THE RITE OF HOLOS

Guy Haley

The air at the centre of the landing pad glowed golden. Rain hissed as it blew into the light. The teleport locus grew brighter, as intense as hot metal, whiting out the faces of Colonel Indrana’s few remaining officers. Most of them had never witnessed a teleport before. A couple of them gasped, holding their hands up to shield their faces. Colonel Indrana squeezed her eyes shut against the glare.

The light shrank, coalescing into nine giant forms. It burned brightly and solidified; where before there had been empty space, angels stood. Indrana blinked away retinal after-images.

The Space Marines were huge, taller than Indrana and the other women under her command by half a metre or more, and far bigger than this world’s men. They had come arrayed for battle in power armour, finely wrought and decorated. Each carried the mark of their Chapter upon their left shoulder, a drop of blood hanging above a stylised chalice. Of the nine, five bore armour entirely in the Chapter’s red. A guard. One of these carried a banner of fine workmanship, two others sported claws upon their gauntlets as long as Indrana’s arms while the remainder carried boltguns. They were alert, their armour’s motors whining softly as they swept the pad for threats.

The other four were officers or specialists. Indrana knew enough of the Adeptus Astartes to see that. Their battle plate was ornate beyond compare, and each different to the next as summer was to winter. One was garbed in deep blue, a psyker who carried a staff shot through with crystal, his head nestled in a web of arcane technology. Another wore white armour bearing the marks of the medicae, the third wore a helmet ghoulishly fashioned in the form of a skull, his armour black. And their leader…

The Chapter Master was taller than the rest, a man of noble countenance, clad in red and gold. The pelt of a great beast was pinned to his shoulders. Only he and the psyker had their faces revealed. Beneath the sheen of the rain, Indrana thought their skin and hair looked oddly dry, and yet both were preternaturally beautiful, as perfect as the statues on the Reliquary Sanctum; angels cast in plaster.

The Chapter Master looked around at Indrana’s tattered retinue. She felt acutely aware of her filthy uniform. She stood as straight as she could. Amusement played in the Chapter Master’s pale eyes. It never occurred to her that he might be laughing at her, it was clear to all that his eyes saw evidence of battle, and that he was pleased because of it.

‘Colonel Indrana?’ the Chapter Master said.

She blinked, momentarily forgetting her own name. He came closer, boots clanging on the landing pad. She was forced to crane her neck to look up at him. She knew she was unpresentable – dark rings surrounded her eyes, smudging her dark brown skin black. Her body odour was rank in her own nostrils. No one had access to the comforts of life here anymore. How different to her he was, tall and shining in his armour, a saint come down from the sky. She felt ashamed.

‘My lord.’ She bowed, her hands behind her back. Her warrior’s braid swung forward, water running from its intricate plaits and beads to drip on the rain-slick metal. Her staff knelt around her.

The giant held his red armoured palms upwards, bidding them to rise. ‘Please. We are all servants of the Emperor, brothers and sisters under arms.’

Indrana stood. The Chapter Master looked right into her eyes. His were almost colourless, like a vessel waiting to be filled, like the chalice upon his heraldry.

‘I am Chapter Master Caedis of the Blood Drinkers, Lord of San Guisiga. He smiled, revealing white teeth that were too long. ‘The Adeptus Astartes have answered your call.’

Colonel Indrana recovered her dignity. ‘We are most grateful. We have refreshments and…’

‘That will not be necessary. You have fought hard. We will not insult your sacrifice by feasting while the foe still lives. Save your food for your soldiers, give them sustenance.’

‘You would see the monster immediately, then?’ Indrana shuddered inwardly at the memory of the three-armed horror. As big as the angels of death, it had slain fifteen of the Praetors of Saint Catria before it had been brought down.

‘In good time,’ said the Master of the Blood Drinkers. ‘First I would view the overall situation. There are decisions of tactics and strategy to be made. We must make haste.’

‘As you wish, my lord.’ Indrana drew in a deep breath. She was cold, soaked to the skin. She could not remember the last time she had been clean and dry. ‘This way.’

Indrana squatted behind the parapet of the command post, Caedis stood impassively beside her, his hand upon the wall.

‘My lord,’ Indrana hesitated. ‘I advise you to get down. Rebel sniper teams come far out into the fire zone…’

‘I have no fear of them,’ he said. He was still, unnaturally so.

‘Very well.’

The bulk of the Reliquary Sanctum filled the horizon, the parkland in front of it reduced to ragged mud. Trees stood limbless and splintered amid shell holes filled with stinking water. Tank hulls sat at the limits of the fire zone, hatches blown, streaked with rust and the black traces of fire.

The Sanctum had not been built as a fortress, but its steep walls made it an adequate substitute. Indrana watched as Lord Caedis examined it closely, staring at details an unenhanced human could never see through the rain. It was as large as a small town, a circular wall punctuated by seven spires that commemorated the heroic tasks of Saint Catria, enclosing a plaza and cathedral. Statues of the saint had been toppled from their niches by the rebels, heavy weapons taking their place. Everywhere, the muzzles of guns protruded. She was sure he could see them, even if today she could not.

‘Tell me a little of what happened,’ said Caedis.

‘I don’t…’ Indrana mumbled. She was terrified. Was she being tested?

Caedis looked at her, and his eyes were kind. ‘I wish only to hear the story from your own lips.’

‘Hesta, the so-called “living saint”,’ Indrana began. ‘She revealed herself to us eighteen months ago. Said she had been sent by Saint Catria to bless her followers. We didn’t know then what she really was.’

‘She was not tested?’

Indrana nodded hard, her beads of rank rattled. ‘Oh yes, by the Ecclesiarch and his priests. She was tested and tested again. There was something about her, a fervour… Those eyes… We wanted it, I think. This is a devout world, but far from the eyes of the High Lords. She performed miracles; miracles in the name of the Emperor.’

Indrana looked at the impassive, dry face of the warrior. She saw nothing there but curiosity. ‘We are not heretics, lord. We are good daughters of the Emperor. It was not until around six months later that we discovered the truth. The bodies, I mean. Only a few, but important. Our High Justicar was among them. We think he had uncovered the true nature of the cult, forcing them to seize control. By the time that happened, fully half of our people had joined Hesta. They… they would not believe what was shown to them, put right in front of their eyes. That she was no saint, but a murderer.’

Indrana shivered. Memories of riots on the streets, priories on fire. Good women burned as heretics by Hesta’s followers.

‘You fought.’

‘Yes lord, although it cost us dearly. I have few warriors left to me. We took back Orius and Regal well enough, but Hesta had been based in the Sanctum since the beginning, secretly fortifying it. We’ve trapped the rebel leadership within the Sanctum, but this is the closest we can get,’ she said, indicating the defence lines either side of the command centre, curving to encircle the rebel stronghold. ‘There is no way through their fire patterns.’ She swept her hand past the rebel bastions spaced out before the Sanctum, their outlines hazy in the drizzle. ‘Emperor knows we’ve tried. I’ve lost so many good women – I am down to less than one half regiment, fewer than a thousand troops. In the end, once you contacted us, I decided it would perhaps be best to stay put. We keep a constant watch. They cannot get out, but we cannot get in.’

‘You made a wise choice,’ Caedis favoured her with a wry smile. ‘Do not fear, we stand with you now. The Blood Drinkers will succeed.’

‘I… I do not doubt it,’ she stammered. ‘No offence, my lord, I did not mean to imply that this task was beyond you,’ she said. She tried to maintain her demeanour while dread contorted her stomach. This man could crush her without difficulty.

‘None was taken, colonel, nor would I wish you to fear that any had been,’ Caedis spoke gently. ‘Do not judge yourself against us. I will not have such a talented commander feel humbled.’ He nodded approvingly. ‘You have fought well, colonel. The Emperor has rewarded you, directing our attentions to this world and your salvation. Your struggle is over. The Emperor’s peace will return to Catria by our hand. This I swear.’

Indrana was ashamed that this angel stood unafraid in full view of the enemy while she skulked behind the plascrete. She rose hesitantly.

‘Do not fear,’ he said. He took one last long look at the Sanctum. ‘Your saint’s shrine is a work of great beauty. We will do our utmost to minimise the damage.’

Indrana gave a brief nod. She could not keep her gratefulness from her face. ‘I would see it returned to its rightful purpose more than anything else, my lord.’

‘Come,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Show me this beast you have slain.’

Indrana led Caedis down from the roof into the command suite. Women worked at cogitator banks and vox stations. Reports crackled in from all over the planet. She led the giant through the bustle of the place, Caedis forced to bow his head as they exited into the corridor. Behind him, women watched from out of the corners of their eyes.

‘This way, lord,’ said Indrana. She directed him through the small, prefabricated complex, then down another flight of steps. At the bottom, broad armoured doors barred the way to an ambulance bay, a lighter pair bearing the medicae helix facing them. ‘Our medical centre.’

The door opened with a pneumatic sigh. The ward had been emptied of beds; she had taken no chances with the monster. She took him on, into the operating room they had turned into a makeshift morgue. She hesitated before she keyed the door open.

Two of the other Space Marine officers were already within, conducting their own examinations.

The Chapter Master nodded when he saw the naked corpse on the table. The thing was an unholy blend of nightmare creature and human female. Parts of it were covered in a hard, blue carapace, the rest of it sickly purple flesh. An additional arm was jointed awkwardly to the left shoulder, ending in a three-fingered hand tipped with curved talons that could cleave through plasteel. This Indrana knew from bitter experience.

The thing would have not been able to stand straight while alive. Its spine was knobbled, tortured. Sagging breasts were pasted over its alien anatomy. Its face, awkward and small on the swollen cranium, was that of a human, but teeth as black and sharp as fear crowded its mouth.

The Space Marine medicae looked up from the corpse. He had removed his helmet; he had a black cross painted over his face, his brow glinted with metal studs, too many to count. ‘It is as we thought, Lord Caedis. Genestealers. The cycle is well underway,’ the medic said. The blades of the device on his arm were coated in dark blood. ‘This is a second generation, I think. The admixture of human material present in its essence is a match to the population of this world. They must have been here for some time – decades, perhaps. They are ready to move on and spread their contagion. It is good we are here.’

Indrana cleared her throat. The room was large, but with the three warriors it felt tiny, and she herself like a child around whom adults conducted their mysterious, serious business.

‘A genestealer? This is the… the type of the monster?’

‘You are not aware of them? They are endemic in this sector,’ the medicae said. His eyes were fierce. In the hard light of the room, features that should have appeared beautiful seemed feral somehow.

‘This world is well off the main shipping lanes, Brother Teale,’ said the black- armoured warrior.

‘Reclusiarch Mazrael speaks wisely,’ Caedis said. There was a warning there, she thought, but then he turned to Indrana. ‘They are an abomination, xenos who infiltrate a host society, infecting it with their genetic material so that those corrupted give birth to monsters, monsters that the parents will do anything to protect. Their will is lost to them. The genestealers are like a sickness, do you understand? A physical menace that corrupts both body and mind.’

‘That makes… The rebellion, the uprising. It makes sense,’ said Indrana. ‘At first we thought them rumours, and then…’ She trailed off.

‘Our proximity to Catria was not mere chance, colonel,’ said Caedis. ‘We have been following and cleansing infestations of these creatures for a quarter-century in an attempt to pinpoint their source. Seven worlds we have purged of their evil.’

‘How will you find them?’ she said.

‘They possess a psychic linkage to one another. Weak, but ever present. It leaves a spoor in the warp,’ said Mazrael. ‘Brother Epistolary Guinian chases it through the empyrean, although the trail is as smoke in the wind.’

‘Nevertheless, our crusade nears its conclusion,’ finished Caedis.

A look passed between the three Space Marines. Their eyes strayed constantly to the corpse, lingering on its wounds. Something was going on here that made Indrana uneasy.

Caedis in particular appeared transfixed. He shook his head as if clearing it, barely perceptibly, but Indrana saw. ‘We will assault the Sanctum tomorrow.’

‘Is there any way to free those in the thrall of the aliens?’ she asked. ‘There are many of my warriors in the Sanctum. They were good once, pure of heart.

Loyal Imperial soldiers.’

The Reclusiarch shook his head. ‘No.’ Through his helmet’s vox emitters, his voice was sepulchral. ‘They are blind to reason, and will fight like animals to protect their false family. They must be annihilated, lest the taint remain to overwhelm your world once more.’

The door hissed open. Indrana’s astropath, Aland – one of the few men on her staff – walked in, deep in consultation with the Blood Drinkers psyker. The warrior broke off his conversation and looked to his lord.

‘We must ask for privacy,’ said the Chapter Master abruptly. ‘We have much to discuss.’

Indrana hesitated. The four adepts stared at her. Caedis’s smile suddenly seemed wolfish. There was a wildness in him, in them all, that scared her.

Astropath Aland came to her side, his staff clicking across the floor. He took her elbow and pulled her gently away. They left the room together.

The door closed behind them, and they walked through the deserted ward.

‘There is something here that I do not like,’ said Indrana. ‘For all their beauty, there is something savage about them.’

‘I cannot see their beauty,’ said Aland. The lights of the ward reflected from the plastic orbs covering his empty eye sockets. ‘And my powers may be feeble compared to those of their psyker, but I can sense that they are conflicted. They have dual natures, these angels of death, although they are in balance for now.’

‘Marvellous,’ said Indrana. She rubbed at her forehead. She was dizzy with fatigue. ‘Let us pray to the Emperor that they keep themselves so.’

‘What of the Sanctum, Lord Caedis?’ said Mazrael.

Sanguinary Master Teale barked out a laugh. ‘We shall storm it easily and drain the tainted blood of those weak-minded enough to fall under the xenos spell.’ His eyes shone with atavistic joy as he dissected the genestealer hybrid.

The Reclusiarch and Sanguinary Master; Caedis’s chief advisors. The first always the voice of reason, the calm in the storm, the bastion against the rage that could take any of them at a moment’s notice. So different from Teale, who urged the embracing of the thirst, the celebration of savagery. The two of them were the twin sides of his conscience, the two aspects of his Chapter: one restraint, the other surrender to the monster coiled round all their hearts.

‘The initial assault will be straightforward,’ Caedis said, ‘though there are many weapons installed. It would be a challenge to take even without the ring of bastions about it. With them there, doubly so.’

‘I welcome that!’ Teale said. He pulled forth a green organ from the hybrid and placed it into a steel bowl. ‘Already the battle-joy stirs within me, I would feel the blood of living foes on my hands and teeth.’

‘Patience, Sanguinary Master, you will have your opportunity,’ said Caedis.

Guinian spoke, his voice sonorous and perpetually tinged with sorrow. ‘We cannot bombard the Sanctum. I require a moment in the heart of their lair. Only then have I chance of locating the ultimate source of this evil.’

Caedis gazed at the genestealer, his eyes fixed on the thing’s oozing fluids. Behind his lips his tongue touched upon lengthened canines. The blood was unclean, laced with the poisonous heritage of the genestealer, yet even so the thirst boiled up in him for a second, filling his mouth with saliva. He forced the thirst down, fettering it under the layers of civility he fought so hard to maintain.

‘The circumstances are favourable?’

‘From what they say of their false saint,’ said Teale, ‘the cycle must be close to completion. She is one of their magi, of that I am sure, and mother perhaps to a new brood.’

‘Young,’ said Guinan. ‘I need to find their young, to follow their calls into the warp for their kin. Then I will find the source,’ said Guinian. ‘We cannot destroy them, or we shall be forced to move on to another infested world and try again.’

‘I would not countenance the destruction of such a building in any case,’ said Caedis. ‘Far better to preserve what beauty we can and engage our foe blade to claw.’

‘Such is the way of Sanguinius,’ intoned Mazrael. ‘The damage will be severe.’

