The Shadow of the Beast

Laurie Goulding

It had become habit, Hornindal realised, to stand before the great lancet ports of the observation deck and measure his breathing against the urgent thrum of the ship’s engines. The adamantium null screens were locked firmly in place, so he could see nothing of the void beyond. Moreover, his eyes were closed.

He gripped the forward rail with both hands, his boots planted squarely on the deck beneath him. Tension gritted his teeth, and made a taut rod of his spine.

Habit. Nothing more. It served no purpose.

Even had he been able to see beyond the crystalflex ports, it was unlikely that the sight would have satisfied his desire – nay, his demand – for haste. Warp space was tricky and dangerous stuff, and rarely gave any sense of real forward momentum; depending on the prevailing currents, it might seem to him as though the Xenophon were utterly becalmed. Or worse still; travelling sideways, or in reverse.

Immortal and beneficent Emperor, grant us speed enough to answer this call.

Hornindal wanted to feel the wind upon his scalp, the crush of inertia pulling him back as they hurtled onwards. He wanted the reassurance that they were making the best possible speed. He wanted to see it with his own eyes.

And since he could not, he stood alone on the shielded observation deck, and imagined all of these things. He needed that distraction. He had not slept in a long time.

He knew that it was only right and proper that he be burdened so; Hornindal stood apart, both philosophically and oft-times literally. He was the bedrock of his brethren; the presence of the Emperor’s guiding light made flesh. He was the example to which they all might aspire. He would not, therefore, demonstrate feelings of doubt or uncertainty, nor give voice to any such concerns. They would arrive in time. Of course they would arrive in time, by His grace.

We are His sword, we are His shield. His benevolence. His wrath.

The vox-bead hung loosely from Hornindal’s ear – though he knew that the Chapter serfs of the small crew were among the best in the fleet, he could no longer listen to the comm-traffic. They worked diligently, burning the ship’s reactor white hot in their attempts to coax more speed from the engines, yet to his transhuman ears their mortal prattling made them sound… inefficient. Amateur. Unworthy of the duty that might soon fall to them, if his most dire projections were proven to be accurate.

It had been almost a year since Captain Theodosios had taken the Fifth Company out onto the periphery – astropathic reports of unrest and civil disobedience to the galactic south-east had prompted their noble Chapter Master Thorcyra to make a show of force, hoping to restore order before it could grow into any real rebellion. But as the weeks turned into months and more desperate calls began to come from across the sector, Thorcyra himself had taken his honour guard and the First and Second Companies into the north, towards the stricken worlds of the Saphir Cluster.

It was as though the Eastern Fringe was erupting into madness, and to those who had witnessed such things before, it was a grim portent indeed. When the final, garbled communication was received from Theodosios and the Fifth, a general recall was issued to the entire Chapter spread throughout the Ultima Segmentum.

‘Sons of Sotha, return home with all haste.’

The entire Chapter. Every last battle-brother, every last serf and retainer.

Not lightly would they be summoned back. Not lightly would Chapter Master Thorcyra have his warriors abandon the myriad crusades and conflicts to which they had been set. As Reclusiarch, Hornindal had been engaged in the liberation of the reliquary world of Egottha, and in his fiery rhetoric he had sworn that this was the gravest duty to which the Scythes of the Emperor could be called. Would Thorcyra now make a liar of him?

It was true that the enemies of the Imperium were many, and strong, and while he and his brothers had nev–

A tremor ran the length of the Xenophon’s hull, and Hornindal’s eyes snapped open. He felt a slight rise in the note of the engines.

The lumen strips on the observation deck flickered and went out, followed by another tremor. With a series of creaking judders, the ship began to list to starboard – the drunken roll of a rudderless wetland skiff.

Without thinking, he replaced the vox-bead in his ear.

‘Shipmaster Kaeron, report immediately.’

No response. Only a cacophony of frantic exchanges. Warning chimes. Tinny, distorted screams.

The Navigator. The Navigator was dead.

An almighty bass rumble shook the deck, echoing through the tortured superstructure, and klaxons blared. The heavy doors ground shut, sealing the chamber and the various other compartments of the ship, and Hornindal felt a familiar electric pressure in the base of his skull as the crew made an emergency jump back into real space.

He gasped, sensing the unclean touch of the warp as it slithered away from his mind and off into the ether, before being almost pitched from his feet by the ship’s sudden deceleration. Natural laws reasserted themselves, though it took him only a moment to recover, and he threw back the deep hood of his robe.

His vox-bead crackled.

‘Lord Reclusiarch, to the bridge!’ came the shipmaster’s voice. ‘We’re moving to evade hostile… objects.’

The twin slaved servitors at the helm chattered wordlessly as they made correction after correction, binaric cant tumbling from their withered lips and only occasionally slurred by ropes of drool. Since they were almost completely immobile in their wired thrones, their increased vocalisation was the only way to gauge the speed of their actions and reactions. For all their vacant, slack-jawed appearances, their internal systems were processing the manoeuvres at incredible rates.

The howl of proximity alarms was deafening in the enclosed space. As the null screens slowly retracted, Kaeron bellowed his orders to a crew that were trying hard not to be transfixed by the horror blooming in the darkness before them.

‘Take us between them! Hard to port, hard to port!’

Behind the command dais, Sub-lieutenant Goss stood bathed in the ruddy glow of the bridge’s emergency lighting, a data-slate gripped tightly under his arm and his mouth agape.

‘Holy Terra,’ he muttered. ‘What are they?’

The shipmaster whirled around to face him.

‘Deck officer. Return to your post immediately,’ he barked over the din.

Another minor impact reverberated through the lower decks, and Goss snapped back to attention. He thrust the data-slate at Kaeron and reached for the edge of his tactical console, hauling himself through the ship’s weakened gravity.

‘Someone call up the system charts. I need local cartography, right now.’

The main bulkhead to the bridge opened with a swirl of equalising pressure, and Goss saw the robed giant Demetrios stride through. The Chaplain made straight for the central dais, but stared all the while out through the armoured viewports before the helm. His eyes were wide and unblinking.

Not in alarm, but in pure, unbridled hatred.

Where Goss and the rest of the bridge crew might be gripped by fear, this mighty hero of the Chapter was filled with a righteous indignation. It was clear enough in his fiery glare and the grim set of his jaw – what right did these monstrosities have to exist in the Emperor’s own universe, let alone to present a direct threat to a ship of the Adeptus Astartes?

As the stars wheeled beyond the frontal ports, the things hung in the void – great organic medusae, each the size of a large hab-block and trailing sickly tendrils hundreds of metres long that grasped at the frozen nothingness. Their livid bodies were bloated and bulbous, ridged with what looked like horned chitin, and yet they each pulsated with an obscene internal rhythm. Even as Goss and the other crewmen looked on, the closest of the things convulsed spastically and swept its tendrils out in a flailing arc, which only narrowly missed the Xenophon’s bladed prow as she banked away.

The helm servitors were running at the limits of their programming merely to avoid each new collision as the things drifted closer. There were thousands of them, and precious little clear space between.

‘Void-born filth!’ Demetrios spat, gripping his rosarius tightly in one hand and pointing defiantly through the main viewport. ‘Shipmaster, ready all weapons.’

Kaeron did not take his attention from the data-slate.

‘My lord, we are too close to obtain a firing solution. I’m working on–’

‘Too close?’ the Chaplain interrupted him. He stalked around the shipmaster’s command throne, gesturing out with a broad sweep of his fist. ‘With all respect, Kaeron, we’re right on top of them! Open the voidlock and I could smite them myself.’

Kaeron held up the data-slate, though Demetrios regarded it coldly. ‘With all due respect, my lord, that is precisely why we must not open fire.’

‘Explain yourself. The Emperor’s will demands that we end these abominations.’

‘Our auspex is still clouded, but short-range scans would suggest that these constructs contain a highly volatile atmosphere within their bodies. Explosive even. If we launch torpedoes or fire the main batteries then I am confident that we could easily destroy them, but the resulting blast would tear this ship apart. Each one of them is almost as wide around as the Xenophon is amidships.’

As if to illustrate his point, the ship soared beneath another raft of tendrils which slithered and twitched over her starboard flank. The contact rang dully through the superstructure, a slew of sensor vanes breaking free of their mountings and clattering against the Xenophon’s armoured skin before they tumbled away into the darkness.

‘And so you allow these unspeakable things to caress our hull, shipmaster?’ Demetrios growled. ‘I will not tolerate this sacrilege.’

Goss glanced over the data scrolling down his console screen. His heart was pounding in his chest.

‘Master Kaeron, the objects are beginning to close in on us. It’s like they’re trying to block our–’

‘Power down the engines.’

All three of them turned to the open bulkhead portal, and Goss saw Reclusiarch Hornindal hunched down beneath the reinforced lintel. He was staring out at the bloated constructs, a look of grim acceptance on his face, almost as though he had been expecting to find just such a nightmare waiting for them.

‘Do it now. They are drawn to the heat and motion.’

Kaeron nodded, and brought the vox-hailer to his lips. ‘This is the shipmaster. Cut main thrust immediately.’ He called out to the enthroned servitors. ‘Helm, set a final escape vector. Short correctional bursts only.’

The pair halted their burbled cant and spoke in eerie mechanical unison.

‘Compliance.’

The vibration of the engines through the deck fell away to almost nothing, and Kaeron silenced the alert klaxons. The Xenophon careened onwards, seeking any gap through which they might make their escape.

Seemingly in response, one of the constructs pulsated one last time before detonating like a gigantic fleshy mine in the void. The blast hurled out cartilaginous shrapnel and slathers of bio-acid in all directions, in a kilometre-wide burst of green flame that licked hungrily at their void shields and rocked the ship from side to side.

Hornindal stepped in behind the shipmaster’s throne. Even as the Xenophon dropped in a slow spiral through the encroaching swarm, he did not let his eyes fall from the grasping, heaving things that reached out towards them as they passed.

‘Shipmaster Kaeron, bring us clear. We must send word to Sotha.’

Kaeron turned to him. ‘Of course, Lord Reclusiarch. It is…’ He paused, appearing unsure whether to speak the words aloud. ‘It is the Great Devourer, is it not?’

Demetrios rankled at the mention of the name. Hornindal merely nodded.

‘Aye. The xenos have returned. Of this alone, I am certain.’

Goss started at the sudden chime of his vox-link, and he realised that he had been holding his breath for several long moments. He listened for a moment. ‘Master Kaeron, I have a report from the sergeant-at-arms. His team cannot gain entry to the Navigator’s chambers. Her killer has likely barricaded himself inside.’

Hornindal shook his head.

‘There is no killer. None but the Navigator herself.’

Another of the giant mines detonated off to their port side, taking out three more in a rapid chain of linked explosions, but the Xenophon had slipped beyond their reach.

‘My lord? Do you mean to say that the Navigator took her own life?’

Ignoring Kaeron’s query, Hornindal placed his immense hand on Goss’s shoulder.

‘Sub-lieutenant,’ he said, grimly. ‘Have the sergeant’s team secure the choir chambers. The astropaths will also be at risk.’

‘At risk from what?’ Kaeron demanded, rising from his seat.

‘See for yourself,’ growled Demetrios, gesturing to the frontal ports.

Cries of dismay and horror spread across the bridge. Goss envied those crewmen who laboured below decks, those who would be spared the sight.

As the Xenophon approached the edge of the vast, living minefield, the kilometre-long Hunter-class destroyer was cast into the shadow of a monster – a true terror of the deep, like the leviathans of legend. It clawed at the void fore and aft with great tentacular limbs many thousands of metres in length, spines running the length of its segmented body and trailing clouds of unwholesome vapour.

‘A hive ship,’ said Hornindal. ‘I had hoped never to see another in my lifetime.’

Lesser vessels clung remora-like around the beast’s great fanged maw, clearly visible even at such immense distance. As the Xenophon’s auspex pulled clear of the minefield, thousands of smaller sensor returns chimed across the board. The space around the hive ship was alive with xenos activity.

Kaeron sank back into the command throne. ‘The void…’ he murmured. ‘It crawls.’

Straightening, Hornindal looked to Demetrios.

‘Brother-Chaplain, call the squads to arms.’

Deep within the belly of the Xenophon, more than thirty Scythes of the Emperor had been billeted for the return journey to Sotha. The Chapter dormitories were sparse and functional, as befit the ethos of the Adeptus Astartes – each warrior was assigned only a sleeping pallet and an arming post. Their empty suits of power armour would stand silent vigil over them on the rare occasion that they entered a full sleep-state, their weapons lying clean and freshly oiled beside them. The scent of incense and lapping powder hung in the air, though it failed to mask the heady aroma of transhuman hormones and acrid sweat that followed them no matter how often they bathed.

Where the human crew filled their own bunk spaces with personal effects and Imperial devotionals, the Space Marines knelt in silent prayer upon the bare floors. Where the Chapter serfs might seek distraction, recreation or sleep during the long hours of the night watch, their masters sparred relentlessly and ate only sparingly, like the ascetics and penitents of monastic tradition.

Many months ago, they had been dispatched across the sector to Egottha, where the bones of Segas, the Chapter’s first honoured Chaplain, had lain in state for centuries. Reclusiarch Hornindal had ignited their faith and led them down to the surface of the contested planet, only to receive word from Sotha of the general recall on the very eve of battle. Like a bolt pistol primed and ready to fire, the Scythes had been holstered once more without unleashing their righteous fury upon the foe.

So it was, that when Chaplain Demetrios summoned his warriors for combat, they were only too ready to respond.

Three full squads now stood assembled in the marshalling hall, in an interlocking sickle formation with armourer serfs scurrying between them. Thirty of the Chapter’s finest, their yellow-and-black battle-plate gleaming in the chamber’s flickering light; casting giant shadows upon the deck.

It was in the shadow of these giants that Milus Ogden felt that he had lived his whole life.

As the Xenophon’s sergeant-at-arms, he and his team had been summoned to the hall along with their Space Marine masters, though it had felt almost like a courtesy. An afterthought. As if they would not also be required to fight and to die, when the time came.

They had abandoned their efforts to break into the Navigator’s chambers, though he had left a pair of his men to watch over the quaking, bleating astropaths in the chantry. At Shipmaster Kaeron’s command, the psykers had attempted to establish communion with noble Sotha, but as they had opened their minds to the warp they began shrieking and wailing, prostrating themselves upon the deck and begging for deliverance from the insidious alien presence that overwhelmed their thoughts.

Even as Ogden stood in the shadow of the Chapter, so now did the shadow of the beast hang over them all. It had blinded them, and silenced their cries in the darkness. Most chillingly, it was possessed of an undying, insatiable hunger, the haggard chief astropath had assured him in no uncertain terms.

It meant to devour every last one of them.

The arched bulkhead doors at the head of the marshalling hall slid open on heavy motors, and Reclusiarch Hornindal entered with Demetrios and a handful of robed Reclusiam serfs. Though their faces were bare, the two Chaplains were decked out in their ebon plate, Hornindal also framed with a great ceremonial cloak of ochre velvet embroidered with the Chapter’s twin-scythe emblem. The thud of their armoured boots upon the deck rang throughout the chamber; every one of the assembled Space Marines stared ahead with impassive ruby helmet optics as they passed, though Ogden could feel the sense of expectation in the air.

Hornindal wasted no time on ceremony or introductions.

‘Brothers. We exited the warp just over twenty-seven minutes ago, approximately six and a half days short of our destination, somewhere between systems in the vicinity of Artaxis. It is my belief that in answering the Chapter’s recall we have encountered the vanguard of a new tyranid hive fleet within Ultima Segmentum, and that their malign psychic presence is responsible for the sudden death of our Navigator.’

Though the Scythes of the Emperor remained characteristically stoic, a few murmurs ran through Ogden’s security officers. He glared sidelong at them, a terse reminder that they stood under the gaze of their masters – Chaplain Demetrios in particular was known to have little patience for ill-disciplined serfs.

‘Though I no longer have any doubt that the xenos’ arrival is in some way linked to the recent troubles along the Eastern Fringe,’ the Reclusiarch continued, ‘this craven, scattered deployment of their forces does not fit with previous models of tyranid fleet activity. The alien is cunning. It learns from its defeats. It already knows that it could not conquer the glorious Imperium with a singular frontal assault, and so now it seeks an alternative.

‘The shipmaster and his officers assure me that no logical trajectory could bring this hive ship and the accompanying swarm so far into the subsector, either from Saphir or the Eastern Fringe regions, without encountering at least some Imperial resistance along the way. Therefore we must assume that the wretched xenos have divided their forces, seeking to harry us along many different fronts and spread their foul influence as widely as possible. They have spawned a vast spore-minefield to blockade the system. Their psychic shadow is growing.’

Ogden felt a curious mix of horror and anger at those words. Though the tyranid menace of Hive Fleet Behemoth was already long vanquished before even his great grandfather had entered the indentured service of the Scythes, whispered tales had spread from battlefronts throughout Ultima Segmentum and gone on to become the stuff of legend. As a child, his cruel siblings had terrified him with stories of the unseen, multi-limbed xenos creatures that they insisted lived in the tunnels beneath the hab-centre, and would gladly feast upon the flesh of soldiers and little boys alike. On many a cold Sothan night, the young Milus had cowered beneath his blanket and started at every imagined noise in the darkness – a far cry from the stern officer who now wore the heraldry of the Chapter with pride.

There was something else, though. Perhaps a more primal fear.

It was akin to the revulsion he felt when even a harmless domestic arachnid would scuttle across the floor of his quarters – the irreconcilable hatred that humanity had nurtured for non-mammalian life since the dawn of time. If that arachnid could master interstellar travel and demand an empire of its own, where then might its predatory gaze fall? What ‘foul influence’ might it exert over the worlds of man?

Ogden steadied himself. He forced his attention back to the grim-faced Reclusiarch, who seemed to tower above even his Space Marine brethren as he spoke.

‘In issuing the general recall, Chapter Master Thorcyra likely summons us to defend the Chapter’s territories to the galactic east from the xenos incursion. However, his eye may have been diverted away from the far greater threat that we have uncovered, here and now – based upon our current position, Shipmaster Kaeron has calculated that our noble homeworld of Sotha already lies within the projected engagement zone.’

Only now did the assembled Space Marines visibly react, with stifled curses and cries of defiance as their tight ranks faltered.

‘Stoke your hatred, brothers!’ cried Demetrios, his gauntleted fist raised high. ‘Save it for the bastard Devourer!’

Many of the mortal serfs were far less restrained in their outcry, and Ogden found himself joining them. Among other less coherent threats that echoed in the chamber, he hefted his lascarbine above his head and vowed the death of the entire tyranid race.

It was unthinkable. Sotha could not fall.

The world was the ancestral home of the Chapter, true, but for many of those present – human and posthuman alike – it was also their birthplace, and for the rest it was at the very least the home of their blood-kin.

In spite of the uproar, Hornindal calmly took up his crozius arcanum from the robed armourer standing ready beside him. With a simple gesture, he ignited the weapon’s crackling power field and held it defiantly aloft, bringing the hall to silence once more. When he spoke again, Ogden noted the old, familiar flicker of restrained zeal in the Reclusiarch’s voice.

‘Brothers, praise be to Him-on-Terra – you and I are of the same mind. We will not allow the hated xenos to lay even a single claw upon our home world! Forewarned, the Scythes of the Emperor will repel any foe, and Chapter Master Thorcyra will lead us in driving the damnable hive fleets from the face of the galaxy forever!’

Cheers, and cries of ‘For Sotha! For the Emperor!’ erupted from the assembly. Chaplain Demetrios bared his teeth in something like a grin, and donned his skull-faced helm before approaching the squads to begin his battle ministrations; first Brother-Sergeant Certes, and then Edios, readily knelt before him to take their solemn oaths.

Turning to marshal his team, Ogden was surprised to see Hornindal approaching him directly. Though he still bore the active crozius, the Reclusiarch did not carry in his manner the same ever-present threat of violence as Demetrios.

‘This duty weighs heavily upon us all, serf-sergeant,’ he said. ‘Without a Navigator, we cannot risk any warp jump to relay our warning to Sotha ourselves. We must, therefore, move through the swarm and beyond the psychic shadow of the hive ship. We must re-establish astropathic communications as soon as possible.’

Ogden nodded. ‘Indeed, my lord… Though that may be just as dangerous as heading back into the xenos minefield…’

He waited for some kind of response, but Hornindal only stared impassively back at him.

‘Where would you have my men deployed, then?’

‘You should prepare for boarding actions.’

‘Board a tyranid vessel, my lord?’ Ogden asked, incredulous. ‘Is such a thing even possible?’

‘No. You misunderstand.’ The Reclusiarch watched absently as the third squad leader, Hekaton, took the knee before Demetrios. ‘If we are not vaporised by bio-plasma or torn apart in the vacuum, then the xenos will try to board us.’

Ogden considered this for a long moment. He could not decide which fate sounded worse.

Like a blade aimed at the heart of the swarm, the Xenophon soared onwards. Her weapons batteries fired until the barrels glowed hot, dashing smaller xenos vessels against the blackness with las-fire and bursts of ordnance; driving the hideous things back in waves.

To Goss’s eyes, they were not even ships in any sense of the word that he could justify. The way they skipped and swam put him in mind of shoals of aquatic hunters, twisting and pirouetting between the Xenophon’s streaking missiles, before wheeling around to strafe her shields with their return fire. They hounded the ship relentlessly, probing the limits of her defences even as they died upon them.

The gunnery officers could not hope to target the vessels with the same fire-patterns they would use to engage traditional craft. The damned things were too fast, too unpredictable; it was like using a boltgun to swat flies. Instead, Shipmaster Kaeron had ordered them to create a kill zone three hundred metres out beyond the ship’s prow – a wall of random fire and timed detonations that would defy whatever morphic intelligence guided the abominations, and either force them aside or tear them to pieces. It was now just a question of whether there was physically enough ordnance on board to see them through to the far side of the swarm. It was far more likely, Goss knew, that the guns would run dry long before that.

As if in confirmation, a warning symbol flashed on the oculus’s hololithic overlay and lent another insistent chiming to the myriad combat alarums that filled the bridge space.

‘The starboard missile racks are empty, sir. We’re down to the reserve magazines.’ He hesitated for a moment, before muttering under his breath. ‘She’s only a destroyer. She’s not built to repel this kind of sustained attack. We’re not going to make it through.’

Kaeron stood in front of his throne, staring up at the tactical display. He replied without shifting his gaze.

‘You don’t know the Xenophon, then. The old girl’s fast, and she’s still got teeth.’

As the hololith refreshed on its three-second combat cycle, flocks of fresh contacts entered the display at the boundaries of auspex range – hosts of new organisms spawned by the larger carriers, or maybe even by the gargantuan hive ship itself? With so many returns it was difficult to tell. Some seemed only to circle at a distance, never even committing to an attack run.

At the centre of the tableau hung the flashing scythe icon representing the beleaguered destroyer, a lone speck of green in an ever-growing ocean of red.

The shipmaster gritted his teeth. ‘Order the starboard crews to reload. I don’t want both racks down at the same time.’

‘Aye, sir.’

A succession of strafing impacts rang through the hull, and one of the foul vessel-creatures swooped in through the void shields to buzz the forecastle before disappearing overhead. Reflexively, several of the bridge crew ducked, but in the instant that it passed the frontal viewports Goss saw a flash of twisted chitin, fused carapace and ice-rimed, horned flesh.

Throne, the horrid thing had even had little leathery fins…

Though the swarm engulfed them, beyond it all lay the lolling bulk of the hive ship; a grossly distended, living horizon. Its great tentacle arms moved languidly in comparison to the rest of the fleet, highlighting the unimaginable difference in scale between them as the Xenophon sped closer. Like some bloated, coddled kraken, the hive ship seemed to watch the unfolding battle with a casual disinterest, the way a fattened Radnarian courtesan might regard a scurrying colony of ants.

