here, in the cold and blackness, strange things lurked, as they did in the lower reaches of a real ocean. They were the rogue thoughts, instincts that a Space Marine ignored and the random outputs of a psychic mind. These were parts of himself that Deiphobus had discarded. Cowardice, a lurking predator, had been banished here, for a Space Marine was hypno-doctrinated to know no fear. The concerns of a normal man, for which a Space Marine had no time, were here too – a shoal of them, petty worries and fears that dominated a man’s mind. Deiphobus had once had a family, and down here the memories of them remained, ignored by the warrior. He had lived a life cut short in adolescence, when that youth had died and the Space Marine been constructed in his place.

Now Deiphobus sunk to the bedrock of his mind, the architecture from which all his thoughts and faculties hung. Here he had built, over years of meditation and study, the fortress from which he could conduct his psychic operations.

Deiphobus did not need to imagine the fortress of his mind, for he had built it in such detail and clarity that it rose up to him unbidden. Its command centre was a great circular room with a throne from which he could observe the whole fortress, and which had a hundred doors each leading to a different mental landscape. The fortress’s armoury had dozens of weapons and suits of armour, studied artefacts of the Chapter’s past with which Deiphobus could arm himself when the mental interrogations became hostile. There were even rows of cells winding deep into the rock, where certain memories were held that were too important to forget but too dangerous to give free rein in his mind.

Deiphobus coalesced in the command centre, seated on the throne. The image of his mental construct looked much as the real Deiphobus did then, the armour perhaps a little more polished, the face perhaps a little more youthful, looking as Deiphobus had when he first built this place.

Outside this fortress, beyond the limits of Deiphobus’s own mind, was the alien’s consciousness. Hostile territory that Deiphobus had to invade. Each door in this place led to a different concept of that mind, which Deiphobus could navigate in search of the enemy’s secrets.

A human had that same basic architecture as Deiphobus himself. Deiphobus knew it well, and could use that to help him make of that mind a place he could search and battle through. But an alien’s mind was something else. Other xenos were psychically toxic, their minds coated with mental poison. Deiphobus’s interrogation entailed a risk that this alien might be just one such psychic deathtrap.

Deiphobus selected a door. It opened, and darkness was all he could see beyond it. A clashing, buzzing sound reached him, his mind’s interpretation of the alien’s surface-thought static. Perhaps it was the sound of the alien’s fear.

Deiphobus dived through the door. He gave himself burning wings to keep him aloft, and armed himself in the heavy gilded breaching armour he had seen displayed on the Phalanx.

He slammed into a wall of inchoate bedlam. It was madness. It was formless and unyielding. It was alien.

Deiphobus struggled to keep his self-image intact. It might dissolve in this chaos and leave him an unthinking, unfeeling particle, lost in here. He might never find his way out. He forced his armour to become more solid and heavy, layering more armour plates onto it until it resembled nothing that had ever been worn by a Space Marine. He imagined anchors dropping, finding purchase in the mire to lock him in position.

He was becoming less like a man and more like a battleship now, a space-bound machine of war. Deiphobus seized on that idea and now an armoured prow faced into the winds of formless matter that hammered at him. His anchors held him fast.

Deiphobus fired from the cannons of his battleship and blasted clear the area around him. It was scoured empty, resembling now the void of space.

Now Deiphobus took the alien’s mind and made from it planets and asteroids drifting around him, like the spacescape of an inner solar system full of young planets. He did not think he had enough control yet to conjure up a star to light this system, so he bathed it in a hard yellow-white light that glared down from nowhere. It was not perfect, but it would have to do.

Deiphobus lay at anchor, searching through the alien nebulae that glowed in every colour. Somewhere, there was something he could use, some common point of reference between this alien’s mind and that of a human.

His spaceship was not faring well. Cosmic winds were stripping away the gilt and revealing pitted steel underneath. The hull was beginning to disintegrate. Deiphobus could feel his orbit decaying, and the light from the nebulae and the stars was bending as the forces of this strange cosmos bore down on the invader.

Deiphobus let the doorway form again behind him and left the void behind. He coalesced again in the throne room of his fortress, letting his consciousness slip back into the familiar form of an Imperial Fist. That door closed, but now it had a window in it looking onto the voidscape Deiphobus had created from the formless mass. He locked the door with a silver key, and so that mental construct was locked into his memory, stored to be withdrawn and used later.

The Librarian held up a hand. His armour was, like the hull of the ship, scored and stripped down. Between the segments of his gauntlets he could see his finger bones, clean of flesh.

Deiphobus let the fortress drift apart, stone by stone, as he rose back towards the surface.

The bodies were burned, and the smoke discoloured the sky for miles around. Its reflection caught the crystals, so even they looked dirty.

Deiphobus watched the heap of corpses burning as he emerged from the drop-pod. Already there was little in the heap that could be recognised as either human, or as belonging to an alien of the species that still lay shackled inside the pod.

‘Librarian!’ said Sergeant Ctesiphon, who was overseeing the pyre. ‘We are ready to leave. There is nothing left on this world for us.’

‘Did Inquisitor Carmillas yield up anything?’ asked Deiphobus.

‘It does not look like it,’ replied Ctesiphon. ‘She had a data storage implant, but it contained only instructions to transmit an astropathic death-code in case the body was found. She is stowed on the shuttle. The apothecary might find more, but my gut tells me there will be nothing.’

‘Then stow the xenos,’ said Deiphobus. ‘We will be back in orbit within the hour.’

‘What was it like in there?’ asked Ctesiphon.

‘Alien. It was all I could do to force a foothold.’

‘It will give up the answers, Librarian.’

‘Ah,’ said Deiphobus, ‘but the answers to what? Even the most talented psyker cannot sift through the entire contents of a sentient mind. Answers are not always the biggest challenge.’

‘You need to know what questions to ask,’ said Ctesiphon.

‘Very good, my brother! This alien will keep all its secrets if I do not know to look for them. I will go through the usual, of course. What it is. What it was doing here. Recollections of the battle. But there is one question I would like to answer very dearly, and I fear it is that answer it will guard the most tenaciously.’

Both Deiphobus and Ctesiphon were looking at the pyre now. Ashes were blowing away. Soon only a few white embers would remain, by which time the Imperial Fists would have left this lonely world behind.

‘Why,’ said Ctesiphon, ‘was this alien the only survivor?’

‘That is the correct question, brother,’ said Deiphobus. ‘Have it restrained in the shuttle. I shall continue in the Nerve-Glove Hall.’

The Imperial Fists strike force finished their work and embarked onto their shuttles. Above them the shape of the Fate of Stalinvast hung, picked out bright silver by the system’s sun. In a roar of engines they left that world which had never had a name.

Deep into the forest, life seethed everywhere. Creatures something like insects, but with scales and the darting cunning of something warm-blooded, skittered across the broad wet leaves. The ground was alive, consisting of a mass of oozing amoebas which writhed through the black loam. The sky was alive, heavy with clouds of wisp-like life forms that rode the air currents before falling in drifts to drain anything they touched of blood. The air that Deiphobus breathed was alive, with microscopic parasites competing to force their way into his bloodstream first.

Deiphobus trudged through the thickening vegetation. It dragged at him, trying to suck him down into the murk. It was up to his thighs, the slurping of the squirming mud like the sound of hungry jaws churning.

Around him, titanic remains of some xenos city decayed into the darkness. They looked grown more than built, great biological shapes of smooth stone now broken up and tumbled by invading roots. Something that might have been a face, or perhaps an image of a moon boiled in solar blazes, loomed over him through the dense canopy. Great stone staircases lead up to nothing. Once, it had been something magnificent, the kind of sight that could convince a man that the aliens who lived here were gods.

‘What,’ said Deiphobus, ‘can we conclude from such a place?’ His self-image here was that of an Imperial Fists Scout, with lighter armour that afforded a lower chance of getting bogged down or stuck. His used a Scout’s combat knife to slash and saw through the worst of the foliage as he forced his way onwards.

‘Fallen from grace,’ he continued. Though he seemed here to be talking to himself, in that fortress at the back of his mind his words were being inscribed on tablets which could be filed away with the rest of his crucial memories. ‘Once there was an empire, now no longer. But that does not mean this xenos is weak. They have known civilisation, and they lost it, and a species does not always do so unwillingly. Though their empire has fallen, they have not tried to rebuild it. Whatever they are now, they have chosen to be.’

The ground in front of Deiphobus gave way and he stumbled forwards. Suddenly an acidic light was shining down on him. The sky was a boiling orange, dominated by the red giant star that burned across fully one-third of it.

A path cut straight down through the jungle, as if carved by a laser from above. The ground was dry and solid, unlike the quagmire elsewhere. Deiphobus looked up and down the path, but it curved out of sight.

‘This is the first world the alien’s mind gave to me,’ he continued. ‘Not a barren place, to act as a firebreak, but a place teeming with life. Its mind seethes. It is intelligent, but perhaps does not have complete control over its own mind. There may be parts of it the xenos itself does not know. But the path itself is the most interesting. It means…’

Deiphobus froze in mid-word. The movement he had spotted in the corner of his eye was not that of an insect or jungle predator. It was too deliberate, too calculated. It was human.

Deiphobus whirled around, drawing a bolt pistol. Inquisitor Carmillas stood behind him.

It was not Carmillas. She was dead. But the likeness was good. Her eyes were a little wrong, for the light behind them was not a glint of human emotion but a literal light, glowing as if the inside of her skull was on fire. Her fingers had too many joints and they did not all bend the right way, so the hand that gripped the hilt of her ornate power rapier looked more like a tentacled creature clasping its prey.

Carmillas lunged. Deiphobus turned the point of the rapier with his own blade but the rapier’s power field discharged with a crack like a gunshot in his ear. The knife shattered in his hand.

Deiphobus drove a shoulder forwards into the inquisitor’s midriff. She shifted to her back foot but held firm.

‘What are you?’ snarled Deiphobus.

‘Xenos within perimeter beta!’ gasped Carmillas in reply, speaking not to Deiphobus but to someone who wasn’t there.

Deiphobus drove the remains of his shattered blade up into the inquisitor’s stomach. The blade found a seam in her flakweave body armour and slid up into her abdomen.

It did not feel like it should. A Space Marine knew well what a knife felt like as it cut through skin and organ, and grazed against the spine and ribs. Carmillas was more like a solid mass, spongy and multi-layered. There was not enough blood. Not nearly enough.

Deiphobus put his shoulder under the inquisitor and threw her over him onto the ground. He followed up with a slash at waist height, further opening up the ruin of her torso.

Her face showed no pain. She looked more angry than anything, as if the wound was an insult. ‘Break open the armoury! To battle stations and repel them! Do not let them into the anatomy theatre!’

She lunged at Deiphobus, and her arm was jointed wrongly. The elbow bent the wrong way, the shoulder unfolding and giving her an extra joint that turned the point of the rapier under Deiphobus’s guard. The point punched between his ribs and speared him right through the torso.

The pain was real. Deiphobus gasped down a breath, and the effort tore open two of his lungs further. The power field burned out a great channel of burned flesh and organ. Red flashes burst in front of his eyes as one of his hearts was ripped apart and his nervous system plunged into shock.

But he was not dead. This was not real. He was not a Space Marine. He was a mental construct, psychically projected into the mind of an alien.

For a moment, the thought created a break in the pain. He could move, he could act, for another half-second longer.

He spent that half-second ramming his combat knife up into Carmillas’s throat. He twisted the blade and her head came off, revealing a shredded mass of grey-brown matter resembling the flesh of the xenos itself.

The inquisitor – which was not an inquisitor at all, but the alien’s concept of a human being – slumped to the ground. Deiphobus looked up at the sky and saw it was turning white. The blood was draining from his eyes and the world was greying out. It lost its shape, for the only thing keeping this world resembling a jungle was Deiphobus’s own willpower.

Deiphobus fell to his knees. He would have to give up on this projection. The xenos had been ready for him this time. But he had found out enough.

The jungle disintegrated, and Deiphobus was yanked up through the freezing ocean as his self-image exploded into a million shards of colour.

The apothecarion of the Fate of Stalinvast was dimly lit and cold. Many battle-brothers had breathed their last there, and their names were carved into the walls. This wing of the apothecarion was the Nerve-Glove Hall, and several devices, looking something like human-shaped casts split in two with their interiors covered in circuitry, were ranked in rows down the centre of the room. The nerve-glove was a tradition of the Imperial Fists – to anyone else it was a torture device, but to an Imperial Fist it was a means to express the strength of body and mind that Dorn’s example had instilled in them.

Deiphobus sat beside the autosurgeon unit on which the alien lay, its wrists and ankles shackled. The alien was comatose – it appeared dead to the sensors of the autosurgeon, but Deiphobus knew better, for its mind was still alive.

‘Librarian,’ said Sergeant Ctesiphon, who stood by the doorway. ‘You are awake.’

‘Most astute of you, brother,’ said Deiphobus. He was aware that sweat was running down his face and his hand still hovered over the xenos’s skull. He withdrew his hand and pulled his gauntlet back on. ‘How long have you stood there?’

‘Long enough to know the xenos is putting up a fight.’

‘It is,’ replied Deiphobus. ‘But there was a path.’

‘A path? Does it mean something?’

‘Everything in there means something.’ Deiphobus stood. His body ached. Every muscle must have been tensed. ‘Have you news?’

‘Techmarine Krusse found something else in the data-medium from Carmillas’s body.’

‘And?’

‘It was hidden, but in such a way that a standard Imperial tech-seance would find it. It was a single word.’

‘And?’

‘Vermilion,’ said Ctesiphon.

Deiphobus thought on this for a moment. ‘Vermilion,’ he repeated, as if searching for something concealed in the sound. ‘Nothing else?’

‘Nothing else.’

‘How far are we out from Beati Magnis?’

‘The crew say five days.’

‘That should be enough.’ Deiphobus looked down at the alien. It was disgusting. All aliens were, but this one had something particularly foul in its near-human proportions. ‘They know of us and what we look like.’ said Deiphobus. ‘But they know nothing of our anatomy. Carmillas may have been their first contact with humanity.’

‘Do they pose a risk?’ asked Ctesiphon.

‘Hopefully not so great a risk,’ said Deiphobus, ‘as we pose to them.’

Deiphobus picked up the path as a deep channel scored through a charnel heap the size of a mountain. In the distance, more mountains rose, stretching off in a mighty range that seemed to touch the purple-black sky seething overhead. The bodies were those of the same alien species whose mind Deiphobus was traversing. They were all different, their skin a different hue of grey and brown, their facial features arranged in a different manner.

This was not a sight from the alien’s imagination. Deiphobus had performed enough interrogations to tell the difference between fantasy and memory. The xenos had seen this once. It had witnessed mountains of its own dead. But the path had not been a part of that memory.

To traverse this region of the alien’s mind Deiphobus had taken on the form, not of a Space Marine, but of a hardy Missionary, a leather-skinned wanderer leaning on a gnarled staff. He wore the once-white robes of the Missionaria Galaxia and his every step jangled with the gear he carried, enough to keep a man fed and sheltered through whatever wilds he might have to cross.

The watchtower was ahead, where the path finally ended. It was obsidian and jade, squat and powerful, a bastion against the wind that howled through the heaps of xenos dead. The door was a solid black slab with a single gap at eye level.

Deiphobus banged a fist on the door. A pair of eyes appeared at the slit. They were human eyes.

‘Speak the word,’ said a man’s voice.

‘Vermilion,’ said Deiphobus.

A few seconds passed. The door swung open. Deiphobus walked inside.

Out of the wind, it was warm. Light came from a circular hearth in the centre of the room. A few medicae orderlies were tending to wounded soldiers. Imperial Guard by the look of them.

Deiphobus knew their wounds never healed. The orderlies’ work was never done. They symbolised the sacrifices made to put this place here, nestled so deep in the alien’s mind that without a path, no one could ever find it again.

Inquisitor Carmillas sat by the fire, washing soiled bandages in a wooden pail of blood-pink water. She was not in her formal inquisitor’s garb. She war a long white dress, already stained with the soldiers’ blood. Her belt held a sword – not a power weapon but a functional warrior’s weapon. Her hair was down around her shoulders. Deiphobus noticed she did not have her bionic eye. Perhaps this was how she had looked when she was younger.

‘Inquisitor,’ said Deiphobus. ‘I have come here to speak with you.’

‘I am afraid,’ replied the inquisitor, ‘that I do not have much capacity for conversation. I am a psychic construct of the Carmillas, not the inquisitor herself. I am as she was in her unguarded moments, and I understand the likeness is very good, but aside from a few simple interactions I am unable to speak in her stead.’

‘That will not be necessary,’ said Deiphobus. ‘I imagine her psykers programmed you with the information I must request. I need to see the protocols with which this xenos was implanted.’

‘Of course,’ said Carmillas. She stood and wiped off her bloody hands on a cloth.

Gleaming black slabs of crystal rose from the floor.

OBSERVE, Deiphobus read from one slab. The words were carved in High Gothic. WAIT, GAIN TRUST, AND RETURN.

Another read, BE SILENT ON MATTERS OF MANKIND.

BE AS A SLAVE TO THE EMPEROR, read another.

‘I see,’ said Deiphobus. ‘This is as I suspected, but it is good to be certain. Were you given any knowledge on the xenos itself to impart?’

‘I was,’ replied Carmillas. Her eyes left Deiphobus and she seemed to be focusing far away. ‘The xenos has a cyclical notion of existence. Their attitude to civilisation reflects this. When their society reaches a pre-determined level of sophistication, they cast down their civilisation and put their cities to the torch, regressing to a feral existence. They then build up their civilisation again until it is time to cast it down once more. The xenos are currently towards the beginning of this cycle, approaching multi-system capacity. This species’ threat level will increase, and their reaction to contact with the Imperium is unknown.’ She turned back to Deiphobus. ‘Is this response to your satisfaction?’

‘It is, inquisitor,’ said Deiphobus.

‘Is there anything further for you here?’

‘No,’ said Deiphobus. ‘I have all I need.’

‘Then good day to you,’ said Carmillas. ‘The soldiers’ wounds must be dressed.’

Into the shattered crag of Miser’s Peak was carved a chamber lined with lapis and gold, lit by a chandelier of pilgrims’ skulls. A great throne stood surrounded by choir-servitors, their hooded, hunched forms kneeling in eternal supplication.

Here the air was chill, for this world was too far from its sun to permit normal human habitation. That fact helped keep it secret, for if there was one thing the Inquisition valued, it was secrecy.

On the throne sat Lord Inquisitor Vortz of the Ordo Xenos. His regal robes were of glistening loxatl hide and his armour was cut from the bones of a dozen species. He was an old man, and his breath misted in the freezing air.

His interrogators and explicators stood at attention beside his throne in the scarlet uniforms of his personal army. Vortz’s presence was such that his underlings might as well have not even been there.

Deiphobus nodded in salute. He stood at the foot of the throne, a place intended to instil the observer with a sense of awe and inferiority to the inquisitor. Deiphobus felt neither. Behind him, Chapter serfs wheeled in the gurney on which the alien was strapped.

‘Lord Inquisitor,’ said Deiphobus. ‘The Space Marines of the Imperial Fists make common purpose with your Holy Ordos. We have brought you the xenos recovered from Inquisitor Carmillas’s outpost.’

‘So I see,’ said Vortz. ‘We were dismayed to hear of the death of Inquisitor Carmillas. She was once the most promising interrogators in our service, and in later years earned great praise from her brethren as an inquisitor. Pray tell, Librarian Deiphobus, how did she die?’

‘In battle,’ said Deiphobus.

‘That is something, at least. My explicators will receive the alien from you. And thus is our business concluded, in the name of the…’

‘This is not a simple xenos,’ said Deiphobus. Though Vortz was probably not used to being interrupted, even a man of his pride knew better than to take a Space Marine to task for it. ‘I have delved into its mind,’ continued Deiphobus. ‘Carmillas left information in datastores within her body in case she died with the alien’s mission unfulfilled. Her psykers built within its mind a set of commands of which it would be unaware. It was a spy, Lord Inquisitor. It was programmed thus to gather information on the aliens’ civilisation and report it back to the Imperium. But her spy’s fellow xenos tracked it down to acquire it by force, and in the battle the inquisitor lost her life. And all of this, I suspect, is of little surprise to Lord Inquisitor Vortz. Does not your own staff of psykers represent one of the Imperium’s finest resources in matters of the alien mind? Did not Carmillas learn from you?’

Vortz thought about this. Unease, well-disguised, passed over the faces of his underlings. ‘It is what I would have done,’ he conceded. ‘This species has been turning up in mercenary bands around the Ghoul Stars. Carmillas was eager to discover what danger it presented to the Imperium.’

‘They despise civilisation,’ said Deiphobus. ‘When their own grows to great, they burn it to the ground and start anew. When they look on the Imperium, it is with whatever passes in their minds for hatred. Watch them, Lord Inquisitor. This specimen will help you. They are savages, but they were not always so.’

Deiphobus turned and left the presence of Lord Inquisitor Vortz, leaving the xenos in the throne room.

Deiphobus, wearing the image that most resembled his physical self, slid the volume of memories into its place on the shelf. This was the library of his memory, a vast and shadowy place, on the shelves of which every interrogation was carefully filed away. Some memories were gemstones arranged carefully in display cabinets, or paintings hung on the walls, but most were books like the one in which Deiphobus had contained the memories of his interrogation of Carmillas’s spy.

‘Is this one mine?’ said Inquisitor Carmillas.

‘It is,’ said Deiphobus.

Carmillas was much as she had appeared in her sanctuary in the alien’s mind, although now there were no bloodstains on her dress. She had tied her hair back, as well, and looked a little more demure and official. ‘Might I read it?’

‘You may.’

‘My thanks. And, Librarian?’

‘Inquisitor?’

‘I cannot help but see how empty this place is. I take it that you do not make it a habit of bringing in new guests?’

‘Mostly the minds I examine have less savoury inhabitants,’ replied Deiphobus. ‘And I do not relish having them run loose in my mind. But you deserve to be remembered, inquisitor. And besides, this place has become rather overfull during the years. It needs a proper curator. If that work is not beneath you, inquisitor.’

‘Of course not,’ replied Carmillas – or at least, the memory that Deiphobus had of Carmillas, furnished by the echo of her he had met. ‘How many of us can help serve our Emperor after death?’ She look around and tutted. ‘This place is a mess, Librarian. You need me.’

‘Then I shall leave you to your work.’

‘I think that would be best.’

Deiphobus let himself fade away, the image he wore becoming translucent, then ghostly, and finally no more than a shadow. He felt the cold and heaviness of his physical body around him again.

He left all that remained of Inquisitor Carmillas in his mind, tending to the volumes of his memories.

THE IRON WITHOUT

Graham McNeill

NOW

His name was Soltarn Vull Bronn and ten of his vertebrae were mangled beyond the power of even the most mechanically adept Apothecary to save. His legs had been crushed to paste and his left arm jutted from the misshapen ruin of his chevroned shoulder guard like a broken girder. No amount of will could force it to move, but he was able to free his right arm from beneath his breastplate.

The circumvallations at the cave mouth were gone, buried beneath the collapsed ceiling of the enormous cavern. Through dust-smeared eyes, he saw that the wall and his command staff were a crushed ruin of flames and smoke. That meant Teth Dassadra was likely dead as well. Bronn had no feelings towards the man save apathy and an Iron Warrior’s natural mistrust, but at least he had been a vaguely competent siege-smith.

His collapsing lungs heaved to sift enough oxygen from the smoke- and dust-clogged air as his ears rang from the apocalyptic detonation that had triggered the collapse. He coughed a wad of bloody phlegm, knowing the position was lost and that any of his warriors who had survived the cave-in he had caused were as good as dead. The Ultramarines’ guns would see to that.

Had that been the plan all along?

Try as he might, Bronn could see no other conclusion.

He had followed the Warsmith’s orders to the letter, with diligence and dogged loyalty.

In retrospect, perhaps that was the problem.

The Warsmith was a warrior like no other, a killer of men whose mind functioned in a radically different way to the Legion in whose name he once fought. To some, that had marked him for greatness, but to others it was a vile stain on their honour that he should bear the visored skull of the Iron Warriors.

Half-breed, they called him.

Mongrel upstart.

Honsou.

He had left them to die, and though Bronn suspected that defeat would be the inevitable outcome of so risky a war, he found he was still surprised. A lifetime of betrayals; from the dawn of the Imperium, when gods walked among their disciples, and all through the Long War to this latest spasm of rebellion. Ever was it the lot of the Iron Warriors to taste perfidy, but this latest treachery was the bitterest Bronn had ever swallowed.

He had believed in Honsou.

Despite his squalid inception, the half-breed had risen through the ranks with the persistence of a monotasked servitor digging an approach trench, displaying just the right balance of initiative and blind obedience to his betters until those less skilled had fallen by the wayside.

It had been on Hydra Cordatus his chance to excel had finally come. Bronn remembered the thundering violence of that siege, the brittle regolith that collapsed at every turn, the hot sun that baked slaves alive and bleached their bones before they were buried in the foundations of the redoubts. Most of all, he remembered the deep yellow rock that resisted every pick and shovel.

It had been a masterfully wrought approach, each sap pitched at a precise angle and every battery thrown up with a speed that would have made the artisan masters of lost Olympia proud. Bronn had fought in the Grand Company of Forrix, and he could still remember the pain of seeing his master gunned down by the Imperial battle engine at the moment of final victory. Standing triumphant in the ruins of the fortress, Forrix had been killed in the moment of regaining his lost fire.

At battle’s end, Honsou was named the Warsmith’s successor and he had given Forrix and Kroeger’s warriors a stark choice: accept him as their new Warsmith and live, or deny him and be destroyed. It was no choice at all, and every warrior had dropped to one knee and sworn fealty to their new master. From Hydra Cordatus, they had battered a path through Van Daal’s Black Legion whelps at Perdictor and returned to Medrengard. Honsou had claimed the timeless fortress of Khalan-Ghol for himself, as was his right, but brooding in a crooked spire was not to be the half-breed’s destiny.

Jealous eyes had fallen upon Khalan-Ghol, and the grand armies of Lord Toramino had joined forces with the berserk horde of Lord Berossus to attack Honsou in his mountain lair.

Though pain was eating away at his formidable powers of endurance, Bronn grinned wryly at how the two lords of Medrengard had been humbled by the upstart half-breed, their armies broken and scattered to ashes beneath the cruel light of the daemon world’s black sun.

Whisperers railed at being commanded by a warrior without lineage, a half-breed with no memory of the Great Betrayal, who had not known the pain of the thousand indignities heaped upon the Legion by the Emperor, and who had not earned his bitterness on the fire-blackened rock of Terra. Honsou’s warriors were now fighters without a fortress, rootless wanderers little better than sell-swords, and that was hard to stomach for men who had stood at the side of a living god.

Even after the destruction of Tarsis Ultra, they called Honsou unworthy, and not even the release of the daemon lord M’kar from his imprisonment on the Indomitable had appeased his doubters. They hated him, called him impure, and plotted his downfall. Heritage and purity of genetics was all that mattered to these schemers, and no matter how many victories Honsou won, they would never accept him.

Bronn had hunted those who spread dissent and ended them, for he had always known that a warrior’s worth was measured in the blood he shed, the soil he dug, the walls he raised and the citadels he split asunder.

By that measure, Honsou was a true Iron Warrior.

But now this…

Bronn could stomach betrayal, it was the Iron Warriors’ lot, but to have it come from within on so grand a scale was galling.

What could be so important beneath the surface of Calth that was worth this?

THEN

Earth-moving machinery roared and bellowed, spitting clouds of caustic, lung-tarring smoke, spraying stone chips from beneath solid rubber tyres. A hundred and fifteen machines pulled like blood-maddened flesh hounds on chains at the cave’s exit. The confined air reeked of machine oil, blood offerings, petrochemical fumes and sweat. Over four thousand mortals in reinforced work overalls and canvas hoods huddled in the shadow of the heavy machines, armed with picks, shovels and rock-breaking drills.

Soltarn Vull Bronn swept his gaze around the widened chamber with a critical eye.

‘I need more machines,’ he said.

‘A hundred and fifteen should be more than enough,’ replied Teth Dassadra, comparing the arrangement of machines with hand-drawn schemata plotted out by Bronn less than an hour ago. ‘The forward redoubt only needs to be five hundred metres wide and twenty high.’

‘You say “only” as though we will be building it in a summer meadow with the enemy attacking us with flower blossoms,’ said Bronn.

‘No,’ said Dassadra, unable to keep the impatience from his voice. ‘I know the mathematics of construction as well as you. My logarithmic calculations are correct, even allowing for losses.’

‘And if those losses are greater than we expect?’

‘Why should they be?’

