irixa

Ben Counter

Parchments covered in words of devotion hung everywhere, illuminated prayers from the hands of Terra’s own scribes. They had spent lifetimes hunched over their work, lifetimes scratching out the words of long-dead saints with quills carved from the skulls of penitents, ink distilled from the blood of martyrs. Holiness bled from the parchments, black ink turning red as it dripped onto the floor of the Phalanx’s war archive.

The ritual decontamination of the space station would take years. The evil done to it by the culmination of a daemon’s plan could not simply be washed away. It had to be prayed out of existence, scoured like a wicked man’s sins out of the steel of the Phalanx until it was fit to fly as a flagship of Mankind again. Teams of Imperial Fist Chapter serfs scrubbed the contaminated decks with holy water while Ecclesiarchy priests were suffered to intrude into the Chapter’s world to bless the wargear that had seen the presence of the daemon. But the Phalanx was still a warship, and war did not pause to let its combatants cleanse themselves of the sin that it brought. The Phalanx still had to serve; the Imperial Fists still had to fight.

The parchments waved in the breeze generated by the air recyclers as Captain Lysander entered the war archive. His own wargear, his Terminator armour and the great storm shield currently strapped to his back, gleamed after the day’s maintenance rites. He looked less like a man and more like one of the statues of heroes that lined many of the corridors of the Phalanx, memorials to long-dead Imperial Fists whose acts of heroism had earned them a memorial in the heart of the Chapter. His shaven head looked like it had been chewed up and spat out, but his features had retained the nobility and focus that marked him out as a leader by sight alone.

The novices in the war archive seemed to shrink when they saw him. They were barely out of the earlier stages of physical transformation that would eventually make them Space Marines, and had yet to serve as Scouts or as apprentices to the Chapter’s Techmarines and Librarians. They rarely saw the senior members of the Chapter, let alone stood before one of them as students. For the time being they were still men, not yet members of the Adeptus Astartes, not yet free of the weaknesses that the Emperor had created the Space Marines to overcome.

‘You know who I am,’ said Lysander. ‘And you know why I am here. You are the future of the Chapter. Some of you will one day serve as Imperial Fists, perhaps under me in the First Company. One of you may even wear these laurels as a captain, though I will not let that happen without you first understanding the meaning of war.’

He looked from one face to another. They stood in ranks, facing the tactical display table that took up a good chunk of the war archive’s floorspace. Each novice had been picked as a youth from one of a hundred worlds the Imperial Fists Chaplains had visited, according to the most exacting standards of aggression, fearlessness and physical potential. Now they looked like children compared with the monster that was Lysander.

‘War,’ said Lysander, ‘is sacrifice.’

He waved a hand and the mimetic alloys of the table’s surface reconfigured themselves into a complex topographical map, rising up to form the peaks and valleys of a rugged snarl of mountains. A holo-unit mounted on the ceiling cast hundreds of glowing symbols across the map. Cylinders among the mountain slopes denoted artillery pieces. Airstrips dotted the tops of foothills. Dozens of unit markings swarmed around the valleys and the lower slopes, various colours depicting the many sides of a great, confused battle.

‘What do you see?’ demanded Lysander.

‘I see Valacian Pass,’ said one voice.

Lysander looked at the novice. His jet black hair contrasted with the red of his irises and the greyish tone of his skin. An underhiver, one of a subterranean race of scavengers and gang killers from some Emperor-forsaken hive city’s depths.

‘Novice Apeyo,’ said Lysander. ‘You memorise the Precepts Militant well. But that is not enough. What does Valacian Pass mean to you?’

Apeyo swallowed. ‘Captain Siculus led a force of battle-brothers in evacuating civilians from the Draven Mask rebels. The rebels were engaged in their own war with the Scarlet Moon cultists who…’

‘No,’ said Lysander. ‘The words of the Precepts Militant are well known to me. I have no need of them. I asked you what the battle means.’

Lysander was met with silence that seemed to go on forever until one novice cleared his throat.

‘Novice Arnobius, you alone wish to speak?’ said Lysander.

Arnobius wore the blue-trimmed habit of the Chapter’s Librarium, its hood covering his shaven scalp and the patches of regrafted skin on his face. Behind the scarred but unassuming face burned a mind that might – just might – have the strength to serve as a battle-psyker in the Imperial Fist ranks.

‘Siculus,’ began Arnobius, ‘had a choice.’

‘Enemy air!’ called out Scout-Sergeant Noctis over the vox-channel, and a split second later Captain Siculus heard the scream of the engines overhead.

Ahead was the vast sweep of Valacian Pass, a deep valley cutting through the red stone mountains. From Siculus’s vantage point in the hatch of his Damocles command vehicle, he could see the great train of refugees choking the entrance to the pass, marshalled by priests of the Ecclesiarchy crying out prayers and appeals for calm. Tens of thousands of them were making the march through the pass to the landing fields on the other side, where they could be evacuated from this world and from the rebel forces encroaching on its cities.

They were Ministorum acolytes and Mechanicus fabricators, Administratum clerks, medicae surgeons and orderlies, the law-scribes of the Arbites and guards from the prisons. The Adept class of Key Thol, the latest city to find itself in the path of the Draven Mask.

The people heard the engines, too. They knew what they meant. Siculus could see the panic running through them.

‘Cover!’ shouted Siculus into the vox. ‘Noctis, you are Squad Iason’s eyes!’

The craft screaming down the valley was shaped like a dagger, a cockpit blistering up from the tip of its blade. Siculus glimpsed the face of the pilot, a blank, chromed mask with a single eye drilled into it, as the fighter aimed its nose down the valley and sprayed fire from the guns mounted on its swept-back wings.

A chain of impacts rippled across the valley sides, spiralling down through the massed civilians. Bodies were thrown in the air, screams just audible over the engines as the fighter ripped overhead.

Siculus swung down into the interior of the Damocles. The Damocles was based on the Rhino APC, giving up most of its passenger capacity for boosted comms equipment that let the Imperial Fists force keep vox-contact through the interference caused by the mountainous terrain. Tactical readouts told Siculus that his force was scattering into cover. He had Scout Squad Noctis and the Devastator Squad of Sergeant Iason, along with his own command squad now sheltering in the rocky debris at the foot of the valley wall.

‘It’s a Red Fang,’ said Techmarine Hamoskon. The Techmarine was crammed into the back of the Damocles where there was barely room for the servo-arms folded up around his body. ‘It’ll cut those people to ribbons.’

‘Iason!’ ordered Siculus. ‘Take it down!’

The sound of gunfire hammered closer. A lance of light spitted the Damocles, shearing through between Hamoskon and Siculus. Siculus threw himself backwards as the Damocles was thrown into the air and he felt the shockwave slam into him, driving the inside of the side hatch into the back of his head.

He was out for a moment. His senses swam back into focus and he was being dragged from the burning wreckage by Hamoskon, the Techmarine using his servo-arms to haul the captain behind him.

Siculus rolled to his feet. He went through the battle-drills in his mind, ticking off his limbs and senses. He was not badly hurt and could fight on. The rite completed, Siculus turned his attention to his own squad, who were running from cover to take him to shelter.

They were his closest brothers, those who had fought at his side since he had been able to call himself an Imperial Fist. One man from each squad he had fought in now wore the red helmet of Siculus’s company, and made up his own honour guard.

Brother Achaikos pulled Siculus into cover. ‘It’s coming back for another pass.’

‘Open fire!’ replied Siculus. ‘Keep his eyes off Iason!’

‘Aye, my captain!’ replied Achaikos. He aimed his bolter at the sky and the other six brothers of the command squad did the same, stitching rapid bolter fire up at the silvery dart now wheeling back around to point down the valley.

Siculus could see Scout-Sergeant Noctis, kneeling out of cover watching the enemy fighter through his magnoculars. The sun glinted off the bionic eye of Sergeant Iason as he took the lascannon from the battle-brother beside him.

He was going to take the shot himself. Arrogance, maybe, or simply the knowledge that Iason was the best shot in the company. It mattered not in that moment as long as the shot was true.

More fire spat down from the sky. It blew shards of stone from the valley sides. The civilians were wheeling now, a melee without head or tail, rushing in every direction at once trying to find a way out from the valley that wasn’t there. People were dying there, blown apart by the fire or crushed underfoot. People who were Siculus’s responsibility.

The lascannon fired. A pulse of glittering crimson sliced one of the fighter’s wings off. The fighter kept its course for half a second and then one side dropped, throwing it into a spin that arrowed off-course.

It slammed into the side of the valley in a bloom of red-black smoke. Shards of stone fell in a dark hail over the panicking people. The sound of the impact boomed back and forth across the mountains, shaking snow from the highest peaks.

‘It will not be alone,’ said Siculus. ‘The Draven Mask have the skies of this world, but they have plenty on the ground, too. Noctis! My brothers! Advance, and keep your eyes high!’

Siculus ran past the wreckage of the Damocles towards the edge of the crowd. ‘Citizens!’ he shouted. ‘Listen! The enemy wishes you dead, but it will not find you here! The Emperor is with you, for we are the Emperor’s hand, and we will deliver you! Carry the wounded and leave the dead, obey your priests, and follow us through this valley! We are the Imperial Fists, they who stood at the battlements of Terra and dared the Enemy to attack, and we will not let you down! On this you have my word!’

Perhaps it was Siculus’s words that had an effect, or perhaps the Ministorum preachers got the majority of the crowd back under control. The heaving of the crowd subsided as the people began to move again down the valley, stepping around the heaps of broken bodies and smouldering craters. Siculus could hear the weeping and the wailing of those who had seen their loved ones die, and the crying-out of the wounded. Some were carried on the shoulders of companions; others dragged themselves along or limped in lopsided groups, leaning on one another for support.

‘I have eyes on,’ came a vox from Scout-Sergeant Noctis. His squad was moving rapidly down the valley, scrambling through the rocks that lined the valley side. Siculus scanned along the slope and saw the dark dots swarming there – light infantry, skilled and fearless, at home in the unforgiving terrain of the mountains. They were typical of the Draven Mask. They had infested this place, and now the call had come for them to crawl out from their holes and feast on the weak who limped past beneath them.

‘Noctis, hold and pin them down! Iason, move into position! My brothers, with me!’

‘Wait,’ voxed Noctis. ‘North-west, the second peak. I see him.’

Siculus looked to the north-west. There a shattered peak, like a broken fang, rose among the great flinty slabs of the range. Some ancient cataclysm had broken off its pinnacle and sent deep fissures running down its height.

There, among the broken, scorched rock, stood a coven of figures, their banners and cloaks waving in the cold wind. The augmented vision of a Space Marine could pick them out in every detail.

Seven of them stood there. Six were men, or at least had once been men. They wore plate armour looted from the tombs of this planet, forged into delicate scrollwork now bolted to bulging, mutated muscle. The weapons they bore had been taken from tombs and museums, blades, shields and lances from an empire that had died thousands of years before. Their faces were sagging knots of ragged skin and every one had put out his eyes, the raw, bleeding sockets the badges of their faith. For they had gouged them out at the order of the seventh.

The seventh was the Eternal Guide, the Light in the Darkness, Lord of the Beatifying Fire, Captain Cohpran Vaa’eigoloth of the Emperor’s Children.

He wore a cloak of caged flame, roiling around his shoulders and surrounding him in a heat haze. His armour was that of a Space Marine in bright polished purple, gilded panels bearing prayers to his own power and beauty. One shoulder panel took the form of a bird’s wing, its feathers picked out in pearls and rubies. Emeralds clustered on his chest in the shape of a planet surrounded by eight stars. His helmet was a featureless gold cowl save for the eyeslits, and on its brow sat a crown of silver dripping with gemstones of every colour. In one hand he carried the Corruptor Prince, a daemon bound into the shape of a staff Vaa’eigoloth had taken from the cooling body of Governor Calx of the Subdamnas Sector. In the other he carried a shield he had made from Autarch Ysandrion of Deldrenath Craftworld. The Autarch was still alive and his face, set into the puzzle of body parts making up the shield’s front, wept with pain.

Siculus froze. A Space Marine should never have allowed events to shock him out of his thoughts, but the sudden appearance of the Traitor Legion captain had thrown him. For a moment his mind was full of nothing but the vision of Vaa’eigoloth. This was the Emperor’s Children captain who had looted a thousand relics of the Emperor’s life and assembled them into a vessel for the daemon that still rampaged through the Ghoul Stars. He had raised a vast army of rebels, mutants and pirate vermin, solely to march them into a volcano so he could hear the laughter of his god as they burned. His armour had been forged in a pile of burning pilgrims and quenched in the tears of their orphans.

Siculus tore his eyes away.

‘We can take him,’ said Achaikos beside him. ‘He has the Six Furies with him but we are a match for them, if we move now and falter not.’

Squad Iason had seen the newcomer too. Already their heavy weapons were turning towards the shattered peak.

‘Captain?’ voxed Iason. ‘Your orders?

‘Hold,’ said Siculus.

‘If we take him down now, whatever plan he has for this world will not come to pass.’

‘And we will abandon these people,’ replied Siculus. ‘A planet’s worth of the faithful. Not to mention that Vaa’eigoloth may well be here solely to divert us from our mission.’

‘It matters not,’ said Achaikos. ‘The mission will be forgotten if we bring back his head.’

‘I agree,’ voxed Sergeant Iason. ‘It is clear to me on which path the greatest glory lies.’

Siculus paused. He saw himself carrying Vaa’eigoloth’s scorched helm back to the Phalanx and seeing it mounted as a trophy of war. And he saw the valley ahead of him choked with the refugees’ bodies.

‘I care nothing for glory,’ replied Siculus. ‘Iason, advance and engage at range. Noctis, support us.’ He turned to Achaikos and the other Imperial Fists of his command squad. ‘You are with me,’ he said. ‘Down the valley. Get these people to safety. Those are my orders.’

The Imperial Fists force followed the mass of refugees down the valley, Iason’s guns already hammering fire into the positions of the hidden Draven Mask rebels. Siculus looked back, only once, towards the shattered peak.

Vaa’eigoloth was turning away, perhaps in disappointment, perhaps in satisfaction. And Siculus could not help but wonder if, beneath that faceless helm, there was a smile.

‘A choice,’ said Captain Lysander. He looked between the faces of the novices. They were waiting for the object of the lesson, for Lysander to explain to them what they should have learned. ‘Arnobius?’

‘He was wrong,’ said Arnobius.

‘Explain, novice.’

‘Siculus had the chance to eliminate an enemy of Mankind. By the time the Imperium brought Vaa’eigoloth to battle he had gone between half a dozen more worlds and done countless evils on them all. All that could have been avoided if Siculus had killed him at Valacian Pass.’

‘I see,’ said Lysander. ‘Speak up, novices. Those who cannot express their own opinion in my presence will never dare walk into the guns of the enemy. Speak up.’

‘I disagree,’ said a novice near the back of the room. Novice Kogen was from a world of scattered islands and vicious sea monsters, where bronzed men fought kraken from the shores under two blazing suns. His skin was the colour of copper and tiny pebbles had been inserted under his brow and temples, framing his face in a scarified pattern. ‘Siculus’s mission was clear and he followed it through to the end.’

‘The loss of the adepts would have been regrettable,’ said Arnobius, ‘but that would mean nothing compared to the elimination of Vaa’eigoloth.’

‘But without the faith and trust of the Imperium’s people,’ replied Kogen, ‘the Imperial Fists can do nothing. If they cannot live in hope that we can deliver them, they will be without faith, and the enemy has his roots in the ranks of the faithless.’

‘There is no statue of Siculus among the heroes on the Phalanx,’ countered Apeyo. ‘With a kill like Vaa’eigoloth he would surely be commemorated as a hero. He would have brought great glory to the Chapter!’

‘And what more evil could the heralds of Chaos have done with a population devoid of hope and faith?’ said Kogen. ‘More than one Champion of the Warp could ever do, I would wager.’

‘I would take you up on that wager, Kogen!’ snapped Apeyo.

Lysander held up a hand. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘These were the same voices that Siculus heard in his head as he wrestled with that decision.’

‘Then what is the answer?’ said Apeyo. ‘Was Siculus right or wrong?’

Lysander smiled. He did not do this very often, especially in the presence of novices, and the unease that passed among them showed they were not sure what to make of it. ‘That question,’ he said, ‘will be answered with another.’

Lysander adjusted the map table’s readout. Valacian Pass and its array of tactical markers disappeared. A holo appeared above it, hovering in the air. It was a banner bearing the image of an iron fist against a pair of crossed lightning bolts. Burning xenos skulls were embroidered around the base of the fist, and above it was the symbol of a planetary system with seven planets. The banner pole was topped with an enormous alien skull, taken from a species with a large brain case and complicated mandibles. One of its eye sockets was burned out by a plasma blast and the skull was scrimshawed with hundreds of names.

‘What,’ asked Lysander, ‘do you see?’

For an uncomfortable moment, no novice answered.

‘The Standard of the Seventh,’ said Arnobius at last.

‘Where is it now?’ said Lysander.

‘The Chapel of Hamander.’

‘Why?’

It was another novice, Dacio, who answered. His pallid skin and overlarge eyes were marks of his origin, on a long-night world where the population had evolved to a near-abhuman strain. ‘It was retired as a relic,’ said Dacio. ‘It is brought out only when the whole Seventh is assembled to fight as one, and when its captain deems it fitting.’

‘Partly true, Novice Dacio,’ said Lysander. ‘But not completely. A more accurate answer would be that this standard hangs in the Chapel because of Manufactorum Sigma. I trust that you have read of it, my novices. I am not here to educate you on what happened there. I wish to find out if you understand what Manufactorum Sigma truly means when it comes to leadership. To the status of an Imperial Fist. To your futures in the Chapter.’

Lysander looked among the novices. They were uncertain. Their lessons until now had not been easy, but they had been simple – wargear rites, tactics, history, rote learning and muscle memory. Now they were being asked to think.

Kogen spoke.

‘Hamander had a choice to make, too,’ he said.

The Granite Sprawl was dying all around, and the Imperial Fists, like everything living there, were bleeding out of it. They were a part of its death throes – the last out, of course. The Imperial Guard had already fled on their seaborne transports and troop landers. The Naval airfields had been evacuated shortly before that. The Imperial Fists were the last out. When the last of them embarked on the Thunderhawk gunships waiting to take them back to orbit, there would be no humans in the Granite Sprawl.

The industrial city was a great dark stain across half a continent, its manufactoria standing as titanic cathedrals to the Imperial hunger for munitions and war machines. Though Captain Hamander had no love for this bleak and inhuman place, it wrenched at him to know it would be taken by the xenos.

Manufactorum Sigma had been the last glimmer of the front line. Now it was burning. The alien artillery had thrown beams of crimson light in through windows of shattered stained glass and set light to the very steel of its girders. The flames inside cast strange shadows from the blazing skeleton of the immense building.

‘Count off, brothers! We cannot wait for you!’ Hamander was in command of two companies’ worth of the Imperial Fists – the entirety of the Seventh and elements of the Fourth, Fifth and Ninth. His own captaincy of the Seventh made him the ranking officer but this was an army that could not be led by one man. Each unit operated independently in the withdrawal, brother watching over brother.

The acknowledgement runes flickered against his retinas. Seventeen squads of Imperial Fists were already embarked. The Techmarines and their tech-novices were still on the ground, overseeing the launch of the strikeforce’s eight Thunderhawks.

‘We are not fleeing,’ voxed Hamander as he reached the rear ramp of his command Thunderhawk, the gunship painted in the gold and black of his company. ‘We will return and rain fire on this place! When the xenos are celebrating chasing us off, then we will drop into the heart of them and scatter them in the confusion of dread!’

Hamander looked back at the manufactorum. The xenos were crawling through it. Light shimmered, fractured images shattering and reforming – a form of advanced force field that addled the eye and made them all but impossible to shoot down at range. The fire did not bother them, though the building was falling down around them. No doubt they had some protection from that, too.

Thousands of them were advancing on a front wider than the Imperial commanders had ever imagined they would. Somehow, through cunning or witchcraft, the aliens had smuggled whole armies into the Granite Sprawl and were rolling across those areas they did not already control. They would take it in its entirety, much of it intact, as the Imperium fled before them.

And then the Imperial Fists would return. Perhaps in hours, perhaps days. Whenever the xenos were most vulnerable. They would tear the heart out of the xenos command. All they needed was a good target.

They would return. Hamander would swear it as soon as he was clear, and have his battle-brothers witness the oath.

‘We’re taking fire!’ came a vox from Techmarine Machaon. ‘Evading now!’

Hamander looked back through the closing ramp of his Thunderhawk. Sprays of las-fire were spattering up from the burning manufactorum, and a bolt punched through the tail of the Thunderhawk Blood Star. Hamander’s own craft, the Hymn to Dorn, lifted off, the final Thunderhawk to do so, and the Imperial Fists army was in the air.

‘The Star is wounded but aloft,’ voxed Machaon. ‘Devlan Wrath is hit. She’s going down.’

Hamander ran to the gun port and saw the Devlan Wrath tipping to one side, shedding a hail of shrapnel from a destroyed engine. It dropped into a flat spin and crashed through a nest of antennae on the roof of Manufactorum Sigma.

‘That’s Squad Talthybius,’ said Hamander.

‘They have the standard,’ voxed Machaon in reply. ‘We must return.’

‘No,’ came a vox from Assault-Sergeant Lapithos. ‘Our orders are to withdraw. There is no gain in sending more battle-brothers to die down there.’

Sergeant Talthybius’s icon was still illuminated against Hamander’s retinal display, but he was gone from the vox-net. ‘Talthybius is alive,’ said Hamander.

‘Then avenge him,’ said Lapithos. ‘Do not join him.’

‘And let the standard of the Seventh Company fall into xenos hands?’ retorted Machaon. ‘I will not return to the Phalanx with my head hung low, knowing I let aliens desecrate the symbol of our honour! Knowing I did nothing!’

‘And how many of your brothers’ lives,’ said Lapithos, ‘will you spend to say you did something?’

‘Silence!’ ordered Hamander. ‘The choice is mine alone.’

‘I will go with you,’ said Machaon. ‘Down there, to the cauldron of fire. I will go.’

‘You will stay with the fleet and get us off this world,’ replied Hamander.

‘Do not do this,’ said Lapithos. ‘Losing the standard is a lesser disgrace than throwing your battle-brothers’ lives away for nothing. You can atone for the one, but not the other. Let the xenos have it and return to avenge Talthybius.’

‘He yet lives,’ said Machaon. ‘He fights alone, his brothers faltering when they should bring all rage and fury to the enemy!’

‘I called for silence! I am your captain!’ Hamander gripped the edge of the gun port as he looked down at Manufactorum Sigma. He could just see the crash site of the Devlan Wrath, a tangle of wreckage that had plunged through the roof of the manufactorum and lodged in its upper floors. Sleek alien grav-tanks were emerging from the burning shell of the building, sweeping round to converge on the site.