Choking back his disgust, Goss reviewed the course that he and his fellow officers had plotted to bring them out of the thing’s shadow. By pulling in close to the gravity well of the planetoid Sigma-Tumbus IV – which was now almost completely eclipsed in their view by the hive ship – they aimed to accelerate beyond the capabilities of the smaller, organic vessels and race for the deep-range shipping lanes beyond. There, Kaeron had reasoned, the astropaths would be free of the alien horror that clouded their minds and could send word to another ship.

Assuming that any ship would hear them.

A renewed proximity alarm sounded, and the Master of Signal called out from his console. ‘Large xenos craft, on direct intercept!’

Coming about from beneath them, a huge, bladed monstrosity turned with surprising agility to bear down into the Xenophon’s kill zone. Seeming to manoeuvre using the largest of its curved appendages, the vessel opened its blunted bow to the void in a silent roar, revealing a fleshy gullet lined with thousands of razored spines. Goss’s stomach lurched as he realised that the thing could likely swallow the ship’s prow and the main batteries along with it.

Kaeron turned and threw himself into the command throne. ‘Finally, something we can target.’ He brought the vox-hailer to his lips with obvious relish. ‘Helm, maintain ahead full. Weapons, make ready for torpedo launch, on my mark.’

Adrenaline surged in Goss’s veins. The razored fiend grew ever larger in the oculus view, scattering the smaller vessels as it came, and the Xenophon was racing to meet it head-on.

‘Enemy vessel at three-fifty metres,’ he said, managing to keep his voice steady.

As the huge creature broke through the edge of the kill zone, las-fire stitching its flanks with deep burns and blasting chunks from the ridged carapace, Kaeron slammed his fist down and shrieked into the vox.

‘Fire! All tubes, fire now!’

The ship lurched as four mighty torpedoes burst from her prow and raced towards the target, though they barely altered her forward velocity.

A seemingly prescient smaller tyranid vessel dived in front of the first projectile, sacrificing itself to save its larger cousin in a burst of ruined flesh and bony shrapnel, but the second, third and fourth found their mark easily. Huge warheads designed to bring down renegade capital ships detonated in the monster’s gullet, blasting the foul thing apart in a flaring bloom of catastrophic, organic ruin. Slathers of flesh and ropes of bloody fluid dozens of metres in length crackled through the Xenophon’s void shields and splattered over her pockmarked hull, to the cheers of the bridge crew.

Kaeron turned to Goss, the thrill of battle written all over his face. ‘She’s got a taste for their blood now, eh?’ he yelled over the furore.

Goss barely heard him, his eyes wide in horror.

One of the dead creature’s wing-like blades, easily two hundred metres long on its own, had spun loose from the bio-wreckage and whirled towards them.

He had meant to call out to the helm for ‘evasive manoeuvres’, but before he could even utter the words the thundering jolt of the impact threw him from his feet. The bone spur sheared through the turrets at the Xenophon’s prow, and cleaved a great gash in the hull-skin down her port flank, before skipping up on the crenellated ridge at her crown and spiralling off into the darkness. Secondary explosions tore through the batteries as their magazines ignited, and warning klaxons howled with renewed vigour throughout the ship.

Ogden was sprinting the length of the ventral transit corridor when the shockwave hit. He felt a ripple of jarred air pressure on his bare face, and just a millisecond later the floor was yanked away from his feet.

He and one of his men – now wearing ship’s issue flak vests and their yellow-striped helmets – had been managing to keep pace with one of the armoured battle-brothers from Sergeant Hekaton’s squad as he ran another pair of boarding shields back from the armoury.

All thought of their task vanished as the deck lurched and the two men were catapulted into the ceiling. Ogden’s head skimmed past a ribbed support beam, but poor old Tyek wasn’t so fortunate – he struck it awkwardly, and the force of the collision snapped his neck and sent him sprawling.

In that same instant, Ogden was wrenched from the air by a rough, vice-like grip around his shoulder; the Space Marine caught him mid-flight and hauled him back down onto the rumbling deck before he could injure himself. Officer Tyek’s body crashed down on top of them both.

The hulking warrior crouched over Ogden for a long moment, shielding his comparatively frail mortal form with his own armoured bulk. His pauldron bore the name Mascios.

‘Are you damaged, honoured serf-sergeant?’ he asked bluntly, the words filtered and distorted by his helmet’s vox-emitters.

Winded, and with his heartbeat hammering loud in his ears, Ogden tried to shake his head. The thunder and crash of distant explosions, somewhere topside, reverberated through the walls and deck plates. Decompression alarms were already sounding.

He felt his ears pop. On board a ship in the deep void, that was a bad sign.

From further up the ventral space – possibly one or two levels above – there came another impact on the Xenophon’s outer hull, but it was the grinding shriek of torn metal that followed it which seized their attention: a localised hull breach, without any doubt.

Where, then, was the roar of venting atmosphere?

Mascios rose, his internal vox clicking audibly as he opened a channel, and Ogden realised that he had lost his own vox-bead in the fall. Finally finding his breath, he weakly pushed Tyek’s body aside and raised his hand, pleading for a moment to recover, but Mascios was already retrieving the two boarding shields.

‘No time,’ he said. ‘We’ve been hit. This entire section is–’

A crash of debris from further down the corridor silenced him, and he whipped around with his boltgun drawn. Ogden was beside him in a splintering second.

A bestial, guttural roar echoed in the gloom, followed by the dull creak of twisted plasteel as something huge and organic heaved its way into the ship.

Smoke filled the bridge, and a burst of sparks fell from somewhere in its vaulted reaches. The helm servitors babbled incoherently to one another.

Rising shakily from the floor, Goss became aware of blood soaking the front of his uniform tunic; he had broken his nose on the deck plates as he fell. He pawed at the fabric in a daze. The rest of the bridge crew, including Shipmaster Kaeron, were moving and talking far too quickly for him to follow. He heard screams and cries for aid over the vox as the forward compartments burned.

His gaze settled on the stuttering tactical display, and he saw that the smaller craft that had been circling the Xenophon were no longer hanging back.

They were moving in, at ramming speeds.

He shook his head, trying to clear his senses. Kaeron was shouting his name.

Off to port, he spotted a handful of them. They were barbed and elongated; fleshy, winged harpoons, each the size of a Thunderhawk. Larger, maybe. They swam through the vacuum like coral rays, rippling their fanned membranes against the nothingness and propelling themselves on to frightening velocities.

Goss fumbled with his console, imploring the remaining gunnery officers to bring them down. Warning symbols flashed all across the hololith.

Hull breach. Hull breach. Decompression. Hull breach.

The closest harpoon-vessel entered a killing dive, folding its wings behind it and rocketing down hard towards the destroyer’s unguarded aft sections. It disappeared from view just as another twirled down into the forecastle and stuck fast, in plain sight of the frontal port – it was like a feathered dart piercing the hide of a lumbering grox, standing proud from the hull and swaying from side to side in the vacuum.

Tech-adepts and their crews were already moving to seal the damaged compartments or to effect what repairs they could. Where the fires still burned, it would perhaps be simpler to lock off the bulkheads and vent the residual atmosphere into the void...

A single voice cut through the chaos of the vox. It was Reclusiarch Hornindal.

‘Security teams to the engineering decks – we are breached. Scythes, to me. Let us show these xenos which of us is the dominant species.’

Coughing in the lingering smoke of some unseen electrical fire, Kaeron appeared at Goss’s side, his left arm clutched limply across his chest.

‘Deck officer!’

Wiping blood on the back of his sleeve, Goss frowned. ‘Sir?’

‘Our course, man,’ Kaeron growled. ‘Can we still reach the gravity well?’

‘With these… things piercing our hull? It’s possible...’ He ran a hand over the console. ‘We’re restoring atmospheric pressure, at least.’

The shipmaster nodded. ‘All power to the engines. Forget the fight. Proceed with our primary objective – we drop our shields and run.’

Following in the footsteps of the armoured battle-brothers, Ogden’s security officers filed quickly down through the access passage to the aft engineering bays. The stench of smoke and hot bile assaulted their nostrils. A strangled scream echoed down from the upper gantries before being ominously cut short.

Ogden checked and rechecked his weapon’s charge.

In the stuttering light from the lumen strips down here, just above the Xenophon’s bilges, it was all too easy to imagine alien horrors lurking at every gloomy intersection they passed.

The five Space Marines – Brother Mascios and the rest of his combat squad – had taken point as soon as the team had entered the narrow passage; Sergeant Hekaton had taken the rest of his men back to the upper levels, where a fourth tyranid vessel had breached the hull-skin. Though the Scythes, equipped with their hefty boarding shields, sought to place themselves between their loyal serfs and whatever alien threat lay in wait, they would only be able to go so far to protect them. Frantic reports from the other teams spoke of entire crew compartments that had either been flooded with xenos toxins or opened up to the vacuum.

Chaplain Demetrios was leading Squad Certes in a desperate counter-offensive on the observation deck, now overrun by chittering, bladed creatures whose inhuman cries could clearly be heard over the combat channels. Edios had fallen, defending tech-crews in the devastated forward sections, though three of his warriors had survived long enough to drag their dying brethren from the inferno.

On the verge of escape through the Sigma-Tumbus gravity well, the Xenophon was being torn apart from the inside. Now Ogden led his combined team in what would be the final attempt to repel the invaders.

Fourteen of them, standing together as one in the face of an unknowable, alien foe.

‘For Sotha,’ he quietly reminded himself.

A staccato burst of gunfire lit up the junction ahead, and the Space Marines heaved their shields into a defensive phoulkon formation. Ogden brought his lascarbine up reflexively, and motioned for his men to hold position.

The heavy thrashing of a large body shook the walls of the passage, followed by a low growl that rapidly turned into a gagging, fluid eruption.

Two crew-serfs in tattered overalls were hurled out into the main passageway by a great gout of bio-acid which scored deep burns into the metal wall. They tumbled to the deck, screaming and clawing at their eyes and mouths even as their flesh came away in sticky handfuls, convulsing their last moments away with rapidly wasting muscles.

Curses and cries of horror among the team were muted as the foul stench washed over them. It smelled like vomit and rotten, burned meat.

Advancing quickly, two of the Scythes turned the corner to block the open junction with their shields while another hurried three of Ogden’s men over to the other side. They picked their way through the growing pool of acidic spoil, hardly daring to steal a glance into the engineering bay as they passed.

Now flanking either side of the tunnel, the two shieldbearers pulled back and hunkered in close to the plasteel uprights as more agitated, titanic thrashing heralded another gout of bio-acid. This time it sluiced over the left-hand wall and corroded the metal plating, and the passageway began to fill with acrid, choking steam.

A series of vox-clicks between the giants betrayed the fact that they were again communicating with one another over closed channels. Frustrated, Ogden used the Chapter’s non-verbal battle language to demand an appraisal from them, his bare hand casting the gesture twice for emphasis.

Brother Mascios stole another glance into the bay, before signing out to the rest of the team.

Single large target. Twenty-five metres, straight ahead.

He leaned towards Ogden, with a gesture of almost paternal concern.

Immobile. Extreme hazard.

Ogden nodded, and divided his men into three fire-groups – one to each flank and one to cover the centre. The Space Marines edged into the groups without instruction, moving instinctively into the perfect tactical deployment.

Frag grenades were suddenly passing between their gauntleted hands. It was to be a frontal assault, then.

At Ogden’s command, the three groups burst from the tunnel by sections, emerging through the shattered remains of the bay’s main hatchway. The fire-groups clustered behind the shieldbearers, keeping their heads down and advancing quickly as the first grenades detonated in the enclosed compartment.

In spite of what they had already heard from the Xenophon’s other security teams and the Space Marine squads engaged throughout the ship, Ogden was still not prepared for the sight that greeted him in that chamber. His pace faltered as his mind tried to process it.

The outer wall, triple-skinned away from the hull with reinforced plasteel and adamantium alloys, had burst inwards where the tyranid ram-vessel had breached the Xenophon, spearing through the inner bulkheads as though they were made from nothing more than wax. Around the breach, amidst the twisted iron debris and jutting rebar, the deck plates were scorched and buckled by the mass of the alien vessel’s living proboscis as it had forced its way in.

And there it lay. A thrashing, mewling thing, easily the size of a great Sothan phantine; recoiling from the frag blasts and bolter fire that peppered its fleshier parts with stinging shrapnel as they began their assault.

Though the majority of its hide was horned and armoured in thick chitin, it had blossomed open to feed upon the soft bodies of the ship’s crew – half-digested human remains and smears of bloody juices fizzed and hissed on the deck before it. Ogden knew that those Chapter serfs who laboured down in the engineering decks under the watchful eye of the tech-adepts would have little access to small arms, and certainly no projectile weapons powerful enough to prevail against a monster such as this. When the main bulkhead portals between sections had sealed in response to the hull breach, they would have been trapped down here with it.

The thing heaved up and roared, its tusked mouthparts snapping wide and lashing at the nearest fire-group as they drew around to the right. It plucked one of them from his feet, to the horror of his comrades, and the man disappeared into the gaping maw with a single ragged scream.

In a panic, the two remaining security officers bolted for the cover of an upended machine cart, their shots flashing harmlessly off the thing’s horned crest as they ran. Their Space Marine shieldbearer bellowed at them to hold position, and in that moment of inattention the beast struck; it splintered the ceramite of his boarding shield and cleaved deep into his armoured torso. The warrior was flung to the deck, choking blood inside his helmet and clutching at his spilled innards.

Horrified, Ogden saw bloated, venous sacs behind the first crest of the proboscis swelling as they filled with liquid. It was preparing to vomit up another gout of digestive acids.

But Mascios had already seen the danger. The armoured giant crossed the wreckage-strewn bay in the space of two heartbeats, avoiding the whipcord feeder tendrils that writhed at the thing’s flanks and leapt in with his combat blade drawn. With a wordless battle-cry he stabbed down into the lowermost sac again and again, spilling gallons of steaming fluid over his armour and onto the deck, robbing the beast of the fuel for its attack.

The horrid mouth clammed shut, the whole proboscis shaking from side to side in an agonised frenzy, batting the Space Marine away with its sheer bulk.

But it was enough. Between the three groups, they poured bolter and las-fire into the gaps between its segmented chitin plates, and stitched the weaker membranous flesh with shots every time it opened its mouthparts to roar. Mascios himself ended it, stuffing a clutch of grenades into the torn flesh behind the armoured crest before diving clear.

The muffled blast almost severed the proboscis entirely. It showered the walls and ceiling with bloody alien filth, and sent the slack, ruined mouth crashing to the deck.

They cheered. Between them all, they had brought the mighty beast low.

Brother Mascios rose, his battle-plate pitted and scored where the powerful acid had worked upon it. The bare metal and ceramite rendered him as a ghost, a pale reflection of his glorious Chapter colours and with wisps of steam rising from the more delicate joint seals. He released the catches on his helmet and pulled it off to reveal reddened, sore features and bloodshot eyes.

Another of the Scythes stood tall and honoured him with the old Sothan salute – right fist closed over the primary heart, then swept out before him. The salute of the reaper, the inevitable victor. Mascios returned the gesture with a thin smile, though he appeared pained by his exertions and the loss of his fallen battle-brother.

Behind him, Ogden saw the flesh of the tyranid vessel twitch. Just once – most likely the post-mortem constrictions of its alien physiology.

Then a second time.

And again.

He tried to speak, to yell out a warning, but no sound left his lips.

The dead flesh was writhing. Churning.

The xenos erupted from the body of their vessel like maggots from a sun-warmed carcass. Ogden froze at the sight. Brother Mascios turned, and in that moment they were upon him. Many-limbed horrors of teeth, claws and glittering, savage eyes, they rose up from Ogden’s childhood nightmares and spilled into reality – so grotesque, so inhuman, and yet… so familiar. They moved and killed with a hunched, insectoid gait, and Mascios’s hot blood splattered across the serf-sergeant’s face.

Gunfire erupted, along with cries of terror and alarm as dozens more of the creatures swarmed into the chamber.

Ogden sank to his knees on the deck, his lascarbine clattering from numbed fingers. He simply could not will himself to rise against them; some primitive, animal part of his brain would not allow it. He was utterly entranced as they lunged and shrieked and tore into his comrades and masters.

It was almost a blessed relief when their scything xenos talons pierced his own flesh and carved him to pieces. Yet in that final moment, he nonetheless felt a strange, cold reassurance that he had done his part.

Hornindal was lost once more in the holy fury of combat.

Without conscious thought he struck left, the powered discharge of his crozius shattering a leaping tyranid’s skull into sticky fragments. He raised his bolt pistol to the right and put two rounds into the central mass of another, before whirling on his heel to strike at a third.

Suffer not the alien to live.

Those words might well have been one of the principal tenets of his faith – nay, the word of the almighty Emperor of Mankind himself! – such was the fervour with which Hornindal now fought.

It seemed, though, that this was to be his end. No glorious death alongside his Chapter brothers on the field of war, no last stand worthy of a small monument in the Reclusiam for his successors to revere. Not that he had pursued such things; he had lived modestly, as a Scythes of the Emperor should, always ready to defend humanity and willing to give his life for that noble cause.

He had made peace with it, as he always did, before he had even drawn his weapons and taken his battle-oaths. But he was going to die here, unknown and unremembered, and for that he would make the xenos pay a hefty price in blood. Another wave of the vile creatures – during the Tyrannic War, they had called them ‘gaunts’ – spilled from the ruptured bulkhead portals at the far end of the corridor. He loosed five shots from his pistol with a steady hand, and five more fell dead.

‘Hold, abominations!’ he cried out through his helmet’s enhanced vox-projectors. ‘You will not cross this threshold. Not while I still draw breath, nor after.’

Even without the gruff burr of the dying klaxons that were sounding in every chamber and compartment throughout the ship, he doubted that the things could have heard or understood him.

The Reclusiarch fought with his back to the sealed portal that led to the astropaths’ chambers. He had made the tech-crews weld it shut, before casting off his cloak to await the skittering, living tide.

Beyond all else, the chantry could not be overrun.

They had to send the warning.

He had left a single armed security officer in with them, to ensure that they did not turn upon one another in some alien madness – a stern man who looked like he would do his duty without remorse. The psykers had gone on howling in terror even as the bulkhead had been sealed. ‘Walled in’, they had called it. Walled in with their shadowy nightmares.

His bolt pistol ran dry. He calmly reloaded it, taking the last clip from his belt, and watching the gaunts scramble over the mounds of their dead that clogged the corridor before he opened fire once more.

When he felt the Xenophon’s engines gutter and die for the last time through the deck beneath his feet, Hornindal gritted his teeth and let out a long, slow breath. He turned to the cowering serf, who fired sporadic and wildly inaccurate laspistol shots from his hiding place in the open wall panel beside the sealed portal.

‘Sub-lieutenant Goss, contact the shipmaster.’

When the ship-wide vox channels had gone down, Kaeron had sent the young officer with a portable wired unit to stand by the Reclusiarch until the very end. To ensure that the lines of communication were not broken, no matter what happened.

The terrified serf patched the link through to Hornindal’s internal vox, gripping the channel monitor close to his ear but unable to tear his eyes away from the encroaching xenos creatures.

‘Shipmaster Kaeron,’ Hornindal said, with a degree of finality in his voice.

There was a burst of static, and it was some moments before any response came.

‘Lord Reclusiarch. We have lost the main engines. The aft decks have fallen.’

Hornindal fired another shot, decapitating a tyranid as it crested the mound.

‘Have we reached the planetoid?’ he asked. ‘Can you complete the escape manoeuvre using auxiliary thrusters?’

There was a long pause. Goss stared up at the Space Marine, a plaintive look on his face. The pandemonium of the bridge was still audible before Kaeron replied.

‘No, my lord. We have entered the Sigma-Tumbus gravity well, but we were already off course and underpowered. We won’t be able to pull away on the far side of the elliptic. Our orbit has begun to decay.’

Hornindal sagged. ‘That’s it, then,’ he said without emotion. ‘It’s over. Launch the beacon.’

‘Of course, Lord Reclusiarch. Will you record a message?’

‘I will.’

Goss screamed in frustration, and snapped off a flurry of shots with his pistol.

‘I should have known, my lord!’ he cried. ‘Tumbus. It means tomb…’

Ignoring the serf’s hysteria, Hornindal checked his own magazine. He could feel a deep rumble building in the walls around them; not the rhythmic hum of the Xenophon’s systems, but the inexorable pull of conflicting gravities and the rush of atmosphere over her hull.

Sixty-five seconds to impact.

‘This is Brother-Chaplain Hornindal, Reclusiarch of the Scythes of the Emperor, Adeptus Astartes. Chapter vessel Xenophon has encountered a tyranid vanguard fleet deep in the Artaxian subsector. The local Mandeville point is mined. Do not attempt to recover this beacon, I repeat: do not attempt to recover this beacon. Advise our home world of Sotha it lies in the path of the xenos invaders. Look to our–’

A screeching burst of static cut the channel, followed only a moment later by a reverberating explosion that rocked the ship. The remaining lumen strips went dark.

‘Kaeron! Confirm beacon launch!’ he bellowed. This time there was no response.

Like rats, the gaunts scattered, disappearing into the gloom.

Thirty-two seconds.

The frantic Goss cried out in alarm as the corridor began to tilt down towards them, and even Hornindal stumbled as the mounds of xenos corpses shifted. The two of them would be buried alive, crushed against the bulkhead by the weight of their kills in the enclosed space.

Another blast tore up from the decks below and sheared metal panels from the corridor’s ceiling, hurling the Reclusiarch bodily into the sealed portal. Debris and foul alien carcasses tumbled down onto the two of them as the Xenophon’s angle of descent increased.

Sotha. Oh, noble Sotha… heed our warning.

Hornindal recalled the horrors he had seen unleashed upon conquered worlds during the Tyrannic War. Seas drained, populations consumed. The horizon blighted by vast xenos towers that pierced the heavens.

He imagined this doom for his home world, and he wept.

Seventeen seconds. Sixteen.

The mighty warrior swatted aside the corpses that slipped and skidded down the slope of the ruined corridor, gripping young Goss by his uniform tunic and dragging him up from the crush.

Protect them always. And when you cannot, simply aid their passing.

The far reaches of the corridor buckled with a deafening groan of tortured metal – the Xenophon’s back was broken. It would not be long now. Deck plates popped free in an undulating wave away from the dorsal ridge, firing rivets and corroded debris into the darkness.

The whole ship lurched as something broke away from the outer hull, and roaring flames swept the length of the corridor; they were ablaze with the heat of atmospheric re-entry.

Hornindal clutched Goss tightly against his broad, armoured chest. The bloodied young officer screamed into the white noise of the inferno, his epaulettes and wrinkled collar smouldering in the heat, his bare face blistering.

Hornindal closed his eyes. He imagined the planet’s surface racing up to meet them as they burned. Something in the ship’s superstructure cracked beneath him.

Holy Emperor, I have failed you. I have failed them all.

He braced both feet against the bulkhead.

Four. Three. Two.

Extract from Fear to Tread

James Swallow

At the start, it had been Horus who called the tune of the battle plans. In the strategium of his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, the master of the Luna Wolves faced his brother across a wide hololithic display and showed him the plan he had conceived to break the will of the nephilim. It was shock and awe, an implacable and showy display of combat might, the kind that Sanguinius’s sibling had made his own time and again throughout the wars of the Great Crusade. In a sea of red and white, Horus wanted the Blood Angels to march shoulder-to-shoulder with their cousins, cowing the aliens with the sight of an army of thousands rolling without pause to the gates of their last bastion. And then through those gates, over the battlements, not stopping, not pausing to parley or hesitate. Like the ocean these things sprang from, Horus had said, we will roll over the aliens, drag them down and drown them.

The sheer bombast of the plan was its greatest strength, but Sanguinius had not been easily swayed to it. Across the hololith, the two brothers had argued and countered, to and fro, one presenting obstacles and challenges to the other. To an outside observer, it might have seemed aloof, almost callous to see these two mighty genhanced soldiers talking over a monumental confrontation as if it were little more than a game of regicide.