‘But not irreparable,’ said Caedis.

‘And so we will triumph where these lesser humans could not,’ said Teale.

‘Do not dismiss them, Sanguinary Master. That the Praetors of Saint Catria contained the revolt at all is close to a miracle.’

‘And yet, lord, they would ultimately have failed.’

Caedis nodded distractedly. His pulse sounded loudly in his ears, his attention was fixed on the blood of the hybrid. What would it taste like, human blood spiced with alien genes…?

‘One concerted breakout attempt and the Praetors’ work will be undone. This hybrid was surely a test, a probing of the line. The Catrians’ victory has cost them dear – there are too few Praetors left to finish the enemy. They stand in triumph upon the brink of disaster. More hybrids will come and find their weaknesses, and then finally the purestrains. They will be overwhelmed.’

‘There is barely a soul upon this planet,’ said Teale. His blades ran along the underside of the hybrid, slipping easily between the thing’s twisted ribs. Its stomach slid out. Teale pushed it to one side and reached inside the chest cavity. ‘Two or three hundred thousand. This world is not worth the effort of saving.’

‘There are fewer now. And where are the men?’ asked the Reclusiarch.

‘There is some minor aberration in the populace. Women are by far in the majority. Men rarely survive to adulthood and those few examples which do are feeble-bodied,’ said Teale.

‘Mutation?’ said Mazrael distastefully.

Teale pushed his arms deeper into the hybrid. ‘Inquisition records place them well within pure-blood norms. The disparity in sex distribution stems from environmental effects. They are not mutants.’

‘Then they deserve our aid, as all true humans do,’ said Mazrael. ‘And aiding them will bring us closer to the conclusion of our crusade. What are your orders, Lord Chapter Master? Shall I awaken Brother Endarmiel?’

Caedis did not reply. He stood with his hand upon his chin, gazing at the slow rivers of black fluid leaking from the corpse.

‘Lord Caedis?’ said Mazrael. ‘Brother?’

Caedis head snapped up abruptly. ‘Yes?’ he said, his voice thick.

‘Shall I awaken Brother Endarmiel? I feel we will have need of his talents in the battle ahead.’

‘Very well.’

Mazrael dipped his head. ‘Yes, Lord. What are the rest of your orders?’

‘We shall destroy the other infected sites from orbit. Guinian, please inform Colonel Indrana. She must withdraw her troops from the cities. Have them form a cordon. Send half of our number to aid them. Tell her that she is to hold the perimeter at all costs. Any who flee the cities are to be killed on sight. If even one of these xenos escapes our wrath, it will all have been for nothing.’

Teale pulled another organ out from the creature and put it carefully to one side. He took up a cloth and wiped down his narthecium blades. ‘I have the beast’s heart,’ said Teale. ‘I am ready to prepare for the Rite of Holos. We will sharpen the Thirst and bring our brothers to full battle readiness.’

‘Is there sufficient of its blood for the ritual?’ asked Caedis.

‘The fluids of these creatures are impure, lord – not fit for our needs. The heart can be burned, the ashes used…’

Caedis looked to his brothers. Their eyes gleamed as if silvered, all of them eager to slake the thirst that tortured them.

‘Our serfs dwindle by the day, lord,’ Mazrael said carefully.

‘Then do what must be done.’ Caedis paused, his heart heavy. ‘The lives of a few are small sacrifice for the preservation of the lives of the many.’

The air around the Sanctum was alive with weapon fire. Five Land Speeders wove between solid rounds and las-beams, drawing them away from the following Thunderhawk and its cargo. The speeders wove an intricate pattern, splitting from close formation as they drew close to the outer defences. Missiles streaked through the air from the Thunderhawk’s wings, obliterating a bastion and the guns within. An answering missile burst harmlessly on the craft’s fuselage.

The Land Speeders roared on, burning gun emplacements to slag. One caught an airburst from the rebels, spinning out of control before its pilot brought it down hard on the ground. The crew pulled themselves from the wreckage and ran headlong at the enemy guns. In seconds, they were within the great Sanctum, killing all they came across.

The way cleared, the Thunderhawk swooped low. Jets roared as it tilted its nose upward, coming to a near-hover. Lifting clamps disengaged, dropping a scarlet Land Raider onto the battlefield. The tank skidded across the mud, tracks spinning. Cannon barrels blurred as they reached their maximum fire rate, felling cult members and dragging tracks of pockmarks across the Sanctum’s stone walls. The tank drove hard at the main portal, a road tunnel that led within. It bucked as it thundered up the embankment onto the ruined road, slewing left to follow it.

A barricade of broken statuary barred the way. Puffs of rock dust erupted in long lines across its surface as the Land Raider’s crew blasted at the traitorous Praetors behind. Their return fire was ineffectual against the machine’s armour.

The tank drew close to the shattered barricade, and short-ranged flame cannons washed death over them, incinerating those who had not already fallen. The tank angled itself past the barricade, crashing into ancient stonework. Tracks squealed as the Land Raider pushed. Blocks toppled, bouncing from its roof, and then it was through into the tunnel.

One by one, the enemy’s guns fell silent as the Land Speeders finished their work. Other sounds took the place of cannon fire – the roar of jets. Battle-brothers plunged from above, jump packs screaming. Mazrael was at their head, obvious in his Chaplain’s black. In their wake another aircraft streaked from the grey skies like a thunderbolt. The assault ship headed directly for the hollow centre of the shrine, braking thrusters roaring.

Caedis’s Land Raider pushed on through the ornately carved tunnel. Statues of Saint Catria in a hundred different guises went past. Foes – traitor Catrian soldiers and poorly-armed civilians alike – shot without effect at the plasteel behemoth. They were cut down without mercy by the vehicle’s guns, crushed against its sides and under its treads. The Land Raider rumbled into the square at the heart of the Sanctum, a grand plaza two thousand metres across, the cathedral soaring from its centre. A giant mosaic of the saint’s deeds covered the floor.

The Sanctum shuddered. Filigreed galleries crumbled as Blood Drinkers landed among the cultists from on high. Grenades shattered friezes, bolts brought saints down from their lofty perches.

All this Caedis observed. Strapped tight into his Land Raider, scenes of violence were projected upon screens in the vehicle’s command suite. He yearned to join his men outside the tank, to sing the hymns of battle and smite the foe. All inside the Land Raider with him felt the same – Teale, Guinian, and the four veteran brothers who accompanied them – but he could not allow them the pleasure of combat yet.

‘The real foe lairs deeper within the Sanctum. We will proceed. Let Brother Endarmiel and the others deal with this first line of defence. Our battle is not here.’

The assault craft spun slowly in the air above the mosaic, its thrusters burning the face of the saint. Cargo grapples retracted, and Brother Endarmiel dropped to the floor, landing upright, his heavy feet shattering tesserae that had endured for three thousand years.

Endarmiel was ancient, even by the standards of the Blood Drinkers, crippled in a long ago war and entombed inside a towering Dreadnought walker. Within his giant body of metal, Endarmiel had fought on with distinction for more than a thousand years, his wisdom helping guide generations of Blood Drinkers to victory after victory.

That Endarmiel was no more.

The Blood Drinkers controlled the curse of their founder with some success, and so Endarmiel had remained sane for a long time, but no one, not even a Blood Drinker, could resist the Black Rage forever. As the decades turned to centuries, Endarmiel’s fall became an inevitability. He was a living reminder of the darkness inside them all.

Endarmiel strode toward the cathedral. Inside were many of the false saint’s followers. Las-bolts and autocannon rounds sparked from his walking tomb.. He strode on heedless. He roared mechanical warcries that urged the Blood Drinkers to greater fury, ancient words that evoked heroes of distant centuries, and drove a powered blood fist through the cathedral’s great door. Carved wood splintered. Rocks thrown from the building’s towers clanged from his armoured shell. Then the door was torn asunder, and he was inside.

Caedis watched as a stick-thin man holding up a blasphemous icon was crushed under Endarmiel’s foot, and then the ancient was deep into the church’s interior and the multitude within, and lost to sight.

‘To the left, past the cathedral’s north tower, that is where our quarry lurks,’ said Guinian. ‘The taint of the xenos lies heaviest there.’

‘Then let us engage them, and rip out their throats!’ called Teale.

Caedis directed his driver across the plaza. The tank’s weight turned tiles to powder and its guns shattered exquisitely carven stone, saddening the Chapter Master.

Fire rained down from above. Those Praetors turned traitor had kept some semblance of discipline. They fired by rank, fell back, fired again, although their guns were little use against the battle plate of the Blood Drinkers. Here and there, a brother fell, but when the Space Marines closed into melee, the humans did not last long.

The Land Raider smashed into an archway picked out by Guinian.

‘Lord, we can go no further. The corridor beyond is too narrow.’ The driver’s voice came into the passenger cabin.

‘Open the assault ramp!’ ordered Caedis. ‘Withdraw and support the assault.’

Metal creaked on stone, the mechanism’s powerful hydraulics crushing it to rubble as it forced the ramp down.

‘Deploy!’ Caedis shouted to his honour guard. ‘Advance cautiously!’ Too often had the Blood Drinkers lost their heads on this crusade, charging in to engage and suffering at the claws of the genestealers because of it. These were his finest warriors, to be sure; if any of the battle-brothers could resist the Thirst it would be these veterans, but none who called Sanguinius father could claim to be wholly proof against its lure.

‘Steady my brothers!’ called Sanguinary Master Teale. ‘Hold tight to your thirst, embrace your fury, but do not succumb. Savour your anger and save it – now is not the time to strike with blade, but with bolter!’

Caedis could feel it himself: the desire to throw off circumspection and charge forward, sword raised. More than anything else he wished to confront the enemy face to face, to rip at them with his hands, and then…

He reined in his passion. He swallowed. His mouth was dry – he yearned for the warm slickness of blood to soothe his throat.

‘Brothers, ware the shadows!’ Caedis watched his honour guard deploy, taking up station behind the wide corridor’s pillars. Brother Metrion had left the Chapter banner aboard Caedis’s flagship, a flamer in his hands now instead. He took the point position, weapon ready. He was covered behind by Brother Atameo’s bolter. Brothers Hermis and Erdagon held back, blue energy playing across their lightning claws. The corridor was wide enough for groundcars, its ornate columns and carved stone screens providing ample opportunity for ambush. This was where the real test would begin.

‘Prime genestealer ground,’ said Caedis. ‘They will assault us first here.’

‘Let them come,’ snarled Teale.

Caedis drew his sword, Gladius Rubeum. The unsheathing of it activated the weapon’s power field and the holo-generator in its hilt. Scenes of victories from the Chapter’s history played up and down the blade.

Metrion went forward slowly, Hermis behind him, pausing to illuminate pools of darkness with gouts of burning promethium. He reached the end of the corridor, where daylight ended and only darkness remained. The others followed. They scanned every surface; walls, floor and ceiling. Attack could come from any angle.

Caedis looked into the next corridor, but there was no light source there. The systems of his armour banished the dark, image intensifiers in the helmet rendering it in grainy green and grey. ‘I see nothing.’

‘Their leader is here, my lord,’ said Guinian.

‘The false saint?’

Guinian nodded. ‘She watches us.’

‘We go on.’

Again Metrion advanced, washing the shadows bright with cleansing flame. He stopped halfway, swiftly unscrewing his depleted promethium canister and replacing it with another.

In that moment, the genestealers attacked.

Autogun and lasgun fire erupted from the far end of the corridor, poorly aimed but in such volume that the Blood Drinkers ducked back to the shelter of the pillars. Guinian, Caedis and Atameo returned fire. The corridor resounded to the distinctive double-crack of bolts, lit by flashes as the rounds embedded themselves in stone and flesh, blowing both apart with equal ease.

Caedis saw hunchbacked figures with scuttling walks. Their features were alternately lost to the grain of the lens images then blurred by the intense glare of bolt detonations, wisps of image distortion trailing brightly from crooked limbs. Only when Metrion braved the storm of fire and bathed the crowd in purifying flame did the Blood Drinkers truly see their enemy.

Hybrids filled the corridor. Like the specimen killed by Indrana’s soldiers, they were neither human nor alien but a mixture of both, the result of the genestealers’ terrible manner of reproduction. Some appeared entirely alien. Others could perhaps have passed for human in poor light. In keeping with the populace of Catria, they were mostly female, with lank hair and bizarrely delicate features. They shrank back from their burning sisters and hissed.

‘This is the first wave! Hold back! Hold back!’ ordered Caedis.

Metrion lost control and hurled himself into the mob of creatures, letting forth another cloud of fire before he cast his flamer aside and drew his knife and pistol. Caedis cursed and gunned down three of the beasts that threatened his standard bearer, but soon Metrion was lost amidst a sea of flailing limbs.

Hermis and Erdagon went to his aid. Lightning claws flashing, they carved their way through the crowd of malformed beasts. Caedis tasted metal as Guinian unleashed a spear of psychic energy at the mob, skewering several of the half-women. Caedis advanced, Teale at his side, both firing as they went.

Then Caedis was in the fray, Gladius Rubeum rising and falling, its energy field crackling as it ripped chitin apart like paper. Hybrids came at him from the left and the right, but all fell to his blade. One penetrated his defences, its claws gouging a line in his greave. Sparks flew from his plate as the monster severed some vital connection. The damaged leg locked for a moment and Caedis felt the support of the armour waver.

All the while he struggled with his own rage. The Thirst battered at his reason, threatening to topple his soul into an orgy of bloodletting that would never cease. He cried out. Combat became a blur of leering faces and flashing claws.

And then, the foe was gone. A handful of hybrids fled, Hermis hard on their heels. Guinian called for him to halt, but he paid no attention. Caedis panted lightly. Gladius Rubeum had been well-blooded.

‘Master?’ said Guinan. ‘What ails you? I sense turmoil about you.’

‘Nothing, Brother-Epistolary,’ said Caedis. His voice croaked. He licked lips that should not yet be so dry, not so soon after the Rite of Holos. He was thirsty, so thirsty…

Teale knelt by the fallen Metrion, and slid a needle from his narthecium into the downed Space Marine’s flesh. The device hissed and a cylinder of red fluid emptied into his veins. ‘He’ll live,’ Teale said flatly. Metrion’s armour had been split in two places. Blood oozed through the gashes, colouring the scratched metal red again.

Caedis had to tear his gaze away. As Teale called in his acolytes to bear the wounded brother away, his own voice trembled. He had his own internal battle to fight.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘We must aid Hermis.’

Guinian paused, Caedis felt something tighten at the back of his skull as the Epistolary sent his senses outwards. ‘Alas, I fear he may already be beyond our help. He has drawn the enemy out in number. If we hurry, we might still save him.’

They ran down the corridor, caution running from them as blood runs from a cup. Caedis could feel it. Once one succumbed to the battle-joy of the Thirst, others were sure to follow. Only the great will of the Blood Drinkers’ elite kept them from rushing headlong into whatever danger threatened Hermis. The sounds of fighting grew, Hermis’s snarls and battle-oaths loud over the helmet vox.

They rounded a corner and burst into a broad courtyard. The sun slashed the space in two, one side bathed in dazzling daylight, the other in deep shadow. Two civilian groundcars, luxury models, were parked by grand arch on the far side. Armour plating and concealed weaponry were readily apparent to Caedis’s eye.

Brother Hermis fought in the middle of the square against a horde of monsters – hybrids close in form to their monstrous father. Hermis stood precisely where the line of light bisected the courtyard. One of his lightning claws pointed upward. Sunlight fought with the crackling lightning playing on its blades.

The other claw was in darkness, arcing upward toward the belly of a hybrid that loomed over him, a devil assailing an angel.

Several more alien abominations darted toward him, arms outstretched. One lay dead on the floor at the veteran Space Marine’s feet, and another was missing one of its upper arms, but fought on regardless. Hermis’s helmet had been torn from his head. Blood ran from a wound in his arm. His face was twisted with battle-joy.

