BLOODLINE

James Swallow

Inside the walls of the sepulchre, time had no meaning.

There were no windows through which to see the passage of night and day across the distant Chalice Mountains and the great red deserts of Baal, no mark of moments from waxen candles, no clock but the beating of Astartes hearts. Light, soft and oily, fell from lume-sconces in the stone walls, eternal and unflickering. It cast hazy shadows over the figures who moved about the chamber, their voices low and intense.

The sepulchre’s perfume was one of metal and rust, a smell like wet copper; blood by the gallon had spilled in this place over the millennia, so much so that the scent of it had penetrated into the stone itself. In the middle of the chamber was a marble table, the white rock stained pink with the vitae of all those who had bled upon it. A Blood Angel lay there now, stripped of his wargear and clad only in thin cotton vestments. Black chains of tempered steel and manacle rings held him in place, for so great were his exertions that without them he would have broken his own limbs as he thrashed and tensed in agony; and yet the warrior lay not awake, not aware, but in some dreamless non-state that was neither wakefulness nor coma. It was only the pain he felt, his cries muffled by a gag of leather across his cracked lips.

Beyond the voices of the Sanguinary Priests and the rattle of the chains, the stifled cries of the warrior were echoed far above, down through the spiral corridors of the minaret that rose up overhead. Screams and shouts that would chill the soul reached into the sepulchre, from the pitiful ones held fast in the cells they could never be allowed to leave.

This place was the Tower of the Lost, the Tower of Amareo. Here it was that the Blood Angels brought their afflicted kinsmen when the nightmare gene-curses of the Black Rage and the Red Thirst became too much for them. The dark bequest of their long-dead Primarch Sanguinius, the Rage and the Thirst lurked in the hearts of every son of Baal – and only in battle, in the final service of the Death Company, could it be given purpose.

But there were some that ventured down the crimson path to such a degree that not even that honourable end would suffice. The tower was their prison, their asylum, their purgatory.

And now another comrade balanced on the verge of joining them.

Corbulo, the highest of the blood priesthood, watched his brethren orbit the body on the marble table, taking readings with auspex devices and supervising the work of the medicae servitors.

Sensing his scrutiny, Brother Salel, one of the Sanguinary Priests, detached from the group and approached him. ‘Master.’ He gave a shallow bow.

‘Lord Dante wishes to know if there has been any change in his condition,’ said Corbulo, without preamble.

The priest gave a grim nod. ‘Aye, and not for the better. The…’ He paused, searching for the right word. ‘The mixture grows more potent with each passing hour. I confess it is beyond the best of us to retard the process, let alone reverse it.’

‘There must be some way…’ Corbulo fell silent as he saw the slow shake of Salel’s head.

‘What he carries within him is like the distillate of a supernova, my lord. It consumes him, burns him from the inside out.’ The other man sighed. ‘No mortal vessel was ever meant to contain such greatness. This was inevitable.’

‘You will turn him over to me, then,’ said a new voice, one heavy and resonant, thick with old pain.

Corbulo turned to see an Astartes stalk out of the shadows, a Blood Angel in the night-black robes of a Chaplain. About him he wore steel honour chains bound to a book of catechism, and at his belt hung an ebon rod ending in a winged, golden chalice – the Blood Crozius, instrument of office for the Guardian of the Lost and the Warden of the Death Company. Brother Lemartes stared out at Corbulo from beneath his hood, his drawn, sunken face reminiscent of the death’s-head skull that adorned his wargear. Lemartes was one of the few men in the history of the Chapter who had fallen into the embrace of the genecurse and survived it – many said he still lived within the shroud of the Black Rage, but so great was his will that he resisted it day and night. As such, he was amply qualified to lead the Death Company into battle time and again. Salel took a step back, unwilling to stand too close to the Chaplain’s fuliginous aura.

Brother Corbulo studied him for a moment, and felt a curious pang of sorrow for Lemartes. What anguish it must be, he thought, to lead your tormented kinsmen into certain death, and each time remain the last man standing.

Lemartes held out his hand. ‘Give him to me. He will find a kind of peace in the cells above.’

Corbulo shook his head, snapping back to the matter. ‘No. No. Not yet, brother.’

‘Then why bring him to my tower at all?’ Lemartes retorted, showing his fangs. He pushed past the Sanguinary Priests to the marble table. ‘Look at him. Release him, Corbulo! It will be a kindness.’

‘It will be a waste!’ retorted the high priest. ‘You understand what he went through to bring the essence back to us? The battles fought and lives lost?’

Lemartes glared at him and spoke in a low whisper. ‘What I understand is that none of that would have been needed if not for the failures of the Sanguinary Priesthood!’ He leaned in. ‘Brother Caecus was one of yours. His hubris opened our home to the forces of Chaos!’ Lemartes spat the last word. ‘You are responsible for the Red Grail, Corbulo. You allowed our enemies to steal a measure of our Primarch’s holy blood.’ He jabbed a finger at the warrior in chains. ‘You brought this upon him!’

Corbulo said nothing. The hateful truth was, there was damning weight to the guardian’s words. The Blood Angel lying before him had been set on a quest to recover a vial of Sanguinius’s precious vitae, kept alive for ten thousand years – and he had done so, wresting it from the grip of the self-styled primogenitor of the eightfold path, the traitor Fabius Bile. But in doing so, the warrior had been forced to find the one safe place in which to protect the holy fluid: he had injected it into his own bloodstream.

And now it was killing him. The powerful essence was too much, even for the enhanced physiology of an Adeptus Astartes. The warrior had barely made it home to the fortress-monastery on Baal before he collapsed in the throes of a crippling fever. The astonishing potency was destroying the Astartes, consuming his own blood and transforming it into something of incredible, lethal power.

‘Rafen.’ Lemartes intoned the warrior’s name. ‘He is strong, but not strong enough. Soon the Rage and the Thirst will consume him, and he will not return. We must let this run its course.’

‘I believe he can survive!’ Corbulo insisted. ‘Each of us, every Blood Angel and successor is a Son of Sanguinius. Each of us carries the smallest measure of our primarch’s blood within us, gifted during our ascension to Astartes–’

‘The smallest measure,’ Lemartes repeated. ‘Aye! A mere drop, and that alone is enough to make a man into an angel of war! But Rafen has taken a dose a million times more potent! He cannot survive that.’

‘So we take it from him,’ said Corbulo, shooting a look at Salel. ‘We purge Rafen of what he fought so hard to recover.’

‘You… mean to employ the sarcophagus?’ said Salel, his expression stiffening. ‘Can such a thing be done?’

Lemartes shook his head. ‘It is foolish to even consider it. If Astorath were here, Rafen would already have found peace at the edge of his axe blade–’

‘But the High Chaplain is not here!’ Corbulo insisted. ‘His duties carry him far from Baal, and so the matter is left to us.’

Lemartes folded his arms over his chest. ‘What would Lord Dante say of this?’

‘He will endorse whatever path brings us back to equilibrium.’ Corbulo looked down at Rafen’s straining, tortured features, and tried to imagine the raging pain of the god-fire coursing through his veins. He could not let the warrior perish; Lemartes had cut him to the quick, and the guilt the priest felt was all too real. He had failed to protect the holy blood and allowed Fabius to steal it. He would not let the Chapter pay another cost by losing one more of their kinsmen to this matter. ‘Take Brother Rafen to the Hall of Sarcophagi,’ he commanded. ‘Find The Touch of Sanguine Dawn, and place him within it.’

With a frown, Lemartes stepped back from the side of the table and allowed the servitors to gather up the twitching body of the Blood Angel. ‘This will only draw out his suffering and make his death twice the agony. Where is your mercy, priest?’

Corbulo looked the Guardian of the Lost in the eye. ‘There will be no death today, Chaplain. I will not permit it.’

The great chamber was some strange melding of hospice and sculpture garden. Dotted with plinths of stone, each crested with a great orb-like carving of gold and brass, the Hall of Sarcophagi pulsed with a heartbeat like a living thing. Trains of thick cables and fluid-carrying conduits snaked from one orb to another, others gathering in bunches that vanished through gridded iron plates in the floor. Above, life-support nodes extended down from ornate silver racks, threading into openings atop each sphere.

The smell of blood and stone was here as well, but somehow not so coarse as it was in the tower. There, it was the smell of death; here, it signified new life, rebirth.

Many of the golden orbs were occupied, each minded by a sleepless menial constantly at work adjusting the flows of gene-active philtres and the operation of nourishment tubules. Corbulo studied the sarcophagus closest to him; he knew it well. It was Angel’s White Sun, one of the oldest in the Chapter’s inventory, forged in the years of the Great Crusade before the Heresy of Horus ten millennia ago. Like each of the orbs around it, Angel’s White Sun was a master-crafted piece of machinery, so advanced that even the Techmarines under the command of Brother Incarael could not fully fathom the intricacies of its workings. It was as much a work of art as it was a device for remaking men. Inside each of the operable spheres lay a Blood Angel aspirant, their flesh drifting in a bath of amnio-fluids mingled with alterants and accelerants that worked at their genetic structure, rewriting their bodies cell by cell. These mechanisms, combined with the powerful implant technologies created for all Adeptus Astartes, could transform a normal human being into the majesty of a Blood Angel. The aspirants who entered the sarcophagi as men would one day emerge as warriors of Sanguinius – at least, those that did not die in the course of the changing.

Some Blood Angels, when not at their duties or called to battle, would come to the Hall of Sarcophagi and slumber inside the very orb where they had been quickened. Many, Corbulo among them, believed that such periodic returns to the womb of their rebirth, spent connected to the blood-sifts, could cleanse the soul and stave off the eventual encroachment of the Rage and the Thirst. The devices had the power to heal a man as well as to change him.

He hoped such a thing might save the life of Brother Rafen.

Corbulo walked the rows of the orbs until he found The Touch of Sanguine Dawn, a fine example of the most noble sarcophagus, tooled in white gold and platinum, plated in brass and polished glassaic. Like Angel’s White Sun, it too dated back to the days before the Heresy, and it had been in service to the Chapter all that time, lovingly cared for by legions of helots and blood-servitors. Legend had it that The Touch was one of several sarcophagi carried into the battles of the Great Crusade itself, aboard the ships of the Blood Angel fleet.

Salel was supervising the menials; they had set Rafen inside and were almost complete in their preparations. Exsanguinator channels and vitae-guides had been bound into his flesh, blood pumps primed and ready to begin.

The senior Sanguinary Priest ran his hand down the open leaf of the sphere. Inside, the surface of the sarcophagus was etched with countless lines of tiny script in High Gothic, each one the name of a brother who had been quickened within it. He searched and found Rafen’s name there, a way down the roll of honour.

‘It is time,’ said Salel.

Corbulo nodded and looked up. He found Rafen staring at him, in the first moment of lucidity he had seen from the Blood Angel in days. ‘Brother-Sergeant…?’

Rafen’s hand gripped his arm. ‘I see…’ he whispered. ‘I see… him.’

‘And he will guide you,’ said the priest, signalling to Salel to seal the sarcophagus. ‘To life… Or elsewhere.’

Rafen’s eyes glazed over and his hand dropped as the orb folded shut like a closing flower. Corbulo heard the throb of fluids filling the interior, the crackle of metal as pressure within changed sharply.

Salel turned away. ‘What now?’

The Touch of Sanguine Dawn shimmered like a jewel. ‘We wait,’ said Corbulo, ‘and let the bloodline do its work.’

They left the chamber, neither of the priests once thinking to glance up at the gallery above; the thought to do such a thing was plucked from their heads and discarded. Unseen by them or any other, a single figure stood up there, half-shrouded in shadow, watching. His preternatural aura made him a ghost, and that was just as he wished it.

Mephiston, Lord of Death, Librarian and master psyker of the Blood Angels Chapter, leaned forward on the balcony and peered into Rafen’s sarcophagus, listening to the turmoil of the mind within.

He saw fire and pain and the colours of raw agony. The psyker’s hands tensed into claws around the stone balustrade of the gallery, knuckles whitening. Rafen’s psychic trace danced there before him like a stark flame in a hurricane, always on the verge of being snuffed out, fighting back with every spark of energy. Mephiston pushed his mind deeper into the maze of sensation, feeling for Rafen’s conscious thoughts.

Rafen was captured in the throes of a terrible fever-dream, a maddening flood of pain that manifested as baking heat and cloying dust. Mephiston could sense the warrior’s self, reaching the echo of it. He saw a measure of what Rafen saw; an unreal, nightmarish landscape of horror and destruction. He saw a battlefield piled high with eviscerated corpses, awash in lakes of freshly spilled blood.

The Flaw. It could only be the power of the gene-curse, he realised. The darkness within every Blood Angel given terrible freedom by the power of the primarch’s blood. The force of it staggered the psyker, and memories of his own boiled to the surface, threatening to pollute the clarity of his telepathic connection – memories of Hades Hive and his own journey toward the madness of the Rage.

Grimly, Mephiston detached the invisible feelers of his psychic power from the turbulent mind of the younger warrior. He could do nothing to help him now.

As he severed the last link, the Librarian took with him one final image from Rafen’s churning psyche – that of an aloof, winged figure clad in a magnificent sheath of golden armour, observing from a distance. Judging him.

‘Take cover!’

Brother-Sergeant Cassiel heard the cry ring out across the landing bay of the starship Hermia, and threw himself into the lee of a support stanchion just as the crimson-hulled Stormbird fell through the atmosphere shield and collided with the deck. The steel beneath his boots resonated with the impact. He flinched as a howling, rising shriek filled the bay: the Stormbird’s forward undercarriage had collapsed and it was riding on a pillar of fat yellow sparks, cutting a gouge through the decking. The proud winged teardrop of blood on the prow was scarred and wreathed in metal-smoke.

The craft slowed and finally halted, moments later to be swarmed by dozens of legion serfs bearing tanks of fire retardants. Cassiel swore a Baalite curse under his breath and approached the wounded craft. Beyond it, he could see the main hatch sliding shut like a gigantic iris; a sliver of green planet vanished out of sight. That would be the last he would see of the world called Nartaba Octus, the last any man would see of it as it was. The final few drop-ships were being taken aboard as the Hermia climbed up to a high combat orbit. From there, the ships of Task Force Ignis and the Blood Angels aboard them would conclude their work. The orders were clear, ratified by Sanguinius himself and struck with the signet of the Warmaster Horus Lupercal.

All human survivors from the scientific colony on Octus had been recovered; the xenos infesting the planet – a horde of dark eldar that had defied full extermination on the ground – would be shown the displeasure of Terra with a space-to-surface barrage from the flotilla’s laser batteries.

The alien reavers had fought hard, and with great tenacity. Cassiel had faced their kind elsewhere during the Great Crusade and punished them, but it seemed the xenos did not learn the Emperor’s lesson. When they were done here, Nartaba Octus would forever bear the scars of this conflict as a warning to those who defied the Master of Mankind and his Sons.

But for the moment, more immediate matters held his attention. Reaching the Stormbird’s hatch, he levered it open and extended his hand to help a brother exit the smoke-filled craft. He knew his face. ‘Sarga? Are you injured?’ he asked.

The warrior shook his head. ‘No, Cassiel. But we have a casualty… Then the reaver scum damaged the ship with a drone… We barely made it back in one piece.’

Cassiel beckoned a medicae servitor to bring a grav-litter closer as a second Astartes emerged from the ship, carrying another over his shoulder. The wounded Blood Angel wore the white and red armour of an Apothecary, but the ceramite was marred with splashes of dark arterial crimson, still wet from the spilling.

Cassiel saw the source of the wound and almost recoiled in disgust. Through a rent at the waist of the warrior’s power armour a length of something that resembled crystal, or perhaps ice, protruded from his body. Gruesome, sickly light glittered within the fragment, casting baleful colour across the Apothecary’s pale face.

‘He was tending to a civilian,’ Sarga explained, his voice flat with anger. ‘One of the sallow-eyed bastards shot him in the back. I killed it, but Meros had already fallen...’

Cassiel leaned closer. ‘Meros? Brother Meros, do you hear me?’

The Blood Angel’s eyes fluttered and he muttered something incoherent.

‘He fought through a raider squad alone,’ Sarga was saying. ‘Must have thought he’d dealt with them all.’

‘He’s not dead yet,’ Cassiel insisted, although Meros’s corpse-like pallor put the question to those words. The sergeant placed him on the litter and moved with it, out toward the infirmary elsewhere on the same deck. His eyes were drawn to the glassy splinter in the Apothecary’s side once more. Cassiel knew it for what it was: a soul-seeker.

The dart was the war-shot from an Eldar splinter gun, the venomous shard poisoned by conventional means, but doubly so by some monstrous form of psionic impregnation. So it was said, the toxin it exuded would not only destroy flesh, but also disintegrate a man’s very soul.

Cassiel, like every servant of the Emperor’s secular Imperium, paid little heed to such superstitious notions as spiritual ephemera, but he had seen the work of a soul-seeker before, seen it dissemble an Astartes from within… and part of him had been left wondering if the weapon had first killed the man’s essence before it murdered his flesh.

Sarga was at his side, his expression bleak. ‘He will die,’ he said.

Cassiel shook his head. ‘No. There’s still time to ensure his survival. We will purge this from him.’

‘How do you propose to do that?’ Sarga demanded. ‘Any attempt to dig out the round will shatter it–’

‘There may be another way,’ said the sergeant.

It seemed strange to see them inside the steel walls of the Hermia’s hull, in the compartment below the starship’s infirmary. The very sight of the great golden sculptures lying here, set upon the deck plates, was somehow wrong, as if the contents of a familiar room had been upset and rearranged.

The lines on Sarga’s worn, leathery face deepened. ‘The sarcophagus…’

Cassiel directed a serf to guide the grav-litter to the closest capsule. ‘Aboard ship on the orders of Master Raldoron himself,’ he said. ‘Several have been distributed among the flotillas, to serve as critical care centres for the fatally injured.’

Sarga shot him a look. ‘A wound that is fatal to an Astartes is a wound that cannot be survived by any man.’

‘We will see.’ Cassiel had the serfs place Meros inside the closest of the orbs.

‘I cannot let this pass without comment,’ Sarga went on. ‘The shard in his side… It is tainted with alien sorcery! What if that taint contaminates the sarcophagus? There is no way to know what effect the psionic spoil may have–’

Cassiel silenced him with a glare. ‘Sorcery? It is only a strain of poison, virulent indeed, but no more than that. It is not magick. And it will be purged.’ He signalled to the helots to close the petals of the orb. ‘The dark eldar took the lives of our brothers down on that blighted world. They will not take this one after the fact, and I will argue the will of my order with the Warmaster himself, should he see fit to challenge it!’

Rafen was buried in sand. The particles were made of ground bone and flecks of metal, glittering redly in the punishing light of a bloated, hellish sun. With slow, deliberate motions, he dragged himself out of the clinging mass, the powder sluicing from him, pooling in the crevices of his wargear.

He found a bolt pistol and a sword nearby, both rusted and decrepit. He wondered if the gun would survive a pull of the trigger. The blade was a pitted, cracked thing.

The Blood Angel lurched forward, shaking off the last of the dust, and he stumbled; the power armour was sluggish, and he felt the full weight of the ceramite and steel across his shoulders. Heat in shimmering waves rose up all about him, and pinpricks of sweat blossomed on his brow.

Rafen grimaced; every movement seemed like a colossal effort. He felt uncharacteristically weak, as if his vitality was draining away. The Blood Angel set his jaw and drew himself up.

He began to walk across the desert battlefield, across the lines of the dunes against the harsh winds that bore gusts of stinging sand. He placed one foot in front of another, moving like an automaton. The masses of corpses and litter of blood he left behind, wandering into the dust and heat, searching. When he ventured to look back, there was nothing behind him but sand and more sand.

Through blurred vision, he glimpsed flashes of stark light off gold armour; or was that some kind of mirage?

No. The figure was still there, remaining beyond his reach, taunting him with its silence. Daring him to come closer.

Rafen looked away, trying to take stock of his circumstances. He had no recollection of arriving in this blighted, lifeless place, no concept of where he was or what purpose had brought him here. He came to a halt, for a moment losing sight of the golden figure as curtains of red dust whirled around him. He dug deep, pushing into his own thoughts, trying to dredge up the truth.

What is the last thing I can remember? He worked at the question, his sweat-filmed brow furrowing.

He remembered the journey back from the Dynikas system aboard the starship Tycho, the days passing in the wilderness of warp space. He remembered the battle on the planet before that, the dispatch of the enemy and the recovery…

He remembered the vial and the blood. Rafen’s hand instinctively reached up and traced the place on his breast where he had stabbed the injector needle home.

He remembered–

–the vial, the holy blood from the Red Grail itself, unfiltered and potent, kept alive for millennia by generations of clerics, coursing through his veins–

–gold and fire, lightning and sun; like nothing he had ever experienced before–

–fear that he would be destroyed by the brilliance–

–what a perfect death–

Rafen gasped and shuddered. The blood of Sanguinius coursed through him, the psychic power within it churning like nuclear flame. It had been too much for his body to contain; it was too much for him. He was like the ancient Terran legend of Ikarus, voyaging too close to the sun, burning and burning.

‘Is… is this place death?’ he shouted, his words ripped from him by the howling winds. ‘Am I to be… punished for my… hubris?’ Rafen found it hard to breathe.

And in answer to his question, the sand became monsters.

The red dust coalesced into things that bore the shape and colour of Space Marines, but they were hazy, nebulous forms that could not hold fine detail for more than a moment. Still, they were coherent enough that Rafen saw them for what they were supposed to be.