But nothing could be further from the truth. The Blood Angel looked into the panes of the holograph and saw the countless icons representing civilian concentrations, the play of the geography, the deceptive desert landscape full of hidden chokepoints and kill-boxes. In his mind, Horus had already weighed the tactics of the engagement and made a regrettable, but necessary choice. He had made the difficult decision and then moved past it, ridden on. Not from heartlessness, but from expedience.

Sanguinius could not do so as easily. The blunt, brute-force approach was better suited to their more intemperate kinsmen, to Russ or to Angron, and neither Sanguinius nor his brother Horus were so artless, so focused upon the target to the detriment of all else.

But it was difficult not to allow the cold rage instilled by the actions of the nephilim to be given its rein. The alien giants, mocking humanity’s great dream with their talk of peace and unity, had left a trail of destruction behind them that had claimed a hundred worlds before they had come to rest upon Melchior.

Sagan, the DeCora Spine, Orpheo Minoris, Beta Rigel II. These planets had been denuded of all human life, populations herded into empath-chapels as big as mountains and then slowly consumed. The true horror of it was that the nephilim used those they preyed upon to do their soldiering for them, snaring the pliant, the lonely, the sorrowful with their ideal of an attainable godhood. They plied them with stories of eternal existence for the faithful, of endless sorrow for the agnostic; and they were very good at it.

Perhaps the xenos really believed that what they were doing was somehow taking them closer to a form beyond flesh, to an afterlife in an eternal heaven-state; it did not matter. With their technologies they implanted bits of themselves into their thralls to further their communion, they cut their own flesh and made the masks to mark their devotees. The nephilim controlled minds, either through the transmitted power of their will or through the weak character of those they chose.

They were an affront to the Emperor’s secular galaxy, not only an offence to the purity of a human ideal but in their insidious cuckoo-nest displacement of those who foolishly gave them fealty.

For what the aliens fed upon, what the scouts of the Blood Angels and Luna Wolves had seen and reported back, were the very lives of those who cherished them. The empty chapels were piled high with stacks of desiccated corpses, bodies aged years in hours as all living essence was siphoned from them. It had sickened the primarchs as the true understanding of the enemy they faced was, at last, revealed.

The nephilim fed on adulation.

Thus, Sanguinius would deny these repellent xenos their sustenance and defeat their arrogance in the same blow. The invaders believed that the Emperor’s sons would never starve them by resorting to the murder of the humans they took as their cattle, and that was so. Yet what the nephilim considered a weakness, the Angel made a strength. So confident were they of their unassailable position, they had met Horus’s arrival with almost the full might of their forces, daring the Luna Wolves to strike at them.

And with the aliens turning their backs, their belief in their victory already blinding them to the unbreakable strength of intent within the warriors they now faced, the true angels fell in fire on Melchior and became the hammer of the Emperor’s wrath.

Running at a charge, the primarch was a hurricane, racing into the thick of the nephilim lines and taking to the air in deft, agile moves. With his sword and the shorter blades of a glaive built into his vambrace he made kill after kill, shouting down those who tried to deafen him with their dirge-waves. Flanking him, Azkaellon and Zuriel, first and second of his personal guard, used their wrist-mounted Angelus bolters to pour cascades of fire into the enemy line. With each hit, the warheads of the mass-reactive bloodshard rounds exploded into hundreds of magno-charged monofilaments; every concussive impact upon the skin of a nephilim caused bloody detonations inside the torsos of the alien creatures. Lakes of bluish, shimmering internal fluids littered the battleground, shrinking slowly as the silver sand absorbed them.

At the heels of the Guard came the captains leading their assault companies. Raldoron, the Blooded of the First, hurled bolter fire from the weapon in his steady hand, his elite veterans emblazoned with ebon fetishes carved in the fashion of the hunter tribes on the Blood Angels home world of Baal. The First Captain was joined by elements of Furio’s Ninth Company shield-bearers, Galan’s men of the 16th with their favoured blade-staves, and Amit with the Fifth, every one of them bearing boltgun and flaying knife.

Heavy weapon barrages concentrated on the copper towers and the walls of the empath-chapels, denying the nephilim the infrastructure of their haven, forcing them to engage head-on. To the south, where Horus had drawn his feint, the great tide of battle was shifting and breaking. The Luna Wolves had first dug in, block-ading any progress or escape by the xenos, and now they advanced. Extending into a wide arc, the line of Horus’s soldiery forced the varicoloured giants back, pressing them on to the blades and the guns of the Blood Angels. With brutal inevitability, the trap the Emperor’s sons had devised aboard the Vengeful Spirit closed like a vice. With each passing minute, they left the aliens less and less room to manoeuvre. Many of the nephilim’s converts began to surrender, droves of them crying out in pain as they tried to peel off the bonded masks; while those too far along the road to worship spent their lives for their masters in a vain and fruitless attempt to slow the pace of the Space Marines.

Sanguinius had no pity for these dupes. They had allowed themselves to be drawn in by pretty words, let themselves be ruled by their fears instead of by their hopes. And in much greater measure, he had only anger for the nephilim themselves.

Over the bodies of the alien dead, the crimson legionaries and their golden warlord turned fury upon the giants. The whickering music of the aliens’ strange songs became an atonal scale of panicked noises punctuated by chugging snarls of aggression. Horus’s landspeeder squadrons raced overhead, bracketing a phalanx of blue-skins with salvoes from their graviton guns and multi-meltas, punching through curls of smoke as the outer rings of the encampment burned.

Galan’s war-cry drew the primarch’s attention and he spared the captain a glance. There was such ferocity, such resolve in the face of the warrior, and Sanguinius felt a surge of pride to be fighting alongside his sons. Legionaries born of Baal and Terra alike, united many years earlier by the Angel himself under a banner of incarnadine, these were his sharpest blades, his brightest minds. In battle they were unparalleled, and for a moment the primarch allowed himself to feel the pure, wild joy of the fight. They were going to win; that had never been in doubt.

The enemy was in disarray, and their villainy was unquestioned. This was a righteous battle, the victory of the Imperium as inevitable as the rising of Melchior’s sun. Sanguinius and Horus would win this day, and a lost world would be brought back into the fold once more. This would be done, by battle-brothers and brothers in blood, by primarch and legionary alike. He could taste the victory on his lips, sweet and dark like good wine.

And so there, on Melchior’s shining sands, the nephilim were put to the sword.

In the aftermath, the freed slaves were isolated from the converts who still remained alive for fear that revenge killings would explode from a mob mentality. Horus took on this deed, in no uncertain terms drilling those who claimed to lead the liberated that justice would be delivered to all turncoats – but it would be Imperial justice, right and true and conducted to the letter of the law.

In the meantime, the convert prisoners were given back-breaking menial work, overseen by troopers from the Imperial Army brigades that had come to support the Legions. The converts carried the dead nephilim to great pyres set about the desert and were made to burn the corpses of the aliens they had worshipped; others were formed into work gangs whose task was to dismantle the copper devotional towers they had forced their fellows to build only days earlier.

Sanguinius stood atop a shallow hill of pale rock and watched the sun dropping towards the distant horizon. His wings were pulled close, and the xenos blood shed upon him as he fought was gone, cleansed from his armour. He nodded to himself. Melchior was safe, the victory secure. Already his thoughts were moving towards the next battle, the next world in need of illumination.

A smile grew on his lips as he sensed his brother’s approach, but he did not turn to look at Horus. ‘There is a question that concerns me greatly,’ said Sanguinius, with false gravity.

‘Oh?’ The lord of the Luna Wolves halted at his side. ‘That sounds troubling.’

Neither of them paid heed to it, but directly below in the shallow canyon beneath the rise, many of the common soldiers, prisoners, even their own legionaries, paused to watch. It was a sight to see a single primarch in the flesh; to behold a pair of these gene-forged transhumans at once was something that many of those watching would remember for as long as they lived. For many different reasons.

‘How can I ease your disquiet, brother?’ Horus went on, affecting a serious mien.

The Angel eyed him. ‘If the grey had done as you asked, if it had set the thralls free… Tell me, would you really have let the aliens go?’

Horus nodded, as if the answer were obvious. ‘I am a man of my word. I would have let them leave the planet’s surface, make for orbit…’ He cocked his head. ‘But when they met your ships up there, well…’ He gave a small shrug, the huge shoulders of his battle plate exaggerating the motion. ‘You’ve never been as agreeable as I.’

The smile became a moment of laughter. Sanguinius gave a slight, mocking bow. ‘So true. I must content myself with merely being the better warrior.’

‘Don’t make me pluck those wings,’ Horus retorted.

‘Perish the thought!’ said Sanguinius. ‘Without them I’d only be as handsome as you are.’

‘That would be tragic,’ Horus agreed.

The moment of levity passed and in the next exchange they had gone from the easy humour of a pair of siblings to the manner of two allied generals. ‘What ships have you chosen to remain to administrate the compliance?’

Horus rubbed his chin. ‘The Sword Argus and the Crimson Spectre, I think. Their Army platoons can garrison here, make sure the nephilim cult is dead and buried. If all goes well, they will disengage and reconnect with my expeditionary fleet in a few months.’

The winged primarch glanced up into the sky. ‘I fear we have not seen the last of these creatures.’

‘The Khan hunts their birth world even as we speak. He will finish what we started here today.’

‘I hope so. The technology the aliens used, the ease with which they infiltrated the minds of these civilians... It’s troubling. We can’t allow it to go unchecked.’ Sanguinius looked back at his sibling. ‘So, where next for you?’

‘The Ullanor Sector. A dozen systems have gone silent, from New Mitama all the way out to Nalkari. I suspect another xenos incursion.’

‘Orks?’

‘Likely. I could use your support, brother.’

Sanguinius smiled again. ‘I doubt that. And I could not oblige even if I wished it. My astropaths have been agitated for days, divining messages from our scouts in the Perseus Null. Compliance is sorely needed there, I have been told.’

‘Father’s great plan… It does not often allow us the chance to cross paths,’ noted Horus. His brother thought he sensed a thread of regret beneath the words. ‘How much glory did we share this day? Not enough.’

‘Agreed.’ There had been a moment when the primarchs had met during the engagement, when a horde of nephilim grey-skins had rushed at them with ear-splitting barrages of noise radiating from the glass spines growing out of their limbs. The brothers stood back to back and weathered every blow, cut down each attacker. The moment had been the fulcrum around which their victory had turned. ‘I confess I would relish the opportunity to share the battleground with you again,’ Sanguinius went on. ‘And not just that. I miss our conversations.’

Horus’s frown deepened. ‘One day we will be done with all this.’ He gestured at the desert sands and the debris of the battle. ‘Then we can talk and play regicide to our hearts’ content. At least until the next crusade.’

Something in his brother’s tone gave Sanguinius pause. There was a meaning buried in there, a moment that he could sense but not grasp; something that perhaps even Horus himself was unaware of.

The chance to examine the thought was lost when a figure in crimson armour came running up the low hill. ‘My lords. Forgive the interruption.’ Raldoron bowed and shot Horus a wary look before turning to his primarch. ‘The Angel’s presence is required… elsewhere.’

‘Is there a problem, First Captain?’ Horus asked the Blood Angels officer.

Raldoron’s expression was unreadable. The warrior had a gaunt, solid face beneath a high queue of grey-white hair, and he betrayed nothing. ‘A Legion matter, sir,’ he said. ‘It requires my lord’s personal attention.’

Sanguinius fixed his captain with a hard stare. He was one of his most trusted men and carried many honours alongside his stewardship of the elite veteran company, hard-won through decades of war in the Emperor’s name. Raldoron was equerry to the primarch and held the new honorific ‘Chapter Master’, serving in a similar role to the warriors of Horus’s advisory cadre, the Mournival. He was not a man given to impulsive and ill-considered actions, so his intrusion here was cause for concern. ‘Speak, Ral.’

There was momentary pause, so tiny, so fractional that only someone who knew Captain Raldoron as well as his liege lord did would pick up on it. But it was enough to signal that something was amiss.

‘One of our brothers has been… lost, sir.’

Sanguinius felt his face become a mask, as cold seeped into his veins. ‘My brother, please excuse me.’

He never registered Horus’s reply; he was already moving, following Raldoron out through the mist of battle-smoke wreathing the darkening desert.

They did not speak, not as they walked, not as they boarded the land speeder that Raldoron had secured for the transit across the warzone. Sanguinius retreated inside his own thoughts and prepared himself for the worst as the First Captain piloted the flyer out across the eastern flank of the conflict area. They moved in the nap of the earth, rolling up and down shallow inclines, skirting the remains of blasted praise-towers and fallen battlements. As the grav motors slowed and they neared their destination, the primarch saw that the matter had been contained exactly as he had wished it to be. Raldoron, ever the planner, had made sure that a wide circular area was secure, a barrier of Blood Angels legionaries standing face-outwards in a wide combat wheel hundreds of metres across. None of them looked up as the speeder passed over their heads and dropped down to settle in the courtyard of a bombed-out empath-chapel.

‘In there.’ Raldoron’s grim words carried over the low hum of the idling engines as he jutted his chin towards the ruin. ‘I isolated him the moment I was certain.’

Sanguinius felt the cold in his blood spread to his hands as they walked towards the slumped shape of the building. The walls had listed to the right and the ceiling had come down, forcing the oval church to sink into the sands beneath. A second, smaller group of legionaries stood around the black maw of the entrance; they were from Raldoron’s honour guard, and they also did not face the site they were guarding nor react to the presence of their primarch.

‘His name?’

‘Alotros,’ said Raldoron. ‘A battle-brother of solid, if unremarkable service. From Captain Tagas’s command, the 111th Company.’

‘What does Tagas know?’ asked Sanguinius.

‘That Brother Alotros is dead, my lord.’ A figure in gold armour emerged from the dark doorway and saluted. Azkaellon’s severe expression spoke volumes as to what had gone on. ‘Killed by the xenos, atomised in an explosion. A noble end.’ The Sanguinary Guard deliberately stepped into the path of his commander and halted, glaring at Raldoron. ‘You should not have brought him here.’

Raldoron opened his mouth to speak, but his primarch talked over him. ‘That is not your place to decide, Guard Commander.’ Azkaellon paled slightly at the force behind Sanguinius’s hard, even tone. ‘Now step aside.’

Azkaellon did as he was told, but he could not remain silent. ‘This should be dealt with by us, sir. Quietly.’

‘Quietly?’ echoed the primarch, his voice suddenly distant. ‘No, my son. No Blood Angel will ever die in silence.’

Inside the fallen alien temple, the stink of fresh blood hung in the air, powerful and metallic. Sanguinius licked his lips; he couldn’t stop the reflex reaction. His omophageaic membrane tasted several different varieties of human vitae, analysing them as instinctively as a vintner would know the ages and textures of a wine’s bouquet. There was alien blood spilled here too, the acrid tang of the nephilim among it all.

He found the golden boots of his warplate casting ripples out across a pool of dark fluid that had formed a small lake in the gloomy interior of the chapel. There were many, many dead in here with him, arranged around the edges of the chamber as if they were an audience watching the stage of a theatre in the round. Smashed fragments of nephilim neuro-tech – synapse sinks, empathic matrices and the like – littered the ruin. But none of the violence wrought here had come from the battle fought through this day. No, the scene here was not one of war, but of madness.

He saw Alotros the moment he entered the temple, the thermal form of him clear to the primarch’s bio-augmented vision against the cold bodies of the dead. The Space Marine was crouched down on one knee as if in a gesture of fealty. With careful, steady actions, Alotros sat in the middle of the lake and mechanically cupped handfuls of the dark fluid, one after another, to his lips. He drank silently, unhurried.

‘Look at me,’ ordered Sanguinius. His heart tightened in his chest and a very specific kind of sorrow gripped him as Alotros slowly obeyed.

The Blood Angel’s armour was badly damaged; fibre-bundle musculature ripped, ceramite cracked. It appeared that the chestplate had been torn open across the sternum and a brutal wound opened beneath it. The primarch recognised the hit pattern of a nephilim shriekpulse, and looking closer he saw the trails of dried blood visible from Alotros’s nostrils, his ears, the corners of his reddened eyes. Such a hit would have boiled the brain matter of an ordinary human, and even for a legionary the impact should have crippled flesh and torn at neural pathways. Alotros was pallid and in obvious pain, but he seemed detached from it. The warrior had taken a point-blank strike from one of the alien weapons and survived, a rare happenstance; but, Sanguinius corrected himself, he had not survived. Not really. At this very moment, somewhere else on the battlefield, Captain Tagas and the men who had been Alotros’s squadmates were making their peace with his death.

His lips, his chin, the exposed flesh of his neck, all were wet with the blood he had been patiently drinking, mouthful by mouthful. Alotros looked at his primarch with bleak, animal eyes. Sanguinius saw a hunger there, the same hunger he had seen before in other eyes, in other places. At first only rarely, but now with a grim regularity.

Alotros released a deep, rumbling growl and slowly came to his feet. His hands tightened into talons and he showed his teeth. Fangs flashed in the gloom. In another time it would have been said that his soul had been usurped by some hellish phantom, that his blood was poisoned, that he was possessed. But such ideas were fantasies. The warping of this good warrior came from something within him, not from a mythical, otherworldly external force.

Sanguinius knew that it was already too late, but he could not go on without trying. He offered his hand. ‘My son,’ he began. ‘Step back, if you can. Step back from the abyss and return to us. I will save you.’

Alotros blinked, as if the words were foreign to him and their meaning difficult to grasp.

‘This is my fault,’ said the primarch. ‘I am to blame. But I will amend this, if you help me.’ He took a step forwards. ‘Will you help me, Alotros?’

It was with a father’s hollow regret that Sanguinius saw his words fall upon stony ground. A feral intent, an impulse drawn up from the very deepest bestial core of the warrior, emerged on the Blood Angel’s face, and finally whatever was left of Brother Alotros of the 111th Company simply went away.

In a berserk, furious rage that exploded out of nothing, the legionary tore across the empath-chapel in great splashing bounds. The primarch hesitated; with power sword, glaive-blade or infernus pistol, it would have been no matter for him to draw a weapon and end the battle-brother’s life before he came within arm’s reach. But something stopped him.

Perhaps it was hope, hope that Alotros would be the one to break the cycle and not do the same as those before; or perhaps it was guilt that stayed his hand, some measure of punishment inflicted on the self to see this horror up close, to know the dying moment of it.

Against all reason, against all possibility of survival, Alotros attacked his gene-father. He was screaming, babbling in fragments of the technomad dialect of Baal’s Low Mesa clans. The warrior wanted only one thing: to bite deep into living flesh and drink his fill of the rich crimson fluid within. He was truly lost.

Sanguinius held Alotros at bay, the warrior’s maddened blows ringing harmlessly off his battle armour, the fires of his rage not fading but burning brighter with every passing moment. The cocktail of blood-fumes on his breath clogged the primarch’s senses, and Sanguinius understood.

He knew where this crimson fury, this red thirst sprang from. He could sense it, coiled like a poisonous thread inside his own genetic helix. A dark bequest that he had passed on to his kin. A recessive death-mark.

‘I am sorry, my son,’ he told Alotros, in the last heartbeat before he broke the legionary’s neck.

Alotros’s snarls ended with a guttural hiss, and at the end there was some brief measure of peace in his eyes. His body fell into the shallow pool; the Blood Angel’s pain was at an end, a final mercy granted to him. But now the darkness in the gloomy alien church seemed shades deeper, heavy with the weight of what had been done there.

For the second time that day, Sanguinius sensed the presence of his brother.

He wheeled, turning to glare into the dimness as a massive shadow broke away from a slumped support column and stood stock-still before him. ‘Horus...?’

‘What did you do?’ His brother’s face caught the light and the ghost of shock was etched upon it. ‘What did you do?’ The sound of his own voice seemed to jolt the other primarch out of his stasis and he rushed towards the fallen warrior. ‘You… killed him.’

In a strangely protective gesture, Sanguinius stepped in front of the corpse, bringing Horus up short. ‘You followed me?’ His tone betrayed anger and surprise, shame and regret and a hundred other emotions. ‘Spied on me?’

It was taking all of Horus’s monumental self-control to stay where he stood, the confusion on his face shifting, changing. He was grasping to comprehend what he had just witnessed, and failing. A primarch executing one of his own sons… The thought of such a thing was terrible to contemplate.

‘You should not be here,’ Sanguinius told him, echoing Azkaellon’s reproach. ‘This was not for the eyes of outsiders.’ His words were dead, bled dry.

‘That seems so.’ Horus gave a glum nod. ‘But I am your brother. I am not an outsider.’ He raised his head and met the Angel’s gaze, challenging him. ‘And I do not understand why you have committed such a hateful deed.’

Sanguinius did not bother to ask how Horus had made it past Raldoron’s guards without raising any alarm; he was a primarch, after all, and the Emperor’s sons had always been adept at going where their will took them.

When Horus looked at him, it was not with anger and disappointment, but with a terrible kind of empathy. ‘I should not have come here, but your reaction when the First Captain spoke… Brother, what I saw in your eyes at that moment gave me cause for concern.’ He stepped around and knelt over Alotros’s body. ‘And now I see I was right to think so.’ Horus studied the dead legionary with a clinical eye, and raised his gauntlet to tap a finger upon his temple. ‘Tell me there was cause. What was wrong with him? Did the nephilim do this, did they cause some great damage to his mind?’

The lie caught in the Angel’s throat. Yes, he could say –

A terrible tragedy. This is the work of the foul xenos. I was forced to take a regrettable action–

‘No.’ The falsehood crumbled before it was fully formed. He could no more lie to his sibling than he could chain Melchior’s sun and pull it from the sky. Horus and Sanguinius knew each other so well that to lie to one another would be a monumental undertaking, a pretence of ultimate artifice. He could not conscience such a thing. ‘No, Horus. This is my fault. The blame lies with me.’

For a long moment, there was only silence between them, and the Angel could see his brother’s train of thought there in his expression, the questions he was asking himself, the answers he found wanting.

At last, Horus stood and placed a hand on his brother’s shoulder, the stony lines of his face etched in disquiet. ‘If you wish it, I will leave this place now and never speak again of the matter. Your Legion is your concern, Sanguinius, and I would never question that.’ He paused. ‘But I am your brother and your friend, and it cuts me to see the sorrow in your eyes. I know you are a compassionate soul, that you would not do such a thing unless it was your only choice. But you have a great burden, and I would help you carry it, if only you will let me.’

The Blood Angel’s eyes narrowed. ‘You ask much.’

‘I always do,’ admitted Horus. ‘Speak to me. Make me understand.’ He was almost imploring. ‘I swear to you, on the honour of my Legion, any words spoken here will never pass beyond these walls. I will keep your confidence from all.’

Sanguinius met his gaze. ‘Even from our father?’

The other primarch said nothing for a moment; then at last, he nodded.

With great care, Sanguinius gathered up the body of his fallen warrior and carried him from the pool of shimmering dark to a stone pedestal. The platform had been home to a crystalline devotional statue of a nephilim, but now all that remained of it was a shallow drift of broken shards that crunched underfoot. The primarch arranged the body of the dead legionary in repose, restoring the dignity that his madness had stolen.

At length, Sanguinius turned to face Horus. ‘We were made to be perfect,’ he began. ‘Tools of war. The supreme princes of battle.’ He slowly spread his hands and the white wings curled at his back. ‘Do you think that father succeeded in his design?’

‘Perfection is not a state of being,’ Horus replied. ‘It is a state of striving. The journey is all that has meaning, not the goal.’

‘Did the Phoenician tell you that?’

His brother nodded once. ‘Fulgrim may be a peacock, but when he spoke those words he was right.’

Sanguinius laid a hand on Alotros’s stilled chest. ‘We give so much to our sons. Our aspect, our will, our fortitude. They are the best of us. But they carry our flaws as well.’

‘So they should,’ said Horus. ‘So we should. To be human is to be flawed – no matter what we are or where we came from, we are still human. We share the same ancestry as the people we defend.’