To Caedis’s blood-crazed mind, the veteran’s battle appeared frozen in time, a study in light and dark as dramatic as any of the statue groups that crowded the Sanctum.

Swift motion wiped the impression away. Hermis went down, claws rending his armour apart. Teale bellowed. Boltguns fired. Alien flesh burst, splattering the pale stone with their gore. Erdagon ran toward the square’s centre in a shallow arc, out of his brothers’ lines of fire. Three genestealers turned to intercept him.

Caedis’s head felt light – his throat was closing up, as dry as desert sand. He shook within his armour as he fought the desire to charge headlong at the genestealers, knowing that his bolter was a better tool here. With every kick it gave, he imagined the sensation of Gladius Rubeum biting into his enemies, and he felt his will ebbing away.

Guinian raised his arm, palm outstretched. Eldritch energy blazed around him, and abruptly died.

From behind the limousines, something that could almost have been a woman stepped out.

Almost.

Her body was as human as any of the other inhabitants of Catria, but her face betrayed her alien origins. Her features were a little too heavy, her nose was slightly ridged, making it appear wrinkled in disgust. Her mouth was unnaturally downturned. And her eyes – they blazed with a contempt for humanity born in the cold places between the stars.

She carried a staff glowing with wyrding might; an alien psyker, a cult witch. The Blood Drinkers had encountered several on the way to Catria.

Caedis’s resolve crumbled, and he dropped his bolter – he could restrain himself no longer. Chanting the war cries of the Blood Drinkers, he raised Gladius Rubeum high above his head and ran at the hybrid magos.

The taste of metal. A blast of psychic energy.

Caedis was flung across the square, his armour dragging sparks from the stone as he skidded across it. The tactical overlays in his helmet lenses flickered. He clambered up, clumsily batting away a darting claw as he did so. Grasping hands sought to pin his arms, a genestealer’s upper claws formed into a pair of single points to drive down at his armour, but Caedis shucked off the creature’s embrace and brought Gladius Rubeum up in a wide arc as he stood, divesting the genestealer of three of its arms. He finished it with a return downwards blow.

Guinian stepped forward to confront the witch, sending aside a blast of energy meant for Caedis.

The air was taut, quivering with unnatural colours. Guinian shouted his praise to the emperor and Sanguinius. His hand upraised, red energy arced from his hand. The witch stood her ground, a dome of flaring light covered her, turning aside the attacks of the Epistolary.

Caedis advanced to the square’s centre where Erdagon stood over his fallen brother, lightning claws weaving an impenetrable cage, keeping the talons of the hybrids at bay. He was on the defensive; power armour was not proof against the genestealers’ diamond-hard claws. Caedis sought to even the odds.

He felled a hybrid from behind, cutting it near in two, the litanies of battle upon his lips. Gladius Rubeum crackled as its energy fields ripped apart another, and then Erdagon was free to attack. Another foul creature died, and another. Back to back, Erdagon and the Chapter Master fought, singing the great songs of battle, surrendering themselves fully to bloody rage.

More genestealers were coming into the courtyard, forcing Teale and Atameo back. Teale discarded his empty gun, and laid about him with his chainsword, the blade’s metal teeth juddering as they bit into chitin. Atameo snapped off bursts of fire as he walked backwards, dropping three, four, five of the gangling beasts. Then he fell. The hybrids were fast, their reflexes outmatching those of the Adeptus Astartes. One had been able to pass through Atameo’s bolter fire and punch a clawed hand through his armoured torso, eviscerating him.

A rush of alien anger burst over the square. Guinian cried out. The crystalline matrix about his helmet sparked and he stumbled, overwhelmed by the cult witch’s warp-born powers. Teale grabbed him by the arm, and pulled the Librarian to the centre of the square, where the others surrounded him.

‘She is strong!’ gasped Guinian.

The four Blood Drinkers stood with the alien dead piled about them. The genestealers came on from every arch and doorway; creeping down stone columns, slinking out of dark corridor mouths.

The Space Marines, heroes among heroes all, were outnumbered. Reports from the rest of the Sanctum came in through Caedis’s helmet vox. Relief was deadly seconds away.

The false saint smiled. Her teeth were small and pointed, her gums dark. ‘You test the might of Mother Hesta, you test and you die. This is our world now, it belongs to the Children of the Stars.’

She raised her staff, glowing with wyrding energy.

‘The blood of life flows quickly!’ Teale said, intoning the first line of the Sanguis Moritura.

‘Only in death can it be stilled!’ replied the others.

‘Let not ours be stilled easily, let it flow on and outward – let it flow from us as we slay those who free it!’

‘Blood is strength, in death it quickens!’

They sang then the hymn of fury, dry lips bitten red by sharp teeth. They prepared to sell themselves dearly.

Hesta pointed her staff at them and laughed.

Stone burst inwards. Lumps of saints flew across the square, battering down several genestealers. A cloud of dust billowed outwards.

Brother Endarmiel strode through the breach, roaring metallically. White dust coated black armour. Twin blood fists whirred. He pivoted and drove a mechanical arm forward, smashing hybrids to a pulp. Hesta’s eyes widened and she cast her bolt of gathered power at the war machine. Purple light flared around Endarmiel’s black armour. He leaned into the blast, weathered it, then strode on and smashed a fist toward the false saint. Hesta stumbled, energy flaring around her as her psychic shield took the brunt of the blow. She snarled, swinging her staff at the war machine’s leg. It connected with a resounding boom. Brother Endarmiel staggered, and Hesta howled victoriously, but the Dreadnought extended one mighty fist. The storm bolter slung underneath fired, and Hesta was cut to pieces.

Brother Endarmiel turned from the shattered remains of the magos and turned upon the brood. Caedis and the others charged forward.

Caught between the rampaging Dreadnought and the lord of the Blood Drinkers, the genestealers were doomed. Their claws could do little against the plating that protected Endarmiel’s sarcophagus. They scored the metal, paring red blood marks and sacred scrolls away, leaving raw tracks in the adamantium, but they could not find their way through it. They died, crushed by Endarmiel’s fists, impaled by Gladius Rubeum, cleaved in two by Guinian’s force staff, torn apart by chainsword and lightning claw.

Erdagon fell, but the slaughter continued unabated.

Caedis slew another of the half-xenos, driving his sword point through its alien skull.

‘Come,’ said Guinian hoarsely. ‘Our target lies within. I can sense them, and they can sense me. Their mother is dead and still they do not fear.’

There were only three of them now: Teale, Caedis and Guinian. Teale turned away from them. The roars of the Dreadnought were deafening as it finished the last of the hybrids, and he had to shout to make himself heard.

‘I must remain here and put aside the blood rage. Erdagon can be saved, and I must retrieve the gene-seed of brother Hermis. Go with fortune and fury, sing well the hymns of battle-joy.’

Caedis gave his assent to the Sanguinary Master. Teale set about his solemn work. Battle-brothers were arriving in the courtyard in Endarmiel’s wake, the fight was nearly done. Caedis motioned for a squad to follow, and together they exited the square and descended into the catacombs beneath Saint Catria’s Reliquary Sanctum.

How many holy women lay interred there? At the base of the stairs, in a wide corridor paved with marble, the burials began, hollows in the wall like shelves five high, each housing a set of mummified remains. Corridors led off at regular intervals, all crammed with desiccated corpses.

The Blood Drinkers advanced, the Thirst boiling within them.

In a tomb remade in a crude parody of a nursery, they found the purestrains. Hollow-eyed women and feeble men snatched the mewling creatures from cribs arranged around a throne of bone and iron as the angels of death entered. Four arms stole around the neck of each surrogate parent, and purple snouts nuzzled human necks. The bewitched humans turned to shield their hellish young with their own bodies. Some raised weapons; bolters barked, and these few fell.

A wave of psychic malice came from this twisted family. Cold, alien eyes stared with hatred from the changeling babies.

‘Do not kill them, not yet,’ ordered Epistolary Guinian in his stern and sorrowful voice. ‘I must take the knowledge I seek from their minds.’

The children of Mother Hesta hissed, tubular tongues sliding over wicked teeth. Reptilian eyes possessed of deep and terrible wisdom regarded them. Their false mothers crooned over them frantically as though they were human infants, blind to their heinous form.

Guinian undid his helmet clasps, air hissing as the neck seal came undone. He set his helm on the floor, and stared at the xenos brood. ‘Know me now, oh foul and repellent beasts, for I will have what I seek.’ Guinian’s eyes glowed, and he reached out to the creatures.

The purestrain young let out a haunting cry as one, heard as much in the mind as in the air. Fingers shifted on weapons in armoured hands.

‘Wait!’ commanded Caedis. The Thirst threatened to undo their task nigh to its completion. ‘Do not fire!’

Guinian eyes slid open. Triumph pulled his dour face into a smile. ‘My lord, I have it.’

‘You can augur the path of the hulk, brother? You can find the initial source of the xenos contagion?’

‘Yes, my lord. I have the psychic scent of these things,’ Guinian spat the word. ‘There are patterns and trails, lord, even in the chaos of empyrean. I can lead us to their foul progenitor.’

Caedis nodded. His eyes swam. The Thirst tortured him. Never had it assailed him so strongly, and a shadow of apprehension stole over his heart.

‘Excellent news’ he said, forcing himself to master his will. ‘I will recall the Second and Fifth Companies to our fleet. This will be a gathering of heroes! We shall crush this abomination at its source once and for all.’

‘Please!’ called one of the women. She was tall and famished, her vitality bled away by her monstrous family. ‘The children! Please, do not harm the little ones!’

Caedis shook his head slowly. ‘Your actions are no sin of your own, but you are forever lost to us. We will commend your souls to your Saint Catria – perhaps she will judge you kindly.’

Caedis raised his hand. The Catrians wailed and screamed.

He let it drop.

Promethium and bolter fire cleansed the chamber.

‘Where were they found?’ demanded Colonel Indrana. She fought and failed to keep the horror out of her voice. From outside the command centre she could hear the thunder of the Space Marines’ departing craft, taking the angelic warriors back to their fleet.

‘Bunker 85. No one saw or heard anything,’ said the medicae adept. ‘I have never seen anything like this. These cuts…’

‘Yes. I can see them,’ snapped Indrana. She stared. The medicae facility smelled like an abattoir, not a place of healing.

‘Colonel, what should we do?’

‘Burn them,’ she said curtly. ‘Burn them all. Contact the families. Tell them they died in defence of our home and the Emperor’s domain.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Immediately!’

The room burst into activity, her order breaking the air of terror in the room, each of the women present thankful of a task to perform.

There was no relief in action for her, not for Indrana. There was no one to order her, nothing to distract her from the terrible sight of her slaughtered soldiers. Slaughtered was the right word, she thought – they had been killed like animals. She looked upon the seven pallid corpses of her guardswomen, their skin bled to a sickly ashen grey, and she shuddered as she considered the nature of Catria’s deliverance.

GILEAD’S CURSE

Chapter Ten

Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett

They say the best storytellers fear nothing. I think they should fear everything. If we feel no fear then we must feel no compassion or empathy, either. Fear is our enemy unless we make bravery our friend.

I never learnt to conquer my fear, only the art of telling a tale, and of inspiring fear and compassion in others.

The skaven are a godless breed, but if we feel no sympathy for their plight our hearts are more surely to be made of stone than of flesh.

The Vampire Count is a being of great strength and sadness, and if we feel no fear for him our hearts are surely more foolish than sanguine.

But men are fools, and storytellers too, so make of this next chapter what you will, for I know where terror treads, and with all my heart I wish that these tales were not my calling, for I know that I must lead you in her footsteps.

The sky over Nuln glowed with a strange yellow light that no one seemed to notice. The air was dry and cold and heady, and it seemed not to move at all. A door slammed closed in one quarter of the city and a window swung open in another. A whispered breath and a faint, atonal note hovered in the air, but seemed not to move or dissipate. One moment it hung over the university, and the next a stray student, alone in the quad, looked over his shoulder, sure that he’d heard a step behind him. The brilliant, green grass of the low cut lawn, smooth as a billiard table, suddenly looked grey, and the student bent down to look at it, mesmerised for a moment by the apparent fissures in the baked earth that crumbed away to sand, and then rippled, the blades of grass perishing as if they had never existed. The student blinked, and suddenly the lawn was as verdant as ever, and someone was leaning out of an upper window shouting at him to leave the bloody grass alone or suffer the penalty of a minus for behaviour.

The student stood and looked up at the window. The tutor had turned away, otherwise he might have seen how dry the boy’s skin was, how old and tired he looked, how desiccated.

The old and the young, and the sick died that night, and no one noticed. Cut flowers wilted and then dried to papery husks as vases and jugs were suddenly without water. When they awoke, their owners were disappointed that their blooms had not lasted longer, but times were hard and plants fragile, so the fact that they had them to enjoy at all, even for the briefest time, was a blessing. Fruit and vegetables turned to dried husks in kitchen racks and on the little vines that many of the city-folk grew to supplement their meagre diets, and no one thought to question or complain. Such was the way of the plague. Nothing could be done.

The two moons of Mannslieb and Morrslieb hung in the firmament, flat, grey and featureless, shedding almost no light through the yellowish haze of the sky. It was as if they had turned their faces from the city, as if Nuln had somehow been abandoned.

They came by the South Gate into the city. The City Guard of Nuln gathered in the yellow haze that signalled the twilight of the rising sun, and began preparations for opening the gate. They trimmed the wicks and filled the reservoirs of their lamps, emptied the still-warm ash from the brazier, allowed to burn out at dusk the evening before, and primed and relit it. Their breath clouded the air in front of their faces, and they stamped their feet in the chill of the morning while they waited impatiently for the boy to bring their breakfasts.

The South Gate into the commercial quarter of the city had been quiet for months, and the guard expected no visitors so early in the day, except perhaps for a little foot traffic. It was not a market day and commerce was depressed.

The three guards, their weapons slung on their backs, gathered around the brazier as it began to give off a little heat. Within a few minutes the boy, unarmoured and unarmed, but for a long knife, which had no scabbard, but which slotted into a leather loop at his belt, arrived with a greasy, brown paper parcel that was leaking steam and an earthy smell.

Surn Strallan was particularly attached to his sheathless knife. It was guard issue and had been used by any number of men before him, but the boy was inordinately proud of it, so much so that he had honed the blade to remove every nick and dink that it had suffered over scores of years, and he had sharpened it so thoroughly that it cut cleanly through human hair. As a result, the blade was as narrow as a stiletto, and looked not unlike his uncle’s, the butcher’s, boning knife.

‘Mutton... again?’ asked the largest of the guardsmen, ‘and old, too, if the smell’s anything to go by.’

‘Be grateful we’re not eating discarded shoe-leather,’ said his younger, taller companion, the man in charge of the little band.

‘I’m not sure we ain’t,’ said Surn, until the other men turned on him, scowling, and he handed the parcel to the old man, raising his hands, as if in surrender. ‘I’m joking.’

‘Not funny,’ said the old man, freeing the corner of the largest and greasiest of the pies from its paper wrapping and carefully examining the pastry where some of the gravy had leaked out, sniffing it before taking a large, hot bite.

‘Not remotely funny,’ said another guard, a middle-aged man with scrawny arms and legs, which didn’t nearly fill his breeches and sleeves, and a round belly, almost like that of a pregnant woman.

When the air moved a little around the men, making them even colder in its draught, they huddled together around the brazier, eating their pies and ruminating on the state of the city. They did not see the cart and its entourage cresting the rise that led to the last few hundred yards to the gate, and if they had seen it, they would have considered it unremarkable.