‘Because this is a world of Ultramar,’ said Bronn.

‘A world like any other,’ said Dassadra with a dismissive shrug as they reached a group of workers crouched behind a kinetic mantlet and bearing heavy picks across their shoulders. The men were tense, awaiting the order to advance into the teeth of massed artillery. For men under a virtual death-sentence, they appeared remarkably calm.

Bronn rounded on Dassadra. ‘No, it is not. These are the best fighters we have faced. They fear us, yes, but not so much that they will break and run when the first shells land among them. So long as the Ultramarines stand, so too will they.’

‘You admire them,’ hissed Dassadra.

‘I do not admire them, fool, I simply recognise their abilities,’ countered Bronn. ‘It would be stupid to do otherwise.’

Dassadra gestured to the thousands of men, servitors and drones gathered around the machines. ‘Plenty of meat and bone to raise a wall if the diggers fail.’

Bronn turned to the group of men sheltering behind the mantlet. With a casual twist of his arm, he unsheathed his entrenching tool from its shoulder scabbard. Its name was Earthbreaker, and its dull iron was scored and nicked where swords and axes had gouged its haft, yet the pointed half-moon of its blade was as sharp as the day it had been taken from the forge-armoury.

As a tool of siege, Earthbreaker had dug countless trenches, excavated a thousand tunnels beneath the hardest rock and raised earthworks so vast as to be visible from low orbit. As a weapon, it had taken the head of ten captains of the Fists, had split the spine of a greenskin warlord of six systems and hewed innumerable humble rankers in the bloody heave and swell of close-quarters battle.

Bronn hammered its blade into the nearest slave’s back. Blood welled around the embedded iron, and the man jerked as his ruptured spinal column sent contradictory impulses flailing around his dying body.

‘Mortal muscle to drive iron tools is in plentiful supply, and can be easily replaced when blood inevitably soaks the earth,’ said Bronn, irritated at needing to explain his methodology to Dassadra. ‘Machines are less easily replaced.’

Bronn shook the split body from his blade as another mortal ran up from the rear ranks to take his place. The dead man’s former comrades threw his corpse in front of the bulldozer, to be crushed into the rock when the assault began.

Using Earthbreaker like a walker’s staff, Bronn moved through the cavern, marking out lines of advance and reinforcing his construction orders as he went. The mortals looked up in terror as he passed, which was as it should be. He was sending them to their deaths, but even marching out into a hellstorm of artillery, gunfire and shrapnel was more palatable than displeasing an Iron Warrior.

Dassadra watched his every move, searching for mistakes and flaws in his orders, but Bronn knew he would find none. His aide had come to him from the shattered survivors of Lord Berossus’s army, and though those warriors had sworn loyalty to Honsou, they were little better than whipped dogs, volatile and always looking for advantage.

Bronn paused at the machine closest to the cavern mouth, a towering eighteen-wheeler on spiked iron tracks and with a giant hopper of crushed stone secured at its rear, rubble gathered from the collapsed ruin left by the defenders after the destruction of the giant tunnel leading from Guilliman’s Gate to Four Valleys Gorge. From this debris would be built a wall to shelter the heavy guns of the Iron Warriors, and the dark symmetry of this pleased Bronn no end. Flexible pipes at its sides pulsed like intestines, filled with rapid-setting permacrete that would be used to bind the loose rubble together and allow the mortal slaves to erect the mesh-wrapped blockwork of the batteries.

The cavern mouth was a semi-circular slice of wan daylight, something that grated against Bronn’s sensibilities. They were underground, and underground places should be dark. It made no difference to the projected operation, but it offended his sense of the way things ought to be. Bronn knew the subtleties of rock better than anyone, and it was said with only a spoonful of irony that it spoke to him.

Where there was a weak seam in a wall, Bronn would find it. Where the soil was softer and more amenable to undermining, he would know of it. Just by touching the rock, Bronn could know its hidden strengths, its complex structure and its inherent weaknesses. Where others might mount an escalade with more flair or know best when a breach was practicable, no-one knew the rock better than he.

Bronn held out his hand for the plan he had drawn earlier. Dassadra gave it to him with the speed of one who knows well his master’s desires. Bronn checked the distances between his machines and the cavern walls, the lines of advance and the routes of dispersal once they emerged from the transient safety of this tunnel.

‘This is all wrong,’ he said, swinging up onto the integral steps machined into the flank of a vast bulldozer with its shovel blade worked in the form of an enormous fanged daemon maw. The machine had been a gift from the Tyrant of Badab after the Skull Harvest, and was, to Bronn’s eyes, needlessly embellished. The operator’s cab was set behind a heavy mantlet of flared horns and armoured in sheets of layered metal, with only a thin slit by which the driver could see out.

He hauled open the door to the operator’s cabin and growled at the hunched figure hard-wired into the control mechanism. A hybrid thing of machine parts and bruised flesh, it had once been an Iron Warrior whose mortal remains had been housed in the sarcophagus of a Dreadnought.

‘Brother Lacuna,’ said Bronn, his voice muffled behind the fire-blackened visor he had taken from the pulped remains of his former captain on Hydra Cordatus. ‘You are too far forwards. Pull back ten metres.’

‘I will not,’ answered the operator, his voice a wet, rasping thing of droning vox-scraps stitched together to form a stunted vocabulary. ‘To raise the first block, I must be ahead of the pack.’

Bronn sighed. No Iron Warrior who could stand, wield a weapon or entrenching tool wished to demean himself by operating one of these machines, yet they were an integral part of the Iron Warriors modus operandi. Just another of the many contradictions inherent to the Iron Warriors. Only those plucked from wrecked Dreadnoughts or too badly injured to survive were deemed fit for such duties, and even then they weren’t the most suitable candidates.

‘You must pull back,’ insisted Bronn. ‘The first layer of foundation needs to be dug simultaneously. The rock at this depth is layered with staggered bands of loose soil and will collapse inwards if it is not strengthened at the same time. You understand?’

Lacuna stared at Bronn, though it was impossible to tell what was going on in his ravaged brain. The similar urge to wreak harm and inflict mayhem that saw many Dreadnoughts reduced to blood-crazed madness afflicted the machine operators, though their madness was of an altogether more dangerous kind.

The kind that could cause a fortress to fall.

‘I understand,’ said Lacuna in his chopped-up language. A hash of binary blurted from his vox-grille, and Bronn was glad the visor hid his grin as he caught the gist of Lacuna’s insult.

‘Just get it done,’ said Bronn. ‘And if you call me a fabricator of wooden walls again, I’ll have what’s left of you wired into a mine-clearance drone.’

Even with half his face gone and the remainder replaced by cannibalised servitor parts, Lacuna was able to register surprise at Bronn’s understanding of binaric cant. A frothed grate of machine laughter bubbled up from Lacuna’s rebuilt throat, as the bulldozer’s engine fired up and the gears clattered into reverse.

Bronn withdrew from the cab and slammed the door shut, riding along on the running boards until he was satisfied the machine was where it was supposed to be. He banged a hand on the door and dropped to the hard floor of the cavern. Its surface had been planed smooth by melta fire in readiness for the earth-moving machines and the Black Basilica, and Bronn felt its strength as he knelt and placed his palm upon it.

‘Is the rock strong?’ asked the harsh, guttural bark of this host’s war leader.

Bronn stood and gave a curt nod. ‘It is good rock, Warsmith Honsou, old rock,’ he said. ‘The kind of rock that can stand against everything the universe has to throw at it. The kind of rock that once formed the heart of Olympia.’

Honsou shook his head at such ill-placed nostalgia. ‘Olympia’s rock failed in the end, didn’t it?’

Bronn’s jawline clenched. ‘Its people failed,’ he said. ‘Not its rock.’

Honsou never missed a chance to remind his Legion that they had destroyed their own homeworld after its populace rebelled against their lawful rulers. It seemed wilfully perverse to twist such a knife in the guts of his men, but Bronn had long-since learned to let such barbs pass without comment.

‘But the rock of Calth will fall?’ asked Honsou.

‘It will not stand before the inevitability of Perturabo’s true sons,’ Bronn assured him, meeting Honsou’s barb with one of his own.

‘I never thought it would,’ said Honsou with a lopsided grin. The upper quadrant of the Warsmith’s face was a mangled, knotted mass of scar tissue, mortician-grafted augmetics and raw flesh, the result of a close encounter with a bolter shell and a collapsing tunnel. What might once have been considered roguish was now pulled into a permanently sardonic leer. One arm was encased in Mark IV plate pulled from the body of a dead Iron Warrior, the other a perfect replica of an arm fashioned from silver mercury.

Honsou saw Bronn’s attention and lifted the arm up before him.

‘This whole cave could fall and this arm wouldn’t have a scratch on it if you dug it out.’

‘The rest of us would be crushed, though,’ pointed out Bronn.

Honsou grinned. ‘Always so literal,’ he said. ‘I think that’s the real reason the Iron Warriors followed the Warmaster into rebellion. Horus probably said it as a joke and Perturabo took him at his word.’

‘Then that just shows how little you know,’ snapped Dassadra.

Bronn held up a fist to prevent Dassadra speaking again, but Honsou appeared to be amused rather than angered at his aide’s outburst.

‘He has spark, this one,’ said Honsou.

‘One of Berossus’s men,’ answered Bronn.

‘Ah.’

Before Honsou could provoke Dassadra again, Bronn said, ‘Is there something you needed, Warsmith?’

Honsou nodded, acquiescing to Bronn’s authority here. ‘You are ready to begin the advance?’

‘I am,’ confirmed Bronn. ‘Just give the word and I’ll have a wall built across that ridge inside a day.’

‘Good. Who’s leading the first push?’

‘Jaegoth Ghent.’

Honsou nodded. Ghent was a good man under fire. Lord Toramino had had most of his nervous system stripped out by adepts of the Dark Mechanicus and replaced with artificial receptors. It made him a dour battle-brother, but a warrior who wouldn’t flinch if an artillery shell landed right next to him. Ghent had directed the approach saps to Khalan-Ghol, and Honsou had been careful to spare his life in the wake of the carnage surrounding the last days of his former abode.

‘Tell him to stand down,’ said Honsou.

‘What? Why?’

‘You and I are going lead the push from the cavern,’ said Honsou.

‘Are you insane?’ demanded Bronn. ‘Why would you order such a thing?’

‘It’s been too long since I got my hands dirty with a pick and broke the earth of an enemy world,’ said Honsou. ‘I need to get back to what I do best, building walls for big guns. And if I’m going to do that, I need someone who knows the rock better than anyone else at my side.’

‘If the half-breed wants to die, let him,’ said Dassadra. ‘No-one will mourn him.’

Bronn expected Honsou to kill Dassadra for his temerity, but Honsou just laughed.

‘Maybe not,’ said Honsou. ‘The daemon lord may command the Bloodborn, but I lead this host, and one of the benefits of that is being able to do what I damn well please. Bronn, get this little bastard away from me before he spoils my good mood and I kill him.’

Bronn ordered Dassadra away with a curt nod, and stared at Honsou.

‘Why are you really doing this?’ he asked once Dassadra was out of earshot.

‘Do I need a reason?’ countered Honsou.

‘If you’re going to lead my machines out there, I need to know you’re doing it for the right reasons. I’m not going to let you get them destroyed just to prove a point to the daemon lord or the Legion.’

‘And what point would I be proving?’

‘That you’re an Iron Warrior,’ said Bronn. ‘A true son of Perturabo.’

‘Do I need to prove that? Look at where we are. Not even Perturabo brought the iron and the stone to Ultramar.’

Bronn shook his head and lowered his voice so that no-one but Honsou would hear him.

‘No matter how many escalades you make, no matter how many breaches you storm or fortresses you raze, they will never respect you as an Iron Warrior. This will make no difference to how these warriors see you. To them you will always be the half-breed.’

Honsou put a hand on Bronn’s shoulder and turned him towards the light at the cavern mouth. Rippling shafts of sunlight danced in the blue-hazed fumes of the grumbling bulldozers and lifter rigs.

‘Beyond that opening are my enemies,’ said Honsou. ‘Behind me are warriors who would happily turn their weapons on me if they thought they could get away with it. Do you really think I’m doing this to try and impress anyone? I know who I am, and I don’t give a greenskin’s fart what anyone thinks of me.’

‘Then what do you hope to achieve?’

‘I need them to see me make war like an Iron Warrior,’ said Honsou, leaning in close and baring his teeth in sudden anger. ‘Even if they never accept me as one, I need them to know that I fight like one. I need them to understand that if anything happens to me, if any of them make a move against me, then they’re all going to die on this forsaken rock. I’m the only one who can win the war on Calth, and I want them to know that. Without me, this invasion is over.’

‘And if we die out there?’ asked Bronn as Honsou walked away. ‘What happens then?’

‘We’ll be dead,’ said Honsou. ‘What does it matter what happens after that?’

Leaving Soltarn Vull Bronn to oversee the last preparations for the assault, Honsou made his way back through the cavern, relishing the sudden sense of excitement that filled him. It had been a spur of the moment decision to lead the assault into the great underground cavern, but it felt right. It felt good. Every word he had said to Bronn was true, but there was more to it than that.

Honsou cared little for the esteem of his fellow Iron Warriors, but the voices that harped at him from the darkest recesses of his mind demanded he prove his worth every moment of every day.

They are right to hate you…

The Clonelord should never have wrought you…

You are nothing but an aborted experiment that escaped the furnace…

Most of these voices made no sense to Honsou, for he remembered nothing but disjointed scraps of his birth as an Iron Warrior. Nor could he recall the life he had lived before being transformed into a thing reviled by those he had been crafted from and those he had been created for. No, the drive – the obsession – he had to place himself in harm’s way came from the need to prove those voices wrong.

He was as good as any Iron Warrior.

He could fight as hard and with as much cunning and dogged determination as any of those crafted from Perturabo’s gene-seed. And if he had to set the galaxy afire from one spiral arm to the other to prove it, then so be it.

Honsou had long ago come to this realisation, but had never voiced it to another soul. Let them think he wanted to be like them. Let them think he wanted to be one of them. Their hate only spurred him on, and their sneering condescension only made him stronger.

His fists clenched and he unsheathed the monstrous, night-bladed axe from its leather harness at his shoulder. The weapon had belonged to a warrior of the Black Legion, but like most of the accoutrements of war Honsou now sported, it had been taken as a trophy of murder. His augmetic eye had been plucked from the ruined skull of a Savage Mortician, and the impervious, silver-steel arm had been sawn from the body of a captive Ultramarine.

Further back in the long tunnel that led to the irradiated surface of Calth, a series of armoured blockhouses had been built in staggered chevrons. The Iron Warriors never paused on the march without constructing solid walls to protect their fighters. M’kar might have an inexhaustible army of daemons to call upon, but Honsou needed to husband his resources.

Warriors in burnished plate ran mock assaults with tiny clockwork armies thrown against miniature fortresses, cleaned weapons that had been cleaned a thousand times already or simply stood like ageless statues and waited for the order to attack. Honsou saw Cadaras Grendel and the Newborn working through a series of combat drills before a blockhouse at the centre of the ugly constructions of steel and stone.

Grendel had taken over the Newborn’s training since Ardaric Vaanes’ capture, but his methods were far from subtle, and he did not have the fluid panache of the former Raven Guard. Where Vaanes had sought to teach the Newborn from a standpoint of making it a better warrior, all Grendel wanted was to make it a better killer.

A subtle difference, and one that mattered little in the crucible of combat, but a difference nonetheless. Honsou had often watched the Newborn train with Vaanes, grudgingly enjoying the ballet of limbs and blades, the lethal choreography of death and the bouts that were more like dances than brutal combats. The Newborn had tried to learn more than just battle skills from Vaanes; it wanted to learn of its soul and how it could rise above its nature to become something more. No such teachings were to be found in Grendel’s sparring, only bloody, bruising lessons in killing. If the Newborn sought any higher truths to its existence in Grendel’s tutelage, it was having those desires beaten out of it.

Honsou found it hard to look upon the creature, seeing the face of his nemesis in its lopsided features and dead skin mask.

Hot-housed in the nightmarish Daemonculaba womb-slaves, the Newborn was a dark mirror of Uriel Ventris, a hybrid by-blow of warp spawned genetics. No-one had expected it to survive, but it had lived and become stronger than anyone could have foreseen. Better to harness and mould such a creature in the ways of its masters before allowing it to become something of its own.

Honsou paused to watch Grendel and the Newborn fight.

It wasn’t pretty, a brawl of superhumans who fought without the drag of honour, rules or the need to play fair. Knowing the skill of Grendel and the Newborn, it was likely the bout had been going on for quite some time. Elbows, knees and heads were weapons, a moment of weakness an opening. Their fight was not about who was the best, but about who was left standing. Grendel sent a vicious right cross at the Newborn’s jaw, the fist driving with enough force to pulp rock. The Newborn swayed aside, but Grendel’s elbow jabbed, cracking it in the jaw and hurling it from its feet.

Grendel followed up with a crushing knee to the groin and a thundering series of rabbit punches to the Newborn’s throat. Honsou grimaced as he heard bone break and flesh rupture. The bout was over, but Grendel kept up his furious assault without pause.

‘I think you beat him,’ called Honsou, and Grendel turned to look at him with a grin of triumph. The mohawked warrior’s chest heaved with the adrenaline of battle as the Newborn spat a geyser of brackish fluid and rolled onto its side.

‘Remind me never to get into a fight with you, Grendel,’ said Honsou, holding a hand out to his lieutenant. Grendel looked up, his malignantly scarred features a clenched fist of venomous anger.

Honsou saw the look and said, ‘Don’t even think about it.’

Grendel shrugged and took Honsou’s silver hand. His fists were coated in blood that vanished into the depths of the alien limb as Honsou pulled him to his feet.

‘After we’re done here, you and I need to get in the ring,’ said Grendel. ‘Ever since Khalan-Ghol I’ve wanted to beat you bloody.’

‘Trust me,’ said Honsou. ‘The feeling’s mutual, but I need you alive.’

Grendel twisted his neck and spat a mouthful of crimson spittle as the Newborn climbed to its feet. A faint luminosity shimmered beneath its skin, as though its heart were a lumen globe buried beneath its armour instead of a beating organ. The bones Grendel had broken were already healing, and the cuts his mailed fists had opened on the Newborn’s face were sealing even as Honsou watched. He’d long been aware of the Newborn’s ability to undo the most horrific damage, but it never failed to unsettle him.

‘Is it time to launch the attack?’ it asked.

Honsou nodded, but kept his eyes on Grendel.

Though its skin hung loosely on the bone beneath with a mannequin’s artificiality, there was no mistaking the patrician cast of its inherited features. He didn’t know what the creature had looked like before its transformation in the Daemonculaba, but it bore the unmistakable gene-cast of Uriel Ventris.

‘Bronn has everything in place, and we’re ready to move,’ said Honsou.

‘I don’t like Bronn,’ said Grendel.

‘You don’t like anyone,’ pointed out Honsou.

‘True,’ admitted Grendel. ‘But he really gets under my skin.’

‘Why?’ asked the Newborn. ‘From what I have seen, Soltarn Vull Bronn is a highly competent warrior. His geophysical knowledge is second to none. Better even than yours, Warsmith.’

Honsou wanted to feel slighted, but he knew the Newborn was right.

‘There’s a trace of the witch to him,’ said Grendel, swinging his shoulders to loosen the muscles and twisting his neck from side to side. ‘I don’t care how many sieges a man’s fought, you can’t know the heart of a planet’s rock just by touching it and looking at it.’

‘I don’t care how he does it,’ said Honsou. ‘He’s never wrong.’

‘There’s truth in that,’ nodded Grendel with customary capriciousness. ‘How long before he gets a practicable wall up?’

‘It won’t be long, no more than a day,’ said Honsou.

‘We will lose a great deal of men to complete a wall in so short a time,’ said the Newborn.

‘We stand to lose a lot more than just men if we don’t get this done quickly.’

The Newborn nodded, accepting Honsou’s logic, but its head cocked to one side as it read a hidden truth behind his expression.

‘What are you not telling us?’ it asked.

The attack began, as all Iron Warrior attacks began, with a punishing artillery barrage. The guns at the tunnel mouth boomed and roared, filling the cavern with choking banks of acrid propellant smoke. Vast, ceiling-mounted extraction units sucked great lungfuls of the smoke and pumped it back through the rock to the surface of Calth, though no amount of machinery could totally eliminate the chemical reek of explosives fashioned in the heart of a daemon world. No sooner had the first barrage been launched than the second was away. Mutants and adrenal-boosted mecha-slaves fed the voracious appetite of the guns, hauling heavy flatbeds of shells to the artillery line.

Bronn watched the thundering power of the artillery and knew the field of fire was woefully narrow for the task at hand, but with the restricted frontage allowed by the cave mouth, there was little that could be done to widen it. The vibration of the shellfire was titanic, and the cavern shook with the violence of it. Dust and fragments of stone fell from the ceiling, and Dassadra looked up with a critical eye.

‘Don’t waste your energy worrying about the cavern,’ said Bronn over the helm vox. ‘The rock above will hold.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Positive.’

Dassadra looked unconvinced, but Bronn had little time to waste in reassuring him. Any Iron Warrior who couldn’t read the structural strength of a cavern like this wasn’t worthy of the name. Bronn heard the sound of distant explosions, a subtle change in the pitch of the unending pounding that filled the cavern.

‘Earth and deep rock,’ he said, angrily. ‘We’re hitting their earthworks.’

‘You want the guns realigned?’

Bronn considered Dassadra’s request. It was not a suggestion without merit, for the shellfire was killing nothing of note; maybe a few units of the Ultramar soldiery, but certainly none of the Space Marines sure to be in the valley beyond.

‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘but remember that these volleys aren’t about killing, they’re about keeping the bastards’ heads down. Move the guns forward and increase the tempo as the flanking artillery widens its fields of fire.’

Dassadra passed the word to the gun crews, and moments later the rapid tempo of the guns stepped up as yet more shells arced into the valley. Dust and pulverised rock hung in the air like heavy fog as the artillery line moved forward with mathematical precision. Bronn felt the vibration of footsteps behind him, and knew from the weight and length of them that his Warsmith was approaching.

Bronn turned to see Honsou hefting a short-handled entrenching tool. Like Earthbreaker, it was as much a weapon as a tool of siege.

‘Yours?’ asked Bronn.

Honsou nodded, and hefted the tool up for him to see. The haft was scored steel and its blade was notched with repeated impacts on hard earth and brittle bones. Flaking brown stains coated its edges, the residue of a thousand or more deaths, and the dirt of myriad worlds encrusted its ragged edge.

‘I crafted it myself,’ said Honsou proudly, offering it to Bronn.

‘As any proper Iron Warrior should,’ agreed Bronn, feeling the heft of the entrenching tool. ‘It’s shorter than most I’ve seen.’

‘All the entrenching tools made in the weapon forges of Warsmith Tarasios were short. Made them better weapons for fighting in a trench.’

Bronn’s eyes widened in respect for the lost Warsmith.

‘The Warsmith who broke open the Jade Bastion,’ said Bronn with an admiring nod. ‘I forgot he trained you. That explains why it’s weighted towards the digging end.’

‘You know as well as I do that battles fought in the trenches are bloody toe-to-toe affairs,’ said Honsou, taking back his entrenching tool. ‘Brute strength, ferocity and a short swing are more important than skill.’

‘And you lack for none of these qualities,’ laughed Bronn. ‘You are a scrapper and a brawler.’

‘Is that a compliment or an insult?’ asked Honsou.

‘You decide,’ replied Bronn. ‘Now are you ready to use that thing?’

Honsou grinned and tucked it in tight to his chest. ‘Give the word, Soltarn Vull Bronn.’

Bronn lifted Earthbreaker and held it aloft for long moments before ramming it down into the hard rock of the cavern floor. The vitrified stone split apart and as the cracks spread out from his feet, a mighty roar went up from the thousands of workers gathered behind him.

As the guns fired once more, Bronn jogged with heavy, mile-eating footfalls towards the mouth of the cave. The rocky floor shook with the force of the heavy digging machines moving through the gaps between the artillery pieces, and trumpeting, honking, screaming war horns blared in unison as the Iron Warriors advanced into the teeth of the Ultramarines defences.

Bronn ran at a relentless pace, stolid and inexorable, with Honsou on one side and Teth Dassadra on the other. They moved without haste, but with a terrible inevitability that had seen even the mightiest citadels humbled. Howitzers spoke with thunderous booms, and the roar of engines echoed from the cavern sides like the howling of an army of daemons.

The light at the cavern mouth swelled before them. The noise was deafening, a titanic hammerblow of shockwaves that made a mockery of any attempt of their armour’s auto-senses to attenuate the crescendo of destruction. Bronn felt the percussive body-slam of artillery fire as they ran past the forward line of emplaced Basilisk guns. Spewing clouds of ejected smoke billowed in chaotic vortices, hauled and yanked by the extractors and subterranean atmospherics.

‘Iron Within!’ shouted Honsou.

‘Iron Without!’ answered Bronn.

Honsou had seen Four Valleys Gorge before through the eyes of remote drone servitors, each time a fleeting glance before a lethally accurate artillery round atomised it, but this was the first time he had seen it with his own eyes. In times of peace, it would have been place of bucolic splendour that led deeper into the caverns beneath Calth, but now it was like a page from Perturabo’s great Castellum Arcanicus, with entrenchments spread across the landscape like the sutures on the Newborn’s face.

Earthen redoubts and permacrete strongpoints occupied the high ground, while firing trenches, automated pillboxes and armoured brochs covered the dead ground where landscape did not conform to the needs of defence. By any estimation, it was a fearsome array of textbook defences, but what was textbook to the Ultramarines was predictable to an Iron Warrior. Three fortresses of green marble barred further passage downwards at the cardinal points of the enormous cavern, and though each was a powerful bastion, with overlapping fields of enfilading fire, none offered serious impediment to the Iron Warriors.

Honsou saw this in an instant, spotting where the defences were weakest, where an approach might be made – though he would not be making it himself – and where the Ultramarines were hoping to lure them into attack. His view was obliterated a second later as a thundering series of hammerblow detonations marched across the landscape, booming mushroom clouds of geysering earth and fire and smoke.

The sound rolled over Honsou and he grinned at the visceral thrill of fighting at the sharp end of a charge. The plateau before him was empty and shaped like a flat oval, a place for visitors to Calth’s underground to marvel in the sheer technical bravura that had shaped so vast a space for human habitation from the rock of a lethal world and rendered it as hospitable and welcoming as any heavenly paradise.

In a heartbeat that vision changed from a place of wonder to a place of death.

The first enemy artillery shells screamed down and exploded above the plateau in a storm of deafening horror. Air-bursting warheads flensed the ground with a hellstorm of red-hot steel fragments; some no larger than a fingernail, others like scything axe-heads, and the carnage wreaked amongst the slave workers was horrendous. Honsou saw a man shredded to the bone, his skeleton pulped to a rubbery mass a second later by the pounding shockwave of detonation.

A group of near-naked slaves with heavy picks slung over their shoulders vanished in a fiery mass of swirling fragments, their remains no longer recognisable as human. Hundreds died in the first instants of the barrage, and a hundred more in the rippling firestorm that followed. Honsou heard their screams, but paid them no mind. Mortal flesh was of no consequence to him. He would sacrifice a million lives on the altar of his ambition, and then a million more.

Shredded carcasses littered the ground, dancing bloody jigs as the ground shook and the air buckled with the bludgeoning force of the blasts. Black streaks of burned smoke and the sucking heaves of pressure drops, sudden vacuums and bangs of displaced air made all sense of direction meaningless. Any sense of up or down, left and right was obliterated in the terrifying disorientation of overloading sound and light and pressure.

Honsou’s armour saved him from the worst of the hellish thunder, but it could not fully mask the cataclysmic hammering. His every plate rang with impacts, as though someone was unloading shotgun shells against the back of his helmet with every step. The ground heaved as though in the grip of a powerful earthquake, and fires erupted sporadically from the ignited clothing of the dead.

He could see little before him save banks of shrapnel-twitched smoke and sheeting knives of fire from above that lit fresh scenes of suffering and bloodshed with every strobing flash. Black gashes torn in the ground filled with boiling blood and severed limbs, headless trunks and bones shorn of their flesh. He lost sight of Bronn and the few other Iron Warriors who had made this charge with him. It was impossible to tell if they were still alive or were unrecognisable chunks of gouged meat and metal.

Adrenaline surged around Honsou’s body, driving him on through the nightmarish blitzing hurricane of pounding blast waves and fizzing shrapnel. He knew it was foolish to expose himself like this, that he was risking the success of the invasion of Calth with his reckless theatrics, but there was little choice but to show the warriors who followed him that he was willing to risk his own life and that he could fight like an Iron Warrior.