‘Indeed. If we lost that connection… If we truly were beyond humanity, then the Emperor’s sons and the Legiones Astartes would have more kinship to xenos like them–’ Sanguinius gestured towards the corpse of a nephilim blue-skin ‘–than to the children of Terra.’ He shook his head. ‘But for all that we are, we cannot escape what is within.’ The Angel pressed his fingers to his chest. ‘I have bequeathed something dark to my sons, brother.’

‘Speak plainly,’ Horus demanded. ‘I am not Russ who would judge you, or Dorn who would not listen. You and I, we have no need for pretence.’

‘I believe that there is a hidden flaw in the genetic matrix of the Blood Angels gene-seed. Something in my own bio-type. I have looked within myself and seen glimpses of it, brother. A murky core, a trait that lies buried and waits to be awakened.’

Horus’s gaze fell on the dead warrior. ‘This is… the fury that I saw in him?’

‘It cries out for blood. And there is never enough.’

The Luna Wolf turned away, thinking. ‘How many times?’

‘Alotros is one of several that I am certain of. There may have been others who perished in battle without note of it.’

‘A handful, in two hundred years, from a Legion of one hundred and twenty thousand?’ Horus folded his armoured gauntlets together. ‘How can you be sure of–’

Sanguinius held up his hand. ‘I am sure,’ he said gravely. ‘And the incidences are coming closer together. I fear that, in time, it will grow to encompass every one of my sons. In my meditation, I have seen such… possibilities.’

His brother waited for him to continue. Each of the primarchs were touched by their father’s preternatural gifts in a different way, and for Sanguinius, part of that legacy was a certain kind of sight. A hazy, indefinite sense of foreknowledge.

‘The story is always the same,’ he went on. ‘A warrior in the throes of battle succumbs to a rage that builds and builds until his reason is lost. His humanity is stripped away until only a feral core remains. He kills and kills, seeks blood and more blood.’ He paled as he spoke. ‘And at the end, at the very worst of it, he loses every last piece of himself.’

‘Until death is a kindness.’ Horus nodded again. ‘Brother… I understand now. How long have you known?’

Strangely, as Sanguinius had given voice to the words he felt the load upon him lighten, as if the act of confiding in Horus had indeed lessened his burden. ‘I have kept this from our father and brothers for several years. I am searching for a solution. Some among my sons have a measure of the truth. They are united with me in finding a way of undoing this flaw.’ His jaw stiffened. ‘My flaw.’

‘Brother…’ Horus began, framing his words.

Sanguinius shook his head. ‘Don’t say it. You think that I blame myself for something I have no control over, but I do not agree. This is my legacy and I must account for it. A primarch…’ He faltered over the words, his voice thick with emotion.

‘A primarch is father to his Legion,’ said Horus, completing the thought for him. ‘I will not disagree or try to convince you otherwise.’ He paused again. ‘Who else is aware of the full dimensions of this?’ Horus glanced towards the entrance of the fallen empath-chapel.

‘Azkaellon, Captain Raldoron, my Master Apothecary on Baal… and a few others.’

When Horus spoke again, his voice was low. ‘Why in Terra’s name did you not ask for help?’

Sanguinius met his gaze. ‘Tell me, Horus. What is it that you are most afraid of?’

The demand took the other primarch off-guard, and for a moment, the Luna Wolf was on the verge of dismissing the question; then his expression shifted and he gave the brutally truthful answer. ‘Falling short. Of failing my Legion, my Imperium… my Emperor.’

‘Something each of his sons shares, even if many of us would never have the courage to admit it.’ Sanguinius walked away, the shadows lengthening around him. ‘I could not speak of this to any of the others. You know as well as I do that it would diminish my Legion. Some of our brothers would see it as weakness and seek to turn this truth against me.’ He grimaced. ‘Alpharius, Lorgar… They would not be generous.’

‘But why have you kept this from father? If any living being could know the key to it, it would be him!’

Sanguinius rounded on Horus, his seraphic features hardening. ‘You know the reason!’ he answered with a snarl. ‘I will not be responsible for the erasure of the Blood Angels from Imperial history. I will not have a third empty plinth beneath the roof of the Hegemon as my Legion’s only memorial!’

Horus’s eyes widened. ‘It would not come to that.’

Sanguinius shook his head once more. ‘I cannot take the risk. The Emperor has concerns that go far beyond the needs of his individual sons. You know that is so.’ He frowned. ‘We all know that is so.’

Silence fell again, broken only by the hollow wind pulling at the ruined walls of the temple and the distant crash of metal as another nephilim praise-tower was cut down.

Then, with grim finality, Horus offered his hand to the Angel. ‘I swore to you I would say nothing of this. I will keep that promise for as long as you wish me to.’

Sanguinius accepted the gesture, their vambraces clanking together as they shook hands in the old pre-Unity fashion, palms grasping each other’s wrists. ‘I trust no one more than you, Horus,’ he said. ‘Your solidarity means more than I can express.’

‘I will do all I can to help you deal with this matter,’ said the Luna Wolf. ‘However long it takes.’

Raldoron barely covered his shock when not one, but two primarchs exited the ruined building. Without a word to any of the assembled warriors, Sanguinius and Horus walked away across the silver sands, each turning from the other to make for the lines of their Legions’ forces.

At his side, Azkaellon was as rigid as a statue, and the First Captain had no doubt that the leader of the Sanguinary Guard was silently furious. Horus’s appearance could only mean one thing. He knew.

Sensing his scrutiny, Azkaellon shot Raldoron a hard look. ‘Your warriors are ineffective.’

‘Watch your damned tone, bodyguard.’ The captain’s answer came back through gritted teeth. He pointed out beyond the ring of his troops. ‘Your second-in-command is slinking around out there, and he didn’t catch the primarch either.’

‘Zuriel will be reprimanded for his error, have no doubt of that.’

Raldoron didn’t. Azkaellon was so severe in his manner that sometimes it seemed he was utterly inflexible on anything. It was a frequent cause of friction between the warriors of the First Company and the Sanguinary Guard. Raldoron’s fluid, adaptable command style was at odds with Azkaellon’s aloof, rigid comportment, and the two of them reflected that down to the bone.

‘I have work to do,’ said the Guard Commander, striding away from the ruins. ‘I hope I can leave the rest of the details to you without fear of further error.’ Before Raldoron could retort, the flight pack on Azkaellon’s back spat flame and his sculpted wings unfurled. In a flash of gold, the warrior was gone.

The First Captain’s grimace deepened and he dismissed his warriors with a sharp gesture. He gave one of them a glare. ‘Where is the Apothecary? I called for a savant an hour ago!’

‘Here, lord,’ said a voice behind him.

Raldoron turned and found a legionary marching towards him across the rubble-strewn square, emerging from the smoke. The warrior’s crimson armour bore the white trim of a sanctioned Legion medicae, and from his battle plate hung narthecium packs, drug flasks and other flesh-cutter’s tools. His left gauntlet was heavily modified from the standard Mark II Crusade-pattern unit, bulky with the protruding barrel of a reductor. He wore the badge of the Prime Helix and there was a skull sigil on the brow of his helmet showing his status as an Apothecae Minoris, the most junior rank. A labour-servitor ambled after him, listing as it clumped over the uneven ground. The captain studied the Apothecary; he would have preferred a veteran to assist in this matter, but to re-task a more seasoned officer from their duties would have drawn undue attention.

The new arrival gave a salute. ‘Reporting as ordered.’ He gave no sign of having witnessed the departure of the two primarchs, which was just as well. Fewer questions for him to dwell upon, thought the captain.

‘You will follow me,’ ordered Raldoron, ‘and say nothing.’

They entered the fallen chapel and the Apothecary activated the illuminator mounted on his backpack. The cold ray of white light searched the chamber, picking out thousands of motes of rock dust suspended in the heavy air, before shimmering off the great liquid pool in the slumped spaces of the nave. Raldoron saw the beam venture towards the shadowed forms of the dead and he called out, dragging the young Apothecary’s attention and the light to the podium where Alotros’s body lay. The captain grimly stripped the dead battle-brother’s armour of all company marks and personal icons, until there was nothing to show who this warrior might have been or where he had served.

‘The progenoid glands,’ said the captain. ‘Remove them.’

There was a moment of hesitation on the part of the other Blood Angel, but the faceless helmet showed no expression, and soon he was at work. The reductor gave a high-pitched buzz as it bit through exposed flesh, the tip digging into the corpse before it splayed open and snipped out the gene-rich knots of meat. Each progenoid was a collection of DNA metadata expressed in organic form, the raw code of the Blood Angels physiognomy rendered as flesh; similar organs were implanted in every legionary, each tailored to the particular traits and quirks of their brotherhood. They were the most precious resource of a Space Marine Legion, for each progenoid recovered from a fallen warrior would find new life in the body of the next generation of recruits. In that way, they would maintain a genetic lineage with those who came before them and those who would come after, as the organs manifested within them.

The Apothecary reverently placed Alotros’s gene-seed in a hermetic capsule, but before he could drop it into a seal-pouch at his hip, Captain Raldoron reached out and took it from him.

‘What is your name, Apothecary?’ asked the officer, forestalling any reaction.

‘Meros, sir. Of the Ninth Company.’

‘Captain Furio’s command.’ He nodded. ‘A fine warrior. A company of regard.’

‘Thank you, sir. But–’

Raldoron went on as if Meros had not spoken. ‘The men of the Ninth know how to follow orders. So I have no doubt you will follow this one.’ He fixed the young warrior with a steady glare. ‘Never speak of this moment. You and I were never here.’ He held up the capsule. ‘This does not exist. Say it.’

Meros hesitated again, then spoke. ‘You and I were never here. That does not exist.’

‘This is our liege lord’s wish.’

The other Blood Angel saluted again. ‘So ordered.’ He backed away a step as Raldoron beckoned the servitor to come forwards, making ready to gather up the corpse.

But before the machine-slave moved in to do his bidding, the First Captain removed an object from his belt pack. It was a slab of inkstone from the night deserts of Baal Primus, and with quick motions, Raldoron passed it over the dead warrior’s armour, blotting out the crimson with a layer of glistening, smoky black. The action had a strange, ritual quality to it, a finality that deadened everything. However this battle-brother had met his end, it was in a manner that would be forever lost to the Legion’s chronicles.

The captain whispered something, and Meros barely heard him.

‘Rest, brother,’ he told the fallen warrior. ‘You are in the company of death. I hope you find peace there.’

Gilead’s Curse

Chapter 8

Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett

You couldn’t think that was the end of the tale. There’s always more to come, and Gilead te Tuin Tor Anrok will be making new legends for new storytellers long after I am no longer of this world. Leave now, and you will miss the best of it… or the worst. It is true, I must rest often, but an hour’s sleep here or there is nothing more than anyone of my great age might expect to be allowed.

Draw closer, for, if you give me leave to rest easy in my chair, and speak softly, I will preserve my strength and get to the end of the cursed tales before your patience runs out. There is nothing left to me now but the tale, and the telling of it at the proper pace. Heed or heed not, I can do no better.

Laban did not want to sheath his blades all the time the Vampire Count was their companion, but he soon discovered that he would need hands, feet, knees, elbows, and in some places his fingertips to follow Gilead back above ground.

Gilead led the way, followed by the Vampire Count, with Fithvael and Laban behind. They had fought the skaven long and hard, without sustaining a single meaningful injury between them. They were, nonetheless, weary, and as thousands of corpses were buried beneath as many tons of earth, rock, brick and dust, they faced the arduous task of finding a way back to the surface. The skaven were dead, or buried alive. They had lived below ground and had died below ground. There was nothing to be said about it, and no one to mourn them.

Gilead found portions of tunnels and corridors that had not entirely collapsed, joined by voids and cavities that remained because of the integrity of the great dwarf structure, hewn from the earth and turned to obsidian crystal by the Rat King’s amulet. Gilead wove his way along tunnels, slid between fallen rocks and found cavities behind decaying walls that he dismantled one crumbling brick at a time.

He was conscious, all the time, of the Vampire Count, of his gleaming red eyes on his back, but he felt no threat. The creature would not blindside him; it would not be in its best interests. He was more concerned about his young cousin, Laban, who might seize an opportunity to be a hero. Gilead owed the Vampire Count, not much, but, at the very least, a little respect for his dignity.

At a particularly narrow fissure between the remains of a stone wall and a rock fall, the Vampire Count halted. Gilead had stepped easily through the gap, but, even sideways, the Count was wedged solid before a third of his body had passed to the far side. He turned to Fithvael, behind him, who shrugged.

When the Count continued to look at Fithvael, the elf moved closer and began to examine his armour. It was old, but well-cared for, and of a standard human type with fastenings at the sides of the body and the insides of limbs that had not changed much over the centuries. The armour had been well looked after, by the knight’s squire a millennium ago, and by the Count for many scores of years. The ancient leather straps were supple, as tough as steel, but shaped by the hands that fastened them over decades. They must have been replaced many times, but the buckles and fastenings had been removed from old straps and reused on their replacements. The patina of a thousand years made the metalwork smooth and soft, and an impossibly deep colour. As Fithvael’s nimble fingers worked the buckles and straps, he realised that they didn’t feel clumsy and bulky in his hands as most products of human manufacture did. He wondered, for a moment, where they had originated, but it did not matter.

Fithvael eased the straps on the body armour down the Count’s sides, allowing him to become an inch narrower; it was enough to free him from the clutches of the walls to his chest and back, but did not allow the two parts of the cuirass to collapse far enough for him to pass through the gap.

‘You must remove your armour,’ said Gilead, ‘and quickly.’ Then he placed the palm of his hand on the low roof of the cavity he had climbed into and felt the pulse of the earth around them moving. ‘Help him.’ the elf urged his companions.

The Vampire Count stood with his feet apart and his arms raised, and Laban and Fithvael worked one on each side of him to remove the metal pieces, after first disarming him of a small arsenal of weapons. Laban was surprised at how warm and smooth and ancient the elegantly curved and worked sheets of metal felt; nevertheless, he didn’t care to hold them for any length of time. He was also careful not to touch the flesh of the Count or the clothes he wore beneath the metal. He could feel no life, no warmth, no pulse. The armour was radiating more heat than the body inside it.

Fithvael began the work of strapping the separate pieces of armour together to make a series of bundles that could be carried. For several seconds, the four of them could hear nothing but the sound of metal on metal, and of old leather being threaded through buckles. Then there was a low rumble, and a series of distant whumps

‘Fear not,’ said the Count, looking at Fithvael. ‘I will have no further need of my armour. There is but one fate remaining to me, to be fulfilled, and my nemesis will join me in battle equally ill-equipped.’

‘Your trust in me does me much honour,’ said Gilead, looking directly at the Vampire Count. He looked smaller without his armour, but equally stoic and serious. Somehow, the leather and linen garments that he wore beneath his armour showed only the marks and wear of polished metal. There were no rings of grime at collars or cuffs, no yellow sweat stains beneath the arms or low in the back. There were no oily finger marks, nor blood, saliva, nor any marks made by any bodily fluids.

This was a knight who did not sweat, whose heart did not pound, nor bowels nor bladder open to humiliate him. This was a knight who had been taught how not to shed a tear as a child, and who could not shed one now, even should he desire so to do.

‘You should pass, now,’ said Fithvael, standing the Vampire Count’s breastplate upright against the nearest wall, as if it were some kind of memorial to the creature who had cheated death. There would be no other.

The Vampire Count held out his hand to Laban, who was holding his weapons. The elf looked warily at the Count, and then to Fithvael, who shrugged, and finally to Gilead. There was another rumble, and silty dust began to fall onto the Count’s shoulders, marring his shirt.

‘Quickly, cousin,’ said Gilead. ‘Restore his weapons.’

‘But,’ said Laban, twisted the sheath of the sword in his hand, as if trying to wring something from it.

‘But me no buts,’ said Gilead. ‘Sir Knight will have need of his weapons before another dawn. We can do without our armour, but surely not our swords.’

The Vampire Count bowed his head, and then looked into Gilead’s eyes as he took his weapons from the young elf.

Without the armour, the Vampire Count was firm and sinewy, longer and leaner of frame than he appeared. He did not pass as easily through the gaps and fissures as the elves did, but a little manoeuvring, stretching a limb here, folding at the waist there, and he managed to keep pace with Gilead as they clambered up through ruined passages to reach the surface.

When he saw light for the first time, Gilead blinked and smiled. He was on his hands and knees in a sharply sloping space, the brick floor kicked up, broken and uneven, buckled and shifted by the movement of earth all around. The shaft of light came inbetween two rocks above. It was little more than a pinprick that cast a pool of light on the floor below, no more than the size of a small coin, but slightly elliptical.

‘It is full sun,’ said Gilead, ‘the noon of the day.’

The Vampire Count looked at Gilead and nodded.

‘There will be time enough,’ he said. ‘I shall remain below ground until the dusk.’

‘Indeed,’ said Gilead.

‘You’ll have to get out, now,’ said Fithvael. ‘There is no path to bypass you, sir, and the boy is weary of the confines below ground.’

Gilead crawled under the light, so that it shone an oval on his shoulder. Then he reached up and carefully began to remove bricks and rocks from close to his head, until his entire head and back was bathed in the hard northern sunlight. When the hole was wide enough to allow his shoulders egress, Gilead lifted his hands above his head and stood to his full height, so that half of his body was above ground. The space occupied by the Vampire Count, Fithvael and Laban below was thrust back into darkness as Gilead’s body shut out the light. The Vampire Count’s eyes gleamed and glistened in the darkness, apparently full of life after the draining effect the sunlight had produced in him.

Gilead lifted himself out through the hole, and quickly unwrapped his cloak from around his body. He covered the opening with it, so that no more sunlight could penetrate.

He had emerged in a shallow, waterless ditch that ran along the edge of a dry, dead field. No crops had grown there for years and the ditch, which had once been for irrigation, was sandy and smelled of dust. There was no cover, apart from the depth of the ditch and the hedgerow running alongside it; standing, Gilead could see and hear for miles, and he did not fear being seen. All was still and silent.

A few moments passed, and then Gilead’s cloak lying in the bottom of the ditch began to bulge and move, as if it had a life of its own.

Below ground, Laban had insisted that the Vampire Count hand his weapons back to him. It did not matter that the Count would be weak in the sunlight and quite ineffective in a fight with Gilead. It only mattered that Laban keep his cousin safe and protected, and, to that end, if the Vampire Count was the next to pass out into the world above, as he must be, the young elf was not prepared to take any risks. He and Fithvael would not be able to climb out of the hole in time to fight off the Count if he chose to attack Gilead.

The Vampire Count, naked of his armour and his weapons, lifted his hands above his head, as if in surrender, and pushed up through Gilead’s cloak. He preferred not to be exposed to the sun if it wasn’t absolutely necessary, as it made him feel weak and ill, sending chills through his body and slowing down his responses.

Gilead watched as his cloak began to take on the shape of the man beneath it: first the hands and then the head and shoulders. Finally, the Vampire Count pulled the rest of his body up into the ditch and sat against the side of it, several feet from Gilead, never shifting or removing the cloak from around his head and torso.

Then Fithvael and Laban emerged into the sunlight. Laban blinked and smiled. The sky was clear and grey and as bright as a northern sky could be with the sun directly overhead.

When they were all in the ditch, Gilead touched the Vampire Count’s shoulder through the cloth of his cloak. The Count moved back over the hole, lowering his body into it, and disappearing, leaving the cloak covering the aperture.

Laban reached out a hand to draw the cloak towards him, thinking that he would fold it and return it to his cousin.

‘Leave it,’ said Gilead. ‘Let him rest peacefully until dusk. I owe him that. We all owe him that.’

The three elves climbed easily out of the ditch and set up a small camp close-by, shielded from the worst of the cold wind in the lee of the tall, sparse hedgerow. The straggling, thorny shrubs were pale and almost barren, but, in one or two places, Gilead was able to scratch the surface of the twigs and branches and find patches of green flesh beneath. The hedgerow was alive, if barely, so there must be enough plant material in the area to sustain them for a day or two, if the need arose. For now, they were content to rest and recuperate, and to prepare for what was to come.

‘My cousin,’ began Laban.

‘Cousin, indeed,’ said Gilead, smiling slightly and reaching his arms out to embrace the boy. Laban looked startled for a moment and then walked shyly into the embrace.

‘You honour me, my lord,’ he said, bowing his head.

‘You brought the boy, old man,’ said Gilead, embracing his mentor, servant and faithful friend for the first time in a great many years, for only the third time in their lives.

‘You are much changed, Gilead,’ said Fithvael, surprised by the unexpected warmth of their reception.

‘Not so very much,’ said Gilead. ‘Enough, I hope. Now, explain yourself, old man; why have you brought the boy?’

Gilead, Fithvael and Laban talked, rested, ate and prepared.

As Fithvael honed the blade of Gilead’s second blade, and Laban adjusted the cuffs of his shirt so that they would fall away from his wrists if he was wielding his blades, Gilead spoke to them of the amulet.

‘The boy,’ said Gilead. ‘I shall never forget that boy. “By Sigmar’s beard, it was always the skaven.” That’s what he said. It was always the skaven. He was wrong.’

‘The plague?’ asked Laban. ‘He thought the skaven had caused the plague? How could that be?’

‘It was not so,’ said Fithvael. ‘Gilead has told us that the boy was wrong. What he has not told us is why he was wrong, or why the boy believed that the skaven were responsible.’

Gilead reached two slender fingers into the top of his boot and, a moment later, pulled out the amulet that had hung around the Rat King’s neck on the ribbon of plaited hair. He turned it over and over in his fingers, examining it. It seemed inert; it did not sparkle or glisten, nor did it seem to absorb and deaden the light that hit it. It was matt and darkly colourless. It looked like a rock, a pebble, perfectly elliptical, but unassuming.

After looking at it for several moments, Gilead flicked it at Fithvael, who caught it deftly in his left hand, his right still holding the whet stone with which he was restoring Gilead’s blade in preparation for what was surely to come.

‘What is it?’ asked Gilead. ‘Why would it change the skaven king?’

‘Change him?’ asked Fithvael. ‘How did it change him?’

‘He was old and slow, and confused.’

Fithvael held the amulet up to the light between his thumb and forefinger. It did nothing. He tossed it back to Gilead.

‘He might be able to shed some light on this,’ said Fithvael, gesturing towards the cloak that still covered the hole in the ground.

‘You would rely on a Vampire Count for information?’ asked Laban. ‘That way foolishness lies, surely, cousin?’

‘I have followed a path through the plagued lands for more than a decade,’ said Gilead. ‘They brought me to the creature. I thought he must be an instrument of misery in the lives of the humans. I thought he must be a catalyst for all that has befallen the lands and the crops and creatures. And yet, he fought at my side against the skaven and now he seeks me out to do battle to the death.’

‘What of the stone?’ asked Fithvael.

Gilead held it to the light as Fithvael had done and then dropped it back into his boot.

‘There is power in it… The power to show me great artifacts, fine wonders of the world, wondrous objects of great significance. It showed me how they had been collected. It showed me that it was the greatest of them,’ said Gilead. ‘If you had only seen what I have seen.’

‘Yet I have not,’ said Fithvael.

‘Nor I,’ said Laban.

The older elves looked at the younger, and he returned to his chore.

‘By Sigmar’s beard, it was always the skaven,’ said Gilead. ‘They stole the amulet. The Rat King stole the power of eternal life.’

‘If you deduce correctly,’ said Fithvael. ‘We know the “what” and the “why”, but not the “from whom”. Where did the amulet originate? What is its purpose? Are there others?’

‘Its purpose is evil,’ said Gilead. ‘I have followed the plague, and the amulet is all I found.’

‘The amulet and the Vampire Count,’ said Fithvael.

‘He found me,’ said Gilead.

‘Did he?’ asked Fithvael. ‘Are you sure of that? Was he looking for the same thing you were looking for, or was he hunting the skaven for some other end.’

‘He is already immortal,’ said Gilead. ‘He sought me out, that he might meet his nemesis, and finally rest.’

‘That’s what he found,’ said Fithvael. ‘But, are you sure that’s what he was looking for. Are you sure he followed you until he found you, or did he find you while pursuing some other end?’