They were Blood Angels, after a fashion, but no stripe of that noble Chapter that had ever walked beneath the Imperium’s light. These twisted phantoms were part parody, part monstrosity, hulking and lumbering things that mimicked the majesty of the Sons of Sanguinius through the lens of horror. Inverted, screaming aquilas decorated their armour, blood oozed from joints, and laughing, fanged masks showed eyes of glowing red. Books of blank verse and babbling skulls dangled from the ends of barbed honour chains. The ghost-Astartes were abstracts, sketches made of sand by an insane artist.

They attacked him, laughing in shrill voices.

Rafen fired the old bolter and it croaked, spitting out shells in puffs of flaking rust; but while the tumbling rounds found their mark, they did no damage. The point of each hit became a concave spattering of powder and the phantoms lost solidity, the crumbling mass-reactive bullets passing straight through without detonation.

Snarling, dizzy with pain and the leeching heat, the Blood Angel went to the broken-tipped sword and met the charge of the ghost-Astartes, swinging high-low for a lethal cut that would have opened any foe to the air. The sword bit, he felt it, but the sand-forms gave along the line of the rusted blade and let it fall harmlessly through them. Rafen might as well have been using a rapier made of smoke.

But, to his dismay, the return of blows was by no means equal. The phantoms shifted their mass, compacting the sands almost to the density of rock, a split-second before landing a swinging punch on Rafen’s jaw. As he was knocked back, a second and then a third granite-hard impact landed on his chest and sternum.

He fell back against the rise of the red dunes, light-headed, as they came at him again; and now the phantoms had no helmets to hide their faces. This time, he saw a twisted mirror of his own features snarling back at him, the image shivering and flickering like a poorly-tuned vid-pict.

Rafen threw himself forward and into the mass of one of the ghost-Astartes. It exploded apart in a torrent of grit before he could close his hands around its throat. The sand ripped at the bare skin of his face and neck, clogging his nostrils and mouth, trying to suffocate him. He flailed around, like a man fighting off a swarm of hornets.

Then he heard gunfire, the hard snapping crashes of a bolter, heard the sizzle of shots passing close to him. The dust ebbed away, retreating in a tide, re-forming, as a new figure crested the closest dune and came scrambling down the rise.

Rafen saw another Blood Angel – solid and well defined, caught in the haze of heat but certainly not one of his phantoms.

The new arrival let his weapon swing away on its tether and unlimbered a break-tooth chainaxe. The axe sputtered and choked, but the teeth still spun, and with quick motions he carved into the ghost-Astartes. Where Rafen’s blade had passed through them like air, the other warrior’s weapon hit firmly and shrieked through the mass of clogged dust and sand.

In moments, the grotesques were dissipating on the constant wind, discorporating until at last there was nothing left of them.

Rafen nodded warily to the other man. ‘My… thanks, brother.’ He saw more clearly now: the other Blood Angel wore the white and the crimson of an Apothecary, although the company colours and unit symbology were strange – not wrong, but somehow unfamiliar. The warrior’s wargear was of an elderly design, the old Mark IV Maximus pattern that few Chapters still deployed. He met the Apothecary’s gaze and saw that the other man was measuring him with a similarly questioning stare.

‘Are you injured?’ he asked, holstering the chainaxe. He walked with a limp, Rafen noted, favouring his side, and for the first time he noted the scarring of a deep wound in the Apothecary’s belly. The warrior hid his pain well, though; he had a strong face and eyes that seemed too young for it.

‘No…’ Rafen began. ‘Yes. Perhaps.’ He shook his head, and the world swam around him. ‘The heat…’

‘Aye, the heat,’ agreed the Apothecary, and that was answer enough. He looked around, eyeing the shifting sands suspiciously. ‘Those… things. What were they?’

‘I don’t know,’ Rafen admitted. ‘My weapons were useless against them.’

‘Fortunate that mine were not, then,’ came the reply. The other man managed a wan smile. ‘I’m cheered to find you, brother. When I awoke in this place, for a while I feared I had gone mad.’

‘We may yet, both of us,’ said Rafen grimly. ‘Tell me, how did you come to be here?’

‘I…’ The Apothecary’s face froze as cold understanding gripped him. ‘I… Do not know.’

‘What is the last thing you can recall?’

‘The battle…’ He spoke in hushed, tense tones. ‘The xenos.’ His hand slipped to the wound on his gut. ‘They gave me this…The rest is darkness.’

Before Rafen could speak again, the other warrior caught sight of something over his shoulder and pointed. Even as he turned to see it, Rafen knew it would be the figure in the gold, watching them.

It stood sentinel, seemingly closer without having moved, briefly more defined in the gaps between the veils of dust that flashed past. Gold armour, an unmoving mask, furled silver wings. Watching.

‘Do you see him?’ Rafen asked.

‘Aye. What is it?’ The Apothecary’s words were hushed.

The sands howled and clawed at their faces, forcing them to look away; when the torrent of dust abated, the figure was gone.

Far beyond where it had stood, in the distance a shape rose out of the shimmer. A pinnacle mountain, impossibly tall and wind-carved from stone as red as spilled blood.

‘An omen,’ said Rafen. ‘An objective.’

They walked on together, side by side through the howling cascade of the sandstorm, the distant tower of stone their only guiding marker in the featureless desert. Whatever the nature of this place, Meros’s pragmatism did not waver in the face of it. The mountain was the only landmark in sight, so they would go to it. There was a certainty in that, a logic that the Apothecary could only feel as right. But quite how he could know that was something Brother Meros would not have been able to articulate.

It was strange: everything about him seemed unreal, detached from truth – and yet Meros felt the sure slip of the baking sands under each footfall, he felt his occulobe tighten to tune his eyes against the hard radiation of the great red sun overhead, he felt the relentless heat upon his face. These things seemed very real.

If only I still dreamed, Meros thought. Then perhaps I would know if this was true or some trick of the mind. But Space Marines did not dream, because they did not slumber – not in any manner that common men would understand. The catalepsean nodes implanted in his brain allowed Meros and his kindred to sleep without sleep, ever waking and watchful even as their minds rested. And so, he had no mark against which to measure his current circumstance.

He glanced at the Blood Angel trudging alongside him. An omen, he had said. The words seemed peculiar coming from the mouth of an Astartes, resonant of old idolatry and superstition. And other things were subtly amiss: the other warrior’s wargear was ornate and oddly proportioned, chased with much detailing, and tapers of parchment dense with lines of text that Meros could not read. All this, and his face was unknown to the Apothecary.

That in itself was not unusual – the IX Legiones Astartes numbered over one hundred thousand men under arms in service to Great Sanguinius, and Meros could not know every single one of them – but there was something about the dark-haired warrior that rang a wrong note in his mind. It was as if he did not fit.

Then again, Meros was just as displaced, stranded in this trackless no-man’s-land with no understanding of how he had come to be here. His hand slipped to the place where he had been wounded. The memory of the shard burying itself in his gut was still fresh and he flinched as he recalled it. A sickening throb rang through him and he swallowed a gulp of dry air.

Meros glanced at the other warrior once more, trying to put the echo of the pain aside. ‘I… never asked you your name,’ he said.

‘I am Rafen,’ came the reply. ‘Of the Fifth Company, under Brother-Captain Sendini.’

‘Wh-who?’ Meros forced the word out, his legs turning to lead, stumbling to a halt. The name meant nothing to him. And the commander of the fifth… He was…

‘Are you all right, brother?’ said Rafen, watching him warily.

Meros began to shiver, his skin crawling beneath his armour. ‘I… I…’ A painful, prickling sensation washed up his arms, burning his skin like the touch of acid. With a trembling hand, the Apothecary pulled at his gauntlet and vambrace, disengaging the armour locks, letting them fall to the sand.

His bare arm was a livid red, veins bulging, flesh twitching. Unable to stop himself, Meros clawed at the exposed flesh and ribbons of epidermis came free, fluttering into the wind. He cried out even as the diseased tissue fell, scattering across the sands. Impossibly, the more he scratched away, the more there was.

The decayed skin-threads danced in the air, and then to his horror, they began to unfold. Clever puzzles of discarded flesh split and divided, weaving into thread-thin lines that knit back into obscene forms; spindly humanoid outlines with elongated limbs and narrow, elfin skulls.

‘The reavers!’ Meros shouted. ‘This is… their poison!’

The meshed threads of skin flitted and danced, and then turned back on the Apothecary, lashing out at him like a torrent of barbed whips.

Rafen recoiled at what he saw, his hand snatching up the rusted bolt pistol from his belt, falling back to gain a span of distance from the motions of the strange flesh-forms. He knew the shape and the dance of them – somehow, these apparitions were dark eldar in origin, flashes of their cruel xenos hate appearing and disappearing in the ghosts of their faces. They looked like animated streamers of cloth, perhaps bandages or garlands, coiling and turning to give the impression of a body beneath when in fact there was nothing there.

Whatever animated these forms, it was abhorrent to the Blood Angel. His erstwhile comrade was right on that matter, at the very least – even through the heavy dust of the air, Rafen could taste the sour tang of poison billowing about the lithe monsters. They were toxic horrors, spinning in a grotesque ballet.

The eldar-things rained down blows on the apothecary, lightning-fast and unrelenting. He tried to fight back with the rust-clogged chainaxe, but each sweep of the buzzing blade-head met only air as the threads parted to let it pass.

Rafen forgot the bolt pistol and drew the broken sword. He did not know the origin of the other warrior, but he could not simply stand by and do nothing.

‘Away, daemon!’ he shouted, wading into the whirling cyclone of whipping threads. ‘Begone from here, or face your end!’

The rusted sword rose and fell, and in each place where the chainaxe’s blunt edge had failed to score a hit, Rafen’s blows cut the skin-matter into shreds. He fancied he heard screaming on the wind, coming from some far distant place.

Angry and vicious in their retreat, the tears of discarded flesh fluttered high into the air, coiling upon one another as if caught in the funnel of a whirlwind, and then vanishing into the unceasing murmur of the sandstorm.

The Apothecary was down on one knee, panting. His face was a maze of shallow scratches, and his bare arm a bloody ruin. He looked up. ‘Rafen,’ he rasped. ‘Thank you, brother.’

‘Brother?’ Now the moment of the attack had passed as swiftly as it had begun, Rafen’s confusion turned to ready distrust. He aimed the damaged tip of the sword at the other warrior’s face. ‘Are you really such a thing, or do you only pretend at it?’ He took a step closer, bearing his teeth. ‘Did you bring me here?’ he demanded. ‘I have fought warpspawn before, and won! I will do so again!’

‘I do not… understand…’ said the white-armoured Blood Angel, holding up his hands. ‘You raise a blade to me? Why?’

‘What breed of daemon tainted you?’ Rafen snapped. ‘Answer me!’

The Apothecary shook his head. ‘These things you say, you speak in riddles!’ He staggered to his feet, glaring at Rafen, his strength returning. ‘You accuse me of complicity…’ He shook his head. ‘Those… those creatures… I have never seen the like. They are the avatars of the poison…’ The warrior broke off, becoming pale. ‘Primarch… It still runs in me.’

Rafen’s broken blade was suddenly at his neck. ‘Then perhaps I should end you.’

‘You would do such a thing?’ An expression of utter disgust crossed the other man’s face. ‘An Astartes, killing an Astartes? Brother against a brother?’ He shook his head. ‘Perhaps it is you that is tainted and false!’ The Apothecary drew the chainaxe, his voice rising. ‘When I came to your aid against the ghosts in the sand, I did not question your honour! Those phantoms had your face, Rafen! But I did not kill you because of it!’

For a long moment, Rafen wavered on the cusp of drawing back the weapon to strike, but then he relaxed his stance and stepped away.

‘I do not know what you are,’ he said. Rafen turned his back and walked on.

Meros followed him; there was little else he could do.

Once, in the time before he had been raised up to join the Blood Angels, when he had still been a child, still human, Meros had heard a mad old seer speak of darker powers and places beyond the understanding of men. The recall of that moment was so far distant that it was barely even a memory anymore. His past life had been smoothed away by the monumental changes that had made him one of the Emperor’s finest warriors, so now all that remained were impressions.

But clear enough to return to him now, enough to remember the fear in the old seer’s eyes. The warp is the sea of souls, he had said. In it, all things can be made and unmade. Everything is mutable, blood and time like sand…

Like sand…

Meros walked behind Rafen, following him up the lee of a steep dune, the constant buzzing dust plucking at him, ripping what moisture there was from his lips and nostrils. Even the nictating membranes over his eyes were gummed with deposits of blown sand, forcing him to blink and brush at his face. His hand came away red with the powdery deposits. Meros lumbered after the other Blood Angel, the only other sound the labouring of the myoma muscle-quads in their power armour.

He reached the top of the ridge and found Rafen standing still. Meros halted and followed the other warrior’s gaze, up and up.

They stood at the foot of the pinnacle mountain, the spire of red rock reaching away into the clouds of dust–

But it was not a mountain. It had never been one. From a distance, the eye had been tricked to believe that was so, the scraps of the shape and image parsed to form what one expected to see.

Laying his gaze upon it all, however, was a revelation.

Rafen and Meros stood at the foot of a great statue, a carving taller than the highest Titan, the base buried in the red sand, the top visible against the shadow of the crimson sun.

‘My liege,’ breathed Rafen, sinking to one knee. Meros did the same, but unlike the other warrior, he did not turn his face away.

Meros looked up. He saw how the rocky crags formed the shape of voluminous robes that ended in a hood, and the carved planes of an infinitely noble face framed there. The patrician, shining majesty of Sanguinius’s aspect looked down on them in judgement, his hands clasped before him, his mighty wings gathered in around his shoulders like a cloak.

‘How can this be here?’ he breathed.

‘Where is here?’ Rafen replied. ‘I fear this is the answer. This place is death.’

Then Meros saw a glitter of gold and raised his arm to point at it. ‘Who is that?’

Rafen raised his head and saw the warrior in golden armour. He stood upon a ridge along the lower part of the massive statue-mountain, a carved line representing a fold in the robes of the primarch. For the first time, the Blood Angel saw him clearly.

About a beatific face-mask, a broad iron halo described a perfect circle. Intricately tooled armour in gold and brass gave the figure a muscular silhouette that mimicked the finery of a Chapter Master’s ornate ceremonial wargear, but where Lord Dante would wear upon his back the engine of a powerful jetpack, this figure grew wings of shining white steel, glittering with the ruddy light of the swollen sun overhead. Great trains of oath-papers hung from his hips, fluttering on the breeze.

‘No,’ muttered Rafen. He saw it clearly and yet did not wish to believe it. ‘You are a myth,’ he whispered. ‘An illusion.’

‘Who would pretend at the glory of our primarch?’ Rafen heard the Apothecary say the words, disbelief equal in his tone. ‘No one has the right to wear the gold…’

‘Sanguinor.’ The word slipped from his mouth. Rafen had heard the tales of the golden guardian many times, the reports of battles so ancient, so far removed from his experiences that they seemed more like fables, like the folklore of the nomadic Tribes of the Blood on Baal Secundus. He had heard these things, and yet he had never truly believed in them.

The galaxy contained many strange sights, many unknowable truths, and Rafen had lived his life in the face of them without credulity. It was how he had been trained by his late mentor, Koris. To see clearly, to challenge everything. The story of the Sanguinor had remained just that – a story. A tale told by the oldest of the veterans in the lulls between battle, a legend meant to steady the will. A metaphor for honour and courage.

And yet it stood before them now. The stories told of this avatar of all that was good and noble in the character of his Chapter, an undying force of pure will that would give its blessing to warriors fighting against the most hopeless of odds. The golden angel of vengeance who would descend from the skies in the moment of greatest need. The eternal and unending warrior.

Rafen had never truly believed, for he had fought at the speartip of wars that shook the pillars of his Chapter’s history, and never seen the face of this legend; and to see it now, in this place, brought a sudden fury to the Blood Angel. He stepped forward, filling his lungs to shout. ‘What do you want?’ he bellowed, his voice rising over the constant winds to echo off the mountainside. ‘Is this your judgement? Show your face! I will tolerate these illusions no more! Reveal yourself!’ He raised the bolter and took aim. ‘Or must I shed your blood to find the truth?’

Meros saw Rafen draw the pistol and he felt the rush of adrenaline flood through him. The figure in gold could only be one thing, one being – for the strictures of the IX Legiones Astartes forbade any but the primarch himself and his personal guard from donning such armour. It could only be the Lord of the Blood, the Great Angel himself; and here before Meros the warrior Rafen was bringing a weapon to bear upon him.

The Apothecary shot forward and grabbed Rafen’s arm, pulling it up and away. ‘What are you doing?’ he snapped. ‘Are you insane? You dare draw a firearm in the presence of your primarch?’

‘Primarch?’ Rafen turned on him, knocking him back with a savage shove. ‘Whatever you see up there, it is not Sanguinius, the Emperor’s Light find him! It is an echo at best, a shadow of his glory released upon the moment of his death!’

Rafen’s words fell like a rain of stones, the force behind them, the certainty, striking Meros with the power of a physical blow. ‘What did you say?’ he whispered. In the next second he was at Rafen’s throat, shaking him, glaring into his eyes. ‘He is not dead! The Primarch is not dead, how dare you speak such lies? I saw him stride the battleground at Melchior with my own eyes. I heard his voice call me to arms!’ Meros was livid with anger and confusion, unable to comprehend what would possess the other Blood Angel to voice such folly.

Rafen struggled against him. ‘Then either the Rage has taken you, or you are a liar and a fool! My primarch lies dead, ten thousand years and gone–’

‘Falsehood!’ Meros’s towering anger slipped its leash and he struck out at the unspeakable lie as it fell from Rafen’s mouth. His blow hit home, knocking the rusted bolt pistol from the other warrior’s grip. The weapon tumbled away down the incline of the dune and vanished into the sandstorm.

Despite the clinging, parching heat, a sudden chill washed over Meros as he found a moment of new understanding. ‘You…’ He pointed a finger at Rafen’s face. ‘You do not exist. You never did! You are the poison, eating at my brain! You are the soul-seeker’s venom!’ It made a horrific kind of sense; Meros knew full well from his decades in service to the Legion’s medicae corps that the dark eldar were masters of toxins, their cruelty extending to the deliberate, mind-killing methods of their tainted weapons. All this, everything around him – Rafen, the sand-phantoms and the flesh-ghosts, the mountain and the desert and the golden figure – all of it was a hallucination.

He was not here. He was somewhere else, perhaps still on Nartaba Octus, bleeding out his last while his mind lay trapped in a prison of dreams.

But Meros would not meet his end without a fight.

With a roar, the Apothecary came thundering back at him, the decrepit bolter across his back tossed away, the sputtering chainaxe in his grip. Rafen saw the look in the other warrior’s eye and knew the colour of frenzy when he saw it. He met the spinning, broken teeth of the weapon with the cracked edge of the sword. Each of the ruined blades ground against one another, spitting thick sparks, metal howling and crackling as it burned.

They were a match, these two. Blade met blade again and again, each time blunting on the defence of the other, each time scoring no better than nicks and cuts, never to the bone, never deep enough to cripple.

In the endless storm, under the unmoving red sun, they fought for hours, shifting back and forth, gaining and losing ground, their lethal dance without conclusion. Attack and riposte; feint and strike; block and advance. Each form in their battle schema met opposition and reflected back upon the aggressor.

Thick, chemical sweat sluiced from their bio-altered glands, mingling with clotted blood. The howling wind was the chorus to the grunts of their effort, the thud and clang of sword and chainaxe meeting, parting, meeting again. The heat and the pain dragged on both of them, dulling their strength.

‘Why…’ The Apothecary spoke through cracked lips as their weapons locked for the hundredth time. ‘Why will you not leave me? You will not have my death…’

‘Your words,’ Rafen gasped, ‘my thoughts, false one…’

‘You cannot reach me!’ he shouted back. ‘Your words mean nothing! You are the falsehood, you are the darkness in my blood! I am Meros, Blood Angel, Son of Sanguinius, and I deny you!’

‘Meros?’ The name cut like a knife across Rafen’s heart.

The break-tip sword dropped from its raised position, and suddenly the warrior’s guard was open, but the Apothecary did not strike. He held the chainaxe high, wary of this new tactic.

‘What perfidy is this?’ Rafen asked, weary and wrathful in equal measure. ‘Is that name plucked from my thoughts? Does my mind turn against me now?’ He turned and shouted toward the golden figure, who had not wavered from his place of observation. The warrior beat his fist against his chest. ‘I know Meros!’ he bellowed. ‘I know him here!’

Rafen pressed the hilt of the broken sword to his sternum, to the very spot where his vital progenoid gland lay deep within the flesh of his torso. The progenoid, a complex knot of genetic material, was the legacy of countless cohorts of Blood Angels, removed at the point of death and implanted anew in the bodies of the next generation. They were the most precious of the Chapter’s bequests, the living sources of the gene-memory passed on from brother to brother, assuring that the Sons of Sanguinius would live on forever.

The progenoid implanted in Rafen’s flesh was such a thing, and he honoured the stewardship of it – just as the warriors who had borne it before him had honoured it until their deaths. Rafen knew the names of every one of them, every Blood Angel down through the passage of ten thousand years and more.

Meros was one of those names. An Apothecary, a warrior of note and record who had fought during the darkest chapter of mankind’s history; the civil war known as the Horus Heresy.