The figure that led the cart was stooped and cloaked. The man would have been taller than average, if he had stood up straight, but he leaned heavily on a staff and did not make the extra effort to draw himself up to his full height.

There was little noise in the air, just the wet chewing and snuffling of the guardsmen as they ate the too-hot pies that made their nostrils drip, and the crackle of the little fire in the brazier. They should have heard the cart in the stillness of the early morning, but it seemed to make almost no noise. The compacted earth of the road seemed to fall away, to desiccate, as the figure walked ahead of the cart, leaving a two or three inch thick layer of fine, sandy dust for the cartwheels to roll through. The sound it made was not the usual clatter of steel tyres on hard earth, but the light, gritty, shushing sound of sand being displaced.

The road behind the cart seemed to mend, firming to packed earth again, but with two deep grooves where the cartwheels had passed through it, filled with more of the sand. The cart had only two large wheels, and might have been pulled by a pair of horses, if the double yoke was any indication, but the little band was clearly impoverished, and the vehicle was being manhandled by two more slender, cloaked figures; who pushed from behind the yokes rather than pulling as a horse would.

Their feet and hands were bound in dusty linen in the absence of cobbled shoes and stitched gloves, to protect them from the hazards along the road, and from the blisters and callouses that would result from driving the cart. The bowed heads were shrouded in the hoods of their cloaks, and their faces were not visible.

Most of the cart’s contents were roughly covered with a tarpaulin that looked almost as if it had been made from a great canvas banner or sail, but which was filthy and threadbare, held together by the gritty dust that penetrated its weave. Stacked further back on the rocking cart, roped in place, were several earthenware jars made of a clay that was too pale and yellow to have come from the Empire. The jars were of similar sizes, no bigger than eighteen inches tall. They were round of belly with narrowing shoulders and carved wooden lids sealed in place, and they were heavily inscribed in a language that appeared to consist entirely of pictograms or hieroglyphs, which were so entirely alien that only two people living in Nuln at that time could decipher them, and one of them was now too old and too blind to attempt the task.

The shape under the tarpaulin was roughly human, although rather larger than a man; the arms appeared to be crossed, resting on the torso and the feet stuck up slightly, as if the figure were resting peacefully on its back.

The little group was only a matter of a few yards from the gate when Surn happened to look up from his hot breakfast. His mouth was open to allow the steam from his pie to escape, and to allow enough air into the mix to cool the morsel between his teeth so that it didn’t burn the inside of his mouth.

The sight of the cart came as a shock to Surn as he had not heard it coming up the road, and he instinctively inhaled, when he should have swallowed, forcing a piece of gristle into his throat, so that he choked and gasped. The man standing next to him thumped Surn on the back with one bony fist, but his arms were so scrawny that there was little strength in them, and the lump of gristle remained lodged.

Surn’s face reddened, and soon the fat man on the other side of him joined in the thumping, trying to revive the poor boy, whose mouth was still open, and who was trying to cough the scrap of food up with so little success that his lips were rapidly turning blue.

The boss continued to eat his breakfast, his back to the road.

Surn flapped and gestured, at the same time, distending his throat and neck, trying to dislodge the unfortunate blockage that was preventing him from warning his fellow guards of the arrival of the cart, not to mention cutting off his air supply.

The pantomime continued for twenty or thirty more seconds, Surn becoming increasingly frantic for his life.

At last, the guard boss wiped his oily fingers on the greasy paper his pasty had arrived in, and balled it up before tossing it onto the little fire in the brazier where it spat and gave off the stink of burning rancid fat. Then he came behind Surn.

As he did so, the cart, pushed by its pair of human labourers, rolled past the guards as they shuffled back the few inches required to avoid having their feet crushed under its wheels. Not one of them noticed that a spray of sand, almost like the wake behind a fast moving, small boat came up over their boots, leaving a film of pale dust behind, unlike the dark, hard earth the track on that side of the city was actually made of.

The guard boss raised a hand to the cart as it trundled past, noticing that the lead man lifted his staff a few extra inches off the ground, as if in acknowledgement as they passed beneath the arched portal that marked entry through the gate. Then he clasped Surn manfully around the torso from behind, and thrust his clenched fists into the boy’s sternum, twice. The second thrust caused the piece of mutton gristle to burst, dramatically from Surn’s throat and hit the stone of the arch where it stuck, wetly, for a moment.

Surn placed a hand flat on his chest, bent double and heaved in a huge, gasping breath.

He blinked and looked down at his boots. He lifted one of them and the feint layer of sand that coated them shifted, collecting in the creases of the worn out leather. Surn replaced his foot on the earth and looked after the cart, but he could neither see nor hear it.

‘What was that?’ he asked.

‘A waste of good gristle,’ said the hungry, fat guard.

‘The cart,’ said Surn, finally standing upright. He pointed through the archway and then down at his boots. ‘What was the cart?’

‘Just a cart,’ said the skinny legged man.

Surn looked his boss hard in the face.

‘What?’ asked his boss.

‘I don’t know,’ said Surn. ‘Only this.’

And with that, Surn pointed at his worn boot and then kicked the arched wall with the toe of it, sending a puffing cloud of gritty, yellow dust billowing up from it. He did the same with his other boot.

The boss took his chin in his hand and looked from Surn’s face to his boots.

‘So,’ he said, ‘your boots are dusty.’

‘Yes,’ said Surn, ‘but so are yours, boss. And when are your boots ever dusty?’

The boss looked down at his boots. He took his pristine, white neckerchief from around his throat, and rested the toe of his left boot on the wall so that he could wipe it without bending double. Sandy yellow dust came away on the neckerchief, leaving a smudge of staining ochre on the clean linen.

The boss held the neckerchief up to his face and flinched slightly.

‘It’s hot,’ he said, ‘and it smells of... I know not what.’

‘It’s just dust,’ said the fat guard. ‘Are you going to finish this pie, or shall I eat it before it goes cold?’

‘Dust comes from somewhere,’ said the boss. ‘This dust didn’t come from these parts. ‘The earth here is brown, or grey since the plague, and sometimes it’s black. There’s the clay brought in from the west that comes in red, and a spot of chalk if you go far enough north, but this is yellow. Where’s the nearest yellow earth?’

‘So, they’ve come a long way,’ said the fat guard.

‘If they’ve come so far, why haven’t they left the yellow earth far behind, why are they still scattering it?’

The boss looked at the cloth again, and smelled it.

‘What is it?’ asked Surn. ‘What does it smell of?’

‘It smells of the hottest, driest day of the hottest, driest summer of your life, boy,’ said the boss, ‘and then some.’

The boss lifted his nose from his neckerchief and wheezed to catch his breath. As he coughed, his lips shrivelled and cracked, and he reached for his canteen, suddenly parched. Then, he blinked hard, his eyes suddenly tearless and gritty.

‘Is the professor still talking about sand?’ asked the little bit of a girl, whose name was Gianna, and who had raided her father’s supply of decent ale for her visitors.

‘He is,’ said Fithvael, ‘but I feel sure he’s getting to the point.’

‘How long has it been?’ asked Laban.

‘Who asked you?’ asked Gilead. ‘What are you still doing here? It will soon be dawn, and the horses need tending.’

‘Shall I never live it down?’ asked Laban, slumping onto his elbows so that he was almost lying on his back on the hard flags of the tavern floor.

Gianna leaned over and touched Laban on the top of his head with her free hand, as if he were some child to be indulged.

‘I’ve forgiven you already,’ she said, smiling.

Gilead looked from Gianna to Laban.

‘The horses,’ he said.

Laban got elegantly and swiftly to his feet, making sure that he didn’t lock out his knees, avoiding banging his head on the low ceiling beams of the small room.

‘Try not to be seen,’ said Gilead, ‘and close the door and the gate behind you.’

‘It’s the composition,’ said Professor Mondelblatt. ‘Every region has its very own combination of silica and quartz, and earth and stone compounds; every area has its own specific balance of biological matter and geological, so that with careful study it’s possible to determine within a matter of miles where any sand sample originated from. Then there’s the range of sizes and colours of the individual grains, the weight and density of a sample, how powdery it is, for example, how silty. There’s a fine line to be drawn between silt and sand, I could debate it for hours.’

‘You have debated it for hours,’ said Fithvael, ‘and still I do not understand what it is you are trying to tell us, old man.’

‘I can tell you nothing,’ said Mondelblatt, surprised. ‘By what means did you presume I could impart any knowledge to you about what is to come, what must befall?’

‘Why are we here?’ Fithvael asked Gilead.

‘He knows,’ said Gilead. ‘You know old man.’

‘What I know,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘has taken a lifetime to learn. If only you trusted me, I might impart a small portion of it, but you will never trust me as you should.’

‘You can keep us all locked up in here for as long as you like,’ said Gianna, pouring more ale into Mondelblatt’s glass. ‘I can’t say I mind, especially not with my old dad incapacitated for once, and serve him right. You brung the old professor here for a reason, though, and that big boy out there, he’s worse than useless. So, if you get my drift, I’m thinking that you’ve run out of choices. Show the professor a bit of respect and find out what you need to know.’

Gilead did not look at Gianna nor answer her. She finished pouring, and harrumphed slightly before wandering away from the little table where the two elves and the old man continued to sit.

‘She’s right,’ said Fithvael. ‘What harm can it do?’

‘To trust him?’ asked Gilead.

‘It’s what you came for,’ said Mondelblatt.

There was an almighty crash from somewhere above, followed by a thud and the tinkle of falling glass. Fithvael was out of his chair in an instant, but Gianna, already on her feet, was quicker, and she flew up the wooden steps at the side of the room.

‘He had to wake some time, and he’ll be as mad as a bear,’ she said, over her shoulder.

Mondelblatt’s gaze followed the girl as she disappeared at the top of the steep staircase.

‘See,’ he said, pointing, ‘look there. They’re all over the city. All over my beautiful Nuln. It was only a matter of time.’

‘We should go,’ said Fithvael. ‘It isn’t fair to the girl to keep her father subdued.’

‘I think she rather likes him like that,’ said Gilead. ‘Better to keep him unconscious and remain here than to render every man that sees us in the city unconscious. With Laban for company, we’ll leave a trail of bodies.’

With that, Laban entered the tavern again.

‘I heard a noise,’ he said. ‘A window broke. There was shouting.’

‘See to it,’ said Gilead, pointing up the stairs.

When Laban entered the room at the back of the tavern that looked out over the yard, he saw Gianna and her father in a stand-off, one on either side of the narrow bed. The tavern keeper was trying to grab at his daughter, growling at her like the bear with a sore head he surely was. Gianna was trying, not very hard, to placate him. The elves made her brave, and she had taken too much grief from her bullying parent for too long. She goaded him.

‘I’ll set them on you. I’ll make you pay. You’ve paid already, you old goat. They’ve been drinking your ale all night long, and serve you right. I doubt they’ll pay, either, since they can tie you up and do what they will with you.’

The tavern keeper growled again and lashed out, swinging his left arm across the bed, still trailing the length of rope that had restrained him, but which he had broken free of.

Laban reached out a hand, almost nonchalantly, and took a firm hold of the rope. With a twist and a tug, he turned the fat man onto his side and pulled him onto the bed, where he hogtied him.

‘I’ll see Sigmar’s great wrath come down on you... you beast!’ said the tavern keeper, but without any force in his words, since his face had paled and his heart was beating too fast. He did not like the elves. He did not understand them, and he was very much afraid of their presence in his establishment. He knew that if he should live long enough to see them leave, he would become the hero of his own modified tale about that night, but, until then, he was a coward and he knew it.

Laban sighed.

‘Go on then,’ said Gianna, gesturing towards her father with a look approximating glee on her small, pretty face.

Laban sighed again, and then he cuffed the tavern keeper high on his shoulder, against his neck, so that he rendered the fat man unconscious once more while trying to inflict the least possible damage on him. As it was, he’d wake up with a fearful ache.

‘I never could stand listening to the old goat whining,’ said Gianna, ‘and, Sigmar help me, I’ve been doing it for long enough. Now, what’s next?’

Laban and Gianna emerged from the top of the staircase, the elf bending at the shoulder as he descended the stairs.

‘He won’t wake again any time soon,’ said Gianna, wiping her hands on her apron as she stepped off the bottom stair. ‘Feels like breakfast time, if I’m not mistaken.’

‘Then we stay,’ said Gilead.

‘What are all over Nuln?’ he asked Mondelblatt. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘The signs,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘they are all over the city.’

‘What signs?’ asked Gilead.

‘Signs of things to come,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘Signs carved into the fabric of my beautiful city. I see them everywhere. I see them in the gargoyles and waterspouts and drain covers of the temples and shrines. I see them in the gable-ends and muntins and keystones of the colleges of the university, and I see them in the fence posts and banisters, and handrails and beams of the taverns and houses.’

‘And you see them here?’ asked Gilead.

‘Don’t you?’ asked Mondelblatt.

‘I will when you show them to me,’ said Gilead.

‘Then we must begin,’ said Mondelblatt.

‘It’s three blokes and a cart,’ said the fat guard. ‘How much trouble could they possibly be? Besides, they’re in, now, and what could we have stopped them for?’

‘Don’t we have a responsibility?’ asked Surn. ‘Aren’t we here to keep the city safe?’

The fat guard and the one with the skinny limbs looked at Surn and then at each other, and then they laughed. The fat guard laughed so hard that he had to put his hands flat on his knees so as not to over-balance, and he stood like that for several long moments, laughing deep and soundlessly in his throat.

The boss, though not inclined to work harder than was absolutely necessary, did not join in with the merriment.

‘What do you think we should do?’ he asked Surn.

‘We didn’t stop them,’ said Surn, ‘so we didn’t do our job. Did we?’

‘Supposing we had stopped them?’ asked the boss. ‘What then?’

‘We might have found a reason to turn them away,’ said Surn.

‘We might,’ said the boss, ‘and we might not. If we’d found a reason to turn them away, and they’d decided not to leave, what then?’

‘Then we’d have driven them off,’ said Surn. ‘After all, it was just three blokes and a cart, and we’re armed and trained.’

The fat guard bent low over his knees, his face crimson with mirth.

‘They might have passed muster,’ said the boss.

‘Then at least we would have done our duty,’ said Surn.

‘You think we neglected our duty?’ asked the boss. ‘That’s a serious allegation.’

‘I do,’ said Surn, ‘but can’t we put it right?’

‘How can we put it right and fully man the gate?’ asked the boss. ‘Traffic has been light, but the sun is rising steadily, and there are bound to be more pedestrians and more wagons and carts to check and clear. It could be a long day. Is it wise to begin at a disadvantage?’

‘Three men can easily man the gate,’ said Surn. ‘There’re only ever three guards on this gate, except when there’s a trainee.’

‘But you’re the trainee,’ said the skinny limbed guard. ‘You’re the guard we can manage without.’

‘Then I shall volunteer,’ said Surn, standing tall, puffing out his chest, and resting his hand on the hilt of his stiletto blade.

‘Volunteer for what?’ asked the boss. ‘No one asked for a volunteer for anything.’

‘I volunteer to shadow the three blokes and their cart. I volunteer to watch them, to see where they are going and what they are doing. I volunteer to keep a close eye on them at all times and to report to the city guard if they transgress or circumvent any civil or criminal laws.’

The fat guard, his hands on his knees, and his head so low that all anyone could see of him was the puce bald spot on the crown of his head, rocked gently with his silent laughter.

‘Since you put it like that,’ said the boss, with a wry smile, ‘you have my permission, for one shift only, to monitor said vehicle, and you may report back to me at the end of the allotted time.’