Something struck the side of Honsou’s helmet like the thunder hammer of a Dreadnought and he was sent flying. A body flashed past him, and he braced for impact as the clashing, intersecting waves of force flung him about like a leaf in a storm.

He hit the ground hard and skidded across the cratered rubble of the plateau. After a quick check to make sure he still had all his limbs, Honsou pushed himself to his knees with his entrenching tool. The sky rippled with orange and red streamers of arcing shells and fiery detonations, but it felt distant and somehow unreal.

The smell of cooking meat came to him, and Honsou looked down to see a long shard of shell casing jutting from the centre of his breastplate. The metal sizzled, and it was still possible to make out a white eagle and read the stencilled lettering on its side. He grunted and pulled the fragment from his body. Its tip was sharpened to a dagger point, the last ten centimetres coated in blood.

‘You don’t get me that easy,’ he snarled, standing calmly in the midst of the barrage.

Along the length of the plateau, Bronn’s earth-moving machines were advancing through the constant rain of artillery shells. The air-bursting shells were having little effect on their up-armoured topsides, and they were driving ever-increasing heaps of rubble and pulverised rock towards the edge of the plateau. A waist-high berm of Calth’s earth was being pushed out before the machines, and would swiftly give the mortal slaves a measure of protection while they built up the more permanent defences.

Dozens of machines had been crippled with lucky strikes to vital components, while others had been comprehensively wrecked by enemy gun crews who’d realised the futility of air-bursting man-killers and switched their weapons to high-explosive shells. He saw Teth Dassadra waving more diggers forwards, allocating them work space in lieu of wrecked machines. Honsou remembered Dassadra from the final days of Khalan-Ghol, a warrior who had only too readily switched his allegiance from one master to another. Honsou couldn’t fault him for that, where was the sense in staying with a master whose star had been eclipsed?

Honsou would have done the same, but it meant keeping such a man appeased with victory and enough scope for his own ambition to prevent him from turning to bite the hand that fed. Honsou remembered Huron Blackheart’s last words to him, and decided that when the time came to abandon this front, he would leave Teth Dassadra behind.

‘Are you just going to stand there or are you going to use that damn tool?’ demanded Soltarn Vull Bronn, emerging from the smoke and hanging fog of dust particles. Honsou grinned and took a two-handed grip on its short haft.

‘Show me where to dig,’ he said, and Bronn gestured towards the forward edge of the plateau. Honsou and Bronn ran past a blazing digger, its cab a mass of fused metal and molten rubber pouring from its conduits and exposed pipework. Something writhed within the operator’s cabin, something still alive and unable to die in the killing fires. Thick black smoke obscured the horror, and it was behind them before Honsou could make out more than a blackened skull twisting on a serpentine neck, screaming in pain that would never end.

‘That trench needs to be another metre deep, and at least half a metre wider if the foundations are going to hold up to a barrage!’ shouted Bronn. ‘See it done.’

Honsou felt no anger towards Bronn at his brusque tone. This part of the campaign was Bronn’s to run as he saw fit, and if that meant dragging the Warsmith towards a trench then so be it.

‘Consider it done,’ said Honsou, dropping into the trench. A hundred or more mortals in shredded work wear hacked at the earth, picks battering the bedrock of Calth in a staccato rhythm. Some looked up as he landed among them, but most kept their heads to the earth, terrified that if they looked up and acknowledged the carnage going on around them it might reach out and pluck them from their illusory safety.

‘Dig together!’ shouted Honsou, though he had no idea how many heard him over the constant pummelling of artillery. ‘With me!’

Honsou bent his back and drove his entrenching tool into the earth, the blade biting deep and parting the soil of Calth like the softest flesh. He twisted and tossed the earth backwards without breaking the rhythm of his swing, and even before it landed, his shovel blade was embedded in the earth once again.

‘Together!’ bellowed Honsou, his digging like the regular piston strokes of a battle engine. Dig, lift, twist, thrust. The motion never changed, and Honsou grinned as the memory of his early days in the Legion returned to him. He remembered days spent digging on his belly, pushing approach trenches forward, filling sandbags and gabions with turned earth. Instinctive muscle memory drove his arms, his strength working his body like a perpetual motion machine. There was purity in this work, a singular purpose that allowed for none of the infighting between warbands or any rancour of past betrayals to interfere.

All that mattered was the man and the soil, and the powerful strokes to shift it.

Honsou glanced to his left, and saw the men around him were attempting to mimic his pattern of dig, lift, twist and thrust. They couldn’t match his speed or apparently effortless rhythm, but they were at least working together. The trench was already widened and getting deeper with every passing minute.

He heard a screaming whine, louder than the others that blended together in a banshee’s chorus, and looked up. Through the billowing, dancing clouds of smoke and dust, Honsou saw a bright streamer of a shell’s contrail as it arced over with agonising slowness and aimed its warhead down towards his trench. It should have been moving too fast to see. There should have been little more than a split second’s warning, but Honsou saw the gently spinning shell as though upon a slow-motion pict-capture. Its wide body was tapered at both ends, spinning slowly and painted sky blue. Its tip was gold, which struck him as needlessly ornate for a weapon of war, and he had time to wonder whether it would be better to be killed by a precious metal or a base one.

‘Incoming!’ he shouted, though few would hear his warning or be able to respond to it in time. Honsou threw himself into the forward wall of the trench he had just dug, pressing his body into the earthen rampart and hoping the shell wouldn’t be one of the lucky ones to score a direct hit. He clutched his entrenching tool tight to his chest as the scream of the shell’s terminal approach battered through the endless thunder of impacts and detonations.

Honsou knew artillery sounds, and this was the sound of a shell coming right at him.

He closed his eyes and exhaled as the shell struck.

The high-explosive shell slashed down and struck the centre of the trench, as though a mathematician had plotted its trajectory. Confined by the high walls, the blast roared out along the trench, incinerating those closest to its point of impact, and shredding those beyond in tightly packed storms of tumbling metal. The shockwave blew men out of their overalls, leaving them naked and twisted into grotesque knots of liquefied bone and shattered limbs.

Honsou was plucked from the trench and hurled into the air. Dozens of red icons flashed to life on his visor as the reflecting blast waves pulled his body in a hundred different directions. Seams split, plates cracked and pressurised coils beneath his breastplate ruptured, venting corrosive gases and precious oxygen. He lost all perception of spatial awareness, and only knew which way was down when he slammed into a line of prefabricated, mesh-wrapped blocks of wall being driven forwards by the second wave of diggers.

Gathered up in the tumbling debris before the blocks, Honsou had no control over his movement. His body was still paralysed by the numbing force of the explosion, and he roared in frustration as he was pushed back towards the trench line. Earth and rock gathered around him, pinning his arms in place, but every nerve in his body was still reverberating in the aftermath of the blast, and he couldn’t move.

The yawning black line approached, and Honsou knew there was nothing he could do to prevent his being buried in the trench. A fitting end to his short-lived reign as Warsmith or a bitter irony to be buried in the foundations of a siegework? He kept struggling, though there was nothing he could do to prevent being buried alive. To the last breath he would fight, even as hundreds of tonnes of rubble crushed him to death in the depths of an invaded world.

The harsh rumble of the digger’s engine changed pitch, changing from the throaty roar of a corpulent dragon to a squealing wail of a denied hedonist. Honsou teetered on the brink of the abyss, a rain of pebbles, soil and permacrete drooling into the trench in front of him. He let out the breath he hadn’t realised he was holding and felt sensation return to his limbs. A hand reached out to him. He grabbed it unquestioningly and hauled himself upright, steadying himself with his entrenching tool.

‘Getting buried in the foundations of a fortress wall is one way to prove you are a true Iron Warrior,’ said Soltarn Vull Bronn. ‘But I wouldn’t recommend it.’

Honsou gasped, his body now his to control again, but his racing senses too stupefied to reply. He nodded his thanks as Bronn pulled him away from the front of the earth-moving machine as its engine revved up again, vomiting a petulant blast of exhaust fumes in his face.

‘Brother Lacuna does not like to be stopped in his tracks,’ explained Bronn, as the machine’s horns emitted a series of angry honks and squirts of binary static.

Honsou saw a hostile pair of cybernetic eyes glaring at him from the thin slit cut into the armour of the operator’s compartment, and moved away from the machine as its tracked wheels spun and bit. Its feed pipes retched as they poured sludgy grey permacrete into the trench. The oozing mixture set almost instantaneously to form a foundation bed for the blocks coming in on the mass-loaders.

‘Won’t happen again,’ promised Honsou. ‘He’s bigger than me.’

‘When has that ever stopped you getting in a fight?’

‘Never,’ grinned Honsou, taking stock of the work around him.

Despite the continuous bombardment, the shape of the fortification was taking shape all along the plateau. The trench line was filled with rubble and rapid-setting permacrete, onto which hundreds of rectangular, mesh-wrapped blocks of debris were being fixed. Already they formed a waist-high wall embedded with iron spikes and the beginnings of gun ports. The artillery duel was still ongoing, with the Ultramarines having the better of the exchange in terms of lives taken.

But this first sortie had never been about taking lives.

Booming reports exploded overhead, and hammering detonations shook the plateau, but kinetic mantlets were now in place, sheltering the slave workers from the worst of the barrage. As the ground level smoke began to thin, Honsou saw the plateau was a cratered no-man’s-land of torn up rock, craters filled with steaming blood and bobbing body parts. A vision of desolation, ruin and death.

‘You have your bridgehead, Warsmith,’ said Bronn proudly.

‘What’s the cost?’

‘Negligible,’ replied Bronn, picking his way over the broken ground to stand in the outline of a gun tower yet to be built. ‘Perhaps two thousand slave workers, but there are plenty more on the surface yet to be brought down.’

‘Machines?’

Here, Bronn looked concerned. ‘At least fifty out of action, and maybe half of those will never raise earthworks again.’

‘Fifty? So many?’

Bronn shrugged. ‘As I told Dassadra, this is not a normal foe we face. These are warriors of Ultramar. They fight hard, just like us.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Honsou. ‘They don’t fight like me.’

‘Maybe not, but it’s going to be a hard bloody slog to reach those fortresses, no matter how you fight. That I can promise.’

Honsou unsnapped the ruptured seals at his gorget and pulled off his helmet. Dried blood streaked his face and he felt a fragment of green glass embedded in his cheek. He had long ago become inured to pain and tore it clear without even noticing.

‘The fortresses are unimportant, Bronn,’ said Honsou, marching back through the mass of rumbling machines. Milling warriors and bustling slaves jostled in the smouldering ruins as they dragged more and more blocks forwards to raise the fortifications still higher. Much remained to be done on the wall before it could be called practicable, but the hard work had been done. The foundations had been laid and mortared with blood. All that remained was simply a matter of arithmetic and the cold hard logic of war.

‘Unimportant?’ repeated Bronn. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

Iron Warriors stood tall as Honsou passed, and he knew he had, if not won their unquestioning loyalty, at least earned a measure of temporary respect for his willingness to fight at the lethal edge of battle. The weapons of war may change, knew Honsou, but every war needed a powerful will of bone and muscle and living flesh to win it. No matter how big the guns, or towering the war machines, every siege came down to men putting themselves in harm’s way and breaking open the soil of an enemy world. Since the first wooden palisade walls had been raised on hilltops by savages in a forgotten, lightless age it had ever been thus, and always would be.

‘It will make sense all in good time, Bronn,’ promised Honsou.

‘Speak plainly,’ demanded Bronn, taking hold of his arm. ‘How can the fortresses be unimportant? How else are we going to get below the surface except by breaking them open?’

‘We aren’t getting below the surface,’ said Honsou. ‘I am.’

‘Have you gone mad?’ stormed Bronn. ‘Ardaric Vaanes was your master of stealth and even he failed to insert himself behind the enemy lines.’

‘I’m not planning on doing it stealthily, it’ll be in plain sight, but they’ll not see me coming,’ said Honsou, shrugging off Bronn’s hand. ‘But this is where I need you to trust me like you have never trusted anyone. Can you do that?’

Bronn stopped to remove his helm, and tucked it under his arm. He looked at Honsou with a resigned expression that spoke of a lifetime of bitter disappointments.

‘I would rather not,’ he said.

‘Honest, at least,’ laughed Honsou.

‘What did you expect? You didn’t get to become Warsmith by being a model of trust and honour.’

‘True,’ admitted Honsou. ‘But I need you to fight in a way you’ve never fought before.’

‘What way is that?’

‘I want you to attack this cavern like you’re looking to win, but fight simply to hold.’

‘What is the point of that? If I attack, it will be to win.’

‘I don’t need that,’ said Honsou.

‘Why? There is no purpose to war if not to crush the enemy.’

‘Listen well, Bronn,’ said Honsou. ‘There is something beneath this world the daemon lord requires me to destroy, and I can’t do that if I have a host of Ultramarines in pursuit. They need to be kept here, pinned in place for as long as I’m gone. I need them to think this is our true purpose in coming here.’

‘Then what is our purpose if not to conquer this world?’

‘Better you don’t know,’ said Honsou. ‘We’re here for one thing, and it’s something I can only do without an army at my back.’

‘You’re leaving the army?’ asked Bronn in disbelief. ‘Who will command? The Grand Company won’t accept Grendel as their leader; the man’s a brute. And that… creature from Medrengard you keep around. It’s an abomination and it insults every son of Perturabo that you allow it to wear our Legion’s colours.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Honsou with the grin of a man who knows the punchline of a joke no-one even knew he was telling. ‘Grendel and the Newborn are coming with me.’

‘So who will command?’

‘You will,’ said Honsou.

It took another fifteen hours for the wall to rise to its prescribed height, twenty metres of hard-packed blocks sheathed in molten metal, strengthened with adamantium reinforcement, and built upon bloody permacrete footings hacked deep into the flesh of Calth. Circular towers with angled abutments, deflector hoardings and numerous loopholes where heavy guns could launch explosive warheads into the valley punctuated its length. Deep artillery pits were dug in the shadow of the banner-topped wall, and into them masked slaves dragged wide-barrelled howitzers on bloody chains. Shaven headed madmen attended these guns, iron-visored priests of the Dark Mechanicus and corrupted calculus-logi with eyes that saw not in hues of mortality, but in angles, trajectories and degrees of deflection.

The Bloodborn army was now ready for battle, thousands of soldiers clad in combat fatigues, gore-smeared armour, fright masks and ragged semblances of uniforms stitched with the daemon lord’s rune. Entire regiments were poised in the shadow of the wall, eager to spill the blood of their enemies. Scattered through the host, impatient squadrons of battle tanks, hulking daemon engines and weaponised servitor-things blared their hatred from saw-toothed augmitters. Ten thousand Bloodborn swords clattered on spiked shields, and a rhythmic chanting of meaningless doggerel filled the air beneath the rumble of gunfire.

While the Bloodborn waited for the order to attack and the Iron Warriors busied themselves with the mortal mechanics of their craft, other beings made their way to the centre of the wall. Clad in flesh-sewn robes, they were an incongruous sight amid such industrial activity and mechanistic surroundings. They moved with the lurching, awkward gait of cripples, broken clockwork automatons or things that were unsuited to using mortal bodies for locomotion.

An unnaturally tall being in a fuliginous robe of crimson led them, skeletally thin and hunched over as though made from twisted wire. Its hood flapped loose, as though draped over the long skull of a crocodylus. Wheezing breath escaped from beneath the hood, cold as the grave and just as lifeless.

Bronn and Teth Dassadra watched the approaching warlocks from the centre of the wall with more than a measure of distaste.

‘It offends the rites of advance that we use such unnatural means to fight the enemy,’ said Dassadra. His hand rested on the butt of his boltgun, as though he was considering turning it upon the witches.

Bronn shrugged. ‘We are at war, and we use what weapons are made available to us.’ But he too was irked at the appearance of these lurching, wiry figures. Though they were ready to storm the valley, Honsou had postponed the attack until these daemonic sorcerers had done their work.

‘What can warpcraft do that our guns cannot achieve?’ pressed Dassadra.

‘Wait and find out.’

‘Where did they even come from? They weren’t on any of the ships that came to Calth.’

‘You know that for sure, do you?’ said Bronn, growing tired of Dassadra’s constant harping. ‘You searched every scrap of darkness aboard our warships and know they were not among us?’

‘I didn’t see them when we took Ultimus Prime,’ said Dassadra more warily. ‘Where were they when we had to fight through an army of skitarii and battle-servitors?’

‘Perhaps you should ask M’kar himself,’ said Bronn. ‘I’m sure the daemon lord would welcome your questions.’

Dassadra fell silent at the mention of M’kar’s name, and watched as the figures formed a circle, into which was led a group of slaves who walked with the sluggish, dragging footsteps of sleepwalkers. Their flesh was excoriated and raw, cut with symbols that meant nothing to Bronn, but which he presumed were of significance to the warlocks. The slaves dropped to their knees, idiot grins plastered across their willing faces as they bared their necks.

The leader of the skin-robed witches stepped into the circle of sacrifices and a long blade of a finger unfurled from his ragged sleeve. Part organic, part sharpened wire, it flicked out like a scorpion’s stinger, and a throat was opened with a whip-crack of metal on flesh.

‘M’kar tothyar magas tarani uthar!’ screamed the warlock as blood squirted from the slave’s ruined artery. Before the first drop hit the ground, the pack of thrall-warlocks fell upon the slaves in a jagged, jerky frenzy of stabbing blades and shrieking wire-claws.

Like a shoal of ripper fish, they tore the slaves to gory tatters, letting their blood fill them like water pumped into empty bladders. The bodies of the warlocks, once so skeletal and thin, now swelled with black life as they gorged themselves on the slaves’ life force. They howled with perverse satisfaction, but their joy was short-lived as the master of the sorcerers supped greedily from their newfound well of power.

The blood was drawn from them like dark mist, pulled towards the master of the warlocks like spiralling ribbons of oil in an ocean maelstrom. His hunched form gradually straightened until he stood taller than a Dreadnought, his once frail-looking frame now made monstrous. He raised his curling arms to the cavern’s roof and loosed a piercing scream that split the air like the sonic boom of a Hell Talon.

The beat of a thousand Bloodborn drums echoed from the cavern walls in answer as roiling thunderheads formed just below the rocky ceiling. Bronn had quickly adjusted to the changeable weather patterns of the cave, but this was something else entirely.

Arcing bolts of lightning leapt from cloud to cloud, gathering strength and frequency with every passing second. The temperature in the cave dropped sharply, and a cold wind blew from the mouth of the tunnel that led back to the surface.

‘Blood of Iron,’ cursed Dassadra. ‘Lightning? With this much metal? They’ll kill us all!’

Bronn said nothing, knowing that this was no ordinary lightning to be drawn to iron as metal is drawn to a magnet. This was warp lightning, brought into being and directed by the towering figure at the heart of the sorcerers. A booming peal of thunder eclipsed the maddened drumming, and a sheet of dazzling lightning blazed from the clouds. The atmosphere in the cavern twisted as though some fundamental aspect of it had changed, and blinding traceries spat from the unnatural clouds. Black rain fell in torrents, turning much of the cavern floor to quagmire and slicking the armour of the Iron Warriors with an oily, rainbow sheen.

Instead of striking amid the Bloodborn as Dassadra had feared, the lightning slammed down again and again over the upland ridges where the enemy artillery pieces were sited. Mushrooming flares of explosions curled into the air, followed moments later by the crack of detonating munitions. Fire raced over the high ground as weapon after weapon went up, vanishing in a spreading bloom of electrical fire. Explosions lit the underside of the clouds, and Bronn blinked away dazzling afterimages of darting, invisible forms; all black wings, reptilian bodies and screaming fangs.

‘Now do you see the worth of these warlocks?’ asked Bronn.

Dassadra nodded curtly. ‘They are effective, I’ll give them that.’

That was as much as Dassadra would allow, and Bronn grinned as the ridges between the three fortresses burned in the fires of the warp.

‘Order the advance,’ said Bronn. ‘Tanks and infantry only.’

Dassadra looked up, puzzled. ‘Only tanks and infantry? Why not the daemon engines?’

‘Because that is the order,’ said Bronn.

‘We should attack with everything we have,’ protested Dassadra. ‘First Wave doctrine requires overwhelming force to break the will of the defenders.’

‘I know Perturabo’s doctrines, Dassadra, I need no lessons from you.’

‘Then why–’

‘Carry out your orders!’ snapped Bronn.

The sounds of battle were muted by the rain and distance, but even from behind the high wall he had built, Bronn could hear sharp exchanges of gunfire, explosions and screams. Dassadra remained on the wall, and though the man had balked at Bronn’s seemingly inexplicable orders, Bronn had given him no choice but to obey.

Bronn marched through the screaming, stamping mass of cyborg battle engines Votheer Tark had contributed to the invasion of Calth, knowing better than to stare too long at the binding symbols hacked into the meat and iron of their bodies. Some were restrained by chains of cold iron, others by more esoteric means, but every one was a lethal engine of bloody death that could fight for an eternity without tiring of the carnage.

Had these machines been sent into the fight, the enemy might already be broken, but Honsou did not want the enemy broken. It seemed like folly of the highest order, but Bronn forced himself to stop second-guessing Honsou’s plans. The Warsmith had the favour of the daemon lord, and the workings of such a mind were not for mortals to know.

Bronn entered the vast arch that led back towards the surface, following the sound of shrieking hydraulics, low-grade melta cutters and clattering armour. Arc lights riveted to the cavern walls illuminated ammunition and explosives gathered in towering stacks, and the light reflected dazzlingly from vast iron plates being bolted to the rock of the cavern. The metal roadway was being laid in readiness for the arrival of the Black Basilica, the hulking leviathan that was part mobile cathedral to the great gods of the warp, part awesomely destructive war engine with the power to level cities.

The Iron Warriors and the Bloodborn had reached the valley through tunnels dug by subterranean Hellbore diggers, but the Black Basilica needed the rubble blocking the full girth of the tunnel cleared before it could take part in the battle. Its overwhelming firepower would be decisive, and Bronn wondered how he could possibly maintain the stalemate Honsou desired with so powerful a weapon at his disposal.

He paused in his journey to place a hand on the cavern wall, letting the soul of the planet come to him through his gauntlet. The rock glistened in the glow of the arc lights, the quartz and nephrite shimmering like specks of sickly gold. Bronn pressed his cheek to the stone, feeling every tiny vibration, every imperfection and every teasing ripple from afar. The Black Basilica was close; he could feel the tremors of its monstrous weight and the core-deep rumble of its engines.

‘Two hours perhaps,’ he said quietly. ‘No more than three.’

This world was hurting, and every pick, shovel and drill that pierced its skin was a wound that would never heal. Though Calth was a planet honeycombed by tunnels burrowed through its mantle, they were passages opened by people that had once called its surface home before Lorgar’s spite had poisoned its sun. Calth had not resented those intrusions, but the Iron Warriors were unwelcome visitors, and every grain of soil they dug was begrudged.

Bronn pushed himself away from the wall and continued deeper into the cavern until he came to a row of five tubular machines shaped like enormous torpedoes with rock-drilling conical snouts. Each Hellbore was as long as a Stormbird, but wider in beam and more heavily armoured. Their flanks were bare, scraped iron and all five had their crew ramps splayed wide as the assault forces boarded.

Only the nearest of the Hellbores would be carrying Iron Warriors, the others transporting Bloodborn shock-troops or Astartes warriors from the renegade Legions spawned in the aftermath of the Great Betrayal. None of these latter warriors were closer than six foundings to the first Legions, and yet they called themselves Space Marines. Mixed in with these inferior copies were a bastard mix of xenos species, some bipedal and birdlike, crested with spines of many colours, others arachnid, quadruped or unclassifiable in form.

Bronn shook his head at such a mongrel mix of killers.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Honsou, approaching from the nearest Hellbore. ‘It’s an ugly looking army.’

‘Ugly doesn’t even begin to cover it,’ said Bronn. ‘I can accept a great many things, but to know that we have fallen so far is… galling. We once fought alongside the primarchs, gods of the battlefield, and now we draft sub-par warriors who call themselves Space Marines and unclean species from who knows where in the galaxy to fight our battles.’

‘These are cannon fodder,’ said Honsou. ‘And if it makes you feel any better, they’re all going to die.’

‘Yet you are going with them into the valley.’

Honsou shook his head. ‘No, these are just a distraction, something to keep the Ultramarines looking straight ahead while I go beneath them.’

‘Hiding in plain sight,’ said Bronn with a slow smile of understanding.

‘Just so,’ agreed Honsou.

Bronn’s hand unconsciously moved towards his pistol as Cadaras Grendel and the creature Honsou called the Newborn approached. Both saw the gesture and their posture changed immediately. Grendel grinned in anticipation of a fight, while the Newborn looked at him curiously, as though trying to decide which limb to remove first. It took an effort of will, but Bronn removed his hand from his weapon.

Grendel laughed and jerked his thumb in the direction of the Newborn. ‘Very wise, this one would have ripped your head off before that gun could clear its holster.’

Bronn ignored Grendel, watching as the sinuous forms of the blade dancers climbed into the last Hellbore. Each was a swordmaster of sublime skill that had followed their champion, Notha Etassay, to New Badab in search of enemies worthy of their blades. Bound to Honsou after he had defeated Etassay during the final duel of the Skull Harvest, they were devotees of the Dark Prince and therefore not to be trusted.

Honsou followed his gaze and said, ‘This is war; and I’ll make use of such weapons or warriors as I have without care or regret.’

‘I said the same thing to Dassadra,’ replied Bronn. ‘But I was lying.’

Honsou shrugged. ‘You still believe in the old ways, Bronn. That’s always been your problem.’

‘The old ways were good enough for Lord Perturabo,’ said Bronn.

‘And look where that got him,’ said Honsou with sudden anger. ‘Stuck in a dead city on Medrengard, imprisoned by his own bitterness and resentment. If he cared so much about the wrongs done to him, why isn’t he out bringing every Imperial stronghold to ruin? There isn’t one fortress wall left standing that he couldn’t put to rubble in a day.’

Honsou’s vehemence surprised Bronn. He hadn’t thought the Warsmith cared anything for the Long War or Perturabo’s notable absence from its battles. Had Bronn misjudged him or was this yet another piece of theatre designed to achieve an end that could not yet be seen?

‘The ways of our master are not for us to judge,’ he said, though words sounded hollow even to him.

‘You’re wrong,’ said Honsou. ‘They are ours to judge. And one day someone will take Perturabo to task for his lack of action.’

That made Bronn laugh. ‘Really? And who will that be? You?’

Honsou’s anger vanished, and Bronn was reminded how unpredictable Honsou could be, as violent as a berserker or as capricious as a pleasure-seeker of the Dark Prince.

‘Who knows?’ said Honsou with a broken-toothed grin. ‘Maybe I will one day. Wouldn’t that be delicious? A half-breed mongrel bastard sat atop the Ivory Throne. What I wouldn’t give to see old Forrix’s face if he could have lived to see that!’

‘You’re insane,’ said Bronn, as sure of that fact as he was about the composition of Calth’s bedrock.

‘You might be right,’ said Honsou, turning away and making his way towards the assault ramp of the Hellbore. ‘But I have a shrine to find and you have a battle to prolong.’

A group of perhaps forty Iron Warriors marched ahead of Honsou, filing into the Hellbore with unquestioning discipline. Bronn knew a great many of these warriors; they were among the finest killers left to the Legion. All had fought on Terra, and each had sworn personal oaths of moment before the Ivory Throne. A pang of bitter and solemn regret touched Bronn to see such warriors engaged in such an ignoble war.

Honsou climbed to the top of the ramp and turned as Grendel and the Newborn went inside. He raised a fist to Bronn and slammed it hard against his breastplate.

‘Give me a day,’ said Honsou. ‘Give me a day, and I’ll give you a victory that will make you forget there ever were any “old ways”.’

Bronn nodded as the assault ramp folded up into the body of the Hellbore, but his heart sank as he heard the lie in the Warsmith’s voice.

Honsou was leaving them to die.

NOW

The pain was getting worse.

His armour was non-functional, and he could barely move. His strength, once so formidable, was deserting him. Plates that had once protected him from harm were now a burden his weakening body could no longer endure. He remembered being presented with his armour in the columned majesty of the Gallery of Stone, kneeling with thousands of his fellow warriors before the burnished form of the primarch.

Bronn remembered the unbreakable pride he had felt, the sense of belonging to something greater that had sustained him all through the darkest days of the Great Betrayal. The Long War and the decline of the Legion had shown him there was no such thing as unbreakable. Even the greatest pride could be humbled, even the mightiest fortress could be breached, and even the staunchest faith could be shattered in the face of betrayal.