He shook his head. ‘It… is not possible!’ In this place of delusion and dark nightmare, it could not be real. Rafen struggled to understand. The burning blood that even now coursed through him – was this the way it would destroy him, twisting his mind, unravelling everything about him, clawing at the threads of his history?

He turned back toward Meros, his voice rising. ‘You cannot be here…’

The other Blood Angel did not pay him any heed, for his daemons – and Rafen’s – had emerged from the storms to assault them both once more.

They came, and they brought the night with them.

It was as if the crimson sun had never shone upon the red desert; now there was only a sky ink-black and scarred with stars that burned cold, the watcher upon the towering sculpture rendered in shadow and cool, aloof shades of silver.

Meros’s poison attacked, the thread-things weaving about him, ripping into his skin. His armour… his armour was suddenly gone, and now all he fought in were his duty robes, stained with blood and patches of dark sweat. The heat of the day was gone, replaced by a bone-deep cold that sucked the energy from him.

Meros battled with the chainaxe, his questions to Rafen forgotten for the moment. Each hit missed, each blow went wide; his wraiths, however, scored every strike with perfect accuracy.

The sands were trying to murder him.

Rafen brought up his hands to cover his face as a hurricane exploded out of the dust. Darkness and cold flooded in, as if he had been thrown into an icy lake. Distantly he registered that the dragging weight of his wargear had somehow ceased to pull upon him. All he felt was the scratching agony of the whirling flecks of grit ripping through the robes surrounding him, scoring his flesh.

He did not dwell on the changes that unfolded. In this unreal place, all Rafen could do was to cling to what he knew to be true, and draw that close.

The broken sword in his hand turned and rattled through the air, and did nothing. The sandstorm ejected him with a sound like laughter and breaking stones, mocking him as he stumbled.

The wraiths danced away as they toyed with the Apothecary. Meros lurched from his knees and found Rafen beside him. The Blood Angel extended a hand to him and pulled him up. He met the other man’s gaze.

‘Will you kill me, then?’ he asked. ‘Or let them do the deed?’

‘I understand now,’ Rafen replied, nodding toward the silent watcher in gold. ‘Do you not see, Meros? We are here and our daemons are here. Alone, they will kill us.’

Over Rafen’s shoulder, the sands twisted into the form of a monstrous armoured Astartes, feral and abhorrent. It came on, clawed hands raised in attack. Behind Meros, the threads of skin reformed into something resembling a dark eldar Incubi, hollow-eyed and leering. Both shapes were becoming solid, real. Lethal.

‘What is the bloodline?’ Rafen asked suddenly. The words had a ritual, rote quality to them.

‘The eternal bond of brotherhood,’ Meros said, the reply coming to him from nowhere. ‘The will to survive beyond death.’

Rafen weighed the old, rusted blade in his hand. ‘This is my will, kinsman,’ he told him, and gestured to the axe in Meros’s grip. ‘And that is yours. Do you see?’

A smile formed on Meros’s lips. ‘I do.’

‘To the fight, then,’ said the other Blood Angel, ‘if it may be the last.’ He rocked off his feet, leading with the broken sword, throwing himself not at his twisted doppelganger, but at the avatar of Meros’s pain and anguish.

Meros moved at the same moment, the understanding coming to him. He swung the chainaxe at the phantom that screamed with Rafen’s face, turning the blade toward the neck.

Sword and axe found their marks as one, each killing the nemesis of the other; and in silence, the tainted dreams that tormented the Blood Angels were swiftly ended. The ghostly apparitions dissolved into nothing, captured on the winds and blown to the horizon.

‘It is done,’ said Meros, turning to face Rafen. ‘We are freed. Brother.’ He extended a hand to the warrior and Rafen reached for it–

–and time seemed to become fluid, slow and heavy.

The darkness was closing in, and all around the landscape began to ripple and fade as the certainty that underpinned the unreal place came apart. With no threat to make it whole and give it purpose, the desert was crumbling. The statue-mountain became smoke, dissipating on the never-ending winds.

A great, sudden fear reached into Rafen’s chest and clutched tight around his hearts with claws of ice. Meros saw the look in his eyes and his expression begged the question.

‘Rafen? What is wrong?’

So much, kinsman. Rafen tried to give voice to the words, but he could not move. He was frozen there, his flesh ignoring every command he gave it. So much is wrong. If the Apothecary truly was Meros of the Blood Angels, if he truly was the Astartes who lay as no more than bone and ashes in the halls of the dead on Baal, then in some way Rafen could not fathom, the man lived in another time, another place.

A place before the death of Sanguinius. Oh, what glory to live in that moment. And what horror yet to come.

With all his might, with every last moment of his strength, Rafen fought to utter a warning. From his mouth came a single, strangled word. A curse.

‘Horus–‘

Gold shimmered in the darkness. The figure in armour was there, and Meros did not seem to see him. With infinite slowness, a gauntlet of brass and shining amber raised to place a hand over the silent lips of an unmoving mask. The message was without ambiguity, the command unmistakable.

Silence.

Unaware, Meros held out a hand to touch the other warrior’s shoulder. ‘Rafen? We are victorious… What troubles you?’

But then the moment faded, and the sands became as blood, drowning them both.

The Touch of Sanguine Dawn opened and cast crimson liquid across the flagstones of the Hall of Sarcophagi in a steaming tide.

Wet with fluids, Rafen stumbled from the interior of the golden orb and fell to one knee. He coughed and tore the breather tubes from his nostrils, taking ragged gulps of air. ‘I… I am alive…’

‘Indeed.’ The dark voice drew his gaze up. He found himself looking into burning eyes that dared him to break away. The power of Lord Mephiston’s will was almost impossible to resist.

Finally, he released Rafen and the warrior looked down at the tracks along his arms where numerous vitae guides had been implanted. ‘The… blood…’

‘Gone,’ Mephiston told him. ‘The measure of the Primarch’s sacred vitae has been returned to the Red Grail, to its rightful state. Balance, restored at last.’

Rafen slowly climbed to his feet, as blood-servitors swept in to clean and reconsecrate the ancient sarcophagus. ‘Then at last my mission is complete. I feared it would destroy me.’

The psyker-lord looked up, to the ornate stained-glass windows set in the walls over their heads. ‘You have stood at the edge of death’s abyss for weeks, Rafen. Lemartes and many others believed you would perish, and pass unto the Emperor’s right hand. But you defy the odds once again.’ He turned that baleful gaze back toward the Blood Angel. ‘One might wonder if you were blessed. Or cursed.’

Rafen drew himself up. ‘Whatever the Emperor wills.’

Mephiston came closer. ‘A question, Brother-Sergeant. What did you see in there?’

‘Nothing…’ The lie came to him before he could stop himself. He thought of red sands, a golden warrior, a kinsman millennia-dead. Now, as he stood here in this place of stone and steel, what he had experienced seemed like the fantasy of a fevered mind. Rafen’s hand strayed to his chest, to the place where his progenoid gene-seed implant lay dormant. ‘I… dreamed. Nothing more.’

‘Perhaps,’ said the psyker. ‘It is written that the Great Angel was possessed of a powerful psionic talent. Some say that he read the hearts and minds of his warrior sons as if they were open pages of a book. That he saw his own death at the hands of the Arch-traitor. That to him, even the veil of time was a malleable thing.’ He nodded. ‘The power of Sanguinius resonated through his very blood. Even ten thousand years on, we know this to be true.’ Rafen watched as Mephiston crossed to The Touch of Sanguine Dawn and stroked it with infinite gentleness. ‘These great sarcophagi,’ he went on, ‘they were built to his design. They are links to his will. And one might wonder if, after so many centuries of use, if they might not have absorbed some measure of his eternal power.’ He turned back to face Rafen. ‘Do you understand, Brother-Sergeant?’

When Rafen spoke again, the truth welled up in him. ‘I saw something,’ he admitted.

‘What was it?’

‘A myth,’ Rafen whispered.

‘Open it,’ commanded the warrior in gold. ‘Do it now.’

‘My lord–‘ Brother-Sergeant Cassiel tried to object, but a single sharp look was enough to silence his objections. ‘As you wish.’ He threw a nod to the legion serfs crowded around the flanks of The Touch of Sanguine Dawn, and as one they opened the petals of the sphere.

Dark rivers of crimson flowed from the interior, running away into drain vents. Light from the Hermia’s lumeglobes revealed the figure within, a muscled form pale in flesh, breathing hard. With every passing second, the colour returned to him.

Sarga leaned in. ‘The wound has closed. I see no signs of lingering infection.’

‘What about the shard itself?’ asked Cassiel.

Sarga nodded to himself. ‘Destroyed. The sarcophagus disintegrated it, purged all trace of it from his system. He lives.’

‘Get him out,’ said the gold-armoured warrior.

The serfs did as they were ordered to, and moved to carry the Blood Angel to a grav-litter. He stirred, and pushed them away, standing on his own, blinking in the light.

‘We… are freed…’ He whispered.

Cassiel gave him a fresh robe. ‘Meros. How do you feel, brother?’

He gave a nod. ‘I live. Thanks to you.’

‘It would seem so.’

Meros turned to see who had addressed him, and a flash of shock crossed his face. ‘You–?’ But then in the next moment, he composed himself. ‘Forgive me. The golden armour… I thought you were… Someone else.’

‘You know who I am?’ The warrior was a towering figure, resplendent in the master-crafted wargear of a High Sanguinary Guard – the praetorians of the Primarch himself. Dark, shoulder-length hair fell about his gorget, framing a long, noble aspect.

‘You are Azkaellon,’ said Meros, ‘bearer of the Glaive Encarmine and the banner-master. First among the Sanguinary Guard.’ He met the other man’s gaze. ‘What do you wish of me?’

‘I came to see if you would die,’ Azkaellon replied, his voice cold and steady. ‘I learned of your bravery on Nartaba Octus and wished to see the face of a battle-brother who would meet such odds. With those wounds, I expected to witness your passing… but clearly the strength of the Great Angel himself runs strong in your heart.’

Meros gave a shallow bow. ‘I will not die yet. Sanguinius will tell me when that time is at hand.’

For the first time, Azkaellon showed a flicker of emotion; the briefest of smiles. ‘You seem certain,’ he went on. ‘Tell me, Meros. How do you know that to be so?’ He nodded to the sarcophagus. ‘Did you… see something while you slumbered?’

Meros recalled visions of red sands, a golden warrior and a kinsman he did not know. His hand strayed to where his progenoid gene-seed implant lay beneath his flesh. ‘My own fears made manifest,’ he replied, at length. ‘Now banished forever.’

‘As it should be,’ Azkaellon said, with a nod. ‘Now rest, Meros.’ He looked around at Cassiel and the others. ‘All of you, gather your strength and prepare for battle. I have this hour received orders from our primarch. The Hermia and Task Force Ignis are to rendezvous with the rest of our Legion’s ships.’

‘Which flotilla?’ said Sarga.

Azkaellon did not grace him with a glance. ‘All of them. The Legion musters in its entirety for battle and new glory.’

Meros’s brow furrowed. Such an assemblage of the Sons of Sanguinius was unprecedented. For the primarch to gather them all for war, the deed would be of great import. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘Our liege-lord’s brother, the Warmaster Horus Lupercal, has given us a duty that only the Blood Angels are capable of,’ said the Sanguinary Guard. ‘We are to bring the light of the Imperium to the worlds of the Signus Cluster.’

GILEAD’S CURSE

Chapter Nine

Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett

Every tale must take its twists and turns where they may fall. I have no say in the unfolding of this story, and can only re-tell the events told to me. Gilead’s saga is a long and complex one. He has lived too many life-spans, fought too many foes and saved too many lives, for these tales to take a simple course. The Rat King was dead, and the noble Vampire Count dispatched, and yet the threat was not expunged from the land, and Gilead and his faithful companions made their way to Nuln in pursuit of they knew not what.

Gather round, listen closely, and take heed. A tale has only the value of its telling and of its message, and you might all learn something from Gilead te tuin Tor Anrok. I know that I have.

In a matter of days, Gilead was on the road again with Fithvael and Laban at his side. He had not thought to travel with an entourage, but then he had been confident that he would find his quarry in the great north lands, and was not a little surprised to find he was travelling south again, back through the Empire to the great city of Nuln.

The journey was not a difficult or arduous one. Gilead retrieved his palfrey, and a few hours of tracking brought the elves to the Vampire Count’s war steed, which was broad of back and comfortably seated both Fithvael and the boy. They removed its armour, sigils and other adornments and threw a blanket over its back in place of the heavy saddle that it was accustomed to. The horse was big and bulky, but looked as much like a carthorse as anything else by the time it was stripped of its finery, and it drew few glances on the roads they travelled, mostly in darkness.

‘Why think you to ride to Nuln?’ Laban dared to ask when Gilead advised the elves of his plan.

‘To save my legs,’ said Gilead, clucking at his horse to move a little more quickly as the sun crawled idly over the horizon.

‘I don’t–’ began Laban.

‘In all things, we use our heads to save our legs,’ said Fithvael. ‘Thinking costs less than physical labour. Have you learnt nothing, boy?’

‘Perhaps my education should begin here,’ said Laban, finding his confidence. ‘Perhaps it should begin with an explanation of what we are doing, and why.’

Gilead, who was a length or two ahead of the war steed, turned his horse and stopped so that it filled the path in front of Fithvael and Laban’s shared mount.

‘We are doing what we always do, what we were sworn to do, what we strive to do. When we need not serve ourselves we serve others. Now, we do both, and we do it with a good grace, and with fewer questions, if we know what is good for us,’ said Gilead, glaring at the youth.

‘And by “we”, you mean me?’ asked Laban, making eye contact with Gilead over the Fithvael’s shoulder.

Gilead said no more, but turned his horse back in the direction they were heading. At the first opportunity, he made his way off the road and into a sparse stand of trees.

Once fed and sitting before a small, but comfortable, fire, Gilead explained his purpose in heading for Nuln after spending so much time in the north.

‘The vampire sent me south. He did so for a reason.’

‘I was there,’ said Laban. ‘I heard what the creature said, yet I could make neither head nor tail of it.’

‘You speak like a human,’ said Gilead, an edge of contempt creeping into his voice.

‘Tell the boy,’ said Fithvael, ‘and tell me. I would follow you anywhere, te tuin, and you know it, but I, at least, deserve your confidence.’

‘I have never had anything but confidence in you, old man,’ said Gilead. ‘You have ever been a valued teacher and a faithful friend, and I will not soon forget the great services you have performed for me, or for others besides.’

‘Then tell us,’ said Laban.

Gilead glanced at his young cousin, then turned back to direct his words at Fithvael.

‘There is a scholar in Nuln,’ said Gilead. ‘You must remember him, I’m sure?’

‘Is that wise?’ asked Fithvael. ‘He is a knowledge thief, a scoundrel and a liar… if he is the man I remember.’

‘But he was refined,’ said Gilead, ‘and “genteel”.’

‘By human standards, perhaps,’ said Fithvael. ‘But I fear you are attempting a jest, my lord, and your demeanour confounds me.’

‘Confounded,’ said Gilead. ‘I’m sure that’s the very word, Fithvael. I am confounded, too. I must know where the threat comes from if I am to do battle with it. The land is dying. The creatures of the air, earth and water, the men, women and children of other, lesser, races are perishing, and now the plague has struck our own kind. Our own Baneth has been taken from us. I would he had been longer in our lives and taken a slower route into our memories.

‘Aye,’ said Laban, bowing his head.

‘Aye,’ said Fithvael.

‘The scholar is an imperfect man, more so than many, but if he can help us, if he can direct us and fill the gaps in our knowledge, his debt to me, his debt to all our kind, will be paid.’

‘My fear precisely,’ said Fithvael. ‘Can we gain the knowledge by no other means?’

‘By many means,’ said Gilead. ‘By many means that will eat up time and miles, and lead us on a quest that could take a score of years or more to unweave the clues and mysteries that will no doubt be laid before us. I seek a shorter, surer route.’

‘You seek a dangerous route.’

‘So be it,’ said Gilead. ‘I will not trouble you to enter the city at my side.’

‘It troubles me little,’ said Fithvael, ‘but the boy might be kept from the worst of the dangers.’

‘I’m not a boy,’ said Laban. ‘I was sent to learn. I was given into your care to squire my cousin Gilead and to learn what he might teach me. Spare me nothing.’

‘Fine words,’ said Fithvael, feeding and banking up the small fire so that they might rest beside its warmth during the daylight hours before taking to the road once more.

‘I’ve had no need of a squire these many years,’ said Gilead.

‘You had need of me,’ said Fithvael.

‘Of you, my friend, yes, but I would hardly call your services “squiring”.’

‘It matters little,’ said Fithvael. ‘The boy is right. Baneth was a younger soul than I, and has left us already–’

‘He left us prematurely,’ said Gilead. ‘I will not hear you speak of your death.’

‘Time is short,’ began Fithvael.

‘Not for us,’ said Gilead. ‘Not once this malaise is thwarted.’

‘Then let it be so,’ said Fithvael, ‘but do not deny the boy. He is right. He came to us from the High Council, and it is our duty… it is your duty to further his education, to make of him a strong, noble-minded cousin for our future.’

The roads into Nuln were much travelled. People came from far and wide to benefit from city-life. Artisans came to work, labourers and domestics to serve, and gentlemen to trade or teach in the universities. It was the university that Gilead planned to visit.

It was almost dusk when the three elves travelled the last mile of the Nuln Road to the north gate of the city. It saw more traffic on an hourly basis than any other single gate into the city, and the road was thronging with people exiting and entering Nuln as lights and lanterns began to be lit all over the city. The guard lit the brazier that stood at the gate, partly to keep the soldiers warm, and partly so that light was easily cast on the men and women scurrying back and forth from their places of work or learning, to their homes outside the city, or from their occupations on the surrounding land and beyond to their homes within its walls.

Gilead had chosen the route, because, as busy as it was, there was a good chance that their passing would go unnoticed. On the other hand, if they were stopped, the volume of traffic through the gate would make it easy enough for Gilead to hand the guard a little coin by way of payment for ease of entrance into the town, without it being remarked upon by the hordes of people around them.

On this occasion, no move was made against the two steeds with their three riders, and the elves entered the city unmolested.

They travelled through the industrial district of the city, still busy and noisy despite the plague that had decimated the countryside. The Malaise seemed not to have struck the towns so severely, although it soon became clear that locals were growing food on every available plot of land, and were utilising all outside spaces. Balconies which once held flowering plants now supplemented the household kitchens with small quantities of leafy vegetables and soft fruits. The plants were a little grey and threadbare, but the buildings around them seemed, somehow, to protect them.

The elves kept their hoods up and their sleeves down, covering as much as they could of their heads and hands, and they slumped down onto their mounts, bringing their knees up and curving their backs so as to seem of more human proportions. The postures they adopted were not comfortable and Laban began to suffer quite quickly, but it was imperative that they not be seen or recognised.

In times of strife, prejudices are closer to the surface and more brutal, and anyone could fall under suspicion, any foreigner or non-human.

The elves were singular among the crowds, but went unnoticed.

The safest places in the cities were often also the most dangerous. The slums, the hovels, the out of the way, hole-in-the-wall places could effectively conceal the presence of a thief or murderer or even an elf, while,at the same time, in the same places, the most innocent woman or child might be brutalised physically or mentally for very little reward.

Gilead preferred these places where people chose not to look too closely at anything but coin. A relatively small amount of money could prevent prying eyes from noticing how tall the elves were, how slender, how upright, how pale… how other. Gilead preferred to go to the places in the city where everyone’s eyes were cast down or away, where no one looked for the truth in the eyes of another. His elf eyes could speak true and still his otherness would cause anything from a feint or swoon to an unprovoked attack.

The elves found their route along Commercial Way and around the university into the Maze and the old slum districts of Neuestadt. The streets were narrow and crooked with overhanging roofs and odd junctions, and the three elves soon had to dismount and walk in single file. Gilead led them and Fithvael brought up the rear. Laban walked between them, leading the old war steed.

‘Why has he brought us here?’ Laban asked over his shoulder. ‘This place is full of filth and degradation. Thieves and assassins too, no doubt.’

‘Speak up,’ said Gilead. ‘I’m sure your insults didn’t reach the ears of our hosts.’

Laban turned to Fithvael, colouring slightly.

‘There is much to learn,’ he muttered.

‘You’ll learn it all, in due course. Give it time,’ said Fithvael.

‘“Give it time” will only waste my time and put us all in danger,’ said Gilead. ‘Better teach him to shut his mouth. Make that your first lesson, and learn it quickly.’

Laban scowled, but did not speak again.

Gilead suddenly disappeared through an arched gap in the wall to their left, over an earth step and into a narrow yard with a ramshackle lean-to roof against the wall of the adjacent building.

‘What is this?’ asked Laban.

A human head appeared through a hole in the wall above the makeshift roof. Backlit, it was impossible to determine the human’s sex.

‘Business?’ it asked in a voice which offered no further indication as to the owner’s gender.

‘A room. One bed. Three meals,’ said Gilead, raising neither his head nor his voice.

The little door that covered the hole in the wall closed abruptly.

‘So we all eat, but only one of us sleeps?’ asked Laban.

‘You can sleep,’ said Gilead. ‘But if the horses are taken, you’ll have to find more, and you won’t find them here.’

‘Where’s the ostler?’ asked Laban. ‘The stable boy? The stable for that matter?’

‘What do you suppose that to be?’ asked Gilead, gesturing towards the lean-to roof on the opposite wall. Laban walked over to the wall, stepping under the roof that protruded from it like some semi-permanent awning. He toyed with a wrought-iron tether-ring driven into the wall at waist height and pulled at a sagging bag of old, damp straw. Having disturbed it, he stepped back, away from the unpleasant mouldy smell that emanated from it.