Beaming, Surn bowed slightly to the bemused boss, and ducked quickly through the city gate, hugging the wall, making himself as inconspicuous as he possibly could while drawing far too much attention to himself simply by moving as no one else was likely to in a month of Sundays. He could have sauntered or wandered through the gate and gone unnoticed, but he skulked; he bobbed and wove, and he sneaked and insinuated. If anyone had been within a hundred yards of him, he would surely have drawn their gazes, but nobody was within a hundred yards of him on the outside of the city wall, except for his fellow guardsmen, and anyone within a hundred yards of him on the inside of the city wall was not within sight of him as he wedged himself into the corners and crevices between buildings, and skulked in the alleys and byways that had no windows looking onto them.

‘Well that saves us finding errands for the boy to run, today,’ said the skinny limbed guard.

‘Don’t think it saves you from doing your job, mind,’ said the boss, ‘just because the best of our conscience is absent.’

‘He’s not absent,’ said the fat guard, looking up for the first time in several minutes, ‘he’s on a mission.’

The horses were tended to and everyone else was fed by Gianna, who was beginning to think of the elves and the old man as a sort of surrogate family. No group of men had ever kept her company for so long, nor been so polite as this one was, and, besides, they’d kept her father occupied and out of her hair for several hours in a row. It didn’t seem to matter to her that she hadn’t slept and she’d barely rested. She’d been treated with nothing but respect, and it was all she’d ever longed for.

As they finished their breakfast, Fithvael pointed up the staircase.

‘Who carved the newel posts for the stairs?’ he asked Gianna, as if it were an idle enough question.

‘What’s a newel post?’ asked Gianna.

‘It’s a hundred years old,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘this little room, or two hundred, perhaps. You forget how short our human lives are, elf.’

‘So you don’t know who carved the wood for the tavern?’ asked Fithvael.

‘Know them?’ asked Gianna. ‘Only that they were ancestors. ‘Six generations... No... Seven. How does it work? Six greats. My six greats-grandad was the first tavern keeper here. Well, not here. His first tavern was a hole in the wall, a shack, a shanty, but it was right on this spot. It was on the outskirts of the city, then, a backwater. He had this place built when my five greats-grandad joined the family business. They needed a cellar for brewing by then. That’s when they did the upstairs.

‘Not much more than a hundred years, then’ said Mondelblatt.

‘Nine generations,’ said Fithvael, ‘in a hundred years. Isn’t that a lot, even for humans?’

‘Something over a hundred years, or so,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘How old are you girl?’ he asked, catching Gianna lightly by the hand.

‘Old enough,’ said Gianna.

‘It’s not a trick,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘just an innocent question.’

‘Fourteen,’ said Gianna, flushing slightly.

‘How old’s your father?’ asked Mondelblatt.

‘Don’t know,’ said Gianna. ‘Don’t care. Old.’

‘Your mother?’ asked Mondelblatt.

‘Died when she was twenty,’ said Gianna.

‘Poor child,’ said Fithvael, ‘not to remember your mother.’

‘I remember her very well,’ said Gianna. ‘Why wouldn’t I? I was nearly seven when she died of the scarlet fever, and my brothers and sisters with her.’

‘You don’t have children?’ asked Mondelblatt.

‘Not all the time I can shift my arse fast enough not to get caught, I don’t,’ said Gianna, matter-of-fact and not ill-humoured.

‘Academically speaking,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘we measure a city generation in the Empire in fifteen year increments. Nine generations makes one hundred and thirty-five years; closer to a hundred years than two.’

‘Where were you one hundred and thirty-five years ago, te Tuin?’ asked Fithvael.

The elves eyes met, neither one needing a reminder of where they had been together, and what they had endured during their decades of questing and adventuring. Time was nothing to them. They felt things as deeply now as they had five decades ago, or eight or twelve. Time changed nothing.

Gianna laughed a nervous laugh, but stopped when she saw the expressions on the elves’ faces.

‘Strange ain’t they?’ she said, changing the subject and breaking the spell. ‘I can’t say I ever noticed them before.’ She stepped over to the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and ran her hand over the carvings in the wood with their hundred or so years of wear and patina.

‘That’s local,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘religious, Sigmarite. It’s a ward of sorts, not common now, but brought in from the countryside, from the superstitions of the innocent folk coming to the city and changing their fortunes for better or worse, but forever. That’s the one, though, higher up,’ he said, craning his neck and pointing towards the top up the staircase.

Gianna skipped up the steps to examine what was carved there. She ran her hand over it and peered at it. Then she traced the edges of it with a finger.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it’s been here my whole life and I’ve never looked at it before.’

‘Humans aren’t subtle creatures,’ said Gilead, ‘but not to know your surroundings is crass even by the standards of your own species.’

‘Don’t berate the child,’ said Fithvael, rising from his seat at the table and following Gianna up the stairs.

‘Let me see, child, what is it?’ he asked.

‘I’ve never seen its like,’ said Gianna, tracing its edges with her fingertips.

‘I know what it is,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘and I can show you where there’s another like it, and then another, and a hundred more in Nuln, and then I can show you other things just as odd, and just as portentous.’

‘It’s a portent?’ asked Gianna, her eyes widening in her startled face and her hand snatching away from the carving as if it could somehow do her harm.

‘Everything is a portent,’ said Fithvael, trying to placate the scared child. ‘A portent is a useful thing. Without them we wouldn’t know what to fear or guard against.’

The elf looked at the carving and turned to Gilead.

‘It is what you described,’ he said. ‘It is what you saw below the ground, in the Rat King’s lair. It was in your vision.’

‘The beetle,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘One of the myriad. You saw an oil slick of throbbing wing cases, and you heard the clacking of carapaces and the clicking of exoskeletons. The air thrummed with them, if I am not mistaken.’

‘It’s a bug?’ asked Gianna. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it in these parts, not in Nuln, not ever.’

‘They’re not from around here,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘You’d have to travel south for many a day to find such a creature, or any of his cousins. You’d have to travel into the very heart of the dead lands of the deserts.’

‘What’s deserts?’

‘Empty places where nothing green grows, where there is no rain, only the heat of the day and the cold of the night, only the sun or the moons. Empty skies where there are no clouds, and where, if the air moves, it takes the sand with it. Empty places where there is nothing but sand in all its incarnations, where there is nothing but dry dust and death and heat and sand.’

‘And bugs,’ said Gianna.

‘And bugs,’ said Mondelblatt, snapping out of his odd reverie.

‘Why is it here, then?’ asked Gianna, ‘if it doesn’t belong?’

‘They were here before,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I knew that they would return. I knew, when the plagues came, and I expanded my studies; I knew when I transcribed the language of their symbols; I knew when you told me of the artifacts you had seen; I knew that they would come back; I knew that they would seek to change the Empire forever. All this, I knew.’

‘What don’t you know, old man?’ asked Gilead. ‘Why do you hesitate?’

‘I am sure, only now,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘why you were sent to me.’

‘I was not sent,’ said Gilead. ‘I came to you for answers. I came because you are the only man I know who might be able to explain what I experienced, what it means, and how it relates to the plague. I do not trust you. I do not truly believe that you have the answers, but I had to try. My people too, are dying.’

‘I do not have the answers,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I do not have the answers, and yet, I do have the answers.’

‘Riddle us no riddles, old man,’ said Fithvael. ‘You’re frightening the girl.’

‘It is simple,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘The answer stands before you. Or rather, he sits. Gilead te Tuin Tor Anrok is the answer.’

‘Then you had better tell us what the question is,’ said Fithvael.

The cart rolled soundlessly over the cobbles in the backstreets of Nuln, save for the low shushing of sand displacing beneath its wheels. The figures propelling the vehicle along its course bowed their heads and shuffled their linen-covered feet, driven by their master. His hood shrouded his face, but he adjusted it, once or twice, with bandaged hands so that he could tip his head back or tilt it to one side and peer up at an eave or mullion, or down at a foundation stone or a curb. He saw what he was looking for everywhere, and he followed where the carved symbols and hieroglyphs led.

For the first half a mile, as they wove a way into the southern quarters of the walled city, the trio encountered no one. They skirted the slums of the Faulestadt region, and the small-scale industrial areas that were little occupied in these times of strife. The tanneries were all but abandoned, since few cattle had survived the plague, and those that remained were too valuable for their milk to be stripped of their leather. The same applied to the hardy goats, which had faired a little better than their bovine cousins. One or two leather workers managed to eke out their trade by repurposing old leather goods, turning worn wineskins into satchels and old saddle leather into sheaths and scabbards, but much of the district was deserted.

On the corner of Aver Street, as the cart turned towards the docklands and the Great Bridge, a child, sitting on a curbstone, chewing at a stub of meat that his grandmother had dried three winters since, (being a wise woman of old, country habits), heard an odd shushing sound, and turned his head. The wheels of the wagon passed inches from his feet, spraying a wake of fine sand over them, the grit reaching his face and the tough, sinewy morsel in his hand.

The child breathed in as the cart drew away, only to find that he could not breathe out. His hand spasmed as he panicked, and he dropped the precious scrap of meat, which landed in a pool of sand at his feet. He reached for his throat and tried to cough. Then he tried to wretch. His fingers felt hard and bony against the flesh of his throat, and then the skin of his neck felt dry and papery under his petrified hands. His eyes widened, and were too dry for him to be able to blink closed again. His gums receded in an instant, his teeth looking like pegs in the face of a dried-up old corpse. He did not slump or sag. He simply fell, sideways. There was no softness left in his body, all the suppleness had been sucked out of him, dried up, desiccated. His clothes hung off his dead body, a body that looked as if it had perished a thousand years before and had been locked in a dry, airless vault for all eternity.

No one knew the child. No one claimed the corpse. It was an abomination. Its mother didn’t recognise it, though she hunted for days for her lost son.

A rumour soon spread about the tiny, papery corpse. The local people whispered speculation about the course the plague must now be taking, but they did so in hushed tones, not wanting to believe that such a terrible fate might befall them. Better to live with the everyday inconveniences heaped one upon another over the years since the plague had begun to spread across the Empire, and better to ignore the atrocities that no one understood or could adequately explain.

The religious prayed, and the superstitious touched their talismans of good fortune, and all turned their backs on others’ misfortunes, grateful that the worst had befallen someone else.

That was how the cart passed unnoticed through the poorer districts of Nuln. It passed unnoticed because it was safer not to heed its existence. The city-folk of Nuln kept themselves to themselves, turning away, even from their neighbours and cousins, when there was nothing left to believe in and no one left to trust.

No one but Surn Strallan took any note of the cart with its figures of burden pushing it through the narrow streets, or its guide looking for a path to follow. The vehicle was distinctive and easy to spot at a junction of streets from more than a hundred yards away. Strallan did not want to get close. The sand bothered him. Where was the sand coming from? There was no sand in Nuln. There was dirt and filth and cobbles and hard-packed earth, and, when the river was low there was the clay and silt of the exposed mudflats, but there was no sand.

Strallan ducked and wove, running ahead to a cross street, so that he could sit on a curbstone and watch the cart coming towards him. He sat facing the cart, looking between its wheels at the street beneath. There was no sight of any sand trickling from one of the vessels on the back of the wagon. There was no sign of a sack of sand that might have been punctured. There was no sign of a barrel, or even a wineskin that might have been filled with the stuff. And yet, as the wheels turned they ground into sand, cutting through it and spreading a wake of it behind them. Sand collected in the gutters of the streets of Nuln, and against the curbstones.

Surn Strallan wondered, if he had brushed it all up and collected it in a sack, just how much sand he would have, and reckoned, after following the cart for an hour, that it would be too much sand for one man to carry on his back.

As the cart approached him, Strallan hopped back to his feet and ducked down another alley, winding a path north, parallel to Aver Street. He was sure that the vehicle was heading towards the bridge, and planned to reach it first. Sometimes, it’s better to follow from in front.

He turned his head to the right as he heard a strange intake of breath, and he almost fell over an old man, tapping his way along the narrow, uneven pavement, with a stick that was so tall he had to hold it a third of the way down its length.

‘I’ve never seen such a terrible thing,’ said the old man, to no one in particular, ‘and I hope I never shall again. Such a strange creature, such a peculiar sight.’

‘What was it, old man?’ asked Surn. ‘What did you see?’

He looked out past the old man’s shoulder and saw the cart rumbling towards him, towards the bridge.

‘The body of I don’t know what, an ancient child corpse, or a shrunken thing, wrinkled and weathered, and older than time, lying on its side in the gutter. How did such a thing come to be there? What will the plague bring to our doors next?’

Strallan shuddered, but did not answer the old man, who wasn’t looking at him, and hadn’t really been talking to him in any case; he’d simply needed to say what was on his mind, and the boy happened to offer a convenient ear.

‘What will the plague bring, indeed?’ asked Strallan, ducking out of the old man’s path and onto the southern docks as the cart approached within ten or a dozen yards of his position.

‘When will it come?’ asked Fithvael. ‘What form will it take? How will we know the evil when it arrives in Nuln?’

‘I do not know,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I do not know, and I do not know. Gilead is here, and that is enough. If the elf is here, the other will come, and when it comes, Gilead will find it and destroy it.’

‘You know where to look,’ said Gilead. ‘I am not the answer. The answers are to be found in your texts and scholarly works. If you have become the professor that you claim to be, if you stopped lying and began to earn the career and the reputation that you stole and cheated for, then you must know where to find the answers. You must know what references will lead you to the key to this plague, and to unravelling the mysteries that surround it.’

Gilead rose from his chair and gestured to Fithvael.

‘We leave for the university,’ he said.

‘All of us?’ asked Gianna.

‘Stay here,’ said Fithvael, kindly. ‘Keep this place locked and safe for us to return to, feed your father and rest awhile, and we will return.’

‘Promise nothing,’ Gilead told his old companion, sternly.

‘We will return,’ said Fithvael, looking directly at Gianna.

She tugged free the cloth that hung from her apron string and wrapped it tightly around the remains of the black bread and cheese rind on the table, and she stoppered a half-full jug of ale.

‘There’s nothing to eat at the university. The students are all so thin. Take this,’ she said, ‘and you’ll have to come back to return the cloth and the jug.

Fithvael took them from her, and smiled. Mondelblatt stood awkwardly, and then sat down again, heavily. He had been sitting for several hours, and, while he did not need a very great deal of sleep, staying in one position for any length of time rather seized up his joints.

Fithvael stepped in and took the old man’s arm, as Mondelblatt planted his stick more firmly between the flags and made a second, more successful attempt to rise.

‘Perhaps we should take the palfrey, after all,’ said Fithvael.

‘No,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘if anyone should see me riding into the university the staff will begin to whisper, and once the gossip starts, the city will be agog. Besides, someone must cover a great deal of ground in the city, mapping the signs.’

‘The bugs,’ said Gianna.

‘We cannot send Laban,’ said Gilead. ‘The boy is far too conspicuous.’

‘I think he has learnt his lesson,’ said Fithvael. ‘He seeks only to do his master’s bidding, and his master is nothing if not demanding.’

Gilead said nothing.

‘Or, I could do it, if you prefer,’ said Fithvael.

‘I do,’ said Gilead.

‘What am I to look for, old man?’ asked Fithvael.

Mondelblatt sniggered slightly, and Fithvael frowned at him.

‘You called me old,’ said the professor, ‘and yet you must be three times my age.’

‘Older than that,’ said Fithvael, ‘but only by comparison to your race.’

‘Older than that, and wiser too,’ said Mondelblatt. He was rummaging around in the deep pockets of the academic gown that he wore, and soon pulled out the stub of a pencil and a notebook made of ancient, woven paper, stitched together at the spine.

‘Sit for a moment,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘My skills as a draughtsman are rudimentary, at best, but I shall do my best to convey the shapes of the sigils that you are looking for. Mark them as accurately as you can on a map that you must buy from the man, I don’t recall his name, halfway down Eyk’s End, the green, windowless doorway. No one makes a better map, and precision will make all the difference.’