How had he failed…?

The attack of the Bloodborn had been defeated, broken and hurled back by the combined might of the Ultramarines and their mortal armies. The savage warriors of the Mechanicus had fallen upon their dark brothers, fighting with a ferocious hatred born of the knowledge that their foes had once been like them. Yet even as the battle turned in the favour of the Imperial forces, the Black Basilica had joined the fight, and its vast array of guns had wrought fearful carnage upon the defenders, bringing them to the verge of destruction.

But even that mighty weapon had been lost…

Pieces of the dark leviathan lay scattered around the cavern, its priceless debris left to rust in the moist atmosphere, for no adepts of the Dark Mechanicus remained alive to gather them. Bronn should have anticipated a stealthy insertion, after all the Raven Guard had always been the masters of the shadow strike and the infiltration of the most heavily defended citadels.

Bronn remembered fighting alongside Corax and his warriors many years ago, in battles that had been forgotten by that primarch’s sons, but which were still fresh in his mind. For all that the Space Marines of this stagnant Imperium were pale shadows of the great Legions of old, the man who had led his team into the heart of the Black Basilica was a warrior worthy of the title. Professional admiration gave way to pain as he coughed a wad of blood onto his chest.

With the destruction of the Black Basilica, the fight had gone out of the Bloodborn, and Bronn cursed Honsou for allying what little strength remained to their fragment of the Legion to such dross. Dassadra had slaughtered scores as they fell back over the wall, bloodied and broken against the ceramite and blue lines of the cavern’s defenders.

A gloomy status quo had fallen between the two armies as Bronn and Dassadra sought to re-establish control over the shattered mortals of the Bloodborn. Threats, promises of plunder and a number of strategic executions had brought order back to the host, and Bronn had drawn up plans for a second assault when yet another disaster had struck.

With the Bloodborn drawn up in readiness to assault the valley once again, word came of an attack from the rear. Sporadic explosions and gunfire drifted from the tunnel they had fought to clear for the Black Basilica, the rattle of small-arms fire and the heavier blasts of wide-bore guns belonging to battle tanks. It should have been impossible. Hadn’t the Ultramarines been broken on the surface? But as more contact reports screamed over the vox, it became impossible to deny the reality of the catastrophe.

A ragtag host of scavenged armoured vehicles, ad-hoc battalions and Ultramarines surged from the tunnel mouth and fell upon the Bloodborn with the fury of berserkers. Bronn knew some form of communication must have passed between these Ultramarines and the defenders of the valley when an answering battle cry went up from the three fortresses.

Their gates had opened and thousands of blue-armoured soldiers had charged out with squads of Ultramarines at their head. Despite the best efforts of Bronn and Dassadra, the sight of two forces closing on them had shattered the last courage of the Bloodborn and they had scattered into disparate warbands, striking out for their own survival, little realising that by doing so they had doomed themselves.

Hammer and anvil, both forces of Ultramarines had smashed together, crushing the Bloodborn between them, and they had not been merciful. Yet for all that the battle was lost, the Iron Warriors were not about to lay down their weapons and go quietly into defeat. Knowing that Honsou had left them to die, Bronn had prepared for such a moment and waited until the time was right to vent his last breath of hatred.

The traitor Warsmith Dantioch had called it the final solution to any siege, and in that at least he had been right.

A vast array of explosives rigged along the length of the tunnel awaited his trigger signal, and as Bronn saw an Ultramarines sergeant coming for him with murder in his stride, he had known that time had come. With one last look at the fortifications he had fought and bled to build, Bronn mashed the firing trigger and the world ended in fire, falling rock and thunder. He expected to die in the collapse, but he had lived, though it was to be only a brief respite.

Bronn blinked away afterimages of crackling detonations, strobing flashes of secondary explosions and crackling ammo fires.

He knew he was dying, but to die for this?

To be nothing more than… what, a distraction for a mission that had clearly failed?

That was galling for a warrior of his heritage.

He felt the earth shake again, and his eyes flicked towards the roof of the cavern. Dust fell in a dry rain, and spalling flakes of glassy stone sounded like sand trickling through an hourglass as it slowly coated the battlefield. Though the cavern’s structure was sound, Bronn wished for the cave to collapse, to bury this moment of infamy beneath millions of tonnes of rock and deny his foes any succour in triumph.

The ground shook again, but this was no aftershock of his final solution, this was a tremor of something moving beneath the earth. Bronn knew rock well enough to know the difference, and he pressed his palm to the ground, letting it speak to him as it had on countless occasions before. He felt the seismic communication, the echoes and the gnawing bite of melta-bladed cutters as they clove the rock like a pack of subterranean borer-ambulls.

Beyond the mangled remains of a trio of Basilisk artillery pieces, the earth heaved upwards, and a geyser of spraying stone and mud exploded into the air as something iron and yellow heaved its bulk into the cavern. Bronn instantly recognised the conical snout and flared rock scoops of a Hellbore drilling rig.

‘Careful, you idiot…’ he hissed. ‘The soil is always thinner nearer the surface.’

Whoever was driving the Hellbore was unskilled in the finer points of its operation, handling it like a runaway Land Raider instead of a precision tunnelling device. Sparks flew as its drill cogs tore through a wrecked chassis of a smouldering battle tank. Metal shavings flew like glittering decoy chaff ejected from the defence pod of a Thunderhawk.

The Hellbore vanished from sight as it lurched past its centre of gravity and crashed down onto its side. An explosion ripped up from the mangled tank as an ammo cache exploded. More than likely, the occupants of the Hellbore were now trapped within. If the Ultramarines didn’t kill them, the lack of oxygen would eventually see them dead.

Whoever had brought the machine back to Four Valleys Gorge had returned to defeat and death, and Bronn dismissed the tunneller as he heard the voices of Ultramarines, curt orders barked in a battle cant that had not changed in ten thousand years.

Such a span of time was almost incomprehensible. To Bronn, those days of gods and heroes were a past he had lived in the span of a single lifetime, but these warriors had only half-remembered myths to tell them of such long ago days. They could not remember what was a recent memory for him…

I was there when the walls of the Imperial Palace fell.

Bronn turned his head, searching for a weapon to hold as he died. A bolter lay within easy reach, but beyond it he caught sight of Earthbreaker, the weapon that had cast unnumbered fortresses down and raised myriad others to the skies. His gauntlet closed on the T-shaped pommel, and he dragged it over the broken ground with his fingertips. The blade scraped over the black stone brought down from the cavern’s ceiling, high-density igneous rock laid down in volcanic eruptions before men had set foot on this world.

‘Fused metamorphic stone from close to the surface,’ he said with a wheezing, frothed breath that told him his lungs had finally collapsed. With only his secondary organ dragging oxygen to his broken body, it was only a matter of time until hypoxia killed him.

‘Aurelian’s sons were thorough in their spite,’ he noted, seeing fragments of irradiated flakes mixed in with the rock.

‘Yet still they were defeated,’ said a cultured, perfectly enunciated voice above him.

A foot stamped down on Earthbreaker’s haft, snapping the weapon in two. Anger engulfed Bronn, and he rolled onto his back, ignoring the shooting spikes of searing pain that engulfed his chest, yet left his body below untouched. He looked up at a broad-shouldered warrior in the azure battle plate of the Ultramarines. A golden eagle glittered at his chest and star-bleached emerald trim lined the notched edges of his shoulder guards.

‘Things might have been different had the Iron Warriors been with them,’ hissed Bronn, clutching the broken handle of Earthbreaker to his chest. The warrior shook his head and removed his laurel-wreathed helm, revealing a face of classic patrician proportions, symmetrical and with high cheekbones, a strong chin and close-cropped blond hair that framed eyes of milky blue. Every inch an Ultramarine.

‘You are defeated here,’ said the warrior, sliding a fresh magazine into his pistol. ‘I do not think the outcome then would have been much different had a wretch like you been there.’

‘You are wrong, whelp, iron is forever,’ said Bronn, letting his head loll to one side. ‘From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron.’

‘What is that?’ asked the warrior, his voice dripping with contempt. ‘A prayer?’

‘It is the Unbreakable Litany,’ said Bronn, his strength fading. ‘And may it forever be so.’

Through the dancing flames of defeat, Bronn saw a darting figure slip through the wreckage of the Basilisks crushed by the Hellbore, a half-glimpsed shadow with a limb that threw the firelight queerly from its mercurial surface. Though it should have been impossible, Bronn thought he saw a pale blue glow of an augmetic eye through the sheeting dust and ash.

Your mission is complete, the eye seemed to say. But mine goes on…

‘Why did you come here?’ demanded the Ultramarine. ‘You must have know you could not defeat the true sons of Guilliman.’

‘Why did we come here?’ smiled Bronn, shaking his head as a weight lifted from his broken body. ‘Better you don’t know.’

He loosened his grip on the iron will that held his life anchored to his flesh, staring up at the Ultramarines warrior with a last breath of defiance.

‘You think you have won a victory here?’ he said.

‘I know we have,’ said the warrior. ‘Your force is destroyed, and Calth is ours again. All across Ultramar, your master’s armies are being pushed from our worlds. Yes, I would say this is a victory.’

‘The years have not been kind to the Ultramarines,’ said Bronn. ‘Once they were the Battle Kings of Macragge, but you are just poor shadows of those giants.’

The warrior levelled his pistol at Bronn.

‘I should leave you to suffer your pain, but it insults me to let you sully this world with your life a moment longer.’

‘Who are you?’ asked Bronn. ‘Tell me the name of the man who is going to kill me.’

The warrior considered his request for a moment before nodding.

‘I am Learchus Abantes, sergeant of the Ultramarines Fourth Company.’

Bronn smiled. ‘The Fourth, yes. Of course it would be one of you.’

Learchus pulled the trigger, and Bronn died knowing yet more blood would be spilled before the Iron Warriors were done with Calth.

Stromfel’s Teeth

Josh Reynolds

It was the afternoon of the eve of Mitterfruhl and the sound that rose from the streets was as deep and as black as the ocean bottom. Those who heard it first, mistook it for thunder. For the voice of the storm that had rolled in moments earlier from the Sea of Claws. The sound stalked beneath the celebratory ringing of the city’s bells like a sea-beast through the shallows and tore the holiday cheer from the hearts of every citizen who heard it. And as the last, dull echoes drifted out to sea, Marienburg erupted in blood and terror.

Near the docklands, hooves struck sparks from rain-slick cobbles as the evening market crowd screamed and parted. A grocer flew into the air, conducting a lazy somersault, trailing red the entire way. A matron was slapped from Manann’s realm to Morr’s by a flick of inhuman claws. Something pearly grey and wet-skinned swam through the sea of humanity like a sword through flesh, leaving mangled wreckage in its wake. Saw-edged teeth slammed home on an outthrust arm, tearing and masticating.

The hooves thundered on, like an oncoming wave. Black, dead eyes rolled in tight sockets and the thing turned to face its pursuers as they burst out of the drover’s way, their mounts lathered and snorting. Steam rolled off of the animals in the rain. The horses were clad in emerald and turquoise barding and carrying men in heavy armour of similar hues. The knights carried tridents and their armour was engraved with piscine designs. At their head, a bulldog figure leaned over his horse’s neck and roared, ‘There’s the bugger!’

Manann take me if he’s not a master of the obvious, Erkhart Dubnitz thought. The broad-shouldered knight grinned behind his visor as he looked at the stocky shape of Dietrich Ogg, Grandmaster of the most humble, and violent, Order of Manann galloping next to him. Ogg would spit him on a hook and use him for bait if he made such a crack out loud. Ogg’s temper wasn’t the best even when he hadn’t been pulled from a warm feast-hall to ride through a storm in full armour, in pursuit of something with entirely too many teeth.

‘Speaking of which,’ Dubnitz muttered as the creature rose to its full height, gill slits flaring and its wedge-shaped head swinging around. It wore the tattered trousers of a sailor, now stretched and torn. It had the form of a man, though much distorted by muscle, but its head was utterly inhuman. As it spread its arms, the horses skidded to a stop, issuing alarmed neighs as their hooves splashed in the rainwater.

The knights had pursued the thing from the red ruins of a tavern deep in Marienburg’s bowels, and it had left a trail of death through the Narrows as it made its way towards the North Dock. Monsters of one sort or another weren’t uncommon in Marienburg; things with too many limbs or too few clustered beneath the docklands like barnacles and there were stories of rats of unusual size in the sewers. Not to mention those one-eyed devils in the marshes.

But this was something else again. It stood in the rain, barrel torso heaving, as if it were having trouble breathing. To Dubnitz, it looked as if someone had sewn a shark onto a bear and then beaten it until it got angry.

‘Manann’s scaly nethers, Dubnitz,’ one of the knights breathed as he fought to control his agitated mount. ‘He’s a big one!’ Dubnitz glanced at him. Gunter was young. A merchant’s second son, his dreams of adventure in the great wide world had been sewn up tight and kicked out of reach by a handsome donation to the Order from his father. Still, once he’d come out of his pout, the boy had taken to the spurs quickly enough.

‘Bigger they are, Gunter,’ Dubnitz said, absently dropping his fist between his horse’s ears. The animal snorted and calmed. Dubnitz flipped up his visor and peered at the creature that waited for them at the other end of the market square. ‘Is that thing wearing trousers?’

‘I do believe it is,’ another knight said, cradling his trident in the crook of his arm as he lit a scrimshaw pipe. He sucked thoughtfully on the stem. ‘You don’t suppose it’s a modest beastie, do you?’

‘If it is, it’s doing a bad job of it, Ernst,’ Dubnitz snorted. ‘I can see it’s–’

‘Silence in the ranks.’ Ogg gestured towards the creature with the small trident that occupied the stump of his left hand. ‘If you’re quite finished mooning over it, would someone go and whack its bloody ugly head off?’ he snarled, his pudgy features bathed in rain, torchlight and sweat. ‘There’s a Mitterfruhl feast I’d like to get back to, thank you very much.’

The half-dozen knights all looked at one another surreptitiously. One of the first rules you learned in the Order was never, ever, under any circumstances, volunteer for anything. Unfortunately, some took longer to learn that lesson than others.

‘Right, one spitted shark coming up,’ Gunter said, kicking his horse into motion before Dubnitz could stop him. The too-wide mouth gaped as the young knight drew close. It lunged and tackled his horse, wrapping grey arms around its neck and chest. As Gunter gave a yell and jabbed at it with its trident, the creature turned, yanking the whinnying horse off its feet and smashing both it and its hapless rider into the hard cobbles in a crash of metal. Black talons snatched at the tangled knight’s head. The ornate helmet burst, as did the skull within.

‘Manann gather his poor, stupid soul,’ Dubnitz snarled, slapping his visor down. He’d liked the lad. He dug his spurs into his horse’s flanks. The creature tore Gunter’s corpse free of the thrashing horse and swung it about before hurling it at the others. Horses reared as the body hit the street. The shark-thing did not pause, but dove on towards Ogg, jaws wide.

The Grandmaster tried to sidestep the creature, but the square was too crowded and it was too quick. It was on him a moment later, its talons tangled in his horse’s barding. The jaws champed at him and Ogg cried out.

Dubnitz jerked his horse’s reins, causing his mount to bump against Ogg’s and both horses stumbled. The shark-thing lost its grip and rolled beneath the stamping hooves. The other knights had gotten over their shock and they closed in, hemming the creature in from all sides.

Tridents plunged towards it, driving it back before it could rise. It retreated, still silent; its eyes were empty of everything save raw, wild hunger. Its blunt snout rose and it audibly sniffed the salty air. Then it spun about and began to lope away.

‘It’s heading for the sea. Cut it off,’ Ogg said.

‘I’ll do more than that,’ Dubnitz said, urging his horse into a gallop. The crowded streets were rapidly emptying as the creature raced on. It had fallen onto all fours, its heavily muscled limbs pumping. It shouldered aside a fruit wagon and toppled a night soil cart, spilling dung across the street. Dubnitz cocked back his arm, hefting his trident as his horse leapt over the fallen cart. ‘Manann guide my aim,’ he muttered, blinking rain out of his eyes. With a grunt, he hurled the trident, catching the creature in the back. It stumbled and caromed off a wall. It twisted around, snapping at the weapon that had suddenly sprouted from its back.

Dubnitz circled it and his horse snorted and shied as the thing snapped blindly at it. The shark-thing shook its head and darted forward. Dubnitz’s horse reared and he was almost thrown from the saddle. The knight reached out and grabbed the haft of his trident, hoping to pin the creature down. Instead, he was ripped off his horse as the creature began to thrash.

Dubnitz hit the ground hard, his armour scraping on the cobbles. A clawed foot stomped down, nearly doing for his head the way it had done for poor Gunter’s. Dubnitz rolled awkwardly to his feet even as the shark-thing loomed over him. Foul breath washed over him and he swept his sword from its sheath in a wild, wide arc. Blood sprayed the far side of the street and the monster staggered, clutching at its split, hopefully useless jaw. Dubnitz didn’t give it a chance to recover. He sprang past it and grabbed for the trident, kicking it in the back of its leg as he did so.

It toppled with a wheeze. He shoved on the trident, knocking the thing flat. It squirmed beneath him, gnawing at the cobbles. A sharp elbow hit his cuirass hard enough to put a dent in it. Dubnitz staggered, wheezing. The creature yanked itself off the street and whirled towards him. He swung his sword at it, but it caught his wrist in an unyielding grip. He dug his free hand into its throat, but it didn’t seem to notice, so intent was it on getting its teeth into him. Its weight drove him back and began to bend him double as it leaned against him. It stank of the deep places of the sea.

Dubnitz glared through the eye-slits in his faceplate, meeting the thing’s eyes. For an instant, just an instant, he thought he caught sight of something in them other than hunger. Then its bloody, shattered jaws spread wide and it bent its head towards him.

A moment later, its skull ruptured like an overripe fruit, splattering him with cold blood. He tore himself free of its grip and let the body slump. As it fell, it revealed a tall, one-eyed man who thrust a smoking Hochland hunting rifle into the hands of one of the soldiers behind him. The latter were clad in the uniforms of the Marsh Watch, and bore the insignia of Manann’s golden trident on their uniforms.

‘Dubnitz,’ the one-eyed man said, stripping off his gloves as he approached the body of the shark-thing. One of the men accompanying him trotted close behind with an upraised shield to keep the rain off of his master. Dubnitz stood and saluted with his sword.

‘Lord Justicar,’ Dubnitz said. ‘It is, as ever, a delight and a joy to see you.’

Aloysious Ambrosius, Master of the Marsh Watch and Lord Justicar of Marienburg, grunted and squatted, looking at the dead creature. Dubnitz turned as Ogg and the other knights rode up. Ogg’s face went through a number of contortions as he caught sight of Ambrosius before settling on what he likely thought was an expression of pleasure. ‘Aloysious,’ Ogg grated.

‘Dietrich. Lovely weather we’re having,’ Ambrosius said as he examined the creature.

‘At least it’s not raining cuttlefish again,’ Ogg said. ‘What are you doing?’

Ambrosius didn’t answer. ‘What have we here?’ he said as he reached beneath the creature and jerked loose something small. Holding it up to the rain to clean the blood off, it was revealed to be a shark’s tooth on a thin cord.

‘A shark with a shark-tooth amulet,’ Dubnitz said. ‘That’s not odd at all, is it?’

‘Coincidence is the bugbear of lazy minds,’ Ambrosius said, rising to his feet. He rubbed his eye-patch with the heel of his hand. ‘One of these things just attacked me in the opera house, Dietrich.’

‘And it escaped?’ Ogg demanded. He turned in his saddle. ‘Mount up! We’ll–’

‘Calm down,’ Ambrosius snorted. ‘Of course it didn’t escape; I dispatched it. Cost me a cape of fine Cathayan silk though,’ he added regretfully. ‘And it ruined my evening.’

‘Manann forfend,’ Dubnitz said. Ogg and Ambrosius looked at him. The latter snorted and kicked the creature’s body.

‘Indeed. I–’

The sound was as deep and as solid as a punch to the gut, and it interrupted the Lord Justicar just as effectively. The first toll shuddered through those gathered in the square and lumbered on towards the docks. Dubnitz staggered, feeling ill. It tolled again, and the street seemed to shiver. Distant screams erupted, and an alarm bell began to ring. ‘What was that?’ Dubnitz said, looking around. More alarm bells began to sound, ranging from the silvery peal of the fire bell on the Street of Mercy to the deep, grim boom of the Mourners’ Bell in the Garden of Morr near the Marsh Gate. And then, finally, the long, low melodious sound of the ship’s bell mounted above the doors of Manann’s own temple.

‘It’s the Tide Bell,’ Ogg said. His eyes were wide with dismay. ‘Erkhart, Ernst, get going. The rest of you, pair off in squads and ride for the other temples.’

‘I just got my pipe lit!’ Ernst complained as he dumped the contents of his pipe on the street and stuffed it back within his saddle.

‘Isn’t that always the way of it?’ Dubnitz said as he climbed back into the saddle. Moments later he and Ernst were riding hard for the Temple of Manann. Smoke from dozens of fires rolled through the city streets, and the rain beat it down into a slushy scum of ash. People ran through the streets, fleeing in panic. The celebratory mood of Mitterfruhl had turned into terrified anarchy.

‘Pity about Gunter,’ Ernst said as they forced their horses through a choked square. ‘Lad had real promise, I thought.’

‘Promise is no proof against teeth and claws,’ Dubnitz said sourly. ‘Or against bad wagers. Did you know he still owed me five Karls?’

‘Owed–’ Ernst began as his eyes widened in sudden realization. ‘By Manann’s sea cucumber, that little rat owed me as well!’ He began to curse virulently. Dubnitz nodded sympathetically.

‘Do you think his family might cover his debts?’ Ernst said hopefully a moment later.

‘One thing at a time,’ Dubnitz said, pointing.

The square before the Temple of Manann was packed with a heaving crowd. It was an undeniably angry heaving crowd at that and it pressed close about the doors of the temple. Several pale-faced temple guards stood between the crowd and the doors, their tridents locked to form a makeshift barrier. ‘This looks bad,’ Ernst said, gripping his own trident more tightly.

‘Get between those guards and the crowd,’ Dubnitz said, kicking his horse into motion. He swatted about him with the flat of his trident, causing the fringe of the crowd to contract. People were yelling and screaming in a mingled cacophony of fear and anger. In times of trouble, people looked to their gods, but such a mob had been too quick to form. There was something other than blind panic at work here.

‘Get back or get trampled,’ he roared as he nudged his horse into the current of curses, boils and rude gestures. ‘Don’t make me come down there.’ Probing hands went for his legs and his saddle and he gave a portly fishmonger a jab with the business end of his trident. ‘This horse is church property, get off.’

As his horse spun, lashing out with its back-hooves, Dubnitz caught sight of several priests of the sea-god standing on the marble steps of the temple, watching in consternation. Only one of them was a familiar face. ‘Goodweather,’ Dubnitz bellowed, ‘Fancy seeing you here!’

The young woman, slim and dark, blinked in surprise as she caught sight of Dubnitz. She gave a half-hearted wave as Dubnitz urged his horse closer to the line of temple guards. ‘Goodweather, can’t you summon one of those winds of yours, or how about something nastier?’ Dubnitz said, leaning over in his saddle.

‘What are you doing here, Erkhart?’ she hissed, gathering up her robes and stalking down the steps. ‘I thought I told you to–’

‘What? Stay away from a temple dedicated to my patron god?’ Dubnitz said in mock disbelief. ‘And just because of a simple misunderstanding,’ he continued.

‘Is that what you call it?’ Goodweather snapped, glaring at him. Dubnitz flipped up his visor.

‘Of course,’ he said, beaming at her. ‘It was dark. Mistakes were made.’

Her fingers curled into claws. ‘Mistakes,’ she repeated darkly.

‘Yes. I thought she was you, obviously. Forgive me?’ he said, leaning down towards her. Her punch, when it came, nearly knocked him off his horse. She hopped back as he righted himself, clutching her hand and cursing. He rubbed his jaw. ‘Is that a no?’

‘Yes,’ she snarled.

‘Yes you forgive me, or yes it’s a no?’ Dubnitz said.

‘We don’t need your help!’ Goodweather said.

‘Looks to me like you do,’ Dubnitz said, looking back at the crowd. The faces of the crowd were studies in frustration, fear and anger. Most of them were just scared. Some of them were trouble-makers looking to make whatever was going on worse. And others… his eyes narrowed as he caught sight of a particular, peculiar figure, standing on an overturned cart and gesticulating in a frenzied fashion.

The man was all ribs and shoulders, with coarse clothing and a dozen shark-tooth necklaces clattering around his scrawny neck. Strange tattoos covered his puckered, tough looking skin and warning bells went off in Dubnitz’s head. ‘Oh that’s not right,’ he muttered. He turned back to the fuming Goodweather. ‘See that skinny fellow on the cart there, Goodweather? What do you make of him?’ he said.

Before she could reply, someone hurled a cobblestone into the head of one of the temple guards. The man’s head snapped back and he toppled like a felled tree. Dubnitz cursed and jerked around in his saddle as Goodweather rushed towards the fallen man.

‘If you’re finished fraternising, Erkhart, I could use some bloody help!’ Ernst shouted, flailing about with his trident. His horse snorted as a human wave surged up around him, hands grabbing and improvised weapons stabbing, hacking or thumping. The crowd, unpleasant looking before, had turned ugly in a matter of moments. More cobblestones flew, accompanied by dung, bricks and several contradictory political slogans. Someone somewhere was beating a drum in time to the sound of the Tide Bell ringing. Dubnitz rode to the aid of his fellow-knight, but as he cut through the crowd, his horse gave a terrified snort and reared up.

The sickening sound tolled again, rattling his teeth in his jaw and causing the world to spin before his eyes. His stomach felt like it had the first time he had ever climbed to a crow’s nest, as if it were full and falling all at the same time. His horse reared again, screaming and lashing out at something he couldn’t see.

He heard cries of fright and saw bodies tumble past, trailing blood through the rain. A familiar smell bit into his sinuses and he forced his horse to drop down, revealing the hideous shape that was blossoming before him. The man was no different from any other; he had the look of a sailor or a sea-jack. He screamed and thrashed, his ballooning limbs snapping out to swat aside anyone who got too close. His eyes met Dubnitz’s and he reached out with fingers that looked like overcooked sausages.

‘Huh-help muh-meeee…’ he whined. His words spiralled up into a wordless shriek as pink flesh turned grey as twitching limbs wobbled in an unpleasant fashion. Bones cracked, splintered and re-knit even as the flesh on them puffed up and split and the face, once human, tore in half to reveal a great triangular maw full of razor teeth.

‘Gods below,’ Dubnitz hissed. The creature, obviously in agony, thrashed about as it tore too-tight clothing off. It was the spitting image of the monster from earlier; possibly uglier, in fact, if it was possible. Before it could realise he was there, he stabbed down at its roiling flesh with his trident. The prongs sank into the mutating meat and the trident was jerked from his grip as the creature whipped around. Talons fastened on his horse’s snout and a single, savage jerk snapped the animal’s neck and nearly decapitated it.

Dubnitz roared as he was forced to drop out of the saddle. He hit the street and immediately found himself being trampled upon by fleeing people. Luckily, his armour kept the damage to a minimum and he soon forced himself to his feet, just in time to meet the monster’s awkward, flopping charge. Moving quickly in full armour was difficult, but a strong desire not to be disembowelled lent him speed. He stumbled aside as the creature bounded past him, pouncing on a luckless man. The creature’s victim screamed just once before the shark-thing bit his head off in a single wide-mouthed bite. Dubnitz waited for the nearest bystanders to clear out of the way and then drew his sword.

The shark-thing stuffed the rest of the body into its maw, chewing noisily. Its black eyes scanned the crowd like those of the animal it resembled; there was no glee there, no sadistic pleasure, nothing to imply that the thing gained any enjoyment from its actions. It had no impetus but cold, pure hunger.

Dubnitz advanced towards it, sword held out before him. It turned, slurping a twitching foot down its gullet. Dubnitz grimaced and then blinked as he caught sight of a shark’s-tooth necklace dangling from its bulbous throat, the material of the necklace itself biting into the thing’s gray skin. He wanted to look around, to see if the skinny man with his many necklaces was capering about somewhere, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off the monster.

It gazed at him hungrily and started forward, picking up speed as it came. Dubnitz ducked under a wild sweep of its claws and his sword drew a red line across its barrel chest. The creature gave no indication that it felt any pain as it dropped a fist on him, knocking him to one knee. It snagged a fleeing woman as Dubnitz fought the catch his breath and took a leisurely bite out of her neck.

‘Monster,’ Dubnitz snarled. He lunged and the beast flung the woman’s body at him, sending him stumbling. It jumped at him with a quickness that belied its size and its claws sank into his armour.