‘You’ll find something more wholesome for them to eat, too,’ said Gilead, handing Laban the reins to his palfrey. ‘You can use the straw for a mattress if you so desire but, from that odour, I suspect an infestation, so I wouldn’t recommend it.’

‘What of the bed?’ asked Laban.

‘For my cousin and faithful companion,’ said Gilead. ‘Have you no respect for your elders and betters?’

‘I only wondered why we should not all benefit from rest,’ said Laban.

‘Rest does not benefit the restless,’ said Gilead. ‘There will be time to sleep when I must and an eternity of rest when I’m dead. For now, there is work to be done, and it is better done by night.’

‘Food first,’ said Fithvael, giving the broad war steed a reassuring slap on the rump to encourage it into the makeshift stable.

Laban strode over to the old elf’s side, throwing his cloak over his shoulder.

‘Not you,’ said Gilead. ‘I’ll have yours sent out.’ He turned back through the arch, followed by Fithvael, and ducked through a low door three or four yards further along the wall.

Laban was left in the small, grubby yard with no one for company but the horses and no light or heat to speak of. He decided that deprivation was something he must be bound to get used to if Gilead was to be his master, but he would not thank him for it.

Gilead stepped into the darkened room. Some light bled in between the badly-drawn drapes; not moonlight, but the light of a hundred lamps and candles lit in the various chambers of the university to enable the most serious of scholars, or the least able, to study long into the night. The university buildings were never truly dark and light escaped from windows and doorways, around ill-fitting doors, or those left ajar, and between partially-drawn curtains or from windows that were left naked. Gilead did not need the light to know how the furniture was arranged in the two small rooms, for nothing had moved, but he was grateful for the chance to see the piles of books and papers that had sprung up all around the little study and adjoining bed-chamber in time to step over or around them. The room had been free of obstacles the last time he had been in it, but that was fifty years ago and men are wont to accumulate things, as if ownership of objects made their lives somehow richer.

There was so much about humankind that Gilead did not understand, nor did he wish to.

The elf was familiar with the university buildings, and with these rooms in particular. He had been stealthy in his approach and had entered the quadrangle without being noticed. He had kept to the shadows and moved silently, close to the high stone walls, standing under one or other of the oriel windows on those occasions when someone appeared from a doorway to cross the quad or duck into a stairwell.

Gilead had taken the narrow, spiral staircase in the north corner of the quad, and walked the length of the corridor on the third floor of the building. It was a more circuitous route than taking the imposing, carved-wooden staircase in the East Hall, erected long ago to commemorate the death of the last grand master of the scholars’ guild. The East Hall was kept very well-lit because it was the main thoroughfare through the building. It was always full of people moving around the university or simply gathering to talk and exchange ideas. On Gilead’s last visit, which had also been his first, Mondelblatt, the newly invested Professor of Ethnological and Corporeal Physick, had taken him to his rooms by the more private route, not wanting to be caught red-handed with one of the elder race and, as a consequence, be found out for the liar and cheat that the elf knew him to be.

Gilead had not forgotten the building, the layout of which was as clear in his mind as if he had visited yesterday, but he had forgotten how it, and the man he had undertaken to visit once more, had made him feel. The whole place made his flesh crawl.

He hadn’t originally sought to frighten Mondelblatt, for he needed something from the man, but once at the university, Gilead felt no compunction, breaking silently into the professor’s rooms by night so that he should be the first thing the so-called scholar saw when he awoke with a start.

Mondelblatt’s eyes widened as he twitched awake, and Gilead thrust his hand over the man’s mouth.

Mondelblatt blinked hard, and stared at Gilead. His mouth relaxed under the elf’s hand and Gilead was confident that the professor would not cry out.

Mondelblatt shook as he sat up, then turned and placed his feet on the floor. Gilead looked down to see gnarled, purplish flesh, the second toe on the left hooked over its neighbour. He saw how thin the man’s skin was, and how frail his hands as he reached for a walking stick that was propped against the nightstand.

The hair that stuck out in tufts from under a yellowing linen nightcap was sparse and white and the professor’s eyes were red-rimmed and rheumy.

‘Is it you?’ asked Mondelblatt. ‘Have you come for me?’

‘I’ve come to talk to you, old man,’ said Gilead.

‘It talks,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘Just as I knew it would.’

He turned to Gilead, standing in front of him barefoot, one hand on his cane and the other resting lightly on the elf’s torso, close to his waist.

‘I knew when my time came, it would be you,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I am ready.’

Mondelblatt took his hand from Gilead’s torso and looked at it.

‘Your flesh is solid… and warm. What are you?’

‘You know what I am, old man. Who I am,’ said Gilead.

‘You are death,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘come to rescue me from this hell-hole. I knew how you’d come to me. I knew I’d never be forgiven for the elf. I have waited a long time. Decades of fear and loathing, and now it is as nothing to me.’

‘What?’ asked Gilead. ‘Of what do you speak, old man?’

‘I am not afraid. I am ready. It is right,’ said Mondelblatt.

Gilead looked down at the shrivelled human, and then around them. He took the old man by his slender, wrinkled wrists and urged him, gently, to sit on the edge of the bed. Then he took a taper and lit the lamp on the nightstand. Next to a pile of books stood a pitcher of water, a tall beaker and a pair of round, wire-rimmed eye-glasses.

Gilead picked up the glasses and put them gently in Mondelblatt’s hands, folded, inert in his lap. Mondelblatt did not move for a minute or two. He simply sat on the edge of the bed, spectacles in his hands.

Gilead stood in front of the old man, next to the nightstand so that the lamp shed a good deal of its yellow light on him.

‘Put them on,’ said Gilead. ‘Take a proper look at me.’

‘What need I of spectacles?’ asked Mondelblatt. ‘I know what you look like, and if you were a being of my imagination or a spectre sent by Morr himself, you would still look the same to me.’

‘You speak of death as if it were nothing,’ said Gilead. ‘Only the living do that.’

‘Then who are you?’ asked Mondelblatt, still calm but fussing with his spectacles to unweave the arms and bring them up to his eyes.

‘I am who you believe me to be,’ said Gilead. ‘But I do not bring death.’

‘Then what do you bring?’ asked the old man, who had risen again from his bed, his glasses on the end of his nose, and was peering up into Gilead’s face, distorted by the shadows cast by the lamplight below.

‘Only questions, and no one else to go to with them,’ said Gilead.

‘I can answer questions,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I used you, I lied my way into this job and, in the end, I learnt a very great deal from it.’

‘How so?’ asked Gilead. ‘You feared I would return, and do you harm?’

‘I feared I would be exposed as a cheat and a liar. I feared being found out, and the only cure for that kind of fear is to begin again, to learn everything and to prove I could earn my scholar’s robes.’

‘And have you, old man?’ asked Gilead.

‘More so than you would ever believe of an old liar,’ said Mondelblatt.

Gilead had shared his stories with Fithvael, and his thoughts, too. The Rat King had been driven insane by his longevity, by the slowing of his manic life, and had died as a consequence, but not before what little brain he had turned to mush. The Vampire Count had tried to warn him too, and that had to be worth something.

Nuln seemed like the obvious place to come, despite Fithvael’s misgivings, but he didn’t have the answers that Gilead was looking for either.

Gilead did not yet trust Laban, and someone ought to stay with the horses lest they be stolen, so when Gilead went out into the night to find Mondelblatt, he and Fithvael left the tiny inn together. Fithvael took his own route in a wide circle around the university district. He skirted the schools, the quads and the buildings that made up the classrooms, lecture theatres and the lodgings of the students. The oldest buildings stood low and squat towards the middle of the quarter and Fithvael made careful mental notes of where they stood in relation to one another, which direction they faced, how they were adorned and ornamented and how alive they were with the activities of the inhabitants.

Fithvael did not trust Mondelblatt, but he understood Gilead’s need to see the old wretch. It was Fithvael’s job to ensure that no harm or ill-will befell his friend. Fithvael walked round and around for an hour, then two. Students and masters came and went, some with books and scrolls under their arms, one or two with flasks or bottles and several with hot, paper-wrapped foodstuffs bought at the pie shop on the south-east corner of the district, closest to the student lodgings.

Fithvael spent several minutes standing against the pie-shop wall, cast in shadow by the tall, apparently windowless building across the alley. Gilead was taking his time, and Fithvael, while not actually hungry, was looking for an excuse to do something, to interact with someone, to learn some titbit of information while he was out and about.

He wondered why Gilead had hired a bed at all, since Fithvael had slept in it for less than three hours and saw no chance of getting back to it any time soon.

Two young men ducked out of the narrow doorway, bringing with them the smell of greasy pasties, the pastry clearly made with animal fats regardless of whether it contained meat or not. Fithvael saw the grease spots on the paper that wrapped at least two rancid-smelling savouries, and possibly more, and the ink on the long-fingered hand that held them. The first boy to emerge was almost as tall and almost as lean as an elf, and Fithvael surmised that the surfeit of pies must have been bought with the view to fattening the fellow up, for his friend, the young man carrying more than enough books for two to study, was quite fat enough already. Fithvael cast his gaze across the lit doorway and could clearly count three chins on the shorter, more rotund of the two humans.

‘Have you heard what they’re saying about old Mondelblatt?’ the tall, lean boy asked the other.

Fithvael’s ears pricked and he took a step closer to the end of the alley.

‘Hear about it?’ asked the rotund student. ‘I was there!’

‘Did it happen the way they’re telling it?’ asked the lean boy.

‘I don’t know,’ said the other. ‘What are they saying?’

‘That he’s insane,’ said the lean boy. ‘They say he was babbling about dust.’

‘Sand,’ said the fat boy. ‘He lectured on sand for three hours, and even then he wouldn’t have stopped if Doctor Kitzinger hadn’t flounced in to claim the hall for his next lecture. Mondelblatt had run over by an hour, but he looked as if he’d barely begun on the subject.’

‘Are you sure it was sand?’ asked the lean boy. ‘Not dust?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked the fat boy. ‘Didn’t I tell you I was there? Of course it was sand! Dust indeed. Who lectures about dust for three hours?’

‘Who lectures on sand for three hours?’ asked the lean boy.

‘And his eyes were sparkly the whole time,’ said the fat boy. ‘You’ve never seen the like.’

The boys would soon be out of Fithvael’s hearing, but he had heard enough. He turned in the alley and headed north, back through the precincts of the university, in search of Gilead.

‘Dry as a bone it is,’ said Mondelblatt. He chafed at the neckline of his nightshirt, which didn’t seem to Gilead to be restricting in any way. ‘A man could choke, it’s so dry.’

Gilead poured a tall beaker of water from the pitcher on the nightstand. He’d poured two already and watched Mondelblatt drink them, but nothing seemed to quench the old man’s thirst.

‘What of the skaven? What of the objects the Rat King collected?’ he asked the old professor. ‘Where did they come from? What do they signify?’

‘I’ve told you,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘They have no meaning. That’s not what you came for, and you don’t trust me. Without trust, without everything, I can tell you nothing. I know there is more.’

Gilead stood and turned away as the old man downed the beaker of water that the elf had poured for him. Mondelblatt’s nightcap fell from his head as he leaned back to drain the glass. Gilead noticed how thin and ragged his neck was, and how hard his throat worked to swallow the liquid. He also noticed that there was very little hair under the cap, not much more than he had seen around its perimeter, and that the old man’s head shone whitely and was dappled with liver spots.

‘How old you seem,’ said Gilead.

‘You don’t,’ said Mondelblatt. He reached out to place his beaker on the nightstand, but it was further than an arm’s length away, and he was too old and weary to get up, so he simply held it between his hands.

‘You shouldn’t be so old,’ said Gilead.

‘I’m not,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I am… I forget how old. It was my birthday… No, I am not old, not terribly.’

‘Then why?’ asked Gilead.

‘Can you not see that I am parched?’ asked Mondelblatt, throwing the beaker at Gilead in exasperation.

Gilead took a step back, but said nothing.

‘If you will not tell me the whole of it, I cannot… I will not help you,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I thought once to owe you much, but I’ll be damned if I’ll be held to ransom. I knew nothing then, and what I knew I cheated and stole for, but those days are gone, and I am a scholar. I am a scholar I tell you, and as honourable as the next man… more honourable!’

Professor Mondelblatt was becoming agitated and Gilead wondered if the man was quite sane. On the other hand, the elf was holding something back. He was holding something back because he couldn’t quite bring himself to trust the human.

Perhaps it was time. Perhaps it was Mondelblatt’s time. Fifty years had passed easily and quickly enough for the elf, but that was a life to a human, and Gilead began to wonder if he had misjudged the professor. The elf had sought him out, after all, not the other way round.

‘Not here,’ said Gilead.

‘Then where?’ asked Mondelblatt. ‘And while you tell me, pour me some water. I’m more than parched!’

Gilead held Mondelblatt’s beaker of water, which the old man gulped from periodically while he dressed, and finally, after the old man had trickled a thimbleful of urine into his empty chamber pot, the two left the professor’s rooms and made their way back along the corridor and down the little spiral staircase.

Gilead looked left and right at the bottom of the stairs, then placed a firm hand on Mondelblatt’s wrist, indicating that he should stay where he was.

‘Gilead,’ said a voice behind him as the elf turned in the entrance to the stairwell.

‘Fithvael?’ asked Gilead. ‘Why came you here?’

‘A rumour,’ said Fithvael. ‘Nothing more, but we must return to our lodgings and discuss our progress. I fear things are not as you would wish.’

Both the elves heard a shuffling gait to their right and turned to look, stepping back beneath one of the large oriel windows that ran along the lengths of the east and west walls, facing into the quadrangle.

Mondelblatt stood for a moment in the light of the doorway, turning slowly in an odd, skipping dance.

Gilead made to step forward, but Fithvael caught his arm. Gilead placed his hand over his friend’s and said, calmly, ‘It’s Mondelblatt.’

‘Has it been so very long?’ asked Fithvael as the two elves stepped out, taking one of the old man’s arms each and propelling him along the walkway and out at the south gate.

‘Yes and no,’ said Gilead.

‘I heard he was quite mad,’ said Mondelblatt.

‘He is,’ said Gilead, ‘but not in the way that his own kind mean.’

Fithvael looked across the insignificant little man between them at his old friend.

‘He’s paid a price?’ he asked.

‘A high price,’ said Gilead. ‘But only to our advantage.’

‘What now?’ asked Fithvael.

‘Now we take him back to our lodging and tease out more of his truths.’

‘Truths?’ asked Fithvael. ‘Does he know anything about the truth?’

‘Sometimes it is only the dishonest who finally know the meaning of truth.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ said Fithvael.

‘What are you keeping from me?’ asked Mondelblatt. ‘I know you are keeping something from me… the most important something… the key to everything.’

‘Not so loud, old man,’ said Fithvael, holding Mondelblatt’s wrist so that his agitated hand couldn’t knock over the drinks on the table. The elf gestured with his other hand for the serving girl, the innkeeper’s daughter, to replenish the old man’s beaker yet again.

The girl had looked at Mondelblatt in disgust more than once and had kicked a chamber pot under the table, sure that the old man must need to use it soon, and knowing that she’d be the one to scrub the floors clean if he should lose control of his bladder. She wondered just how much liquid the old man could hold in his gaunt, fragile frame.

The ale she poured was pale and cloudy and tasted of fermentation. There was no distinctive flavour to suggest what it had been made from, but it was as honest as it could be in these troubled times, and they were lucky to have anything to brew with at all.

‘The blonde child, the sky clematis, the orb and egg. I understand them all, but only as parts of a puzzle,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘Humankind, flora, the dwarf, insects, the elf – all are represented by the best, purest examples of their worth in the world, but there is more. There must be more.’

Gilead thought back to the Rat King’s dank chamber deep below ground, of the niches in the wall of the strange ante-room, of the visions that had come so strongly to his mind, of the princess, of the destruction of the plant, of being inside the dwarf’s head, of the shimmering carpet of the insects’ carapaces. He thought of his reflection and of the depth of darkness of the obsidian ceiling in the great underground hall. He thought of the ratman and of his amulet, the same amulet that nestled in the cuff of his breeches, inside his boot.

He had known all along that he would have to show the amulet to Mondelblatt, but he had also known what it had done to the Rat King, how sad and sorry his end had been… And he knew the scholar’s weaknesses.

Gilead knew the prematurely aged man to be weak of will, greedy, selfish and filled with his own importance. He knew that those had been his key character traits fifty short years ago, and he believed that mankind was too brutal and too arrogant even to desire to change, let alone to accomplish any fundamental shift in personality. He doubted that Mondelblatt had changed enough not to be drawn in by the powers of the amulet and by the immortality it seemed to offer.

The elf was also unsure as to how the amulet was activated, since it seemed to have little or no effect on him or his companions. He had taken it out several times, tossed it to Fithvael, held it up to the light, breathed on it, polished it and subjected it to various tests of a more arcane nature dictated by the tenets of his kind.

The amulet had remained inert, dull.

He had also seen its effect on the skaven, on their king, and he had seen the magic that it could produce. He wondered how close to the skaven humankind really were. He wondered what triggered activity in the little stone.

Gilead sighed.

‘I could wonder forever,’ he said, ‘but I fear we have precious little time.’

Gilead motioned to Fithvael and the two put their heads together and lowered their voices.

‘Are you quite sure of our old friend, te tuin?’ Fithvael asked.

‘No,’ said Gilead, ‘I am not. I am sure that this plague must end and I am sure that time is of the essence. There has been enough destruction, and if we can put an end to it, sooner has to be better.’

‘We have time,’ said Fithvael as he saw the dull little stone, extracted from Gilead’s boot, turning in the elf’s fingers.

‘No,’ said Gilead. ‘With Baneth’s death, time, even in our terms, is running short.’

They watched Mondelblatt rubbing his eyes and blinking.

‘What is it, old man?’ he asked.

‘My eyes are dry,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘So very, very dry.’

Fithvael almost felt sorry for Mondelblatt, who seemed older and more frail than he should after fifty years, even for a human. He placed a reassuring hand over one of the old man’s.

‘You’re tired,’ he said, ‘and it’s late. I’ll find a balm for you when we’re done, and take you home to bed.’

Before Mondelblatt could answer, Gilead leaned in, his closed fist resting on the table’s surface, close to the old man’s trembling hands. The human looked from Fithvael to Gilead, then down at the elf’s fist.

‘You have brought me something?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Gilead. ‘I want to show you something. It is not mine to give, but if you can tell me something – anything – about it…’

Mondelblatt turned his hand over for Gilead to drop whatever he was concealing in his fist into it. Instead, the elf simply held the amulet between his finger and thumb, one digit on the bottom of the oval stone and one on the top. When Mondelblatt reached out for it, Gilead moved it out of the old man’s range.

Mondelblatt blinked once more, and when he opened his eyes, Fithvael noticed that large, salty droplets sat upon his lower lashes. Another blink and two bulging tears trickled down the old man’s cheeks.

Mondelblatt blinked again and sighed.

The hand that had been wrapped around his beaker, constantly bringing it to his mouth for long gulps of the poor ale, uncurled and relaxed and both of his hands stopped trembling.

With the last of Mondelblatt’s long exhalation, the small room fell quite quiet.

Then the serving girl with the large jug of ale shouted out.

‘Hey!’ she said. ‘Someone’s got to clean that up. Can’t you make him go in the pot?’

Fithvael looked down to where the serving girl pointed at a growing puddle of pale liquid that was inching out across the worn flags of the floor.

On the other side of the tavern wall, Laban te tuin Tor Mahone started from a light sleep as the horses began to snort and sniff and paw at the smooth-worn cobbles of the yard. The young elf got up and looked around as the first fat raindrop fell from the sky, landing on his shoulder and trickling down the front of his cloak.

The larger horse rocked its neck and stamped its foreleg. As a second drop fell from the sky, then a third, Laban bent to look at the horse’s leg. He was surprised to see a rainbow-sheened, carapaced insect, its shell as black as an oil-slick and iridescent with reflected colour. As he bent to scoop it away, the carapace opened to reveal large bright wings and the insect made a clicking noise before flying away.

Laban patted the horse’s shoulder and whispered in its ear, trying to reassure the beast, while the palfrey huddled as close to the wall under the ramshackle roof as she could manage.

The rain was unlike anything the elf had ever seen. The drops of water were unfeasibly large and apparently filled with light, shining whitely out and then spraying across the darkening cobbles as they landed. As the frequency of the drops increased, the noise became almost deafening.

Laban wanted nothing more than to pull his cloak tightly around him and run to the entrance to the inn, in the hope that he wouldn’t drown in the process, but he dared not disobey Gilead or Fithvael.

Seconds later, as the elf stood with his back pressed against the wall, he felt the water rising around his ankles, falling too fast for it to run off into the drains and soakaways at the lowest points in the yard.

He felt sure that the whole city would be flooded if the rain lasted for more than a few minutes and he dreaded the death and destruction that would inevitably result from such a disaster.

He looked hard through the rain and into the sky beyond and saw clear, bright moonlight, as if the rain was falling in a narrow band that he could see the edge of. He turned and looked in the opposite direction.

Laban stepped out into the rain and dashed over the step and through the opening in the wall. By the time he had crossed the street, he was standing on pale, dry cobbles. He looked up and could see only the blackness of the sky, punctuated by the light of twin moons and the stars that filled the firmament. The elf could see no rain clouds, and certainly none that could produce such a downpour; such clouds would surely have obscured the stars and moons.