Gilead nodded at Fithvael, who pulled his hood up over his head, lowered his knees and dropped his shoulders so that he was suddenly a foot shorter and more rounded of form than he naturally was. He would have little trouble passing for a man, especially in a city where everyone was afraid of what they might see if they chose to take notice of anything. He ducked out of the tavern, tucking Mondelblatt’s notebook between the fastenings of his jerkin.

Within a very few minutes, he was steering the palfrey through the byways of the waking city, east towards Eyk’s End and the North Gate, to begin his task.

Gianna brought Laban back into the tavern as Gilead lifted his hood and dropped his knees and shoulders. The elf boy was already standing low, almost stooping. He fit easily under the height of the beams now, and had clearly taken his mistakes to heart. Gilead looked at him, and Laban dropped his eyes to the floor.

‘You will escort the professor,’ said Gilead. ‘Allow the old man to lead you back to the university. Do his bidding, but remain at his side.’

‘Where will you be, cousin?’ asked Laban.

‘Everywhere,’ said Gilead. ‘Sometimes before you, and sometimes beside you, sometimes to your right and sometimes your left. I will always have you in my sights. I will always be able to see and hear you, even if you cannot detect my presence. Go undetected, Laban te Tuin.’

‘You talk as if it is not safe,’ said Laban.

‘Do you know that it is?’ asked Gilead.

‘You know better than I do,’ said Laban, bowing his head a little further, aware of his earlier transgressions.

‘If I raise the alarm, shield Professor Mondelblatt and, if you are able and it is safe, return here,’ said Gilead.

‘If I am not able?’ asked Laban.

‘The professor will know what to do,’ said Gilead as he and the old man exchanged a long look. ‘At all and any cost, keep Mondelblatt safe. Our task is great, so great that we cannot fully understand it. Much as it pains me, I fear we need the professor and his knowledge if we are to prevent the demise of our race.’

‘You’ll do more than save your family, Gilead,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘You’ll save the Empire.’

‘Raise not your hopes, old man,’ said Gilead. ‘You must know that when it came time to save my family, I was found wanting. When it came time to save my brother, I failed. With everything to lose, I lost it all.

‘Your only hope, old man, is that loss means nothing to me.’

LET THE GREAT AXE FALL

Part Two

Graham McNeill

When Cuthwin awoke, it was as though he’d spent the night in a warm bed with one of Aelfwin’s Night Maidens. His limbs felt refreshed and his head was as clear as a winter’s morning. He rolled from his blanket and stretched, sitting upright with a bemused grin on his face as he saw the rest of their company felt a similar sense of wellbeing. Teon and Gorseth set off to gather fresh kindling for the fires, but the smile fell from Cuthwin’s face as he saw the churned ground all around them, hundreds of footsteps in the earth and scraped claw marks on the rock. Cuthwin leapt to his feet and snatched his sword from its scabbard as he saw more and more signs of a sizeable warhost’s passing. Even the men with little in the way of woodsman’s skills could hardly fail to notice the imprint of so many feet, and voices were raised in confusion at the sight of the tracks.

‘What happened here?’ asked Wenyld, kneeling beside a clawed footprint.

‘We slept through the night,’ said Leodan, scanning the path that led up the mountain.

‘What in the name of Ulric’s balls was in that drink?’ demanded Cuthwin. ‘We could have been killed!’

Leodan shook his head. ‘Nothing that shouldn’t have been. It’s just burned water rakia.’

‘Damn it, Leodan, you could have killed us,’ snarled Wenyld. ‘You might have a death wish, but don’t drag us down with you.’

The Taleuten horseman gripped the hilt of his knife, and for a moment Cuthwin thought he might actually draw it.

‘Talk sense, man,’ said Leodan. ‘If I’d put us out with strong drink then we’d all be dead.’

Despite his anger, Wenyld saw the logic of what Leodan was saying, and nodded curtly, turning to Cuthwin with a mute appeal for an explanation. Cuthwin had none to give him; he couldn’t tell how many had passed in the night, nor, for that matter, could he imagine how they hadn’t all been woken or killed. He tried to move carefully around the tracks, but it was impossible to step on any patch of ground that hadn’t been tramped flat by the passage of uncounted feet.

‘This makes no sense,’ he said. ‘Why aren’t we dead?’

Cuthwin gave up trying to decipher the tracks and looked up as he heard voices raised in anger from farther along the path. He saw Sigmar making calming gestures towards the dwarfs who all looked as though they were ready to start a brawl in a crowded tavern. A hunched figure in a cloak of iridescent feathers stood behind Sigmar, and Cuthwin took an instant dislike to the man, though he could not say why.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Looks like trouble.’

Wenyld and Leodan followed Cuthwin as he made his way to the ugly scene brewing between Sigmar and the dwarfs. Even before he reached Sigmar’s side, he heard words like necromancer and daemonspawn. It didn’t take any great leap of imagination to know that these words were being directed at the man in the cloak of raven feathers. As Cuthwin approached, the man turned to look at him, and the huntsman felt acutely uncomfortable, as though all his secrets were laid bare. He looked away, standing just behind Sigmar as Master Alaric glowered in fury.

‘We will not march with this warlock at our side,’ said the dwarf, his hand of flesh and blood curled tightly around his axe, his bronze one clenched in a fist.

‘But for Bransùil we would all be dead,’ said Sigmar.

‘Or enslaved in one of the rat things’ hell-pits,’ said the raven-cloaked man, clearly the Bransùil of whom Sigmar spoke. ‘Which, trust me, would be far worse.’

‘Shut your mouth, daemonkin!’ roared Alaric, hefting his axe meaningfully.

Sigmar raised his hands. ‘Alaric, this man saved your life. Now calm down and put up your weapon before you dishonour yourself.’

Alaric glared at Sigmar, and only the oaths they had sworn kept him from violence. Cuthwin knew how seriously dwarfs took their oaths, and by voicing how close Alaric was to breaking his, Sigmar had shamed him into backing down. But it had cost Sigmar greatly to invoke the power of his oath, and even Cuthwin could see that Alaric was cut deeply.

Alaric lowered his axe and calmed his raging temper with shuddering breaths.

‘Aye, so be it, Sigmar,’ said Alaric with a disappointed sigh. ‘While we march together in these mountains I’ll not harm this one, but if he ever works his sorceries on me or my warriors again, my axe will have his head off his shoulders so fast, he’ll walk ten paces before he knows he’s dead.’

‘You have my word he will not,’ said Sigmar, turning to face the cloaked man. ‘Swear it.’

Bransùil sneered, as though unused to being given such commands, but he nodded and gave an awkward bow to the Emperor. ‘So be it, I shall not work my magics upon the sons of Grungni again. You have my word on it.’

Alaric did not acknowledge Bransùil’s words, but simply turned and set off towards the path leading farther into the mountains.

‘Be ready to march by the time the shadows reach that rock,’ said the dwarf, pointing to a white boulder at the end of the plateau. Looking at the sun’s position, Cuthwin saw that didn’t give them much time. Sigmar saw it too, and let out a deep breath.

‘Cuthwin, Wenyld, get everyone ready to move out,’ said Sigmar.

‘Sire, what just happened here?’ asked Cuthwin. ‘Who is this?’

‘The tracks you see all around us?’ said Sigmar. ‘A host of armoured monsters passed in the night, and this man saved us from them. How, I do not yet know, but that we are alive at all is thanks to him.’

‘I am Bransùil the Aeslandeir,’ said the man, and Cuthwin stiffened at the alien sound of the man’s homeland.

‘You are Norsii?’

‘I was born in the north, yes,’ agreed Bransùil. ‘A student of Kar Odacen, but don’t hold that against me.’

‘We can’t trust his kind,’ said Leodan. ‘You drove the Norsii out for a reason. They hold to the old ways of dark gods and blood sacrifice.’

Wenyld put his hand on the hilt of his knife, and Leodan’s sword slipped an inch from its leather scabbard. Cuthwin saw Bransùil’s eyes glitter with dark amusement, and stepped in front of his bellicose companions.

‘Why are you here?’ asked Cuthwin. ‘And how did you come upon us? I saw no tracks that could belong to you.’

Bransùil smiled. ‘There are paths through this world that not even you can track, Cuthwin, son of Gethwer. Paths that only those with the shealladh can see.’

A chill travelled the length of Cuthwin’s spine and he backed away from the man, making the sign of the protective horns over his heart.

‘He is a warlock!’

‘Warlock, wyrd, galder-smith, sorcerer, seider… I have been called all such things and worse,’ said the man, ruffling the feathers of his black cloak. He grinned, and Cuthwin saw his teeth were a perfect white, like the first snow of winter. No man’s teeth should be as white.

‘We owe him our lives,’ stated Sigmar. ‘And that is a debt we will honour.’

‘He probably saved us for something worse!’ said Wenyld. ‘A sacrifice to his heathen gods!’

Bransùil laughed – a cawing, echoing sound – and said, ‘Wenyld son of Wythhelm, if I desired you dead, you would already be a feast for the scavengers of these mountains.’

Wenyld blanched as the man laughed.

‘Enough,’ said Sigmar. ‘This man is under our protection and you will fight at his side as you would any of your sword-brothers. You understand? Now put up your blades and get ready to move.’

Cuthwin nodded. He didn’t like it, but he understood the debt they owed this man. So many tracks had passed in the night that there was no way they could have lived against such numbers. Sigmar walked past him to where Taalhorsa was hobbled by the edge of the cliff. Cuthwin felt the cloaked man’s gaze upon him and reluctantly turned to face him.

‘You do not need to fear me, Cuthwin, son of Gethwer,’ said the man. ‘Today the sun is bright, the wind is clear and the champion of Kharneth is many leagues ahead of us. Let us bask in what the gods have given us while it is ours to enjoy, eh? I have no doom for you this day, but who knows what tomorrow may bring?’

Wenyld took Cuthwin’s arm and led him away from the grinning warlock.

‘Pay him no mind,’ said Wenyld. ‘His kind are never to be trusted. Even their truth is cloaked in lies.’

Cuthwin nodded, but said nothing as he reached his horse. He would keep an eye on this Bransùil. No good could come of association with those who practised the dark arts. Cuthwin possessed a single arrowhead fashioned from a silver icon of Morr that he’d had blessed by the high priestess of Shallya.

He had been saving the arrow for Krell.

Now he wondered if he would need it to slay a mortal enemy.

Another six days’ travel took them higher and higher into the mountains. Alaric spoke little during that time, aside from advising on the best path for the horses, but Sigmar couldn’t blame him. The dwarfs did not approve of men dabbling in the sorcerous arts, though he would not be drawn on why, save a thinly-veiled barb at the easily corrupted hearts of humankind.

Midmorning on the fourth day of travel saw the hunters pass the snowline, and the weather deteriorated still further. Swirling blizzards halted Sigmar’s warriors on the fifth day, forcing them to find shelter in a winding cave system that had clearly been home to a large beast at some point. The tracks at the cave mouth were a mix of ursine paw and something vaguely birdlike, but paintings on the stone walls spoke of a crude kind of intelligence.

Piles of gnawed bones, some as long as a man’s leg, lay in a rotting pile of discarded trinkets and skulls, some recognisably greenskin, others of a form and shape that none of the hunters could recognise.

‘We shouldn’t stay here,’ said Cuthwin, looking around the stinking interior of the cave. ‘It smells of fresh blood. Whatever lives here brings its kills back to devour. It’s probably out hunting just now, and we don’t want to be here when it comes back.’

‘We don’t have a choice,’ said Sigmar. ‘The storm is too severe. We need shelter.’

‘If the beast returns to its lair, we’ll be trapped.’

‘That’s a chance I’ll take,’ said Leodan, leading his shivering horse into the cave, though it fought him as soon as it caught a whiff of the blood and bones. None of the horses were willing to enter the cave without a struggle, and hauled at their riders as they were dragged inside. Even the prospect of a blizzard seemed preferable to their mounts, and Sigmar wondered if he should take that as a sign.

‘Get some fires going,’ ordered Sigmar. ‘And do it quickly if we’re not to freeze.’

Cuthwin nodded, but before the huntsman could begin to gather up their meagre supply of firewood, Bransùil opened his hands and spoke a muttered word that sounded part exhalation, part violent expulsion. The cave was suddenly filled with light as twin balls of seething orange fire sprang to life in the palms of his hands.

Sigmar was astonished. He had heard that the shamans of the Norsii could command the elements, but had never seen a man perform such a feat before his very eyes. Bransùil flicked his wrists and the two balls of flame fell to the ground, continuing to burn as though sustained by invisible kindling and fuelled by unseen timber. In moments the cavern was comfortably warm, and the ice and snow coating the warriors’ armour and cloaks began to melt.

‘You can summon fire with your power?’ asked Sigmar.

‘I can summon many things,’ replied Bransùil. ‘Fire is but the least of them.’

‘You should not wield great power with such casual ease,’ warned Sigmar. ‘Men will fear you for it.

‘Men already fear me,’ said Bransùil. ‘Most days they are right to, but not today. The fire will warm us and cook our food and keep nearby predators at bay.’

Sigmar nodded and knelt by the nearest of the fires. Its heat was powerful, and soon warmed his frozen limbs. Though initially reluctant to approach these unnatural fires, cold, hunger and Sigmar’s example eventually drove the men to gather around the crackling blazes and prepare the cook pots.

Alaric’s dwarfs took neither heat nor sustenance from the fires, and simply sat at the back of the cave, speaking in their native tongue with low voices and chewing their tough stonebread. It saddened Sigmar that Alaric had reacted with such anger at the presence of the Norsii warlock, but he understood the dwarf’s hostility. His people had lost warriors in the fight against the northern tribes at Middenheim too, and he had no reason to trust Bransùil.

Neither did Sigmar, but necessity made for strange bedfellows.

Steaming bowls were passed around, and the mood thawed along with the ice as the men began to feel more human with hot food in their bellies. Sigmar sat with his warriors around the blaze nearest the cave mouth, and the shimmering flames made the pictograms on the walls dance like drunken revellers on a feast day.

Bransùil accepted a drink from Leodan’s bottle, and Sigmar was surprised at the gesture, for the Taleuten had been the first to draw his blade at the mention of the warlock’s homeland.

Leodan saw his look and said, ‘The man’s not killed us, and now he’s keeping us warm. That’s worth a mouthful of rakia.’

Sigmar accepted that simple logic and nodded.

The talk was slow and forced, each man wary of speaking too freely in the presence of the Norsii. If Bransùil took offence, he hid it well, and simply sat in silence with his hands stretched toward the fire.

‘How far behind Krell do you think we are, Cuthwin?’ asked Sigmar.

Cuthwin rubbed a hand over his face, and Sigmar saw the weariness etched into the man’s features. He remembered Cuthwin as a young boy, catching him sneaking through Reikdorf to spy on his Blood Night, and still found it hard to reconcile the bearded huntsman before him with that cocksure youngster of his memory.

‘Hard to say,’ said Cuthwin. ‘The storm is blowing away the tracks almost as soon as they’re made, but I reckon we’re close.’

‘How can we ever catch such a monster?’ asked Teon. ‘It doesn’t get tired, doesn’t need to sleep and it doesn’t need to stop to eat.’

‘You are wrong, Teon, son of Orvin,’ said Bransùil. ‘It does get tired.’

‘How can that be possible?’ said Gorseth. ‘It’s dead.’

‘How little you know…’ smiled Bransùil. ‘Aye, Kharneth’s champion is dead, and the fiend who brought his damned soul back to life is no more. You saw what happened to the rest of the legion of the dead when your Emperor slew the necromancer, it collapsed to dust and ruin. But Nagash was not the only one with a claim on Krell’s soul. The Blood God, Kharneth, claimed him an age ago and his hold is unbreakable. Krell’s hate and rage give him strength. They sustained him when all others of his kind fell, but even hate has its limits. Even rage cools.’