‘I know not, old friend,’ said Gilead.

‘Then, may I suggest,’ said Fithvael, ‘that you find out?’

The conversation ended, and the elves returned to their tasks.

‘How will you kill him?’ asked Laban, finally.

‘You assume that I will kill him, and not be killed by him,’ said Gilead. ‘Your confidence is misplaced.’

‘You have fought a thousand enemies before,’ said Laban. ‘You fought a thousand in one day, killing the skaven. How would you doubt your combat skills?’

‘I have fought the knight before, and could not get the better of him.’

‘You walked away from that battle,’ said Laban.

‘And so did he,’ said Gilead. ‘The way to win in combat is to respect your opponent… every opponent. Treat every battle as if it is your last. Fight every inch in every arena. Tire not. Surrender no quarter. Expect neither defeat nor victory.’

‘Show neither fear nor contempt,’ said Fithvael.

The two men were reciting a form of mantra, a prayer.

‘As my master taught me,’ said Gilead.

‘Who was your master?’ asked Laban.

‘You are looking at him,’ said Gilead, and he turned his head to look at his teacher, and, in so doing, directed the young elf’s eyes to his mentor.

‘The old servant?’ asked Laban.

Gilead glared at the youth, who blushed.

‘Begging your forgiveness, sir,’ said Laban.

‘You’ll do more than that,’ said Gilead, tossing Laban his shorter blade.

Laban caught it from the air, and looked puzzled at Gilead.

Gilead smiled at Fithvael.

‘Show the boy,’ he said.

‘It’s neither the time nor the place,’ said Fithvael, chuckling.

‘But I need to rest,’ said Gilead, ‘and what is more relaxing than watching a great show of combat skills? Indulge me.’

‘Hand me the knife, boy,’ said Fithvael.

Laban stood and offered Fithvael the blade, hilt first.

‘You’ll need this, later,’ said Fithvael, sheathing the blade and handing it to Gilead. ‘We will work unarmed.’

Fithvael was on his feet, facing Laban, his stance broad, his shoulders square, his hands hanging loosely by his sides.

‘Need you prepare?’ he asked the boy.

‘For what?’ asked Laban.

‘You heard our master,’ said Fithvael. ‘Let us indulge him with a little play. I ask again. Is there any preparation you would like to do before we commence?’

Laban looked from Gilead to Fithvael. They were both smiling, and the old elf seemed relaxed and unthreatening.

Laban looked down at his body, and at his empty hands. He was unencumbered by a cloak, and his well-fitting travelling clothes did not impede his movements.

‘What are you waiting for, boy?’ asked Gilead.

Laban looked from Gilead to Fithvael again, and Fithvael made a slight gesture with both hands, beckoning.

‘I don’t…’ began Laban.

‘Ah,’ said Gilead, ‘but you must.’ He smiled again. ‘Don’t hurt him, old man,’ he said.

‘Not for anything,’ said Fithvael.

Laban te Tuin Tor Mahone took a step towards Fithvael, keeping his knees soft, and then threw a punch in a long arc into Fithvael’s chest. Fithvael dipped his chest away, bending backwards from the waist. Laban’s fist did not connect. He had not thrown the punch hard for fear of hurting the old elf, but he was humiliated and his face flushed slightly as he cupped his fist in his hand. Next he threw a tight jab to Fithvael’s gut, but, with one step, the old man turned his body sideways and grabbed the jab before it landed against his hip. He threw the fist back at the young elf.

Fithvael stepped into the next punch, stopping Laban’s forearm against his upper arm, and planting a sharp slap on his opponent’s cheek, as if teasing him. Laban countered with a jab and a hook. Fithvael ducked so that the jab cleared his shoulder, throwing Laban against his chest, so that the hook sailed around the old man’s body, and they ended up in a clinch. Fithvael lifted Laban slightly and planted him back on his feet.

He slapped the boy again, once on each cheek, before Laban was ready to be joined once more in combat.

‘You’ll have to do better than that,’ said Gilead. ‘Use your speed. He is old and past his prime.’

Laban looked at Gilead, encouraged, and changed his tactics. He flew at Fithvael, turning in the air with a high kick. Again, there was no impact as Fithvael danced out of the line of fire, but, having turned, the mentor caught the boy’s foot out of the air and twisted it. He brought Laban down to earth, as he landed heavily on his chest, his foot still in Fithvael’s hand. The mentor turned the foot, obliging Laban to turn over so that he was lying on his back with Fithvael standing over him.

‘You’re dead,’ said Gilead.

‘I didn’t want to hurt him,’ said Laban.

Fithvael let go of the boy’s foot, and gestured again for Laban to rise and attack.

‘Catch your breath, and try again,’ said Fithvael, standing before the boy; feet shoulder width apart, arms crossed over his chest.

Laban stood, wary. Then he lunged at Fithvael, head-down, as if to throw his shoulder into the old elf’s gut, in a wrestling hold. In one elegant movement, Fithvael ducked low and under Laban, and lifted him off his feet and over his back. Fithvael came up into the standing position, his arms still crossed while Laban sprawled on the ground behind him.

Gilead laughed a low chuckle, which made Fithvael turn for a second in wonder. Laban saw the old elf turn, and chose his moment, hoping to catch the old elf at the apex of his turn, off-balance and off-guard. Fithvael was old, but he was long practised in the arts of combat, and what he lacked in strength or speed he made up for in cunning and an economy of movement. He was neither as off-balance nor as off-guard as Laban had believed him to be, and he snapped back to his stationary position, using the boy’s momentum against him, causing him to stagger out under the old elf’s arm to sprawl on his belly at Gilead’s feet.

‘The pup has much to learn,’ said Gilead. ‘When do you begin?’

‘I believe I just began,’ said Fithvael crouching at the fire they had built, digging in its embers for the tubers roasting there. He flicked one out with his knife, in Laban’s direction. The boy was sitting on the ground close by, and caught it in his hands.

‘Lesson number two,’ said Gilead as Laban dropped the tuber and began to blow on his scorched fingers. ‘Think twice before you ever catch a hot potato.’

Dusk came early in the north, and when it was impossible to distinguish between threads of black and white in the waning sunlight, Fithvael looked to Gilead for permission to lift the cloak from the hole in the ground.

Fithvael and Laban had taken an hour to clear a flat area of ground for the combat to take place in. They had grubbed up the last of the pale weeds, removed the few rocks and stones that had found their way onto the fallow land, and raked through the dusty earth with bunches of hedgerow twigs to level it. There were no makeshift weapons hidden in the ground, no rocks that could be used to add weight to a fist, no lost blades, no detritus of former skirmishes. There were no roots to fall over, and no shade advantage, since the sun was all but set; the moons were high in the sky. The space was even marked out at a distance from the ditch so that no accidental fall could put one or other opponent at an advantage.

Gilead had eaten a light meal and was well-rested and in good spirits. He did not, however, take advantage of Fithvael’s presence and run drills or sparring practice. He would take no advantage that he could not offer to his adversary.

‘Will you talk about the amulet?’ asked Fithvael. ‘Will you ask the knight’s knowledge of it?’

‘If it will further our ends,’ said Gilead. ‘If it will help to banish the plague from these lands… From all land, I will ask. I will not beg.’

‘You won’t have to,’ said Fithvael, straightening the back of the elf’s shirt. Gilead examined the cuffs that Laban had adjusted and nodded his thanks to the boy.

‘You make a fine seamstress,’ he said. ‘Your wife need waste no time in sewing for you.’

Laban dared not scowl.

‘I’ve rarely known you in such high spirits,’ Fithvael said to Gilead. ‘Should I be concerned.’

‘Only for my life,’ said Gilead. ‘I do not relish the thought of my own demise as once I might have, but it holds no fear for me, and still offers some blessed relief. I’m sure you’d rather have me smile in the face of death, than sigh, or cry out.’

‘Is he truly so able?’ asked Fithvael.

‘You saw him,’ said Gilead.

‘I saw him plough through young, stupid creatures, without an ounce of finer feeling,’ said Fithvael.

‘I am sure,’ said Gilead, ‘if he has any feeling at all, it is of the very finest sort.’

They turned to watch as the Vampire Count’s hands emerged from the hole in the ground, holding a sword and a shorter secondary blade. The hands were white, and the fine-boned digits ended in thick cruel talons, shaped like teardrops, as if filed to points. The weapons were those of an ancient Bretonnian knight, beautifully forged from folded steel, and honed to a bright, hard edge. They looked like specimen weapons, never used nor worn, never nicked nor dented. They all knew better. When the Count was waist-deep in the ground, he rested his weapons in the bottom of the ditch, and, planting his hands firmly on either side of the hole, he lifted his body and legs through the aperture.

Laban was young and idealistic, and could not countenance seconding the beast, so he held Gilead’s blades, and Fithvael stood at the Count’s side. No words passed between any of them.

Dressed in nothing but their shirts and breeches, Gilead and the Count took their weapons and saluted one another across several yards of ground. Fithvael and Laban retired to either side of the allotted area.

The combatants circled, first clockwise and then anti-clockwise, neither lifting a weapon to the other. Gilead measured the size of the Count’s stride, the softness in his knees, the weight of his shoulders. He counted his blink. He watched to see which side the Count favoured, which hand was strongest, which leg he trusted his weight to. He detected a flinching of a hamstring in the Count’s right leg, suggesting that he preferred to lunge forward and step backward on the left, so he would tend to fight across his body. Conversely the Count tended to turn his head to the left, suggesting that sight or hearing were more efficient, more acute on the right.

The Vampire Count used his time to stride out the ground, checking the size of the arena in which he must fight, the position of the moons in the sky. He listened for any life-forms that might be close by, any beasts or hidden audience. He eyed up the long, lean forms of the attendants, watching them breathe, discovering who was anxious or likely to intervene in the combat. He knew Gilead already. He knew that the missing digit did not seem to affect the Elf’s blade skills, and that the elf preferred to be the aggressor, attacking, always moving forwards. He knew that his concentration was impeccable, that no bird taking wing, nor clap of thunder would surprise or trouble him, nor the movement of the earth beneath his feet, nor a blade driven hard towards him would throw him off his game.

Gilead was a consummate warrior elf, and he was everything that a knight should be and more.

After several minutes of striding back and forth, and of watching each other, Laban began to relax, wondering if anything would happen, after all. Then the Vampire Count spoke.

‘If I am to die, this night,’ he said, ‘I die with honour at your hand.’

Laban stood up straighter and opened his eyes wider.

‘If I should die before dawn comes,’ said Gilead, ‘I die at the sword-edge of a worthy opponent.’

The Count’s statement was not a matter or form, however, not one of the many rituals he adhered to so fervently to make him feel human again.

‘The skaven,’ said the Count.

‘What of the skaven?’ asked Fithvael. ‘What of the ratmen, bloodless one?’

It was too late, Fithvael’s words were lost in the first crash of steel on steel. The first slide of blade against blade. The first exhalation of breath, the first dance of feet through the dust of the arena.

Gilead turned the Count’s attacking blade, lowering it, and causing his opponent to pull it back closer to his body to prepare for another attack. The second time that swords crossed they did so high. This time, the Count thrust his weight into Gilead, breaking the contact, but the elf was too deft for the knight, and his second blade crossed the first, its tip hooking into the basket hilt of his opponent’s secondary weapon. The Count had to adjust his balance and hold hard to his dagger to prevent its loss.

He escaped and turned, arcing his dagger through the air. Gilead did not try to make weapon contact, he simply moved his head three inches, and the blade whistled past his face, cutting through a thick lock of his white hair. He was inside the Count’s reach, and his opponent had clearly forgotten that he was without his armour. The Count had left his left flank exposed from the armpit to the hip. Gilead drove him the advantage, slicing through the fine linen shirt and into the creature’s tough flesh. There was no blood. Gilead had expected none, but he knew that his blade had hit its target. The Count appeared to feel no pain, but he close his guard and brought both of his blades up in a defensive posture.

Less than a second later, Gilead and the Count were nose to nose, looking through the V-shaped gaps their long blades made in front of their faces.

‘Came you in search of me, my lord?’ Gilead asked, exhaling, and then clenching his teeth as the Count continued to bring pressure to bear on the impasse.

‘I came in search of death,’ said the Count, breaking and bouncing away, out of reach of Gilead’s blades.

The combatants circled one another again, kicking through the mass of footprints left in the dust, marking their combat as if it were a dance.

‘I followed the curse,’ said the Count, lunging forward on his right leg, against the elf’s expectations, catching the deep fold of linen under the arm of Gilead’s shirt, rending a long slit in it, but not touching his skin.

Gilead’s response was a less-well-judged slice of his short blade that tangled with the Count’s sword, the tip of which, embedded in the fabric, did rather more damage to the shirt than was strictly necessary.

Gilead stepped to the side, defending his left arm, and clearing the Count’s reach.

‘The curse?’ asked Gilead. ‘Who is the curse?’

‘Think not whom,’ said the Count, adjusting his grip on his long sword, and resting his left hand on his hip before swinging at the shoulder.

Gilead registered that the left shoulder had some weakness he had exploited by accident and decided that his next move must be to rid the Count of the second of his blades.

Meantime, the Count came forward on his left leg, extending his knee joint and pushing his right shoulder forward into a punishing thrust with the sword. Only Gilead’s slender frame saved him from a potentially fatal injury. The blade pierced skin for the first time, but only skin and an inch thickness of flesh.

‘Think what,’ said the Count. ‘Think of the cursed plague that rids the lands of their riches. Think of the barrenness of the beasts of the field and of the womenfolk.’

Gilead brought his attack heavily to the Count’s left side, wielding both weapons: his sword in a direct attack, his short blade across his body. The Count had no option but to recoil, and withdrew his bloody sword.

Gilead turned his narrow form with his right side, his bloody side, facing the Count, and came in with only his sword, thrusting, parrying and driving onward, forcing the Count to back away across the arena, ensuring that he rely on his right leg, attacking the left shoulder, the weak point.

The Count defended well, parrying hard and rallying for a counter-attack, but a third forward thrust forced him back onto his right leg, and he felt the stiffness of his left shoulder. He must do something to force Gilead to fight on his other side. He tried to turn, but his right leg would not hold, so he shuffled clumsily, and dropped his sword below waist height. Gilead came in fast and strong, flicking the Count’s shorter blade out of his left hand, and catching it by its basket hilt on his sword.

There was a sharp breath sound from the edge of the arena, over Gilead’s shoulder to his right, as Laban gasped. The elf thought his young cousin might even applaud, and it made his lip curl slightly as if in a smile. He raised his sword and flicked the Count’s secondary blade over his shoulder for Laban to hold for him.

‘We call it the plague,’ said Gilead, turning the tip of his sword in small circles at arm’s length, pointing it high at the Count’s head. ‘What know you of it?’

The Count took hold of his sword in a double-handed grip and began to swing it in a great circle from the ground at his right boot-toe to high above his left shoulder. The momentum behind the swing was vast, and the blade arced towards Gilead’s shoulder, making the air sing.

Gilead stepped lightly away from the swing and then brought his own sword down on the Count’s at the bottom of its arc, while driving in at neck level with his dagger. Gilead drove the point of his short blade down inside the Count’s collar bone at an angle, but the small amount of flesh there was dense and leathery, and penetration was not deep enough to do fatal damage.

‘It matters not,’ said the Count, sliding off Gilead’s knife and backing away, rolling the hilt of his sword between his hands, and preparing for a new onslaught. ‘The amulet is buried for all time. It no longer carries its mortal threat.’ With that the Count feinted, and then lunged forward on his strong left leg, attacking low, plunging his blade into Gilead’s thigh. There was a short, sharp spurt of blood, and for a moment, the Count looked painfully disappointed, if, indeed any expression could be read on his undead face.

His disappointment was short-lived. Had Gilead been human and his femoral artery had been as exposed as a man’s was, he might have met his death, but an elf’s artery is protected deep in his thigh in a fine, but virtually impenetrable sheath of cartilage and bone. The damage was superficial.

The Count had made the mistake of taking a step back, thinking that he had bested his opponent, and Gilead quickly drove his advantage, attacking high to the left again, exposing the weakness in the Count’s shoulder.

As Gilead forced the Count backwards, defending wildly, his sword beginning to weigh heavy, even in his experienced hands, the elf spoke again.

‘What if it is not buried?’ he asked.

‘Not buried?’ asked the Count. ‘The Rat King forsook the jewel? Broke faith with his master?’

The Count staggered backwards, blocking another vicious onslaught of paired blades. His hamstring gave way, and he found himself on one knee, leaning away from the blades that must surely finish him.

Laban took a step closer to the Count, watching him carefully, looking for any trick he might still deploy against his cousin. Gilead took a step back from his fallen adversary and thrust his shorter blade into his cousin’s hand.

‘But…’ began Laban.

‘We fight on equal terms,’ said Gilead.

He offered the Vampire Count his hand, and helped him to his feet. His hand was cool and dry and smooth. The grip was strong and firm and the knuckles stood proud, but Gilead felt no revulsion touching it; it was less horrifying than touching the sweaty, flaccid palm of a terrified human.

Gilead swung the Count to his feet and stood back. They had been in close combat for some time, neither had proven stronger than the other. They were at an impasse, except that the Count clearly had information that would be useful to Gilead, and he wanted to tease it out of the undead knight.

Keeping his eyes firmly on the Count, and his blade high, held firmly in his right hand, Gilead teased the fingers of his left hand into his boot and withdrew the stone. He flicked it into the air, and watched as the Vampire Count followed its trajectory with his staring red eyes.

He did not catch it, but let it fall in the dust before him.

‘Is that it?’ asked Gilead.

‘I know not,’ said the Count, adjusting his two-handed grip to one hand, as his eyes flicked back and forth between the amulet and Gilead’s stare.

‘The Rat King wore it around his neck on a hair ribbon,’ said Gilead. ‘It wove a spell around him, and around his people. It altered the very rock that his great hall was hewn from.’

‘Then it is everything his master claimed it must be,’ said the Count. He rocked his weight from one foot to the other, as if limbering up to defend himself from the coming attack, but Gilead stayed where he was, his sword up, but his feet firmly planted.

‘You talk of a master? Another great skaven king? A ratman more powerful than the holder of the charm?’ There was a sneer in Gilead’s voice, as if he didn’t believe the Vampire Count, as if this might be some kind of trick, some form of dissembling. ‘I think not. Are you the master, then, come to claim your prize?’

‘There is no prize,’ said the Count, his gaze dropping and staying low. ‘I followed power, and yet…’

‘And yet?’ asked Gilead, growing impatient, raising his blade in jerking movements, an inch at a time, menacing.

‘I followed power that I might die, and yet…’ said the Count. His voice was fading, as if he were remembering. ‘I wished to honour my liege lord, and more liege lady. I wished only to perform one noble act before I died at the hand of the greatest warrior to ever meet with me in mortal combat.’

‘What noble act?’ asked Gilead.

‘The noble act that you performed in my stead,’ answered the Count. ‘You were taken, and it mattered not, for I knew that you would best the skaven thugs, that you would outwit and outfight them. I knew that you would recognise the amulet for the evil that it might do, for the plague that it has spread through the skaven horde, and I knew that you would destroy it, or return it. I could not restore the world, as you could. I have not the honour nor the nobility I once had.’

‘Return it?’ asked Gilead.

The two warriors were circling each other again. They paced out the arena, watching one another. Laban and Fithvael stood on either side of the space, watching, unable to intervene, but silently praying for Gilead’s life. The battle had been hard-fought in flashes of brilliant swordsmanship, punctuated by long periods of walking and watching, circling and preparing.

Then they were both at the centre of the arena; once more, blades screaming against each other in a flurry of attacks and counter-attacks, of lunges, thrusts, ripostes and parries. One leg of the Count’s breeches was cut away, almost entirely as Gilead turned and drew his sword violently upward and outward, missing his target by the depth of the cloth and leather it was clad in. The Count was faster than Gilead had anticipated without his armour, and nimble too.

Gilead’s reach was longer, so he was at the advantage on the attack, but the Count’s defence was impenetrable. When Gilead did penetrate, the Count’s hide was tough; he did not bleed, and he appeared to feel no pain.

Gilead had a graze on his chin, as if he had shaved badly, his hair was partly shorn away and his shirt was irreparable. The blood in his thigh had clotted quickly, and a clean scab had formed almost instantaneously, or so it seemed to the Count. Other creatures bled long and profusely, even the smaller mammals had served as a decent meal for him, but this elf did not bleed. He could not find his veins and exploit their weaknesses.

Laban had thought to help, to do something, and made to throw his cousin his second blade, but Fithvael, ever watchful, caught the boy’s eye, and slowly shook his head. Laban’s eyes flicked back to the fight; the astonishment on his face made Fithvael turn in the direction that he was looking.

Suddenly, Gilead was no longer visible in one place. He was high and low, wide and fast, close, and then away again. Laban could see the Vampire Count swinging his weapon, always too slowly, never in the right direction. Gilead’s sword had a new momentum. He took a piece of flesh out of an upper arm, carved a hole in a shoulder, hacked away a cheek, and thrust right through the gut.

Gilead was shadow-fast. The world and everything in it seemed to stand still. He could not only see every move the Count would make before he made it, he could counter it and exploit it. The Count was good, his instincts sound, so this would be no easy kill, but Gilead knew, at last, that he would kill the unnatural being.

Laban sat heavily on his backside. He had not seen a shadow-fast elf before. He had known it was part of his family legend, had heard the tales, the old myths, but he had never seen it, and had never thought to see it as long as he lived. He pinched himself, wondering if he was dreaming, at the same time, trying to catch sight of the whirlwind that was his cousin.

The only light was from twin moons suspended high in the sky above. There were few clouds, and nothing more than a breeze in the air, but, in the darkness, Laban could hardly see Fithvael on the other side of the arena, and could see only the glints and flashes of Gilead’s blade. He wondered if the Count could see anything.

And then it stopped.

The Count and Gilead stood as close as two beings can stand one to the other. Laban noted that he could see no blood on the Count’s clothes, and then remembered that the Count did not bleed. The young elf got to his feet and took a careful step closer to his cousin. He almost tripped over the Count’s sword, sticking out of the earth at a low angle, close to his feet.

Laban took the sword by its hilt and freed it from the earth. He held it high in the air that Fithvael might see it, but the old elf was already drawing close.

Gilead had the blade of his sword hard against the Vampire Count’s throat, ready to sever the creature’s head from his body.

‘Do it,’ said the Count, his cold, red eyes, staring into Gilead’s, willing him to end his miserable existence. ‘Raise a pyre for me, that I may not return. Dismember and decapitate my corpse, leave no chance that I might escape this fate.

‘I will do all of those things,’ said Gilead. ‘It will be my honour to serve you in death, but first, tell me what I need to know.’

‘What need you of my knowledge?’ asked the Vampire Count. ‘My tale is apocryphal at best. Trust me not, for I fear, to trust me will do you nothing but harm.’

‘I have nothing else,’ said Gilead. ‘Tell me simply, tell me truly, only that which you know. Embellish nothing. Give me only your truth.’

‘It was always the skaven,’ said the Vampire Count. ‘They spread the plague, but it only resides in them, uses them, and disables them. It originates elsewhere, in the hearts and minds of the southern places, in the lost souls of the sands, in the broken people of the stone sarcophagi, and in their golden leaders.’

Gilead’s hold on the Vampire Count strengthened as the creature began to lose all sense of itself in the bliss that was its demise.

‘Kill me,’ it said. ‘Kill me now. I have nothing more for you. Nothing more to say.’

Gilead gestured to Laban, beckoning him to bring the sword.

When he was close, Gilead let go his grasp on the Count, and, in that same movement, took the warrior’s sword from his cousin and pressed it into his adversary’s hands.

Then Gilead swung, bringing the hilt of his sword from his left shoulder, throwing the blade in a gleaming arc. By the time the hilt of the sword, still held in both hands, was resting against his right shoulder, the Vampire Count’s body was falling.