Then Laban’s mouth fell open as he watched the progress of the band of rain sweep away across the street and over the yard. Two minutes later, and certainly no longer, Laban was leaning into the yard through the arched opening. The cobbles were bone dry and the horses, standing side-by-side under the awning, seemed as relaxed as ever. The palfrey looked up at him and blinked, then walked across the yard and dropped her head down to drink from the shallow trough in the opposite corner. Laban noticed that it was about half-full, just as it had been when the elves had arrived at the inn.

Laban pushed his cloak over his shoulder and, without a second thought, strode into the tavern. His head was uncovered and his thick, pale hair, cut in a straight line at chin level, looked almost like spun silver in the lamplight.

There was an almighty clatter and splash as the serving girl dropped the half-full jug of poor ale that she was carrying and it fell to the flagstone floor, sloshing its contents into the puddle of urine and making even more mess for her to clean up.

For such a little person, she let out a surprisingly loud scream.

The girl was indeed small, even by human standards, and feisty, too, but her lazy father worked her hard, so she was generally too tired to bother noticing the few odd people that found their way into his tavern. She was only glad to be able to earn an occasional tip from them, since her father always seemed to have some good reason not to pay her; today, it would no doubt be her own fault for spilling so much perfectly drinkable ale, even though her father never touched it and kept the decent stuff for himself.

As the scream and the clatter of the tumbling jug filled the small, low room with a cacophony of sound, Laban, who had to stand with his feet apart and his knees bent to avoid his head coming into contact with the room’s ceiling beams, turned back and forth at the waist. He looked first to Gilead and Fithvael, who scowled at him, and then at the girl. When he looked at Gilead and Fithvael for the second time, he noticed the little old man who sat between them, wearing what appeared to be a nightcap and looking at the oval stone in Gilead’s hand. Still, his companions offered him no assistance.

Before Laban knew what was happening, the girl’s father had vaulted the table that stood across the corner of the room and served as a counter. The short, bulky man had what looked like an ancient musket in his hands, but he wielded it expertly and its working parts were clean and well-oiled.

‘The rain!’ exclaimed Laban. ‘Did you see the rain?’

The serving girl’s face was red and her hips swayed as she began to wield a mop as if it were a deadly weapon, lunging it towards Laban’s legs as if she would take them out from under him with one keen sweep.

‘Never mind the rain,’ said the girl. ‘Did you ever look in a mirror? What’s the likes of you doin’ in a place like this? What’s the likes of you doin’ anywhere in this city?’

Laban looked down at himself as if perhaps he hadn’t looked carefully enough in the mirror, and might be inappropriately dressed.

‘I…’ began the elf. ‘I… It was the rain. You’ve never seen such precipitation!’

‘I’ve never seen the likes of you, neither, and I don’t plan on seein’ you again,’ said the girl, still jabbing at his legs with her filthy mop as her father watched from a slightly safer distance.

Gilead and Fithvael looked at one another, but said nothing. They had been together for long enough to know when their thoughts were in accord without the need to speak, and speaking now, cutting the tension in the air with more singsong elven tones, might not be a good idea. It was never their intention to disturb the people they came into contact with and, in these poorest of places, people rarely looked at one another or listened too carefully to accents and speech patterns.

So far, Gilead and Fithvael had gone more-or-less unnoticed, and they did not want to cause any harm by allying themselves with Laban’s foolishness.

Fithvael still had his hand over Mondelblatt’s, unwilling to make a move lest he draw attention to himself. Mondelblatt blinked and looked around.

‘Foolish girl,’ he said, rather too loudly, cutting the air and causing the owner of the inn to swing his musket back in his direction.

‘Who’re you callin’ foolish?’ asked the innkeeper. ‘And what’s the likes of you doin’ ’ere at this time of night, dressed like that? You’re not one of us. You don’t belong ’ere.’

Emboldened by his speech, the innkeeper stepped closer to the table.

Mondelblatt stood up in a single, rather jerky, movement, but the action coincided badly with his general equilibrium and the pool of piss and poor ale, and his foot slid out from beneath him. His chin came down with an almighty crack on the table and he collapsed into a heap, falling onto his stool before sliding inelegantly to the wet floor.

The crash triggered a series of events, beginning with the serving girl thrusting hard with the end of her mop at Laban’s legs. The elf jumped instinctively over the obstacle, but seemed to have forgotten just how close his head was to the ceiling beams. The impact made a loud cracking sound and Laban, his momentum suddenly halted, landed unceremoniously on the floor. Seeing his daughter strike out at the strange creature, the innkeeper shot at Laban. His aim was good, but his reflexes were somewhat slower than they had been when he was a member of the city watch and the musket shot sprayed in a wide arc over the elf’s head as he came down suddenly, landing on his backside instead of his feet.

Fithvael and Gilead glanced at one another and, with a swivel of the eyes and a slight nod, they silently agreed on their course of action.

Gilead got up from the table, turned and took the warm barrel of the innkeeper’s firearm in his hand. With a tug and a deft twist, the elf had freed the weapon and with one short swing he cuffed the innkeeper across the neck with the stock of the weapon, rendering the man unconscious, but essentially unharmed.

At the same time, Fithvael planted a foot heavily on the head of the mop that the serving girl was still wielding in anger. Her face was flushed and she was clearly more ferocious than afraid, but she should be easy enough to subdue.

The girl raged when she couldn’t free the head of the mop and within moments she had thrust away the handle and flown at Fithvael, fists flailing, screaming like a banshee. He had not expected the assault, despite other experiences that had shown him just how fiercely protective human women could be, how resourceful and how vicious.

Fithvael pulled his head and shoulders up so that the hail of blows fell harmlessly on his chest. Harmlessly to him, at least, but he also gave himself away.

The serving girl gasped, pulled her head back and then spat in his face.

It was enough.

Fithvael stopped playing nice.

He grasped the girl by her shoulders and pinned her arms to her sides. She had landed in the elf’s lap when she had lunged at him and sat there now, pink-cheeked with fury, but also blue-lipped.

Fithvael quickly realised that his grip on the girl was constricting her breathing and that if he hung on to her much longer, she might suffocate. He looked her in the eye and smiled, but when he loosened his grip, she took a deep breath and let out a scream that split the air in the room. The noise roused Mondelblatt, whose head suddenly appeared above the table-top.

Fithvael let go of the girl’s left arm in order to place his hand over her mouth to quiet her, but as soon as his grip loosened, she brought her hand up to slap the elf or pull his hair, or gouge his eye. Fithvael didn’t know what form the attack would take, but he had no trouble seeing it coming and caught the girl’s wrist before she was able to do any damage.

She screamed again, but the cry subsided into sobs and Fithvael couldn’t help feeling sorry for the feisty girl, as well as rather impressed by her. He allowed his grasp on her to slacken a little and, glancing down at his right hand, he noticed that the flesh around the girl’s wrist was already darkening with the bruising that had resulted from his strong, lean hands.

Then Fithvael noticed the girl’s hands. They were misshapen and badly swollen and black bruising was appearing around her knuckles.

‘You’re hurt child,’ he said. ‘Calm yourself. Be still.’

‘What are you? Who are you?’ asked the serving girl between sobs. ‘Take your hands off me! What have you done to my father?’

‘Enough,’ said Gilead, sloughing off the hood of his cloak, and sitting tall in his chair.

The girl stared at him. Between his exotic looks, the pains in her hands and the alien and authoritative tone of his voice, she fainted. She slumped in Fithvael’s grip and he arranged her gently against his narrow chest.

The room was suddenly quiet and still. The three elves listened for several seconds to discover whether the girl’s screams had prompted any investigation from the neighbouring buildings on the narrow street, but they could hear nothing. In the backstreets and alleyways of the slums of most great cities, people pretended not to hear screams.

‘Pick yourself up, boy, and take the old man out of the way,’ Gilead said to Laban. ‘I… I’m sorry…’ said Laban, bowing his head to his better. ‘It was… The rain was so…’

‘You’ve done enough,’ said Gilead, dismissing Laban. ‘Clean up Mondelblatt so we can get him back to his rooms and get out of this place.’

‘We must tend to the girl,’ said Fithvael. ‘She fought so hard, she has broken her hands on me.’

Gilead looked at the girl and then at Fithvael. He raised an eyebrow, almost as impressed as his friend was by the girl’s will to fight against the odds.

‘You’ll have to do it fast and alone,’ said Gilead. ‘And you’ll have to keep him out of it.’ He gestured at the innkeeper, still unconscious on the floor.

Laban tried to pick Mondelblatt up, but the old man waved him off and the elf was content not to have to deal with the professor’s urine- and beer-soaked clothes.

Mondelblatt rubbed at his chin, which had a startling red spot on it but was not blackening.

‘I’m going nowhere,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘except where you go.’

‘You’ll tell us what we need to know, and you’ll go back to the university where you belong,’ said Gilead.

‘Then who will help you?’ asked Mondelblatt. ‘Who will school you in the ways of your enemies? Who will lecture you in the mysteries of the sands?’

‘You speak in riddles, old man,’ said Gilead.

‘Aye,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘and riddles will be your undoing if you do not heed me.’

Fithvael looked at Mondelblatt, remembering the conversation between the two students in the alleyway earlier that evening.

‘Listen to him, te tuin,’ said Fithvael quietly. ‘The old man knows what it is. He knows what the stone can do. He knows who wields its power, and he knows why.’

‘I wouldn’t say that, exactly,’ said Mondelblatt.

‘Then what would you say, old man?’ asked Gilead.

‘I’d say that I know where to begin,’ said Mondelblatt.

LET THE GREAT AXE FALL

Part One

Graham McNeill

In the end, they counted eighty-eight skulls in the pile at the heart of the village: the skulls of children, no larger than a fist, all the way to those of fully grown men and women. The entire settlement had been wiped out in a single act of slaughter. Such feasts of death would usually attract the attention of carrion birds, but the sky above Heofonum was empty of scavengers.

Stacked in a pyramid, with the smallest at the top, the skulls were coated in sticky blood that had run down the bony ridges of empty eye sockets and jawbones to pool beneath this grim shrine to man’s mortality. The wooden homes of the villagers lay in ruins, smashed apart as though a herd of bulls had been driven through them. Even the stone hall at the edge of the settlement had been destroyed.

Their hunting party had ridden the length and breadth of Heofonum, turning over every fallen timber, digging through every collapsed home and raking the debris of its abandoned barns, but they had found nothing of its inhabitants save their fleshless skulls. This was the third such village they had found, and with each bloodied pile of skulls laid before them like monstrous altars of worship, the mood of the hunters darkened still further.

Wenyld leaned against the stone wall of what had been the village alderman’s home. The stonework was simple, imitating the style of Sigmar’s great hall in Reikdorf, but this building had not been crafted by the mountain folk, but by the hands of men and was nowhere near as grand or finely made. It had been built to last, with dutiful care and a cunning eye for defence, but that had not been enough to thwart the monster that had razed Heofonum. Having listened to Leodan’s account of its ferocious strength, Wenyld doubted any wall, no matter whether wrought by man or dwarf, could withstand such dreadful power.

Wenyld pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders as a chill blast of wind scudded through the ruined hall. Ever since he’d taken a dead man’s spear to the belly in the last moments of the battle to save the Empire from the necromancer’s undead legions, he’d found it next to impossible to keep the cold at bay. Only perched on a bondsman’s bench at a blazing firepit would any hint of warmth touch him. With winter blowing in over the Vaults to the south, Wenyld knew he was in for a painful season of snow and misery, with aching bones and frost-touched marrow.

‘Great Ulric, you favour the snows, but I’ll be glad to see your brother again with the spring,’ he said with a respectful nod to the ice-white skies of the north.

‘Careful,’ said Cuthwin, emerging from the trees on the far side of the ruined hall. ‘I’d rather we didn’t offend Ulric before we head into the mountains.’

‘Into the mountains?’ said Wenyld, irritated he hadn’t even suspected his friend was near.

Cuthwin had always been the better huntsman, but still it irked Wenyld that he hadn’t heard so much as a broken twig or brittle leaf being crushed underfoot.

‘That’s where the tracks lead,’ said Cuthwin, moving around the building. Clad in worn leather buckskin and a dappled cloak of faded green and brown, he blended with the landscape. His bow was strung, and his long-bladed hunting knife was loose in its sheath.

Wenyld looked up to the blackened, snow-capped summits of the mountains to the south, their craggy peaks like serrated teeth gnawing at the clouds. The Vaults were the edge of the world as far as Wenyld was concerned, a battleground where two vast ranges of mountains met and threw up treacherous valleys, gorges and shadowed canyons.

He didn’t like being too close to the mountains; orcs, goblins and worse made their lairs in the mountains, and no good ever came of going anywhere near such places. Leave such terrain to the Merogens, they were welcome to them.

‘You’re sure?’ he asked, though he knew Cuthwin was never wrong about these things.

‘I’m sure.’

Wenyld sighed. ‘Ah, good. Just what I was looking forward to, a climb into the mountains at the onset of winter.’

‘Could be worse,’ said Cuthwin brightly.

‘Really?’ asked Wenyld. ‘How could it possibly be worse?’

‘You could be doing it without me to guide you.’

‘Aye, there’s that,’ he conceded. ‘You know your way around this terrain. Are you sure there’s not some mountain goat in your family history? Is there some shameful tryst you’ve kept secret all these years?’

‘Only that one night with Ebba,’ returned Cuthwin with a sly wink.

They both smiled. Ebba was a notorious Reikdorf harridan, a mother of ten and as broad as she was tall. She was married to Bryni, a baker of such willowy proportions that it amazed everyone who knew them that they had produced such healthy children, and that he had survived the ordeal.

‘Thank you for that image,’ said Wenyld. ‘Suddenly the idea of hunting a living dead champion of a Norsii blood god doesn’t seem so bad.’

‘There, you see? Told you it could be worse.’

Cuthwin threw his arm over Wenyld’s shoulder as they made their way back to the centre of Heofonum, where the men and horses of their hunting party awaited their leader’s word to move out. Thirty horsemen, clad in gleaming mail shirts and heavy furs, with half-helms of bronzed steel – these were among the finest warriors in all of Reikdorf. Over their armour, they wore white cloaks secured at the neck by a torq stamped with the four-armed cross the former Marshal of the Reik had taken as an informal symbol of their brotherhood.

Many were seasoned veterans, men who had stood in the heaving press of a sword line and lived, which marked them as both skilful and favoured by the gods. A few were little more than youths, the rise of the dead having forced them to manhood before their time.

All were volunteers, none had wives and none had fathered any children.

Sigmar wanted no new orphans and widows in Reikdorf; the war against the dead had created enough already.

One warrior stood apart from the others, a tall, shaven-headed man with a stripe of hair running across his crown to the base of his neck that then became a long, dangling scalp lock, similar to those worn by the Ostagoths. This was Leodan, a horse-warrior of the Taleutens whose Red Scythes rode with Sigmar’s army at the River Reik and who had very nearly met his end at the great axe of the monster they hunted.

Like Wenyld, his wounding had been grievous, and few had expected him to see the dawn. But Taleutens are tougher than seasoned oak, and the horseman’s shattered bones had knitted whole, though he would forever walk with a pronounced limp. Alone of his Red Scythes, Leodan had lived through that hellish night of war-making, and the loss of his brother riders was a wound that could not be healed by poultices and stitches.

Sigmar had once remarked that there was something missing in Leodan, some part of him that wasn’t entirely normal. Wenyld had sensed it too on those few occasions he had cause to speak to the embittered Taleuten. Leodan had remained in Reikdorf following the defeat of the necromancer, a sullen presence at the fire whose shame kept him from returning home and whose pride drove him to relearn his skills as a rider. When Sigmar had asked for volunteers to ride with him, Leodan had been first to offer his lance.

Wenyld and Cuthwin nodded to the warriors as they tightened saddle cinches and fed grain from their panniers to the horses. They all knew that this was likely the last stop before they reached the mountains, and a well-fed horse was a sure-footed horse. None of them had ridden the trails of the Vaults, and Wenyld saw their wariness at venturing into such a hostile environment. The mountains offered a whole host of ways for a warrior to die, none of them glorious. To die falling from a cliff or crushed in a rockslide was no way to enter the eternal hall of Ulric’s kingdom.

Leodan limped over to Cuthwin, his scarred face and ice-blue eyes cold as the grave.

‘What sign?’ he asked.

‘South,’ said Cuthwin. ‘Into the mountains.’

Leodan nodded and turned away, returning to his horse and hauling himself into the saddle with the aid of his lance and an awkwardness the men of Reikdorf pretended not to see. With Leodan gone, two of the younger riders approached, Gorseth and Teon, lads barely old enough to have reached their Blood Night and whose chins were scuffed with only the faintest scraps of beard.

Though they had seen only sixteen summers, Teon had ridden into battle alongside Alfgeir, and earned great renown by standing against the blood drinker that had once been Count Markus of the Menogoths. Gorseth had fought for the Emperor too, standing in the spear line against a host of black riders, and sported a long scar along his shoulder where a rabid corpse-wolf had raked him with its claws.

Both were lads of heart, but they were so young it only reminded Wenyld how old he felt.

‘Did you find any bodies this time?’ asked Teon.

‘No, lad,’ said Cuthwn. ‘We did not.’

‘Where do you think they are?’ said Gorseth. ‘What does the monster do with them?’

‘Best not to think of it,’ said Wenyld. ‘It would give you nightmares that’ll have you weeping at your mother’s teat.’

Gorseth glared at Wenyld. ‘I earned my blooding,’ he said. ‘Same as every man here.’

‘Maybe so, lad,’ snapped Wenyld, suddenly angry. ‘And when you’ve seen more than one battle or can grow more than thistledown on that chin of yours, maybe I’ll treat you as an equal. Until then, stay out of my way and stop asking stupid questions.’

Gorseth’s face flushed ruddy with colour, but he bit down on his anger and turned away. Teon followed his friend without comment, but Wenyld could see the disappointment in the lad’s eyes. He sighed, irked that his temper had got the better of him. Gorseth hadn’t deserved such ire.

‘You were harsh on the boy, Wenyld,’ said Cuthwin, as the two youngsters mounted their horses. ‘Seems like only yesterday we were as inexperienced as him.’

Wenyld grunted. ‘Maybe to you,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember my bones aching in winter so much or feeling the stiffness in my joints yesterday.’

‘Age comes to us all, my friend,’ said Cuthwin.

Wenyld said nothing, his heart heavy. Cuthwin was only a single cycle of the moons younger than him, but a stranger could be forgiven for thinking that a decade or more separated them. War and wounds age men, thought Wenyld, but Cuthwin had somehow avoided the worst ravages of both.

‘How long do you think before they get here?’ asked Wenyld, shielding his eyes against the low sun and looking to the east. ‘I don’t like the idea of too many nights in the open waiting for them.’

Cuthwin shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. Not long, I’d hope.’

‘You’d think it would take them longer,’ said Wenyld. ‘What with the shorter legs.’

‘They don’t travel like we do,’ said Cuthwin. ‘They damn near outpaced the Asoborns of Three Hills on the march to Reikdorf.’

Wenyld nodded. He’d heard the story often enough from Wolfgart, the new Marshal’s voice swelling with his pride as he told how his wife and kinfolk had stood fast against the blood drinker’s army on that tree-lined hillside.

‘Aye, and we’ll damn well outpace you and your fancy horses when we get up into the Vaults, manling,’ said a voice from the brush behind Wenyld. He reached for the heavy-bladed sword strapped to his hip. Cuthwin’s hand kept him from drawing the blade, as a stocky figure encased in layered plates of burnished gromril and shimmering links of mail emerged from the scrub as though from thin air. Silver wings flared from the cheek plates of his full-faced helm, and he carried a great axe across his shoulders, with butterfly-winged blades and an edge sharper than even Govannon could fashion to a weapon.

‘Master Alaric,’ said Cuthwin, with a short bow.

‘Cuthwin, isn’t it?’ said the dwarf, his hands planted on his hips. ‘You younglings all look the same to me.’

‘Maybe if you took your helmet off you’d get a better view,’ said Wenyld.

‘Listen to him,’ said Alaric with grim amusement. ‘You’d think with that cook pot he calls a helmet on his head he’d have the good sense to keep his flapping tongue silent about someone else’s armour.’

‘At least my cook pot lets me see who I’m talking to.’

Alaric took a step forward, and a dozen dwarfs in heavy mail shirts with round, steel-rimmed shields stepped from the brush behind him. Each of the mountain folk were like metal statues, and the threat of violence contained in each one was palpable.

Alaric laughed and lifted the visor of his helm and held out his hand.

‘Good to see you again, Wenyld,’ said Alaric. ‘Grungni knows, you’ve lost none of your charm and good manners.’

‘I had few enough to begin with,’ said Wenyld. ‘But at least I had some.’

‘Never had much use for manners, boy,’ said Alaric. ‘Manners only clutter up what I need to say to someone with pretty words and hot air. And what damn use is that?’

‘None at all, master dwarf,’ said Wenyld, taking Alaric’s hand.

Wenyld had met Alaric in the wake of the battle against the necromancer, when Sigmar had carried his wounded body to the Great Hall at the centre of Reikdorf. The healer Elswyth had been swamped with wounded men, and thus it had been Master Alaric of the dwarfs who had stitched his wounds closed. Even one-handed, he had been steadier than most human surgeons, and Wenyld knew he owed the dwarf his life.

‘Is Sigmar here?’ asked Alaric with his customary abruptness.