‘I need twenty brothers,’ said Hamander. He looked back to the Imperial Fists in his own Thunderhawk – the battle-brothers of Squad Sartan. They were covered in soot and mud from the gruelling journey through the burning manufactorum, and now he was asking them to go back there.

‘We go not for a chance of victory,’ he said to them, ‘but for the future. For the brothers who will take inspiration from our actions this day. It is much that I ask.’

‘Not too much,’ replied Sergeant Sartan. Sartan had lost his jaw in action two decades before and his voice was partially artificial, a metallic grating sound that suited him perfectly. ‘And any of my squad who will not stand beside you will have to face me in the afterlife.’

‘Assault Squad Martez are with me,’ said Machaon. ‘Martez has requested he join you.’

‘Then we are ready,’ said Hamander. ‘Take the Hymn down. Machaon, bring the Golden Dagger down with us.’

‘I cannot countermand your order,’ voxed Lapithos. ‘But I can ask you, not as an Imperial Fist, but as a friend. Good lives are not worth this gesture. Your life is not worth it.’

‘Recover my body, Lapithos,’ replied Hamander. ‘If it clutches not the standard of the Seventh in its fist, then do not mourn me too long.’

The two Thunderhawks, the Hymn to Dorn and the Golden Dagger, broke away from the ascending Imperial Fists gunship fleet and weaved through the fire streaking up at them. They swooped down low into the streets in front of Manufactorum Sigma, cutting off the sight lines to the alien artillery tanks gathered around the manufactorum’s main gates. Those streets were half-ruined tumbles of fallen debris with the occasional corpse dotted around. Skirmishes had washed back and forth across the Granite Sprawl before the xenos armies had pushed forward in strength, like the overture to a bloody play. Perhaps that was what the aliens thought this was – a play, a work of art, the battlefield their canvas. Some said that war was a dance to them, and that whether they lived or died mattered less than the artistry with which they made their steps.

The Hymn to Dorn slewed around, landing engines kicking skirls of dust up from the streets below. The main engines howled and the gunship shot forwards, covering the open ground before the manufactorum before the enemy tanks could get it in their sights.

Hamander hung on as the gunship roared up through the main gateway of the manufactorum, ruddy gloom closing in as it passed into the burning building. Alarms were sounding as the gunship wove between rafters and fallen pillars. Fire was everywhere, rushing across the ceiling and pooling in great lakes around the factory floor. Enormous banks of machinery broke the surface like islands.

The Golden Dagger shrieked by into the ceiling, clipping a wing against a pillar and spinning out of control. It smashed through the rafters and disappeared in a shower of debris.

‘Damn it, Machaon!’ yelled Hamander.

The Hymn rose up through a great hole torn in the ceiling. The upper levels were a warren of offices, side chapels and adepts’ quarters, and everything was on fire. The Thunderhawk’s rear ramp opened up and superheated air slammed against Hamander as he leapt out, drawing his power axe from the scabbard along his back.

His lungs burned, even through the filters of his power armour’s helmet. Without the auto-senses of his eyepieces and his ocular augmentations, he would have been blinded by the smoke. The fire was white blooms against the monochrome chaos, his vision sacrificing colour to pick out movement.

Through the fire stumbled the battle-brothers of Squad Martez. Hamander saw Techmarine Machaon among them, obvious by the silhouette of his bulky forgemaster’s armour and servo-arm.

‘Machaon!’ yelled Hamander. ‘You were to drop off your brothers and withdraw!’

‘The Golden Dagger has fallen,’ replied Machaon. ‘Without my steed, I cannot ride! And so fate has decreed I must fight with you!’

‘Strange fortune that fate compels you to defy me.’

‘We can have an open discussion of it back on the Phalanx,’ said Machaon.

Both squads were deployed. Sergeant Martez was rallying his brothers, who while battered and scorched looked like they had made it into the manufactorum’s upper floors at full strength. Hamander saw the last of Squad Sartan jumping from the Hymn to Dorn.

‘Get clear!’ Hamander voxed to the pilot. ‘Join the fleet!’

The Hymn could do nothing here, with no lines of sight to bring its guns to bear. It rose up through the hole in the manufactorum roof, even as the rest of the Thunderhawks passed overhead, silvery sparks reaching the upper atmposphere.

Gunfire spattered from their flank, shredding through carved wood partitions and mounds of flaming ledgers. A missile streaked past, bursting in a spray of fire against a wall.

‘Scatter and advance!’ yelled Hamander. ‘Keep eyes on all sectors!’

‘Do they seek us, or Talthybius?’ voxed Sergeant Sartan.

‘We will know soon enough,’ replied Hamander.

He saw one of the aliens through the flames. It wore close-fitting armour of curved plates, coloured in reds and oranges with a red helmet inset with triangular green eyes. It carried a weapon of unmistakably alien design, a fat tapering barrel hooked up to an ovoid power pack wrapped around with thick cables and circuitry. A gemstone was set in its chestplate. These aliens all had such gemstones displayed on their armour.

‘Fire Dragons,’ growled Sergeant Martez.

Imperial Fists were firing in all directions, aliens running at them through the flames, firing bursts of crimson power. Up close, here in this close-quarters firestorm, they were deadly. One of Squad Sartan – Brother Closs – fell as a blast melted right through his armour and out through his back, leaving a smoking hole straight through him.

Hamander dived through a burning wall, wood splintering under him, and he crashed into the alien who was aiming a shot behind it. His weight drove the alien to its knees and Hamander hacked down with his axe, slicing off one of the alien’s arms.

With his free hand he grabbed the alien by the faceplate, one thumb crunching through its eyepiece. He wrenched the helmet off its head, seals and cables popping as it came away.

The aliens were like parodies of humans. Long, thin faces and large eyes, like those of some feline hunter which some thought beautiful. In the language of the Imperium they were called eldar, but to Hamander, they barely deserved a name at all. He pinned the eldar to the floor with the butt of his axe and wrapped his hand around its face, snapping its neck with a flick of his wrist.

‘I see him!’ came a vox from one of Squad Martez. ‘Talthybius! I see him! To our west!’

Martez jumped up from the alien’s body. The Imperial Fists were already charging through the wreckage, bolter fire streaking through the ruination littered with the corpses of dead xenos. Two Space Marines lay there too, the fusion weapons of the Fire Dragon eldar having melted through their armour and cooked the flesh inside.

Hamander could see Talthybius now. He held the standard of the Seventh as high as he could, but he was wounded, almost lying on his back as he fired seemingly at random around him.

But it was not random. He was surrounded. Aliens darted from the flames, running almost too fast to see, lashing at Talthybius with silver blades. They moved with the spring of acrobats, their armour the colour of bone, and their tall masks were fringed with flowing red hair.

Talthybius shot one down, sending it tumbling into the fire. But a dozen wounds were opened up in his armour. Members of his squad lay all around him, sliced open, armoured limbs and heads cut off and burning.

Hamander had seen battle-brothers fall in combat before, but it seemed that each time, it got worse. Rogal Dorn had taught the first Imperial Fists to take that anger and focus it, only unleashing it when the only tactical option left was relentless, headlong attack.

The battle-brothers of Squads Sartan and Martez were doing that now, sprinting through the flames to reach the enemy. Blades clashed on ceramite. Bolter shells chewed through the burning walls. Aliens were thrown to the ground and a ceramite boot crunched down onto the neck of one of them. Sergeant Martez lanced one through the belly with his power sword.

Machaon walked calmly, firing bursts of rounds from the storm bolter he had built himself in the forges of the Phalanx. Eldar ran at him and tumbled to the floor, blown open by the blessed ammunition.

Hamander ran through the bedlam. He slid to the ground beside Talthybius. The sergeant was one of the biggest men in his command, and in all likelihood would have represented the Chapter at the next Feast of Blades. Now he was cut low. One wound had opened his face from forehead to lip. Another had ripped open his abdomen and his entrails glistened in the flame.

Talthybius looked around, face full of the pain he was holding back.

‘No,’ he said.

‘We are with you, brother,’ said Hamander. ‘We stand together.’

‘No, captain!’ said Talthybius. ‘You should have fled! You should have abandoned us! Only death remains for you here!’

‘Not so, Talthybius. No brother is given up for dead when he and a single Imperial Fist yet live.’

‘Damn it, Hamander! How many lives did you give up to these aliens, so you could die beside me?’

‘They will not take you, brother, and they will not take the standard.’

‘The standard? You throw away your lives for this? For a handful of silk? The battles you could have won, Hamander! The tides you could have turned! And now they are all lost, for you forsook them all for this gesture.’

The Imperial Fists formed up around Talthybius and Hamander. The eldar were disappearing, flipping away through the flames, evading the bolter fire that rattled after them.

‘We will get you out of here,’ said Hamander. ‘You and the standard. And you will be hailed as a hero before your brothers.’

‘I am dead,’ said Talthybius. ‘Leave me. Take the standard. Die with it in your hand.’

Hamander hauled Talthybius to his feet and dragged him behind him. ‘Brothers,’ he voxed. ‘Find a way down. Find us a landing site!’

The whole manufactorum seemed to shudder. A beam of scarlet light ripped up through the floor, bathing everything in a momentary flare of bright red.

When it died down, there was a hole in front of Hamander where a couple of his Imperial Fists had stood. They were gone, vaporised.

On a column of flame and shuddering haze rose a beast three times the height of a man, seemingly clad in molten armour that hissed and spat as it burned. It wore a crown of twisted bone and one of its hands was a bloody steel gauntlet, shedding an endless torrent of gore. In its other it carried an enormous sword, glowing with power that issued from the alien runes inscribed on its blade.

The terrible shrieking that issued from it was almost deafening.

‘Their god!’ yelled Techmarine Machaon over the noise. ‘Summoned to war! Witchcraft, brothers! Alien witchcraft!’

The Imperial Fists had recovered quickly from the shock of the demigod’s appearance. Bolter fire smacked into its molten hide, seemingly making no impact at all. It turned its burning green eyes from one Space Marine to the next, and if Hamander could read anything from its inhuman face it was scorn and anger.

‘You shall not take the standard!’ yelled Hamander, barely able to hear his own voice. ‘Not while one yet lives!’

The demigod thrust its sword down and Hamander rolled to the side, catching the end of its blade under the head of his power axe. Sparks flew as the axe’s power field fought against the energy of the sword. The demigod was strong, monstrously so, and Hamander felt himself being forced back.

‘When your kind have been forgotten,’ snarled Hamander, ‘they will remember us! They will remember this, when all who knew of you are rumours and dust!’

More aliens were storming into the upper floors. Some had chainblades and heavier armour, plated emerald green. Others, in black and purple, walked slowly through the fires to bring their rocket launchers to bear. The Imperial Fists who remained yelled their war-cries and ran into the fray, bolter fire streaking everywhere.

The demigod lunged forwards and threw Hamander onto his back. Its blade came down like a guillotine, reflecting the flames and the sight of his brothers dying.

‘You have seen,’ said Lysander, ‘the Standard of the Seventh. You have heard the name of Captain Hamander of the Seventh Company, and looked on his image, carved in granite, looking down as you knelt in his chapel. What was it worth to put that standard in such a place of honour? To put Hamander’s name among those of our greatest heroes? If you knew you could buy that for yourselves, for the honour of your Chapter and the glory of your Primarch, how much would you spend to get it?’

None of the novices answered.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘You would charge into hell if I demanded it. You would grapple with the alien and lock horns with the daemon. Yet you will not answer a mere question? Apeyo! How much?’

‘The life of any battle-brother who would stand with me,’ replied Apeyo. ‘If they wished to put themselves on the line for such glory, I would not hinder them.’

‘And your own life?’ said Lysander.

‘Of course,’ said Apeyo. ‘My life for the glory of Dorn.’

‘Your life,’ said Lysander. ‘A life selected from a pool of millions of supplicants. Crafted in the image of Dorn, some say crafted from the very flesh of the Emperor Himself. Armed with the best battlegear. Transported on the best spacecraft. The recipient of resources that the Imperium can ill afford to muster, a life owed to the labour of a trillion men to make the existence of the Space Marines possible. This you would spend to purchase something as meaningless as glory?’

‘I do not believe that glory is meaningless, captain,’ replied Apeyo.

‘But compared to the life of an Imperial Fist?’ said Lysander. ‘How much weight does glory have, placed on the balance beside such a life?’ He turned to the other novices. ‘Answers!’ he barked.

‘None,’ said Kogen.

‘Then Hamander was wrong?’ said Lysander.

‘Yes, he was.’

‘This hero before whose statue you have knelt? This man whose battles and lessons have been taught to every novice since his death? He was wrong?’

Kogen could not answer. Lysander walked up to him, looming down over the novice.

‘Tell me,’ said Lysander, ‘that Captain Hamander made the wrong choice. Before me, before your brothers, tell me that.’

Kogen stayed silent. His eyes flickered to the faces of the novices beside him.

‘And if you cannot say it,’ continued Lysander, ‘then say that, too.’

‘I cannot, captain,’ said Kogen.

‘Good,’ said Lysander. ‘The force returned some days later to find the two survivors of the mission to recover the standard. Hamander was not one of them. He died at Manufactorum Sigma. Were it not for his actions, the standard would surely have been lost and a great shame brought upon the Imperial Fists. And yet, twenty Space Marines died for this. For silk and stitching.’

Lysander dismissed the holo-projection with a wave of his hand and the war archive reverted to its normal half-gloom. He walked between the rows of novices – they were already beginning the augmentation of their skeletal and muscular systems, but even so he towered over them. They did not shy away from him. That was good. The cowardice of a normal man was being hammered out of them. A decent proportion of them would receive the armour of a Scout, and of those, many would take on the armour of a full battle-brother. They were not ready yet, of course. Perhaps they never would be, until they wore the black fist of the Chapter in anger before the enemy.

‘One final question,’ he said. He took from an ammo pouch at his waist a single bolter shell. It was inscribed with the initials ‘IRIXA’, inlaid with gold filigree and studded with emeralds. It had been drilled and threaded onto a thin chain, to be worn as a talisman. ‘What do you see?’

He held the bolter shell up. The novices watched but there was no recognition on their faces.

‘Imperator Rex In Xanatar Aeternam,’ said Lysander. ‘What do those words mean to you?’

‘Xanatar is a world on the Eastern Rim,’ said Novice Lukra, a short, stocky lad with huge meaty hands and a square reddish face.

‘And what of Xanatar?’ asked Lysander.

‘I know no more about it, captain,’ said Lukra. ‘Such is my shame.’

‘You want me to tell you what punishment you are to administer to yourself for your ignorance,’ said Lysander, ‘and then explain to all of you what you do not know. There will be no session in the nerve-glove, Novice Lukra. None of you have been told of Xanatar. That is because this bolter shell was one of a hundred created in the forges of the Phalanx for Chaplain Belisar four hundred years ago. If you know of Belisar it is only as one of thousands of names on the rolls of honour, perhaps an inscription on the wall of the Reclusiam. He is not commemorated as a hero here, or recorded as a strategist in our histories. None teach of him at all, save I. I show you this because once, like Siculus and Hamander, Belisar had to make a choice.’

The storms of Xanatar had killed civilisations before, rising up from the flint deserts in blizzards of razor-sharp stone. Every few centuries they would rise, occasionally striking a few decades apart or waiting for millennia, but they always returned and they always wiped out whatever hopeful young culture had sprung up on the rich volcanic slopes of the lava rivers.

They had stripped the Imperial colony of Port Xan of everything above ground. Of those caught in the open, not even bones remained. It had happened three weeks ago and the flurries of stone were still lashing against the chewed foundations. The small population were sheltering in the hazard bunkers underground, or huddled in twos and threes in the basements and storage cellars where they had fled to when the sky first turned dark.

Through the brown-black blur of the storm, the dark red glow of the nearest lava river cast a blood-coloured light. It was a tributary of one of the greater volcanic flows. Xanatar’s volcanoes placed a constantly renewed layer of nutrient minerals on the planet’s surface, making it extremely fertile and a coveted location for conversion by the Administratum into an agri-world to feed the young worlds of the Eastern Rim. And it would be a hugely productive world again, until the next storm came.

Chaplain Belisar walked against the storm, the weight of his Terminator armour alone keeping him on his feet. The black paint on its leading surfaces had been scraped off by the hail of flint, revealing the dull gunmetal of the ceramite underneath. The auto-senses built into the skull-faced helmet struggled to make anything of the storm save for a seething darkness and the deep red ribbon of the lava river up ahead.

Belisar forced his eyes to focus and could just see the shattered foundations of Port Xan nearby. He was in the middle of the settlement, what remained of it. The remains of the tallest structure barely came up to his shin. He tried to find movement in the darkness that was not a part of the storm’s chaos.

A shadow moved against a shadow. Belisar drew his storm bolter, bracing his wrist to hold its twin barrels level against the stone wind.

‘Ill met,’ said Belisar on a broad-channel vox-broadcast. ‘But met as a brother, nonetheless.’

From the darkness coalesced the shape of a Space Marine. In the light his Terminator armour would have been an iridescent black, like the carapace of a beetle. The emblem of a golden fist gripping a hammer was inscribed on his chestplate and the same symbol was sculpted in deep relief on one shoulder pad. Mounted in the Space Marine’s golden helmet were a pair of similarly coloured sensor lenses in which Belisar could see his own reflection. On one knee guard was a campaign badge depicting a storm cloud and lightning bolt, demonstrating that this battle-brother had fought in the crusades among the Imperium’s eastern reaches over the last decade.

‘Chaplain,’ said the Space Marine. The vox-net was distorted but audible. ‘I guessed that they would send you.’

‘At the Feast of Blades when we last met,’ said Belisar, ‘you defeated me and won the laurels for your Chapter. You conducted yourself as an honourable brother in all things. That is why I know you are not what some say you are.’

‘And what,’ came the reply, ‘do they say of us?’

‘That you are traitors,’ replied Belisar. ‘But I know that you are no traitor, Tek’Shal.’

Tek’Shal walked a few paces closer. His marks of rank were visible now. He had a veteran sergeant’s chevrons on the body of the boltgun hanging at his side. Acts of leadership were commemorated by the gilded crux terminatus and winged bolter shell hanging from the brocade across his chest. One greave was carved with the pattern of a spider’s web, with purity seals pinned to it like trapped prey.

‘Because I am a son of Rogal Dorn?’ said Tek’Shal.

‘Because I learn a great deal about those I fight. It is a Chaplain’s role to do so. I know you, Tek’Shal, better than you realise.’

‘So you think you can convince us to kneel as inferiors?’

‘Not kneel,’ said Belisar. ‘No one is asking for your obeisance. Just to take a step back from this path. It is not too late to choose a new one. Step away from it, leave Xanatar and the Eastern Reaches – not for good, just to demonstrate you have no designs upon it yourself. The Imperial Fists have great influence among the Imperium’s military, we will see to it that there are no repercussions. I swear this as a brother.’

‘You cannot swear that,’ said Tek’Shal. ‘Not when you will strip from us all we have earned.’

‘This world means so much to you?’ said Belisar, holding his arms wide to indicate the tortured landscape around them both. ‘This is worth abandoning the Imperium for?’

‘Xanatar is where it starts,’ came the reply. We have laboured years among these stars, fighting the Emperor’s fight, unheralded and unthanked. Not for us the honours of Terra, the fame of Dorn’s favourite sons! These hands that have taken a thousand lives have laid a hundred brothers to rest. All we ask is to keep what we have earned! The worlds of this subsector, in recompense for the war we fought and won here. Is this not what the lowest Imperial Guard regiment is offered – the right of settlement in conquered territory, in recognition of their sacrifice? Thus we claimed Xanatar, the first world in our dominion. Thus we will take what we are owed, nothing more.’

‘We are Space Marines!’ said Belisar. ‘We exist to fight the Emperor’s war. We do not need the power over a world to motivate us to our duty. Where did you learn that you fight for reward? Our duty is its own reward, to see it done or die in the attempt. It is not the place of a Space Marine to seek to rule what he conquers. It is his place to win it back and defend it for the dominion of the Emperor, not his own.’

‘And what of the Ultramarines?’ retorted Tek’Shal. ‘They rule their own empire, do they not?’

‘That is different, brother. You know that.’

‘Is it, Chaplain? Why? Because the Ultramarines have the most glorious of histories, because their word is heard when ours is ignored?’

‘Because the Emperor granted that dominion to Roboute Guilliman! He who does not walk among us cannot cede the worlds of His Imperium to you!’

‘Then what He cannot give us,’ said Tek’Shal, jabbing a finger towards Belisar, ‘we will take!’

‘I see,’ said Belisar. ‘You are certain in the principles of what you do. I must respect that. But the consequences are another matter.’

‘Ah, the consequences!’ replied Tek’Shal. ‘And tell me, what will they be? The Lords Militant will declare us Excommunicate, perhaps? A Naval fleet will appear in a few years’ time to bring us to justice. Every line of ours they cross, we will be waiting. We will storm them and cripple them, one by one, just as we did the xenos and the traitor who once held these stars! Do not speak of consequences, Chaplain Belisar of the Imperial Fists. Those who fight us will feel the consequences of denying us what is ours by right.’

‘No,’ said Belisar. ‘Those are not the consequences of which I speak.’

‘The Imperial Guard, then? A million men sent to drive us out world by world? They will never bring us to battle. As Dorn once taught his scouting corps, we will melt away and emerge again in twos and threes to kill a dozen men and vanish. Every force landed against us will be picked apart and bled white. The lifeless husks of armies will litter these worlds. You know this to be true, Belisar. You know how we fight.’

‘Again,’ said Belisar calmly. ‘That is not the consequence you face.’

Belisar took a single bolter shell from the ammunition pouches around his waist. He held up the shell so Tek’Shal could see it. It was intricately inscribed, and among the scrollwork were the letters ‘IRIXA’.

‘Imperator Rex In Xanatar Aeternam,’ he said. ‘The Emperor Reigns on Xanatar for All Time. Lowly as this world is, it is the Emperor’s. The bleakest rock is His, and it is our duty to keep it His. I came here willing to kill you, Tek’Shal, because my duty to the Emperor and His Imperium is greater than the bond of brotherhood between us.’ Belisar put the shell into the chamber of the storm bolter. ‘I knew that you were a man of honour. But I am not. I will shoot you down here, though you are without a weapon in your hand. I will put you down, be you a fellow son of Dorn or no.’

Tek’Shal could have gone for his own bolter, hanging at his side. But the storm bolter was aimed right at his head, and he could not have drawn his weapon before Belisar’s finger pulled the trigger. The Terminator’s hand did not move.