Gilead had felt the flex in the blade of his sword as it cut through leather and petrified sinew and on through empty veins and a calcified trachea. Then he felt the jarring sensation in his arms as the blade hit something that it could not strike through. The vertebrae still holding the Vampire Count upright were harder than the steel of his sword, and would not be divided by it in one swing.

The Count’s head did not separate from his body, but lolled like some grotesque doll’s head, bloodlessly. The legs buckled beneath the Count, the right first, tilting his torso awkwardly to one side as his head bounced for a moment at the extremity of his spine.

Gilead turned and walked away. He handed his sword to Fithvael and approached the hedgerow, which he began to rip away with his hands, quickly gathering large amounts of dry twisting twigs and lengths of half-dead wood.

‘We must build a pyre,’ said Gilead. ‘We must honour our dead, and when we have held vigil and seen the bones scattered, we turn south.’

Dead Man’s Party

Josh Reynolds

It was Spring Tide, and Marienburg was awash in revelry of both the sublime and more boisterous sort. Poles bearing caged seagulls were hoisted aloft as the celebration unfolded. Cornets and other instruments were played, mostly badly, by over-enthusiastic revellers. Buckets of seawater were sloshed about on the unwary as priests and pilgrims bellowed out the more profane hymns to Manann, popular among sailors.

Steel spheres containing handfuls of incense and hot coals were draped from every available protrusion, and clouds of exotic spices drifted across the streets, battling for dominance with the normal urban stew of the canals. Children threw dried flakes of seaweed and coral into the waters of the Central Canal as the great altar-barge of Manann hove to, the high priest roaring his praises and shaking his gull-pole until the bird’s raucous squawks threatened to drown out his own.

Every citizen was either in the streets or in the taverns, or heading from one to the other. Or so it seemed to Erkhart Dubnitz, knight of the Most Holy Order of Manann-in-Marienburg, as he stiff-armed a red-faced drunk into the canal in order to clear a path for his charge. ‘Right this way, Meneer Lomax,’ he said obsequiously, bowing and sweeping an armour-plated arm out just in time to catch a bucket-bearing priest in the belly. The seawater sloshed across the cobbles and Dubnitz’s charge chuckled.

‘At least the stones are getting a good scouring, hey?’ Bernard Lomax said, rheumy eyes taking in the celebration with a weary air as he leaned on his narwhal-horn cane. He was dressed archaically, in the fashion of his youth, and his clothes showed signs of having been repaired, rather than replaced. Lomax was old, and age weighed heavily on his thin form. He had the heft of a Nehekharan mummy in his twilight years but none of the joie de vivre, as the Bretonnian saying went.

‘Are you enjoying yourself, Meneer Lomax?’ Piet Van Taal said. Like Dubnitz, Piet was a knight of the most holy, and only occasionally violent, Order of Manann. In contrast to Dubnitz’s barrel-chested heft, he was a lean whip of a man with the stamp of one of the lower rungs of Marienburg’s aristocracy on his features. Like Dubnitz, he wore a coat of chainmail beneath an emerald surcoat bearing the trident-and-crown emblem of Manann, god of the seas.

‘Who can enjoy themselves with the stench and the noise?’ Lomax said, coughing into a clenched fist. ‘Is this what you do for fun?’

‘Not quite, no,’ Dubnitz said quickly. ‘Normally our carousing takes place indoors, away from the hurly-burly.’ He spun and punched a celebrant who’d been about to place a wreath of eel-skins and shark fins around his neck.

‘That sounds good,’ Lomax said, watching the wreath clatter across the cobbles.

Piet looked at Dubnitz over the top of Lomax’s head and mouthed, ‘The Scalded Gull?’

Dubnitz nodded. He laid a leather gauntlet on Lomax’s shoulder. ‘Right this way, Meneer Lomax. We’ll have you quaffing in no time.’

‘Are you taking me to a dive? Is it filthy?’

‘The filthiest,’ Dubnitz assured him.

‘Will there be loose women?’

‘The loosest,’ Piet said.

‘It sounds delightful,’ Lomax murmured, clasping his trembling hands together. ‘Lead on Sir Knights! I have a half-century’s worth of abstinence to make up for.’

The knights led him through the crowd into the back alleys that stretched out from the Central Canal, where the noise of the Spring Tide celebration grew muted and the natural odoriferousness of Marienburg reasserted itself. The Scalded Gull clung to a little-used stable on Fishhook Lane like an unsightly growth. It was an overlarge shed, with wide windows and a door that was less an obstacle than a curtain. It wasn’t crowded, for which Dubnitz muttered a silent prayer of thanks to Manann.

The barman grunted an unintelligible greeting and Dubnitz raised three fingers and gestured to a table in the back corner that sat beneath the hide of giant rat that had been stretched across the wall and nailed in place. Lomax looked curiously at the hide as they sat. ‘What is it?’

‘It thought it was a man,’ Dubnitz said. ‘Now it’s a conversation piece. We cleaned out a nest of the pestiferous beasts a few years back in the area, now all of the local swill-sellers let the Order drink for free.’

The drinks arrived and the two knights emptied their mugs in moments, slamming them down almost simultaneously. Lomax blinked at the speed. He hesitated, his fingers gripping his own mug as he looked into the foam as if it hid secrets. Then he jerked it convulsively to his lips and knocked it back. Dubnitz waved his hand, signalling for another round. Lomax went momentarily cross-eyed and coughed. ‘It has been some time since I had anything stronger than turnip juice,’ he said. He licked his lips. ‘I quite liked it.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ Dubnitz said, and he was. He examined the old man. Lomax was a man of means. He was also a miser with money to spare. Money which he’d promised to the Order of Manann, money which they desperately needed, if the hollow echoing sound of the tithe coffers was anything to go by. All Lomax had asked in return was one night, just one night of carousing and stupidity, to make up for a lifetime of thrift and denial, because misers like Lomax didn’t make charitable donations without strings attached.

It wasn’t that strange a request, all things considered. Lomax’s ascetic life hadn’t been by choice so much as by necessity. A man without pleasures or vices was a hard man to trap. The life of a dyspeptic shut-in had kept old Lomax toddling along through two generations of greedy grasping relatives who chafed at the tightness of Lomax’s purse strings and weren’t shy about trying to cut, burn or poison their way into said purse. Those same relatives had set up a howl that would have sent invading Norscans scurrying back to their boats when they found out that Lomax was leaving his substantial fortune to the Order of Manann.

It was more out of spite than religious epiphany, Dubnitz knew. Lomax was doing the next best thing to taking it with him, and because greedy relatives didn’t like it when miserly relations loudly announced their intention to change their will and leave the bulk of their substantial fiduciary assets to an up-and-coming order of humble templars, there would be some attempt to stop it.

Thus, strings. A night of sybaritic pleasure, one full night, and then the new will took effect at cockcrow. All the Order had to do was give their new patron the best night of his life. Grandmaster Ogg was filled with a joy that he could barely contain and had ordered his most masterful carousers to take things in hand. Dubnitz and Piet set to it with a will, the former theorizing that Lomax, long having gone without, might mistake quantity for quality, and make the night’s work quick and easy.

By the eighth mug of rotgut, Lomax was cackling and clapping as a Strigany dancing girl spun and shook across the tabletop. The Scalded Gull had grown loud since they’d arrived as celebrants filtered into the alleys from the party outside. Dubnitz watched bleary-eyed as pickpockets plied their trade through the dense crowd and the dancing girl’s ferret-faced kin did the same to the pickpockets. Then, as Lomax started shouting a bawdy tune he’d known in his boyhood, Dubnitz spotted the assassin.

He was a dock-snake, one of the lean, lethal savages who ascribed to no union or guild and who roamed from berth to berth, unloading and loading vessels for under-the-table pay. A hooked fish-knife sprouted from one sinewy hand as he slithered through the crowd, his eyes locked on Lomax with the feral intensity of a starving wharf rat.

Dubnitz roared and shot awkwardly to his feet. Alcohol fumes clouded the edges of his vision. The dock-snake stumbled back as the dancing girl screamed and the crowd began to roll back like ripples spreading from a stone dropped in a rain barrel. Piet, still in his seat, was looking around blearily as he groped blindly for his sword.

Dubnitz’s sword sprang from its sheath in a crooked arc, slicing air rather than flesh as it passed just in front of the dock-snake’s nose. The man sprang past him, one bare foot hooking the table edge as he propelled himself up and at Lomax, who had tipped his head back and was raising a mug all unawares. Dubnitz spun and grabbed the back of the would-be killer’s trousers and, with a roll of his shoulders, sent the dock-snake hurtling backwards into the wall behind the bar with bone-breaking force.

And then, as the echoes of that crash faded, it all went to hell. People screamed. The dancing girl leapt off the table in a splash of silks and a rattle of bangles. Dubnitz spun in a circle, seeking enemies even as he noted that it was taking Lomax a long time to gulp his ale.

‘Dubnitz,’ Piet said. ‘Did something just happen?’

‘Someone tried to kill Lomax,’ Dubnitz mumbled. The room swayed around him.

‘Did you stop them?’

‘Yes,’ Dubnitz said.

‘Are you sure? He looks dead. Is he dead?’ Piet said, gesturing sloppily towards the crossbow bolt that had sprouted from the bottom of Lomax’s mug. The point of said bolt had passed through the mug and between Lomax’s open jaws, piercing the soft tissues of his sinuses on its trek into his brain.

Dubnitz looked blearily over his shoulder. He blinked owlishly and belched. ‘I’d say it’s a definite possibility,’ he said, stumbling over ‘possibility’.

‘Are we sure he’s dead?’

Dubnitz kicked the body, toppling over in the process. From the floor, he said, ‘Almost positively, yes.’

‘We’re dead,’ Piet muttered, shaking his head.

‘I thought he was the one who was dead,’ Dubnitz said, as he heaved himself to his feet.

‘Ogg is going to kill us.’

‘Bound to happen,’ Dubnitz said cheerfully, squinting around at the empty tavern. The evening crowd had chosen discretion over curiosity and fled. The Scalded Gull was empty of life, though the sounds of the Spring Tide celebration still curled through the open windows. ‘Don’t sober up on me now, Piet, it’ll only end in tears.’

Piet cursed and tried to stand, but he only succeeded in windmilling his arms and causing his chair to groan in protest. ‘What are we going to do? Lomax is dead!’

‘Says who?’ Dubnitz said, spreading his arms. ‘Tavern’s empty, Piet.’

‘He’s got an arrow sticking out of his head!’

‘So we pull it out,’ Dubnitz said mildly, striding to the bar and reaching under it. He pulled out a bottle and eyed it, then pulled the stopper with his teeth and knocked back a slug. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand he stomped back towards the table. ‘Have some good Sartosian red and calm down,’ he said, tossing the bottle to Piet, who caught it awkwardly.

‘I don’t think more alcohol is the solution here,’ Piet said, taking a long drink.

‘Can’t hurt,’ Dubnitz muttered, taking hold of the end of the bolt transfixing the dead man’s head to the back wall of the tavern. He had been tilting his head back for a swig from his mug when the bolt had perforated his palate and nailed him and his mug to the wall. Dubnitz worked the bolt free with a grunt and squinted at it. ‘Pretty sure he’s dead,’ he said.

‘I thought we’d established that,’ Piet said gloomily.

Dubnitz didn’t reply. He carefully pulled the dead man’s head back down. The eyes had rolled to the white and a trickle of blood seeped from one nostril, but other than that, there was little sign of what had killed him. Unless you got a good luck in his mouth or at the top of his head, Lomax could have simply been dead drunk, as opposed to just plain dead.

‘I’m sorry old man,’ Dubnitz murmured, closing Lomax’s eyes. ‘We promised you a night out to celebrate your generosity and what did you get for it but a bolt to the brainpan. Maybe you should have given the money to the Cult of Morr instead.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Piet said mournfully, staring into the bottle, which he’d managed to half-empty in impressive time. ‘Grandmaster Ogg is going to pickle us like herring.’ He looked blearily at Dubnitz. ‘I don’t want to be pickled.’

‘We won’t get pickled,’ Dubnitz said, peering at Lomax’s body speculatively. He turned, swaying slightly, and sighted down the crossbow bolt. He found the open window of the tavern and said, ‘Aha!’

‘Aha?’ Piet said, blinking.

‘The window,’ Dubnitz said, stumbling towards the window. He stuck his head out and peered at the wall of the stables opposite. The night-stew that passed for fresh air in Marienburg slapped his face, sobering him slightly. ‘The arrow came from outside.’

‘Brilliant deduction,’ Piet said, shoving himself to his feet. ‘Sam Warble himself couldn’t have done it better. Are you sure your name isn’t Zavant Konniger? We’re going to get pickled!’

‘Stop saying pickled. Ogg will jelly us, if anything. Man loves his jellied eels.’ Dubnitz absently scratched his chin with the crossbow bolt, then thought of poison, stared at the bolt and swallowed thickly. ‘What time is it, Piet?’

‘How should I know? Time to find warmer waters,’ Piet said, taking another swig from the bottle. ‘If we ride out now, we can be halfway to Altdorf in a few days.’

‘Don’t put the saddle on the horse just yet,’ Dubnitz said and snatched the bottle from him and knocked back the rest of it in one gulp. He tossed the bottle out of the window and strode back towards the bar. ‘I’ve got a cunning plan.’ He grabbed a broom and number of rags from behind the bar and several more bottles. He used his foot to roll a small keg of Averland Bear’s Milk towards the table.

‘This isn’t going to work,’ Piet said as Dubnitz pulled Lomax’s corpse upright by its shirt-front.

‘Of course it will,’ Dubnitz said, yanking the cork out of a bottle of wine with his teeth and pouring the contents over the body. ‘If he smells like a brewery exploded, no one will give him a second look. And all we need to do is keep him moving until the will goes into effect.’

‘This is madness,’ Piet said as he draped the dead man’s arm over his shoulders. ‘We should alert the watch. Captain Schnell, over at the Three Penny Bridge watch station, is a friend of mine.’

Dubnitz shook his head. ‘I owe Schnell money. Besides, this is Marienburg, and we’ve done worse,’ Dubnitz said, doing the same with Lomax’s other arm. ‘Besides, it’s all for a good cause, Piet. We’re seeing that Lomax’s last request is carried out.’ The body slumped between them, feet dragging. ‘We need twine.’

‘Twine,’ Piet muttered, looking around. ‘Why do we need twine?’

‘Well, to keep him walking, obviously,’ Dubnitz said. ‘It doesn’t have to be twine. See if you can get this broomstick down his trousers.’

‘Couldn’t we just sit here quietly with a few drinks?’ Piet implored.

‘People need to see him up and about,’ Dubnitz said. ‘It is our duty, for the Order and for Manann. Now, in his name find some twine or a broom or... here.’ Dubnitz grabbed up a chair and broke it on the floor, depositing the bulk of Lomax’s weight onto Piet. Taking the pieces of the chair, he stuffed them down the back of Lomax’s trousers and into his boots, stiffening his legs. Then he swiftly tied Lomax’s ankles to Piet’s and his own.

‘With him between us, we should be able to manage it,’ Dubnitz said, draping Lomax’s arm back over him. Awkwardly, he snatched the broom from Piet’s hands and jammed it down the back of Lomax’s jerkin and down into one leg of his trousers. Then he handed a rag to Piet and jerked Lomax’s head up. ‘Now, tie his head to the back of the broom.’

‘People are going to notice!’ Piet protested.

‘Not with his hat on they won’t,’ Dubnitz said assuredly. ‘Trust me, I’ve done this before.’

‘When?’ Piet demanded.

‘I’m not at liberty to say. A woman’s honour was involved. The situation was very uncomfortable for everyone concerned,’ Dubnitz said, stuffing Lomax’s fallen hat on his head. Lomax hung between them, not quite sagging. His head tilted down slightly, and he looked – and smelled – drunk.

‘Now what do we do?’ Piet said.

‘Now we carouse as we’ve never caroused before,’ Dubnitz said. He snatched up Lomax’s cane and spun it with the dexterity of a professional alcoholic.

They shuffled towards the door, Piet first and then Dubnitz, walking Lomax’s corpse between them. As they exited the tavern, a sound from above caused them to look up. A body, dressed in battered leathers, rolled off of the stable roof and thumped into the alleyway. A moment later, a crossbow followed, shattering as it struck the ground. Dubnitz stretched out Lomax’s cane and prodded the fallen man.

‘He’s dead too,’ he said.

‘I hope so,’ Piet said. ‘That’s Giuseppe Giancarlo, the Miragliano Murderist!’

‘How can you tell?’ Dubnitz said, rolling the body over to reveal its mauled face and chest. The man, whatever his identity, looked as if he’d walked face first into an exploding cannon.

‘Only man I know whoever lavished that much affection on his crossbow,’ Piet said, nudging the broken crossbow with his boot. Dubnitz saw that it had been inlaid with silver and the stock was ornately engraved.

‘Didn’t do him much good,’ Dubnitz said, peering up. ‘I suppose we know now who shot Lom– I mean, shot at Lomax.’ Giving in to ghoulish impulse, he grabbed the back of Lomax’s head and made it nod. Piet blanched.

‘Don’t do that,’ he said.

‘He doesn’t mind.’

‘It’s blasphemous!’

Dubnitz snorted and looked at the body again. ‘Of course, now we’re left with the question of who killed your friend Giuseppe.’

The sound of soft sandals scraping the cobbles caused the two knights to swing around to the darkened end of the alleyway, their burden causing them to almost overbalance. ‘I think we’re about to find out,’ Piet said.

The Arabyan was the first to step forward. He was wreathed in black robes and he stopped and leaned on his scimitar. ‘I want Lomax,’ he said, fluffing his curled beard. A discreet cough caused him to pause, and he turned slightly. ‘We want Lomax, Mock Duck and I,’ he corrected. The Cathayan slid forward to join him, pistols strung from his narrow frame like holy talismans. He drew one and cocked it, aiming it at Dubnitz. His dark eyes found the body of Giuseppe and narrowed. He looked at the Arabyan, who frowned. ‘Which one of you killed Giuseppe?’

Dubnitz and Piet both held up their hands. ‘Not us,’ Dubnitz said. ‘I assumed it was you.’

The Arabyan blinked. Then, he coughed. Something bright protruded from his throat. He reached up with a trembling finger and touched it. Then, with a gurgle, he toppled forward, revealing the wavy-bladed dagger jutting from the back of his neck. The Cathayan spun, drawing a second pistol. He leapt into the darkness, his pistols roaring. More pistol shots sounded, and then, silence.

‘We should go,’ Piet said.

‘I concur,’ Dubnitz said. ‘Make for the alley mouth–’

The shapes were shadows within the darkness at first, blotches of black. As they eased into the torchlight, metal gleamed. Brass masks, wrought in the shape of a daemon’s grinning leer, peered out of ragged cowls. Gauntleted hands emerged from voluminous sleeves, clutching wavy-bladed daggers. There were three of them.

‘Well, there’s a sight I hoped never to see,’ Dubnitz hissed.

‘The Murder-Brothers of Khaine,’ Piet whispered, the colour draining from his face. The murder-brothers, sometimes known as the massacre-monks or the slaughter-priests, were the pre-eminent assassins in Marienburg. Devoted to Khaine, god of murder, they lathered an unhealthy amount of religious fervour onto even the simplest back-alley killing.

‘We’re lucky it’s not all twelve of them,’ Dubnitz said, extending Lomax’s cane. Tiles crashed down from the roof, shattering on the ground. Dubnitz’s eyes flickered upwards and he caught sight of furtive movement. ‘Spoke too soon,’ he added.

‘Oh gods,’ Piet said hoarsely. ‘They’re all around us.’

‘Back away slowly,’ Dubnitz said. ‘If we can get to the mouth of the alley–’

‘Give us the merchant, dogs of Manann,’ one of the murder-brothers croaked, his voice distorted by the contours of his mask. ‘Khaine has no interest in your hearts today.’

‘Glad to hear it, but as you can see, our friend here can barely stand without us, so–’ Dubnitz said, tapping Lomax’s chest with the cane.

There was a rush of feet and a wavy dagger speared out of the darkness to the side. Piet snarled and drew his sword, the motion swinging Dubnitz around to face two more of the murder-brothers as they sprang for him. He lashed out with the cane, catching the tips of both blades in the carved grooves that lined the cane and twisted his wrist, jerking the knives from their wielders’ hands. His metal shod boot came down on a sandaled foot and an assassin yelped. The cane slashed out. Narwhal horn was almost as hard as iron, and a brass mask crumpled.

Piet’s sword chopped out, separating a cowled head from hunched shoulders and then they were galumphing towards the mouth of the alleyway, the hounds of Khaine in hot pursuit. As they ran, Dubnitz was reminded of the three-legged races he’d participated in as a boy, and of the Tannery rats which had pursued the racers along the course. He’d hated it then, and time hadn’t dulled the feeling. Sound and the smell of the canals washed over them as they burst out into the throng. People laughed and jeered and wept. Men draped in flags stumbled past on stilts carved to look like ships’ masts. Clowns clad in paper seaweed gambolled past. Dubnitz, Piet and the corpse between them fit right in to the madness of Spring Tide.

As they awkwardly shoved into the morass of drunken revelry, Dubnitz craned his neck. ‘I think we lost them!’ Adrenaline had burned away the last dregs of drunkenness that had made their current predicament seem like a good plan. Thinking on it, Dubnitz wondered if it might not have been better to simply hide the body somewhere until the next morning.

‘Knife,’ Piet hissed.

‘What?’

‘Knife,’ Piet snarled, flailing his hand. Dubnitz looked down and saw a wavy-bladed dagger jutting from Lomax’s belly.

‘Whoops,’ Dubnitz said, plucking it out and tossing it into the gutter. The wound wasn’t deep, but it was dark. Dubnitz snatched a bottle of something equally dark and strong smelling from the hands of a woman balancing a trained seagull on her nose and splashed it on the wound. Then he knocked back a drink and handed it to Piet, coughing.

‘Are there really twelve of them,’ Piet said, taking a drink.

‘Supposedly,’ Dubnitz said, scanning the crowd. All of the nearby taverns would be cramped and reeking messes, with no room to move, if it came to that, which it likely would, as the murder-cultists of Khaine were nothing if not persistent. ‘Keep your eyes peeled, Piet.’

‘No worries on that score. I won’t be closing them again until we’re done with this farce,’ Piet hissed. ‘This is an idiotic plan, Dubnitz. We were almost killed back there!’

‘Ish-is thath-that-Bernie?’ a voice roared before Dubnitz could reply. ‘Hey! It’s old Penny-Pinch him-himshelf!’ A fat hand, bedecked with rings of varying degrees of vulgarity, grabbed Lomax’s shoulder and tried to turn him. Momentarily panicked, Dubnitz and Piet flailed about, their balance off. They righted themselves and turned as the fat merchant stumbled back, blinking blearily. The man’s chubby features brightened as he blew at the feather that drooped from his shapeless hat out of his face. ‘It is you!’ he said, slurring his words. He ignored Dubnitz and Piet and poked Lomax in the chest. ‘I shaid to myshelf, I said, ‘Rupol-Rudolpho, that can’t be Bernie Lomax, because he hates parties! But it is you and–’ he sniffed Lomax and reeled back extravagantly. ‘And whooh! You’ve been at it!’

Dubnitz grabbed Lomax’s hand and stretched it out to swat playfully at the drunken merchant’s shoulder even as he grabbed the back of Lomax’s head and made it nod. Piet glared at him, but Dubnitz jerked his head towards the merchant and shrugged.

The merchant blinked again. ‘Shay, Bernie you look sort of peaked. I know thish wonnerful cure– ack!’ He reached up to swat his neck and Dubnitz saw a tiny feathered dart pop free of his third chin and bounce into his palm. The man blinked a third time, his eyes out of synch. ‘Down I go,’ he said mournfully, sinking to the street, where he was swiftly swallowed up by the crowd. Dubnitz heard a ‘tink’ and saw another dart rattle off of his cuirass, leaving a tiny trail of fluid in its wake.