Cuthwin nodded. ‘He is. The Emperor set out from Reikdorf as soon as he received word from Karaz-a-Karak.’

‘Good to see a manling king still understands the value of an oath,’ grunted Alaric. ‘Take me to him. There’s killing to be done.’

Sigmar knelt with his head bowed beside beside the small stone shrine, one hand over his heart, the other clasping the haft of Ghal-maraz. The plates of the Emperor’s burnished armour shone like silver, and the thickly-furred pelt of a great bear hung from his shoulders. A short-bladed sword was strapped to his side, and his anger at the death of his people hung over him like a lightning-shot thunderstorm.

The shrine itself was a small structure of four stone columns with a pitched roof of grey slate. It stood beside the shattered northern gateway of the village, and Sigmar knew it was lucky to have escaped destruction when the gates had been smashed asunder. No walls enclosed the shrine and at its heart was a statue of the wolf god in his bearded, barbarian aspect. A pair of wolves sat by his side, and he carried his mighty two-handed warhammer over his shoulder, a warrior who has never known his equal and never would.

Sigmar did not pray for himself: he petitioned the god of the northern winds and wolves to look kindly on his subjects that had been murdered in Heofonum.

‘Great Ulric,’ said Sigmar. ‘Your people died here, and they come before you as victims of a terrible evil, one which has escaped Morr’s judgement more than once. I would ask you to welcome them to your halls, where the beer is cold and the roasted meat is always hot. I ask this not for me, but for your loyal people.’

Sigmar received no response, nor had he expected one, for Ulric was a god who rarely answered prayers. His lessons were harsh, and taught a man self-reliance.

A hard god to follow, but a worthy one.

Sigmar stood as he heard someone approaching. From the heavy, mechanical rhythm of the footsteps he had a good idea who that might be. Sigmar did not turn around, and gently touched the heavy, rune-inscribed head of Ghal-maraz to the carved hammer of Ulric with a nod of respect.

‘Praying to the Wolf God can wait. There’s a grudge to be settled,’ said a voice he knew could only belong to one dwarf.

‘Greetings, Alaric,’ said Sigmar, finally turning and descending the short steps of the shrine to the ground. Alaric was just as he remembered him: stout, immovable and utterly dependable. His armour was gold and bronze and silver, and he was not surprised to see the hand he had lost in the battle was restored with a mechanical gauntlet.

‘I see you got yourself a new hand,’ said Sigmar.

‘Aye, lad,’ said the dwarf, flexing a bronzed gauntlet of articulated digits that moved just like a limb of flesh and blood. ‘Can’t have a one-handed dwarf smith, sounds too much like an elf god for my liking.’

‘And that would never do,’ smiled Sigmar, but a moment of melancholy touched him as he was put in mind of the silver fingers the dwarf had crafted for Pendrag. His fallen friend’s replacement hand had been a miracle, but this artefact was clearly of much greater sophistication. None among the dwarfs were as skilled in the craft of the smith or the forging of runes as Alaric, and this piece was a masterpiece of the metalworking arts.

‘They already call me mad,’ said Alaric, his gruff tones not quite concealing his irritation at the name. ‘Can’t have them thinking I’m an elf-friend too. I’d need to shave my head and find the nearest daemon to kill me.’

‘A daemon?’ said Sigmar with a shudder, remembering the terrible creature he had fought atop the Fauschlag rock of Middenheim. He shook his head. ‘I would not be in too much of a hurry to meet such a beast. Even a hero like you might struggle to defeat a daemon.’

‘Maybe so, lad, maybe so,’ agreed Alaric. ‘And we’ve a bastard hard fight ahead of us as it is. Even that bumbling smith of yours couldn’t put him down fully with the baragdonnaz he’d rebuilt. A dwarf-built one might have done it, but he put it together like a blind apprentice with a hangover.’

‘It didn’t kill the monster, but it hurt it.’

‘That it did, lad, that it did,’ conceded Alaric. ‘And if we can hurt it, we can kill it.’

Sigmar nodded slowly, offering a hand to Alaric, who accepted his warrior’s grip and shook it with a grin of real pleasure.

‘Just once it would be pleasant to see you when there’s not killing to be done,’ said Alaric.

‘That it would, my friend, but these are not the times we live in.’

‘There’s truth in that,’ agreed Alaric, striding back to the centre of the village with Sigmar at his side. ‘And I’m glad to see you’ve honoured your oath.’

‘You are my sworn oath-brother, you and King Kurgan both,’ said Sigmar. ‘You should know I would never break my word.’

‘There’s them among your kind don’t know the value of an oath,’ said Alaric. ‘They’d break a promise as soon as break wind, and with just as much thought for those around them. It’s easy to forget sometimes that you’re not all the same.’

‘I’ll try not to be offended by that,’ said Sigmar with a wry grin.

The dwarf looked genuinely puzzled, but said nothing as they reached the centre of the village. Sigmar’s riders stood by their mounts, ready to ride at a moment’s notice, and nine armoured dwarfs stood in a small square by a fallen signpost.

Alaric rejoined his dwarfs and turned to survey the warriors Sigmar had brought with him with a critical eye. Apparently satisfied, the runesmith addressed his words to every one of them.

‘You all know why we’re here,’ he said. ‘There’s a grudge that needs settling, and we’ve all been wronged by the monster that did this killing. These aren’t the first folk its killed, not by a long shot, and my people know that better than anyone. I can see there’s some among you manlings know it too.’

Alaric stared hard at Leodan, and the scarred Taleuten gave a slow nod.

‘Now this monster is more than just a dead thing that’s been lifted from the grave, it’s a monster that’s been steeped in blood for longer than any of you can remember. Longer than a lot of my kin can remember, and that’s saying something.

‘It’s got a name, and names are powerful things. Knowing a thing’s name breaks its hold on you. Once you know its name, you’re not so afraid of it. Well this thing’s called Krell, and he was reaving and slaying in the name of the Blood God centuries before this new Empire of yours was a glint in young Sigmar’s eye. Before your distant kin even came across the mountains, Krell was spilling blood and taking skulls for the Blood God. Grungni alone knows how many dwarfs and men fell before his axe, too many, and every one of those that died needs avenging. Back in my hold, there’s a book. We know it as the Dammaz Kron, what you’d call a Book of Grudges, and everyone and everything that’s done my people wrong is remembered. We dwarfs never forget an insult, and even if it takes a thousand years or more, we get even.’

Alaric paused, his mechanical fingers clattering as he made a bronze fist.

‘Krell’s done your kind great wrong too,’ said the runesmith. ‘He killed your warriors at the River Reik, and he’s butchered hundreds more now that he’s recovered his strength. Wherever it was he hid his dead face these last months, I don’t know. Probably in some dank barrow in the deepest part of the forest or some worm-infested cave beneath the earth. It doesn’t matter, all that’s important is that he’s shown his face again and we can end his slaughters right now.’

‘How do we fight a thing like that?’ asked Teon. Sigmar had been wondering the same thing. He did not see Krell on the battlefield, but had heard the terrible stories of his power and murderous fury. The undead champion of the Dark Gods would not be a foe easily bested.

Alaric unsheathed his axe and brandished it over his head.

‘We fight with heart and courage,’ he said, turning the weapon so that all could see the glittering, frosted sigils on its shimmering blade. ‘And with master runes.’

Alaric swept the axe in the direction of the mountains to the south, and his dwarfs followed him as he set off with a mile-eating stride. Sigmar had seen dwarfs on the march and knew they would be able to maintain that pace for days on end. There would be no danger of the horsemen leaving the foot-slogging dwarfs behind.

Wenyld led a dun gelding to him, the muscular steed that had faithfully borne him into battle against the necromancer. Sigmar had sought the horse out with the dawn, knowing that a horse of such courage and heart was a rare beast indeed. He had found it grazing by a patch of untouched grass at the northern end of the city, and it had welcomed him with a stamp of its hooves. The horse was named Taalhorsa and tossed his mane as Sigmar climbed into the saddle and secured his boots in the stirrups.

With the Emperor atop his steed, the rest of the warriors mounted and awaited the signal to move. Wenyld unfurled the Emperor’s banner, its bright cloth woven anew by the women of Reikdorf in the aftermath of the great victory against the dead. It rippled with gold and blue and crimson, the armoured warrior and wolves adorning the fabric given wondrous animation by the stiff breeze.

Sigmar flicked his reins and Taalhorsa set off after the dwarfs. Wenyld, Leodan and Cuthwin rode alongside the Emperor; his banner bearer, lancer and scout. Leaving Heofonum behind, they rode along little-used and overgrown paths that led inexorably up to the cold, shadow-haunted tracks of the mountains. Sigmar glanced down at the village’s fallen signpost as he passed.

It had once pointed to Reikdorf in the north and somewhere illegible in the east. Though Reikdorf was hundreds of miles away, Sigmar was heartened by what it represented. It showed that even people distant from his capital actively thought of him as their Emperor.

It also reminded him of how he had failed them.

He had promised these people protection, but what protection was there from a monstrous champion of the living dead whose damned soul was sworn to the Blood God?

The ground quickly began to rise in choppy waves of rock-strewn ridges, tree-lined gorges and rough slopes of loose stone that cascaded downhill as the horses trudged ever upward. The dwarfs quickly outpaced the mounted men, but Alaric had the sense to order his warriors to slow their stride and allow the riders to keep up. As chafing to the dwarfs as such a delay was, they knew it would be madness to allow their forces to become separated.

Krell was not the only danger in the mountains.

Alaric had spoken darkly of a tribe of greenskins known as the Necksnappers, and the spoor of rats and the sound of their scuttling claws on rock stretched everyone’s nerves wire-taut. Cuthwin caught the scent of something repellent, and soon came upon signs of its passing – footprints of splayed claws and sharp talons. He had no idea what this beast might be. Sometimes it walked on two legs, sometimes on all four, but its stride was long and its prints deep, which was enough of a reason to stay out of its way.

Krell’s passing was easy enough to discern.

The Vaults had long been a place where the kings of old and their long-vanished tribes had laid their dead to rest. Overgrown barrows, so ancient they had been obscured by rockfalls and the growth of hardy mountains scrub, lay broken open and emptied. Piles of discoloured, dusty bones lay at their entrances and the musty, stagnant air of the darkened tombs was the reek of a spoiled storehouse. Rusted weapons and verdigris-stained armour lay strewn about, as though Krell had thought to loot the tombs and been disappointed by the lack of anything of worth inside. The higher they climbed, the more of these broken barrows they saw, and each one gave Sigmar a shudder of unease as he stared into the darkness beyond their shattered portals. He had stared death in the face, and could not forget the chilling touch of mortality on his soul. Sigmar was a proud man, but he liked to think he was not egotistical. He knew he would not live forever, that he would one day stand before the judgement of Morr in the slabbed necropolis of the dead.

As a warrior and an Emperor, his was a life steeped in battle and blood, and to think that he would live forever was foolish indeed. But as he stared deep into the bleak, emptiness of the cairns of these long forgotten kings, he was touched by an altogether greater worry. He chuckled softly to himself, dispelling the gloom that had crept on him with every step Taalhorsa had taken.

‘Sire?’ asked Wenyld, twisting in his saddle. ‘Did you say something?’

‘No, it’s nothing,’ said Sigmar. ‘I was merely amused by my vanity.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Sigmar pointed to a barrow with a yawning entrance and a crumpled skeleton lying in a heap of brittle bones. ‘I look at these violated tombs and my greatest fear is not dying. Do you know what my greatest fear is, Wenyld?’

‘No, sire.’

‘I fear being forgotten.’

‘You will never be forgotten, my lord,’ Wenyld assured him. ‘How could you be? You are the first Emperor, the founder of the Empire and the ruler of the lands. You and the Empire are one and the same. Without you, there is no Empire.’

Sigmar smiled and said, ‘I imagine the kings buried in these tombs thought the same, but do any of us remember them? Do the saga poets still sing of their mighty deeds? What is left of them but dust and bones? No, Wenyld, it is only the vanity of men that allows us to think we will always be remembered.’

‘I disagree,’ said Cuthwin. ‘These men may have been kings, but what did they do of note? Did they found an empire? Did they save the race of men from extinction time and time again? Their names and deeds may have been forgotten, but armies will march with your name on their lips for as long as there are men to speak it.’

As Sigmar listened to Cuthwin, the image of the vast column of men with bloodied halberds and red swords the necromancer had shown him in the final moments of their battle returned to him. Those men had carried banners with his name emblazoned upon them, and bore talismans of the twin-tailed comet as they marched from a scene of wanton slaughter.

‘You should not speak of such things,’ said Leodan, surprising everyone. The horseman was taciturn at the best of times, but he had barely spoken since they had ridden from Reikdorf all those weeks ago.

‘Why not?’

‘You bring the notice of the gods by speaking of immortality,’ said Leodan. ‘Men should not dream of it, for immortality is for the gods alone and they are jealous of their eternal lives.’

‘We weren’t talking about immortality,’ said Cuthwin.

‘Yes, you were,’ said Leodan, raking back his spurs and riding to the head of the snaking trail of mounted men with his lance-tip glittering in the sun.

‘What was that about?’ wondered Wenyld.

Sigmar had no answer for him and they lapsed into silence as the day wore on and the terrain became ever more difficult. The ground grew rougher and steeper, the path through the tree-shawled gorges getting narrower and narrower. These were mountains that did not suffer living things to move freely through their deep valleys and forests without effort.

At every turn in the path Sigmar felt as though a hundred eyes were upon the hunting party, hidden spies stalking them on the cliffs above or malevolent observers watching from behind every crag or in every shadow. The sense of threat and imminent danger was palpable, and he knew he wasn’t the only one feeling it. Many times, horses stumbled and men cried out as they swung out over towering drops when they took their gaze from the path to seek out what might be a lurking enemy above.

A chill wind howled down through the gorge, a knifing cold that sought out every gap in a cloak or every thin patch of cloth covering a man’s bare skin. Sigmar shivered in his armour and wished he’d worn the padded undershirt Count Marius had sent from Marburg. Ostentatiously decorated with embroidered stitching and needlepoint images of hammers and comets, Wolfgart had laughed at the sight of it, but it was undeniably warm and of sublime quality. Say what you wanted about Marius, he understood the value of quality goods.

Thinking of Wolfgart brought a rueful smile to Sigmar’s lips. He missed his old friend, and dearly wished Wolfgart could have accompanied him on this ride into the mountains. The rogue had wanted to come, but one look at Maedbh’s eyes and her swollen belly had convinced him that to leave Reikdorf would be a mistake. The old women who knew of such things had told Maedbh she was to bear a son, and Wolfgart’s joy was complete. The boy would be born within three cycles of the moon, and Wolfgart had made Sigmar swear he would return in time for his son’s birth.

In any case, Wolfgart had no choice but to remain in Reikdorf. With the departure of Alfgeir into the snow-wilds of the north, someone had to assume the mantle of Marshal of the Reik. Though Wolfgart had protested, Sigmar had known there was no one else who could follow the example Alfgeir had set. In a solemn ceremony, attended by no less than three of the Empire’s counts, Sigmar had presented the glittering sword of the Marshal to his oldest friend, who had grinned like it was his Blood Night all over again.

A clatter of falling rock from ahead shook Sigmar from his nostalgic reverie. He looked for the source of the sound, seeing a scree of loose stone tumbling from the cliffs above them. Sigmar’s eyes narrowed as he saw a flitting shadow in the thick brush that clustered at the edge of the high cliff like the bushy eyebrows of an old man.

Sigmar heard the creak of seasoned yew and looked over to see Cuthwin had his bowstring pulled back and a goose-feathered arrow nocked. The huntsman scanned the clifftop, but eventually eased the string back, but did not replace the arrow in his quiver.

‘What did you see?’ asked Sigmar.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Cuthwin. ‘Maybe a coney or a fox.’

‘Or something more dangerous perhaps?’

Cuthwin nodded, and Sigmar saw how it irked him to be unsure of anything.

‘Keep a wary eye out,’ said Sigmar and Cuthwin nodded, keeping one eye on the narrow path and one on the cliffs above them.

The path continued to wind up the angled slope of a white cliff that glittered with golden dust embedded in the rocks, and Sigmar wondered why none of the dwarf holds had constructed some iron structure to hew it from the cliff. Perhaps it was too dangerous or perhaps it wasn’t even gold. Sigmar was no miner, and the fact that none of Alaric’s dwarfs had given the cliff so much as a second glance told him that it probably wasn’t gold.

Alaric was waiting for him at a bend in the track, where a jutting boulder with a flat face projected out into space. Alaric stood with his hands braced on his hip, standing at the very tip of the boulder, with nothing to prevent him from falling thousands of feet to his death. The winds howled around the dwarf, but he seemed not to notice.

‘Hard going,’ said Sigmar, drawing in the reins.

‘This?’ said Alaric with a distracted air. ‘This is a gentle stroll compared to some of the galleries below Karaz-a-Karak. At least there you have good stone above your head, and not this damned empty sky.’

‘It’s hard going to us,’ said Sigmar.

‘Aye, you’re only manlings, it’s true,’ agreed Alaric. ‘You like your land flat and covered with trees and growing things.’

‘What are you doing out there on that rock?’

Alaric looked around, as though he’d been unaware of where he was standing. He stamped down on the boulder, and Sigmar winced, half expecting it to shear off and carry the dwarf to his doom. Alaric saw his face and grinned.

‘I forget your kind doesn’t know stone like we do,’ he said. ‘I was reading the stone ahead of us, lad.’

‘What is it saying?’ asked Sigmar, who knew not to mock such statements.

‘Hard to say,’ replied Alaric. ‘They don’t speak quietly here. These mountains didn’t just rise up nice and calm. No, they were brought into the world with violence and fire and earthquakes that would split your Empire into shards if they happened now. I still hear the echoes of that.’

Alaric extended his arms to the north and west. ‘The Black Mountains in the north and the Grey Mountains in the west. Tell me what you see when you look at them.’

Sigmar shielded his eyes from the lowering sun with the palm of his hand and looked out over the titanic peaks of the Black Mountains. The jagged, crimson-hued mountain that men of the south knew as Blood Peak reared over a gnarled mob of craggy summits that stretched into the clouds of the far distance. Dots of bird flocks swirled over the nearest peaks, like crows over a battlefield.

Only the misty edges of the Grey Mountains could be seen from here, the sharp slopes cowled in patches of snow. What lay beyond those mountains was a mystery to the men of the Empire. Only the Bretonii had dared venture into the ice-locked passes that led to the lands beyond, and no one had seen or heard from that lost tribe in nearly two decades. Twilight was fast approaching, and there was little Sigmar could see that had attracted Alaric’s attention.

‘I’m not sure what I’m supposed to see,’ he said at last.

‘Do you see the mountains moving?’ asked Alaric.

‘Moving? No, of course not,’ said Sigmar. ‘Mountains don’t move.’

‘Ah, lad, of course they do,’ said Alaric with the amusement of someone who knows the punchline of a jest. ‘This world is a lot less solid than you manlings think it is. All this land, these mountains and the oceans, they drift on giant beds of stone that float on vast seas of molten rock. They move and grind against each other, and sometimes they collide to raise giant mountain ranges like this. A long time ago, before we dwarfs even built our holds, two of those beds collided, and the shock of that threw up these mountains.’

‘You’re mocking me,’ said Sigmar.

‘Not at all. Aye, these beds of rock move so slowly that you fast-moving races don’t see it, but dig the rock for long enough and you’d soon know. The rock bed to the north scraped up over this one and the tail end of the northern mountains rode roughshod over the mountains of the south to make this almighty snarl-up of peaks and valleys and this pass.’

‘This is a pass?’ said Sigmar. ‘I thought this was just some secret path you knew. Ulric’s breath, the very teeth of winter are blowing down on us.’

‘It’s a pass right enough,’ said Alaric. ‘Yonder to the north-east is Karak Hirn, but our path won’t take us anywhere near there. Shame, I’d have liked to see the great wind cavern and hear it bellow.’

‘Alaric, why are you telling me this?’ asked Sigmar.

‘I’m not sure,’ said the dwarf, with a soft sigh. ‘I suppose I just want you to understand the rock and stone like I do. There’s history here, and memory too. These mountains have seen their fair share of dying, and I can feel there’s more on the way. The monster we’re hunting came this way, and he wasn’t the only one.’

‘My scout didn’t see any signs of anything else,’ said Sigmar.

‘Your scout doesn’t know rock like I do.’

‘You think there’s trouble coming?’

‘In these mountains, there’s always trouble coming,’ said Alaric.

They found a place to camp for the night only a little farther up the pass, a projecting lip of rock that Sigmar would have called a narrow plateau, but which Alaric seemed to think was a sweeping plain. In any case, the point was moot, as there was good water streaming down the cliff in a sparkling waterfall, and screes of tumbled boulders that offered plentiful cover and places for sentries to watch the approaches.

The riders saw to their horses first, hobbling them in the centre of the flat ground and rubbing down their lathered flanks with handfuls of scrub grass warily pulled from the edge of the cliff. Each beast was then led in turn to the natural trough at the base of the waterfall and allowed to slake their thirst in the bitingly cold water.

With the mounts settled, the men attended to their own needs, filling waterskins and breaking out hard bread and salted meat from the horses’ panniers as the darkness began to close on the mountains like a fist. Fires were lit against the cliff and the reflected heat dispelled the worst of the bitter wind blowing down from the heart of the Vaults. Warriors sat close to the fires, untying their heavy furs to allow the warmth to reach their bodies.