Belisar sensed that Tek’Shal was smiling beneath the many-eyed faceplate of his helmet. ‘I am not alone on this world,’ said Tek’Shal. ‘What will you do when I am dead?’

‘I forged a hundred bolter shells for Xanatar,’ replied Belisar coolly. ‘When I have killed you, I will have ninety-nine left. How many of your brothers will I kill before they overcome me? I am a Reclusiarch of the Imperial Fists. I have faced members of the Traitor Legions, and unlike any of your men I have killed a Space Marine before. So, how many will I kill? And when I am done, how great a will do you think the Venom Thorns will still have to rule their own empire?’

‘We will weave the web around you, strangle you like prey,’ said Tek’Shal. There was steel in his voice now.

‘Khorhadek, captain of the Skulltakers, took an oath to kill me and give my head to his god,’ replied Belisar. ‘But it was his skull that became the trophy, for I placed it on the Altar of Brotherhood on the Phalanx.’ Belisar kept the storm bolter levelled at Tek-Shal’s face. ‘I will break out of your web as I broke out of his, and stalk you through this storm like the Emperor’s own ghost. All of this will happen unless you leave Xanatar and every other world in this sector to the rightful rule of the Emperor.’

‘You will not kill a Space Marine,’ said Tek’Shal. ‘And we will not give up our right to rule what we have conquered.’

The storm bolter did not waver.

‘I fought you, too, remember,’ continued Tek’Shal. ‘And the man I fought was not one who could kill a battle-brother in cold blood. Chaplain or no, you are a Space Marine. This is not a choice you can make.’

Belisar did not move. Neither did Tek’Shal.

The storm screeched across Xanatar, so dense that it seemed to hide everything on its surface from even the Emperor’s eyes.

‘What did he choose?’ asked Novice Arnobius. The novice’s eyes were still on the bolter shell dangling on its chain.

‘What,’ said Lysander, ‘do you think?’

‘Tek’Shal was a renegade,’ replied Arnobius. ‘A Chaplain would have no choice but to…’

‘To kill another son of Dorn?’ interrupted Lukra. ‘Can any Space Marine do so? Not in combat, in battle, but as an execution?’

‘Then you think, Novice Lukra,’ said Lysander, ‘that Belisar should have let Tek’Shal rebel against the Emperor’s rule?’

‘I think he would not have,’ said Lukra. ‘But as to whether he should have? I think that is another question I cannot answer, captain.’

‘That is because you are a novice, Lukra,’ said Lysander. ‘Because no such choice has been demanded of you. But one day, it will. This I swear. No one who fights in the Emperor’s name can ever do so without making decisions that cost lives, or determine the honour given to the Chapter and to the Emperor, or which can force us against every principle we have devoted our lives to upholding. To answer your question, Novice Arnobius, Belisar left Xanatar alive. That is all anyone knows of the matter. What he did, what befell Tek’Shal and his Chapter, Chapter records do not show. They have been lost to the ages. Nothing but a trace of the incident remains, and that was only recently discovered in the Phalanx’s archives.’ Lysander coiled the chain around the bolter shell and put it away again. ‘I can preach no lesson from Chaplain Belisar’s example. You must draw your own lesson. You must make your own choice.’

Far off, in the distant depths of the Phalanx, a bell tolled.

‘Bolter drill is due,’ said Lysander. ‘The lesson is ended. Go, novices, to your duties. Dismissed.’

The Phalanx was an old ship, one of the oldest in the Imperium. Parts of it, some believed, dated from the Age of Strife before the Emperor had conquered Holy Terra and forged from that darkness the current age of Mankind. Segments of hundreds of ships could be found within the vast mobile space station, and every few decades explorator teams were permitted on board to delve into the most ancient parts, forgotten and unused. Sometimes they turned up fragments of Imperial Fists history thought lost. Sometimes they found whole chapels, barracks decks, training halls and memorials that had been forgotten. In the voids between the mapped and used parts of the space station, there were corners that concealed secrets.

In one such void, choked with slanting support beams and wreathed in centuries of dust, stood a lone statue. Once, perhaps, it had been part of a larger memorial or statuary hall. Now it was all that remained.

It was of a Space Marine in Terminator armour. It was carved from obsidian, with a mask of ivory. The mask was in the form of a skull, the traditional garb of the Chaplain.

Lysander ducked beneath one of the beams to reach the foot of the statue. It was larger than life-sized, and the carved lenses of its eyepieces seemed to stare down at him. There must have been no question of the statue being sculpted with the Chaplain’s face showing – the skull was the face he displayed to the Chapter, the face with which he confronted his foes. That was the way of the Chaplain. On the battlefield he was not a man but an idea, a symbol, a vision of the Chapter incarnate.

The name inscribed on the base of the statue was Belisar.

Lysander knelt.

‘When I was but a novice,’ said Lysander, ‘I taught myself that there is no limit to what we must do for victory. Lives are forfeit to it. Even honour. Even the principles that make a Space Marine what he is. When I read the record of Xanatar, I knew the choice I would have made. And when I found this place, I knew I was right.’

Lysander looked up into the ivory mask. ‘I know that I am right. I pray that I am right. And that those who follow me will be right, too.’

In the statue’s right hand was the storm bolter, inlaid with deep yellow lacquer. In his left hand was another helmet, this one carved from iridescent blue stone – a neat hole was bored through one eyepiece, the impact of a bolter shell right through perhaps the only weak point in a suit of Terminator armour.

At the statue’s feet was an ammunition box. The box stood open and in intricate detail, as if it was the most important part of the whole statue, were rendered the ninety-nine bolter shells that remained.

THE LION

Part Three

Gav Thorpe

VII

Slashing the yellow-gleaming blade of his manreaper across the chest of an Iron Hands sergeant, Typhon shouldered his way through the doorway leading out onto the courtyard in front of Tower Eight. He was swathed by the shadow of the eight great Mastodons, their gun sponsons silenced and their canopied driver’s cabins emptied by the boarding actions of his Grave Wardens, who were now pressing on towards Tower Three. From there the main gate of Magellix would be within reach.

‘Commander, we have received a signal from the fleet.’ Vioss’s tone was urgent.

‘Why have they not yet attacked the Dark Angels?’ snapped Typhon as he lumbered up the gentle slope of the courtyard not far behind the line of his advancing warriors.

‘The Dark Angels have positioned themselves between our ships and the enemy. Any attack against them will allow the Iron Hands to move around the flank of the flotilla. We have more urgent concerns, commander. The Lion’s battle-barge has launched a torpedo towards Magellix.’

‘A bluff,’ Typhon replied instantly. ‘The Lion will not destroy Magellix any sooner than I or my counterpart in the Iron Hands. The contents of that facility are too precious to risk destruction. Continue the attack.’

‘Are you sure, commander? We have detected a cyclotronic warhead. It will obliterate everything at Magellix and a hundred kilometres around. It will destroy Tuchulcha as well as us. The fleet also reports detection of seven more Dark Angels vessels heading in-system.’

Typhon paused, a thought occurring to him. He voiced his doubt to Vioss.

‘What if the Lion does not desire Tuchulcha, but merely wants to prevent us from gaining possession?’

‘Commander, we cannot risk guessing the Lion’s intent. We must pull back. We can achieve nothing if we are annihilated.’

Growling to himself, Typhon activated the company-wide comm-stream. He snapped out a series of commands, pulling back his warriors from their final assault on the main gate. Instead, he established them in positions overlooking the central tower of Magellix and guarding the tunnel network beneath. When he was finished issuing orders, he switched his comm-unit to a general broadcast.

‘Happy now, Lion of the First?’ he snarled. ‘I will respect any ceasefire observed by the enemy. Know now that you intrude upon the business of the Death Guard Legion, and it will go poorly for you.’

Surprising Typhon – he had expected no reply to his invective – the comm crackled with a return signal. It was the same resonant voice as before – the Dark Angels primarch. It was too late to reconsider his scornful words, and his disdain would not allow him to offer any apology for them even if the Lion demanded it.

‘Look to the western skies.’

Typhon turned his gaze as instructed. He saw a flash of light in the upper atmosphere, and what appeared to be a suddenly-spreading electrical storm set the jade clouds roiling. Seconds ticked past before the crack of the torpedo’s detonation reached the commander’s audio pick-ups.

‘You are to pull back all forces from Magellix station. I will grant you safe passage back to your vessels. You, Captain Typhon, will remain at Magellix with a bodyguard of no more than one hundred warriors to attend a parley under my aegis. The rest of your force will remove themselves to two hundred thousand kilometres from orbit. Failure to comply will result in your destruction. The same conditions have been transmitted to Captain Midoa of the Iron Hands.’

The link cut before Typhon could respond, not that he had anything to say in the face of such a bald ultimatum. He watched the dark clouds of super-heated gases expanding like a blue stain across the western sky and realised that the Lion did not make empty threats. For the moment, his mission was compromised, but that did not mean he had to abandon his objective entirely; he had means unknown to the Dark Angels.

‘Vioss, one hundred of the Grave Wardens to form an honour guard. All other forces are to return to orbit. Have the remaining Grave Wardens embark on Terminus Est and I want you to take personal charge of the dearthfield. We shall allow the Lion to believe he is master of Perditus for the time being.’

‘I understand, commander. The Grave Wardens will re-arm and repair in preparation for the next offensive. We will not suffer defeat here.’

Thefog covering the inner courtyard of Magellix station was dispersed by the plasma and steam of a descending Stormbird. The eagle-like craft put down, its landing struts taking the weight as the dust settled around it and the mists began to seep back between the perimeter towers.

There were already a thousand Dark Angels arranged by company between the arriving ship and the main gate of Magellix. To one side of the force waited the Death Guard while the Iron Hands were guarded behind a cordon on the opposite side of the open space. Only Typhon and Midoa had been permitted to approach the Lion’s landing craft, two armoured giants amongst a gaggle of a dozen Mechanicum acolytes dressed in red robes, the heads of all but two encased within breathing domes; those other two had rebreather attachments inserted into their faces and chests and required no further assistance in the thick Perditus atmosphere.

The Lion stepped out on the descending ramp of the Stormbird with Corswain to his right and the recently-arrived Captain Tragan to his left. Behind came a number of banner bearers and other attendants carrying such articles of Caliban as usually accompanied the primarch; plaques, goblets, crowns, shields and other items associated with the Lion’s multitude of ranks and duties. Behind them came the cabal of Librarians, now numbering six from the fleet mustering in orbit, their blue robes flapping in the slow but strong breeze – the higher-pressure air of Perditus turned even a sluggish gust into a wind that could bowl over a normal man. As one the Dark Angels silently lifted bolters, heavy weapons or swords in salute to their commander-in-chief.

The Lion needed no helm, though the air was acrid in his throat and made his lungs feel stretched by its weight. He wanted to impress upon all present that he was a primarch, with the force of an entire Legion to command, and not just any Legion; the Dark Angels, the First Legion. His standard bearers took up station on either side of the route to the main gate, the Lion’s many titles shouted through their external address systems.

The Lion’s armour had been polished to a gleam, the black enamel as glossy as midnight oil alloyed with diamond, the gold shining like the heart of a star. A scarlet cloak draped from his shoulders, its train five metres long, kept aloft by the artifices of Caliban; ten suspensor-floating devices wrought in the shape of short blades etched with the names of the Knightly Orders of his homeworld. On his left hip the Lion wore his greatsword, Adamant, its ruby-encrusted pommels and gold-chased hilt and crosspiece glittering as brightly as his armour. Below the right side of his breastplate the Lion’s belt was hung with six cylinders each the size of a man’s forearm, bound with platinum, the dull red leather cases containing the Proclamations of Caliban; the first laws decreed by the Lion after his ascendancy to command of the Dark Angels, swearing Caliban to the service of the Emperor for eternity.

Sweeping down the ramp with his entourage keeping step as best they could, the Lion advanced on the waiting Mechanicum dignitaries. They introduced themselves in ascending order of rank, so that the Lion instantly dismissed the first eleven shrivelled, half-machine men and women and focused all of his considerably intimidating attention on the last: High Magos Khir Doth Iaxis, Overseer of Magellix and Custodian of Tuchulcha, as his heralds attested.

Iaxis was a tiny man, perhaps no more than a metre tall, taken to be a child attendant by the Lion until the magos had pulled back his hood to reveal a near-conical head and ageing, pinched face. The back of the magos’s skull was extended by a series of segmented plates that came to a rounded point and moved strangely of their own accord, contracting and expanding slightly, perhaps as mood or effort occupied the Mechanicum priest. Thin bony fingers jutting from veined hands rubbed and entwined together, almost hidden in the cuffs of Iaxis’s heavy sleeves, and his slight shoulders were no wider than the Lion’s greave. If the diminutive tech-priest felt at all threatened by the giant looming above him – and the Lion could have easily crushed him with his foot like a titan of myth – the magos did not show any hesitation. His thin, reedy voice was almost muted by the bubble of the breather dome encompassing his small head, but the words were spoken with authority and precision.

‘We are pleased to welcome you again to Perditus Ultima, Lion of Caliban,’ said Iaxis, nodding his head inside the breather dome. ‘Please follow me.’

The Lion felt a moment of impatience, expecting to be forced to check his stride in the company of the minuscule Iaxis, but his fears were misplaced. As the magos’s entourage dispersed, they revealed a set of mechanical legs, which Iaxis ascended quickly by means of a narrow ladder at their rear. Placing his own legs inside the struts of the machine’s pelvic arrangement, his robe rucking up briefly to reveal pale, wiry legs interlaced with reinforcing struts, Iaxis settled into the ambulator. With a hiss of actuators, the legs straightened, bringing Iaxis almost to the height of the Lion’s shoulder. In the presence of his minions, Iaxis would have been above them all, but the primarch still stood taller than the mechanically-bolstered magos.

As they walked to the main gate the Lion became aware of a silver-and-black shadow hovering close to Corswain’s shoulder: Captain Midoa. Glancing to his left, the Lion saw Typhon walking shoulder-to-shoulder with Tragan. The Lion ignored the other captains until they were all inside the entrance chamber behind the main gate. Once inside, the Lion turned and addressed his ‘guests’.

‘Captain Typhon, Captain Midoa…’ The Lion was not sure what he was going to say to them. They were an inconvenience at the moment, but as he had explained to Corswain aboard the Invincible Reason, it did not suit to make hasty or arbitrary judgements about the loyalty and agenda of others. He instead addressed Iaxis. ‘Magos, please convey the two captains to a suitable part of the facility where they may await my return. Little brothers, you will watch them for me. Captains, I remind you that all of Magellix is under the protection of my aegis. Do not think for a moment to dishonour me.’

With that matter perfunctorily dealt with, the Lion turned his back on the two captains and continued across the gate hall. The chamber sloped downwards slightly, the far end broken by three archways, each leading to a set of moving steps that descended further into the bowels of Magellix.

‘The door on the right, primarch,’ prompted Iaxis. ‘Let me show you what all of this fuss is about.’

Most oftheMechanicum facility had not existed the last time the Lion had been on Perditus Ultima, but the tunnels beneath were familiar to the primarch. Though they were now sheathed in plasteel struts and plastite board, the meandering passageways were etched into the Lion’s memories, so that once they disembarked from the fourth internal conveyor, some half a kilometre below the surface, he was able to find the path unerringly towards the cavernous chamber where the machine was kept.

The last time he had walked these tunnels, frenzied machine-cultists had been dying by his hand. The people of Perditus had been enslaved to the machine and died in droves to the guns of the Dark Angels and the newly-renamed Death Guard. The Lion’s first encounter with Mortarion, a tense affair that had ended with neither primarch liking the other, had taken place only three months earlier, and the two Legions had been fighting side-by-side as a display of unity for the Emperor. The Perditians had howled praise to their inanimate overlord even as they perished. Now the tunnels rang only with the boots of the primarch and the thud of Iaxis’s walking apparatus.

Coming to the central cavern, the Lion found further passage barred by an immense doorway, emblazoned with the symbol of the Mechanicum. Iaxis stalked forwards on his artificial legs and pushed a hand towards a reader-plate set into the metal beside the portal. The Lion’s sharp eyes glimpsed a design on the wrist of the tech-priest as he extended his arm; a faint outline almost indiscernible from the rest of the overlying skin. The primarch knew it for what it was immediately: an electoo, a hidden mark that could be realised into being by a pulse of bio-electricity. The Mechanicum made wide use of them – as did some of the more secretive orders on Caliban and many other societies throughout the Imperium – but the Lion had never before seen the design concealed on Iaxis’s arm. It was of a stylised dragon, wings furled, coiled tightly about itself so that its neck merged with its body and its head lay alongside its tail.

‘Your electoo, what is its significance?’ the Lion asked as door locks rumbled into the walls and a heavy clanging sounded from within the door itself. ‘I thought myself learned in the customs of the Mechanicum, but it is a device I do not know.’

Iaxis inhaled sharply and glared at his wrist as if in accusation. His expression mellowed after a moment, becoming one of embarrassment rather than shock as he regarded the primarch with yellowing eyes.

‘A childish totem, Lion, nothing more,’ said Iaxis. He paused and a moment later the dragon appeared prominently on his withered flesh, glowing a deep red. ‘The Order of the Dragon, something of a defunct sect now, I am pleased to say. It is remarkable that you could see that pigmentation beneath my skin, I had quite forgotten it.’

The door opened with a hiss of venting gases, swinging inwards to reveal the cavern etched into the Lion’s memories. Much had changed, but it was unmistakably the same place. The vaulted ceiling, nearly seventy metres high and banded with rock strata of many colours, was pierced now by rings bearing heavy chains from which hung guttering gaslights. The walls, nearly two hundred metres apart at their widest, were obscured behind panels of Mechanicum machinery and devices, so that the bare stone was hidden behind banks of dials and levers, flashing lights and coils of cabling and pipelines.

Gantries and walkways, steps and ladders were arranged around the device itself, with sensor probes, monitoring dishes and scaffolding further enmeshing the centre of the warp device. The thing itself was still there; the sentience, or at least semi-sentience that had enslaved a whole star system hanging in mid-air like a world in the firmament. It was a perfect sphere of marbled black and dark grey, with flecks of gold that moved slowly across its surface. Ten point six-seven metres in diameter – the Lion remembered the Mechanicum’s first measurements exactly – it was made of an unknown material, impenetrable to every sensor, drill and device the Mechanicum had brought with them.

The Lion knew that the thing was regarding him with some alien sense. He was not sure how he could tell, nor how the warp device could sense him in return, but the fact remained that he was convinced it saw him this time as much as he had been convinced the first time he had entered this hall. On that occasion several hundred rag-clad Perditians had died in the next few minutes, unwilling or unable to lay down their primitive weapons, forced to defend their demigod to the last breath and drop of blood.

There was something else different, at first unnoticed amongst the rest of the Mechanicum clutter. Two protuberances now extended from the sphere, one at each pole, each only a few centimetres long. The rounded nodules touched against circuit-covered plates stationed above and below the device, which in turn were linked by a dizzying web of wires and cables to the surrounding machines. On a mat in front of the orb lay a small boy, aged perhaps no more than seven or eight Terran years.

He lay immobile on his side, eyes unblinking, as stiff as a corpse, which he might have been were it not for the gentle rise and fall of his chest; the Lion could hear the boy’s heart beating ever so slowly, and could smell sweat and urine on the air.

A pipe extended from the boy’s back, and another from the base of his skull, joining him with the mechanical array surrounding the warp engine. As soon as the Lion’s eyes fell upon the boy, he sat up, moving jerkily like a badly-controlled marionette. The eyes were glassy, the limbs moving stiffly. With a glance at the alien orb, the primarch saw the golden motes were moving more swiftly than before, forming brief patterns in the dark swirl.

‘You have returned.’ The boy’s voice was flat and devoid of emotion, his face featureless. A hand raised and waved erratically.

‘It talks now?’ said the Lion, the words half-snarled as he turned on Iaxis. The tech-priest shrugged.

‘We could not discern anything of its construction or workings, but it seemed likely that it had some means to communicate with the Perditians before we were forced to wipe out their society. It took us nearly thirty years simply to devise this crude interface. We have learnt a lot from Tuchulcha. It is very cooperative, if a little enigmatic and, well, alien.’

‘I hear too,’ said the boy. ‘You seem displeased.’

‘You remember me,’ said the Lion, before he could stop himself. He glared at Iaxis. ‘Why the boy? We fought to rid Perditus of slaves and you have given it another.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Iaxis with a dismissive wave of the hand. ‘It’s just a servitor, Lion. We tried all manner of computational, logarithmic and cipher-based languages, but none of them worked. When presented with a servitor, though, it was able to tap into the established neural interface in only a few days.’

‘What a coincidence,’ said the Lion.

‘There is no coincidence. I was designed to assimilate with the human form, Lion. May I call you Lion? I overheard the magos use it. Is that the correct form of address for one such as yourself?’

The primarch wanted to ignore the device’s questions, but the boy’s voice lingered in his thoughts.

‘What are you?’ said the Lion, stepping forwards until he was within arm’s reach of the puppet-servitor.

‘I am Tuchulcha, Lion. I am the everything. I believe the magos and I are friends, though he sometimes grows angry with me. I try to remain patient with his outbursts.’

‘I asked what you are, not who you are. Curse you, what am I saying? You are a machine, a sophisticated machine and nothing more.’

‘I am everything, Lion. Everywhere. I was once Servant of the Deadly Seas. Now I am the Friend of the Mechanicum.’

‘You are dangerous,’ said the Lion. ‘A war is being waged for possession of you. I should destroy you and save much turmoil and bloodshed.’

‘You cannot destroy me, Lion. Not physically, nor do you desire it. All things desire to possess me. The one they call Typhon dreams much about me. The mind of the other, Midoa, is closed to me. It contains too much iron for my liking. You… You are neither open nor closed. You scare me, Lion. It was not until you came that I knew what fear was. Your return scares me, Lion. I do not wish to be destroyed.’

It was hard not to imagine the words being uttered were from the boy, but the Lion forced himself to focus on the glistening orb rather than its animated avatar.

‘Iaxis, my puppet needs more nutrients.’ As Tuchulcha said this, the boy’s bladder emptied, sending a watery stream down his leg to puddle on the plasteel floor. ‘My apologies, Lion. I have not yet mastered the basic functions of this form. Its pathways were underdeveloped.’

‘It is the third servitor we have had to attach,’ explained the tech-priest. ‘The previous ones aged unnaturally, hence the youth of this specimen. We are hoping it will survive for a few years longer than the previous interfaces.’

‘You seem to know a lot about what is happening on the surface,’ said the Lion, suppressing the distaste he felt at Iaxis’s uncaring attitude to the expenditure of human lives, even if they were unthinking servitors.

‘They pass through me, and I come to know them,’ said Tuchulcha. ‘Their minds touch upon mine. Yours does too, but it is far too heavy to carry. How do you cope with such a burden?’