‘Time to go,’ he said, using Lomax’s cane to open a path. Piet staggered after him with a strangled curse.

‘What happened?’ the other knight barked. ‘What was that?’

‘Poison dart!’ Dubnitz replied. ‘They use them in the Southlands, I’m told.’

‘I thought the Khaine-lovers only used knives!’

‘They do,’ Dubnitz said. ‘That was someone else.’

‘How many assassins did Lomax’s relatives hire?’ Piet nearly shouted.

‘My guess would be all of them,’ Dubnitz said. ‘Duck!’

‘What?’ Piet said as Dubnitz sank down. Piet, unprepared, was jerked directly into the path of a blow from a pair of iron-shod knuckles. He swayed and tripped over his own feet, pulling Lomax down and forcing Dubnitz to stand. Dubnitz twisted, lashing out with the cane to strike the scar-faced bruiser who’d lunged from the crowd. The weighted knob of the cane bounced off the big man’s brow, and the latter staggered, shaking his head like a fly-stung ox.

‘Get him, Bull!’ a smaller, thinner man dressed in a stylish outfit that had seen better months shouted. ‘I’ll get Lomax.’ The little man had a thin moustache in the style of Estalian duellists and a dagger sprouted from his hand as he dove towards his prey.

‘Piet,’ Dubnitz said, thwacking the big man again. ‘Shake it off Piet! Duty calls!’

Piet, jaw already purpling, reached out with his free hand, grabbing the little assassin’s wrist and slamming it against Lomax’s knee. ‘Middenheim! Get this fool!’ the little man yelled, struggling with Piet. A thick rope dropped over Piet’s free hand with alacrity, and he was jerked around. A lanky Middenheimer who was dressed in wolf skins and wielding a hunting lasso, pulled on the rope, pulling Piet towards him. He frowned as the bonds holding Piet to Lomax and Dubnitz held. ‘He’s stuck, Danzig!’ he shouted.

‘Not for long,’ Danzig snarled, another knife appearing in his hand as if by magic. Dubnitz gave the big man another whack with the cane and the ivory shattered on his broad head, revealing a hidden blade. Dubnitz’s eyes widened and then he whirled, parrying the little man’s blow. Danzig stared in shock and then back-pedalled as Dubnitz swiped at him. Dubnitz jabbed the tip of the blade just beneath Danzig’s chin. ‘Fancy Danzig, as I live and breathe,’ Dubnitz said. ‘And this must be Bull Murkowski and Middenheim Oscar, who’s from Talabheim, if I remember correctly.’

‘Erkhart,’ Middenheim said, still holding Piet’s arm trapped in his lasso.

‘If I recall correctly, there’s a warrant out for all three of you,’ Dubnitz said. The crowd swirled around their island of deadly calm. If anyone noticed the five men and the corpse, no one gave any sign. Fire-eaters belched nearby, filling the air with heat and the smell of sulphur.

‘Just give us the merchant, Dubnitz,’ Danzig growled.

‘He hit me,’ Bull grunted, rubbing his face.

‘I did, and several times at that,’ Dubnitz said, nodding. ‘And I’ll do worse than that if you three jackals don’t scarper.’ He hugged Lomax’s stiffening body close. ‘Bernard Lomax is under the protection of the Order of Manann.’

‘You–’ Danzig began. Whatever he’d been about to say was cut off abruptly by a wave of boiling heat as a tongue of flame shot between them. All of them turned to see a fire-eater gesture with his fire-stick. Then he let loose with another belch of fire. Middenheim cursed as his lasso curled and fried, snapping and sending him tumbling. Piet, free, grabbed for his sword.

‘Dubnitz,’ he snapped. Dubnitz turned from the fire-eater to see the black shapes of the murder-brothers of Khaine prowling through the crowd like sharks.

‘Them again,’ Dubnitz said. ‘They’re like a bloody rash.’

The fire-eater had been joined by a tumbler, clad in silk and humorous pantaloons. The tumbler bobbed and bounced and sent a slipper-clad foot elegantly crunching into Bull’s dumb features. The big man backed away, puzzled, as the tumbler continued to kick, punch and prod him. ‘Lomax is ours Danzig,’ a man clad in a Tilean carnival mask said, levelling a repeating pistol that was so intricately engineered that it qualified as a work of art. The pistol burped and Danzig scrambled away, hands raised as the cobbles beneath his feet were chewed to dust by the pistol.

‘We’re going to be killed by jugglers!’ Piet said. ‘I don’t want to be killed by jugglers!’

Dubnitz didn’t reply. The repeating pistol was swinging towards him, smoke curling from the barrel. The eyes behind the carnival mask were dark and eager. Then, abruptly, they widened. Carnival-mask slumped, a wavy-bladed dagger jutting from his back. A murder-brother vaulted over him, plucking the dagger free as he did so. Dubnitz lunged, spitting the cultist on Lomax’s sword-cane. The move pulled Piet and Lomax out of the path of the fire-eater, who unleashed a titanic flume of heat. A nearby drunkard burst into flame and suddenly the crowd noticed the pandemonium going on in their midst.

Screams mingled with music and prayers as the crowd thrashed in sudden panic. People fell into the canal. Others scrambled for the safety of doorways or open windows. Dubnitz jerked the sword-cane free of the murder-cultist’s chest and narrowly parried a thrust harpoon. A man with the look of a Norscan whale-hunter jabbed the harpoon again, trying to pin Dubnitz to the cobbles. ‘Piet, I need some help here!’ Dubnitz shouted.

‘You’re not the only one,’ Piet said. He’d lost his sword, and now held a broken cobblestone, which he brought across the jaw of a mime that drew too close with a satisfying crunch. ‘I hate mimes.’

‘Was that mime an assassin?’ Dubnitz grunted, the tip of the harpoon nearing his face.

‘I have no idea,’ Piet said, bouncing the cobble on his palm before throwing it at the fire-eater, who unleashed another plume of flame. The cobble bounced off the man’s tattooed skull and he instinctively took a breath, inhaling the fire he should have been spewing. The fire-eater’s screams were cut short as he was cooked inside out.

‘Bad show, monsieur,’ a purple clad Bretonnian snarled, driving his foot into Piet’s armoured chest. Off-balance, he fell, dragging Lomax and Dubnitz with him. ‘The ancient art of mummery is sacred,’ the Bretonnian continued, as the two knights flailed helplessly, trying to get to their feet. Lomax’s dead weight, however, made that difficult. ‘It seems I, Bartok of Bastonne, master of the mystical art of the Athel-Loren war-dance, am granted the honour of collecting the bounty on Monsieur Lomax.’ Bartok blinked. ‘Why are the three of you tied together?’

The harpooner jabbed at Dubnitz while the Bretonnian spoke, and the knight, having lost Lomax’s cane, grabbed the harpoon as it stabbed at him. With a convulsive shove he rammed the handle into its wielder’s face, busting lips and freeing teeth. As the harpooner reeled, Dubnitz swung the harpoon at the Bretonnian who was preparing to launch a kick at Lomax’s wobbling head. The haft of the harpoon caught the assassin on the knee, and he fell with a cry. As he hit the ground, Dubnitz hit him again and again, battering the master of the mystical art of the Athel-Loren war-dance into bloody unconsciousness.

‘Piet, let’s go, up and at them, can’t spend all evening in the gutter,’ Dubnitz roared, using the harpoon to pull himself to his feet and to simultaneously drag Piet up. Lomax bobbed between them like a cork on water. The body was already going stiff and further hampering their movements.

‘I want to go home now,’ Piet said, punching an Estalian knife-man wearing too much green and yellow to be wholly sane. The Estalian staggered back into the crowd and was trampled by yelling drunks.

‘The night’s young yet,’ Dubnitz said. A murder-cultist darted from the screaming, pushing, crowd, twin daggers raised high. Two miniature crossbow bolts caught him and sent him spinning into the canal. A killer in a featureless helm and a red hauberk calmly reloaded the small crossbows attached to his armoured forearms as he stood on the bundle-board of an abandoned wagon. ‘On second thought, you’re right, it’s time to go!’

The Spring Tide crowd around the central canal had thinned as the realization that attempted murder was being committed on a grand scale set in. Outside of the immediate area, however, the party was still in full swing. Dubnitz and Piet lurched towards the crowd. Crossbows twanged and Piet glanced over his shoulder, cursing. ‘He’s got arrows in him,’ he said.

‘He’s got more than that,’ Dubnitz said. ‘I think the harpoon nicked him; he’s leaking all over my armour.’ He snagged a flagon of ale from a tipsy bawd bellowing out a hymn to Manann and knocked it back. ‘Piet, this wasn’t one of your better ideas I must say,’ he said, slopping foam on the street.

‘My idea,’ Piet nearly shrieked, glaring at him. ‘I– pigeon!’

‘I think you mean “duck”,’ Dubnitz said. Piet dove for the ground, yanking Lomax and Dubnitz atop him as a pigeon hurtled through the space occupied by their heads only seconds previously. The pigeon struck the sign of a tavern and exploded in a ball of fire and feathers. Dubnitz gazed at the charred spot that marked the unfortunate avian’s final impact and said in shock, ‘By Manann’s scaly nethers that was a Herstel-Wenckler pigeon bomb.’

‘It’s a swarm!’ Piet yowled, trying to crawl away, his armour clattering. Dubnitz, on his side atop Lomax’s corpse, stared up in horror at the feathered shapes descending towards him like verminous avenging angels. Only a fool or a madman would release pigeon bombs into streets this closely packed.

‘Death by pigeon,’ he murmured, suddenly calm as he faced his imminent doom. ‘Who’d have thought such a thing possible in these civilised times?’

‘Shut up and help me run,’ Piet screamed, shoving Dubnitz off. Lomax flopping between them, the two knights stumble-ran into the safety of the crowd as the first pigeons struck the street and fire erupted. Dubnitz’s foot skidded as he stepped in a cuttlefish. The high priest of the Cult of Manann was flinging the creatures from his altar-barge as it passed along the canal.

‘Get to the barge!’ Dubnitz said, forcing them a path to the canal with the harpoon.

‘But–’ Piet began.

‘Go, go, go,’ Dubnitz said, bashing a set of stilts aside and sending a man dressed as an Arabyan schooner staggering into a low hanging sign. He sensed more than saw the assassins following them. Lomax’s relatives had seemingly spent their inheritance before they’d even gotten it. Every killer in Marienburg was after them and some few from farther afield.

‘Dubnitz, to your left,’ Piet said.

Dubnitz twisted as a man wearing a bronze mask crafted in the shape of a snarling tiger’s head lunged out of the crowd, clawed gauntlets scraping off Dubnitz’s chainmail sleeve. He thrust the harpoon between the assassin’s legs, tripping him up. But even as he fell, a hard-faced killer wielding a notched axe took his place, chopping at Dubnitz. Dubnitz swatted him with the harpoon and as the axe-man stepped back, a pigeon alighted on his shoulder. He had time for a single expression of panic before the pigeon bomb blew him into gory bits. Dubnitz blinked blood out of his eyes as overhead, Cathayan fireworks went off, lighting up the night sky. Somewhere, the great Tidal Bell in the Temple of Manann was ringing.

‘Hear that? It’s almost morning,’ Piet said. ‘We made it, I can’t believe we–’

The crowd thinned at the edge of the canal. They had gotten ahead of the barge, but not of the assassins.

‘Bernard Lomax, you are marked for death,’ an oily duellist said, gesturing with his rapier. ‘Meet it manfully.’

‘Give us the merchant and you can go free,’ a sinister halfling with a dagger spinning between his pudgy fingers said. Around he and the duellist, a half-dozen other would-be bounty killers had eased forward. Like as not, half of them hadn’t even been hired to do the deed and were simply opportunists. Dubnitz could hear sword fights breaking out throughout the crowd as other assassins, too far back to join the fun, turned on one another either in frustration or optimism.

‘I’d be happy to,’ Dubnitz said, keeping the harpoon extended. ‘And I will, as soon as you tell me which of you lot was throwing the pigeons.’

‘What pigeons?’ one of a pair of twin beauties wearing little more than scars and armour said. She and her companion looked up. ‘Oh,’ the other one said softly.

All eyes swivelled upwards as flapping sounds filled the air. Dozens of pigeons swooped over the street, beady eyes looking for perches. ‘Pigeons; thousands of them,’ Piet muttered.

‘Run!’ Dubnitz said, stumbling forward.

Bird droppings and explosions rocked the street and a body pin-wheeled through the air. The explosions weren’t large, but then, neither were halflings, Dubnitz reflected as he loped towards the canal with Piet. Those assassins not caught in the airborne conflagration hurried after them.

Piet was muttering prayers to Manann as he ran. Dubnitz simply cursed, letting flow a shower of creative invective. He cursed Lomax and his relatives, Ogg and his grandiose designs, and Marienburg with its proliferation of professional murderists. He’d always suspected he’d die at the end of a hired blade, the victim of a jealous husband or scorned woman. Possibly a city official with a grudge, or an old enemy, free of prison, or even Grandmaster Ogg, once he figured out what Dubnitz had done with his missing hand. In fairness, it made a lovely candelabrum and the Duchess had been quite appreciative, but Ogg wouldn’t understand. He had no sense of proportion, that man.

But, mostly, Dubnitz cursed Manann, because once again the sea god had given him no luck but bad. Even as he settled into a quiet, snarling rhythm of curses, however, the holy altar-barge of Manann hove into view ahead of him and cuttlefish slapped the stone, hurled by the high priest. ‘Haha! There it is Piet! Get to the barge! It’s our only chance,’ Dubnitz said, trying to hurry them along.

‘The barge? But–’ Piet began.

‘No time for buts, Piet,’ Dubnitz said. The stones were slick near the canal and he had to stop himself from falling head over heels. ‘It’s the barge or the blades.’

‘Maybe we should think about this,’ Piet said.

‘What sort of knight are you? Just jump,’ Dubnitz shouted, grabbing a handful of Lomax’s jerkin and leaping. Piet, despite his protestations, jumped along with him. The barge wasn’t far from the edge of the canal, being as wide a craft as the temple could afford.

A moment of vertigo stretched across eternity before Dubnitz’s foot found the edge of the barge. The altar attendants reached out automatically to grab the knights as they swayed back and forth on the edge of the deck. Dubnitz and Piet staggered forward, nearly knocking over the votive candles and sending an iron pot of blessed seawater spilling across the deck. Priests slipped and slid as the water sloshed around their feet. The high priest turned, mouth open in mid-bellow. His hands were full of cuttlefish and words of benediction died on his lips. He looked at Dubnitz, who grinned sheepishly. ‘Bless a trio of pilgrims, your supremacy?’ he asked.

‘Aren’t you one of Ogg’s bully-boys?’ the high priest said, flinging a cuttlefish over his shoulder. ‘You are! You’re Dubnitz, the one who let that goat–’

‘May I present Bernard Lomax, your excellency,’ Dubnitz interjected. ‘He is a humble merchant and follower of His Most Salty Majesty, Manann.’ He glanced at Lomax’s dangling head. ‘He’s overcome with emotion, your benevolence.’

The high priest waved a hand in front of his nose. ‘He’s overcome with something, I’d say.’ He squinted. ‘Is that a–?’

‘What dagger?’ Piet said, hastily plucking the errant blade out of Lomax’s back and flinging it over the side of the barge.

‘Are those crossbow bolts?’

‘You know how it gets during Spring Tide, your most tidal excellency,’ Dubnitz said swiftly. ‘People go wild. They let their hair down. Sometimes crossbows are involved.’

‘Are you sure he’s–’ the high priest began dubiously.

‘Oh Mighty Manann, Bless Us Your Servants!’ Dubnitz bellowed, falling to his knees and causing the barge to rock as Piet and Lomax followed suit. The latter’s stiffening limbs and joints gave forth a plaintive series of cracks and pops as abused ligaments split. ‘He’s too afraid to ask it of you himself, your saintliness,’ Dubnitz said, cracking one eye open. ‘Could you bless him, perhaps? Let the crowd see that he has your favour?’

‘I–’

‘Oh Mighty Manann, Absolve Us of the Sins of Dry Land!’ Dubnitz shouted, gesturing wildly, making sure to jerk one of Lomax’s hands so that it flopped beseechingly at the high priest’s robe. The crowd was cheering now, every eye on the barge. Seagulls squawked and horns blew. The high priest leaned close.

‘What are you up to, Dubnitz?’ he said.

‘I assure you, it’s for the greater glory of Manann, your pristine parsimoniousness,’ Dubnitz said. The high priest frowned, but straightened and raised his hands in benediction.

‘I expect we’ll be getting a nice donation this week from the Order,’ he muttered before launching into the words of Manann’s Blessing. The noise of the crowd surged in volume, hammering at the ears of those aboard the barge. It was only by the slightest of chances that Dubnitz heard the whine of a bullet. He leapt to his feet, yanking Piet and Lomax up. The bullet punched into Lomax’s back and sent them stumbling forward, into the high priest, who squawked in sudden fear as the corpse lurched into him.

A triumphant assassin leapt to his feet on a ledge overlooking the canal, the Hochland long rifle held over his head as he let out a yell. Dubnitz swept the harpoon’s blade through his bindings, freeing himself from Lomax and then sent the harpoon hurtling towards the assassin. ‘Imperial assassin!’ he roared. ‘He tried to kill the high priest!’

The assassin fell from his perch with a yell as he twisted to avoid the harpoon. Rifle and assassin both tumbled into the canal as the crowd gave a howl like an angry beast. Dubnitz spun and pointed at a familiar black-clad shape. The murder-cultists of Khaine had been following the barge at a distance, picking off their competition with the patience of stalking tigers. ‘More assassins,’ he shouted, and the crowd drew back, suddenly exposing the brass-masked killers, who looked around in confusion. Then, as one, the revellers fell on the killers, dragging them under as surely as the waters of the canal had swallowed the rifleman. Fierce as the murder-cultists were, they were no match for an entire city’s worth of fists and feet putting the boot in. Black-clad shapes sank beneath the press, battered into insensibility by the Spring Tide celebrants.

‘A fine display of the old Marienburg fighting spirit,’ Dubnitz said, hands on his hips. ‘By which I mean filching their valuables while they’re bleeding on the street.’

‘If you’re finished congratulating yourself, I could use some help,’ Piet snarled.

Dubnitz turned to see the other knight fumbling with Lomax’s body, which was tangled in the high priest’s robes. Dubnitz scampered over. ‘One moment your excellency, help is on the way,’ he said, surreptitiously unknotting the bindings that held Piet tied to Lomax. Dubnitz hauled Lomax’s abused corpse off of the high priest and pulled it into an embrace. ‘Bernie! By Manann’s beard, no!’ he said, adding a wail for good measure as he shook the body. Lomax’s head flopped back and forth, his neck having been broken at some point and time. ‘He’s been shot!’ Before the high priest could scoot away, Dubnitz grabbed his hand. ‘Take his hand, excellency, take it and comfort him as he goes to Manann’s realm!’ He grabbed Lomax’s limp hand and slapped it atop the high priest’s. The latter blanched and tried to pull away, but Dubnitz held on, his face the picture of tortured melancholy. ‘Shot, your mercifulness, shot while saving you from a killer!

‘I thought he was–’ the high priest began.

Dubnitz rode over him, shouting, ‘He has given his life for you! For Marienburg! Comfort him as he…’ He paused, watching the horizon. ‘As he – hold on,’ he said, counting the strokes of the Tide Bell in his head. ‘Wait for it – yes, there we go – comfort him as he dies, oh great sage of the Free City!’

The high priest, uncertainty writ on his features, mumbled something as spontaneous weeping broke out amongst those elements of the crowd not busy kicking in the faces of the murder-cultists. Dubnitz shoved the high priest aside and pulled Lomax into another embrace, tears spilling into his beard as he blubbered heroically. Word of mouth was a fine thing, and street corner patterers were already carrying the word of Lomax’s heroic sacrifice across the city, Dubnitz wagered.

The entire city had witnessed Lomax die at cockcrow, and there’d be no contesting of the will by his relatives, not when the manner of his death was known. A hero of the city, dying to rescue the high priest of Manann, and donating his worldly wealth to the templars devoted to said god. ‘Sometimes, I suspect the gods love me,’ Dubnitz said as he blubbered. ‘Do you ever get that feeling, Piet?’

Piet dropped to one knee beside him, a hand placed comfortingly on his shoulder. ‘You’re a horror, Erkhart. A literal horror,’ he muttered.

‘Yes, but what I am not is pickled,’ Dubnitz said. ‘And neither are you, so stop complaining. It all worked out for the best. Now, would you say it’s cockcrow yet?’

Piet sighed and nodded. ‘I think we’re in the clear.’

‘Ah well, Manann giveth and he taketh away, drift into his bosom, be at peace and such, et cetera and so forth,’ Dubnitz said, dropping the body and rising abruptly to his feet. He clapped his hands together and looked around. The rising sun caused the scum on the surface of the canal to sparkle prettily. ‘So… who’s for breakfast?’

Born of Blood

Valkia the Bloody: The legend of the Gorequeen begins

Sarah Cawkwell

Swooping whorls of colour lit the night sky with their vibrant shades. Vivid reds, deep blues and virulent greens twisted and blended into one another, producing an entirely unnatural display unlike anything anywhere else. Only the Northern Wastes could boast such stark, murderous beauty as presented by the snowy tundra. They culminated in this spectacle, the magnificent aurora that crowned the top of the world. Nowhere else was there such magical fallout.

Her eyes wide, the child stared up at the fury of the skies, stricken mute by their very majesty. By her side, the warrior clad in blood-stained furs reached down to scoop her up in his arms. With ease he lifted her onto his shoulders that she might better see. She was getting rather large for such treatment now that she was older, but she was still slender and lightly built. The warrior had no difficulty in bearing her weight. She shifted slightly to make herself comfortable.

‘They say that when the Axefather is pleased with our efforts, the tides of the sky will flow and ebb with darkest red, leached from the blood of our enemies. On the day that happens, Lille Venn, our people will rise far above all others.’

Her father smiled. He did not have to see her to imagine the look of wide-eyed wonder on his ten-year-old daughter’s face. She was a beautiful child and although he loved her dearly, her ever-growing resemblance to her dead mother brought a fresh wave of bitter loathing towards the enemies that the Schwarzvolf faced. The war between the two tribes had raged for nigh on twelve cycles of the moon and the elders of the Schwarzvolf had foreseen that the morrow would see victory or death for Merroc and his people.

The child wound a lock of dark hair around her finger and continued to stare into the skies. Words were few and far between from his daughter. She had always been an introspective and thoughtful child, intelligent and sharp beyond her years. The death of her mother at the hands of their enemy a year ago had hurt her, but with the easy pragmatism of all her people, she had borne it with stoicism. Occasionally she would speak, invariably to make an observation or to ask a question. She was inquisitive and curious and this pleased Merroc. He may have produced no sons of the union with Valkia’s mother but this girl, his first child, was his pride.

‘How does it happen?’ Her question, when it came, was demanding, as though she accused her father of arranging this spectacular show of magic purely for her benefit.

‘None of us truly know, Lille Venn.’ Lille Venn, he called her. Little Friend. ‘There can be little doubt that such a miracle is the work of the gods themselves.’

‘Where are the gods?’ She absently tugged on his scraggly beard, winding it around her little fingers.

‘Far to the north. Further than any of us have ever travelled. None who have ventured there have ever returned to tell of what lies beyond the mountains.’

‘When I grow up,’ she said with the fierce determination of children everywhere, ‘I will go there.’ When Merroc laughed, she narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Why is that funny?’

‘I believe you, Lille Venn,’ said Merroc, his laugh becoming nothing more than a smile. ‘If anybody could make that journey, it would be you.’ His words mollified the little girl and the flash of anger left her eyes. She was like her mother to look at, that much was true. But her bearing, manner and attitude were Merroc’s through and through.

He loved her for that alone.

Together, the two of them watched the winds of magic and the virulent display of colour in a companionable silence for several long minutes. Eventually, the girl spoke and this time it was not the petulant voice of a child, but the self-assured tone of a young woman who knew what she wanted.