‘Hold fast, Erkhart,’ Ernst shouted, galloping towards Dubnitz and his opponent. The other knight threw his trident, catching the shark-thing in its thigh. It shoved Dubnitz aside and turned, yanking the weapon loose in a spray of blood. As Ernst rode past, chopping down on it with his sword, it slapped him out of the saddle with the trident. Ernst crashed into the street and lay unmoving. The creature stalked towards him, still clutching the trident.

Dubnitz rushed towards it and drove his sword between its shoulder-blades. It shuddered and threw its arms wide. He threw himself against the hilt, forcing the blade in deeper, hoping to shatter its spine or pierce something vital. It hunched over, chomping at the air. He was nearly pulled off of his feet, but he drove a boot into the small of its back and ripped his sword free. The shark-thing turned and grabbed for him. He backpedalled and chopped into its wrist. The blade cut halfway through its limb and stopped. It whipped its arm aside, pulling his sword out of his grip and stabbing at him with the trident. The tines scraped off of his cuirass and he tripped over his own feet, landing heavily.

Coughing blood, the creature raised the trident over him. It dove towards his head and his palms slapped together around the outer tines. Jerking his head to the side, he guided the points into the street and kicked at the creature’s belly. It was like kicking a wall, but it rocked back, off balance. Desperate, he grabbed the head of the trident and snatched it out of the creature’s slack grip. Spinning the weapon around, he jammed it into the creature’s belly. It loomed over him, jaws snapping, and began to pull itself down the length of the trident.

‘Dubnitz, get the necklace!’ Goodweather screamed from somewhere just out of sight. ‘Get the necklace you great oaf!’

He lunged for the necklace and hooked it with a finger even as the thing’s saw-edged teeth scraped his visor. Dubnitz ripped it free and the creature convulsed as if he’d removed a limb. It bucked and thrashed and he rolled it off of him with a grunt of disgust. It curled around the trident and its heels thudded into the street as steam began to boil off of it, carrying a strange stench into the air.

Dubnitz watched in horrified fascination as the creature began to shrink back to human proportions. It sloughed off the corrupted grey hide, revealing bloody pink flesh beneath. The man gasped and gazed at him blankly. His wounds had not disappeared and as Dubnitz sank down beside him, he coughed, muttered and went still. He didn’t look much like a cultist; then, they never did.

Still, he had asked for help. What cultist or mutant would do that? The knight closed the corpse’s staring eyes and stood as Goodweather moved quickly towards Ernst’s splayed form. Moving towards her, Dubnitz said, ‘Is he…?’

‘No. Just had his lights put out is all,’ she said, looking at him over her shoulder. ‘More than I can say for some.’ Dubnitz looked around. The square was now host to a scene of carnage – bodies laid heaped here and there, mostly the result of the crowd’s panic at the creature’s initial appearance. The survivors had cleared out quick enough, and the other priests were endeavouring to help those that they could, while the temple guard looked on warily. The air stank of smoke and blood, despite the rain washing both away. Alarm bells were still ringing, and he could hear the crackle of fire and the clash of weapons. The latter was likely the Dock Watch or Ambrosius’s Marsh Watch snapping into action with all the speed an underpaid, unenthusiastic autocratic body could muster.

He looked back at Goodweather. She was an altogether more pleasant sight. Women weren’t a common fixture in the Grand Temple of Manann. Thus, Goodweather was, in many ways, an uncommon woman. She knew the holy sea-shanties backwards and forwards, even the rude bits most priests left out. And she had a punch like a mule.

‘We’ve sent for the priestesses of Shallya, but they’re in the same situation we were,’ Goodweather said, wiping her hands on her robes and standing. ‘There’re mobs at every temple. What,’ she said, noticing the look on his face.

Dubnitz coughed and shook his head. ‘We might want to send runners and warn them to be on the look-out for more individuals wearing these little beauties,’ Dubnitz said, letting the shark’s tooth necklace dangle from his fingers. ‘How did you know, by the way?’

‘I guessed,’ she said with a shrug.

‘Dubnitz blinked. ‘What?’

‘In the stories, it’s always the amulet. Or the crown, or the glove or the ring, some out of place innocuous thing,’ she said, turning back towards the temple. She gestured to two of the guards. ‘Pick him up,’ she said, motioning to Ernst. They hastened to obey.

‘Well, regardless of your astonishing disregard for my safety, you were right,’ Dubnitz said, hurrying after her. ‘The question is, why?’

‘Stories are stories for a reason,’ she said. She stopped and looked at him. ‘There’s something moving in the city. It’s in the air and the water; it’s in the rain, Erkhart,’ she said, holding out a hand. The rain filled her palm and gleamed greasily before she dumped it onto the street. ‘It’s moving through Marienburg, just out of sight and sense.’

‘Like a shark in the shallows,’ Dubnitz said, holding up the necklace and eyeing it.

‘Are you trying to be funny?’ she snapped.

‘No,’ he said. He bounced the shark’s tooth on his palm. It felt warm. He turned, prompted by some instinct. ‘Hunh,’ he said.

‘What?’ Goodweather said.

‘I wonder what happened to our friend with a neck full of necklaces just like this one, the skinny wastrel on the cart. I suppose it’s too much to hope he got trampled.’ He looked at her. ‘Did you see him?’

‘No, I was distracted by the monster,’ she said tersely. ‘Give me that!’ She snatched the necklace out of his hands. A moment later she grunted and almost dropped it.

‘What?’ Dubnitz said.

‘Stromfels,’ she hissed, turning the tooth over to reveal a curiously shaped scratch in the surface. The tooth seemed to squirm in the rain, and Dubnitz felt a prickling, crawling sensation in his gut.

‘Oh bugger,’ he said. Stromfels… the god of pirates, storms and sharks. Every sailor’s least favourite things. The worship of the shark-god had long been outlawed in Marienburg, thought furtive sects still worshipped him in badly lit back rooms and isolated tributaries out in the marshes. It was a name that every follower of Manann, devout or otherwise, knew well. Stromfels was the bogeyman… the dark of the deep sea and the doom that waited down below the white-capped waves. ‘Was he just some deranged cultist then? Daemon-possessed?’ he said, his mouth suddenly dry. He looked back towards the body of the man who’d been a shark. Was that what it had been? He thought again of the confused, despairing look in the man’s eyes and shuddered.

‘If he was, then he was not alone,’ someone said. Dubnitz turned and his eyes went cross as he stared down the tip of a sword. On the blade dangled a half-dozen more necklaces like the one Goodweather held. Most of them were bloody. Dubnitz looked up.

‘Lord Justicar,’ he said. ‘Ah, I ¬– that is to say, we–’

‘I see,’ Ambrosius said, leaning across the pommel of his saddle, his sword blade resting on his forearm. Dots of blood marred his cheek and armour. His horse whickered softly and stamped a hoof dangerously close to Dubnitz’s instep. Past the animal’s rump, Dubnitz saw members of the Marsh Watch, mostly looking worse for wear, moving through the carnage of the temple square, arresting those who weren’t dead or dying. Ambrosius tilted his blade, spilling the necklaces into Goodweather’s hands. ‘We have reports of more of the creatures, though we’ve only managed to kill a few. Their numbers are increasing. I am alarmed by this,’ he said calmly. ‘Ogg and the others are protecting the other temples in the district, as well as certain other, ah, strategically important areas.’ That meant they’d be guarding the richest and most influential members of Marienburg society, Dubnitz knew. Even in the midst of a crisis, Ambrosius was keenly aware of which side his bread was buttered on.

Goodweather looked at the pile of teeth in her cupped palms and her face took on a slightly queasy look. Dubnitz looked up at the Lord Justicar. ‘That’s a lot of monsters,’ he said.

‘One is more than this city needs,’ Ambrosius said grimly.

‘Mitterfruhl,’ Goodweather said suddenly. The two men looked at her. She made a face. ‘Mitterfruhl – the beginning of the rainy season-is a day sacred to Stromfels. Traditionally, it’s when his worshippers made their sacrifices.’ She looked up. ‘Storms were a sign of Stromfels’s pleasure.’

Thunder grumbled and the grey sky looked swollen and ill as Dubnitz looked up at it. ‘Sacrifices,’ he said. ‘As in more than one, you mean.’

‘Stromfels is a hungry god,’ Goodweather said. ‘He is as hungry as the ocean and twice as wild.’

‘Very poetic,’ Ambrosius said, sheathing his sword. ‘These amulets then are… what? Signs of his favour?’

‘That poor bastard didn’t seem very favoured to me,’ Dubnitz said, nodding towards the body of the former shark-man. Several more of Goodweather’s fellow priests surrounded the body and were engaged in a purification ritual involving sea-salt and crushed seagull bones. ‘More surprised really,’ he murmured.

‘What?’ Goodweather said, looking annoyed.

He looked again at the necklaces. ‘They’re all the same, aren’t they?’ he said.

‘What are you getting at, Dubnitz?’ Ambrosius said.

‘They’re all the same!’ Dubnitz said, gesturing to the teeth. He grabbed one of the amulets and pulled the cord tight. ‘Look at this.’

‘It’s made of horse hair,’ Goodweather said, looking puzzled.

‘Not what it’s made of but how it was made,’ Dubnitz said. ‘I grew up in the Tannery, remember?’ Located in the maze of streets that played host to the city’s tanneries, the Tannery was a squalid, foul-smelling territory and the gangs of mule-skinners and cat’s meat-men who made it their home were as dangerous as any dock-tough or river-rat. ‘Weave-men have particular ways of making cords. It’s like a signature of sorts.’

‘And these all have the same signature,’ Goodweather said, examining the others. She looked at him in shock. ‘Manann carry me, but your head might be useful for something other than balance.’

‘Now do you forgive me?’ he said. She glared at him but didn’t reply. Dubnitz looked at Ambrosius. ‘These were all made by the same person,’ he said.

‘I gathered, thank you,’ Ambrosius said. ‘The question would be, who?’

‘No idea,’ Dubnitz said, grinning. ‘But I know how to find out.’ Dubnitz pointed towards one of the large marble statues of Manann that stood watch around the temple square. ‘If anyone will know where these are coming from it’s that little mud-puppy,’ he said, indicating the boy who was crouched on the statue and watching the goings-on in the square. His blue coat was unbuttoned, likely because the brass buttons had been pawned. A ragged sash was wrapped around his waist, with a rust-dotted sailing knife thrust through it. Bare feet and fingers clung to Manann’s marble beard, despite the rain.

The blue-coats were omnipresent on the streets of Marienburg, especially when there was trouble afoot. If there was a riot or a festival or a brawl, they’d be there, on the fringes. People no longer even noticed them. Whether orphaned or abandoned, they all wore the same blue-dyed coats given to them by the priests who ran the Tar Street workhouses, and they all scampered through the streets like miniature northern savages, yelping and howling when those houses emptied for the evening.

‘What would a street-cur know about Stromfels?’ Ambrosius said.

‘Likely a surprising amount,’ Dubnitz said, tapping the side of his nose. ‘You wouldn’t believe what people let slip around little shell-like ears.’ Without waiting for a reply, Dubnitz strode towards the statue. When he reached it, he looked up at the boy. ‘Renaldo, you little snake. Get down here. I need to talk to you.’

‘Talk to me from down there, steel-fish,’ Renaldo said, sticking out his tongue. Renaldo was a regular face in the Temple of Manann. Dubnitz knew he begged alms from the merchants and picked the pockets of drunken seamen in the square. He’d boxed the boy’s ears more than once for trying the latter on Dubnitz himself.

Dubnitz grunted. ‘I have a job for you, you ungrateful little eel.’

‘Does it pay in food or fancies?’ Renaldo said, shimmying along Manann’s outthrust arm. He hung upside down from the extended trident, his dark eyes narrowed cunningly.

‘Both. Either,’ Dubnitz said. He let the shark’s tooth amulet dangle from his fingers. The effect on Renaldo was immediate. The boy hissed like the stray cat he resembled and scooted back up the statue. Dubnitz blinked. ‘That was unexpected. Renaldo, get back here!’

‘I ain’t taking that, steel-fish! I saw what those things do!’

‘And what’s that?’ Dubnitz pressed, circling the statue in pursuit of the boy.

‘They’re cursed!’ Renaldo barked.

‘Yes, well, I need to know where they’re coming from,’ Dubnitz said. ‘You don’t have to fondle the damn thing, just tell me where they’re coming from!’

‘Ikel!’ Renaldo crowed, eyeing Dubnitz suspiciously from behind Manann’s crown.

‘What’s an Ikel?’ Dubnitz said.

‘It’s not a what, steel-fish, it’s a who,’ Renaldo said. He stood on Manann’s shoulder and leaned against the statue’s head. ‘Ikel the marsh-man. He came into the Tannery about a week ago. He’s been shilling those teeth in the Beggar’s Market. Oleg the blind beggar tried to filch a few and Ikel cut him a sharp smile over his kidneys.’

‘Wouldn’t be the first time Oleg had to digest a bit of steel,’ Dubnitz grunted. ‘The Beggar’s Market, you say?’ A thought occurred to him. ‘What’s Ikel look like? Is he an inked-up gentleman, perchance?’

‘Like a squid shat on him,’ Renaldo said, nodding.

‘Wonderful,’ Dubnitz said. ‘Best scarper Renaldo, lest the Marsh Watch get hold of you.’ Dubnitz watched the boy slide away into the growing dusk and turned back to Ambrosius and Goodweather. ‘Beggar’s Market,’ he called out, tossing the amulet up and catching it. ‘Fellow called Ikel.’

‘You have a way with children,’ Goodweather said.

‘I’m something of a hero to the downtrodden, yes,’ Dubnitz said, puffing out his chest.

‘Be that as it may, is the boy’s information good?’ Ambrosius demanded. ‘Can we trust it?’

‘As much as anything heard on the streets,’ Dubnitz said, tossing the necklace back to Goodweather. ‘I think Ikel was here earlier. Watching the festivities.’

Ambrosius’s eye narrowed. ‘Hnf. Priestess Goodweather?’

‘Stromfels is an enemy of Manann,’ Goodweather said, dumping the necklaces into the pouch on her belt. ‘Our missionaries in the marshes and in the north have been attacked before.’

Ambrosius sighed. ‘Fine. You two will go to the Beggar’s Market. Find this Ikel. Take him into custody.’ He looked at Dubnitz. ‘That means I want him alive, Dubnitz.’

‘But of course, Lord Justicar,’ Dubnitz said, banging a fist against his cuirass smartly.

‘You want me to go with him?’ Goodweather said, her tone implying that she hadn’t heard Ambrosius correctly.

‘You have worked together before, yes?’ Ambrosius said, pulling on his horse’s reins and turning about. ‘Far be it from me to break up a successful partnership. Get me Ikel.’

‘But–’ Goodweather began, following Ambrosius.

‘And do hurry,’ Ambrosius said, ignoring the priestess.

‘But-but–’ Goodweather said, watching Ambrosius ride away.

Dubnitz coughed into his fist. Goodweather turned and glared at him. ‘What?’ Dubnitz said.

‘Let’s just be about this,’ Goodweather snarled.

Luckily, the Tannery was close to the docklands. Marienburg was in a tumult. The streets were packed with people fleeing in one direction or another; some sought the safety of the temples while others huddled in taverns and shops. Though the shark-things were few, the rumours of them were flying thick through the canal-streets. Looters were mistaken for daemon-worshippers and the armoured knights of the Order of Manann for the black-iron clad warriors of the north. Mobs of panic-stricken citizens burned the buildings of their neighbours as old grudges blossomed into violence. Through it all, the rain pounded down like the tears of Marienburg’s many gods.

Several times Dubnitz was forced to fend off the attentions of the opportunistic and terror-maddened. His sword was heavy with blood as he forced Goodweather through the throngs clogging the streets. However, those throngs thinned as they entered the Tannery, eventually disappearing entirely.

The Beggar’s Market occupied a natural meeting point between several side streets in the Tannery. The stink of boiling fat and rotting meat was thick on the wet air. The streets were empty of life, save the scrabbling of rats in the gutters. Something crashed in the distance. Dubnitz wondered if another of the shark-things was loose somewhere. Ambrosius had said as much. The thought made his muscles tense. The haze of still-burning fires danced above the rooftops like a false dawn.

‘I shouldn’t be here,’ Goodweather said. She had her hood pulled low, and the symbol of Manann was displayed prominently on her chest. ‘I should be at the temple. There are things to be done.’

‘Are they more important than countering the machinations of the minions of the shark-god?’ Dubnitz said, his palm resting on his sword hilt. Drying blood dotted his armour, hiding the piscine designs beneath red splashes.

‘Minions,’ Goodweather repeated, looking at him.

‘What would you call them?’ Dubnitz said.

Goodweather merely shook her head and looked around. Empty stalls lined the walls of the buildings on either side of the street. On any other night, rain or not, those stalls would be crammed with men and women selling their wares. The Beggar’s Market was almost a parody of the great mercantile squares that occupied other parts of Marienburg. Here was where the poor came to buy and sell their pitiful wares; they were doing neither tonight.

‘How do we tell which stall we’re looking for? And where is everyone?’ Goodweather said.

‘As to the latter, I can only guess. But as to the former… there!’ He pointed. The shark’s jaws were larger than any beast Dubnitz had had the misfortune to meet in the sea or otherwise. They spread wide on a rough cut wooden post mounted over a dingy stall. ‘They’re not a subtle folk, these worshippers of the shark-god.’

‘No,’ Goodweather said grimly. ‘Stromfels is as subtle as the oncoming storm.’

‘And as remorseless,’ Dubnitz said. ‘That explains that. The people of the Tannery have always had a nose for trouble. They go to ground like rats when trouble rears its head.’ He held up a hand. ‘Hsst…we’re being watched,’ he said softly. Goodweather twitched and looked around, her fingers sliding towards the knife on her belt.

‘Why didn’t the Lord Justicar send any men with us?’ she muttered. The knife in her hand was hooked and serrated, the blade engraved with the name of Manann.

‘Probably because he had none to spare, Goodweather,’ Dubnitz said, his eyes flickering across the street. ‘The whole city is going up in flames and inundated with monsters. Finding one man, no matter how important, isn’t high on his list of priorities.’

‘There’s no guarantee that Ikel is even here!’ Goodweather snapped, looking around warily.

‘So who’s watching us then, hmm?’ Dubnitz said. The two of them had moved back to back instinctively. The rain had picked up, coming down now in semi-opaque sheets. Thunder snarled and then, the deep tolling rolled through Dubnitz’s bones. Goodweather gasped and clutched at her chest. The puddles of water collecting on the street rippled and the rain wavered into weird shapes.

Shapes rose suddenly from the street, clad in rags and trash, their faces masked by blackened peat bags. Swords, axes and clubs were gripped tight in grimy hands. In silence, they rushed towards the duo. Dubnitz drew his sword and chopped upwards into an attacker’s skull in one smooth motion, cutting the man in two from chin to pate. He turned as another, carrying a rusty billhook, leapt wildly at Goodweather. The priestess flung out a hand, and a fistful of fish-scales drifted towards her attacker. The flimsy, tiny scales pierced the man’s chest, arms and face like tiny arrows, leaving blisters and burns in their wake. The man screamed and fell, clawing at himself. Goodweather swept her hooked knife out and cut his throat with one economic bend of her elbow.

Dubnitz shoved her aside as an axe dropped towards her head. He caught the blade on his own, and sparks dripped into his face as the two weapons slid across one another with a squeal. He kicked out and was rewarded with the sound of snapping bone. The axe-man fell, and Dubnitz caught him on the back of the neck with his sword. The head rolled loose into the gutter.

There was a scream from behind him and as he turned he saw a cultist stagger, clawing at the billhook sticking up from his back. Goodweather put a boot and jerked the confiscated weapon loose. Dubnitz inclined his head and she gave him a sharp nod. Then, her eyes widened and she hurled the billhook.

Dubnitz cursed and fell backwards. The billhook scraped across his cuirass as it caught his attacker in the throat, dropping the man into a heap. ‘Nice throw,’ he said, straightening up and turning towards her.

‘Not really,’ she said, as the last of their attackers pressed the edge of his notched cutlass to her throat meaningfully.

‘Drop your sword,’ the man growled, his voice muffled by his mask.

‘No,’ Dubnitz said, starting forward.

‘I’ll kill her,’ the other said.

‘He’ll kill me,’ Goodweather added.

‘No he won’t,’ Dubnitz said, drawing closer, the rain pattering across his armour.

‘He won’t?’ Goodweather said.

‘I will!’ the cultist said.

‘You won’t,’ Dubnitz said. ‘Because if you do kill her, I’ll hurt you for it.’

‘I do not fear death,’ the cultist said.

‘I didn’t say anything about death. I said I’d hurt you. And I will. I will personally oversee your sentence in the Temple of Manann. I will put the Question to you again and again, until you are nothing more than shark-chum. Your every moment will be an eternity of agony, my friend, and I will not let it end,’ Dubnitz said mildly. He stopped and extended his sword. ‘It’s your choice, of course.’

The cultist shoved aside Goodweather with a cry and launched himself at Dubnitz. Dubnitz beat aside the cutlass with an almost gentle gesture and spun around, swatting the man on the back of the head with the flat of his blade. The cultist dropped onto the water-logged street like a pole-axed ox. Dubnitz looked at Goodweather, who was rubbing her throat. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes. Nice speech,’ she said.

‘I meant every word,’ he said softly.

‘Of course you meant it. You always mean what you say, when you say it. That’s the problem, Erkhart,’ Goodweather said. Dubnitz fell silent. He occupied himself with jerking the cultist to his feet and shaking him into sensibility.

‘Up,’ Dubnitz barked. The man groaned and Dubnitz prodded him with the tip of his sword. ‘Where’s Ikel? Did he know we were coming?’

The cultist didn’t answer, shaking his head. Dubnitz lifted the man’s chin with his sword. ‘Talk, or I’ll begin carving the Litanies of the Sea on you, friend. And my friend here has enough salt to do the job properly.’

‘Erkhart…’ Goodweather began.

‘I know what I’m doing,’ Dubnitz said, glancing at her. She shook her head.

‘So do I. Hold him,’ she said. As Dubnitz swung the weakly struggling cultist around, Goodweather scooped up two handfuls of rainwater. She murmured into her cupped hands, and the water bubbled in a strange fashion as she placed it beneath the cultist’s nose. Steam rose from the water. ‘Take off his mask,’ she said. Dubnitz complied. The cultist was a pale faced, pop-eyed man, with strange ritualistic scars on his cheeks and forehead. The steam wavered in the rain and then plunged up into his nose and eyes. The cultist shuddered and gurgled.

The hairs on the back of Dubnitz’s neck rose as the body in his grip went slack. ‘What are you–’ he began. Goodweather silenced him with a look.

Finally, she stepped back. ‘Release him.’

Dubnitz did, and gladly. The prayers of the servants of Manann were a strange, wild thing and though he served the god, Dubnitz knew that there were mysteries that he would never be privy to. The cultist jerked back and forth, gurgling. ‘Lead us to Ikel,’ Goodweather said, her face slick with rain and sweat. Her eyes showed the strain of what she was doing. The cultist spun and staggered, like a marionette. Then, with a moan, he stumbled off.

‘Let’s go,’ Goodweather said hoarsely. Dubnitz followed her.

‘What did you do to him?’

‘A simple trick, though I’ve never tried it with anything larger than a seagull,’ she said. She rubbed her head. ‘As long as the steam stays in him, he’ll do as we say. Manann will compel him. But once it escapes…’

‘Hopefully he’ll get us to where we need to go then,’ Dubnitz said.

The cultist led them on a crooked, circuitous route through the Tannery. As they entered a badly lit cul-de-sac, the deep, black tolling happened again, and it made Dubnitz’s head feel as if it were fit to burst. Goodweather grabbed her head and nearly sank to her knees. Prayers to Manann burst from her lips in desperate speed. The cultist shuddered to a stop as it happened, steam rising from his ears, mouth and nose. The street seemed to be submerged beneath murky water and vast, terrifying shapes slid between the buildings, swimming from shadow to shadow.

Dubnitz opened his mouth to speak, and bubbles flowed into the air around his head. The rain had become something else entirely. His limbs felt sluggish and leaden and as the echoes of the deep boom faded, and those immense, terrible shapes shot past and over him into the city faster than any bird, the world snapped back to normality.

Goodweather clutched at her amulet, her thumbs pressed tight to the trident symbol of Manann. She looked at him, her face pale and her eyes wide with horror. Dubnitz knew that his own face was likely the mirror image of hers, but he shook it off.

The cultist lay limp on the street, his body contorted and rigid. Dubnitz didn’t have to examine him to know he was dead. ‘I think we’ve found the place,’ he rasped.

The store front had seen better years. It was shabby even by the standards of the Tannery and it smelled of rotting fish. A number of the latter had been nailed to the lintel, their blank eyes staring out at the street. It was only by looking carefully that Dubnitz could tell that the fish had been nailed up in the shape of Stromfels’s symbol. He felt cold and sick and he hesitated before the door.

‘We could go back. We could get help,’ Goodweather said from behind him.

‘And what would happen between now and then, eh?’ Dubnitz growled, all humour gone. He looked up into the rain. There was a feeling on the air, like sailors got just before that first storm-tossed wave crested the bow and caused the boat to dip alarmingly. ‘Those bells – whatever they are – are becoming stronger. You felt it as well as I did.’

‘We’re at the eye of the storm,’ Goodweather said. She gingerly touched one of the fish and then drew her fingers back as if they’d been burned. She looked at him. ‘Erkhart…’

‘I know,’ he said. Then he lifted a boot and kicked the door in. Sword at the ready, he shouldered his way in. Rain dripped down through the sagging ceiling and ran in rusty runnels across the mouldy wooden planks of the floor. There was a vile smell, like a pig left too long on the butcher’s block in the summer air. ‘You’d think there’d be more guards,’ he said quietly.

Goodweather stepped past him. She pulled a gull feather from her pouch and released it. A cool breeze, smelling of the clean sea, took it and carried it through the shop towards the back of the room. The feather dropped to the floor and spun gently in a small circle. Dubnitz stood over it, his eyes narrowed. He dropped to his haunches and, with his sword-point he traced the edges of a trapdoor out in the thin skin of mould that covered the floor.

Carefully, he levered it open with his blade, revealing an unpleasant looking set of stairs. A foul stink wafted upwards-he smelled blood, and stale water. He looked at Goodweather. ‘Ladies first,’ he said.

‘Manann’s sword before Manann’s shield,’ she said piously.

‘Bloody dark down there,’ he said.

‘Isn’t it?’ she said. Dubnitz sighed and started down. The smooth stone of the foundations were wet to the touch, sweating with the stuff of the canals which criss-crossed the city. No place in Marienburg was more than a few feet from the water, whether it was fresh or salt, canal, marsh or sea. The city floated on moist foundations, the stones eroded century by century. Dubnitz paused at the curve of the stairs. Weak torchlight illuminated the bottom steps and he could hear the steady slap-slap of water against stone. Some places in the Tannery had underground docks, for moving illicit goods into the marshes or deep wells that provided water.

Goodweather pressed against his back. He continued down. Goodweather gasped as they caught sight of the first body. The man lay sprawled in the corner across from the steps. His hands were curled around the handle of the knife buried to the hilt in his belly. He was not alone. A dozen more bodies filled the oddly angled confines of the cellar. More than a dozen, in fact. Bodies were heaped upon bodies, all with self-inflicted wounds and all surrounding the deep well of scummy water that occupied the centre of the cellar.

In fact only three living forms occupied the cellar as Dubnitz and Goodweather reached it. A man easily recognizable as Ikel was one and the other two were soon of no consequence. As Dubnitz stepped forward, the two cultists stabbed each other and fell in a heap.

As they fell, the strange, fang-like shard of black stone that thrust out of the dark water of the pool shuddered and vibrated with a hideous bell-like peal of noise. It was thunderous in the confines of the cellar, causing the stones to grind against one another. The water swirled suddenly with a number of water-spouts and Dubnitz shielded his face as shadowy immensities burst free of the pool as the bell-noise pounded at his bones and eardrums. The shadow-things shot upwards, passing through the upper floor and away as the echoes of the bell faded.

Blinking through the pain of the sound, Dubnitz focused on Ikel, who smiled at him in apparent recognition. The cultist grinned, revealing crudely filed teeth. ‘You’re too late,’ he said. ‘Stromfels’s teeth dig deep into the meat of Manann’s realm. The King of Sharks will have his Mitterfruhl feast.’

‘Looks like he’ll be doing it sans guests,’ Dubnitz said, kicking a body. Ikel chuckled.