‘My intellect?’ said the Lion.

‘Your guilt.’

The Lion did not answer straight away, not trusting himself to reveal something in front of Iaxis that he would rather remained inside his own thoughts.

‘What use is it?’ he demanded of Iaxis, turning away from the boy-puppet. ‘It was agreed with the Mechanicum that Perditus Ultima and the device were spared only because you thought it might have some purpose we could harness for the Imperium.’

‘And it does, it does!’ Iaxis seemed quite animated at this. ‘Tuchulcha, will you please show the primarch what you are capable of.’

Before the Lion could offer any protest, he felt his mind and body lurch, the sensation somewhere between that of a warp translation and a rapid teleportation. Darkness clouded his vision for an instant, and when his eyes were clear, he found himself no longer in the cavern beneath Perditus Ultima.

They were unmistakably in his throne room aboard the Invincible Reason. Tuchulcha and his avatar, minus most of the monitoring equipment, floated behind the throne, while Iaxis stood where he had been, a couple of metres to the primarch’s right. Sirens were blaring and the voice of Captain Stenius was bellowing over the internal speakers.

‘Battle stations! All crew report to battle stations. Geller field is being raised. Five minutes to full enclosure. Repeat, we have unexpectedly translated to the warp, Geller field is being raised, be prepared for attack.’

The Lion was dumbfounded, unable to comprehend what had happened for several seconds. He eventually realised that Tuchulcha must have moved the battle-barge into the warp and displaced itself, the primarch and tech-priest onto the vessel an instant later. Part of the Lion was appalled by the dangerous situation and Iaxis’s naiveté in allowing this to happen; a greater part of him marvelled at the unprecedented power on display.

‘Tuchulcha,’ the Lion said slowly, thinking it would be wise to be ‘friends’ with the unpredictable machine, ‘where are we now?’

‘We are adjoined to the place you call Perditus, Lion.’

The primarch turned to Iaxis, brow furrowed.

‘Adjoined? We are in the warp. How is this possible? We were far too close to the world, to the star, for a translation.’

‘Tuchulcha does not have to worry about that sort of thing, Lion,’ the tech-priest said with a toothless grin. ‘It is able to burrow directly from real space to warp space, without any backwash or graviometric displacement.’

‘Why have I not learnt of this before?’ demanded the Lion.

‘Our studies are far from complete,’ replied Iaxis. ‘At the moment, we are at the whim of Tuchulcha, and as you see it is a little, well, temperamental.’

‘Tuchulcha, I wish you to return us and the ship to Perditus Ultima.’ The Lion kept his tone calm and friendly, suddenly aware of how precarious his position had become.

‘Of course, Lion.’ The boy’s thin, blood-starved lips twisted into an abhorrent approximation of a smile. ‘What do you wish me to do with the rest of your ships?’

VIII

The Lion’s audience chamber was quiet, occupied only by the primarch and his seneschal. The Lion was seated in his throne, betraying no sign of his thoughts or mood, as impassive as a statue. Corswain stood at the primarch’s right, trying his best to conceal his own misgivings at the emerging situation. As time silently ticked past, he could no longer hold his tongue.

‘My liege, I do not question your judgement in this matter, but I must admit to my own ignorance. We have secured Perditus Ultima and possess enough force to destroy the Death Guard outright, yet you invite their commander to a parley? I have an ill feeling about this. And to have the Iron Hands’ captain present at the same time seems counter-productive.’

The Lion turned his head and regarded Corswain for a moment, his expression stern.

‘You are right not to question my judgement, Cor.’ The primarch’s lips formed a thin smile, lightening his demeanour, if only a little. ‘However, my reason for this meeting is straightforward. Before I decide on our following course of action, I must ascertain for myself the extent to which the knowledge of Perditus’s secret has spread. Though he probably does not realise it, I remember that Captain Typhon took part in our original expedition here. He was just a company captain, I recall. That he knows of Tuchulcha’s existence is unsurprising, but I sense that his agenda is not as transparent as it would first appear.’

‘And Captain Midoa, my liege?’

‘His presence here is an oddity, little brother. It might be chance that he intercepted the Death Guard attack, but coincidence does not sit well with me as an explanation. I must know why he came to Perditus, and on whose authority he claims to act. The Iron Hands are leaderless, my brother Ferrus slain at Isstvan, and I thought his Legion rendered inconsequential. It appears that I am wrong, and so I must have answers to questions that nag at me.’

The comm-piece in Corswain’s ear chimed and he listened for a moment to the communiqué from Captain Tragan.

‘Our guests will be here imminently, my liege,’ Corswain said.

‘Good,’ replied the Lion, directing his gaze back to the double doors. A few seconds later, those doors hissed open, revealing Tragan and a guard of thirty Dark Angels. In their midst were Captains Typhon and Midoa; the first easily seen in his huge suit of Terminator armour, a head taller than the surrounding warriors. At first glance, Typhon’s armour appeared in poor repair, much patched and stained, the white of the Death Guard mottled in places with oil and battle damage. A moment’s further inspection, however, revealed to Corswain that the Terminator suit was poorly maintained only on a cosmetic level; Typhon moved freely, every step accompanied by a wheeze of servos and hiss of fibre bundles. A short blade hung at his belt and in his hands he held his scythe-like manreaper.

Midoa followed behind the Death Guard commander, his black-and-silver armour showing signs of fresh paint and polish. His black cloak was tattered at the edges and a fresh scar was healing on his brow. Corswain had expected someone older, Midoa’s fresh features a counterpoint to the seals and marks of honour that adorned the chestplate and shoulder guards of his suit. Like Typhon, he was still armed, with a power sword at his waist and a twin-barrelled combi-bolter slung on a strap over his shoulder.

‘Thank you, Captain Tragan,’ said the Lion. ‘You may leave us.’

Corswain turned in surprise, but his primarch’s attention was fixed on the two newcomers.

‘My liege?’ Tragan could not stop the question before he spoke it.

‘Please return to your duties, captain,’ said the Lion, keeping his tone affable. ‘I am certain that our guests refused to surrender their weapons on principle only. I would expect no less from officers of the Legiones Astartes. They would not be so foolish as to test me on my own ship.’

With a glance at Typhon, Tragan nodded. The Dark Angels fell in behind their commander as he departed. The Lion gestured for Typhon and Midoa to approach.

‘Am I to be your prisoner?’ snapped Typhon, his voice echoing from the external speakers of his suit. ‘If you are to execute me out of hand, then do so and be done with it.’

‘You will address me properly, commander,’ the Lion replied, showing no anger at the Death Guard’s accusation. ‘I have yet to decide your fate. Do not give me cause for upset.’

Typhon said nothing for a few seconds, subjected to an unblinking stare from the primarch. Under the force of that gaze he eventually nodded and slowly lowered to one knee.

‘Lord Jonson, Primarch of the First,’ said Typhon. ‘Forgive my impertinence.’

‘Perhaps,’ said the Lion. He waved a hand for Typhon to stand. ‘What is your purpose in coming to Perditus, commander?’

‘I’m sure you already know it, Lord Jonson,’ said Typhon.

‘And still I wish it heard in your own words.’

‘The warp device, Lord Jonson,’ Typhon said, glancing at Captain Midoa. ‘I came to Perditus to claim possession of it.’

‘Interesting.’

‘The Warmaster desires this device, for reasons that you should know well. It is inopportune that you should seek to thwart his plans in this way. He will take it badly.’

‘Horus will take it badly?’ snarled Corswain, stepping forwards. ‘The Dark Angels do not answer to Horus.’

‘In time they will, I am sure,’ Typhon replied smoothly, looking briefly at the seneschal before returning his attention to the Lion. ‘Your opposition to the Night Lords is expected, but unnecessary. It is an irrelevance, made personal by mutual antagonism. What is Thramas to the Dark Angels?’

‘They are the Emperor’s worlds, and we will protect them,’ said Corswain, laying a hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘Treachery does not go unpunished.’

‘Be quiet, little brother,’ said the Lion, shifting in his throne to rest an elbow on the sculpted arm, chin lowered onto his closed fist, eyes still fixed upon Typhon. ‘Let the commander speak freely.’

‘I have nothing more to say, Lord Jonson,’ said the Death Guard.

‘Your threat is meaningless, commander. What you say is irrelevant, but what you do not say is so loud that it deafens me.’

Typhon started to speak but the primarch silenced him with a raised hand.

‘You make no mention of my brother, Mortarion, your primarch. Do you still fight for the Death Guard, commander? Or do you pursue an ambition at odds with your lord? If Mortarion desired the device you mention, he has the resources of an entire Legion at his disposal. Why would he send such a small flotilla to claim such a precious prize? No, Mortarion is not the hand that guided you here, commander.’

Straightening, the Lion rested his hands on his knees and leaned forwards.

‘Similarly, you invoke the name of the Warmaster, but it is not Horus’s will that despatched you to Perditus. Perhaps as you say, I am an irrelevance to my traitorous brother, but that does not mean Horus would wish to pit his sons against mine in open conflict. He destroyed three Legions at Isstvan, but my Dark Angels were not amongst them. Curze, Mortarion, Horus; none of them desire full scale war with my Legion, and for good reason.’

In reply Typhon was silent, perhaps regretting his words, or fearing that further argument would only serve to betray him more deeply. The Lion moved his dark gaze to the Iron Hands commander.

‘And you, Captain Midoa, what purpose brought you here?’

‘To secure Perditus Ultima against the traitors, Lord Jonson,’ replied the captain, looking across to Typhon. ‘We arrived just in time, it appears.’

‘And who set you upon this purpose, captain?’

‘We were part of the four-hundred-and-sixth expeditionary fleet, lord, far from Isstvan when the muster was called. When we learnt of the tragedy that had befallen our Legion, we did what we could, securing such worlds as we had newly brought to compliance, fighting those traitorous forces that we encountered. Six months ago we were intercepted by an Ultramarines fleet near Ojanus, and received summons that Lord Guilliman was gathering all loyal forces at Ultramar. We answered the call, and later the primarch despatched us to Perditus, fearing the traitors might attempt to seize the device held by the Mechanicum.’

The Lion accepted this with a slow nod, deep in thought.

‘And now that you have learnt of Perditus’s secret, what is your intent?’ asked the primarch.

‘It is not safe to leave the warp engine here, lord. It is too powerful to risk its misuse, and so I believe the best course of action is to relocate it to the safety of Macragge.’

‘Indeed,’ said the Lion, eyebrows arching high. ‘You took that decision upon yourself?’

‘Lord Guilliman had intimated that such a course might be necessary, lord.’

Fingers drumming quickly on the arm of his throne, the Lion moved his gaze from one commander to the other and back again, before looking at Corswain.

‘When we have concluded this parley, send word to the captains, little brother. The fleet is to assume formation for the bombardment of Perditus Ultima.’

There were outbursts from Typhon and Midoa, which fell on deaf ears.

‘As you command, my liege,’ said Corswain.

‘You cannot destroy the warp engine!’ said Midoa, taking a step forwards. ‘If its power can be harnessed, it could be the weapon that enables us to turn the tide on the traitors.’

‘You suppose too much, captain,’ the Lion replied sharply. ‘I too received Guilliman’s summons. I do not concur with his plans, and I would no more trust him with this engine than any servant of Horus. I consider Ultramar no safer place for this device than Perditus, and even if Guilliman does not use it for his own purposes I cannot allow it to fall into the hands of the Emperor’s enemies.’

Typhon’s laugh rang around the chamber as Midoa made further protest.

‘Your good humour is misplaced, commander,’ snapped the Lion, silencing Typhon’s mirth and Midoa’s arguments. ‘I am of a mind to let you depart Perditus without the engine, so that you might take word of its destruction to whatever masters you wish to claim. However, slight me again or dishonour my audience and I will be content to allow your lieutenants to perform that errand in your stead.’

Silence greeted this proclamation and the Lion stood up, signalling that the audience was at an end.

‘Perditus Ultima and its prize will be destroyed within hours. Tell my brothers that there is nothing for them here.’

IX

On the main display, the tiny speck of light that was Captain Midoa’s shuttle disappeared behind the shadow of his heavy cruiser, the Fastidious Prosecutor. Looking at a sub-screen, the Lion saw the Terminus Est of the Death Guard powering away, its plasma engines almost lost against the light reflecting from Perditus Ultima’s surface. The primarch was about to turn away, with both Typhon and Midoa now returned to their respective ships, when he overhead a message from Lady Fiana coming through to one of the communications attendants.

‘Relay that connection to speakers,’ the Lion demanded, pointing a finger at the Legion serf, who complied immediately, eyes wide with surprise.

‘Lauded primarch, my family and I are detecting a distortion in the warp around Perditus Ultima,’ Fiana repeated, her voice coming through the address grilles all around the strategium.

‘Tuchulcha?’ asked the primarch.

‘No, this is something different. It is like a miniature vortex, a hole burrowing through the warp.’

‘Burrowing from where? To what does this hole lead?’

‘Give us a moment, lauded primarch. Ardal is ascending the pilaster for a better fix on the location of the disturbance.’

‘Raise void shields,’ snapped Captain Stenius. ‘Arm weapons batteries and sound the call to battle order.’

The Lion was content to let his subordinate take the appropriate defensive measures. He waited with arms crossed, gaze moving between the main screen, the sub-display of the Terminus Est and the speaker located to the right of the display array, as if he could see Lady Fiana beyond.

‘Detecting a power surge from the Terminus Est, captain,’ announced one of the serfs at the scanner consoles.

‘Just raising void shields, captain,’ said another almost immediately after.

‘The warp disturbance is local, very small.’ Navigator Ardal’s voice was reedy over the internal comm. ‘I do not know how, but it seems to be originating from the Death Guard flagship.’

‘Where to?’ snarled the Lion. ‘Where is it directed?’

‘Perditus Ultima, lauded primarch. It’s some kind of warp tunnel, straight into the heart of the facility. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘Corswain!’ The Lion’s use of the seneschal’s name automatically switched the battle-barge’s systems to a direct address channel. Almost unnoticed, a tiny icon blinked on a sub-screen, indicating on a schematic of the Invincible Reason that Corswain was in the transit corridor outside the starboard launch bays, having seen off Midoa and Typhon.

‘Yes, my liege?’

‘Assemble your guard, and the Librarians, at teleporter chamber two. I will meet you there.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Lay in coordinates for the Magellix facility. The Death Guard are trying to steal the warp engine.’

Typhon’s manreaper parted the tech-adept from pelvis to throat, the scythe’s power field fizzing and cracking with vaporising blood. The ragged remains of the tech-adept flopped to the bare stone of the floor as a squad of skitarii burst from the doors ahead. The Mechanicum’s bionically-augmented warriors sported a variety of laser weapons and rocket launchers. As red las-blasts seared down the tunnel and the corkscrew contrails of guided rockets followed, the Grave Wardens opened fire. Typhon’s autocannon thundered in his fist while a counter-barrage of missiles and bolts hammered into the half-machine defenders of Perditus Ultima.

The Terminators continued their implacable advance, stepping over the sparking, bloodied remnants of the skitarii, passing into the corridor that led to Tuchulcha’s prison. More skitarii appeared and were cut down, the Grave Wardens all but impervious to the weapons carried by their foes.

At the head of the column, Typhon was still trying to push aside the side effects of the warp-teleportation he had employed to bring his warriors inside the facility. The Father had not been so generous in his gifts this time, and Typhon’s skin felt heavy beneath his armour. His whole body itched and his head occasionally swam with the effort he had expended to punch a hole through reality.

‘Why did we not do this when we first arrived?’ rasped Vioss, striding alongside Typhon to the left. ‘We would have retrieved the device long before the arrival of the Dark Angels.’

‘I did not know that Tuchulcha was awake,’ replied Typhon. ‘It will have to transport itself back to Terminus Est, for I do not have the power. It is of a far greater mass than it looks, the bulk of its construction existing only in warp space.’

‘A feat of engineering,’ said Vioss, his sarcasm plain to hear.

‘A miracle of the Father,’ Typhon corrected him as they came to the chamber of Tuchulcha. The Death Guard commander stopped, seized by a sudden pain in his abdomen. He gritted his teeth as he felt something squirming through his insides; or at least a sensation he considered similar to having his intestines burrowed out by some hellish rodent. In a few seconds the pain had passed and he barrelled forwards through the next set of doors.

The globe of Tuchulcha hung in the centre of the room, surrounded by the entrapments and delving devices of the Mechanicum. Typhon was struck by the beauty of the patterns that flowed across the device’s surface. A melange of oily colours merged and split, creating a hypnotic effect. With some effort, the Death Guard leader broke his gaze from the floating orb, seeing a red-robed figure kneeling before the device, hood covering head and face.

Typhon aimed his reaper autocannon at the kneeling figure, but his finger did not squeeze the trigger as a child’s voice broke the quiet.

‘Stop! Do not harm him!’

A youth had stepped out of the tangle of cables surrounding Tuchulcha, sallow-skinned, connected to the apparatus imprisoning the device. It took a moment for Typhon to realise that the servitor-body was being manipulated by the machine.

‘He is of no consequence,’ said the commander. ‘He has been your jailer, and should be punished.’

A liquid-filled gasping emanated from the servitor-youth, which Typhon realised was laughter.

‘I cannot be imprisoned, not by the likes of this creature,’ said Tuchulcha.

‘Good, then you will be able to come with us.’

The boy did not reply, but looked away, head tilted back as if he was gazing through the rocky ceiling of the hall.

‘You do not have long, Typhon of the Dusk Raiders,’ he said. ‘The Lion comes, seeking your head. Your warriors are being slain.’

As if in confirmation, the first reports crackled across the comm-net. The rearguard of three squads of Grave Wardens were under attack. Their report was short-lived, talking of the blazing sword of the Dark Angels’ primarch, and of nightmare hooded creatures by his side that had eyes of flame and claws of iron. Ten seconds passed and Typhon heard no more from his men.

‘He has brought his psykers with him,’ Typhon told Vioss. ‘I cannot contend with their combined abilities. Warn Charthun and the second line, they must fall back towards this position.’

‘As you wish, commander,’ said Vioss.

‘We are the Death Guard now,’ Typhon corrected Tuchulcha. ‘I cannot take you back to my ship by my own hand. You must come with me if you want to be free.’

‘Free?’ Again there was the strangled gurgling of laughter from the animated boy. ‘I have been waiting a long time for the Lion to return. I saw him, the first time he came, and knew that my saviour had been delivered to me. The Perditians trapped me here, but with the aid of Iaxis I have been able to loose my bonds. I have remained solely because I knew the Lion would return to me.’

‘He seeks to destroy you,’ said Typhon.

‘He seeks to possess me, as all others have before,’ replied Tuchulcha. ‘Fear not for me, brave Typhon. You must fulfil your own destiny. Your primarch awaits you. It would be such a waste for you to be slain here. Here, let me help you.’

Typhon’s protest died in his throat as he felt the surge of translocation. A moment later, he was on the strategium of the Terminus Est, his remaining Grave Wardens around him.

‘What was that about?’ said Vioss, shaking his head. The captain turned to the surprised attendants at the bridge controls. ‘Set course for the nearest translation point. The Dark Angels will be after us soon enough.’

‘No need,’ said Typhon, feeling a pressure in the back of his mind that he recognised well. ‘Tuchulcha has already put us well out of harm’s way.’

Dismissing his serfs, Typhon was left alone in his chambers, the bare metal bulkheads spotted with rust, lit by the unfettered glare of the light strips in the ceiling. He peeled off the last layer of his undersuit, tossing the sodden mesh aside to reveal his pallid flesh. He could not understand what had happened. The Father had sent him to Perditus to rescue Tuchulcha from the clutches of the Mechanicum, but he had failed.

The ache in his gut was still there, and the Death Guard commander looked down at his stomach. Beneath his flesh could be seen the rigid plates of his black carapace. There was something else, pocking his skin just below his breast plate. He could not see so clearly past the curve of his muscled chest, so Typhon turned and looked at himself in the polished bronze of his mirror.

Just beneath his solar plexus were three blisters, each as large as his thumbtip, arranged in a triangle, touching each other. They were dark red, surrounded by a black ring, weeping clear fluid. He felt no pain as he gently prodded one of the buboes with his finger. In fact, the sensation sent a thrill of pleasure through his body.

Typhon had a moment of realisation. He had freed Tuchulcha. By travelling to Perditus, he had turned the Lion’s eye towards the world, setting in motion a course of events that led somewhere Typhon did not know, but was to the grand design of the Father. The trio of blisters on his flesh was a reward; a sign from the Father that Typhon’s loyalty had been noted. He was marked now and forever, marked by the love of the Father.

It was just the beginning, of course. The Grave Wardens were only the first. The Father wanted them all. The Father wanted the love and loyalty of every Death Guard; the love and loyalty of Mortarion above anything else.

‘Areyou surethat was all the message said?’ Captain Lorramech shook his head, eyes fixed on Midoa. The two of them walked back to the strategium, heading from the conveyor that had brought them up from the docking bay.

‘That was all the Lion said I was to say,’ confirmed Midoa. ‘He was very specific. “Tell Guilliman I have a reply for him,” the Lion told me. “Tell him to wait for me. I am coming.” That was it.’

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.

Iaxis and his device were safely stowed in the deepest holds of the Invincible Reason. Magellix station had been turned to molten slag and rubble in a few hours; nothing was left for any other Legion to claim.

The Lion’s lips moved, so slightly that perhaps a casual observer would not have noticed. Also none but those with the superhuman hearing of a primarch would have heard the words that came from his near-unmoving lips.

‘I have Curze now,’ the Lion said, speaking only to shadows. His monologue stopped every few moments, as though to allow someone else to speak. ‘With Tuchulcha, we will be able to trap the Night Haunter. We have to be careful not to act too swiftly. Yes, when the time is right, but not before. If Curze notices a drastic change in our strategy he will respond, perhaps abandoning Thramas altogether. You are right, that would not be helpful.’

The Lion paused and wiped a fingertip across his brow.

‘Guilliman is a misguided fool at best, and a traitorous dog at worst.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I know that, but I would no sooner bend my knee to him than to Horus. Curze has the truth of it, but I was blinded by my anger. It has fallen to me to be the scale upon which history will be balanced. Every event has its counter, every brother his equal. Curze seeks to sap my morale and the strength of my Legion with unending war. Such shall be the duty of the Dark Angels. Yes, they will be ready for the task. There will be no new Emperor, only a lifetime of war. My brothers will bleed each other dry, contesting for eternity until there can be no victor. No, not even him. There is only the Emperor, none is worthy of inheriting that mantle. I will ensure the Legiones Astartes destroy themselves before another matches the power upon Terra. That is true. Faced with the prospect of mutual annihilation, my brothers may come to terms. Horus will be forced to acknowledge the Emperor again, and Guilliman and the others will not usurp their true master.’