‘I want to fight with my people tomorrow,’ she said, tapping Merroc on the shoulder as an indication that she wanted to be lifted down. Within the tribe, it was not unusual for a child of her age to fight. But Valkia, despite her ferocity, was female. It was customary to refrain from allowing any female child of the tribe to enter battle without having produced at least one live offspring.

‘Lille Venn, you know that I cannot allow this thing you ask.’

‘I am not asking you, Papa. I am telling you what I want.’ He indulged her outrageously, but then he always had. He could not help himself. She was utterly charming when she wanted to be and a hard-hearted little bitch the rest of the time. But in this matter, he could not forsake hundreds of years of tradition.

‘I forbid it.’

‘I defy you.’ It was an old game of theirs, one which she could maintain far longer than he could. He would deny her something and she would taunt him until a smile would cross his face and he would give in to her piping demands. But this… was unthinkable.

‘You will not.’ There was a hard tone in her father’s voice that Valkia had never heard before and it shocked her to silence. She had rarely seen her father the chieftain. She was used to Merroc as being just her father. The thought that he would deny her what she wanted brought a pout to her lips. Merroc hunkered down until his eyes were level with hers.

‘You are my only child,’ he said. ‘If I were to take you into battle tomorrow, it would be inviting your death. You have to grow and bear a grandchild before you can take the field of battle.’ He felt briefly awkward discussing this with her; her eyes were like little emeralds, hard and green, and bored into him. ‘Your mother bore you when she had known fourteen summers. You have yet to reach eleven. Do not be so quick to wish for your death, Valkia, for it will come. It comes to us all in time.’

He stood and tucked his long, dark hair which was shot through with threads of silvery-grey, behind one ear. He looked up at the aurora. ‘I can’t give you what you want, my daughter, not this time. You cannot fight. I will not lose you to those animals. You are too precious to me and to the future of our people.’

She looked up at Merroc and considered him. He was tall and broad of shoulder, his well-muscled body made larger by the addition of the furs that he wore as proof against the northern cold. He seemed very old to her, although he was perhaps only twenty-five years of age. If you lived to see thirty summers, the people of the Schwarzvolf considered you ancient.

His face, whilst too battle-scarred to ever be called handsome, was nonetheless proud and arrogant. There was an undeniable purity in his appearance that told of his good stock. The reigning family had held the chieftain’s cape for seven generations, the mantle passed from father to son. Merroc’s marriage to her mother had produced only two living children: Valkia and her sister Anya, who had died before the first year of her life was out. Three sons had been born to Merroc and his wife and none had been born with breath in their lungs. Merroc tried to deny the whispers, but he had come to believe them over time.

He was cursed.

‘I see.’ Valkia’s two words were spoken through pursed lips and he looked down at her fierce, determined little face. He forced the smile from his lips and reached down to take her chin in his hand.

‘I cannot allow you to take up arms and fight in the battle tomorrow, my daughter,’ he said. ‘But I will speak to the Circle this night. They may permit you to take up a shield and join the ranks of the shield maidens.’ She jerked her face free and looked as though she would argue, but Merroc caught her again. ‘Listen to me, Valkia. I don’t care how much fuss you make. You will understand that this is the way it must be or I will beat it into you. I cannot buck the traditions of our people for your childish whims.’

‘I am not a child.’

‘Then stop acting like one.’ She looked crushed and he softened slightly in his attack. ‘I will do what I can, but I make no promises. Come now. The Circle meets soon and I have tarried too long here.’

‘You promise you will speak to them?’ Reluctantly, the little girl relented and slid her hand into her father’s bigger one.

‘When have I ever disappointed you, Lille Venn?’

She had no reply she could give to that, only a cold, penetrating stare which was far too old for her and which left him feeling very uncomfortable.

The Circle was a group of seven tribal elders and leaders. As the tribe’s chieftain, Merroc sat at its head but frequently felt that his words went unheeded. He had come to the mantle at a young age, barely sixteen, and they had never stopped treating him like a youth.

They met in Merroc’s semi-permanent dwelling; a yurt made from animal hides that had spent long hours tanning in the sun. They were stretched across rigid poles and treated with animal fat that acted as proof against the cold and the moisture. A small opening at the top funnelled the smoke from the fire in its centre. The remains of a deer trapped a day or two before turned on a spit over it and the Circle frequently reached up to hack a slice from the animal and gorge noisily upon it.

The conversation had largely been strangely optimistic, given the fact they knew the dawn would bring either success or eradication. None of the Schwarzvolf were given over to pessimism before battle. If they did not believe they would win through, then they would not. It was quite simple.

‘They will strike at first light.’

The words came from Ammon and all eyes swivelled towards him. The tribe’s Warspeaker, he was only a year or so younger than Merroc and the closest that the chieftain had to a true friend. He had guided them through seemingly endless battles against their most rapacious enemies. The tribe who had so hampered them for months had never been granted the honour of being recognised by a name. The warriors of the Schwarzvolf called their enemies ‘they’ or ‘them’. To give them a name was to ascribe something humane to them. And they were anything but.

The Schwarzvolf were widely considered one of the most ferocious tribes in the north lands and with good reason. Tenacious and fearless, their young warriors had been known to fight with limbs severed or their intestines held in by their shield hand. But they... they were of a different ilk. They liked to take prisoners, something which the Schwarzvolf found strange. They harboured a belief that if something was too weak to be free then it was too weak to live. Torture, sometimes followed by slavery, would follow and to Merroc and his people, the concession of freedom was not something they subscribed to.

Ammon got to his feet and moved to the flap of the animal skin tent. He gave a piercing whistle into the darkness and a lithe, slender figure slid from the shadows and entered Merroc’s tent.

‘My chieftain.’ The young man inclined his head with respect in Merroc’s direction. Radek, his name was. He was one of the most shrewd, canny warriors in the tribe and his ability to hunt and scout was so astute that there were occasionally whispers that he must have made particularly dark pacts with the gods to acquire such skill. Fleet of foot and deadly with his bow, he had risen to the position of Pathfinder with alacrity. He was, Merroc recalled, Ammon’s nephew.

‘Radek. What news from beyond the camp? What do we have on our side for tomorrow’s battle?’

‘We have the land with us, but little else. Their numbers equal ours, if not exceed them.’ The scout accepted a cup of wine, mulled and heated in a cauldron that hung over the fire. Not really strong enough to intoxicate, the wine was nonetheless welcome and he took a long sip from it, savouring the flavour. It was sweetened and given its pungent aroma by a mixture of spices, and the berries which made its base were in plentiful supply at this time of the year.

Radek set down the wooden cup and looked at Merroc. A slight smile played on his lips. There was a faint shadow of downy fluff on his chin. He was remarkably young to have come so far. The thought flickered through Merroc’s mind but he almost immediately chided himself. Just because Radek was young was no reason to judge his competencies. ‘There are two things we have that they do not, however. I got as close as I could to their camp earlier tonight.’

‘And those are...?’ Merroc left it hanging and reached forward to flense another slice of venison from the deer. He chewed on the meat, its juices dribbling down his chin and slicking his beard.

‘We have more shields than they do. We can hold our lines far longer.’

Merroc nodded. ‘The line will hold. This is a good start. The other?’

Radek’s faint smile became an impish grin. ‘Sobriety, my chieftain. They are drinking heavily, perhaps as a way to numb the cold in their bones. They are not used to being this far north. Come the dawn, they will be suffering for it.’ This generated a ripple of laughter through the yurt and Merroc nodded, wiping grease from his face.

‘This is excellent,’ he rumbled. ‘None of our warriors will be drinking this night. Tomorrow, when we have watered the earth with their blood... then we will drink.’ The ripple of laughter became a combined grunt of approval. Merroc turned his head to the right. ‘Godspeaker?’

The man sitting at the chieftain’s right hand had been called Fydor at birth, but in this council, he wore the name Godspeaker. The tribe’s shaman and doctor, his knowledge and gift of foresight were deeply revered and respected. Just as Ammon the Warspeaker sat at the chieftain’s left hand, so the Godspeaker took the trusted position on the right.

‘I am yet to read the omens,’ he replied. The Godspeaker was the oldest man currently living within the tribe. He had seen no fewer than forty summers and some whispered he had seen sixty. The hand that reached out to accept a cup of mulled wine was darkly tanned and liver spotted. ‘I will do so shortly.’ His eyes, dark and depthless in his ancient face, bored through Merroc in much the same way that Valkia’s had a few short hours before.

‘You have a question for the Circle,’ observed the Godspeaker. Merroc wound a lock of his beard around one finger and let out an exasperated sigh. There was never any doubt that Fydor was exceptionally gifted. Whether with premonition or the simple art of understanding body language and distraction didn’t matter.

‘Aye,’ replied the chieftain. ‘It is a small thing. I was waiting for a suitable time.’

‘Now is as good a time as any.’ The Godspeaker opened out his hands, palms spread. ‘Speak, chieftain.’

Merroc shifted slightly uncomfortably, uncrossing his legs and re-crossing them. The Circle sat comfortably amidst a number of cushions scattered on the floor. He took up his cup and sipped the wine. As he did so he gathered his thoughts carefully, knowing that how he phrased the next sentence could be instrumental in its success or otherwise.

‘It is not a question,’ he said in due course. ‘My daughter wishes to take her place in the battle tomorrow,’ he said and there was such challenge in his voice that, for a moment, he wondered if he had been too aggressive with it. ‘And I have agreed that she can take her mother’s place as a shield maiden.’

‘You are asking us for our approval?’

‘No, Warspeaker.’ Merroc shifted his gaze to Ammon. ‘I am telling you.’

‘It is unseemly. She is too young. Far too young. She has yet to produce an heir. If she were to fall...’

‘If she falls, then I will take another woman of the Schwarzvolf to wife.’ When Valkia’s mother had died, Merroc had been grief-stricken enough to say that he would not re-marry. The promise he made here was spontaneous and he almost immediately knew regret because it sparked the conversation he had avoided for nearly a year.

‘You know the Circle’s views on this matter, chieftain. We have told you that we feel the time is right for you to take another woman to wife anyway. You need to produce an heir. If you do not and you should die, then there will be great upheaval amid our people.’ It was no exaggeration on his part. Should the line of the chieftain fail, there would be a fight for the mantle that would potentially halve their number. ‘You do not surely wish to impart such a legacy to your people?’ The Godspeaker was calm and his voice measured. Merroc recognised the spark in the older man’s eyes and felt the defiance that had so marked his leadership of the Schwarzvolf bubble to the surface.

‘I already have an heir.’ Merroc’s voice was as fierce and proud as Valkia’s had been when she had made the suggestion in the first place. ‘She will take her place as the leader of our people when the time is right.’

‘Pretenders to your position will kill her before the day she takes up the mantle.’

‘She will likely kill them first.’ Merroc was surprised at how much he believed the words he was saying. His dark-haired daughter was barely ten years old and yet she had already demonstrated great tenacity and courage.

But she was a child still and more – she was female. There had been female leaders of the tribe over the years but every one of them had been assassinated within days, sometimes within hours, of taking their place. Equality was one thing and the Schwarzvolf would gladly fight with their women at their side. But to defer to their command was to call into question centuries of belief and structure.

The odds were not in Valkia’s favour. Not for the first time since she had torn her way into the world, Merroc felt a pang of sorrow for the hardships she must inevitably endure.

An uncomfortable silence had descended on the tent, broken eventually by the chieftain. None of those present had protested and he took that as his cue. ‘Then it is agreed. Valkia may take the field of battle tomorrow.’

A ripple of assent passed across the assemblage. The only man present whose eyes met those of the chieftain’s directly were those of Radek the young scout. Merroc was not sure whether the expression he saw there was a good thing or not, but he did not dwell upon it. He didn’t need the approval of the young. He was the tribe’s chieftain.

The Warspeaker’s prediction had been reasonably accurate bar a single detail. The enemy struck just before dawn rather than at first light. They launched their attack whilst the erratic and forbidding bale-moon was still low in the sky, taking its presence and the absence of its pale cousin as a good battle omen. Fiery gold stained the horizon, tarnishing the sickly green light and cutting shafts of grey which threaded through the velvet night. There was a biting sharpness in the air that carried the threat of more snowfall.

Their early attack earned them no advantage however. The warriors of the Schwarzvolf had been prepared for what felt to one young girl hours already.

Valkia had slept poorly the previous night. She had dozed fitfully whilst waiting for her father’s return from the Circle and when he had ducked his head to enter their yurt, she had sat bolt upright and fixed him with her disturbingly intense stare.

To learn that she was able to take the field of battle had sent a thrill through her. She had never experienced such a feeling before; a surge of adrenaline that set her stomach to churning. She would never have acknowledged that such a sensation was akin to fear because the people of the Schwarzvolf did not know fear; only recognising it as a weakness that needed to be overcome.

Across her right arm was strapped a huge, bronze-shod round shield that was almost as tall when resting against the ground as Valkia herself was. Her left hand remained free, giving her the ability to bear the shield with both hands should it be required. Although she was only a child, she was not so small that she was completely lost in the shield line. To either side of her were women of the tribe she knew by face but not name. They had merely glanced down at the small girl and shown her how to hold the shield correctly.

She wore a thick leather jerkin that was several sizes too large for her but which had been cinched in at the waist with a belt. It was long enough that it came below her knees and there was no flesh visible between the edge of the tunic and the tops of her leather boots. Her tangle of dark curls was slicked back from her face by rendered animal fat and pale woad, in the same style as all the warriors of the tribe. A warrior’s queue, or ponytail, would give an enemy a potential handhold and whilst the fat stank, even in the chill of the morning, it was better by far than having your head removed from your shoulders whilst your enemy held on tightly.

Valkia wrinkled her nose at the smell of the grease on her hair, but none of the others were showing any sort of discomfort so she tried not to let them see. She shifted position slightly, the movement earning reproachful looks from the women either side to her.

‘Keep still,’ the one on her right snapped, not unkindly. ‘Do not fidget. Remain as still and straight as you can manage. If the enemy see a weakness in the shield line, they will exploit it.’

Valkia would normally have snapped back, but instead she nodded, appreciating that the words were given as advice and not admonishment. The woman smiled briefly and reached down with her free left hand to squeeze Valkia’s shoulder. The girl looked up, made slightly bolder by the display of camaraderie.

‘What’s your name?’ The taller woman, seemingly not much older than Valkia herself, seemed surprised by the question.

‘Kata,’ she replied, returning her gaze to the fore. Although they had been prepared for a while, there was still no sign of the enemy. ‘And you are Valkia, chieftain’s daughter. It would seem that you are finally ready for your first taste of battle.’ She looked back down again and the smile was back. ‘It is my first battle, too. When we return victorious, perhaps we can regale one another with stories of our bravery.’

‘I would like that.’

‘So would I,’ Kata replied. She did not need to expand on the fact that she would also like the opportunity to present herself before the chieftain. The entire tribe had gossiped about his need for another woman since the death of his wife and Kata was unwed and of child-bearing age.

There was the sound of approaching running feet and Radek, along with several of the other scouts, emerged from the edge of the thin forest that was the natural border between the Schwarzvolf and their encroaching enemy. The young scout was in a state of dishevelment but still held himself with pride.

‘They are coming,’ was all he said.

‘Then we take the fight to them,’ cried the Warspeaker. ‘We do not stand and let our enemies break upon us!’

A roar of agreement came from the skirmish warriors and the women of the shield line and Valkia raised her own piping voice along with theirs, caught in the thrill of it all. Soon, she would taste war.

Soon, the course of history would change.

First contact came far sooner than Valkia could ever have imagined and for a few heart-racing seconds she wondered if she would live to see her father again. The fore shield line, the more experienced women and younger warriors who bore weapons as well as shields, absorbed the initial impact. Numbering at least a hundred, the enemy tribe were largely armed with the axes so favoured by the people of the north and they hacked repeatedly into wooden shields sending splinters flying in all directions.

The air was filled with the screams and shouts of more people than the little girl had ever seen gathered in one place. It was a riotous clash of sound, sight and smell and she could barely take any of it in. Her world seemed almost to shrink until there was only her and those who stood either side of her.

She tasted a moment of abject terror as she stared around what was rapidly becoming a battlefield. She took in the sights of people she knew wading into the attackers, their own weapons flailing and hacking. Her eyes sought out her father, the bloody red sigil of the Schwarzvolf on his jerkin. The other warriors wore symbols too; but none wore the red of the chieftain’s house.

Merroc was already in the thick of battle, having burst from the shield line with the others and utilised the jarring shock of impact to their advantage. His furs were splattered with blood and what little of his face could be seen behind the leather helm that covered most of his head was similarly stained. The two-handed battle-axe that he wielded with such aplomb swung slowly, decapitating and dismembering wherever it went.

There was so much blood. It ran like a bloody river, saturating the ground underfoot and she slid several times. So much blood. So much death. Everywhere there was the smell of copper as it stained the snow, dirty and slushy from the trudging of hundreds of feet. The scent of it tickled the child’s nostrils and she found herself inhaling deeply rather than trying to avoid it.

Something was fired deep inside her soul as she breathed in. This was what she had been born into, this ceaseless violence and horror. This was her birthright. If only she could take up arms and step into the breaches that were appearing in the battle line as warriors fell, dead or injured...

‘Step!’

The order came from somewhere to the left and Valkia was jarred into alertness once again. Her hold on the shield slipped a little and she groped to catch it again, her small hands tightening around the grip. She found herself moving forward with the rest of the line, her shorter legs meaning she had to half jog to keep up.

‘Step!’

Another shouted order and Valkia moved forward. She looked up at Kata and saw the grim determination on her new friend’s face. Without realising it, she automatically mimicked the expression. The shield line moved forward, closer to the fray, and Valkia felt once again that strange mix of thrill and fear. A few more feet and the line would be close enough to engage and protect the warriors.

Her attention was caught yet again by the flash of her father’s sigil and she turned her head. If she strained hard enough, she could make out broken words. Using her own intelligence and understanding, she filled in the gaps as best she could. He was bellowing at the Warspeaker. They were both shouting at the top of their voices in order to be heard over the cacophony that surrounded them. Ammon was, like her father, covered from head to foot in the blood of the enemy and his face was grim.

‘...barely making an impact on their numbers, my chieftain.’

‘We need to keep... They will fall eventually. They’re undisciplined.’ Merroc indicated around himself, pointing and shouting instructions that Valkia could not fathom. The noise was overpowering, the press of bodies claustrophobic. Daylight was in evidence; a dull, heavy light that was choked with leaden, snow-filled clouds and which would later be filled with the greasy smoke of funeral pyres. There would be no bright sunlight this day.

A sudden dip in the noise level allowed Valkia to catch the tail end of her father’s words.

‘Their leader is in the middle of the attacking warriors. He is surrounded on all sides by his strongest and best. If we chew their force from the sides, then we can get to him. And I want him brought alive.’

‘As my chieftain commands.’ Ammon inclined his head.

Valkia didn’t understand strategy, but her father’s suggestion struck her as remarkably shrewd. The enemy were definitely all facing forwards; even those at the very back – at least as far back as her reduced height would allow her to see – were intent on ploughing through the solid line of the Schwarzvolf.

‘Radek!’ The Warspeaker turned from his chieftain and sought the head scout. He bade the youth carry the message to the outlying warriors and with a sharp nod of his head, the scout set off at a run.

Valkia watched him go and turned her head to meet the gaze of her father. Merroc gave her a tight smile and she felt immediately certain that they would win this battle. There was no way her father, such a great man, could lose to a rabble like this.

She was proved, over the course of the next hour or so, to be quite right. As soon as the skirmish began to break up, as the enemy were forced to meet the new challenges from either side, the rival tribe’s already decidedly scrappy line began to completely lose cohesion. Once that happened, it became easy for the Schwarzvolf fighters to pick them off in droves. The shield line, of which Valkia was a part, was ordered to break and do what they could to aid the slaughter.

Some began to flee, many being cut down before they even made it as far as the woods through which they had marched, but most were killed and left where they fell. Nobody told Valkia that she must not take part in this massacre and as such she took up a dagger dropped by one of the fallen and threw herself into what remained of the fray. Her blade hamstrung several of the enemy and their last sight before they toppled to the ground was that of a dark-haired devil child darting away from them. In her wake came death. Always death, brought swiftly and without mercy by a warrior of the Schwarzvolf. Valkia’s passage did not go unnoticed. On the far right flank, her father watched his daughter and felt great pride in her actions. He moved with alacrity to follow her and joined her. He darted from enemy to enemy, the broad smile of his axe lopping the heads and limbs from enemies with lethal precision.

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the noise began to die down as the numbers thinned to a handful. Some had surrendered and they would be judged for suitability for auxiliary warriors. The tribe may not have taken slaves, but they had no compunction when it came to offering a place within their number for those of worth. The females amongst the enemy who had been spared death would be used for breeding. Valkia knew this and although was still somewhat ignorant of the true hardships of the tribal existence, often wondered if death was not a preferable option. The Schwarzvolf would head to the camps of their fallen enemy and claim any breeding women and children for their own. In this way, the tribe expanded.

‘It is over, Valkia.’ Her father stood before her and reached out his hand to take the dagger from her. ‘There is but one thing left to do. Come with me.’

With obvious reluctance, the child handed over the dagger and slid her hand into that of the big warrior. He led her through the fallen, past the dead and the dying.

Valkia was slowly regaining her awareness of the here and now. As well as the corpses of the enemy, there were bodies of her own people. She looked around anxiously for Kata but did not see her. She found herself hoping that her new friend was not dead.

Merroc led Valkia to a group of people who were gathered in an approximate circle around a single man. As big as Merroc and knotted with rangy muscle, this other man was the leader of the enemy. Valkia knew this even before Merroc could tell her. He looked up at their approach. He was lying on his side, his armour in tatters and his body drenched in gore. Something resembling a stylised skull had been crudely branded onto his chest. It was a strange symbol and it appeared to writhe and change even as she stared at it. She looked away, realising that her eyes ached if she attempted to look at it for too long. A great gash in the man’s thigh pumped arterial blood into the ground beneath him. It was more than evident that he was not going to survive.

A string of harsh syllables grated from his lips at Merroc but Valkia could not understand him. The words he spoke were in a language she had never heard and she looked between the dying man and her father. Merroc held himself with even more pride than he usually did and didn’t even flinch when the man on the ground drew back his head, hawking a gobbet of bloody phlegm at the chieftain.

‘A barbarian of the worst kind, my daughter,’ said Merroc and he turned to Ammon, holding out his hand. Ammon put a finely carved spear into it, which Merroc angled thoughtfully at the warrior on the ground. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘No. This kill belongs to you, Valkia. It was your strike to his leg that felled him and the honour of his slaughter is yours.’

Without another word, he handed her the spear. It was bigger than she was and it felt awkward to hold. She felt the weight of expectation on her shoulders and knew, without understanding how, that her actions in the next few moments would somehow define her very future.

The enemy lying at her feet swivelled his gaze from Merroc to the child and the pain and hatred on his face slowly became a sneer. It was all the incentive Valkia needed. How dare this creature treat her with anything less than the respect due to the daughter of the chieftain of the Schwarzvolf? How dare he look at her as though she was beneath his interest?

How dare he?

When the spear slid into his chest, Valkia savoured the sensation of it slipping into his heart. A gout of blood spewed forth from the barbarian’s mouth with projectile force, covering the little girl. But she did not even flinch. Instead, she put her entire weight behind the spear, driving it ever deeper into her enemy’s chest. She twisted the spearhead viciously, opening up the wound, and only released the pressure when she felt it drive through his back and into the soft earth beneath.

The warrior gave several violent spasms and choked up a last mouthful of blood before he died, his eyes staring glassily into space. Valkia returned his earlier gesture and spat on his corpse.

From his vantage point, Merroc watched with pride that could barely be contained. It didn’t matter that she was not a son. His daughter had more than proved her mettle here on the field of battle. She was a warrior at heart and she would rise to greatness. Of that he was sure.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Raymond Swanland

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