Alaric’s dwarfs sat in a small circle around their own fire, though none of them removed their armour or loosened their cloaks. The race of mountain folk and the race of men were bound by powerful oaths, but neither sought out the company of the other. As alike as they were in basic form, there remained – and would always remain – a gulf of understanding between them. Common cause had brought them together, and but for a number of rare instances, few men and dwarfs would count themselves as friends.

Sigmar moved through the campsite, taking the time to stop at each fire and exchange words with the men gathered around it. He knew every man’s name, and though he was exhausted by the time he sat at the fire with Wenyld, Cuthwin, Leodan, Teon and Gorseth, he knew the effort had been worthwhile. The talk around the other fires was animated, and good-natured banter flowed between the men instead of dark muttering and fearful speculation of what tomorrow might bring.

‘Another long day,’ said Cuthwin, as Sigmar sat down.

‘They’re only going to get longer. Alaric says these are just the foothills of the Vaults.’

‘Dwarf humour or dwarf understatement?’ asked Wenyld.

‘The first, I hope,’ said Sigmar, loosening the cords binding his boots and flexing his feet with a relieved sigh. Seeing the men around the fire grinning, Sigmar said, ‘Even Emperors get blisters sometimes.’

‘Even from horseback?’ said Cuthwin, passing Sigmar as bowl of hot oats and goats’ milk. The milk was starting to turn, but Sigmar didn’t mind. A warm meal at the end of a day’s travel did more to restore spirits than anything else, but Sigmar knew they would need to catch Krell soon before lack of supplies forced them to turn back.

They ate their food slowly, letting the aches and pains of the day ease out in the heat and companionable silence. Leodan passed a leather-wrapped bottle around the fire, a powerful Taleuten liquor distilled from grain and root vegetables. Sigmar took the first drink, and Cuthwin and Wenyld gratefully accepted one also. Teon and Gorseth each took a mouthful, and both coughed and retched at the taste of the powerful spirit.

Leodan smiled and said, ‘It’s an acquired taste, lad, but it’ll keep you snug in your bed through a long, cold night.’

‘Not too snug,’ warned Sigmar, as Leodan took another long mouthful. ‘Alaric’s dwarfs are taking the first watch, but we’ll be taking our turn too.’

Leodan shrugged and put the bottle away with a sour look, as the rest of Sigmar’s warriors made themselves as comfortable as they could. With only their saddle blankets between them and the rocky ground, it was going to be a long night. Sigmar arranged his saddle for a pillow before pulling his furs over him.

He closed his eyes, and sleep stole upon him almost instantly.

Sigmar woke with the first touch of chill in the air, a deeper cold than simply that of the mountains. This was a cold that only emanated from beyond the portals of Morr, the breath that accompanies those unquiet souls who do not pass through the god of the dead’s halls to their final rest. His eyes snapped open, and he rolled from his furs with Ghal-maraz leaping to his hand. The rune hammer glimmered with corposant, the bound magics that were inimical to the dead sparkling like snowflakes in a fire.

‘To arms!’ shouted Sigmar. ‘Up! Up!’

Not a soul moved, his men resting where he had left them. The horses stood as still as the carved horses at the end of Lancer Bridge over the Reik, their eyes glassy and lifeless.

‘Up, damn you!’ roared Sigmar, delivering his commands with a boot to hasten his men awake. They grunted and rolled over in their sleep, but did not awaken. Sigmar saw that even Alaric’s dwarfs were still slumbering, and knew that some fell enchantment was at work.

‘Ulric’s bones, get up!’ shouted Sigmar, kneeling beside Cuthwin and shaking the huntsman violently.

‘He can’t hear you, son of Björn, no one can,’ said a rasping voice from the darkness.

‘Show yourself, damn you!’ demanded Sigmar, turning to try and pinpoint the sound.

‘In time, but for now it would be best for you if you kept silent. Yes, silent would be good. Your men and the stunted ones were easy, but you have will that is not easily hidden.’

‘What have you done to them?’ cried Sigmar. ‘Are they dead?’

‘Always so loud, you heroes,’ said the voice. ‘I’m not deaf, and neither are they.’

‘Answer me, damn you!’

‘Of course they’re not dead, dung-for-brains. Look, they still breathe. Their chests still rise and fall and warm air still blows from their lungs.’

‘Come out of the shadows, you coward! Face me!’

‘Face you? Don’t be ridiculous,’ laughed the voice. ‘Would I go to all this trouble just for you to bludgeon me with that hammer of yours? Now be silent, son of Björn. I mean you no harm, but they do! Look behind you, Sigmar Heldenhammer, and find yourself a place to remain silent and still!’

Sigmar cooled his temper towards this invisible speaker, angry at being so manipulated, but as he heard the tramp of marching feet from below, he could still recognise the lesser of two evils. Sigmar ghosted silently to the narrow portion of the thin plateau on which he and his men were resting. Far below, but climbing rapidly, was a seething host of creatures, though Sigmar had difficulty in determining exactly what they were.

Some carried torches, while others bore tall banners of bone. He could hear the clatter of armour and a scratching, squealing sound like a barnful of chittering mice. The wind changed direction, and a verminous reek of stinking, unwashed flesh was carried uphill. Sigmar gagged at the stench, like an exposed midden on a summer’s day. He fought to keep his food down as he smelled rotten meat, excrement and a hundred other fouler aromas. The noise of the approaching host grew louder, a barrage of squeals, squeaks and guttural barks.

Though it was too dark for an accurate gauge of numbers, Sigmar reckoned that at least five hundred or more creatures were marching towards their camp. He looked back over his shoulder to his sleeping warriors, knowing they were dead unless he could get them to move.

But how to rouse men who had been ensorcelled by some nameless enchanter?

Before Sigmar had a chance to think of a solution, he saw the pathway leading back down the mountain ripple and undulate, as though the rock had become suddenly malleable. In the thin light of the torches, he saw a wriggling carpet of mangy rats running ahead of the host: hundreds of disgusting creatures with patchy fur, branded backs and splintered fangs.

He stifled a gasp of horror and pushed himself hard against the cliff, stepping up onto a lip of stone as the seething tide of rats surged past like a furry river of diseased flesh and blood-matted fur. Some were brown, some were black, and yet others were white and furless. Pink tails wriggled like worms, and they snapped and bit at each other, as though driven by the whips of cruel masters. A few turned and sniffed the air as they passed him, and several turned their beady pink eyes upon him. They hissed in puzzlement, but passed on without attacking.

Behind the rats came scuttling beasts that loped and darted in the firelight of the torches. Wretched things in rags and scraps of armour, with their elongated snouts obscured by sackcloth hoods and their eyes made huge by orbs of glass nailed to their skulls. Sigmar held his breath at the sight of these vile monsters, monstrous hybrids of man and rat. They carried rusted swords, crude halberds and heavy cleavers with notched blades and old bloodstains. They hissed and spat with feral glee as they moved past him, but none of them so much as turned a grotesque, rag-swathed head towards him.

Sigmar took a tight grip of his hammer’s haft, but instead of falling upon his men with their brutal cleavers, the rat-things tramped over the narrow plateau as though it were unoccupied. They marched past with their strange, jerking, hopping gait, but paid no mind to the sleeping men and dwarfs in their midst. Though the sleepers were clearly visible to Sigmar, the stinking horde of ratmen ignored them, as though they had no inkling of their presence whatsoever.

Sigmar let out his breath, and regretted it immediately as a rat-thing with black armour and a bronze headpiece, segmented like a beetle’s carapace, paused in its march and stepped close to the cliff. Its nose twitched and its blistered tongue flicked out, as though tasting the air. Stubby whiskers bristled, and it cocked its head to one side. Beneath its helm, Sigmar saw eyes that were the red of a low-burning fire, eyes that narrowed with a loathsome, feral intelligence that horrified him.

The creature stood tall, its furred body twisted in a hideous parody of a man, upright and erect, but still with reverse-jointed legs and a whipping tail that ended in a barbed hook. A wide leather belt at its waist held a collection of skinning knives and a stubby wooden club fitted to an intricate mechanism of bronze and iron with a glowing green light at its heart.

Sigmar leaned back, letting the cold water streaming down the cliff pour over him as the creature took a stalking step closer. The icy chill of the water was freezing, but he did not dare move. How this thing could not see him, he did not know, but he guessed that if he so much as moved a muscle, whatever enchantment was keeping his men from the sight of these beasts would be undone.

The beast’s face was less than an inch from him, its breathing wafting the stench of its last meal in his face. The smell of spoiled dairy and rotten meat made Sigmar want to gag, and its hot, rancid breath was animal and reeked of an open sewer. The flesh of its maw pulled back as it hissed in consternation, revealing two enormous, flat-faced fangs like sharpened chisel blades.

A whip cracked and the dreadful thing flinched, spinning around and rejoining the marching host as it continued its journey into the mountain. Sigmar watched the creature go, as larger beasts and more intricately attired creatures shuffled and scuttled past. Careful to keep his breathing even and his movements to a minimum, Sigmar blinked away the spray of water in his eyes as he tried to make sense of these nightmarish horrors.

Wolfgart had spoken of fighting squealing creatures with the faces of rats in the tunnels beneath Middenheim, and Sigmar – like everyone else – had assumed them to be no more than bestial forest monsters yoked to the Norsii army as it burned its way south. But to see such a horde, moving with such cohesion and discipline forced him to think of these things as something else entirely.

At last the end of the vermin horde passed his place of concealment, and when the last of the hissing, chittering beasts had vanished around the bend in the path farther up the mountain, Sigmar dropped to the hard-packed earth of the path. His body was numb with cold, chilled to the bone by the spray of water from the high peaks. His clothes were soaked through and his flesh was like ice as he stumbled back to his camp.

A fire burned at the centre of the plateau, and he made his way towards it, stripping off his sodden garments and pulling a warm blanket from an open pack. A solitary figure sat cross-legged before the fire, a shaven-headed man whose body was concealed by a voluminous cloak of black feathers. His shorn skull was tattooed with the black, reflective eyes of crows, and his own eyes were no less black.

Sigmar knew this stranger must be the source of the sorcery that had kept his men from the attention of the rat-things, but was too cold to do more than kneel beside the fire and let the heat from the flames thaw his naked flesh.

‘Greetings, son of Björn,’ the man said with a lopsided grin. ‘I am Bransùil the Aeslandeir.’

‘I am Sigmar Heldenhammer, but you already know that, don’t you?’

The man nodded. ‘I know a great many things about you, son of Björn. Much of which you would rather I did not know, but that is not to be the nature of our relationship. I will know all your secrets, and that is why you will trust me.’

‘Trust you?’ laughed Sigmar. ‘I don’t know you.’

‘You will,’ said the man with a sage nod. ‘Or you did. It is hard to be certain sometimes.’

Sigmar looked over to where his men still slept, peaceful and blissfully unaware of the terrible danger that had just passed them in the night.

‘So how is it my men and I are alive?’ asked Sigmar as the fire began to warm him. He had decided against any violence to this Bransùil, guessing that any man who could hide so large a group from so many monsters was not someone to be taken lightly.

‘A simple incantation,’ said the man with a grin that exposed brilliantly white teeth. Sigmar had only ever seen such clean teeth in the mouths of young children, and he was reminded of the leering skull of the dread necromancer. ‘When you spend as long in the far north as I once did, hiding yourself is the first trick you learn from the ravens.’

‘But how did you do it?’ pressed Sigmar.

Bransùil leaned over the fire, and Sigmar saw the darkness of his eyes had receded. In place of the blackness of crows’ eyes, the man’s eyes were now a brilliant, cornflower blue.

‘Magic,’ he said.

The HUNTER

Graeme Lyon

It is whispered that the forest is haunted by all manner of creatures. On the holy days, when we make the sacred rites to appease the gods, the elders tell tales of murderous tree-daemons that lurk in the deep groves, of their twisted roots and grasping branches that can snap a warrior in half. One of the dams claims to have seen huge savages with armoured bellies fighting over the corpse of a deer by the river, beating one another with the bones. I have never believed such stories. I spend my days in the forest. It is my domain and I have never seen anything so outlandish.

Until now.

It was the smell that first alerted me. It was familiar, a reek of unwashed flesh and matted fur, but another scent lay beneath it, something I did not recognise. I followed the odour, and soon saw more signs of the intruders.

They are not subtle, these… things. Whatever they are, they lack my skill in woodcraft. They travel as brazenly as a kid on his first hunt; cracked twigs and broken branches mark their passage. I stayed far behind them and followed their trail, tracking them by the devastation left in their wake, and by that foul lingering scent. Now I have found them.

There are five beasts, I think, and I am alone. But I am a hunter, and they are my prey. I check the string on my shortbow and finger the arrows in the small deerskin quiver that hangs low at my side. My spear sits strapped across my back. I am ready. My instincts tell me to attack, to kill them now and offer their remains to the gods in appeasement for their trespass. I restrain myself and await my chance.

This past night, I crept close enough to see them. I sat outside the circle of flickering firelight and watched as they slept. That they would desecrate this land with fire shows that they do not respect the gods. I would have slit their throats as they slumbered and watched their blood feed the soil, were it not for the guard that paced their camp. I ventured as close as I dared, crouching low and stalking on all fours to watch them closer. Even asleep in the half-light, they were foul.

Now, with the sun high in the sky, I perch in the treetops and watch as they pass below, never knowing I am there. This place is sacred. It is here that I hunt the great stags that the elders butcher for the holy day offerings. That the beasts walk here is an affront to the gods. I observe them. They walk upright, as do I, and use tools and weapons, as do I. But then, so do the greenskinned mountain brutes and the chittering tunnel-rats, and I have little in common with them.

Their flesh, where it is exposed, is ruddy and hardened by the sun. They are covered by patchy fur on their heads and faces, thicker across their bodies. Seeing such a mockery of my own perfect form sickens me. An eremite who lives in seclusion in the sacred groves once told me that we were created by the gods in their own image. I wonder what manner of gods made these fiends.

I see my chance. One of the beasts splits off from the pack and wanders beneath the trees on which I perch. I wonder why, until I smell the tang of urine. Anger flares in me. The monster is defiling this holy ground with its waste. I nock an arrow and take a deep breath as I aim.

My quarry finishes. It turns. I breathe out. My arrow takes it in the throat. I am sure that I see a look of confusion cross its loathsome features. It falls.

One.

I step from the shadows and look down at the corpse as its blood soaks the leaves, deepening their autumn-red. An amulet hangs around its neck, harsh silver against the dark fur. I do not recognise the symbol, but I feel an instinctive fear of it. Perhaps it is an icon of whatever barbaric gods they worship.

From the distance, I hear a bellow, and I dart behind a tree. Another beast comes off the trail, searching. It doesn’t see me as I rise and garrotte it with my bowstring. Its body goes limp in my arms and I let it fall.

Two.

My heartbeat quickens with fear as more come. They know now that I am here. The first is dead before it reaches me, arrows to the chest and leg spilling its life upon the forest floor.

Three

There are two left. I pull my spear from my back.

They lope towards me, carrying broad-bladed axes that could split my skull with a single stroke. They are warriors, bulky and used to killing. One of them brays at me, its language harsh and guttural. A challenge? A question? I do not understand. I do not want to. It lunges, axe swinging towards my neck. It intends to finish this cleanly. It doesn’t get the chance. Surprise and fear war on its monstrous features as my spear pierces its gut. The spear snaps as I pull it out, and the beast’s blood gushes across me, soaking me. It stinks. I can smell and taste nothing else.

Four.

The remaining fiend throws itself at me. I drop the shattered haft of the spear and grab an axe from the ground. I deflect a blow aimed at my leg, and my desperate return stroke splits my foe from groin to throat. More heathen blood feeds the earth, and I feel the gods rejoice at the offering.

I relax.

Five.

The arrow takes me in the throat.

I try to laugh, though I make no sound, as I recall how the first of the beasts died. The gods mock me. I fall to my knees, and my eyes find those of my killer. I see something I recognise in its gaze, and realise that I was not the only hunter in the forest this day.

Six.

Fedor had been tracking the beastman for three days.

He had heard tales that a pack of the subhuman monsters lived in the forest, but he had never believed it until now. He pulled his arrow from the creature’s throat, illuminated by the bright sunlight streaming through a gap in the forest canopy. It was a fusion of man and animal, covered in thick, shaggy fur, with horns coiling from its head. A beastman, the southerners called them. He pulled his thick fur coat tighter about his body.

Pulling his axe from his belt, Fedor raised it to sever the beast’s head. As he looked down at the creature, he met its weak gaze and saw something familiar, something he recognised. For a moment, they were connected, hunter and prey, until Fedor let the axe fall.

NECESSARY EVIL

Rob Sanders

The wraithgate sat in damnation’s darkness, lit only by the dread twilight of the Eye. Dusted in brimstone, its curves and arches cut a skeletal silhouette into the puce yonder. Here, among the perversity of a daemon world – where reality was twisted and the impossible ruled – the portal waited in the gloom. It waited for a visitor: one with reason to leave the interdimensional labyrinth of the webway beyond and step through a gateway to hell. Not many would accept such an invitation, but in a place where time had little meaning, the xenos artefact did not have long to wait.

From the archway’s agitated nothingness proceeded the sizzle of warp static. Immaterial energies arced between the slants and barbs of the wraithgate’s alien architecture, shattering the space between. Drawing on unimaginable power, the portal scorched a hole through the fabric of time and space. Piece by piece, the reality beyond was assembled like the fragments of a stained glass window.

Bronislaw Czevak stepped forth from this new reality and out onto the surface of the daemon world. His eyes were unmistakably ancient, yet his features were those of a much younger man. His coat was an abomination of eldritch design and alien fabric: ankle-length, incorporating a nauseating clash of colour with the insanity of interlocking patterns. As its harlequin tails flapped in the light breeze, the fabric’s surface rippled with a form of alien field technology that played with the eye. Inquisitor Bronislaw Czevak of the Emperor’s holy Inquisition, interdimensional refugee. Hunted by the Ruinous Powers for what he could do; by the Imperium for what he had done; by the alien eldar for what he might do. Inquisitor Bronislaw Czevak – known himself to hunt, on occasion.

Taking in his surroundings, Czevak raised one furrowed brow. His shoulders sagged at the indication of a destination reached, before snapping the gilded covers of the Atlas Infernal shut and burying the antique tome in the depths of his alien coat. Still bathed in the protective purity of the book’s power and with the webway portal dying to inactivity behind him, the inquisitor jumped down from the gate and strode out across the hellish surface of an accursed world.

Nereus had once been covered with fertile oceans and even now no sand or soil graced its surface, just rust and sulphur-dust. Stamping, the inquisitor found that beneath the powder was solid metal. Wrinkling his nose at the rotten stench, he climbed an escarpment of reinforced scrap and corroded plating, reaching the irregularity of an apex ridge. From this vantage point, the inquisitor took in the daemonscape. The rusted archipelago extended for some distance and height, reminding Czevak of a volcanic island reaching out of the waters. The blood-red of a brimstone ocean boiled beyond, the sulphurous surf lapping up against the metal shore, encrusting the coast with yellow crystals. The waters thrashed with larval daemons, swarming and snapping like carnivorous fish in an evaporating pool. In the thin skies above, flocks of furies soared on the hunt for soul-prey.

Beyond the predators, Czevak was treated to an unnatural celestial phenomenon. In the night sky, he could see the gaping mouth of the warp rift known to Imperial Navigators as the Craw. While Nereus bathed in the warplight of the rift’s exit point, its twin raged to the galactic south, erupting without warning to snatch vessels on the Imperial trade routes that skirted the Eye. Reports of Imperial ships lost to the Craw had been circulating for nearly a thousand years, with lost vessels forming the mountain of scrap that now reached up from the depths to create the rusted peninsula. Far out to sea, Czevak could hear the mournful drone of daemonsong: monsters of the deep, rumbling below the waves. Above, furies had started to circle, drawn down by the scent of fresh flesh.

The daemons scattered unexpectedly.

Czevak squinted, then shook his head slowly. Against the backdrop of the Craw’s swirling vortex, a silhouette grew. The horror of a doomed vessel, freshly tossed from the mouth of the rift. A freighter. Wreathed in spectral flame, the ship streaked down through the daemon world’s atmosphere, on a crash course for the archipelago.

Czevak dropped down onto an expanse of rust-riddled hull plating and began to run. He felt the impact of the crash through the superstructure of the derelict below. As he sprinted, hurdling twisted scrap, he felt the ship grind its way up behind, cleaving through the hullscape. Time seemed to slow as Czevak became enveloped in the enormity of the catastrophe unfolding around him.

The metal quaked beneath him as the vessel’s prow struck the escarpment. The freighter flipped, its colossal aft section thrown up towards the sky. It balanced for an incredible moment, like a great ferruswood about to topple, before rolling over and crashing awkwardly down on its side. The freighter – already wracked with explosions – erupted, sending a shrapnel-storm rocketing in all directions.

Czevak threw himself to the ground, but a blast wave of debris struck him from behind. Metal bars shot past and sheets of hull plating pranged and rattled off the ground before the inquisitor. A section of decking flew overhead, smacking Czevak on the back.

With nothing but the hiss of the crash in his ears, Czevak lay there. Blood ran down the side of his face. There was also something wrong with his leg. Turning his head he saw that his was not the only body out on the sulphur-dusted expanse. Czevak’s eyes met those of an ejected crew member who was trapped nearby, under a flaming girder. There was little the inquisitor could do to help, but instinct prompted him to go to the man’s aid. He tried to get up but agony shot through his leg and letting loose an involuntary howl, Czevak allowed his throbbing head to sink back to the metal floor.