Again the Lion stopped, with a slight shake of the head. He turned his gaze to his left, and out of the shadows appeared a diminutive figure. It was no taller than the height of a man’s knee, clad in an ebon robe, tiny and nimble black-gloved hands visible, but the rest of its body and face hidden in shadow. The diminutive creature looked up at the Lion and two coal-like glows briefly lit the inside of its hood.

‘No, it is too important,’ said the primarch. ‘Even if what you say is true, I cannot return to Caliban yet. Come what may, I have to stop Horus and Guilliman.’

The small figure bowed its head, and the Lion did the same, his whisper full of sorrow.

‘Yes, even if it costs me my Legion.’

Gilead’s Curse

Chapter 6

Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett

Mastering the bardic arts requires such discipline, such breadth and depth of understanding that it falls to the very few, to the most learned, and to those truly in their unfettered prime to invoke a character that is other.

I fell upon my profession as a child at the bedside of a teller of the most magical of elf tales, and I have tried my humble best to invoke the ancient race honestly and honourably.

I weary now, and know that it will take all the energy I have to do justice to this portion of the tale, this most pained and painful of subjects, this creature of the endless night, of enduring darkness, of pity and of pathos.

Forgive me if I falter, for so desolate a character never walked the Empire but he filled these bardic veins with bloodless ice. I feel a glacial blast only anticipating unfurling this tale. Stir the fire, for my chilled hands will not hold the poker steady, and swathe my shoulders in another of your fine blankets, and I will do my very best.

Hail mine liege lord the night

Hail mine liege lady the moon

Hail mine steed of might

Hail mine blades of doom

Hail mine eternity of life

Hail mine eternity of death

Hail mine duty of strife

Hail mine sacrifice of faith

He spoke the words over and over, first aloud, and then silently. For the first half-hour of silent repetitions, his lips moved, but, gradually, the words became a mantra, a meditation in his exhausted mind. Then, his lips were all but stilled, the top, so pale that its edge was invisible, the lip and the surrounding skin the same bloodless, grey hue. His bottom lip swelled slightly at the centre, dark and moist, as if a great black ball of blood was trying to leak out from between his teeth. It quivered from time to time. He longed to feel the words as he had felt them a thousand years ago, but he felt nothing now, nothing but the futility of an existence devoid of all meaning.

He sat in a small clearing with his back exposed. He had long-since given up the practice of sitting with his back against a tree or wall, or into the corner of a room. He had long-since abandoned any desire to defend himself. He relished his vulnerability, however artificial it was. He knew that if he was attacked from behind, he would surely hear his adversary, be on his feet before the attack had happened, and would probably have run his assailant through on his sword before the poor deluded fool had a chance to parry or counter-attack.

He was the consummate fighting machine. He had no heart, no fear, no weaknesses, and above all no worthy opponent.

Everyone was his enemy. Every mortal creature despised him, as he despised himself. Every sentient race cursed him, cowered before him and condemned him, as his own kind had condemned him to this endless round, this interminable existence.

He was nothing. He had nothing. Time had taught him that as it had taught him little else of any value.

He was merely a construct, only the sum of the parts, parts that had been so key to his life once, long ago when they had meant something. He had been the battle. He had been the armour and blade. He had been nobility. He had been service. He had been honour, loyalty, faith. He clung to the tenets of his long-dead existence, not lest he should cease to exist, for he knew that he could never cease to be, but lest his existence become not only futile, but also structure-less. The routine was all that remained. The observances were all that reminded him of what he had once been. He knew not how to pray like a Bretonnian knight, but he knew that a Bretonnian knight must pray, and so he prayed the only prayer that he knew. He knew that a Bretonnian knight must be noble, strong, faithful and brave. He knew that he had once been all of those things. What he was now, what he had been this past millennium was none of those things. That he could act as if he was what he had once been must be enough.

He had not died an honourable death. He would not die in honour, now, and so he must make his observances, follow his routines, and preserve a receding corner of sanity in his hindbrain.

He settled a camp, not because he needed to rest, but because he had been taught how to settle and strike a camp as preparation for his first crusade. He lit a fire, not because he needed the heat or the light, or to cook food, but because fire was the essence of life. He mended his clothes, cleaned his armour and oiled his blade, not because those things made a difference to his capacity for combat, but because the routines made him feel alive, human, humble again for a moment, as if his continued existence mattered, as if he had a cause, a reason for being.

He sat before the fire he had built, a neat, perfectly symmetrical cone of twigs, giving off a warmth that he could not truly feel, and worked lapping powder into the smooth, curving steel of his cuisse. He wove small, regular circles across the metal to the rhythm of the words in his head, trying to think of nothing else.

It was impossible.

He had been sitting like this when the elf had come upon him. He had used this same cuisse as a shield when he was forced to improvise to save himself from the great warrior’s onslaught.

To save himself.

How had he come to save himself?

Why had he fought to save himself?

The Vampire Count sat still, silent, without even the words in his head for company, without the mantra, the improvised prayer that kept all other thoughts from his fragile mind. He polished the armour only because that was what he did, and now the very act that helped to keep him sane brought with it the madness of the question, ‘Why had he fought to save himself?’.

The humans were as nothing. He had never been a man in the prosaic sense. A knight is not a man, for he is so much more, and so much less than other men. He had not sought to defile men in the way that had been so popular among his kind for so long. He had taken the solitary path. He must battle when the battle came to him, but he would not raise the dead nor bring with him the destroyed. For those who were less than nothing, for the hordes that were destroyed only to be brought back to destroy anew, were less than pitiful, less than pathetic.

He had fought to save himself for he could not fail to do what he had been schooled to do. He could not fail to be that knight, that paragon, that exemplar. A few decades as that living, breathing knight could not be wiped away, not even by a thousand years of undeath.

The elf, whose name he knew not, was the closest he had come in a thousand years to real, final, ultimate death.

His face showed no expression. His lip did not quiver, nor did his pupils dilate. His nostrils did not flare, nor did his brow rise. The thought in his head was not visible on his face.

The Vampire Count began his mantra again, his lips working the sounds of the words that he spoke fervently, aloud, filling the clearing with increasingly stentorian tones. With every repetition his voice grew stronger and firmer.

Hail mine liege lord the night

Hail mine liege lady the moon

Hail mine steed of might

Hail mine blades of doom

Hail mine eternity of life

Hail mine eternity of death

Hail mine duty of strife

Hail mine sacrifice of faith

He knew what he must do. He must fight to the death for the right, for the privilege of being expunged, of being removed wholly and completely from existence. He could not sacrifice himself, so he must find a worthy opponent and die at his hand. He must find the elf. He must challenge him, and he must trust that the magical being would finally best him in combat.

The knowledge freed the Vampire Count from the pall of ages, liberated him from the threat of eternal life, and lifted him. He did not know what it was to feel happiness or even contentment, and he did not feel them now. He did feel a little less dread, a little less resignation. He wondered if what he felt was hope, but he dismissed the thought almost before it had a chance to come to life in his mind. The rhythm of his mantra was broken for a moment, and his voice faltered. The feeling did not last, and the undead creature began his prayer again, from the beginning, as he kicked over the remains of his fire, folded away his tin of lapping powder and his polishing cloth, and took up the first piece of armour to strap to his body.

The elf had sought to destroy the skaven. The Vampire Count resolved to descend below ground, and, perhaps, the skaven would find they had an ally, after all.

Despite there being little to party with, there was great reason to party, and party they must.

Dozens of their men had been returned to the community, both to the town and to the surrounding tracts of farmland. The men had returned and borne with them tales of the rout of the skaven.

They did not know who had slaughtered the ratmen in such numbers, or how he had done it. Only one or two of them had seen the warrior, so tall and lean, so ethereally handsome. A very few had seen him wield his weapons, killing and maiming with every thrust and strike. Those few told their stories long and loud to whomever would listen. Their audiences of women and children were large and growing, and, within a day or two, all the men were claiming to have seen the wondrous creature. Some even dared to call him an elf; although so rare and extraordinary a creature had never been seen by any of them before.

Most claimed to have seen him, some claimed to have been standing within feet of him when the tide of skaven was broken on his blade, and a few even claimed to have fought alongside him. One told of how he had been back-to-back with the elf, of how he had been urged on by the creature and then praised in dulcet tones for his bravery.

‘“No man ever fought so bravely”, that’s what he said,’ said Varn Holst, a short, portly man, who had come away from the undercrofts with a long tear in the skin of his shin, which was red and raw and infected. He’d taken the injury falling over a skaven blade abandoned in one of the underground tunnels before he’d even joined the fray. He’d laid low after taking the injury, and had only begun to run for his life when he heard the cries of his fellow humans behind him. Just a few days later his mother-in-law removed the leg below the knee, and only a week after the battle with the skaven, Varn Holst died of a fever. He’d had his moment of glory, had told a good yarn, and there was no shame in that, but everyone knew that if he’d ever actually seen an elf, at best he would have soiled himself or fainted clean away, and, at worst, he would have died of fear where he stood.

The merrymaking continued for days, half-party, half-wake. There was little enough to eat at the best of times, but someone somewhere was always willing to brew beer, and even the hard stuff, from whatever rotten peelings, unripe fruit, or even flaking tree-bark might be available, so there was a surfeit of alcohol. Several of the younger men and one or two women were made sick by ale that was too young to drink, after all the properly brewed stuff was gone. For the rest, there was more than enough alcohol of the kind that burnt all the way down and then all the way up again, and might cause temporary blindness in anyone who had the constitution to drink more than a pint of it. Indeed, it had been a huge help to poor old Varn when his leg had to be amputated.

They did not know what the rout of the skaven meant for the land, for their families or for their futures, but for now, for these few days, the townspeople and folk from the surrounding countryside were content to make merry and celebrate the small victory bestowed on them by the mysterious warrior.

They did not notice the strangers in their midst. They did not see the tall, elderly man or his taller, younger companion. They did not lower their voices when the slumped, hooded interlopers sat quietly in the corners of their drinking holes.

The strangers watched and listened and registered everything. They heard the humans’ drunken stories, as incoherent and elaborated as they often were, and they pieced together some semblance of the truth.

The creature the humans had mistaken for the villain of the piece, the mysterious figure they had shrunk from and feared, the ethereal being that they credited with the decimation of the land and all the other hardships they had suffered these many years, had become their hero, his praises sung in every word that passed their lips.

The unlikely pair of strangers watched and listened. They entered and left the cookshops and drinking holes without being confronted, or even noticed, and they moved from street corner to street corner, from farmstead to lowly hovel to garner as much information as they could. They were not disappointed.

Some of the stories were contradictory, for what elf could be hunted and tracked by the coarse humans? Some stories were embellished to the point of being almost comedy, for what elf had ever worn full plate armour of the type described by one over-zealous story-teller? And still there were mysteries left unanswered.

There were dozens of stories of bravery and derring-do, all involving the mysterious, fearless warrior, often with a phalanx of eager humans in support. There were dozens of descriptions of blades flashing faster than the eye could follow their trajectories, and of ratmen being killed and maimed in the onslaught, or running screaming from the valiant swordsman. One human, surrounded by an eager audience, even blew out every lamp in the windowless hovel, which was his theatre, putting the very last and smallest, with its meagre glow, between his feet under the table, so that everyone could experience the miserable dark below ground in the tunnels that made up the labyrinthine warren the skaven inhabited.

The strangers left under the cover of darkness, after the story-teller began to weave tales so absurd and unbelievable that the older of the two could hardly contain his mirth, while the younger was filled with scorn and indignation.

‘They talk of him as if he had wrought some great magic,’ said the youth.

‘They should,’ said his older companion. ‘He does that.’

‘They do not talk of where he is,’ said the youth, ‘nor of what happened after his great victory.’

‘No,’ said the other.

‘It is him, though?’ asked the youth.

‘You’ve heard the stories. He is the subject of tales that will be told and retold for a thousand years by the humans. If we cared to tell his tales, we would tell them for millennia.’

‘But the discrepancies? There are so many, and they are of the strangest kinds,’ said the youth.

‘The humans tell stories in a particular fashion; the truth is less important to them than the romance of the tale. They know not what an elf truly is, and so they embellish, ornamenting a character in their own terms, in ways that define the sense of a being rather than the reality of it.’

‘So, it is him.’

‘It is him,’ said the older man as they walked into the darkness away from the edges of the town.

‘Do you know where to find him?’ asked the youth.

‘He said that he would find me,’ said the other, ‘but since there is no sign of him, and no word of him leaving the skaven warrens, I fear we shall have to follow him underground.’

The old man stopped suddenly, and watched for a moment or two as the youth, failing to notice that his companion was not at his side, strode purposefully onward.

‘So like him,’ the old man said to himself. ‘So young and tall and headstrong, and so very, very like him.’

The youthful figure stopped and turned to face his old companion.

The old man lifted a hand in acknowledgement, and began to walk towards the youth. He dropped his head, so that no part of his face was visible beneath his hood, and he muttered under his breath, ‘Where are you Gilead te Tuin? Where are you my old friend?’

The Vampire Count had very little in the way of tracking skills. He was drawn by blood, and could smell it on everything, creature, monster, human. He could smell the difference between the carrion-eating, lower mammal life-forms that he had been forced to feed on in the past few years, and the sweeter subtler aroma of the grass-eating mammals whose blood he preferred. The skaven smelt like the lower orders, like the rodents they got their common name from, but even more vile. Nothing would induce him to sate his appetite on those loathsome monsters. Humans, while they had their undead uses for many of his brethren, did not represent the richest of pickings for him, their omnivorous appetites and their indiscretions with alcohol, tobacco and other drugs made their blood tannic and greasy. A young, female vegetarian human who did not sully her blood with drugs and drank only water was the highest prize of all, and virtually impossible to resist, but there were so few of those around that he had not partaken of one in more than a decade.

The elf had not smelt of blood at all, and was so skilled at leaving no evidence of his existence that the only trail he had left was a trail of bodies, of skaven dead.

The Vampire Count stopped for a moment while he allowed this thought to foment. If he could not track the elf by his blood scent, nor recognise the clear, spring-water smell of his adversary, he would simply follow the trail of rat bodies, for the elf would surely be found at the site of the biggest pile of slaughtered skaven.

Fully armed and armoured, the Vampire Count stowed his belongings, and stood beside his war steed, waiting for the sun to set. His best chance to track down an entrance to the skaven labyrinth below the earth was in open ground, since the ratmen were too lazy to dig through the roots of trees. He would have to wait for several hours in the woods before emerging at twilight, but he was used to the passage of great tracts of time and could wait out these hours without recourse to thought or movement, food or rest. As he waited he would recite his mantra, over and over again, and try to remember the true meaning of honour.

Hail mine liege lord the night

Hail mine liege lady the moon

Hail mine steed of might

Hail mine blades of doom

Hail mine eternity of life

Hail mine eternity of death

Hail mine duty of strife

Hail mine sacrifice of faith

‘Tell me of the skaven,’ said the youth as the companions sat together over a small fire, eating the roasted flesh of the tubers and corms that grew in the mulchy layers of earth close to the surface.

‘The ratmen?’ asked the older man. ‘They live no life at all, but fill what little time they have with retched thrashing and mewling and scavenging for carrion. Their weapons are primitive and their usage crude, but predictable. But talk is meaningless. You are well-trained and will confront the skaven soon enough.’

The stench in the air was of putrefaction, animal and vegetable, but there was no smell of fresh blood or of living beings, not even of the skaven.

The Vampire Count stood soft in the knees and low at the shoulders in a dark, earthy tunnel, his eyes glowing, shedding enough light for him to see a yard or two of the path ahead. He could hear nothing, and his touch was impeded by the covering of leather, chain and metal that encased his body. He must rely on being able to smell and taste the air to find his quarry.

The Vampire Count did not draw his weapon in the confined space, since there was nothing nearby to attack nor to defend himself against, but he was eager for the fight. He could move more easily in open spaces, and in tunnels built of brick or hewn from rock rather than dug out of the earth with claws. At every junction, the Count took the wider tunnel with the higher ceiling, while still working his way down into the earth.

The scents changed little, but the confined spaces seemed to concentrate them. Many of the smells were as old as time, unable to escape and dissipate into the air above ground. None of the smells were dry, none clean, none fresh or enticing. The tunnels smelt not of sweet earth or baked brick, or hewn stone, but of rot and decay, of damp and infection and death and putrefaction. It did not dawn on the Vampire Count to wonder what he smelled of. It did not occur to him that his body smelled of age and death, of disease and fear.

None stopped his passage through the tunnels and burrows that drew him deeper underground, for there were none to stop him.

The first skaven that the Vampire Count encountered were a clutch of mewling infants, pink and mottled of skin, crusted of eye, transparent of claw. He drew his sword through their pitiful bodies not in self-defence but in revulsion. They made no sound as they died. The only sound the Count made was to exhale with the stroke, as he had been taught hundreds of years before, despite the fact that breathing was redundant and his lungs were petrified, rendered useless at the time of his undeath. He had maintained his habits forcibly at first, afraid that he would forget his old self as his undead state took precedence over everything that had gone before. Now he wished that he had forgotten, that he could forget. Nothing in his undead life gave him pain so much as the loss of the old way of living.

The Vampire Count took hold of the neck of his scabbard in his left hand, preparing to replace his sword, when he heard a faint, distant scratching noise that brought his nose up to meet the movement in the air to detect any fresh odour.

The smell was of carrion flesh and infection, but newer, more immediate, and more likely to be alive than dead.

The Count adjusted his grip on his sword and surged into the darkness, down a sloping corridor that gave way to another and then another. Two minutes later, he found himself at a junction of four corridors, one sloping upwards, two low and dark, but the fourth... the fourth was wide of mouth and sweeping of curve.

The Count heard a crash and a tumble, and the shriek and screech of narrow jaws and unsheathed claws. He was almost bowled over by a scratching, screaming bundle of several skaven bodies, hurtling from the tunnel like cats in the middle of a fight.

A pair of bloody, shiny eyes looked up at him, and the head they belonged to was suddenly still at the centre of the mayhem. As the ratman opened his mouth to shriek a warning to the other members of the ragged ball of fur that constituted their several bodies, the Count brought his blade across its jaw and out through the back of its head. In one sweeping motion, he separated the ratman from its life by dividing the crown of its head from its mandible. A second ratman lost an eye, and, while it was lamenting its fortune, was lanced through the belly on the end of the Count’s rapidly swinging sword. The Count misjudged his third stroke when one of the ratmen moved faster than he had anticipated, and he took two limbs from the skaven, a lower and an upper on its left side. The ratman tried for a moment to run away from its attacker, but became confused, and could only perform a sudden ragged circle before it bled out. The Count thought he had seen off the last of the little clutch of skaven when the fourth clamped one paw to its face and another to its chest and then literally keeled over in front of him before he had even swung at it. But there was a fifth ratman, who had separated itself from the melee at the first opportunity and was hot-footing it back down the tunnel, bellowing as it went.

The Count followed it, not so quickly, but with steely determination. Any live ratman would surely lead him, eventually, to the great skaven-killer that was the ethereal elf.

The pair of men, tall and slender silhouettes in the fading light, struck camp as soon as they had finished their meal and cleaned their utensils. The elegant dishes went back into their packs, and they left the site of their meal as it had been when they had arrived. The last of the fire was brushed back into the earth and carefully kicked over, and the companions left no trace of themselves as they went in search of an opening in the ground.

Their eyes adjusted quickly from the twilight to the underground gloom, and they soon found themselves navigating a series of earth tunnels, moist to the touch, but eerily quiet.

The older, shorter of the two figures led the way when the tunnels and corridors were too narrow for them to walk side-by-side, and their exceptional height meant that few of the burrows were tall enough for them to stand upright in. The older man kept his entire torso low, so that his head remained upright and level, and the youth behind him followed his lead, soon matching his stride, and growing increasingly confident.

‘How do we track him?’ asked the youth.

‘We don’t. We track death.’

‘Because of the humans?’ asked the youth.

‘Because of the humans’ stories,’ said the older man. ‘If he defended them, if he slew even half as many as they say, if he is still beneath the ground, then we will find him where we find death.’

‘Deeper then?’ asked the youth, as they came to a fork in the tunnel. He hesitated for a moment, resting the palm of his hand against the dark, packed-earth wall, and looked hard at his companion, as if concentrating. ‘There’s movement.’

‘Deeper,’ said his companion, already leading the way.

At the next turn in the tunnel, in a shallow alcove to the left of them, they saw their first dead.

‘What is it?’ asked the youth, steadying his breathing, lest the stench of putrid flesh overwhelm his senses.

‘They,’ said his companion. ‘They’re the young. That’s what their offspring look like, such as they are. Not very different from the adults, smaller of course, but equally pestilential.’

‘He did this?’ asked the youth.

His elder dropped in his knees to look a little more closely at the bundle of blood and downy fur.

‘The kill is clean, efficient, executed with a honed blade. He could have done this. No... He must have done this, for who else in these parts would wield a blade so elegantly? Certainly not the skaven, and the humans carried more tools than weapons below ground when they went into battle.’

‘It isn’t the work of a human hand,’ the youth agreed.

‘The rest might be due to fatigue or the confines of the space. The strokes do not quite conform to his usual pattern or attack, but in the absence of an alternative, we must believe that it is him.’

The pair continued for another quarter of a mile of tunnels, turning this way and that, following the vibrations in the walls. Then the older companion stopped suddenly as he felt a series of thuds through the earth floor.

‘Bodies?’ asked the youth.

‘Falling to the floor. Creatures are dying.’

The youth made to hurry forward, but the old man extended an arm to prevent him. There was a strange, animal cry, and then nothing.

‘He doesn’t need our help,’ said the old man. ‘The battle is over, until the next time.’

‘Should we let him know we’re behind him?’ asked the youth. ‘Should we call out?’

‘Subtle as ever,’ said his companion. ‘He’ll know we’re here. We’re not hiding our footfalls, and we’re speaking together freely. Even an idiot human would have no trouble tracking us down.’

Minutes later, they came upon four skaven corpses, variously annihilated with some bladed weapon.

‘Look here,’ said the youth, pointing to a corpse that had died of its injuries, the limbs on the left side of its body cut cleanly from its body. ‘This is not the work of a consummate warrior.’

His companion looked down at the body.

‘No,’ he said, ‘but the skaven are surprisingly fleet, and singular of purpose. If this rat creature darted swiftly and suddenly enough, especially with a kick of adrenaline behind it, there is just a chance that even an experienced swordsman might miss his target once in a while.’

‘It seems so unlikely,’ said the youth.

‘Perhaps,’ said the old man, ‘but he has been below ground, fighting a massed horde of skaven, for several days, and none of us is perfect... Not even–’

The skaven was almost past them before they had seen it, crossing the junction where they had found the corpses. The youth drew the shorter of his blades, but his companion had drawn a blade and driven it through the creature, high against its collarbone before he had the chance to wield it.