The Norsii’s eyes glimmered darkly, and Sigmar couldn’t shake the idea that he spoke with admiration for such power.

‘So he’s getting weaker?’ asked Wenyld.

‘Weaker, yes, but still monstrously dangerous,’ agreed Bransùil. ‘To walk in the mortal world for a creature such as Krell requires powerful magic. Dark magic. The invisible energy of tombs and graves, of dark deeds and violent murder. That is why he has come to the Vaults, for the tombs of dead kings throng its weed-choked pathways and gloomy valleys. The darkest of magic can be found here, but without a necromancer to channel it, Krell can only sup crudely from broken barrows. Such magic is finite and old; it fades quickly and his strength is a fraction of what it once was. You will never have a better chance of ending him than you do now.’

‘So he can be destroyed?’ said Sigmar.

‘Of course, nothing in this world is eternal,’ said Bransùil. ‘Not love, not duty, nor – in the end – honour. You know this. When the storm breaks on the morrow, we must travel high to the edge of a vast crater, the site of an ancient starfall that not even the sons of Grungni know, wherein lie the ruins a lost city. An outpost built in the name of a forgotten conqueror from the Land of the Dead. Built to serve an eternal empire, it was destroyed within a hundred years, and passed from living memory. At the heart of the city lies the tomb of its mightiest general, a warrior whose deathly energies Krell will drain to restore his power, perhaps even enhance it. The wards around the tomb are strong, and not even a being as powerful as Krell can break them easily. But he will break them given time.’

‘Then we must stop him before he reaches this city,’ said Sigmar.

‘You cannot stop him, he is already there,’ answered Bransùil.

Despite the threat of the beast whose lair they were currently inhabiting returning, Sigmar’s warriors passed a restful night, and awoke warmed by Bransùil’s fires that surged back to life with the dawn. The storm had passed in the night, and the day was bright, with a thin powder of snow draping the path into the toothed summits. Sigmar stood at the mouth of the cave, staring out over the mountainscape around him. Such titanic peaks dwarfed the achievements of men, and they would outlast any great deed he might hope to perform.

The city they were to travel to this morning was proof enough of that.

Bransùil had spoken of an immortal god-emperor known as Settra, a being whose armies and war-fleets had once nearly conquered the world. His reign was to have lasted until the end of time, but, like all mortal men, Settra had died and his empire had faded into forgotten myth. What did it matter how many lands a ruler conquered or how many people offered him fealty if he would eventually die? Lesser men would come after him, and all that he had built would decay until nothing remained.

Sigmar knew he was being vain and morbid, but the thought that all he had built and shed blood to create would be lost after his death troubled him deeply. He did not desire immortality as Settra was said to have done, but nor did he want his achievements to pass into legend, a tale of pride and hubris told at the fireside by old men and saga-poets.

Alaric emerged from the cave and gave Sigmar a respectful nod.

‘I’ve been thinking about what you were saying, old friend,’ said Sigmar. ‘About the mountains.’

‘What about them?’

‘Looking at them from up here makes a man feel small,’ said Sigmar. ‘I realise now that we’re all very small in a very big world.’

‘Some men are bigger than others.’

‘Some dwarfs are bigger than others.’

Alaric grunted in amusement. ‘You and I are oath-sworn, Sigmar, and nothing will ever change that, but you would do well to hurl that warlock from the cliffs and be done with him.’

‘He’d probably spread that feathered cloak of his and fly off.’

‘I’m serious,’ said Alaric. ‘Nothing good will come of keeping him close, mark my words.’

‘I’m not a fool, Alaric,’ replied Sigmar. ‘I know his arts are not to be trusted, but for now his purpose and our purpose are united.’

‘You do not know his purpose, it would be unwise to think you do.’

‘Very well, then I will say that our purposes appear to be united,’ said Sigmar. ‘And that will have to be enough. Bransùil has power, and to fight something that bears the mark of the Blood God, we will need that power.’

‘Aye, like as not,’ agreed Alaric. ‘But I still don’t like it.’

It took the morning and the better part of the afternoon to climb to the edge of the crater Bransùil had spoken of. Though the landscape all around was shawled in snow, the steep-sided rock of the crater’s rim was bare and black. The pale glitter-threaded rock they had become familiar with over the last week gave way to the glossy stone more commonly found where mountains erupted with fire and smoke. Even the thin scrub with which they had rubbed the horses and bulked out their grain began to thin. The air took on a grainy quality, as though invisible dust hazed the atmosphere, and when Sigmar dismounted to touch the snowless rock he found it was warm.

The lip of the crater was hundreds of feet above them, almost as tall as the Fauschlag Rock, and Sigmar could see no obvious paths. Alaric led the way, unerringly finding hidden defiles and stepped grabens that afforded access to the upper slopes. The climb was exhausting, and by the time their hunting party had led their mounts to the top, both men and horses were breathing hard and lathered in sweat.

Sigmar saw Alaric and his dwarfs standing silhouetted at the lip of the crater, looking vaguely frustrated at the laboured progress of the men behind them. His breathing came in shallow gasps, and he found it hard to take a breath, far harder than it should have been.

‘Breathe slowly,’ said Alaric. ‘The air is thin up here, and you manlings don’t do well at such heights.’

‘I thought dwarfs were all about depths, not heights,’ said Sigmar.

‘Dwarfs cope well with any extremes,’ said Alaric, without any hint of irony.

Sigmar nodded as he climbed the last ridge of the crater and stared down into the ruins of what had once been an outpost of a dead empire. What little was left of his breath was snatched away in wonder.

A vast hollow had been gouged from the mountain by the ancient starfall, a wide, steep-sided depression thousands of feet in diameter and hundreds deep. A dozen towering waterfalls spilled into the crater on its far side through a naturally formed dam of compressed rock, and glittering rainbows arced over the ruins of a great city of black stone. Tall towers and giant temples with golden domes and great needles of tapered silver vied for space with grand palaces and ornate castles, with each building Sigmar’s eyes fell upon grander than the last. Great lakes formed in what had once been pleasure gardens and rivers flowed along proud avenues before vanishing into abyssal cracks torn through the base of the crater.

Sigmar saw the city was built to an ingenious design: its streets were arranged in concentric rings, with every thoroughfare cutting through its circular geometry angled towards the building at the city’s heart. A vast temple, stepped and constructed of angular blocks of a pale stone that even Sigmar could tell had not been hewn from these mountains. Ornamented beyond all reason, its pillars were topped with great carven lions, its portals flanked by wide processionals of beasts that merged human and animal anatomies.

A great road, easily wide enough to accommodate a column of marching men wound down to the city along the inner face of the crater, and Sigmar wondered what had happened to the road on its outer face.

Bransùil strode to the crater’s lip, his eyes dark and peering into forbidden places where no man’s gaze ought to penetrate.

‘You must hurry,’ he said. ‘The last ward is collapsing.’

Sigmar rode at the head of his warriors, each man galvanised by the thought of finally cornering the monster they had sought for so long. The road into the crater was smooth and led onto one of the main avenues that encircled the palace at its heart. It was a simple matter to navigate the city, for its sacred geometries were necessarily simple.

The city’s architecture had been impressive from above, but seen up close it was doubly so. The buildings were of a heroic scale unknown among the lands of the Empire, and Sigmar vowed that his realm would soon boast such monumental structures. Though thousands of years or more had passed since their builders had raised them, Sigmar saw each building was still as sound as they day it had been completed. Only those structures that had suffered at the hands of earthquakes or the eroding effects of the water had suffered the ignominy of collapse.

Leodan rode at his left, Wenyld to his right with Sigmar’s banner held high.

Cuthwin, Teon and Gorseth rode behind him, with the dwarfs split into two groups that jogged with an unflagging pace to either side of the riders. Bransùil rode with Gorseth, who, as the youngest warrior in their group, had been appointed the unwelcome task of bearing the warlock on his mount. Sigmar kept the horses at a brisk walk, knowing he might have need of their fleetness later. The mood of Sigmar’s warriors was grim but eager, as much at the thought that they would soon be able to return home as defeating Krell.

Twice they were forced to take detours as they came upon blocked streets that had not been obvious from above or found swollen rivers of ice-cold water that were too deep to ford. Yet the precision of the street plan allowed them to navigate their way to the centre of the city without difficulty. A fallen stone needle afforded a crossing of one fast-flowing river and the swift application of dwarf hammers broke open a way that was previously blocked.

Before long, Sigmar found himself riding along the grand, statue-lined processional that led to the great mausoleum temple. The statues were part man, part animal, but not in the monstrously melded way of the beasts that dwelled in the Empire’s forests. These creatures looked constructed, as though they had been bred or shaped with deliberate intent. The idea that anyone would breed such monsters was anathema to Sigmar, and he found himself glad that this Settra’s empire had passed from history.

‘This is the place,’ he said. He could feel the strange wash of dark breath that gusted from inside. The part of him that had passed through the Flame of Ulric felt the emanations of dark magic from the temple, and Sigmar recoiled as he sensed a connection between that power and this. To think that Ulric’s power shared even a passing kinship with such evil unsettled him greatly.

The portal that led within was easily wide enough to allow his warriors access without breaking formation, but Sigmar ordered a halt as they reached the edge of the darkness that lay within. Sigmar twisted in his saddle to look up at the edge of the cliffs encircling the city as he felt a sudden chill on the back of his neck, as though a cold northern wind had brushed past him. He felt as though someone were watching him, but it was not an uncomfortable sensation or a threatening one.

‘Something wrong?’ asked Leodan.

‘No,’ said Sigmar.

‘We must hurry,’ said Bransùil. ‘Krell’s strength is growing even as we wait.’

Torches and lanterns were broken out of packs, and tinderboxes sparked to ignite the oil-soaked brushes and wicks. With light to guide them, Sigmar’s warriors rode into the temple with greater urgency, the stone carvings of its walls glittering with embedded jewels and gold relief. Sigmar saw the dwarfs’ entire demeanour change at the sight of so much ancient gold.

The passage was wide and high, and Sigmar could imagine the great cortege that had accompanied the dead general as he made his way to his final resting place. To this vanished culture, death was something to be venerated.

Cuthwin rode alongside Sigmar and said, ‘I’ve heard that the tombs of the old kings were full of traps. Shouldn’t we ride with more care?’

Sigmar shook his head. ‘Any traps will have been triggered by Krell.’

He didn’t need to add, I hope.

The air of the temple was charged with a subtle vibration, and Sigmar could feel the wards sealing the tomb at the heart of this structure were close to breaking. From somewhere far ahead, he could hear the thunderous booming of enormous impacts. A terrible roar of howling anger echoed from the walls, and Sigmar felt the same fear he had known when facing the dread necromancer himself. He had fought great beasts, creatures of nightmare, daemons and devotees of the Dark Gods, but this fear touched the very mortality of every man, and exposed his worst terrors. Sigmar loosened the haft of Ghal-maraz and swung his glittering warhammer in looping arcs at his side.

The passage opened into a vast, vaulted chamber of dark stone and soaring statuary depicting ancient gods whose names had been lost and great kings whose deeds had been forgotten. Its roof enclosed an immense space of dusty gloom, pierced in numerous places to allow beams of dim, moon-shot twilight to illuminate its grand void.

At the centre of the space stood a great sarcophagus on a golden bier, surrounded by piles of skeletal warriors in armour of gold, silver and jade. They had been smashed to pieces by the fury of the red-armoured giant that stood before the sarcophagus with its great axe rising and falling like a butcher cleaving a carcass in two. Wisps of dark magic flowed like poisonous fog from the cracks in the imperishable substance of the sarcophagus, and Sigmar knew the last ward was on the verge of being broken. Even without further blows from Krell’s axe, it had suffered too much damage and was beginning to unravel by itself.

Krell’s bulk was enormous, taller by a yard than the Berserker King of the Thuringians and broader than even the troll Sigmar had fought at Black Fire.

Plates of armour beaten into shape from a metal known only to a far distant world encased Krell’s body, embossed with skull sigils that writhed in anger and howled in unending rage. Blood dripped from every skull-faced rivet and stained every link of mail that hung in tattered strips from exposed joints. Splayed bone horns jutted from his helm, and Sigmar saw that great portions of the champion of death’s armour had been blasted clear or hung from his frame in broken fragments.

The sight would have been pitiful were it not for the vast shanks of dried meat and yellowed bone that jutted from the wounds torn through Krell’s armour. The blood that coated his armour and dripped from his gauntlets was not his own, but an unending stream from the skulls taken in the name of his hellish master.

‘Krell!’ bellowed Alaric. ‘I name thee Grudged.’

The giant champion of the dead and slaughter turned at the sound of the name he had borne in life and let loose a fearsome roar. Beneath its shattered visor, the monster’s face was a fleshless nightmare of yellowed bone and grey flesh. A hideous emerald glow burned in one eye socket, and its lambent light promised only death.

The grinning skull leered at them, as though remembering those who had escaped its axe once, but who would not do so again. Sigmar felt the cold dread of this monster, the terror that leeched from its dead bones and sapped the courage of all who stood before him.

But these were men of Reikdorf who had faced an army of the dead, men who were commanded by the very warrior who had smashed the great necromancer to dust. They fought beside dwarfs who had stood against Krell and lived, who were led by the greatest runesmith of Karaz-a-Karak.

But most powerful of all, they were dwarfs who bore a mighty grudge.

Krell swung his mighty axe around, a weapon stained black as midnight by the blood of a million victims, and the powerful reek of its murders filled the dusty tomb. Krell had no voice, but a throbbing bass rumble, like a dreadful mockery of a heartbeat boomed with every step he took.

‘Any thoughts as to how we’re going to do this?’ asked Alaric.

‘With horse and speed and strength!’ shouted Sigmar, raking back his spurs and urging Taalhorsa to a gallop. His riders followed him with a wild yell, Leodan with his lance lowered and Wenyld with Sigmar’s banner aloft. It was a wild charge, with none of the grace or elegance of the Taleuten Red Scythes or the wild passion of the Ostagoth Eagle Wings, but it had power and it had Sigmar.

And it had Ghal-maraz.

Driven by anger, driven by shame, or driven by guilt, Leodan was the first to reach Krell.

He thrust his lance into the very heart of the undead champion’s chest as though driven by the hand of Ulric himself. The cold iron tip punched through the red-stained metal as the wooden haft of the lance splintered into fragments with the force of the impact. Krell didn’t so much as stagger, and the Taleuten kicked his boots free of his stirrups as Krell’s axe slashed down with awesome force.

The enormous blade clove Leodan’s horse in two through the saddle, and an ocean of blood flooded from the shrieking creature’s body as it fell. Leodan rolled to his feet, his sword already in his hand, as the rest of Sigmar’s riders hit home. Heavy broadswords, double-edged slashing blades and short stabbing swords clanged against Krell’s armour, some piercing the gristly flesh beneath, others rebounding in showers of red sparks.

Krell’s axe struck out, faster than any weapon of such size should be able to move, and five riders were hacked from their mounts, decapitated with executioner’s precision. Their headless corpses rode on for a few yards before the weight of their armoured bodies dragged them to the ground.

Sigmar swayed aside from a return stroke of the axe and slammed Ghal-maraz against Krell’s shoulder. Unnatural plates buckled and broke against the fury of his blow, and Krell at last staggered. The champion spun around, his axe reaching for Sigmar, but finding only empty air. Sigmar wheeled Taalhorsa around and drove his ancient warhammer into Krell’s back, splitting apart the cuirass of his monstrous armour and drawing a howl that echoed in this world and the realm of the dead.

The cracks in the sundered sarcophagus split wider, and the deathly tang of evil magic grew stronger. Sigmar cried out as he saw another six of his men cut down by Krell’s deadly axe, their souls dragged from their bodies to feed the monstrous appetite of the blood-hungry champion.