‘Blood must enter the water to bring the sharks,’ the cultist said.

Dubnitz caught Goodweather’s eye. Her face was as stiff as those of the corpses that lay around them. ‘They needed a sacrifice.’

‘Blood calls to beasts,’ Ikel cackled, rattling the shark’s teeth necklaces he wore. ‘We gave them away freely. Good luck charms we called them, and aye, so they are… Stromfels’s luck!’ Dubnitz saw that the black stone was studded with such teeth. Indeed they almost seemed to be growing from the rock like barnacles. Hundreds, thousands of sharp shark’s teeth poked through the slick surface of the stone and the sight of them made his flesh prickle.

‘What?’ he said.

‘The necklaces,’ Goodweather breathed. Her voice was full of horror and loathing. ‘The teeth are parts of Stromfels, parts of his power, even as this symbol I wear is Manann’s.’

The realization hit Dubnitz like a fist. ‘Then everyone wearing one of those…’

‘They belong to Stromfels now!’ Ikel yelped. ‘They are Stromfels. Or they will be. It takes blood, so much blood…’ Dubnitz froze, remembering the great shadows he had seen. Moving like sharks through the streets. Had they been seeking the wearers of the necklaces? Were they daemons hunting hosts to use to feed and ravage the city of the sea-god?

‘What was the point?’ Dubnitz said, tearing his eyes from the stone and moving closer to Ikel, who sidled aside, his fingers tapping on the hilt of the knife thrust through his belt.

‘Careful Erkhart,’ Goodweather said. ‘Don’t let him do it.’

‘Don’t let him do what?’ Dubnitz snapped.

‘Don’t let him kill himself. If he kills himself, the sacrifice will be completed,’ Goodweather said. ‘And those who haven’t been transformed yet will be.’

‘Silence,’ Ikel snapped. ‘Manann has no voice here. This is Stromfels’s place. Stromfels’s temple!’ He gestured wildly at the black stone. ‘His teeth pierce the veil of Manann’s flesh, opening the way for us… for all of us!’

‘To do what then?’ Dubnitz said harshly, his eyes on the knife in Ikel’s belt. If he could keep him talking…

‘To feed the god,’ Ikel said. ‘Stromfels is as hungry as the ocean, and like the ocean he must be fed.’ He drew the knife. ‘His children burst through the veil and feed on the unworthy. And it is our honour to help them.’ Ikel lifted the knife to his throat. ‘It is my honour–’

‘No!’ Goodweather shouted, flinging her own blade. It slid across Ikel’s wrist and he yelped and dropped his knife. Goodweather leapt on him, robes flapping. ‘Erkhart, get the stone,’ she said.

‘And do what with it?’ Dubnitz roared, plunging into the water. It closed about his legs greedily, and his limbs went immediately numb, nearly causing him to fall. Things brushed against his knees and he nearly fell forward into the stone. He caught himself at the last minute, his hands shooting out against the stone. Impossibly, the metal and thick leather of his gauntlets gave way before the teeth like thin paper and Dubnitz snarled in pain. He jerked his throbbing hands back. His palms bled freely.

Goodweather, struggling with Ikel, shouted, ‘Get it out of the water. Hurry!’

Dubnitz looked at her and then at the stone. It gleamed nastily and he hesitated to touch it again. But, not knowing what else to do, he sank down into the water, digging for its base. His blood coloured the water as his fingers were shredded. Pain ran wild up his forearms and sparks bounced at the edges of his vision. It felt like his hands were being chewed.

‘Dubnitz, hurry!’ Goodweather called from behind him.

With a groan, Dubnitz lifted the stone. His chest and shoulders swelled and his feet slid beneath the water as he ripped it free of the pool. Fangs fastened into his thigh as some unseen something coiled about his legs. He stamped blindly, and a powerful blow crashed into his back, nearly knocking him over. He staggered forward, still holding the stone aloft. It seemed to grow heavier, its weight doubling and tripling. His arms trembled as he fought to reach the edge of the pool.

In his head, he heard the slash of a shark’s fin through eternal waters and the thunder of a great, gluttonous heart. His lungs were full of water and the smell of his blood spread across the spirit-sea that held Stromfels and his progeny. Shadow-things spun around him, darting at the edges of his vision and fear cut through him like a knife. ‘Manann help me,’ he muttered. For the first time in his life, the prayer was a sincere one.

He caught a glimpse of movement, and saw Goodweather on her back among the bodies, Ikel straddling her, his filed teeth darting for her throat. Dubnitz, reacting on instinct, bellowed and hurled the stone at the cultist. It caught Ikel in the head and shoulders and he fell without a sound, the black stone settling on him with an almost hungry squelching sound. Despite the blood, there was no toll of sound. No shadow-things springing from the water’s depths to rampage through his city. Nothing, save a disappointed silence.

The waters of the pool thrashed suddenly and then went still. The oppressive feeling of the cellar faded slowly, as if whatever presence had been causing it were receding. Dubnitz collapsed, half in and half out of the water. He coughed and looked at Goodweather, who got to her feet slowly. ‘Did it work?’ he said, pulling himself out of the water.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, looking around. ‘I think so.’

‘You think so? You seemed bloody certain when you were ordering me in there!’ Dubnitz growled, trying to get to his feet and failing. His hands and legs were covered in blood and the shredded remnants of his armour.

She helped him sit up. ‘It seemed like the thing to do.’

‘Seemed like the…’ Dubnitz gaped at her. ‘Are you saying you guessed?’

‘I suppose I did, yes,’ Goodweather said hesitantly.

Dubnitz began to laugh, softly at first, and then great, echoing guffaws. Goodweather joined him and the sound of their mingled laughter drove the last lingering shadows back into the depths.

An Extract from Knight of the Blazing Sun

Josh Reynolds

The orcs came down out of the Worlds Edge Mountains into Ostermark like a green tide, sweeping villages and towns before them in a cascade of flame and pillage. But the men of the Mark stood firm and met the orcs with pike, shot and sword. Soldiers in purple and yellow livery crashed against barbaric green-skinned savages, matching Imperial steel and age-old strategy against inhuman muscle and brute cunning. Men and orcs screamed and died as the frozen ground turned to mud and the sun swung high in the sky.

Elsewhere, horses pawed the frost-covered earth in nervous anticipation. Their breath escaped in bursts of steam which drifted haphazardly through the close-set scrub trees that surrounded them and their riders. Hector Goetz reached down and stroked his mount’s muscular neck. The warhorse whinnied eagerly. ‘Easy Kaspar,’ he said. ‘Easy. Miles to go yet.’ Goetz was a tall man, and he wore the gilded armour of a knight of the Order of the Blazing Sun easily, if not entirely comfort¬ably. He glanced down the row of similarly armoured riders that

spread out to either side of him and wished he felt more confident in his chances of surviving the coming engagement.

‘Just give him a thump, boy,’ someone said. Goetz twisted in his saddle, meeting the cheerful gaze of his hochmeister. Tancred Berlich was a big, bluff man with a grey-streaked beard and a wide grin. Red cheeks and a splotchy nose completed the image of a man more concerned with food and drink than fighting and death. He had commanded the Kappelburg Komturie for as long as Goetz could remember. ‘Horses are like soldiers… a thump or three is good for morale.’

Goetz chuckled as Berlich gave a booming laugh. His smile faded as Berlich’s opposite number from the Bechafen Komturie glared at them through the open visor of his ornate helmet.

‘I know that proper military discipline is difficult for you, Tancred, but I would like to remind you that this is an ambush!’ the man hissed through gritted teeth. Of an age with his fellow Hochmeister, Alfonse Wiscard looked older. His face was a hatchet made of wrinkles and his eyes were like chips of ice. Those cool orbs swivelled to Goetz a moment later. ‘Control your hochmeister, brother, or the orcs will be on us far sooner than we anticipate,’ he said.

‘Leave the boy alone, Wiscard,’ Berlich said before Goetz could reply. ‘He’s got more experience than all of the puppies you brought along combined. Don’t you boy?’

‘I… have seen my share,’ Goetz said, looking straight ahead. ‘More than most perhaps.’

‘The Talabeclander insults us!’ one of Wiscard’s men said.

‘Quiet,’ Wiscard snapped. His face was twisted into as sour an expression as Goetz had ever seen. He felt impressed despite himself. ‘Quiet, all of you. We are here to fight orcs, not rehash old grudges.’ The prov¬inces of Talabecland and Ostermark had been at each other’s throats for decades, for one reason or another. While the only loyalties the members of the Order were supposed to hold were to Myrmidia, the Order itself and the Emperor, in that order, occasionally the old traditional disagreements crept in.

‘Besides, the boy’s not really a Talabeclander; he’s from Solland!’ Berlich said, pounding Goetz on the shoulder.

‘Solland hasn’t existed for a long time. Longer than my lifetime,’ Goetz protested.

‘Modesty. I think he’s the heir,’ Berlich whispered loudly to Wiscard. ‘Old Helborg owes the boy a sword, or my name isn’t Tanty!’

‘Sudenland is gone, hochmeister. As is its elector,’ Goetz said patiently. ‘Sudenland’ was how his mother had insisted on referring to the dead province, now long since absorbed by Wissenland. It was a peculiar¬ity of the old families, and one Goetz had never been able to shake. ‘And your name is Tancred. I have never heard anyone refer to you as “Tanty”.’

‘See? See? Only royalty talks down its nose like that! Boy’ll be Emperor if he survives,’ Berlich laughed.

Goetz craned his neck as a young pistolier rode up. Both horse and rider were clearly exhausted. The pistolier had sweat dripping down his youthful fea¬tures, cutting tracks in the grime that otherwise covered his face. ‘Milords,’ he wheezed. ‘The Lord Elec¬tor Hertwig requests that you see to the flank!’

‘Ha! Finally!’ Berlich growled, slamming a fist into his thigh.

Goetz watched the young man lead his horse away, both of them covered in sweat and reeking of a hard ride and exhaustion. It hadn’t been so long ago that he himself had ridden among the ranks of the pistolkorps. They had taught him the art of riding and of the use¬fulness of black powder. Thinking of that last one, he wondered what he wouldn’t give for a brace of pistols now. Even just one would mean one less orc to face up close. Unfortunately, while Myrmidia was a goddess of battlefield innovation, her followers were forced to follow the law of the land. Gunpowder was far too rare and unstable to be given to a force prone to reckless headlong charges into the maw of the enemy army.

Goetz sighed. He’d earned his spurs as a pistolier, against orcs then as well. Of course, the raiders he and his compatriots had put to flight then had been as noth¬ing compared to the horde that now crawled across his field of vision, from horizon to horizon. He was sud¬denly quite thankful for the heavy plate he wore, with all of its dwarf-forged strength between him and the crude axes of the green-skinned savages he was even now readying himself to face. He’d seen what an orc could do to an unarmoured man – and an armoured one, come to that – and the more layers between him and that gruesome fate was well worth the inevitable sweat and chafing. Not to mention the smell.

Still, a pistol would have been nice.

‘Don’t look so glum, boy,’ Berlich said, jostling him out of his reverie. ‘Cheer up! We’ll be charging any minute now!’ The hochmeister grinned eagerly, and bounced slightly in his saddle like an excited urchin. ‘Blood and thunder, we’ll turn them into so much paste!’

Goetz turned back around, peering through the pro¬tective embrace of the thicket where they were waiting. While most of the orc army was already engaged in the swirling melee beyond, some canny boss had managed to restrain his impetuous followers. That was impres¬sive, and slightly frightening. Orcs usually had all the restraint of a rabid hound. When one proved capable of thinking beyond putting its axe through the near¬est skull, it meant trouble for anyone unlucky enough to be caught in its path. Right at that moment, the unlucky ones looked to be the eastern flank of elec¬tor Hertwig’s battered force, as a stomping, snorting, squealing flood of orcish Boar Riders hurtled towards the purple-and-gold lines. Goetz tightened his grip on his reins and took hold of his lance, jerking it up from where he’d stabbed it into the ground.

‘Thunder and lightning, that’s how it’ll be!’ Berlich said, lifting his own lance. Goetz took a deep breath and set his shield. He caught Wiscard’s eye, and the hochmeister nodded briskly.

‘We go where we are needed,’ Wiscard said, intoning the first part of the Order’s creed.

‘We do what must be done,’ Goetz replied along with all the rest.

‘And Myrmidia have mercy on those green buggers because I’ll have none!’ Berlich roared, standing up in his saddle. ‘Let’s have at them! Hyah!’ Then, with a slow rumble that built to a thunderous crescendo, the Order of the Blazing Sun rode to war. They brushed aside the thicket with the force of their passage and the Order’s specially-bred warhorses bugled bloodthirsty cries as they launched forwards.

Seconds later, wood met flesh with a thunderous roar, and the ground trembled at the point of impact. Lances cracked and splintered as they tore through the orc lines, shoving bodies back atop bodies and creating eddies in the green tide. Goetz’s teeth rattled inside his helmet as his lance was reduced to a jagged stump of brightly painted wood. He tossed it aside and drew his sword, wheeling his horse around even as the broken weapon struck the ground. Goetz lashed out as a green shape crashed against him in the press of combat.

The orc’s mouth gaped wide, its foul breath spill¬ing out from between a gate of yellowed tusks as the sword passed between its bulbous head and its sloped shoulders. The head, still mouthing now-silent curses, tumbled forward, striking Goetz’s shield and springing away into the depths of the melee.

The body, its neck-stump spurting blood, was car¬ried in the opposite direction by the snorting, kicking boar its legs were still clamped around. Goetz hauled on his horse’s reins, forcing the trained destrier to side¬step the grunting beast. The horse bucked and kicked at the fleeing pig and then swung around at Goetz’s signal, lunging towards the next opponent with a sav¬age whinny.

Goetz’s sword chopped down left and right until his arm began to ache from the strain. The orcs kept coming, treading on the bodies of their dead or dying fellows in their excitement as they fought to get to grips with the men who had crashed into their flank.

It had been a bold move, and a necessary one, but Goetz wasn’t so sure that it had been a smart one. Fifty men, even fifty fully-armoured knights of the Order of the Blazing Sun, could not stand against the full weight of an orc horde, no matter how righteous their cause or how strong their sword-arms. Now, with their task accomplished, they found themselves surrounded by an army of angry berserkers as the rest of the elector’s forces attempted to reach them. It was not a position that Goetz enjoyed being in.

A crude spear crashed against his thigh and skittered off his armour, leaving a trail of sparks in its wake. Goetz swung his horse around and iron-shod hooves snapped out, pulping a malformed green skull with deadly efficiency. He brought his shield up instinc¬tively as a swift movement caught his eye. Arrows sprouted from the already battered face of the shield and Goetz chopped his sword down, slicing through the hafts as he whispered a quiet prayer to Myrmidia.

‘Hear me, Lady of Battle; keep me from harm and kill my enemy, if you please,’ he said as he took a moment to catch his breath. He looked around. The battle had devolved into a chaotic melee, with ranks and order forgotten in the heat of battle. A volley of handguns barked nearby; men screamed and died, their cries barely audible above the cacophony of the orcish battle-cries. He caught sight of Hertwig’s standard, waving above the battle.

‘Ware!’ someone yelled. Another knight, his armour flecked with gore, gestured wildly and Goetz twisted in his saddle, catching a gnaw-toothed axe on the edge of his sword. His arm went numb from the force of the blow and he was forced to bring his shield around to catch a second blow.

The shield crumpled inward as the axe crashed against it. The orc who wielded it was as large a mon¬ster as Goetz had ever seen. It had a dull, dark hue to its thick hide and heavy armour decorating its mus¬cular limbs. The beast was large enough to attack a mounted man without difficulty and as Goetz’s horse shied away, the brute roared out a challenge in its own barbarous tongue.

‘Come on then!’ Goetz shouted back. He kneed his mount and the warhorse reared, lashing out. The orc howled as a knife-edged hoof plucked one of its bat-like ears from its head. It drove one massive shoulder into the horse’s belly, toppling it onto its side. Goetz rolled from the saddle as his horse fell, losing hold of his shield. He retained his sword however and man¬aged to block a blow that would have taken his head from his shoulders.

The orc loomed over him, its teeth bared in a grin. The edge of the axe inched downwards towards Goetz’s face, despite the interposed sword blade. Muscles screaming, he drove a fist into the orc’s jaw, surprising it as well as numbing his hand in the process. It had been like punching a sack of granite.

The beast stepped aside, more from shock than pain, but the hesitation was enough. Goetz swung around, chopping his sword into the orc’s side. It roared and backhanded him, denting his helm and sending it fly¬ing. He fell onto his back, skull ringing.

Bellowing in agony, the orc jerked at the sword, trying to pull it free. It gave up after a moment and, bloody froth decorating its jaws, swung its axe up for a killing blow despite the presence of Goetz’s sword still buried hilt-deep in its side. Before the blow could land a lance point burst through the orc’s throat. It dropped its axe and grabbed at the jagged mass of wood, bending dou¬ble and nearly yanking its wielder from his saddle.

‘Are you just going to sit there all day, brother, or are you going to help me?’ the knight cried out as Goetz looked up at him. Goetz’s reply was to throw himself towards the hilt of his sword. The orc arched its back, gagging as it tried to remove the obstruction in its throat. Even now, nearly chopped in two and with a lance through the neck it was still fighting… and still more than capable of killing.

Goetz caught the hilt with his palms and shoulder and thrust forward with all of his weight. The orc’s roar turned shrill as the sword resumed its path through the beast’s midsection. Goetz stumbled as dark blood sprayed him. The orc fell in two directions, fists and heels thumping the ground spasmodically.

Rising, Goetz caught his horse’s bridle. ‘Easy, Kaspar, easy,’ he murmured, knuckling the horse at the base of its jaw as it nuzzled him. He hauled himself awk¬wardly up into the saddle. Muscles aching, he turned to his rescuer.

‘My thanks, brother,’ he said, jerking on his mount’s reins and turning it. The other man raised his visor and snorted. Goetz recognised the fine-boned features as those of the man who had taken offence at Berlich’s comments earlier. Velk, he thought the man was called.

‘Save your thanks, Talabeclander,’ Velk said. ‘If I’d known it was one of you lot, I might have let the brute finish you off.’

Goetz spat out a mouthful of dust and shook his head. ‘I see the hospitality of the Mark is as generous as ever.’

Velk glared at him and opened his mouth to reply when a sharp voice interrupted. ‘Brothers! Cease this nonsense. There are still orcs to kill.’ Goetz turned and saw Wiscard, riding towards them, a blood-stained warhammer dangling loosely from his hand. Three other knights trailed after him, including Berlich, who looked as cheerful as ever despite the blood matting his beard.

As Wiscard drew close, he motioned with the ham¬mer and said, ‘Look!’ Goetz followed the gesture and saw a crude standard rising above a cloud of dust. The tattered remnants of a number of banners, some from regiments native to the Empire, others from Bre¬tonnia and one or two from places that Goetz didn’t recognise, hung from the crossbeam of the standard, flapping amidst an assortment of skulls and gewgaws. As they watched, the elector’s standard, gleaming gold and purple, hurtled towards the other.

‘Must be their warlord,’ Berlich said, setting his horse into motion with a swift kick. ‘Having fun, Brother Goetz?’ he said, grinning at the younger knight.

‘More than is decent, hochmeister,’ Goetz said. The knights began to trot forward as a solid wedge, resting their horses for a moment. Even the strongest animal could only do so much carrying the weight of a fully armoured knight.

Berlich laughed and slapped Goetz a ringing blow on the shoulder. He looked at Wiscard. ‘Didn’t I tell you the boy had spirit?’

‘As a matter of fact, no,’ Wiscard said. ‘Then, I rarely pay attention to your blathering, Tancred.’

‘Blathering?’ Berlich said with a guffaw. ‘Do I blather, Brother Goetz?’

‘Incessantly, Hochmeister Berlich,’ Goetz said, rec¬ognising the game. Berlich liked to pretend he was nothing more than a common soldier, despite having more titles than fingers. The Kappelburg Komturie was a place of little truck with authority or discipline.

Berlich clutched his chest. ‘Cut to the quick! And by a fellow knight… the ignominy of it all.’

‘From what I know of Talabeclanders, you should have expected as much,’ Velk interjected. ‘Traitorous pack of killers, the lot of you.’

Berlich ignored him. ‘What say we introduce our¬selves to yon beastie, Wiscard you old stick?’ he said, gesturing with his sword to the warlord’s standard.

‘My thoughts exactly,’ Wiscard said. He slapped his visor down and the other knights did the same. ‘Velk, Goetz, form up on me.’

As one, they charged. They crashed into the orcs from behind, bowling several over. Goetz leaned over his horse’s neck, chopping down on those orcs not quick enough to get out of the way. Surprised, several of the creatures ran, and those that didn’t fell soon enough.

One of the creatures, however, spun and chopped down on Velk’s horse with a vicious looking double-bladed axe. The horse fell squealing and rolled over its rider, leaving him in the dust. Goetz yanked hard on the reins and sent his own horse leaping between the downed knight and his would-be slayer. ‘Haro Talabe¬cland!’ he roared, shouting the battle-cry of his home province. ‘Up, Talabheim!’

The orc yowled as Goetz’s sword took its hands off at the wrists. His second blow cracked its skull. Velk was on his feet by then, his face tight with pain. One arm hung at an awkward angle, and he grudgingly nodded at Goetz. A moment later, his eyes widened as a mas¬sive shape loomed up out of the dust.

A stone-headed maul crashed against the armoured head of Goetz’s horse, killing the animal instantly and throwing Goetz to the ground for a second time. He skidded across the rocky ground, narrowly avoiding being trampled by the other combatants. His eyes wid¬ened as he looked up at what had to be the leader of the orc horde.

The creature was far larger than the dark-skinned brute from earlier, and its skin gleamed like polished obsidian. A horned, crimson-crested helmet rode on its square head and made it look even taller as it spread its ape-like arms and bellowed. The motion and the sound caused the oddments of plate and mail that it wore to clatter loudly. With a start, Goetz realised that the beast had its standard strapped to its back, as well as a basket full of smaller, vicious looking creatures, all clad in black cloaks and hoods and armed with crude bows. Goblins, he realised, as he rolled out of the way of a spatter of arrows.

‘Myrmidia’s oath,’ Velk said, stumbling back. ‘It’s huge!’

‘That just means it’s easier to hit!’ Berlich roared, swooping past them towards the warlord. Whooping, the hochmeister swung his sword overhand, shearing off one of the horns on the orc’s helmet. The monster howled in outrage and spun much more quickly than Goetz thought possible for a creature that size.

Berlich grunted as the stone maul rose up and rang down on his shield, shattering both it and the arm it had been strapped to. Goetz watched in horror as Berlich’s horse sank to its knees from the force of the impact and a second blow swept the knight from his saddle and sent him sailing. Berlich landed with a sick¬ening thump several dozen yards away and did not move.

‘No!’ Goetz surged to his feet and brought his sword down on the side of the orc warlord’s head, cutting a divot out of its helmet and its face. The maul swung out at him and he leapt back, ignoring the weight of his armour and the growing ache in his limbs.

‘The Mark! The Mark!’ Velk shouted, sounding his own province’s battle-cry and stumbling towards the creature from the other side. His sword struck sparks off the orc’s mail, but did little else. An almost casual jab of a titanic elbow sent him tumbling.

The orc made to finish Velk off and Goetz hacked through the haft of its weapon, more through luck than intention. He swung again, slicing links from the brute’s rusty suit of mail. The creature’s spade-sized hands crashed against his shoulders and he was hoisted into the air. As it opened its mouth, he realised that in absence of its weapon it intended to bite his head off.

‘Myrmidia make me lucky rather than stupid,’ he hissed as he kicked out, driving a foot into its teeth. The blow shattered several tusks. Squirming, Goetz freed his sword-arm and stabbed clumsily at the orc’s face. Most of the blows landed on its helmet, but one found a yellow eye, popping it like a blister. Yellow pus erupted from the creature’s socket and it shrieked and dropped Goetz.

‘Ha!’ Gripping his sword with both hands, he rammed it into the creature’s belly and cut upwards. The orc’s shriek grew louder as Goetz dug the blade in, trying to pierce its heart. Great fists crashed down on him, snapping off a pauldron and cracking his shoulder.

Goetz ignored the pain and forced the blade in deeper, until, at last, the brute’s cries faded and it went limp. He staggered back as it fell, its remaining eye glazed over and its jaws wide. One hand clawed momentarily at the earth but then splayed flat.

Somewhere a cheer went up. Goetz turned, exhausted, and raised his sword over his head. A moment later a sharp pain flared through him and he grunted. He stumbled forward, reaching towards his back.

A thin shaft had sprouted from a gap in his armour. A second shaft, and then a third and a fourth thud¬ded home. A burning sensation erupted from the points of impact and slithered through him. He wob¬bled around, body going numb. His sword slid from nerveless fingers and he sank to his knees. He saw the goblins clamber out of the crumpled basket on the warlord’s back. He clawed awkwardly for his sword.

Evil green faces glared at him in malicious glee as sev¬eral dark shapes darted forward, crude blades drawn. As the goblins closed in, chuckling and slinking, Goetz collapsed, his world melting into fire.

Conrad Balk, Hochmeister of the Svunum Komturie and knight of the Order of the Blazing Sun, shivered as the chill of the sea wrapped around him. He clutched his axe more tightly and kept his eyes on the horizon. It was not meet to watch the goddess’s representative when she was about her business. Nor was it particu¬larly conducive to a restful night’s sleep. The first time he had seen the twitching, spasming ordeal of a trance, he had been horrified. But age and familiarity had brought the reassurance that the priestess could not – would not – harm herself. Still, it always raised his hackles.

Swallowing his nervousness, he draped his fingers over the head of his axe and leaned forward, peering out of the mouth of the cavern. The mist that clung to the surface of the Sea of Claws was as thick as stone, but Balk knew where the southern coast of Norsca was. In his head, a map unfolded and he saw the scars of memory. He saw the place where his predecessor Hochmeister Greisen had died, the place Greisen’s own predecessor, Kluger, had fallen; in both cases, the Norscans were to blame.

In his darker moments, Balk supposed that they would be responsible for his own death as well. He took a breath and pushed the thought aside. Death was unavoidable. Better to think about what could be accomplished before that moment, whenever it came.

Better to think about what could yet be built.

A crow swooped into the cavern and hopped onto a rock near Balk. It cocked its head and croaked. Balk nodded and stepped aside. The crow flew past him and a few moments later he heard the priestess stand.

‘Well, Lady Myrma?’ he said, not turning. He knew what he would see… a young woman, lithe and limber, shrouded in a feathered cloak with her face covered in tribal tattoos. As she moved into the light, the tat¬toos briefly seemed to writhe into a different pattern, though he knew that was impossible. Lady Myrma, the latest in a long line of priestesses and the third by that name known to the men of his Order.

‘Dead,’ she said, her youthful timbre touched with an inhuman resonance.

Balk closed his eyes and said a quick prayer. Then he said, ‘How?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes. Did he die well?’ Balk said intently.

‘As well as can be expected,’ the priestess said, pull¬ing the edges of her cloak more tightly about her. She tapped two fingers against her temple. ‘He felt nothing.’

Balk sighed and kissed the flat of his axe. ‘Good.’

‘Do not indulge in guilt, Master Balk. It is a use¬less thing and self-indulgent.’ She looked at him and stroked the crow that sat on her shoulder. ‘Besides, it will be forgotten soon enough. The Enemy is at our gate.’

‘The–’ Balk’s eyes widened. ‘You felt something? Learned something?’

‘Felt, tasted and chased,’ Myrma purred, licking her fingers. She frowned. ‘Unfortunately, I did not catch him. He is cunning and cruel, that one.’

‘A shame,’ Balk said. He looked out at the sea and gestured with his axe. ‘Well, he will be waiting on us, I suppose. Whoever he is.’ He pulled the axe back and let it rest on his shoulder. ‘They all will. Goddess pity them…’

‘For we will not,’ Myrma said, laying a hand on his arm. ‘Norsca will be burned clean in the fires of her wrath, Master Balk. It will be your hand that sets those fires alight come the Witching Night.’

Balk hesitated. ‘I still dislike that aspect of it. As nights go, that’s not an auspicious one…’

‘Is it not? A night where the winds of magic roar and where the gods themselves can step onto the skin of the world?’ Myrma said. ‘What other night could it be?’

Balk grunted and made his way towards the roughly hewn stone steps that led upwards to the komturie. The woman watched him go, her dark eyes consider¬ing. Then, as if coming to a decision, she shook her head.

‘No. He is not the one, is he?’

She cocked her head, as if listening to the roar of the surf as it thundered against the rock. Beneath her feet, the bedrock of the island trembled slightly. ‘No, you are right as ever, Mistress,’ she said, stroking the crow. It croaked in pleasure and flapped its wings. Myrma looked at it and smiled.