The skaven remained standing, clutching at its shoulder as the older man twisted his blade and opened the wound, making the ratman shriek and fall.

‘You’re right,’ said the youth, ‘they’re fast.’

‘Still not fast enough, though, lad.’

The Count turned as he heard the sudden shriek of a skaven, a ratman under attack. Moments later there was a thud, and the faint sound of words, or perhaps humming. He bent his ear and concentrated on the sounds, but they were not words in any language that he recognised, and nor were they the sudden squeaks and squawks of the skaven. He wondered for a moment if the words might have come from the elf, but dismissed the thought. The sounds came from behind and above him, and the great warrior was surely deep among the ratmen, killing and maiming, and, besides, the elf had been alone, with no one to talk to.

The next junction was a dog-legged right turn down another slope, a marriage of stone and earth that included several ragged steps. The Count hid himself in the shadows at the bottom of the steps and waited.

He heard steps, not the scamper of claws, but the definite strides of upright bipeds. The strides seemed long for any but the tallest humans, but light and confident, more like a dance with a regular beat than simple walking. There were, however, two distinct walkers, the rhythms slightly different.

The strides sounded at first close by, but then deviated before coming back at a right angle to their original position. The corridors were irregular, labyrinthine, and sounds echoed and bounced around in the spaces in a manner that the Count found confusing. He did not trust them.

He moved away down the sloping tunnel that had begun with the stone steps, and could hear nothing.

He stopped again, and the footfalls were audible once more.

He walked back to the steps, and the footfalls stopped.

The Count was sure, now, that he was being followed. His pursuers stopping to listen for his footfalls, and walking towards him when he moved on.

He knew that he could not mask the sound of his steps, or the vibrations he made in the tunnels. He was not built for subtlety and his armour would not allow for it, but he was built to fight, and he would be ready and waiting for the battle when it came to him.

‘Do you hear that?’ asked the youth. ‘That is not the sound of his stride.’

‘Nor that of a ratman,’ said his companion.

‘A human, then?’

‘A super-human if he was responsible for the killing we’ve seen,’ said the old man. ‘A true warrior. I doubt such a man would exist among the towns and villages, and among the people we have seen here.’

‘A traveller, then, a mercenary?’ asked the youth, ‘but then why did the locals tell tales of an elf and not of this mortal?’

‘An exceptional man might seem like an elf to some of them, and might easily become an elf in the telling of their tales. The humans call it “hyperbole”, and they’re wondrous accomplished in the use of it.’

‘We should leave then?’ asked the youth. ‘We should search for him elsewhere?’

‘Where “elsewhere”,’ asked the old man, ‘when there is no word of him anywhere but here. Besides, even the most resourceful human might benefit from our assistance against the skaven.’

‘Have we not a purpose of our own?’ asked the youth.

‘Our purpose has ever been to serve,’ said the old man, ‘and serve is what we shall ever endeavour to do.’

A sheen of red light penetrated the air as the Vampire Count blinked. He knew that they were close, and he knew that he had no choice but to confront them. He expanded the muscles in his chest as if breathing deeply into stone-hard lungs, and he felt a calm descend around him. He would fight. He knew that he would fight, but, for the first time since he had been immortal, he also knew that he could fight and lose.

The youth looked at his companion, his mouth open slightly as if to say something, but his feet stilled against crumbling earth. The passage was to his right, stone steps leading down into it at an angle. He had seen something.

His old companion looked steadily into the youth’s eyes, forbidding him to move or speak.

The reddish light shone faintly but steadily to their right, a little below their head height, but the steps surely allowed for that. The old man moved silently against the wall opposite the tunnel mouth and waved a hand for the youth to stand beside, but behind, him.

They both concentrated hard on the dull light that went out and then returned as if in a blink.

The two men unsheathed their short blades, swords being too long and unwieldy in the confined space.

The youth gestured with his head tilted in the direction of the light, as if asking a question.

His companion shook his head, keeping his eyes on the opening to the tunnel.

Whatever was waiting in the entrance to the tunnel was not human, and nor was it the elf they sought. Whatever was waiting in the entrance was not skaven. It was assuredly not friend, and so it was almost certainly foe.

The old man adjusted his grip on his weapon and, as swift and silent as he could be, he flew down the steps, straight at the red light, ready to defend his life and that of his companion.

A blade came to meet his, mere inches from their faces, as the old man got his first look at his opponent. The youth followed his companion with all haste, but stopped dead in his tracks on the bottom step, stunned by what stood before him.

The youth thrust haphazardly with his blade, but not before his adversary had unsheathed a second weapon, parrying both blades, before turning both of his opponents’ weapons away.

The youth looked from his friend to his foe and back again, unsure of his standing. Should he fight alongside his companion, or should he wait to see what transpired between the two combatants? Honour required that only one of them should do battle with their adversary, that he stand down in favour of the older man, and the first to attack, but their assailant looked like a fierce creature, the stuff of legend.

The old man tossed his short blade to his left hand and drew a second with his right. He did not draw a sword, knowing that it would become an encumbrance in the limited space, and he was not eager to blunt it on steel and stone. The knife he drew from his boot was an all-purpose tool more than it was a weapon, but its long, grooved stiletto blade was honed to an edge for skinning beasts and stripping the bark from saplings, and wielding it would double his chances of striking the Vampire Count a fatal blow.

The Vampire Count came on fast and sure, and the old man had to duck and parry fast and aggressively to prevent the first three strikes of the Vampire Count’s blade from finding the flaws in his defence. Then he was on the attack, looking always for chinks in the warrior’s armour as his blades flashed left and right, aiming at joints and the soft places under the arms and thighs and in the groin. He did not expect to hit his targets against a swordsman who was clearly more than capable, fast, strong and determined, but he might put the beast on the defensive, and slow down the chances that a counter-attack might prove fatal.

The youth had never seen the old man sweat before, and was surprised to see it now. He was even more surprised by the Vampire Count’s prowess with a blade, and his confidence, especially when face to face with so masterly an opponent.

The Vampire Count grunted and feinted, and then came in at an angle across the old man’s body, and the youth finally realised that his companion might be in real trouble. The blade in his hand was ready, and he was as capable as one so young and untried could be. He had certainly proved himself in the training arenas, and had taken more instruction from the old man on their arduous journey to this place. He cut in, instinctively forcing the Vampire Count’s blade wide of his target, slewing the steel across the undead’s body at a clumsy angle, unbalancing him.

The old man got a blade in low, and felt sure that he had torn into the Vampire Count’s calf, despite there being no blood to show for his effort.

The Vampire Count didn’t falter, but stepped into the youth’s next lunge, bringing them virtually nose-to-nose with each other.

The youth breathed in as he prepared to break and thrust, and almost gagged on the rich dry smell of death mixed with the sweet aroma of lapping powders and the musky scent of the fine chamois that the Vampire Count used to polish his armour.

His old companion came to his rescue, blindsiding the Vampire Count with a sweep and a lurch, bringing the blade in his left hand up clumsily, but effectively, into range of those fierce red eyes.

The Vampire Count ducked the old man’s strike, and the youth rallied.

The youth’s next thrust was fierce, but ill-considered. He wanted nothing more than to maim and kill the vile creature, but his disgust had got the better of his fighting prowess, and his desperation to succeed led to a clumsy attack that was easily parried away. The youth found himself without his blade, and had to step back to regroup while the old man held back the Vampire Count as effectively as he could.

The fight slowed.

The old man brought both blades to the battle, lunging and crossing, the first blade skidding off the curving steel of a cuisse, the second barely making contact with the inside of the Vampire Count’s left forearm. The undead warrior parried lightly, making no attempt to separate the old man from his weapons, and failing to take advantage and counter-attack.

The fight slowed further, the old man testing the Vampire Count’s resolve to do him real damage, leaving an opening here, an undefended flank there. He took a tear in his cloak and a nick to an earlobe for his trouble, but no final swing, no fatal blow was struck.

The youth stood and watched, aghast, before coming back into the fray, at which point, the Vampire Count doubled his efforts to take into account his attack.

‘Fight, fiend!’ declared the youth, appalled that such a creature should dare to patronise not only himself, but his revered companion. ‘Attack!’

The old man simply stepped back, leaving the youth to do his best. His best was fine, good even, but it was not the stuff of great legends.

‘Desist,’ said the old man.

The youth fumbled his parry and was rewarded with a long scratch down the length of his right arm, as he reacted in disbelief to his old friend’s command.

The red-eyed creature desisted at once, sheathing his weapon and taking a short step backwards.

The youth attacked once more, a combination of frustration and desperation getting the better of him. He sliced a neat gouge in the Vampire Count’s cheek, and watched, horrified as it failed to fill with blood. A thin trickle of yellowish liquid eventually drizzled out of the curving gash, and the folds of skin separated slightly, but, by that time, the Vampire Count had taken hold of the youth by his shoulders and was holding the stunned boy at arm’s-length. The Vampire Count’s eyes, still red, failed to shine as brightly as they had before, and the youth thought he saw melancholy in them.

Then the moment has past. He shrugged the Vampire Count’s hands off his shoulders and took a step back to stand next to his companion.

The Vampire Count began to turn slowly, confident in the knowledge that he would not come under attack a second time. He felt as weary as he had ever felt, his existence perhaps more futile than it had been only an hour or two ago. He had thought to meet his nemesis, and he had found only another enemy, a worthy enemy, who had given him a fair fight, but these two would have to work longer and harder if they were ever to find a way to best him. The old one, perhaps, for he had clearly been a great warrior in his time, but the youth had a very great deal to learn, and the Vampire Count would rather be a part of that education than end the boy’s life before it had begun. Mortality seemed even more precious to him now, when he viewed it in the eager eyes and strong young limbs of the boy.

If he had been capable of shedding a tear, the Vampire Count might have shed one then, but only for himself, and only because he was thwarted in what might prove his last chance to meet a worthy adversary. Perhaps in another hundred years the boy would be up to the challenge. He did not want to wait another hundred years.

The Vampire Count had taken two or three steps forward before the old man called out to him.

‘Wait,’ he said.

The Vampire Count half-turned, but made no move to walk towards his adversary.

‘You are not he,’ he said over his shoulder, his voice deep and hollow and his tones heavily accented with a guttural intonation that the boy had not heard before.

The old man thought for a moment, and the Vampire Count waited for him to formulate his thought, standing in impressive profile before them.

‘I am not he,’ he said.

‘Nor neither of you be,’ said the Count.

The boy tried to untangle the oddness of the phrase, which, even by the standards of human language felt like a form of torture to his ears. Then he looked from the Vampire Count to the old man.

‘He has seen him,’ he said.

The Vampire Count, failing to understand the boy’s alien language, made to turn from them again.

‘You have seen him, then?’ asked the old man, using the only language the two had in common.

‘Him?’ asked the Vampire Count. ‘I sought out the ancient one, sought out his valour and his wondrous swordplay. I sought to expire at his hand. I sought to count him mine liege lord of death.’

‘You have fought him, then?’ asked the youth.

The Vampire Count turned to face them both, intrigued.

‘Thou art brethren to the ancient one?’ he asked. ‘Brethren, and yet lesser warriors than thou shouldst be.’

‘Older,’ said the old man, ‘or younger.’ He gestured to the youth.

‘Cousins,’ said the youth. ‘I believe we call each other cousin. I am his cousin, and my revered companion is his teacher... and mine too, should I impress him.’

‘Thou, teacher, hast been bested,’ said the Vampire Count, without irony.

‘I was bested a great many years ago,’ said the old man, sheathing his blade and then sitting on the step behind him, stretching his left leg in front of him and pushing his second weapon back into the inside edge of his boot.

‘You are alive,’ said the youth. ‘How come you to be alive. Why would he not kill a monster such as you?’

The old man looked up at the boy.

‘A little respect for the warrior,’ he said in their own language. ‘Talk of being bested might give him cause to best you yet, and me too, should it fall to his will.’

The Vampire Count turned and took a step away from the pair as the youth also made to sheath his blade. Death would not release him from a thousand years of undeath today, and he was tired of talk made so difficult by the version of his language which they spoke, but which he hardly recognised.

Then came the sound.

It filled the corridors with a booming rush that resonated at a frequency lower than anyone would expect from a skaven horde. It was, nonetheless, a cacophony of voices baying and calling as one mind with one intention.

The Vampire Count stood still among the wave of sound as it rolled over him, and then turned to the others. The old man was standing with one hand against the stone wall beside him, and the youth had armed himself and was trying not to cower against the onslaught that was that ferocious cacophony, while clearly intent on getting away from it as fast as he could manage.

The old man stayed the youth with one hand on his arm, a touch both reassuring and commanding. Then he looked hard into the Vampire Count’s eyes for a moment before asking his question.

‘Do they call for him?’ he asked. ‘Is the ancient one still below ground?’

The Vampire Count had an image in his head of Gilead standing in a broad, dark, stinking space, surrounded by tunnels, cutting down ratmen two, three, even four at a time. He remembered the baleful cries as the ancient one wrought his destruction on the petty vermin. He remembered, for a moment, the dual in the forest, and he knew not how the elf had been taken, but every ounce of magic left in his veins told him that he had, that the ancient one would be found below ground, deep in the heart of the Rat King’s empire.

The Vampire Count said nothing, he simply turned on his heel and lumbered off down the tunnel towards the deafening roar that once more assailed their senses, beckoning as he went.

‘No!’ shouted the old man, behind him. His hand was still against the earth wall, and he let go of the youth’s arm in order to point in a direction at a steep angle to the tunnel they were standing in.

The Vampire Count knew that the old man was better equipped than he was to judge the distance and direction of the sound, for he knew something of the constitution and skills of the elf-kind.

The three unlikely companions turned as one, climbed the steps out of the tunnel, and turned into a narrow earthwork, one at a time, descending steeply into they knew not what.

The old elf, Fithvael thought of Gilead, his companion and friend.

The boy, Laban te Tuin Tor Mahone, who had attended Baneth’s funeral and been given into Fithvael’s care, thought of the legend that was his great cousin, Gilead, and hoped that he could somehow prove worthy of the trust that had been placed in him by his community, and of the family connection to his hero, however tenuous it might be.

The Vampire Count thought only of an all-embracing nothingness that would end his misery forever.

THUNDER FROM FENRIS

Nick Kyme

‘No son of Russ should die like this.’

Afger Ironmane was crouched in the snow. He regarded the mangled corpse lying next to him forlornly.

It was Barek Thunderborn, a fellow Space Wolf, his brother.

Steam was rising from the carcass of Barek’s beloved wolf-mount, Gerik. The monstrous beast had been torn apart.

The drifts had lessened in the last hour, and rolled slowly across the tundra. Even so, they had begun to settle over Barek’s corpse. The Space Wolf’s blood, still warm from his recent slaying, created dark-red blossoms in the veiling snow. It did little to hide the lacerations in his battle-plate. Nor did it smother his grievous wounds. Cooling intestines were heaped just below Barek’s groin and trailed a half metre from the murder site.

‘Slain by one of his own.’ Afger bit back his anger, but his gauntleted fist was clenched. Snow dappled his armour, turning blue-grey into dirty white. It piled on his pauldrons, only to loosen and cascade off as he got up. Clods of snow clung to his beard too, the black and iron-grey streaks powdered white.

‘We don’t know that for sure, brother.’

Skeln Icehowl was standing farther away. His voice was deep, like the rumble of slow-moving icebergs. He patted his giant wolf-mount Fenrir as it bristled at the stench of blood.

Like his battle-brother, Skeln wore the blue-grey power armour of the Space Wolves. And also like his brother, it was festooned with fetishes and totems honouring their liege-lord Leman Russ and the fierce, warrior-pride of the Wolf Guard of Fenris. A fanged necklace hung around Skeln’s gorget, and a pelt of thick fur draped down his armoured back. Runic talismans dangled off leather thongs attached to his breastplate, which carried the gilt sigil of a winged, lupine skull.

Skeln’s blond beard was less wild than Afger’s and wreathed by snow. He carried a scar across his forehead and above his left eye – a relic of an earlier battle. Both warrior’s had a feral cast to their features, the echo of their namesake, and went unhooded, preferring to feel the icy caress of the weather.

‘It was Hagni,’ disputed Afger. ‘What else could tear Barek Thunderborn apart like this?’ He gestured to the butchered remains. With Barek’s power amour split like paper, his flesh torn and organs ripped from his body, Skeln found an argument difficult to come by. Instead he snarled, showing long canines. His massive wolf-mount bared its own fangs in empathy.

Afger and Skeln hailed from a rarefied, some said mythical, brotherhood within the Space Wolves. They rode thunderwolves, the greatest of all the Fenrisian wolves, as a man would ride a horse. Such creatures were massive, more monster than wolf, easily twice as large as a Terran bear and many times more ferocious. Thick fur was as strong as steel wire. Long fangs were sharp and broad like swords. Few could master such beasts as those that stalked the Mountains of the Maelstrom, and even then they were not wholly tamed.

‘The Scions of Pestilence are dead. Our mission is ended,’ muttered Skeln. ‘Hagni must be found and captured.’

‘He is wulfen!’ Afger was vehement. ‘He must be killed.’

‘No, Afger,’ Skeln’s voice was firm. ‘The Wolf Priests will judge him. It is not for us to decide.’

‘Barek Thunderborn lies dead and it is not for us to decide? Hagni is our brother no longer. He slew a thunderwolf, Skeln.’

‘I won’t condemn him, Afger. What if it was you we hunted?’

Afger thumped his breastplate. Nearby, his wolf-mount, Skoll, growled and pawed the ground.

‘Then I would welcome death as release from dishonour.’

Fenrir snarled, hackles rising on its muscled neck. A sharp word from Skeln quelled his mount’s ire to a low growl. Any retort would have to wait, as the sound of an approaching vehicle interrupted them.

Both Space Wolves turned and saw a Chimera armoured troop carrier rumbling towards them across a snow-choked road. Several kilometres behind it, south of the Space Wolves’ position, loomed a dark bastion. It was the Imperial command post of the Cadian 154th, the ‘Fusiliers’, and the slab-sided Chimera tank that ground to a halt before the Wolves belonged to the regiment’s commanding officer, Colonel Vorin Ekhart.

The rear hatch squealed opened on half-frozen hinges, landing with a dull thunk, and a jowly man in the olive drab of the Cadians stepped out.

Colonel Ekhart rubbed his gloved hands together, his breath ghosting the air, as he tried to ward off the cold. Neither the storm coat he wore, nor the thick moustaches framing his upper lip, could keep him from shivering.

‘Your men are as grey as the weather, colonel,’ remarked Skeln, appraising the bedraggled state of the Kasrkin storm troopers accompanying him.

Ekhart looked skyward to a blanket of oppressive platinum, and shrugged. Skeln’s shadow eclipsed the officer, the Space Wolf half again as tall and almost twice as wide. To his credit, Ekhart didn’t look intimidated.

‘A long campaign and this damnable cold,’ he uttered by way of explanation. ‘A few weeks for you, my lord, has been the best part of a year on Skorbad for my men and I.’

The colonel stole a furtive glance at Fenrir, who lathed the air with its long, pink tongue, and tried not to show his disquiet. He was dwarfed by the monstrous wolf. Ekhart would barely be a morsel to a beast like that. Even faced with it now, the colonel couldn’t quite believe his eyes. He hadn’t known such creatures even existed, until he’d seen one. Thunderwolf – the name was mythic, almost otherworldly. Yet here two of them stood, like monsters from some elder age, their masters no less impressive and god-like.

Skeln bared his fangs, grinning, though the gesture failed to reach his eyes.

‘Fenrir…’ he warned in a low growl, before the beast backed down and stopped trying to taste the human meat. ‘The Scions of Pestilence are all dead, colonel,’ Skeln continued. ‘You’ll be leaving this rock soon enough, bound for fresh fields and greater glories in the name of the All Father.’

Skorbad had been in the clutch of a deadly Chaos plague when the Space Wolves had arrived. A cult of Nurgle, one of the Ruinous Powers and the entity that revelled in disease and despoliation, had arisen in one of Skorbad’s monolithic cities. Infection spread quickly, the plague’s victims sickening and dying, before stirring into horrific un-life as mindless flesh-eaters. The Cadians had done their best to staunch its spread but had been unable to locate and destroy the plague’s propagators, a war band of Chaos renegades called the Scions of Pestilence – in truth, bloated monstrosities swelled by Father Nurgle’s corruption.

In three short weeks, the Wolf Guard had trawled the cities of Skorbad, found the renegades and despatched them one by one. Hordes of zombies still haunted the deepest ruins but were waning, and aimless without their Chaos pack masters. The Space Wolves’ role in the conflict was over, until Hagni had turned. So far, only the Space Wolves knew of it.

As for the Cadians, they were to consolidate their position and then hand over control to Skorbad’s Defence Forces, who would mop up what was left of the zombie hordes. The less enviable task of putting back together the shattered world’s infrastructure was the job of its governor and his bureaucratic staff.

Ekhart made the sign of the aquila at the Space Wolf’s utterance of the name the sons of Russ used for the Immortal Emperor of Mankind.

‘Indeed, and I’ll not be sorry to leave this place either,’ he then replied. ‘We caught your coded vox echo over our instruments, and I wanted to come out personally to express my gratitude for–’ the colonel stopped abruptly for a sharp intake of breath. ‘Throne of Earth!’ he swore, ‘Is that…?’ Colonel Ekhart had noticed the visceral remains of Barek, just visible beneath the falling snow.

‘Aye, it is,’ Skeln uttered solemnly, not turning to follow the colonel’s gaze.

Ekhart was shaking his head. Somewhere behind him, a Kasrkin threw up. ‘How could…?’ There was a tremble in the colonel’s voice.

To witness one of the Emperor’s Adeptus Astartes, a fearsome Space Wolf at that, killed in such a way was disturbing. Something that could do that, something that could kill one of the mythical wolves must be…

‘A beast,’ answered Afger, having stayed silent until then. He locked eyes with Skeln, ‘One that must be hunted and slain in turn.’

Ekhart averted his gaze to focus on Skeln. His tone was incredulous.

‘I thought you said the Scions of Pestilence were dead.’

‘They are,’ replied Skeln, turning away, not deigning to elaborate.

‘I have heard tales…’ Ekhart began.

Skeln glared back at him.

The colonel licked his lips nervously.

‘Of Space Wolves becoming beasts.’

The curse of the wulfen was the secret burden of the Space Wolves, a genetic flaw handed down by their progenitor that could manifest at any time. Rumours abound, as they always did, but this was one ugly truth to be kept by the Chapter, and the Chapter alone.