Something hit the metal beside him. At first the inquisitor assumed it was more debris but, as he blinked the blood from his eyes, he saw that it was a snaggle-fanged fury that had thunderbolted down from the wretched heavens. Tossing the huge girder aside with ease, the daemon sank its brazen talons into the victim’s flesh. With a swoosh of ragged wings, the thing shot back up into the sky, taking the screaming survivor with it.

As the static of the crash faded and became replaced with screams, Czevak fancied he could hear, of all things, a bell; the clear ringing of a solitary bell coming from beneath the ground. Again the flock of furies scattered. Beside him, a rust-encrusted pressure wheel began to turn, and a maintenance hatch opened in the floor. From the opening surfaced a young woman dressed in scavenged rags. Her face was gaunt and sulphur-smeared, yet full of determination. As she climbed out beside him, Czevak could make out the bump of a swollen belly beneath her rags. A filthy sling held an infant to her breast and several sallow children followed in her wake, clinging to the ragged edges of her cloak. About them hatches, airlocks and bulkheads opened in the archipelago floor. Tattered figures poured out: scrawny men, women and children emerged and spread out across the crash site. All looked thin and unhealthy; some were hunched, while others bore the affliction of extra limbs and cancerous growths. The underdwellers were clearly not daemons but had suffered in the toxic environs of a daemon world. On Nereus they could not hope to escape the warping influence of the Eye of Terror. If it hadn’t been for the nullifying influence of the Atlas Infernal, Czevak would long since have suffered the same fate during his travels. The horde began checking for survivors, scavenging from bodies and stripping salvage from the wreckage.

Turning, Czevak found the woman over him, checking his leg. She pulled back her hood to reveal a tumble of copper curls. She directed the children to gather around and the inquisitor felt their bony little fingers dig into his flesh. The red-headed woman inspected a wound on his scalp and then came in close to his face. She attempted a weak smile but her features fell out of focus. Czevak’s head hurt and he felt the irresistible pull of unconsciousness.

‘Your vessel crashed. We’re going to take you somewhere safe…’ he heard her say, but his eyelids fluttered closed. As the darkness claimed him, Czevak was left with doubt that any such place existed on the daemon world.

The inquisitor awoke on the grubby mattress of a medicae cot. Reaching for the dull ache in his temple, Czevak found a bandage around his head and a filthy intravenous line drooping from his arm. He was alone in a small, roofless cubicle of stacked crates. Above he could see flickering lumen-strips in the ceiling of a much larger chamber. Tensing, he thrust a hand into the folds of his harlequin coat. He found the Atlas Infernal where he had hidden it, and fell back on the cot in relief. He allowed himself the luxury of a moment’s further respite before tearing the morphia line from his arm in disgust and swinging his legs over the side of the cot. His right thigh burned, again with a morphia-dulled delay, and upon inspection Czevak found that it too had been tightly bandaged.

‘Going somewhere?’

Czevak looked up to find the woman he’d seen out on the archipelago in the cubicle doorway. She took her hands from where they rested on the bump of her belly and set to rearranging the infant at her breast within the ragged sling.

‘Where am I?’ Czevak asked, with little indication that he was about to engage in pleasantries.

‘Perdition’s Landing,’ she said, watching the inquisitor struggle to get to his feet before his thigh’s refusal to support him put him back down on the cot. ‘Careful, you’ll tear your stitches.’ She presented him with a shattered length of pipe. ‘We took this out of your leg.’

‘How long was I out?’ Czevak said, an expression of gratitude once again failing to fall from his lips.

‘About ten hours.’

‘Ten hours!’

‘About,’ the woman confirmed. ‘I’m Myra.’

‘I’m getting out of this cot,’ Czevak assured her.

Myra hovered for a moment before taking a makeshift metal cane from where it leant near the cubicle door and tossing it to the inquisitor. Snatching it out of the air, Czevak got to his feet. ‘Who’s in charge here?’

‘The Curator minds the colony’s interests,’ Myra replied.

Stabbing his cane into the metal floor, Czevak hobbled towards the cubicle entrance. ‘Well, I need to see this Curator. I needed to see him ten hours ago.’

‘The Curator is extremely busy with colony matters. He doesn’t usually meet initiates.’

‘Initiates?’

‘Newcomers,’ Myra explained. ‘The colony is the only hope for those left at the mercy of this world – and there is precious little of that. All who arrive at Perdition’s Landing join the colony, enjoying its protection and the fruits of collaboration. We are as one against the evil of this place.’

‘You say that the colony is the only hope for survival.’

Myra nodded.

‘I am the colony’s only hope,’ Czevak told her. ‘You think that the darkness of this place is the only thing to fear? As we speak, there is an evil that makes its way here, as I have. It is no casual malevolence, no indiscriminate daemonic dread. It is driven by unfathomable desire and its mindless servants will stop at nothing to satisfy its insatiable craving.’

‘Why would it come here?’ Myra asked.

‘Simple,’ Czevak told her. ‘You have something it wants.’

Myra took Czevak through the crooked quads and thoroughfares of the castaway colony. Perdition’s Landing had been constructed in the cargo bay of some ancient vessel, long buried below the surface of the crash-site archipelago. The settlement was a labyrinth of crates and salvage recovered from the vessels that had come to their end on the rusted surface above. Myra took the inquisitor through habitation quarters and small markets of salvaged wares, as well as sparse devotional spaces housing silent multitudes at prayer.

The colonists themselves were a motley collection. There were refugees of a hundred Imperial creeds and cultures, with a sprinkling of xenos unfortunates adding some exotic colour, but all uniform in their wretchedness. Their dirty faces poked out of ragged hoods, while tattered cloaks and shawls seemed the order of the day, presumably so that the men, women and children of Perdition’s Landing might hide the shame of their deformities.

With the morphia wearing off and the demand of the walk searing through his injured thigh, Czevak found himself rubbing his wound. About him, the surroundings began to change. Instead of the haphazard structure of crates, objects seemed to have been placed deliberately, exhibited almost. Myra led the inquisitor through shattered murals and frescos, cracked busts and dusty urns. Singed tapestries sat alongside faded paintings and ancient treasures. Hooded colonists looked to the antiquities with the care of reliquary custodians. Thousands of precious artefacts, from huge sections of gargoyle-encrusted architecture to torn tracts and verdigris-covered coins were hung, arranged and displayed about them. Above Czevak’s head a mighty bell was suspended, dull with age.

‘What is this place?’ Czevak asked.

‘This is the Archive,’ Myra replied. ‘The colony forefathers thought it important to keep a little of the Imperium alive in this benighted place. The Archive reminds us of where we came from. A haven of normality in the most abnormal of places.’

‘I heard a bell,’ the inquisitor said, peering up at the large instrument.

Myra reached out for the improvised bell cord that hung down and snaked about them on the floor.

‘It sounds the arrival of fresh wreckages and mobilises the colony for the reclamation.’

‘The reclamation?’

‘The warp rift might have marooned us here but it is also the source of uncorrupted supplies. Each wreck brings us food and fresh water, much needed equipment and, most importantly, arrivals like yourself. New blood, with knowledge and skills essential to the colony’s growth and security. The bell sounds and we all climb topside to recover salvage and survivors.’

Czevak shook his head.

‘What?’

‘I’m just… astounded,’ the inquisitor admitted. ‘How you have survived in this place, amongst its corruptive influence, amongst its threats?’

‘There is little we can do about those,’ Myra said. ‘The colony survives because it stands together. A collective. We stand as one, against all threats.’

A hooded colonist attending to the decorative detail on an aquila carved from dark wood looked up and approached them.

‘Admiring our collection?’ the colonist enquired. Czevak nodded up at the bell above.

‘Neutran. Early M37,’ Czevak told him. ‘Before the Abyssal Crusade but definitely post-Drachmere and the Volk Abstentions. Looks like a Gorshac or Vanderghash. Some form of Adamantique alloy with angelic depictions of the Adeptus Astartes. The Fire Claws, I believe. Probably a Gorshac, then. Vanderghash favoured ferrum.’

‘I’m impressed,’ the colonist told him. His smile was a warm greeting but his eyes were cold and piercing. ‘Few come to the Archive so qualified to be here.’

‘You’re the Curator?’

‘I am,’ he replied. ‘I look to the preservation of the colony’s treasures, both those alive and long dead.’

‘Then, Curator, this will concern you,’ Czevak announced. ‘A danger approaches that far exceeds the peril of your present circumstances. A war host intent on your destruction.’

The Curator raised a bald brow. ‘A day does not go by without one of our number falling foul of the predations of this world, but what would a war host want with us? How would they even know of our existence?’

‘That’s not important right now and I don’t have the time to explain it to you. Know only this: I found you – and they won’t be far behind. They never are.’

‘Who is this war host?’ the Curator demanded. ‘What do they want with us?’

‘They are witchbreeds and faith-traitors. Servants to the Dark Gods. They come looking for an ancient artefact. A gift for their distant master. A relic of ruinous power.’

‘You believe this artefact to be here, in the Archive?’ Myra asked.

‘They search for the Bacillum Formidonis,’ Czevak told them. ‘The Dreadsceptre. An accursed crozius arcanum carried by the infamous Word Bearer Dark Apostle, Rhadamanthys – the dread Herald of Sicarus.’

‘I fear you talk of the Traitor Legions,’ the Curator spat. He shook his head. ‘You or any that follow will find none of their warped artefacts amongst our collection.’

‘Listen to me,’ Czevak implored. ‘Rhadamanthys is long dead, but the Fire Claws recovered the damned weapon from the ice world of Perboreas IX, where the Chaplain froze to death with dark prayers on his lips. It was said that no army marching with the Dreadsceptre before it could ever suffer defeat. With the Bacillum Formidonis, a fighting force would become unstoppable. This is what interests Ahzek Ahriman and the Thousand Sons–’

‘The Thousand Sons!’ Myra exclaimed.

‘You insult us with your accusations. We do not harbour artefacts of the damned here,’ the Curator seethed.

‘Curator,’ Czevak said. ‘Help me find the Dreadsceptre and destroy it. In return, I will take you and your people offworld, to safety. Perhaps not back to the Imperium, but certainly somewhere safer than this.’

The Curator turned angrily on Myra. ‘You bring me this false prophet?’

‘All of this,’ Czevak gestured with his cane, ‘is Neutran. Antiquities from the Fire Claws’ homeworld, no doubt loaded on the reliquary vessel that came to crash land here. The Adeptus Astartes masters of Neutra failed to tell your forefathers why such treasures were being evacuated. The Fire Claws were declared heretics by the Imperium and branded Excommunicate Traitoris for dealing in damned artefacts. The Dreadsceptre is here, hidden among Neutra’s holy relics, and your masters – now known as the Relictors – would have recovered the ruinous weapon, had your ship not fallen foul of the Craw. I’m here for that artefact.’

‘Spread not his lies,’ the Curator commanded, looking at Myra. ‘He is no saviour. There is no artefact and no threat. It is foretold. Our people will come for us. We shall be patient and await our deliverance. It will be our reward for preserving these great treasures so that they, like we, might join a greater collective. Only then will evil be wiped not only from this world but from the galaxy itself. It is foretold.’

With that, the Curator hurried off into the depths of the Archive.

Czevak looked to Myra.

‘Enough,’ she said softly. She lowered her eyes. ‘You’re bleeding,’ Myra observed, looking at the dressing on the inquisitor’s thigh.

Czevak said nothing, his mind elsewhere.

‘Stay here. I’ll get my kit,’ she said.

With Myra gone and blood running down his leg from his ruptured stitches, Czevak limped off after the Curator.

Turning the corner, the inquisitor was surprised to find himself at a dead end. A stone sarcophagus decorated the space, the carved detail of its lid slightly ajar.

Czevak hobbled across to the relic. Slipping his metal cane between the lid and the sarcophagus rim, the inquisitor prised the cover open and it slid across. Allowing the light of the chamber into the sarcophagus, Czevak found that the coffin lacked its stone bottom. Instead, a hole had been cut through the metal decking beneath and a flight of steps descended into the darkness. Czevak followed them down.

Several decks below the cargo bay, Czevak began to question the rashness of his pursuit. He could have been in the same vessel or another derelict entirely; there was little in the way of illumination. Several times he had halted, massaging the savage burn in his bleeding thigh, and squinting into the murk. He was sure he’d seen the faint glimmer of movement and his imagination began filling in the blanks, painting a picture of daemon world monsters stalking the darkness of the colony underworld.

On a small landing, Czevak found he had to rest. The wound on his leg was streaming with blood now and the inquisitor felt it prudent to take off his belt and tie it off above the dressing. Leading off from the landing was a bulkhead. The metal door had been lowered but still cleared the landing slightly, allowing a little of the sickly light of the chamber beyond to filter through. Bringing his face down to the stairwell mesh, Czevak peered beneath the bulkhead.

As his eyes adjusted further, the inquisitor could make out the cloak-tails and sandals of various colonists standing about the chamber. They were gathered around a grotesque throne, two fat cloven-claws scraping the deck at its base. A shiver of horror ran through the inquisitor at the prospect of the daemonic monstrosity to which they belonged. One of the colonists came to his knees and with hood retracted, kissed the hideous feet. The Curator. It shouldn’t have surprised Czevak. The colony of Perdition’s Landing could realistically stand little chance of survival on Nereus without daemonic sponsorship.

The mesh began to quake beneath Czevak’s cheek. The boom of a bell rang through the derelict superstructure. With his movements masked by the pealing, Czevak hurried back up the steps. A fresh vessel-victim was tumbling out of the dark heavens and the colony mobilising for reclamation meant the Curator would be returning. As he staggered up the stairwell, Czevak couldn’t help feeling that it wasn’t the ascending Curator he had to worry about. In the back of his mind, the blackness below was giving birth to the obscene monsters of dark fancy. He heard a hiss right next to his ear. Unmistakable. Not the fleeting notion of an overactive imagination. With the shiver down his spine trumping the bloody blaze of his thigh, the inquisitor hurried, stumbling up the steps to safety.

Czevak found Myra below the bell, alongside a particularly unfortunate colonist. The ragged bell-ringer not only had a small mountain for a back but heaved on the cord with three muscular limbs.

‘Help me find this damned artefact!’ Czevak called as he approached. Time was running out for all of them. Myra couldn’t hear him above the boom of the bell and set to work immediately inspecting his thigh. ‘Leave it,’ Czevak snapped. ‘We have to find that sceptre.’

‘What?’ Myra said, angling her ear up at him.

‘Could you not do that?’ Czevak shouted at the bell-ringer, but the mutant’s brute features just creased with confusion.

‘Reuban,’ Myra called, putting her hand on his hulking shoulder. He released the rope and the bell slowed to silence above them.

‘What?’ Myra repeated but Czevak didn’t reply. He was staring up into the darkness of the bell. He gave a perverse chuckle before hobbling over to the wall and wrapping the cord around a section of recovered cathedral architecture. ‘What are you doing?’ Myra asked again. Czevak braced his cane between the gargoyle-encrusted stone and the Archive wall. Toppling the stone dead-weight of the relic, the irresistible tug on the cord tore the bell from the chamber ceiling. The great Neutran bell bounced, cracked and clanged to the metal floor.

‘What are you doing?’ Myra screamed.

Czevak limped over to the shattered dome of the bell. He stabbed at the darkness inside with the tip of his cane. The clapper within lay still. It appeared strangely at odds with the Neutran design of the bell itself. The clapper rod was adorned with raised glyphs and symbols of dark origin and the clapper head was a brazen, horned skull. The skull was encircled with metal bands, creating a globular cage shot through with spikes and giving the object the unmistakable appearance of a weapon.

‘The Bacillum Formidonis,’ Czevak said. ‘Dreadsceptre of the Dark Apostle Rhadamanthys.’

Myra went to say something.

‘Listen!’ Czevak hissed.

With the boom of the bell gone, the three of them could clearly hear the roar of engines.

‘What is it?’ Myra asked fearfully.

‘They’re here,’ Czevak replied. ‘Help me get this bloody thing topside. We have to destroy it.’

The archipelago rang with the sound of screams.

Czevak hobbled across the mangled landscape, assisted by Myra at his side. Behind them, the hunchbacked Reuban humped the further handicap of the Dreadsceptre across one shoulder. About them, a massacre unfolded. Haunting the sky like a sacrilegious ornament was a spacecraft, a warship. It had clearly reached Nereus by means other than doomed passage through the Craw and hung pristine and deadly in low orbit.

‘They have come, as the Curator predicted,’ Myra mumbled. Czevak recognised the vessel as a Traitor Astartes frigate and its markings as belonging to the Thousand Sons. He didn’t need to correct Myra, however, the teleporter flashes on the scrapscape below did that. Crowds of colonists emerged from the archipelago and fell to their knees at the sight of seeming salvation. As they did, Traitor Space Marines in ancient cerulean plate marched out of the light with the cold certainty of executioners. They opened fire with their bolters almost immediately, hammering the approaching colonists with precision fire in silent impunity.

‘You can’t help them,’ Czevak insisted as Myra came to an astonished stop.

‘We are as one…’

‘It’s over. Help me and help yourself,’ the inquisitor told her.

The Dreadsceptre clattered to the floor as Reuban dropped his burden and began an afflicted bound back towards the carnage.

‘Reuban!’ Myra called, tears rolling down her sulphur-smeared cheeks.

‘Think of your child!’ Czevak implored, his hand on her shoulder.

Reuban didn’t get far. The Thousand Sons were making short work of the colonists and, even at long range, their disciplined gunfire riddled Reuban’s unfortunate body with ragged holes. That was enough for Myra. She clutched the sling containing her infant closer to her chest with one hand and took up the unholy Dreadsceptre with the other. Together, the pair heaved the accursed crozius up the hull of a crashed alien vessel. They reached the precipice of an unnatural cliff face, where the crash-site peninsula met the bloody waves of the brimstone ocean below.

‘One.’

‘Two.’

‘Three!’

As Myra and the inquisitor released the ends of the ruinous object, the Dreadsceptre flew off the cliff-top and tumbled down into the surf. There the relic would be lost forever in the raging, daemonic depths.

Bolt-fire sang off the wraithbone nearby, announcing the approach of Rubric Marines. Abandoning his cane and snatching Myra by the hand the inquisitor ran for the warp gate. Czevak’s leg was sodden with blood and his thigh seared with pain but the thunder of armoured boots and bolter rounds drove the pair on.

‘Come on!’ Czevak roared, putting one arm around Myra’s shoulders and the other around her swollen belly. The two of them slid onto their backsides and skimmed down the sulphur-dusted wraithbone of the alien hull. Leaving a cloud of brimstone behind them, Czevak and Myra reached the bottom, a short distance from the warp gate. ‘This way,’ the inquisitor called, climbing up towards the portal.

On the summit of the wraithbone rise, the silhouettes of Traitor Marines punched through the cloud in indomitable pursuit. Czevak reached the gate first and began the rune sequence required to activate the ancient artefact. As the portal crackled to interdimensional life and began assembling an alternate reality behind him, the inquisitor reached down to help Myra.

‘Give me the child,’ he ordered. Myra was having difficulty climbing with the bulge of her pregnant belly, and the infant held to her breast in the sling presented a further burden. Slipping the babe out of the ragged material, she thrust the child up to him.

Czevak took the swaddling and parted the rags.

Within was no human child. Where there should have been innocent vulnerability, there was carapace and the horror of claws and jaws. A xenos abomination: a genestealer hybrid. Four arms. Bulbous head. An ovipositor slipping out from between needle-like teeth.

‘What’s wrong?’ Myra called from below. The revulsion on his face had frozen her to the spot.

Czevak looked at Myra. For the inquisitor it all began to fall into place: the colonists’ survival in such a hellish environment; their deformities; the collective. Perdition’s Landing did not benefit from daemonic sponsorship. The colony could protect itself. Czevak shuddered at the enthroned monster he’d discovered below the Archive. The Curator: the face of the cult. A genestealer cult, a brood, marooned here on a daemon world.

Czevak considered the Curator’s words to him, his insistence on their deliverance. On their joining a greater collective and how then the evil of the Eye would be wiped clean of the galaxy. Czevak nodded to himself. Should the xenos plague ever come for its lost brood, it might well assimilate the darkness of the Eye and leave this terrible place a barren empire of forgotten evil.

On the rise, still enveloped in the dust cloud, a shadow puppet show played out. Monstrous genestealers were climbing out of the floor, while silhouettes of the Thousand Sons marched on towards the new threat of alien abominations with impassive discipline.

With a heavy heart, Czevak handed back the infant to its confused mother. Looking down into her pretty eyes, he realised that Myra couldn’t see the monster in her arms, only the one before her, about to leave her and her child to their deaths on the surface of a damned world.

‘What are you doing?’ she said in disbelief as Czevak backed towards the portal. ‘Take us with you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he told her and, with grim determination, limped back through the interdimensional static of the webway portal. With a flash, she was gone – and the daemon world of Nereus with her.

Sealing the wraithgate, Czevak was left with possibilities. Perhaps the Thousand Sons would exterminate the genestealer brood in their futile search for the Dreadsceptre. Perhaps the xenos abominations would end Ahriman’s Rubric Marines and their armoured husks would join the Craw-spawned scrap of Perdition’s Landing. Turning his back on the portal, Czevak limped away – undecided which of the two hosts, the Chaos Marines or the xenos filth, were the more necessary of evils.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Neil Roberts

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ISBN 978-0-85787-976-9

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