‘But the one is coming, eh?’ Her smile split, reveal¬ing cruelly filed teeth in a carnivorous grin. ‘Yes. He is coming.’

THE LION

Part One

‘There is but one reason and one reason alone in the exercise of power: to further one’s agenda. Be it selfish or altruistic, such agenda should be the whole of one’s concern without distraction if power is to be expended to its benefit. One need only look to the example of the Emperor’s Great Crusade for proof of this eternal truth; when distraction came it was to the ruin of all.’

– Lyaedes, Intermissions, M31

I

The lord of the First Legion sat as he so often sat these nights, leaning back in his ornate throne of ivory and obsidian. His elbows rested upon the throne’s sculpted arms, while his fingers were steepled before his face, just barely touching his lips. Unblinking eyes, the brutal green of Caliban’s forests, stared dead ahead, watching the flickering hololith of embattled stars.

Aboard the Invincible Reason, flagship of the Dark Angels, Lion El’Jonson thought long and hard. There were many things for him to reason out, yet no matter how hard he tried to stay focused on the military effort to bring the Night Lords to battle, his mind was drawn back to an imponderable dilemma.

Eighty-two days had passed since his confrontation with Konrad Curze on the desolate world of Tsagualsa. Eighty-two days had been enough for his body to heal, for the most part, the grievous wounds the Night Haunter’s claws had inflicted upon the Lion’s superhuman flesh. The armour he wore had been repaired and refurbished and repainted, so that not a mark of Curze’s violence showed upon its ebon surface.

On the outside, the Lion was fully recovered, but within lay the most hideous injuries, inflicted not by the Night Haunter’s weapons but by his words.

No risk of the fair Angels falling? When did you last walk upon the soil of Caliban, oh proud one?

The tides of the warp influenced communication as much as they did travel, and no sure word had been heard from Caliban for two years. In times past, the hateful words of Curze would have been easy to dismiss. The loyalty of the Dark Angels had been beyond question. They were the First Legion, ever the noblest in the eyes of all; even when the Luna Wolves earned great praise and Horus was raised to Warmaster, no others could claim the title of First Legion.

Yet such times seemed a lifetime ago now; civil war and schism tore apart the Imperium, and the surety of the past was no guarantee of the present, or the future. Could the Lion trust that his Legion remained loyal to him? Trust was not a natural state for the primarch. Was there some deeper purpose to the Night Lords’ endless war in the Thramas system? Did Curze speak the truth and keep the Lion occupied here while agents of Horus swayed the loyalty of the Dark Angels to another cause?

Trust had been a scarce commodity for the Lion before Horus’s betrayal, and even then he had been taken for a fool. Perturabo had used his status as a brother to trick the Lion, taking control of the devastating war engines of Diamat under the guise of alliance, only to turn those weapons against the servants of the Emperor. The shame of being so manipulated gnawed at the Lion’s conscience, and he would never again accept the simple word of his brothers.

It was an impossible question and an impossible predicament. The Lion had pondered the meaning of the Night Haunter’s words every night, even as he analysed the movements and strategy of his foe, trying to get one step ahead of his elusive enemy. The Night Haunter had had no reason to lie; Curze had been trying to kill his brother as he spoke. Yet they might just be random spite, as had so often spilled from the lips of Konrad Curze, who had used falsehood as a weapon long before he had turned from the grace of the Emperor; lies were second nature to the primarch and came to him as easily as breaths.

The Lion despised himself for giving credence to the lie, creating the poison that ate away at his resolve. It was simple enough to vow that Thramas would not be surrendered to the Night Lords; it was another matter entirely to prosecute a war against an enemy determined not to fight. With every night that passed, the prospect of decisive battle lessened and the desire to return to Caliban and ensure everything was in order strengthened. Yet the Lion could not abandon the war, if only because it might be a return to Caliban that the Night Haunter desired.

While these thoughts vexed the primarch, at the appointed hour three of his little brothers arrived to brief him on the current situation.

The first to enter was Corswain, former Champion of the Ninth Order, recently appointed as the Primarch’s Seneschal. Across the back of his armour he wore the white pelt of a fanged Calibanite beast, and beneath that hung a white robe split at the back, its breast adorned with an embroidered winged sword. His helm hung on his belt, revealing a broad face and close-cropped blond hair.

Just behind Corswain came Captain Stenius, commander of the Invincible Reason. His face was a literal mask of flesh, almost immobile due to nerve damage suffered during the Great Crusade. His eyes had been replaced with smoky silver lenses that glittered in the lights of the chamber, as inscrutable as the rest of his expression.

The last of the trio was Captain Tragan of the Ninth Order, who had been raised to the position by the primarch following the debacle at Tsagualsa. The captain’s soft brown eyes were at odds with his stern demeanour, his curls of dark brown hair cut to shoulder-length and kept from his aquiline face with a band of black-enamelled metal. It was Tragan that spoke first.

‘The Night Lords refused engagement at Parthac, my liege, but we arrived too late to stop the destruction of the primary orbital station there. The remaining docking facilities cannot cope with anything larger than a frigate, as I suspect was the enemy’s intent.’

‘That’s three major docks they have taken out in the past six months,’ said Stenius. ‘It is clear that they are denying us refitting and resupply stations.’

‘The question is why,’ said the Lion, stroking his chin. ‘The Night Lords cruisers and battle-barges require such stations as much as ours. I am forced to conclude that they have abandoned any ambition of claiming Parthac, Questios and Biamere and seek to hamper our fleet movements for some manoeuvre in the future.’

‘I would say that it has the hint of desperation, a stellar scorched earth policy,’ said Stenius.

‘We cannot rule out Curze commanding such attacks simply out of spite,’ added Corswain. ‘Perhaps there is no deeper meaning behind these recent attacks, except to exasperate and confuse us.’

‘Yet that will still be a part of a bigger plan,’ said the Lion. ‘For more than two years we have duelled across the stars, and throughout that war the Night Haunter has always been moving towards some endgame I have not yet fathomed. I will think on this latest development. What else have you to report?’

‘The normal fleet movements and scouting reports are in my latest briefing, my liege,’ said Tragan. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary, if there is such a thing.’

‘There was one report that I found odd, my liege,’ said Corswain. ‘A broken astropathic message, barely discernable from the background traffic. It would be unremarkable except that it contains mention of the Death Guard Legion.’

‘Mortarion’s Legion is in Thramas?’ The Lion growled and glared at his subordinates. ‘You think this is not a matter to bring to me immediately?’

‘Not the Legion, my liege,’ said Tragan. ‘A handful of ships, a few thousand warriors at most. The transmission does not seem to originate from the Thramas theatre, my liege, but from a system several hundred light years from Balaam.’

‘The message fragments also mention a task force from the Iron Hands in the same vicinity,’ said Corswain. ‘Some skirmish I think, unlikely to impact on our conflict here.’

‘The system, what was it called?’ said the Lion. The primarch’s eyes narrowed with suspicion as he asked the question.

Tragan consulted the data-slate he held in his hand.

‘Perditus, my liege,’ said the Ninth Order captain.

‘It’s barely inhabited, my liege,’ added Stenius. ‘A small Mechanicum research facility, nothing of import.’

‘You are wrong,’ said the Lion, standing up. ‘I know Perditus. I claimed the system for the Emperor, alongside warriors of the Death Guard. What your records do not show, Captain Stenius, is the nature of the research undertaken by the Mechanicum there. Perditus was meant to be kept secret, off-limits to every Legion, but it seems that the Death Guard have other plans.’

‘Off-limits, my liege?’ Tragan was taken aback by the notion. ‘What could be so dangerous?’

‘Knowledge, my little brother,’ replied the Lion. ‘Knowledge of a technology that cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of the traitors. We must assemble a task force at Balaam. A force that can overwhelm anything the Death Guard or Iron Hands have in the area.’

‘What of the Night Lords, my liege?’ asked Corswain.

‘If we relent in our hunt across this sector, or weaken our forces here too much, Curze will make fine sport of the systems we cannot protect.’

‘That is a risk I must take,’ replied the primarch. ‘Perditus is a prize that we must seize from the traitors. I had almost forgotten about it, but now it is brought to mind, I think that perhaps Perditus may hold the key to victory in Thramas too. I shall lead the task force personally. The Invincible Reason will be my flagship, Captain Stenius. The Fourth, Sixth, Ninth, Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Thirtieth Orders are to muster at Balaam.’

‘More than thirty thousand warriors!’ said Tragan, forgetting himself. He bowed his head in apology when the Lion directed a sharp glare at him.

‘When, my liege?’ asked Corswain.

‘As soon as they can,’ said the Lion. He strode towards the door. ‘We cannot afford to arrive too late at Perditus.’

II

Although almost as tall as the Legiones Astartes warriors with whom she travelled the warp, Theralyn Fiana of House Ne’iocene was far slighter, willowy of build with slender fingers. Her hair was copper in colour, as were her eyes; her normal eyes, at least. In the middle of her high forehead, from which her hair was swept back by a silver band, was her Navigator’s eye. To call it an eye was to compare a glass of water to the ocean. This orb, translucent white but dappled with swirling colours, did not look upon frequencies of light, but delved through the barrier that bounded the warp, looking upon the raw stuff of the immaterial realm.

Now that warp-sight was employed moving the Invincible Reason away from the translation point at Balaam. The streaming threads of the warp currents were tugging hard at the ship, which sat cocooned within an egg-shaped psychic field, buoyed upon the immaterial waves like a piece of flotsam on the ocean tides. She sat in the navigational spire high above the superstructure of the battle-barge. Out of instinct, Fiana looked for the bright beacon of the Astronomican, and as she had done for the last two and a half years she felt a part of her soul grow dim at the realisation that it could not be found. That the light of Terra no longer burned had been a source of constant argument amongst the Navigators attached to the Dark Angels Legion, with Fiana amongst the growing camp who believed that the only explanation was that the Emperor was no longer alive. This was not a popular viewpoint, and one not to be raised with the primarch, but the logic was inescapable to Fiana.

In the absence of the galaxy-spanning Astronomican, the Navigators relied on warp beacons – tiny lanterns of psychic brightness from relay stations in real space. They were candles compared to the star of the Astronomican, and only one in ten systems in the sector had them, but they were better than moving wholly blind; so much so that both the Night Lords and Dark Angels had tacitly agreed to treat the beacon stations as no-go areas. The risk of stranding one’s own ships in the warp was too great to chance the destruction of the fragile orbital stations.

Perditus was not a beaconed system, and was located only one hundred and fourteen light years from Balaam, on a two-hundred-and-thirty-degrees, seven-point incline heading from the Drebbel beacon, which in turn would be found on a path at one-hundred-and-eighty-seven degrees, eighteen-point negative incline three days out towards the Nemo system. Glancing at a hand-drawn chart draped over the edge of her rotatable chair, Fiana confirmed this and examined the currents lapping at the barrier of the Geller field surrounding the Invincible Reason.

The warp did not look like its true state, even to her. Yet Fiana’s warp sight allowed her to sense an approximation of its tidal powers and whorls of immaterial confluence. The Balaam system had been chosen for the rendezvous because from here a near-constant current ran through the warp almost as far as Nhyarin, nearly three thousand light years away. Nothing was ever certain with the warp, and its strange ways meant that sometimes the Nhyarin Flow ran backwards or could not be located at all, but eight times out of ten it could be relied upon to speed travel to the galactic south-west, fully across Aegis and two other subsectors. The worlds along its route were amongst the most hotly contested between the Night Lords and the Dark Angels.

Fiana punched in a series of coded orders for the piloting team situated in the command deck. A few minutes later, the Geller field bulged to starboard, its psychic harmonics adjusting to the controls of the crew so that the Invincible Reason edged out of its current course and into the outlying streams of the Nhyarin Flow. Psychic power gripped at the shields like waves tugging at a leaf, and though there was no real sensation of movement, Fiana felt in her thoughts the battle-barge surging ahead, flung forwards across time and space at incredible speed.

Around her, the pinpricks of light that had been the other ships of the fleet winked out of existence. Within half a dozen minutes, nothing could be seen of the flotilla, scattered to the four points of the compass and stretched through time by the eerie workings of warp space.

Turning in place, Fiana conducted a quick scan for storm activity. The whole of the warp was alive with tempests, but the Nhyarin Flow seemed stable enough for the moment. There was no horizon, no distance or perspective, and for just a moment Fiana teetered on the brink of being swallowed by the abyssal nature of the warp. She reeled her mind back into her skull, pulling down the velvet-padded silver band so that its psychic-circuitry-impregnated metal covered her third eye.

Just before her othersense was curtailed she thought she glimpsed another ship, riding on a swirl of energy behind the battle-barge. It was probably another Dark Angels vessel, caught by fortune on the same timeflow as the Invincible Reason. She made a note of it in her log and signalled for her half-brother Assaryn Coiden to ascend the pilaster and take over. As the senior member of the household, it was her responsibility to see that the ship was safe during transitions, but now that the task was complete, she was glad to be able to delegate to her younger siblings. Things were far more peaceful in her quarters, and ever since Horus’s rebellion had begun and the storms had come, just an hour of exposure to the warp had left her with splitting headaches and a soul-draining fatigue.

There had always been talk amongst the household, of what the warp really was, and whispered stories of the strange phenomena that the Navigators sometimes glimpsed on their travels. Now Fiana was certain that there was something else out there; not just aliens living in the warp as she had been warned, but something that existed as part of the immaterium itself.

And the stories had grown in number, and in horror. Ships had always gone missing, but the frequency with which they were now lost was frightening, as if the warp itself was rebelling at their presence. Having felt dark swirls and malignant tendrils tugging at the edges of her thoughts, Fiana knew too well that the warp was far from a welcoming place.

The Lion’s stare was cold as it fell upon the chief Navigator, Theralyn Fiana. This was the fourth audience in seven days that he had granted her, and twice also had he received representation from her through Captain Stenius. Her complaints were becoming tiresome, and made all the more irritating because there was nothing the Lion could do to alleviate the problems she and her fellow Navigators were experiencing. She had joined the Invincible Reason at Balaam, highly regarded as an expert of the warp tides they were travelling, but so far the Lion’s only impression was of a thin-faced woman who had nothing but excuses to offer for their slow progress.

This time she had Captain Stenius for company, and looked even more agitated than normal. The Lion waved Fiana forwards with a gauntleted hand, suppressing a sigh of annoyance. The Navigator stopped five metres from the primarch’s throne, the ship’s captain a few paces behind. She was dressed in a flowing gown of green and blue, of a material that shimmered like water when she walked. Her bare arms were painted with rings of varying design from shoulder to elbow and the backs of her hands were tattooed with intricate intersecting geometric shapes copied by a cluster of pendants that hung on a thin chain around her neck.

Fiana’s third eye was concealed by a broad silver band across her brow, but the Lion could feel its touch upon him, like a spark of heat on his flesh. Navigators, and all psykers for that matter, caused him pause; he was not well disposed to those who might see him in ways that normal men did not. Only the Emperor did he trust with such knowledge.

‘What is it?’ said the Lion. He fluttered a hand towards Corswain, who had just arrived and was due to brief his leader on the latest intelligence concerning Perditus. ‘Be quick, there are other matters demanding my attention. If you wish me to still the warp with a wave of my hand, I must disappoint you again, Navigator.’

‘It is on another matter, an urgent one, that we must converse,’ said Fiana as she rose from her bow. She glanced at Captain Stenius and received a curt nod of reassurance. ‘Lauded primarch, for the past several days, since we translated from Balaam, I and my family have witnessed a ship following in our wake. At first we thought it coincidence; a companion vessel of the fleet that happenstance had tossed upon the same course as ours.’

‘But you no longer believe this to be the case?’ said the Lion, leaning forwards. ‘It is my understanding that it is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to trail a vessel in warp space.’

‘That was our understanding also, lauded primarch. Many times have Navigators attempted to stay within reach of each other, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred all sight is lost within a day, and always within two days. We sometimes make analogy between the warp and the currents of the sea, but it is a simplistic comparison. The warp flows not only through space, within another realm beside our own, but also upon different streams of time.’

‘This I know,’ snapped the Lion, growing impatient. ‘An hour passes in the warp and several days have turned in real space. If a ship translates a day before another, it could be weeks ahead in its journey. You have not yet explained why coincidence is not a suitable explanation, Navigator. I have made hundreds of warp jumps in my life; it is not remarkable that on one journey another ship might be caught upon the same current.’

‘No, lauded primarch, it is not,’ replied Fiana. She straightened to her full height and met the primarch’s glare, though only for a moment before the intensity of his eyes forced her to look away again. ‘It is remarkable that we have changed stream four times in the last five days, seeking the fastest current to Perditus, and within the hour the ship is behind us again. It is following us, lauded primarch, and I know of nobody who possesses that capability.’

The Lion did not waste time asking if she was certain; the forthright tone of her voice and hard look in her eye convinced him that she spoke the truth as she believed it. He nodded and gestured for Captain Stenius to step closer.

‘I am sorry, Lady Fiana, for my curtness. Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention. Captain, I believe that you were already aware of this?’

‘Lady Fiana brought her suspicions to me yesterday, my liege. I asked her to confirm her findings for another day and decided it was worthy of bringing to you.’

‘It is an impossibility, lauded primarch,’ said Fiana. ‘No Navigator can track another vessel in the warp with such accuracy. We work on suggestions and instincts far too vague for such precision.’

No Navigator, thought the Lion, but not impossible.

During his infancy on Caliban, growing up alone in the dark, monster-infested forests, he had learned quickly that some beasts did not need to see to hunt. Some possessed senses other than sight and hearing and smell; they could stalk their prey by the spoor of their soul. Such creatures were the deadliest he had faced, not wholly physical. The knights of Caliban called them nephilla and it was only with great effort that they could be slain, though the Lion in his youth had killed several.

It was a stretch from nephilla roaming the dark forests of Caliban to a ship that could unerringly track another through the warp but, like Fiana, the Lion did not trust anything to coincidence. There were forces at play – forces unleashed by Horus and his allies – that he did not fully understand, and until proven to the contrary the Lion was willing to believe his foes capable of anything.

‘For the moment it is sensible to assume that our mysterious pursuer is a Night Lords ship,’ the Lion said after a half-second of contemplation. ‘Do you think it is possible to elude this enemy without undue risk or excessive delay to our journey? I would not have the foe learn of our destination and the secret held there.’

‘I am not sure I would know what to do, lauded primarch,’ said Fiana. ‘It is not something a Navigator learns.’

‘Surely you have experienced pursuit by other than a ship?’ said the Lion. ‘There are denizens of the warp that are known to chase vessels.’

‘Of course,’ said Fiana. ‘I know a small repertoire of evasive manoeuvres, but the usual response when facing such a crisis is an emergency translation into real space.’

‘That will be our second option,’ said the Lion. ‘I would rather avoid the delay that would add to our journey. You have two days to shake our hunter. Report your progress directly to me, Lady Fiana.’

‘As you command, lauded primarch,’ said the Navigator, sweeping down into a long bow.

When Captain Stenius and Lady Fiana had departed, the Lion called to his seneschal to attend him.

‘I am deeply suspicious of this craft that follows us, Cor,’ the primarch said. ‘Have the weapons crews sleeping beside their guns, and double the watch strength.’

‘As you command, my liege,’ said Corswain. ‘If you have time, we should discuss the strategy you wish to employ when we arrive at Perditus. The last contact we have shows that the Iron Hands and Death Guard were just beginning hostilities. It is possible that one side or the other may have gained the upper hand since then.’

The Lion pushed aside thoughts of phantom ships and concentrated on the wider task.

‘We treat Perditus as hostile,’ he declared. ‘It is impossible to say for which cause any other force fights. Death Guard, Mechanicum, Iron Hands: all are to be treated as enemy until I say otherwise.’

For two days Fiana and the other three Navigators aboard the Invincible Reason performed several manoeuvres that would, in normal circumstances, separate them from the following ship. They frequently changed flows within the warp, shifting the battle-barge from the fast-moving stream of the Nhyarin Flow to the more sedate currents that drifted from its outer edges. They dived into swirling eddies, a risky proposition even before the recent tumults that had engulfed warp space. Twice they turned the ship fully about and forged into counter-flows, taking them away from the route to Perditus. Always the other ship found them again, sometimes never breaking away, other times vanishing only to appear on the edge of detection an hour or two later, following unerringly in the battle-barge’s wake.

After the two days allowed by the Lion, Fiana and Stenius convened again with the primarch to discuss the next course of action. With the Lion was Corswain, summoned by his master. It was Stenius who spoke first.

‘Whatever force guides our pursuer, it is beyond our means to shake them loose, my liege,’ announced the ship’s captain.

‘Not wholly beyond our means,’ said Fiana, earning herself a sharp look from Stenius; enough to betray the existence of a previous argument between the two, though his partial facial paralysis prevented any more meaningful expression.

‘I will not risk my ship,’ Stenius said flatly.

‘You have an alternative?’ said the Lion, directing his gaze to Fiana.

‘Three days ahead, perhaps four, there is a well-known anomaly, which we call the Morican Gulf. It corresponds roughly to the Morican star, a dead system. There is a region that is like a gap in the warp, a bottomless gulf surrounded by a turbulent maelstrom. It is possible to run the outer edges of this whirl, and the storm should mask our departure route.’

‘And the risks?’ asked Corswain.

‘The null space, the void in the eye of the storm, can becalm a ship, leave it stranded for days, for weeks, sometimes forever,’ said Stenius, shaking his head in disapproval. ‘It should not be considered at the best of times, and our mission at Perditus is too important to risk delays or worse.’

The Lion considered this, weighing up the merits of losing the pursuer against potential calamity. He disregarded the Navigator’s plan, but remembered the earlier conversation he had shared with Fiana.

‘Lady Fiana, you suggested before that we might make an emergency jump to real space. Is it possible that we could do so whilst the other ship has been blinded by one of your manoeuvres?’

‘Possible, yes, lauded primarch,’ said Fiana.

‘There is no guarantee that our phantom ship has not the means to detect such a thing,’ said Corswain. ‘We have no idea of their capabilities. As I understand it, any translating ship creates ripples, an echo along the warp currents. If the Night Lords have a psyker or some other means to track our normal movements, a translation would be as clear as a summer day to them.’

‘An emergency jump even more so, lauded primarch,’ added Fiana. ‘The backwash would be like dropping a boulder into a lake; even an inexperienced Navigator could detect it.’

‘There is also the danger that our warp engine rift will collide with the Geller field of the other ship,’ said Stenius. ‘Whatever means they have to follow us, they have to stay close to use it.’

‘Interesting,’ said the Lion, a chain of thought set in motion by the Captain’s warning. He looked first at Corswain and then fixed his eyes on Stenius. ‘Little brothers, have the ship secured for an emergency translation, but keep the gunnery crews at their stations. Lady Fiana, I want you to position the ship in a particular way. Find a swift-moving warp current from which you can quickly move to a contra-flowing one.’

‘What is your intent, lauded primarch?’ asked Fiana, a worried frown creasing her pale skin beneath the silver of her headband.

‘Our enemy shadow our movements closely but not instantaneously,’ explained the Lion. ‘We will move in such a way as to draw them extremely close, and then we will activate the warp engines to jump back to real space. The other vessel should be caught in our exit wake and drawn from the warp after us. In real space our enemy will become vulnerable to attack.’

‘If both ships are not torn apart, my liege!’ said Captain Stenius. He was about to continue his objections, but the Lion cut him off with a sharp gesture.

‘You know my intent. The plan is not a subject for discussion. Lady Fiana, it will be up to you to choose the optimum moment for translation. From everything I have heard of your skill previously, I expect success.’

‘Of course, lauded primarch,’ said the Navigator, her face set with determination. Her reputation had been placed on the line, and for a Navigator aspiring to be the next Matriarch of her House there was no commodity more valuable than the praise of a primarch.

The Lion looked at Stenius and leaned forwards, his voice dropping low.

‘You understand my orders, captain?’ asked the primarch.

‘I do, my liege,’ Stenius replied quietly.

‘Then you are both dismissed,’ said the Lion. He reached a hand out towards Corswain. ‘Stay a moment longer, little brother.’

When the ship’s captain and Navigator had departed, the Lion motioned for Corswain to approach the throne.

‘I am worried about Stenius,’ confessed the primarch. ‘At first he delays bringing the fact of our pursuit to my attention, and now he seems reluctant to resolve our predicament.’

‘I am sure there are no grounds for suspicion, my liege,’ said Corswain, affecting a formal tone, disquieted by the subject of Stenius’s loyalty.

‘Sure, little brother? One hundred per cent certain? You would vouch for Stenius yourself?’

Corswain hesitated at the challenge in the Lion’s voice. After a moment, he lowered to one knee and bowed his head.

‘I have no doubt about Captain Stenius, my liege. However, to allay any reservations you may harbour, I shall have Brother-Redemptor Nemiel report to you.’

‘As you see fit, little brother,’ the Lion said, offering a rare smile.

III

The narrow chamber atop the navigational pilaster could barely hold all four of the Navigators. What the primarch had asked for required a very specific set of circumstances. Fiana and her fellow Navigators each surveyed a stretch of the warp, seeking the conjunction of flows needed to bring the Invincible Reason quickly back towards the phantom ship. All other preparations had been made; the ship’s company were braced for the potentially devastating drop back into real space, while Fiana had warned her companions of the deleterious effect it could have on their minds.

‘I have something,’ said Ardal Aneis, Fiana’s younger brother. ‘A counter-nebulous promontory, on the port bow.’

Fiana directed her unnatural gaze in the direction Aneis had mentioned and saw what had caught his attention. Three warp streams, one very strong, the other two weaker but approaching each other at steep angles, came together to create a three-dimensional whirlpool. The outflow curved back over the battle-barge’s path and intersected with a dead pool that slowly leached back into the Nhyarin Flow.

‘Captain Stenius, please direct primary navigational control to my console.’ The communications pick-up buzzed in Fiana’s shaking hand and she resolutely avoided the concerned looks in the eyes of her fellow Navigators. She received the affirmative from Stenius and a few seconds later the screen below her left arm flickered into life. A diagnostic sub-routine scrolled quickly across the pale green glass and then the screen went blank.

Fiana’s voice dropped to a whisper as she keyed in the manoeuvre required to plunge the ship into the heart of the promontory. ‘Remember the pride of House Ne’iocene.’

There was no sound, in the warp. No real tidal pressures or inertia pulled at metal and ferrocrete, but even so Fiana could sense the tortured mass of the Invincible Reason as its Geller field realigned, shoving the battle-barge from one streaming eddy of warp energy into another. Fiana felt a moment of sickness as her othersense lurched and spun, while all around her, the clashing currents of the psychic promontory smashed together like the slavering jaws of an immense, immaterial beast.

Kiafan, youngest of her siblings, fell to his knees beside the chief Navigator, emptying the contents of his stomach upon the floor between snarled gasps of pain. Fiana ignored the distraction and keyed in another instruction on her runepad. The ship settled into a trough of psychic power for several seconds, before rising up, ejected from the promontory like a grain of sand caught in the spume of a breaching whale.

Fiana gritted her teeth and made a final adjustment to their course, forcing herself to peer along the unwinding threads of energy that unravelled before her. She anchored the Geller field onto the strongest and then pushed aside her companions to collapse into the only chair in the chamber.

‘Captain, we are on our new heading,’ she gasped over the comm. Steadying herself, she looked for the bobbing mote of energy that was the other ship’s warp signature. She located it ahead, approaching quickly. There was no time to waste. Even from their prepared idling state, it would take several minutes for the warp engines to charge to full power. Any longer and they would be right on top of the phantom ship, their Geller fields merging. The effect of translating in such close proximity to another vessel would be certain destruction for both ships.

‘Translate now, captain! Activate the warp engines!’

Trying to emulatethe example set by his primarch, Corswain stood immobile on the gallery above the Invincible Reason’s strategium, just behind and to the left of the statuesque Lion. On the other side of the primarch was Brother-Redemptor Nemiel. The Chaplain wore a skull-faced helm, so that nothing could be seen of his expression, concerned or otherwise. Lady Fiana’s snarled command had not helped settle Corswain’s mood, and had set the command crew below into frenetic activity. The navigation aides moved quickly from station to station in the bright glow of their screens, monitoring power outputs and safety thresholds as the plasma reactors of the battle-barge went up above one hundred per cent output in preparation for the warp engine activation.

Corswain clenched his jaw as he felt an ill-defined pressure building in his skull. It was not like a concussive shockwave or the pull felt in a plunging drop-pod, but more like a container slowly being filled, reaching its capacity and yet not bursting. The ache was behind his eyes, mental not physical. Aside from the brain-juddering dislocation of teleportation, it was the most unpleasant sensation he had ever encountered in his long years of service to the Legion.