‘Go back to your bastion and lock the gates,’ snarled Afger, losing patience. Mounting up, he reined Skoll towards the open tundra. Kilometres distant the black silhouette of Helspire, one of the largest of Skorbad’s cities, blighted the horizon. Hagni would be seeking refuge after his kill. ‘We have lingered here long enough, brother,’ Afger said to Skeln, who nodded.

‘Will you…?’ Ekhart ventured, taking an involuntary step back. His storm troopers levelled their lasguns, as they imagined monsters in the warriors before them.

‘You’d be dead before you’d pull the trigger,’ said a rasping voice.

A Kasrkin put up his hands as he felt the sharp caress of metal at his neck.

A third Space Wolf emerged out of the drifts that had grown more belligerent as they’d been talking, having crept up on Colonel Ekhart’s party.

Skeln scowled, but was inwardly impressed at his brother’s stealth.

‘Thorgard,’ he said.

The Space Wolf lowered his wolf claw and laughed. He hadn’t ignited the blades; at such close proximity, the electrical charge alone would have sheared the Kasrkin’s head off.

Thorgard had a closely-cropped beard with a long mane of ruddy hair, plaited with rune stones and bound by bronze rings. His humour was booming, and showed his perfect white fangs.

‘Your men were sleeping, colonel. Perhaps you should find some better bodyguards,’ he said good-naturedly, tramping past them with a feral glint in his eyes. ‘Brother,’ he added, the grin just for Skeln as he walked on.

Thorgard’s face saddened as he regarded Barek, but was quickly impassive.

‘The All Father will judge him, now. It’s out of our hands.’

Afger growled something under his breath, unimpressed at his brother’s antics.

Skeln ignored their bickering, his attention on Ekhart who had yet to lower his guard.

‘Our will is strong, colonel,’ he assured him. ‘You need have no fear of us.’

‘Can you be certain of that?’ asked Ekhart, craning his neck as Skeln mounted Fenrir.

Skeln noticed Thorgard’s beast pad over to him from where he’d left it hiding amongst the snow so he could play his trick. Its name was Magnin, and it bowed its head to allow Thorgard to straddle it.

Facing the colonel, Skeln’s eyes were dark hollows. ‘Do as Afger said: Go back to your bastion. Lock the gates.’

He urged Fenrir with a firm command and went to join his brothers, leaving Ekhart no less uneasy.

They had tarried long enough. Barek’s slayer must be found and stopped, one way or another. Skeln only hoped there was some of Hagni left to bring back.

Colonel Ekhart shuddered as he watched the thunderwolves lope away. It wasn’t from the cold, either.

A terrible, wracking cough gripped him. It felt like burning acid in his lungs. When Ekhart took his hand away from his mouth, there were traces of blood on his glove.

‘Sir?’ said the sergeant of the Kasrkin, about to go to his colonel’s aid before being waved away.

‘It’s nothing,’ Ekhart lied. ‘Into the Chimera,’ he added, before about facing. ‘We’ll wait for the landers at the bastion and lock our gates.’

‘They’re surrounded,’ hissed Afger, sliding up his bolter to sight down its barrel. ‘I count sixteen left. Estimate thirty dead.’

‘Enemies?’ Skeln’s voice inquired from below.

‘At least sixty… maybe more.’

Following Hagni’s trail, the Wolf Guard had entered Helspire without incident. On the way, Thorgard had told them of his discovery of Warg, Hagni’s thunderwolf, ripped apart like Barek and half-buried by a forlorn roadside. Skeln hoped shame had compelled Hagni to try and conceal the carcass, that some of the warrior yet remained within the flesh of the beast. Shreds of armour had littered the trail, too, discarded by Hagni as he outgrew it, shed like old skin as he metamorphosed beneath.

As it had eclipsed the Space Wolves, the long shadow of Helspire had been a blanket over Skeln’s thoughts. Entering the darkness of the city, he became alert and set his troubles aside.

The sprawling cityscape was ghostlike and silent. Shadowed avenues held potential threats at every turn, huge towers loomed forbiddingly, watching, waiting. Ruins filled the broken streets and plazas, stark evidence of the brutal fight that had unfolded here. It proved little impediment to the monstrous beasts rode by the Wolf Guard. None challenged them. Most of Helspire’s populous was either dead, in hiding or had already fled elsewhere. It made hearing the crack of las-fire and the frantic shouts of Cadians easy to discern. The battle din echoed loudly in the empty city. Tracking it to its source had been even easier.

What might once have been a public auditorium stretched out below Afger. One of its columns, no longer supporting the vaulted ceiling, had half-collapsed. Crashed into the wall and held fast, it offered a high vantage point. Skoll had crawled stealthily up the column and lay on its belly as Afger leaned over to survey the scene beneath him.

There was only room for one thunderwolf at the column’s broken summit, so Skeln waited some fifteen metres or so below with Thorgard and their mounts, hidden by the ruins.

Afger saw a ring of battered-looking Cadian Guardsmen, pulling ever tighter; snapping off sporadic bursts with whatever was left in their weapons’ power packs. Converging on them, a shambling horde of flesh-eaters, their bodies rank with decomposition. The whiff of decay made the Space Wolf’s olfactory senses rankle. The wretched plague victims shuffled on broken limbs, old wounds ragged and dark in their dirty uniforms. Some clutched lasguns like clubs, in parody of their former lives and compelled by degrading muscle memory. Others merely reached with taloned fingers, their sharpened nails piercing their gloves; dried blood masking their grotesque and hungering faces.

‘To be killed by your former comrades in arms…’ Afger whispered, shaking his head, then realised what he was saying. He held his tongue as another Cadian was dragged screaming into the mob and slowly devoured. The rest were fighting hard. They wanted to live.

‘Skeln,’ uttered Afger, ‘High and low.’

Turning to Thorgard, Skeln found his brother was already gone.

‘On my way,’ Thorgard’s voice came through the comm-bead in Skeln’s ear. Always a step ahead was Thorgard.

Skeln mentally traced a route for Fenrir through the ruins that would bring

them to the auditorium floor.

‘We are ready, Afger.’

A second’s pause went by.

‘Now,’ snarled Afger.

Skoll got to its haunches and leapt off the column, a howling battle-cry on the lips of man and monster.

They fell amongst the zombie horde and laid about them with fury. Skoll crushed three of the plague creatures as it landed, dashing out their putrid brains with sweeps of its claws. It seized another in iron-hard jaws, biting it in two and casting aside the remains like unwanted meat. The legs stayed inert, but the zombie’s torso began to crawl along the ground, driven by keening hunger.

Afger paid it no heed. Unleashing his bolter, he gunned down a slavering zombie pack, their bodies exploding as the mass-reactive shells blasted them apart. Gore spattered his armour and Skoll’s brawny, half-cybernetic flanks. Man and beast revelled in it, this baptism of blood, howling for more carnage.

As the creatures moved on Afger, this new prey taking the pressure off the still firing Cadians, Skeln roared into view. He drove Fenrir headlong into the diseased masses, the thunderwolf using its bulk and power to batter through them. Rotting corpses were tossed aside, smashed like kindling against pounding surf, before Fenrir slowed and the real slaughter began.

A zombie leapt at Skeln, having launched itself from a high pile of rubble, only for the Space Wolf to arrest its flight with a blazing retort of fire from his bolt pistol. The creature was held in mid-air, caught in the explosive web from Skeln’s weapon. The muzzle flare lit its gruesome features in monochrome before it disintegrated against the bolt pistol’s power.

A half-second and Skeln swung his weapon around to dispatch another zombie trying to rake Fenrir’s exposed flanks. Decaying talons met adamantium skin and shattered, before Skeln killed it. The monstrous wolf had just torn the head off another plague creature and was spitting out the saliva-drenched skull when Thorgard appeared on the far side of the auditorium, wolf claws crackling.

He sheared through a half-dozen zombies as Magnin carried him low across the floor. Heads, limbs and torsos fell like macabre rain in his wake.

The Space Wolves were three points of a triangle, herding the diminishing zombie horde together, what was left of the Cadians standing at the edge of the corral’s bloody perimeter.

Each time the thunderwolves drove in to the zombie horde they tore out again, wreaking carnage, slaying any stragglers and tightening the noose before charging back in. It was savage and furious, but not an iota of rage was wasted. Every shot was a kill, every blade stroke left a dismembered corpse behind it.

Sixty soon became thirty, then twenty as the Space Wolves butchered with controlled ferocity.

‘For the All Father!’ roared Afger, his snarling face framed by the flare of his bolter’s thunder.

Thorgard echoed him then leapt up onto his beast’s back, balancing on its broad shoulders for a moment like an acrobat at a carnival before catapulting into the zombies. Lightning arcs tore strips in the half-darkness, describing the deadly passage of Thorgard’s wolf claws. Magnin peeled off, loping around the edge of the plague-ridden masses, biting off heads and shredding bodies with its claws.

Skeln had drawn his rune-etched power axe and stormed in, straddling Fenrir’s back. He howled savagely, hacking down to bifurcate a zombie’s skull before decapitating another with the upswing. Cutting the last of the creatures down, he reined Fenrir in. Even then, the thunderwolf worried at the ruined corpses of the twice dead.

It had lasted only minutes, yet the desolation of dismembered bodies swathed the auditorium floor.

Afger was breathing hard, not from exertion but from the feral-rage still fuelling him. He eyed the eight Cadian survivors and motioned to Skeln.

‘What should we do about them?’

The humans were cowering, awestruck and fearful at the same time, faced with the monstrous thunderwolves and their riders. Several were injured, already showing signs of infection. A Space Wolf’s biology was engineered to withstand such contagions. A Cadian’s was not.

Skeln’s body language was resigned as he dropped down off Fenrir and stalked over to the Guardsmen.

‘We can take no chances.’

To succumb to such a flesh plague was horrendous. Skeln could scarcely imagine the dishonour in it should his brothers be susceptible to it; should they ever turn. At least the wulfen curse was pure; at least it embraced the unfettered feral rage that lurked at every Space Wolf’s core. But this… it was ignoble, debased. Grace of Russ that they should be spared such a fate.

Some of the Cadians pleaded for death. Some got to their knees.

The Space Wolf levelled his bolt pistol. A few of the men closed their eyes, their lips moving silently.

‘Receive the Emperor’s Peace,’ Skeln muttered sadly.

A bark of fire silenced any screams and eclipsed the Guardsmen’s lives forever.

‘It had to be done, brother,’ Thorgard said to Skeln as he was tramping back again.

Skeln mounted up.

‘Aye.’

Afger turned his back on the carnage of the dead Cadians. It was a pity they could not save them, but many more would die if they did not find Hagni soon.

‘The plague worsens,’ Afger stated flatly. A burst from his bolter slew the zombie torso labouring to claw across the floor towards them. Eerie silence followed for a moment after.

‘Ekhart’s soldiers,’ he sneered, evidently unimpressed. ‘I wonder how many more have fallen?’

‘It is a small matter,’ replied Skeln. ‘Infected or fully turned, we have to despatch any we come across until Hagni is found. Though the Scions are slain, the plague must not be allowed to spread.’ He fixed Afger with an icy glare. ‘Mercy guides our hand in this, not revenge. You’d do well to remember that, brother.’

Afger snarled and turned away.

‘Lead on Thorgard,’ he growled a moment later.

Skeln regarded the dead Cadians again, the ones he had been forced to kill.

How many did you butcher¸ Hagni?

Thorgard had the wulfen’s trail again. The hunt was back on.

Thorgard sat alone, in the lee of a ruined meat-farm outhouse. It was towards the heart of Helspire and had been badly damaged in the fighting, little more than a broken corner of prefabricated rockcrete with the skeletons of other structures and the shells of destroyed Chimeras half-buried in the snow nearby. A Cadian platoon had come this way, but had got no farther.

The drifts had worsened in the last few hours. An almost total white-out smothered the horizon. Visibility was abysmally poor, even for the Space Wolves’ acute senses.

Thorgard’s head was bowed, as if in contemplation, oblivious to the snow flurries dancing around his head and clinging to his beard like arctic limpets. He’d built a fire, using his body and the ruin to shield it from the ice winds rolling across the urban tundra, and flensed the meat from some shaggy-haired bovine, indigenous to Skorbad and somehow missed in the evacuation. It was messy work; blood painted the ground around him and gave off a coppery stink.

A hundred metres away, two Wolves were watching.

‘Hagni may be a beast, but he hasn’t lost his instincts,’ hissed Afger. ‘The wulfen won’t take the bait. Why do you insist on trying to snare him, Skeln?’

The other Space Wolf crouched alongside him in a ruined warehouse structure. Skeln was staring intently at the perimeter Thorgard had made, at the traps and foils he had set, hidden well in the snow and rubble. They kept low and to the shadows, Fenrir and Skoll lurking just behind their masters.

Of Magnin, there was no sign. Like its rider, the thunderwolf was adept at stealth – an uncanny feat for a monstrous beast that was nearly two and half metres from claw to shoulder.

‘His fate is not ours to decide,’ Sklen replied at length. He glared at Afger. ‘I’ve told you this already, brother. I won’t give up on Hagni. Not yet.’

Due to the escalating drifts, the trail had grown cold in more ways than one. Hagni’s wulfen scent was no longer redolent on the breeze. His tracks had disappeared, as well as any other signs of his passing.

‘You must be prepared to kill him, Skeln. If Thorgard or I fail, you must do it!’

Skeln grunted and went back to surveying Thorgard’s concealed deterrents.

‘Only if there’s no other choice,’ he muttered.

Something niggled at the back of Skeln’s mind. Hagni was leading them further into disputed territory, where the punitive influence of the Imperial Guard had not reached fully. On the way they’d seen entire platoons frozen solid, grimaces etched permanently on the troopers’ faces under the ice. Convoys of vehicles, Chimeras and even battle tanks, were left by the roadside – empty and abandoned. Was Hagni even fleeing from them? Or was it the wulfen that, even now, laid the trap and not the Wolf Guard?

Skeln had no more time to ponder.

Shadows smeared the snowy fog, grey against the drifts. They were heading for Thorgard.

Afger bared his fangs and scowled. Even in the snow storm, he was close enough to detect the stench of putrefaction. The wind rose abruptly, intensifying to a shrieking gale. Thorgard huddled the fire, but made no move, as the shadows approached. A spurt of crimson laced the ground as he sheared away another scrap of raw meat. The shadows jerked and quickened.

They were just a few metres away now… drawn by the blood.

A form emerged, its crooked fingers reaching, shuffling close to Thorgard on bent, misshapen limbs. It was not alone; not nearly alone.

A hundred metres away, Afger reached for his bolter.

Skeln laid a hand on his shoulder.

‘What if he cannot hear them?’ the twitchy Wolf Guard rasped.

The wind had built to a scream. It buffeted Thorgard’s plaits, tossing them around like vipers. Still he flensed, occasionally devouring a strip of the raw meat.

‘He’ll move.’ Skeln’s tone was reassuring, but he reached for his bolt pistol anyway.

Just a metre away – still, Thorgard seemed oblivious.

Could he not scent the creatures?

‘He’ll move…’ The confidence in Skeln’s voice was waning rapidly. The zombie was almost within touching distance… ‘Arse of Russ!’ he swore, powering to his feet and wrenching his bolt pistol free–

–just as Thorgard leapt up, a backhand slash with his wolf claw cutting first through the reaching zombie’s wrist, then driving on into its upper torso and scything through its neck. Its head bounced onto the ground and Thorgard kicked it into the face of another assailant, before launching forward, claws wide, to cleave the plague creature in two.

Thorgard decapitated four more in as many seconds, grinning wildly at the shredded corpses at his feet, and it was over before it had begun. The zombies’ lighter body mass had evidently failed to set off the snares meant for Hagni, but had not been so silent as to fool Thorgard.

Now only fifty metres away and slowing to a walk, Skeln sighed with relief. He and Afger were about to relax when the grey shadows returned. As the zombies appeared in their droves, it became clear by their uniforms what had happened to the crews of the vehicle convoy.

‘Now we go!’ roared Skeln.

Together they plunged into the drifts, weapons booming.

Thorgard rushed forward and bisected a creature from groin to sternum, using his momentum to push through it and leaving the two ragged body hunks flapping impotently, a metre of gore-slicked snow between them.

To his left a zombie stuttered, its advance halted by the staccato fire of Afger’s bolter. A second burst spun it on its broken ankle and pitched the creature back.

An exploding cranium painted Thorgard’s power armour in thick, dead blood and brain matter. The zombie collapsed to its knees like a puppet without its strings and slumped headless in the slushed snow.

The muzzle flash had barely died from Skeln’s bolt pistol as he drew his power axe and went hand-to-hand. Still a few metres from Thorgard, the other Space Wolf found it hard to maintain his brother’s frenetic pace.

Afger sensibly kept his distance, using his bolter’s range to protect his battle-brothers’ flanks. Fenrir and Skoll barrelled past him on either side as he took up a ready stance and switched to rapid fire. As the pair of snarling thunderwolves hit, Magnin rose out of a snow mound, shawled white and growling for blood. The creatures tore into the undead tank crews, ripping off limbs and raking bodies. Any normal enemy would have fled before such carnage, but the plague zombies had long since forgotten fear. They knew nothing now but the urge to feed, the maddening hunger for flesh that was never slaked.

Skeln hacked through a zombie’s spinal column, just as three more of the creatures rammed into him. He was rocked on his heels but kept his footing, splitting the skull of one with his elbow and shredding the other two with a close-range burst of his bolt pistol.

‘Ha!’ Thorgard bellowed, surrounded by plague creatures. ‘Now this is sport!’ He drove a wolf claw into the torso of one, tearing the blades upward and shattering its clavicle. With the other hand, he swiped off a zombie’s head before crushing it to the ground with a heavy boot. One leapt onto his back, scratching at his neck and gorget. Thorgard reached around to seize it and throw it off when another zombie fired a shot into his torso, an old memory triggering the lasgun in its grasp.

Grimacing, the Space Wolf was about to slash it when he found his arm pinned by another creature. A fourth had mounted his right pauldron and was gnawing at the ceramite.

‘Not like this!’ Thorgard raged. ‘Teeth of Russ, my end will be worthy of a saga!’

Heat singed his face as Afger’s bolter shells tore into the zombies clambering over him. The one clinging to his pauldron was torn off, claws still embedded in the ceramite, whilst the creature pinning Thorgard’s arm was struck in the back. The ammo storm rolled up its spine to burst open its head like a rotten fruit. As Thorgard yanked the zombie off his back and then punched his fist through the lasgunner, Magnin leapt to its master’s defence crushing another two.

‘We cannot slay them all.’ Afger’s voice was tinny and cracked with static as it came through on the comm-bead in Skeln’s ear.

‘Agreed,’ he replied. ‘Mount up and break through.’ Afger cut the link when Skeln had finally caught up to Thorgard. ‘It seems your lure was too effective, brother.’

Some of the other Space Wolf’s eagerness had diminished.

‘I had hoped for larger prey,’ he confessed.

Skeln howled and Fenrir bounded to his side, after finishing a zombie with a savage twist of its jaws.

‘We’re done here,’ he told Thorgard as he climbed atop the monstrous thunderwolf’s back. They’d cleared a bloody gap in the horde but had only seconds until the next wave of plague creatures were upon them.

Thorgard nodded reluctantly. He was summoning Magnin when Afger’s voice crashed in on the comm-bead.

‘There!’ he cried, ‘There, I see the beast! Hagni is abroad and in my sight!’

Afger was pointing, even as he slung himself across Skoll’s shoulders and urged the thunderwolf to charge.

Skeln and Thorgard followed his outstretched finger to a dark silhouette crouched on the horizon line. Though distant, the Wolf Guard made out hulking shoulders and a broad back, hirsute with fur. Skeln thought he caught a shimmer from a pauldron hanging loosely off the beast’s shoulder.

There could be no doubt. It was Hagni; now more beast than man.

Howling a battle-cry, Afger hammered past the other two Space Wolves, intent on his prey. Skoll used its muscled bulk to heave zombies out of its way, crushing bodies beneath it as drove inexorably forwards.

By the time Skeln and Thorgard had spurred their mounts, Afger was well ahead of them. They too battered their way through the plague mob, cutting a bloody path to the open ground ahead. Soon, the horde was floundering behind them and an arctic waste beckoned where the chase was on for Hagni.

‘Damn you, Afger,’ hissed Skeln, eyes locked onto his brother, now even farther in front of them.

Hagni’s silhouette had not yet moved. It merely watched its brothers’ approach. At this rate, Afger would reach it well before Skeln and Thorgard. He seemed hell-bent on facing the wulfen alone. And despite the fact he rode Skoll, Skeln recalled all too well the butchered remains of Barek and his thunderwolf. Alone, Afger faced a very uncertain victory.

A sudden cracking arrested Skeln’s thoughts, and a chill entered his spine.

‘Skeln!’ said Thorgard. He was looking downward, already slowing, ‘the ice!’

The snowy tundra they traversed was not solid ground at all. It was a lake, frozen stiff by the cold weather, but now breaking up with the heavy footfalls of the thunderwolves. Skeln saw the ground webbing beneath Fenrir’s massive paws. An ominous cracking sound followed it.

‘Hold!’ he roared, reining the monstrous beast in and stalling the pursuit. Opening up a channel, he shouted into the comm-bead.

‘Afger! Slow down, the ice is cracking.’

‘I have him. The beast won’t escape again.’

‘Afger–’

–wasn’t listening. He severed the link and rode on harder.

‘I’m sorry Skeln,’ he muttered, ‘Barek must be avenged.’ He peered down the end of his bolter, bringing Hagni into his sights–

‘You are mine, wulfen…’

–when the beast slipped away and was gone.

‘No!’

That was when the ground fell away and icy water rose up around them. Weighed down by armour and augmetics, man and beast were dragged into stygian gloom.

Darkness surrounded him, together with a sense of lightness that Afger had not felt for some time. The rage, the grief at Barek’s death, the burning desire for vengeance, all of it seemed muted by the cold. And for a moment, just the briefest of moments, Afger almost gave in.

Something strong and vice-like seized his wrist. He was travelling upwards again. He saw the vague suggestion of light. Air rushed his lungs and raucous noise clamoured into being as Afger breached the freezing surface of the water.

‘Hold on,’ snarled the voice of Skeln, beard dripping icy wet from when he’d plunged in to grab him.

‘Thorgard, I have him,’ he growled, and the other Wolf Guard came into view. He’d removed his wolf claw gauntlets – they lay on the ice nearby – and leaned over to grasp Afger’s power generator.

‘No,’ Afger roared, thrashing. ‘Leave me! Follow Hagni! Avenge Barek!’

Skeln wasn’t listening. Together, he and Thorgard hauled Afger up and onto the fragile ice bank.

Skoll had not been so fortunate. The thunderwolf’s sheer bulk, its cybernetic body fashioned by the Iron Priests, had sunk it like an anchor. With nothing to cling to, the great beast had drowned in the black depths of the lake. It was a poor end for such a noble creature.

Afger’s expression told Skeln that Skoll’s former master thought so too.

For a short while, they sat on the ice, not daring to move should it crack again and swallow them all this time. The zombie hordes were far enough away not to trouble them.

Skeln glared at Afger, his gaze murderous. Thorgard tentatively retrieved his gauntlets. Afger merely lay on his back and stared into the sky. Cold and pitiless, it echoed the feeling in his hollow heart.

Afger had not spoken for over an hour after the incident on the lake. He felt the loss of Skoll keenly, so strong was their bond. A separation of a limb would have been easier to take. When he did finally give voice, now running alongside Skeln on Fenrir’s back, it was clear his mood had not improved.

‘You should have let me sink and gone after the wulfen,’ he growled.

Skeln’s retort was biting.

‘You’ve lost your mount, and we are two brothers down already, Afger. I will not lose another in a vain and foolish sacrifice.’

‘I would not have drowned,’ Afger snapped.

Skeln looked down at him.

‘No, brother, but you would have given up.’

Afger’s shadowed expression betrayed his shame.

Thorgard had found Hagni’s trail again soon after leaving the ice lake, now far behind them, and was leading the Wolf Guard down into the catacombs of Helspire, the urbanisation of the city growing around them suddenly like a virus.

Here, the city was at its darkest. These were its sinks, its bowels, the very bones of its construction. Streets and avenues became tunnels, towers morphed into the sweating columns of foundation stones and the platinum sky was replaced by the rockcrete underbelly of the roads above. A sewer stink pervaded, sullying the icy crispness of the air. Stagnant heat lingered, emanating from the buried fusion generators that ran the benighted city’s power grid.

Thorgard sniffed the air, finding the wulfen’s scent. There was something else, too, something he couldn’t place.

‘It’s strange…’ he muttered, oblivious to his brothers’ arguing.

‘What is?’ asked Skeln.

‘Since killing Barek, Hagni has had many days to get ahead of us. I expected to track him to a lair, not to see him out in the open, especially so blatantly. It’s as if he wants to be caught.’

Afger bristled.

‘He begs for death.’

Skeln’s eyes became cold, hard bergs. His anger made him rasp.

‘No Space Wolf would ever desire that. No Space Wolf would ever die without a fight.’

Chastened, Afger realised he had spoken out of turn.

‘Sorry, brother,’ he admitted. ‘I am not myself.’

Skoll’s death had hit him hard.

‘But what other explanation is there?’

‘No, it doesn’t feel like that,’ offered Thorgard, challenging Afger’s earlier remark. ‘There is no sport in this. I’ve seen whelpling aspirants harder to track. Hagni allows us to catch up, only to then flee.’

‘He’s getting careless then, that’s all,’ said Afger, ‘and hungry. There is only dead flesh here, no fresh meat to sate the beast.’

Skeln was silent and stern. That was when he noticed the sigils daubed on the walls and the rank, pervading stench growing stronger. They were deep into the heart of Helspire now and reaching the end of a long, broad sewer conduit. A chamber loomed ahead, a sickly oval of light announcing it.

‘There’s something else here,’ hissed Thorgard suddenly, reining Magnin to a stop and speaking Skeln’s thoughts aloud. ‘Very large, very strong. Its scent mingles with the wulfen’s…’

Thorgard turned to face his brothers.

‘Hagni wasn’t trying to flee or merely running wild–’

‘He was leading us,’ said Skeln.

‘There may be some of Hagni left after all…’ hissed Afger.

Skeln ignored him.

‘But leading us to what?’

Thorgard ignited his wolf claws. Their electrical glow framed his face in an eerie light.

‘Brothers…’

Misshapen forms were shuffling into the dirty oval of light. In the chamber beyond, Skeln knew in his core they would find Hagni, and whatever it was he had been leading them to.

Skeln had drawn his weapons, Afger too.

‘Thunderwolves!’ he roared, glaring at the approaching zombies, ‘For Fenris and Leman Russ!’

Howling, the Space Wolves charged down the tunnel, making for the opening and whatever waited for them beyond it.

Skeln’s uppercut smashed a plague creature aside, tearing open its torso and spilling diseased innards. He hung down along Fenrir’s flank like a trick-rider from the old clan gatherings of his former life, when he was still human. Another was flung into the tunnel wall, its bones shattered by the force of Fenrir’s swipe. Afger raked three more with controlled bursts from his bolter. The explosive rounds turned the creatures into little more than a visceral mist. Thorgard cut down the rest; by the end of it, his scything wolf claws with slick and red.

‘A vanguard, nothing more,’ he breathed. The actinic glare from his blades pooled deep shadows around his wild eyes. He was ready for more.

Skeln snarled at the miasma of pestilence coming from the chamber entrance.

Howling, and the deep bellowing of something large and unnatural, emanated from it. It was a wolf fighting a monster.

‘Steel yourselves, brothers,’ Skeln growled, and passed through the dirty oval of light riding Fenrir.

The chamber was a confluence of sewer pipes. Rusted openings in the walls disgorged filth. It pooled in a deep basin in the middle of the room. Wallowing in the dark morass was a pustulant giant.

Sloth-like and disgusting, burgeoning rolls of putrescent-yellow flab ruptured the creature’s armour. The fragments of ceramite that still clung to its grotesque bulk were adhered by rivulets of puss, bursting from the boils and sores infesting its blubbery flesh. Horrid and distended, the beast’s mouth was a gaping maw. Several tongues lolled from one encrusted corner. They licked and probed at the sores lasciviously, tendril-like and sentient. Filled with ranks of needle-like teeth, its mouth was like that of a bloated shark.

Skeln saw the potential in those fangs to inflict the wounds that had killed Barek Thunderborn and hope flared that Hagni could still be saved. He wrinkled his nose at the noisome stench emanating from the thing’s corpulent body. Fat flies buzzed around it in a swarm.

Facing it across a river of pestilence was Hagni.

He was not as Skeln remembered him. Hagni’s armour hung off his body in scraps. His lupine form, now covered in thick fur, had simply outgrown it. Fangs were like daggers in his long mouth, stitched around a slightly protruding snout. Sinew throbbed like cords of steel across a brawny body stretched and made more muscular by the changes wrought by the wulfen curse. Horrific as it was, it was as nothing compared to the other monster in the room.

It was one of the Scions of Pestilence, now swelled by plague and decay, favoured by its dark lord and mutated into a hideous plague-spawn, unrecognisable from the traitors the Space Wolves had hunted previously. Even now, before their eyes, it seemed to be growing, absorbing the filth from the tainted sewer pipes. It had not always been this size, and explained how the creature had managed to kill Barek Thunderborn and slip away undetected… almost undetected. The Space Wolves had somehow missed it, but Hagni, turned to wulfen and his preternatural senses enhanced, had not. He could not defeat it alone; there was enough of the Space Wolf remaining to realise this, or perhaps it was merely instinct that had compelled Hagni to seek out allies and draw them to this fight. Skeln hoped for the former.

Skeln processed this in a half-second, before baring his fangs and howling–

‘Slay it!’

A ripple of explosive fire stitched the plague-spawn’s bloated body and a burble of what might have been pain bubbled from its swollen lips. A stream of corruption belched from the creature’s maw by way of riposte, but Fenrir was already moving. An acid-hiss erupted behind Skeln, head down, as his thunderwolf bounded away from the deadly spray. Afger stormed forwards at the same time, working his way through the mire to the plague-spawn’s left.

Zombies stirred in the wretched muck, corpses surfacing like gruesome buoys, animated by the plague-spawn’s presence. Afger shot them down as he moved, shredding them to pieces as he kept an eye on Hagni.

The wulfen ignored him and launched itself upon the creature, raking its rancid flanks. Flesh tore away, wretched and thin with decomposition. Black, sap-like blood started to mat Hagni’s fur as he clawed at it. Like a geyser exploding from the earth, the wulfen was struck in the face by a plume of bile. The force of it pitched Hagni off the plague-spawn’s body and sent him careening into the chamber wall.

Thorgard rode Magnin down the creature’s right flank. Its tongues lashed out like serpents, jabbing at the thunderwolf. The fleshy muscle was laced with barbs and tiny mouths, fang-filled and drooling pus.

Despite its bulk, Magnin turned and weaved to evade the probing tongues. One nicked Thorgard’s pauldron, leaving an acidic scar, as his thunderwolf jinked to the side. He followed its course as it seized a zombie shambling behind them, ripping the creature of its feet and hauling it forwards with a predatory jerk. Swept up in an eye blink into the plague-spawn’s maw, the zombie’s rotten bones crunched as it was devoured.

Head down, Thorgard urged Magnin on.

Skeln ducked another putrid stream from the plague-spawn’s mouth. He had torn out his bolt pistol and the muzzle burned white-hot with the flare of his weapon’s fire. The mass-reactive shells bit deep, sinking, as if in rubber, below the creature’s flesh. Explosions rippled beneath the sickly skin, bulging like tumours but the plague-spawn’s epidermis just stretched to compensate, any damage that had been inflicted regenerated instantly.

Frenzied bolter fire from Afger’s position suggested Skeln’s battle-brother was similarly frustrated.

He unsheathed his power axe and fed a ripple of energy across the rune-etched blade. It was time to get in close.

For Hagni, getting in close was the only way he knew how to fight. Dazed but unbowed, he shook away the wretched bile gumming his fur and drove at the creature again. As wulfen, Hagni was even larger than his Wolf Guard brethren. At over three metres tall, he was a monster. Yet even Hagni was small compared to the plague-spawn, so grotesquely swollen as it was by Nurgle’s taint.

Leaping onto the creature’s back, Hagni slashed and gored, searching for vital organs amidst the blubbery mass. The wulfen was elbow-deep in putrid blood and viscera, but the folds of flab, like fleshy armour, were too thick for him to inflict any serious harm.

Below, Thorgard raced along the plague-spawn’s flank, wolf claws spitting lightning. The stink of burning flesh was redolent in the air, but the long grooves he carved in the creature’s side merely oozed and closed up again, a roll of flab melting down over them.

Skeln was getting dizzy. The vile stench emanating off the creature made the air thick with its contagion. Fat flies buzzed around his face, trying to infest his mouth, ears and nostrils as he sought to get in close. He hacked away a tendril-like tongue and heard a deep yelp of agony from across the chamber. Though his view was occluded by the spawn’s bulk, Skeln recognised the cry of Thorgard’s thunderwolf. Magnin was wounded, possibly even dead.

‘Thorgard!’ he bellowed down the comm-feed.

Crackling static and a half-heard roar of anguish returned to him.

‘Brother, answer me!’

Skeln was pinned by the lashing tongues, oozing fronds attached to the pair that assailed him like the stingers of some rancid cnidaria. He couldn’t get to Thorgard. He couldn’t help his brother.

Another channel opened up in his ear.

‘This isn’t working–’ snarled Afger.

Bolter fire interrupted him.

‘We need to burn it!’

‘With what? We have no flamer, no incendiaries, we–’ Skeln had detected something, a distinctive tang in the mire of sewerage. He fended off a probing tongue, the plague-spawn burbling with laughter. A moment’s respite allowed him to cast about the chamber.

Pipes, everywhere pipes…

Skeln allowed himself a grim smile as he found what he was looking for.

A shadow eclipsed him as the plague-spawn leaned down, the shifting of its mass releasing noxious gases trapped within the rolls of flab. Skeln fought not to gag and reined Fenrir back. The tongue tendrils recoiled and Skeln urged his mount away. Fenrir turned and leapt, narrowly avoiding the burst of corruption vomited from the spawn’s distended mouth. It was still drooling acid as its burbled laughter came again.

But now Skeln was no longer penned in. He used this freedom of movement to ride Fenrir around the plague-spawn’s side, searching for Thorgard, following a pipe kept at the periphery of his vision.

Magnin was dead. The noble beast lay on its side, a brackish liquid trickling from its maw and pooling around its snout. Three, deep puncture wounds were visible in its flank, having entered flesh. They were dark and infected from where the plague-spawn’s tongues had raked it.

Whatever poison was harboured by the plague-spawn, it was more deadly and virulent than that carried by the zombies. If it could kill a mythical thunderwolf, it could kill Skeln and his brothers too.

A desperate roar seized Skeln’s attention and his gaze was drawn upward to where Thorgard and Hagni had mounted the plague-spawn’s back and were tearing at it with their claws.

Lost to grief and vengeance, Thorgard was no further use right now.

A loud crack, followed a shallow crump and the tang of explosive, came from the opposite end of the chamber.

‘Afger?’ Skeln hoped at least one of his battle-brothers still had something left.

‘Bolter’s dry… switching to grenades…’ came the fragmented response.

‘Is it working?’

Fenrir had slowed so Skeln could reload his bolt pistol. Last clip.

Thorgard and Hagni were keeping the creature occupied, eliciting bellows of pain as they tore into its blubbery hide.

Several seconds elapsed before Afger answered. Another explosive rocked the chamber. He sounded annoyed.

‘What do you think?’

Skeln reined Fenrir around, tracing the pipe he had seen earlier to the source of its rupture. He let rip a desultory burst, downing a pair of zombies creeping towards him, before fixing his attention back on the broken pipe.

‘Hang on to whatever grenades you’ve got left. We’re going to need a spark for our accelerant.’

‘What are you talking about, Skeln?’ Afger spoke between thrusts. He’d drawn his combat blade.

‘Can’t you smell it, brother? The tainted water, just below the reek of decay…’

‘Promethium,’ replied Afger a moment later.

Skeln reached the ruptured pipe. It was one of Skorbad’s main fuel lines, fed from its major pumping station. Volatile liquid exuded from it in a slow but steady trickle. They’d need more. Much more.

Skeln jumped down off Fenrir’s back. The thunderwolf turned, guarding its master’s blindside as Skeln sheathed his weapons. He’d have to tear a wider opening in the broken pipe – he couldn’t risk a spark before the tainted water was saturated.

Digging his gauntleted fingers around the ragged hole, he heaved and pulled. The metal screeched but gave instantly. Corruption had ravaged it, degrading the tough housing of the pipe. Promethium was gushing freely now, it lapped onto the floor and spilled eagerly into the morass where the plague-spawn was languishing.

Skeln turned, leaping onto Fenrir’s back again. He unclipped a grenade from his belt. The thunderwolf was barrelling towards a sewer-slicked column at the edge of the room.

‘Find cover,’ he growled to Afger.

Reaching the column, Skeln swivelled his torso and pressed the detonator stud on the grenade. Its parabola took it across the chamber where – a second before it splashed down – it exploded, igniting the promethium drowning the tainted pool.

A burst of incendiary lit up the room, fire sweeping through the water in a purging wave. Through the inferno’s glare, Skeln thought he saw two figures leap free, obscured by smoke and rising flame.

The plague-spawn bucked and thrashed, powerless to heave its monstrous girth away from the burning pool, its efforts only splashing fiery promethium over its waxy skin. It burned, and as it burned, seemed to shrink. Like a diseased candle against the attentions of a blowtorch, the Scion of Pestilence melted away, shrieking rage and denial.

A curtain of fire was left flickering across the surface of the pool; the roaring promethium flames had died quickly. A dark green sludge, polluting the already tainted water, was all that remained of the plague-spawn. Cleansing fire had destroyed it.

Relieved to see Afger alive and well, across the other side of the chamber, Skeln then looked for Thorgard. Another tunnel lay across from them, opposite where the Space Wolves had entered. Diminishing boot steps echoed from the shadows there.

Thorgard was alive, but he had gone after Hagni.

Skeln met Afger’s gaze and the two of them raced towards the tunnel mouth.

Fenrir slowed, keeping pace with the other Wolf Guard, then charged into the gloom of the tunnel.

‘He is a fool!’ snarled Afger. ‘Alone, he is no match for it.’

‘He is blinded by grief. Magnin is dead, Thorgard wants to finish the mission to honour his mount’s sacrifice,’ Skeln countered, adding, ‘Besides, I remember you were determined on facing the beast alone, too.’

Afger sniffed his contempt.

‘So you now acknowledge it is a beast?’

Skeln’s reply was prevented by a scream up ahead.

It was Thorgard.

Fenrir rode on faster–

But was too late.

Thorgard’s half-eviscerated body was lying in the centre of the tunnel, wet and bloody. His torn throat hung open like a second mouth, fixed in a dark red scream.

Afger snarled, walking over to take up one of his fallen brother’s wolf claw gauntlets. He winced as he stooped down, gingerly touching his chest.

‘It’s nothing,’ he growled, before Skeln could say a word. Swiftly, Afger changed the subject back to the wulfen. ‘It’s of the killing mind, now. Hagni is lost to us,’ he said, removing his old gauntlet and pulling the weapon onto his fist.

Skeln was silent, but didn’t linger with Fenrir. There was no time for remorse. The wulfen must be stopped.

The trail was easy to follow. Fenrir tracked the wulfen by the scent of Thorgard’s blood still on the beast. The tunnel took them back up into the snow drifts and arctic tundra of Skorbad. Crimson droplets dotted the landscape at long, loping intervals.

Skeln knew this road, and realised where the wulfen was headed.

‘It returns to its old hunting ground,’ muttered Afger, running alongside them.

Skeln urged Fenrir on and allowed the howling ice-winds to smother his thoughts.

In less than an hour, the bastion loomed on the horizon.

‘Something is wrong,’ said Skeln.

The Imperial command post was dark, as if it had lost all power. Smoke trailed from unseen fires behind the walls and there were no visible sentries. As the Space Wolves drew nearer, they saw the gate was wide open and streaked with bloodstains. A Chimera had slewed to a stop a few metres away, the vehicle’s exit ramps yawning. There was more blood here too.

Two hundred metres of open ground lay between the Space Wolves and the bastion.

Afger was incredulous.

‘Not even the wulfen could’ve got so far ahead and done all of this…’

Skeln eyed the silent battlements. His gaze narrowed.

‘It didn’t.’

Shambling into view where they had laid crumpled and inert, figures wearing the olive drab of the Cadian 154th and cradling lasguns in crooked fingers appeared. Old memories compelled them. The plague had come here, and now the bastion had an undead garrison. In his last act, before the feral aspect of the wulfen had claimed his mind, Hagni had led them here.

Afger grimaced, gripping his chest again, but kept his pain hidden. In the sewer chamber, there hadn’t been enough time to reach cover…

A spark of melancholy flickered suddenly within him. The end of the road was near.

‘I wish Barek and Thorgard were with us.’

‘So do I,’ the solemnity in Skeln’s voice turned to anger, ‘We finish this.’ He outstretched his hand, beckoning to his brother.

Afger seemed reluctant.

‘You’ll never reach the bastion alive on foot, and I need your bolter and blade with me, brother.’

Skeln gestured again.

After a moment, Afger took his hand, seizing Skeln by the wrist and swinging up and onto Fenrir’s broad back.

Skeln spurred Fenrir on just as the zombie-Cadians were levelling their guns.

‘The last charge of the thunderwolves, brother.’

‘Let it be a worthy end, then.’

‘I’ll see you in the halls of Russ, Afger.’

For the first time in weeks, Afger smiled.

‘Aye, that you may.’

Skeln kicked Fenrir’s flanks and the beast began to charge.

If there had been anyone alive to see it, the deed would have been worthy of a saga or two.

Skeln and Afger howled together as las-bolts filled the air around them.

Fenrir died just before they reached the wall. An autocannon burst had opened up its torso in a red mist and the great beast collapsed in the snow, leaving a crimson smear behind it. Their armour punctured and torn by las-blasts, the Wolf Guard burst into the bastion and commenced slaying everything inside.

A ragged firing line, a crippled mockery of disorder, opposed them as they barrelled through the gates. Bolters flaring, the Space Wolves swept the zombies aside and then split up, intent on destruction.

Skeln took the stairway to the battlements. Zombies fell like suicides, heaved from his path as he rose up the steps. He savaged with his fangs, tearing open throats, and split torsos with his power axe to reach the summit. The battlements became a field of slaughter, a reaping of cleaved limbs and staved-in skulls. Russ’s name bellowed loud above the carnage, piercing the blood-red night.

Fires began below. Promethium storage sheds were set ablaze by Afger’s bolter. Explosions cracked, billowing black smoke. Bodies were heaped onto the conflagrations, like heretics onto a pyre. He went to his fists, snapping spines across his knee, wrenching bones from decaying sockets. Afger carved a red ruin with Thorgard’s wolf claw, anointing it in old blood to honour its fallen keeper.

Skeln’s bolt pistol had long been empty when he noticed the wulfen amongst the horde, clawing and shredding with abandon, reunited with its former brothers for one last fight. He’d lost sight of Hagni after that, the need for killing preventing any pursuit.

The Space Wolves were gored and burned, but in less than twenty bloody minutes, the entire Cadian garrison was destroyed. Skeln had not seen Ekhart in the mob, but then could have missed him easily. A haze had fallen upon the Space Wolf, blood-red and frenzied. There was no way to identify any individual amongst the heaped body parts.

Heaving air into his lungs, Skeln was standing at the bastion’s perimeter as it burned. After they’d vanquished the undead Cadians, he and Afger had spread the fires. The roaring flames cast a sombre light on the mound where Skeln had buried Fenrir. He’d wept as he’d done it, Afger looking on, honouring them with stoic silence.

In the aftermath, there was no sign of Hagni. Skeln assumed the beast had loped away once the killing was done. But it was not ended. There was no monster to lead them to, no fight save the one that was left between former brothers. Hagni knew it as well as Skeln did. A reckoning was near.

‘Time to move, brother,’ Skeln said to Afger.

The wulfen was still loose. It was all they had left now to stop it.

‘Brother,’ Skeln repeated when there was no answer. He turned…

Afger was slumped against the hull of the abandoned Chimera. His arms hung down by his sides and his cold eyes were glassy.

For the first time, Skeln noticed the wound in his torso. It was deep and mortal. Afger had held on long enough to finish the fight and see his foes burn. He was with the All Father now, feasting in the halls of Russ.

‘Be at peace, brother,’ Skeln whispered, closing Afger’s eyes.

All dead now, except for him – a lone wolf with but one duty left to it.

Skeln took off his left pauldron, stripped away the arm greave and vambrace of his power armour to leave his skin bare. With a tooth from his fang necklace, Skeln carved the runes of Barek, Thorgard and Afger in his flesh. At the end, he added Hagni.

The bolt pistol was empty, so he dumped it along with his gun belt. Hefting his power axe, he ignited the blade and trudged into the ice wastes.

Somewhere in the drifts, Hagni was waiting.

‘Wulfen!’ His challenge echoed across the tundra.

A few moments later, a feral howl answered.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Jon Sullivan

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