A glance at the Lion confirmed that if the primarch suffered the same discomforts as his little brothers, he showed no outward sign of it. The commander of the First Legion stood with legs braced apart, arms folded across his breastplate, eyes fixed on the multiple screens that made up the strategium’s main display wall. The aides working below acted and interacted like organic parts of a complex machine, the hub of which was Captain Stenius in the command throne. Inquiry and reply, report and command all flowed through the ship’s captain, who orchestrated the whole endeavour with curt responses and clipped orders.

Corswain could only imagine the thoughts occupying Stenius at the moment. Warp translation was difficult enough in perfect conditions, and the current conditions were far from perfect. Another glance at the Lion showed Corswain that the primarch’s attention had moved, from the grey blankness of the screens to Stenius.

It was impossible to discern real meaning from the primarch’s inscrutable glare, but that did not stop Corswain from speculating, occupying his mind with such idle thoughts in order to distract himself from the coming moment when reality and unreality would clash and they might all be wiped from existence.

The Lion’s comments regarding Stenius concerned Corswain on two levels. At first hand, he wondered what he had missed that had been seen by the primarch’s insight. Corswain was, for the moment at least until they were reunited with Luther and the rest of the Legion on Caliban, the right hand of the primarch. It was his duty to foresee his master’s commands and act before they required the Lion’s attention. If there was some facet of Stenius’s manner that he had missed, Corswain felt he was not properly fulfilling his duties.

Contrary to this was the worry that there was nothing amiss in Stenius’s behaviour, which did not bode well for the Lion’s current state of mind. Since Tsagualsa the primarch had brooded, even more than Corswain had become accustomed to. His master had said nothing of what preoccupied his thoughts, speaking only of the ongoing campaign against the Night Lords, but even those conversations had been touched by a new determination, bordering on a hunger for victory that Corswain had not seen in the Lion since the earliest days of the Crusade. The seneschal’s brush with death had forced Corswain to acknowledge his own shortcomings and apply himself to his duties with greater endeavour; perhaps the primarch felt the same.

‘Warp translation in ten seconds.’

Stenius’s monotone declaration cut through Corswain’s meandering thoughts. He balled his hands into fists, knowing what was to come. The Lion stepped forwards, gripping the balcony rail in both hands as he stared down at Stenius, eyes narrowed. The primarch opened his mouth a little, as if he was about to speak. He said nothing and shook his head slightly, lips pursed.

‘Beginning translation to real space.’

This was the part Corswain hated the most, in sensation most alike to the disembodied lurch of teleportation. For an endless moment the Invincible Reason was held between two dimensions, perched on the precipice between the material and immaterial like a wanderer standing at the crossroads of fate. A moment before, it had been adrift on the tides of the warp, cocooned within a bubble of reality kept intact by its Geller field. Now it was in the true universe, plucked from the unnatural currents, its Geller-borne reality imploding as real space engulfed the vessel.

Corswain’s head reeled for several seconds, dizzied by a sense of unreality, his surroundings seeming out of step with him, disjointed and fragile.

The sensation passed, leaving a faint pulsing behind Corswain’s eyes.

The Lion was already barking orders for the short-range scanners to be brought online, eager to see whether his plan had worked and the phantom ship had been dragged out of the warp by the risky manoeuvre.

‘All power to local augurs and broad-band auspex sweeps,’ said the primarch, striding towards the long sweep of stairs that led down into the main chamber of the strategium. ‘Redirect long-range signalling and sensors to comm-net scans. Find me that ship!’

The systems of the Invincible Reason scoured the surrounding space for seven minutes. Corswain and Nemiel had followed their primarch down to the main floor, and had been joined by Captain Stenius who had surrendered his position of direct command to the Lion. Nothing was said for those seven minutes, as the scanner technicians worked feverishly to determine whether the plan had succeeded.

‘Legiones Astartes ident-contact, my liege,’ announced one of the strategium attendants. ‘Twenty-two thousand kilometres from starboard bow. Eclipse-class light cruiser. Night Lords. Broadcasting as the Avenging Shadow.’

‘Monitoring warp field fluctuations, my liege,’ said another. ‘Transferring to main display.’

The largest of the strategium’s screens blurred into life, filled with an expanse of stars. In the bottom right corner, a shifting corona of light silhouetted the enemy light cruiser, trapped in a vortex between real space and the warp.

‘Hard starboard, thirty degrees, down-plane twelve degrees,’ snapped the Lion, having made the navigational calculations in only a couple of seconds; even with the aid of a trigometric cogitator Stenius would have taken at least two minutes to get the exact heading required. ‘Ready torpedoes, tubes three and four. Flight crews to Thunderhawks and Stormbirds.’

The primarch’s orders rang across the strategium, setting teams of officers and functionaries into motion. As this new activity settled, the Lion crossed the floor to the weapons control consoles. Stenius took a step after him.

‘My liege, a full torpedo salvo will have a much greater chance of destroying the enemy.’

‘I do not wish to destroy them, captain. We will capture the ship and seize whatever technology they have employed to track us here. I am inputting the torpedo guidance codes; they will not miss.’

‘Of course not, my liege,’ said Stenius, stepping back, only the tone of his voice betraying his chagrin.

‘I request permission to lead the boarding parties, my liege,’ said Corswain.

‘Denied, little brother.’ The primarch did not look up, his fingers dancing across the rune keys of the main weapons console. ‘We will cripple their ship and I will lead the attack myself.’

‘I do not think that is a good idea, my liege,’ said Corswain, daring his master’s displeasure. ‘The warp interference surrounding the enemy vessel is highly unstable. The ship could be dragged back into the warp while you are aboard.’

The Lion’s fingers stopped their tapping for a moment and the primarch straightened. Corswain prepared himself for a rebuke.

‘Denied, little brother,’ said the Lion, resuming his work. ‘I will need you to remain on board the Invincible Reason.’

Corswain automatically glanced at Stenius, guessing his primarch’s intent. The Lion’s distrust remained.

‘Brother-Redemptor Ne–’

‘Is not a command-level officer, little brother.’ The Lion’s words were curt but not harsh. He finished his task and turned towards Corswain, deep green eyes boring into the seneschal’s skull. ‘You will remain on board, Cor. Unless you have any other reason why that should not be the case?’

‘Torpedoes bearing on target, my liege,’ declared a weapons tech, stilling any reply that Corswain might utter; he had none. ‘Firing solution has been plotted as per your calculations.’

‘Launch when at optimum angle,’ said the Lion. ‘Engines all ahead full towards the enemy.’

‘Aye, my liege,’ replied Stenius. He activated the internal communication system and repeated the order to the Techmarines manning the reactor chambers.

‘Tube three cycling. Tube three launching. Tube four cycling. Tube four launching.’ The words were spat mechanically from the mouth grille of a half-human servitor enmeshed by a tangle of wires to the weapons bank. The haggard figure was little more than a torso and head protruding from a cylindrical console, his eyes stapled shut, ears replaced with antenna-jutting vocal receivers.

On the main screen, the beleaguered Night Lords ship was dead ahead, the streak of the two torpedoes racing from the battle-barge towards it.

‘Twenty-three seconds to torpedo separation. Twenty-seven seconds to impact,’ grated the weapons servitor. Already the blazing plasma drives of the torpedoes were just another glimmering pair of stars against the backdrop of the galaxy, gradually dwindling with distance.

‘My liege, I have Lady Fiana requesting contact on the internal comm,’ said an aide.

‘Direct through speakers,’ replied the Lion, long strides taking him back across the strategium to stand beside the command throne.

‘The Night Lords ship is doing something strange with its warp engines,’ the Navigator reported over the internal address system. Corswain saw his primarch frown at her imprecise language.

‘Be more specific, Lady Fiana,’ said the Lion. ‘What can you see?’

‘Forgive my vagueness, lauded primarch. It is hard to describe to one possessed of normal sight alone. There is something – some things – moving in the Geller field around the enemy ship. It looks like fragments of warp space are actually inside the ship, but that is impossible.’

‘I have heard the word too often lately,’ snarled the primarch. ‘What is the significance of this to us?’

Before Fiana could reply, the Lion’s attention was drawn elsewhere.

‘My liege, the enemy ship is turning, trying to break free from the warp breach. They are closing quickly with our position.’

‘Detecting an incoming hail, my liege.’

The two reports came almost at the same moment and the Lion hesitated for the first time since coming to the strategium, unsure which piece of information to respond to first. The pause only lasted a fraction of a heartbeat before the decision was made.

‘Adjust course by two points to port and ready starboard batteries,’ ordered the primarch. ‘Decrypt hail and transfer to main speakers.’

The air was filled with static hiss for several seconds while the automated decryption systems deciphered the incoming transmission. What came out of the speakers sounded like the garbled hissing of a snake, every syllable spat with derision. The Lion’s face twisted in a lopsided smile and he looked at Corswain.

‘I never cared much for Nostraman, Cor. You have studied it, I know. Tell me, what do they say? I cannot imagine that they are begging for mercy.’

‘They praise you for the trick in dragging them into the light, but then there come the obtuse threats. They say that they will have a reckoning in Slathissin and we will all meet our doom.’

‘I do not recall any system called Slathissin, in Thramas or elsewhere,’ said the Lion.

‘It is a reference to their barbaric past, my liege,’ explained Corswain. ‘It is the lowest hell, where the souls of the fallen exact vengeance on those that wronged them, reserved for traitors, patricides and worse.’

‘There is no such place, their threats are empty,’ said Nemiel, speaking for the first time since he had arrived at the strategium. He looked at Corswain through the lenses of his skull-shaped helm, his expression hidden. ‘There is no hell, and there are no such things as souls.’

A few seconds later, laughter sounded over the transmission, edged with insanity.

‘You are wrong, son of Caliban. So wrong. As you will find out very soon. Slathissin opens its gates for you all.’

‘I gave no order to transmit,’ said the Lion. ‘Cut the feed now!’

‘We have ears nonetheless, proud Lion.’

‘We are not transmitting any signal,’ confirmed one of the communications attendants.

‘My blade waits for your throat, disbeliever. I am Nias Korvali, and at the last midnight I will have a bloody revenge.’

There was a shout from one of the technicians monitoring the scanning arrays, just a few seconds before an automated siren blared across the strategium.

‘The enemy ship is activating its void shields and warp engines, my liege!’ came the panicked cry.

‘Madness,’ muttered Nemiel. ‘The feedback from the void shields will tear them apart.’

‘Fire arrestors, full turn to port!’ snarled the Lion. ‘That same feedback will create a wave in the warp breach, ripping it apart. Activate Geller fields, prepare for unplanned translation!’

‘Torpedoes separating.’ The servitor’s monotone declaration cut through the activity, and Corswain looked up at the main screen, as did the Lion, Stenius and several others.

There was a brief twinkling as thrusters fired and the torpedoes ejected their multiple warheads towards the Night Lords ship. As if in response, the multicoloured bruise on reality that surrounded the target vessel shimmered violently, waves of kaleidoscopic energy pouring from the warp breach in iridescent flares.

The light cruiser appeared to fold in upon itself, the implosion releasing another blast of warp power as its void shields tried to shunt raw psychic energy back into the warp itself, creating a loop that fed into the breach between universes. One moment Corswain was looking at the enemy vessel in the heart of an ever-moving circular rainbow, the next the whole screen was filled with rippling lines and coils of pulsing warp energy; and then he realised that the convocation of energy was not on the screen, but in the air around him.

IV

‘Stay calm.’

The Lion spoke without haste, pouring reassurance and strength into those two words as he felt the touch of panic settling upon the dozens of crew manning the strategium. There was not a man or woman aboard the ship that had not faced death more than once, but being engulfed in the warp breach was a test that none of them had faced before.

He activated the internal comms system with a flick of a finger.

‘All captains and other officers maintain discipline in your sections. We are experiencing a temporary situation that will be resolved swiftly. You have your standing orders, obey them.’

The primarch felt his heart beating a little faster than normal, but it was just an expected response to an emergency. He took a moment to review the situation.

The Invincible Reason was caught betwixt the warp and real space, trapped in a rift caused by the Night Lords’ detonation of their warp engines. The Lion could feel the energy of the warp pulsing through and around him, suffusing the material of the ship, the air, his body. Only a few seconds had passed since the warp tide had engulfed them and everything seemed slightly distorted, as if he was standing at an angle to normality, looking in from a slightly different place.

The lights on the display consoles winked strangely, fluttering to an aberrant rhythm that represented no system on the ship. The muted voices of the crew were dislocated, sounding as though they came from a great distance. The visual screens had gone blank, unable to replicate the vortex of power that was whirling about the ship. Captain Stenius stepped up beside the primarch, a faint afterglow left in his wake, trails of glimmering sparks falling from the edges of his armour as he moved.

‘Status report,’ said the Lion. ‘Void shields. Geller field. Warp engines.’

‘Aye, my liege,’ replied Stenius, his voice echoing for a moment inside the Lion’s head. More fiery trails danced in the air as the captain raised his fist to his chest in salute.

‘We have reports of fighting!’ This came from Corswain, who had moved to one of the main monitoring stations, his voice sounding like a distant shout though he was less than ten metres away. ‘Starboard gun decks, levels eight and nine.’

‘Enemy?’ snapped the Lion. ‘A Night Lords teleport attack?’

‘No clear report, my liege,’ said Corswain. ‘It is very confusing.’

‘Get down there and establish some order, little brother. Clear head, discipline and courage.’

Corswain nodded and headed towards the doors while the Lion turned his attention back to Stenius, one eyebrow raised in question.

‘Warp interference prevents us raising void shields, my liege. We would suffer the fate of the Night Lords. The same is true of the Geller field; we’ve not fully translated and to activate it would risk a massive feedback loop. Warp engines are still cycling back to potential from our translation.’ Though the captain’s face was immobile, his shoulders sagged. ‘We are trapped here for the moment, my liege.’

The Lion absorbed this without comment, the reality of the situation brought home by the captain’s stark words. He formed a plan of action.

‘We cannot break free from this storm, so we must ride it to the heart. Have the warp engines readied as soon as possible. We will make a full translation back into warp space and activate the Geller field to stabilise normality. Have Lady Fiana report to me immediately. Understood?’

‘Yes, my liege.’

The main doors hissed open and fifteen Dark Angels in Terminator armour entered, combi-bolters and power fists at the ready. Their immense armour was black as pitch and trimmed with silver, broken only by the sigils of the Legion on their shoulder pads and the scarlet skull emblems on their huge chestplates; the personal blazon of Brother-Redemptor Nemiel who was there to meet them.

‘Maintain order, brothers,’ the Chaplain told his bodyguard. ‘Be watchful and show no hesitation.’

Stepping offtheconveyor at gun deck nine, his retinue of ten legionaries in close step behind him, Corswain still had no better idea what was happening or who had attacked the ship. The comm-feed was alive with reports of the unidentified assailants sweeping from bastion to bastion and he could hear bolter fire and heavier weapons echoing along the corridor from the gun platforms towards the prow. It was possible, though highly unlikely, that the Night Lords had managed some form of long-range teleport as a last-ditch act before their ship was destroyed; it would not be the most unbelievable act the Night Lords had performed recently.

The gun deck was composed of a main corridor nearly a kilometre long, with access passages every two hundred metres leading to each of the gun turrets, which in turn were self-contained keeps housing the macro-cannons and missile pods used for close attack against enemy ships. They were designed to withstand boarding and Corswain could see that the defence bulkheads had been dropped on the closest platforms, isolating them from the rest of the ship. How any attacker had managed to breach several platforms at once in such a short space was beyond his reckoning.

Several dozen unarmed crew members wearing plain black livery came streaming past, heading to aft, fleeing the fighting. There was a wild look in their eyes and they paid him no heed as he called for them to stop and explain what was happening. Corswain had never seen such terror in the eyes of seasoned men before.

Another burst of furious gunfire sounded ahead as the seneschal and his bodyguard pounded down the corridor towards the fighting. Deck Captain Isaases was supposed to be in charge, but was not responding to Corswain’s calls on the comm; probably already dead.

Amidst the detonation of grenades, a handful of Dark Angels backed into the main passage, bolters blazing into the turret doorway of Gun Keep Four fifty metres away, two flamers licking promethium fire into the opening.

Corswain’s auto-senses dimmed his sight for an instant as a flare of bright energy erupted from the opening; pink and blue flames exploded into the passageway, carrying with them the burning bodies of two more Dark Angels. The seneschal had never seen any weapon like it, and broke into a sprint, readying his pistol and power sword as he closed with the group of legionaries. The two warriors who had been caught in the attack flailed around on the floor as multicoloured flames danced across their armour, melting through their suits like a plasma blast.

A demand for a report died on Corswain’s lips as he came level with the turret doorway and saw what was within, all reason driven from his thoughts for a moment.

The interior of the gun keep was ablaze with multicoloured flames, and in the heart of the blinding inferno cavorted strange shapes. They were like nothing Corswain had seen before, and he had encountered many strange enemies in his years of service to the First Legion. The alien creatures seemed to be composed of the fire itself; headless, legless bodies with faces in their chests and long gangling arms that spouted more fire from maw-like openings at their ends. Their torsos flared out to frilled edges where legs should have been, jumping to and fro with contorted twists. The creatures were setting everything ablaze with abandon, the crackling of the fires accompanied by inhuman screeching and cackling.

Corswain’s pistol felt heavy in his hand as he raised it and for the first time since he had been old enough to hold a weapon his hand trembled as he took aim. Eyes that were made of pure white fire regarded him malignly from the heart of the inferno, burning into his psyche as surely as the flames had melted through the armour of the dead Dark Angels. It seemed as if Corswain looked into a bottomless abyss of flame, the sight searing into his memory like a brand.

He opened fire, but the explosive bolts detonated in the flames before they reached their targets.

The creatures were at the doorway, flames licking at the floor of the main passage. Corswain adjusted his aim and sent two bolts hammering into the emergency release controls. The bulkhead slammed down just in front of the maniacal aliens, cutting off the infernal fire, and eerie silence descended.

Trying to make sense of what he had seen, Corswain noticed that the bulkhead was starting to glow at its centre, the unnatural flames of the attackers now turned to the purpose of burning through the metres-thick portal. As he watched the glow spreading, droplets of molten material starting to stand out on the plasteel like the sweat on his brow, the seneschal judged that it would only be a matter of a few short minutes before the creatures escaped their temporary prison.

In the quiet that had descended, he looked at the other Dark Angels, but like them could think of nothing to say, no orders to give, numbed by the bizarreness of what they had encountered.

‘Seneschal!’ The warning came from Brother Alartes, one of his personal guard.

Turning to look aft, Corswain saw the air swirling with power, as it had done when the warp rift had first engulfed the ship. Shapes were forming in the miasma: monstrous red hounds with scaled flesh and fangs of iron, their tails tipped with venom-dripping barbs, heads surrounded by an armoured frill. The infernal hounds were almost fully formed now, their growls and snarls resounding along the passageway. In moments they would be upon them.

The apparitions reminded him of old tales from Caliban and a word sprang to mind, loaded with loathing and fear: nephilla. Corswain found himself speaking, issuing a command out of instinct that he thought he would never utter as a Dark Angel.

‘Fall back! Retreat and seal the gun deck.’

He stepped back towards the closest conveyor, firing his pistol at the monstrous dogs, though he knew his bolts would have little effect. The other Dark Angels were with him, filling the corridor with the flicker of bolts.

The swish of the conveyor doors opening behind him flooded the seneschal with relief in a way he had never thought possible. He gratefully backed into the chamber as the enormous, incorporeal hounds bounded down the corridor towards him.

To stay would be to die.

The walls of the Navigator’s lounge shimmered with pre-echoes of what was to come. Fiana could see before-images of monstrous creatures pawing at the substance of the ship, her third eye granting her a vision of what was to be. Coiden stood at the door, a laspistol dangling pointlessly in his left hand, his right on the frame of the open portal as he peered into the antechamber, looking not so much with his eyes as his othersense.

‘It’s clear,’ said Coiden, turning to look at Fiana past the high collar of his long vermillion coat.

‘Kiafan, follow Coiden; Aneis, stay with me.’ Fiana ushered her siblings towards the door with a last look back to the spiralway that led up to the navigation pilaster. Something large and slug-like was heaving its bulk through the metal of the escalator steps, becoming more solid as it pushed through from the warp.

Fiana slid up the metal band blocking her third eye and opened the leathery eyelid covering the orb. She concentrated on the solidifying apparition, channelling the energy stream that allowed her to pierce the veils of the warp. Here, in real space, that stream erupted as a scourging beam of black light that struck the beast between the waving fronds surrounding its fanged maw. The thing withered under Fiana’s psychic glare. Its insubstantial form scattered into tattered mist as the energy that bound it to the material plane was thrust back into warp space.

A cry from Kiafan alerted her to more creatures in the passageway outside and she joined the others at a run. Winged, hook-clawed spectres hung from the vents in the ceiling, having seized the hood of Kiafan’s robe to drag him into the air. With her normal eyes, Fiana could see a smudge of movement above Kiafan as the desperate Navigator tried to turn his third eye on the two creatures who had seized him from behind; with her othersense she saw gargoyle-like creatures with long bony limbs and stone-like flesh.

Coiden and Aneis combined their third eyes to blast the hideous creatures back into their immaterial realm, causing Kiafan to fall heavily to the floor. He grasped his ankle and looked up at Fiana with tear-filled eyes.

‘I think it’s broken,’ he moaned.

‘They’re coming through the walls,’ said Aneis. Humanoid and other shapes were coalescing through the bare plasteel bulkheads around the Navigators; too many to destroy.

‘Pick up your brother,’ Fiana told Coiden. She grabbed Aneis by the shoulder and dragged her brother past the pair. She gave him a shove towards the door leading through the next bulkhead. Something pot-bellied and cyclopean was forming out of a dark pool of rust and slime spreading across the floor of the passage beyond.

‘Clear a path,’ Fiana said.

‘Where to?’ Aneis asked, his youthful face almost white with fear.

‘The strategium,’ replied Fiana. ‘We must reach the protection of the Lion.’

Having recovered someof his equilibrium, Corswain did all that he could to organise a defence of the gun decks, but the mysterious invaders were all but impossible to confront. From the scattered outbreaks across the Invincible Reason, it was clear that the attack was not confined to the gun batteries, or even the starboard decks. Pockets of foes were appearing across the vessel, with a large number seemingly intent on taking over the warp core chamber. With foes materialising behind defensive lines, making a mockery of any physical barrier that could be erected, Corswain had mobilised the ship’s company into hundred-strong patrols.

Not far from the strategium, he and his bodyguard came across Lady Fiana and her family. They were being escorted by Sergeant Ammael and his squad and though the Navigators looked distraught and haggard none of them seemed to be seriously injured. The seneschal relieved Ammael of his obligation and sent him to the engine decks where the fighting was becoming protracted.

When the group reached the strategium, they were confronted by an unexpected sight. There were no signs of fighting here; the technicians went about their duties with crisp calmness, diligently ignoring the scene that was playing out in their midst.

The Lion stood at the centre of the main chamber, and before him knelt a Dark Angel, a white tabard over his black armour, head bowed in obeisance. Surrounded by his personal guard, Brother-Redemptor Nemiel stood over the kneeling legionary, his pistol and crozius in his hands.

‘Wait here,’ Corswain quietly told the Navigators, motioning for them to stand to one side. The Lion heard the whispered words and looked across at Corswain.

‘Your timing is unintentionally impeccable, little brother,’ said the primarch. ‘I am faced with a dilemma.’

‘My liege, I do not know what is happening here, but I am sure it can wait a while. We need your guidance. The ship is under sustained attack, from creatures that are almost impervious to our weapons.’

‘The punishment of oath-breakers brooks no delay,’ said Nemiel. As he approached, Corswain recognised the kneeling legionary. His helm was under his arm, his face half-hidden behind long waves of black hair. It was Brother Asmodeus, formerly of the Librarium.

‘Oath-breaker?’ said Corswain. ‘I do not understand.’

‘My little brother has transgressed,’ said the Lion, though there seemed no anger in his voice. ‘Upon being attacked, he broke the Edict of Nikaea and unleashed the powers of his mind.’

‘He performed sorcery,’ snarled Nemiel. ‘The same vileness perpetrated by the Night Lords that now threatens our ship!’

‘That is to be decided, Brother-Redemptor,’ said the Lion. ‘I have not yet delivered my verdict.’

‘The Edict of Nikaea was absolute, my liege,’ said Nemiel. ‘Warriors of the Librarium were to curtail their powers. Asmodeus has breached the oath he swore.’

‘Did it work?’ said Corswain.

‘What?’ said Nemiel, turning his skull-faced helm in the direction of the seneschal.

‘Asmodeus, did your powers destroy the enemy?’

The former Librarian said nothing, but looked up at the primarch and nodded.

‘Interesting,’ said the primarch, his green eyes fixing on Corswain as if to see into his thoughts.

‘I have seen first-hand what these things can do. They are…’ said the seneschal, hesitating to use the word. He took a breath and continued. ‘We face nephilla, my liege, or something akin to them. They are not wholly physical and our weapons do little damage to their unnatural flesh.’

‘They are creatures of the warp, lauded primarch.’ The group of Dark Angels turned as Lady Fiana approached. ‘They are made of warp-stuff, and the breach has allowed them to manifest in our world. They cannot be destroyed, only sent back. The gaze of our third eyes can harm them.’

‘Is this true?’ asked the Lion, stooping to lay a hand on the shoulder of Asmodeus. ‘Were your powers capable of harming our attackers?’

‘From the warp they come, and with the power of the warp they can be banished again,’ said the Librarian. He stood as the Lion changed his grip and guided the legionary to his feet. He met the primarch’s gaze for a moment and then looked away again. ‘Brother-Redemptor Nemiel is right, my liege. I have broken the oath I swore.’

‘A grave crime, and one that I will be sure to prosecute properly when the current situation has been resolved,’ said the Lion. He looked at Nemiel. ‘There are two others of the Librarium aboard: Hasfael and Alberein. Bring them here.’

‘This is a mistake, my liege,’ said Nemiel, shaking his head. ‘The abominations that attack us, these nephilla, are a conjuration of sorceries. I swore an oath also, to uphold the Edict of Nikaea. To unleash further sorcery will endanger us even more. Think again, my liege!’

‘I have issued an order, Brother-Redemptor,’ said the Lion, drawing himself up to his full height.

‘One that I cannot follow,’ said Nemiel, his tone hard, though Corswain could see the Chaplain’s hands were trembling with the effort of defying his primarch.

‘My authority is absolute,’ the Lion said, clenching his fists, his lips drawn back to reveal gleaming teeth.

‘The Edict of Nikaea was issued by the Emperor, my liege,’ said Nemiel. ‘There is no higher authority.’

‘Enough!’ The Lion’s roar was so loud it caused Corswain’s auto-senses to dampen his hearing, as they would if he was caught in a potentially deafening detonation.

The seneschal was not entirely sure what happened next. The Lion moved and a split-second later a cracked skull-faced helm was spinning through the dull-glowing lights of the strategium, cutting a bloody arc through the air. Nemiel’s headless corpse clattered to the floor as the Lion held up his hand, pieces of ceramite embedded in the fingertips of his gore-spattered gauntlet.

Corswain looked at the face of his primarch, horrified by what had happened. For a moment he saw a vision of satisfaction, the Lion’s eyes gleaming as he stared at his handiwork. It passed in a second. The Lion seemed to realise what he had done and his face twisted with pain as he knelt beside the remains of the Brother-Redemptor.

‘My liege?’ Corswain was not sure what to say, but as seneschal he knew he had to act.

‘We will mourn him later,’ said the Lion. The primarch stood up, his gaze still on Nemiel’s body. He broke his stare and looked at Lady Fiana, who flinched as if struck. There were three droplets of blood across the pale flesh of her right cheek. ‘Tell the Librarians they are relieved of their Nikaean oaths. Lady Fiana, you and your family will each lead a company of my warriors. Cor, assemble eight counter-attack forces.’

‘Eight, my liege? Three for the Librarians, and one each for the Navigators, I understand. Am I to lead the other?’

‘I am,’ said the Lion. ‘No creature, nephilla or any other, attacks my ship without retribution.’

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Jon Sullivan

© Games Workshop Limited, 2012. All rights reserved.

Black Library, the Black Library logo, Games Workshop, the Games Workshop logo and all associated marks, names, characters, illustrations and images from the Warhammer universe are either ®, TM and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2011, variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world. All rights reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-85787-983-7

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise except as expressly permitted under license from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See the Black Library on the internet at

blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at

www.games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 You attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.