‘Hurry!’ cried Bransùil. ‘The last ward is almost spent!’

Alaric and his dwarfs hurled themselves into the fray, hammers beating on Krell’s body like demented smiths in a forge. Each warrior bore a weapon inscribed with runes that worked the magic of the dwarfs into a useable form, and each blow wreaked fearful damage on the strange plates of his armour. Alaric’s frost-bladed axe bore runic magic the equal of that worked onto the killing face of Ghal-maraz, and every blow sheared slices of metal and bone from the beleaguered champion.

Krell leapt into the air, slamming down with bone-crushing force on two of the dwarfs, their armoured bodies crushed to paste beneath the creature’s bulk. A looping axe blow sheared another two in half and only Alaric’s master-forged axe saved him from a similar fate.

Mortal warriors faced an immortal champion, and though two of the greatest heroes of the age fought alongside them, this was no equal contest. Each time Krell’s axe swept out, men and dwarfs died, and Sigmar knew they could not long suffer such rates of attrition. The sarcophagus at the centre of the temple cracked wider still, and the taint of dark magic gave a bitter, poisonous taint to every breath. Portions of the stone began to dissolve into the air as the magic sealing the long-dead general in his tomb crumbled under the assault of so much malignant power.

‘Alaric, go left!’ shouted Sigmar, wheeling his horse around the champion’s right flank.

The runesmith obeyed without question, attacking the giant from the opposite side. Teon and Gorseth fought beside the dwarfs, darting forward between swipes of Krell’s mighty axe to hammer their swords against his armour. Leodan fought alone, standing before the might of Krell with his notched sword held high. His armour was split wide, and Sigmar saw the Taleuten was lucky to be alive. Blood masked his face, and a long gash ran from his collarbone to his hip. A finger breadth deeper and he would already be dead.

Sigmar vaulted from Taalhorsa’s saddle and wrapped one brawny arm around Krell’s neck. His hammer slammed down on Krell’s helm, buckling the metal and drawing a bellow of inchoate rage from the beast. The haft of Krell’s axe shot up as Sigmar drew his arm back for another strike and slammed into his temple. The force of the blow was incredible and bright lights burst before Sigmar’s eyes as he was thrown from Krell’s back. Ghal-maraz spun from his grip, and he landed badly on the steps of the bier.

Little remained of the sarcophagus, only a fading outline of stone that diminished like morning mist. Within lay a skeletal corpse with the flesh pulled taut over a regal bone structure and clad in armour of gold, jade, amethyst and bronze. A strange weapon with a recurved blade lay on the corpse’s chest, and a glimmering light was reflected in the emeralds set in its eye sockets. A dusty breath sighed between its sharpened teeth, and Sigmar fought to recover from the dizzying force of Krell’s blow.

Bransùil knelt beside him, and placed a hand on his chest. He spoke a soft word that sounded like the chorus of a child’s lullaby, and fresh strength flowed through Sigmar’s body.

‘The ward is gone,’ he said. ‘This your chance, son of Björn. Drive him into the tomb!’

Sigmar nodded and looked for his hammer, knowing it was the only weapon capable of causing lasting harm to the undead champion. Ghal-maraz lay in the midst of the fighting, where Leodan, Wenyld and Teon battled to keep the great axe of Krell at bay. More men were dead, and only three dwarfs still stood with Master Alaric as Krell shrugged off their attacks with a sound of grating metal that Sigmar realised was diabolical laughter.

Gorseth saw Sigmar rise to his feet and dived under Krell’s axe to retrieve Ghal-maraz. The youngster’s eyes blazed with winter fire as his slender fingers closed on the haft. Sigmar knew the temptation of such power on a young heart, but Gorseth shook it off and hurled the great warhammer to Sigmar as the black axe descended and cut into his shoulder.

Blood sprayed from the wound, and Teon cried out as his friend fell. Sigmar caught the spinning hammer as Teon threw aside his sword and dragged Gorseth away from the fighting. The effort was noble, though Sigmar knew a wound from so dreadful a weapon would almost certainly prove fatal.

Wenyld screamed and drove his sword up into Krell’s belly as Leodan vaulted from a fallen portion of masonry and swung his sword at the mighty champion’s head. Such was the power and emotion driving Leodan that his blade struck a blow like no other. Krell’s helmet shattered into spinning fragments, revealing his ruined and blackened skull and madly gleaming eye. Fully half of Krell’s skull was gone, the rest torn away by the blast of the dwarf war machine at the Battle of Reikdorf. Yet even as Sigmar watched, the bone was reknitting, weaving fresh substance as the dark magic released from the sundered tomb saturated the air.

‘Cuthwin, son of Gethwer!’ yelled Bransùil. ‘Now is your moment! Loose!’

Sigmar looked over to where Cuthwin knelt beside Gorseth and the weeping Teon. The huntsman’s bow was bent and a shaft with a shimmering silver arrowhead was nocked to the string. Cuthwin let fly between breaths and the arrow soared as true as any loosed by the king of the fey folk himself. The silver arrowhead punched through Krell’s remaining eye, and the towering champion bellowed with rage as the magic imbued in the metal seared his damned soul with holy fire.

Sigmar knew they would never get a better chance to end Krell’s terror, and hurled himself at the reeling monster. Master Alaric also recognised the moment and attacked with his rune axe cutting into Krell’s thighs and belly. Leodan and Wenyld fought at his side as Krell took backward step after backward step. Dark light spewed from the awful wound in his skull, twisting coils of black smoke that shrieked as it fled the dissolution of Krell’s body. The monstrous champion’s axe clattered to the ground as his clawed hands sought to contain the abominable energies that sustained his existence.

The tomb of the great general flared with unnatural light as Krell drew on the reservoir of dark magic contained within, and Sigmar saw how they could end this. He spun around the flailing champion and took hold of Master Alaric’s shoulder.

‘Together,’ he said.

Alaric nodded, understanding Sigmar’s meaning in the way that only warriors who have fought and bled together for decades can know. Together they surged forward and their blows were struck with such symmetry and unity, that no force in the land could hope to resist. Krell stumbled back towards the tomb as the long dead general stirred from his aeon’s long slumber.

Sigmar leapt and swung Ghal-maraz in a vast, sweeping blow that slammed into Krell’s chest with all the strength he had earned in his years of battle. The mighty warhammer shattered the last of Krell’s armour and a vast explosion of runic magic hurled the champion back into the tomb. Coils of dark magic enveloped the fallen champion; spiralling coils of vicious, jealous blackness. An immortal general from a bygone age fought the theft of the power intended to raise him from the grave, and the two creatures of undeath roared against one another in their desperate fury.

Bransùil stepped in front of Sigmar and Alaric, plunging his hands into the vortex of dark magic with a guttural chant of power words that sounded like a thousand windows shattering at once. The power contained in the tomb was old and strong, and was not about to be contained without a fight. Bransùil shuddered as his own strength went to war with magic conjured into being by a master of undeath. Crackling arcs of deadly energies whipped around him as he drew his arms in as though moulding clay upon a wheel. Sigmar and Alaric stepped back from the tempest engulfing Bransùil, shielding their eyes as a dazzling blaze of light exploded from the tomb and the earth shuddered as though struck once again by the hammer blow of a starfall.

Portions of the temple’s roof fell inward, crashing down in enormous, building-sized chunks of masonry. Vast cracks split the walls and moonlight speared into the quaking temple. The crash of falling coffers and cracking rock was deafening, and the surviving warriors fought to hold their footing as the mountains shook with the fury of such powerful magics being unleashed.

‘Get out!’ shouted Sigmar. ‘Get out of the temple!’

Alaric and his fellow dwarfs ran for the nearest crack in the temple walls, knowing with the skill of their race the escape route least likely to bury them beneath thousands of tons of stone. Sigmar ran for Taalhorsa and threw himself into the saddle as Leodan grabbed the reins of a fallen warrior’s mount. Cuthwin and Wenyld rode for the passageway by which they had entered the tomb, and Sigmar was pleased to see his banner still flew proudly. Teon hauled Gorseth over his saddle and rode after the remaining riders as yet more pounding slabs of stone crashed to the ground.

It galled Sigmar to see how few would be making the journey back to Reikdorf, but he knew that they had been lucky to finish Krell with any of them left alive. He turned and held his hand out to Bransùil, who gratefully scrambled up behind him. The warlock’s face was ashen, lined with exhaustion and sheened with sweat. Behind him, Sigmar saw the tomb of the general was gone, and its place was a shimmering sphere of crystal, like a vast diamond in which two forms could be made out as ghostly shadows.

Krell and the former occupant of the tomb were frozen together, locked in an eternal struggle for survival that would never end. Great chunks of stone slammed down on the magical prison but shattered and spun away, leaving the crystal tomb unmarked by so much as a scratch.

Sigmar raked back his spurs and Taalhorsa surged to the gallop as though all the Ölfhednar of the marshes were at their heels. The temple was collapsing with ever-greater speed and violence, and clouds of dust billowed around them, making it impossible to see more than a few yards. Sigmar had to trust to Taalhorsa’s sense for danger as they swerved away from falling rubble and leapt over high barriers of toppled columns. Bransùil wrapped scrawny, buckle-boned arms around his waist as Taalhorsa leapt a yawning crack in the ground and lost his footing for a moment.

‘On!’ cried Sigmar. ‘Taal guides you!’

The horse righted itself and set off with a whinny of terror as the ground heaved with elemental fury. Booming cracks of grinding stone echoed from all around them, and Sigmar heard a groaning crash of falling rocks and a roar of falling water. They rode into the grand tunnel that had brought them to the interior of the mausoleum, and Sigmar leaned over his horse’s neck, speaking words of courage in its ear.

At last there was only sky above them, and Sigmar let out a wild yell of exultation as they left the tomb behind. Sigmar’s warriors and Alaric’s dwarfs saw him, but he saw they were not out of danger yet. The mountains shook and rocks tumbled from the high slopes as the titanic forces of the earth convulsed. The natural dam at the lip of the crater was breaking apart, and vast geysers of icy water were spilling into the city. The rivers were overflowing and soon every building would be underwater.

‘Ride!’ ordered Sigmar. ‘Before we all drown!’

‘We’ll run,’ said Alaric with stubborn pride. ‘I’d rather wade than ride.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said Sigmar, ‘but wade fast.’

The riders set off at the gallop, retracing the route they had taken to reach the mausoleum as vast spumes of waters flooded the city. Surging meltwater crashed against the walls of palaces that had stood for thousands of years and toppled them in a heartbeat. Tidal surges dragged entire streets to ruin, and soon the horses were galloping through knee-high water of unbearable cold.

Splashing and frantic, the horses reached the road leading back to the lip of the crater, and Sigmar’s racing heartbeat eased a fraction as they gained height above from the drowning city. Higher and higher they climbed, and Sigmar eased the pace as he saw Alaric and his dwarfs wade to the road with little more then their beards above the surface. He laughed as they shook off the water like wet dogs and marched towards the waiting men as though they had just taken a brisk stroll in the rain.

The crashing thunder of falling water continued as they climbed to the top of the slope, and the city was swallowed by the freezing run-off of an ancient glacier. Teon and Wenyld lowered Gorseth to the ground, and Sigmar was amazed to see the lad still clung to life. He was young, but he was tough, as were all good Reiklanders.

Sigmar dismounted and knelt beside the boy.

‘You have my thanks,’ he said. ‘That was brave of you to get me my hammer. Foolhardy, but brave. But for your courage, I doubt we would have prevailed.’

Gorseth smiled and his eyes fluttered.

‘Don’t you bloody well die,’ snapped Wenyld. ‘You hear me, boy. Don’t you dare. Not when old men like me walk away without a scratch.’

Gorseth coughed, and his spittle was bloody. ‘No more jokes about my age…?’

‘I make no promises,’ said Wenyld, and Sigmar saw there were tears in his eyes. ‘Stay alive long enough to reach Reikdorf and we’ll see.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Gorseth as Leodan and Cuthwin began binding the terrible wound in his shoulder.

Though the temperature was falling rapidly as night drew in, none could tear their eyes from the sight of the newly formed mountain tarn. The surface rippled like the ocean, and the moonlight sparkled on the water as it lapped at the edge of the crater, not ten feet below them. The violence of the earthquake had subsided, though the mountains still grumbled with smouldering anger.

Sigmar let out a pent-up breath and helped Bransùil down from Taalhorsa’s saddle. Even through his armour, Sigmar could feel the misshapen, birdlike frailty of the warlock’s body. The man nodded gratefully as a freezing wind blew over the surface of the lake and an icy prickling sensation crawled over Sigmar’s skin.

A bitterly cold mist rose from the water, like the breath of the great frost giants said to haunt the featureless ice tundra of the Northern Wastes. The horses whinnied, their eyes wide and their ears pressed tight to their skulls in fear. The wind passed over them, but it was not the deathly cold of the dead, but the cleansing chill of a good northern winter. Sigmar had felt that cold before, when he had passed through the flame at the heart of Middenheim, and he clung to the memory.

No sooner had it arisen than the mist dissipated, and cries of astonishment arose from the men and dwarfs as they saw what had become of the lake. The water had frozen solid, leaving a vast, shimmering plane of ice before them. From the surface to the deepest reaches of the crater, the lake had been transformed in an instant to solid ice.

‘Ulric’s blood!’ swore Cuthwin, turning to Bransùil. ‘Did you do that?’

The warlock shook his shaven, tattooed head, staring over the glacier lake with a curious expression. ‘No, young Cuthwin. I have a degree of mastery, aye, but such powerful elemental magics are beyond my ability to wield.’

Sigmar followed Bransùil’s gaze, and his eyes narrowed as he caught sight of a distant shape on the far side of the crater. Someone was standing directly opposite them by the shattered gap where the rock dam had once held back the mountain waters. Though it was dark and the shimmering moonlight was filtered through a haze of ice particles, Sigmar swore he could see a figure swathed in fur.

A wolf-clad man with but a single arm.

Even as Sigmar caught sight of the man, he vanished into the moonlight shadows. He watched the spot for a while longer, hoping he would show himself again.

But the man did not return, if he had been there at all…

Sigmar turned away from the lake. Krell lay entombed beneath millions of tons of ice, sealed in a magical tomb in the heart of an ice-locked city, and Sigmar allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction.

‘Will it hold?’ he asked Bransùil. ‘The crystal prison you created, will it hold?’

‘It will hold,’ replied the Norsii. ‘For a very long time, but it will not endure forever.’

Sigmar nodded, as though this was a fundamental truth of the world he had only now come to fully appreciate.

‘Nothing lasts forever,’ he said. ‘Nor should it.’

An Extract from Angel Exterminatus

Graham McNeill

ONE

Beauty in Death
Regeneration
Sentinels

A small detail, almost inconsequential, but important nevertheless. A creature no larger than a man’s thumb: a winged clade with a segmented carapace and a brittle exoskeleton of variegated puce. Atop its head, whiplike antennae tasted the myriad new scents flavouring the air, moving with uncharacteristic slowness as toxic numbness spread throughout its body.

The creature, a Cordatus vespidae, moved with a drunken gait across the churned red mud of the hillside, buffeted by warring thermals gusting from the earthworks sprawling at its base like a virulent plague. Sky-bound anabatic winds carried the smells of war – burned iron, smoky chemical propellants, musky post-human oils, lubricant and blood.

To any student of xentomology, the creature’s behaviour would have seemed strange to say the least. Its feeder mandibles snapped at nothing and its legs twitched as though rogue impulses were firing from its tripartite brain along its nerve stems, like a palsy. Its hive-nest had once been situated in the waving branches of a tall polander tree, but shell-fire had long since reduced the stepped banks of agri-terraces to a cratered wasteland of splintered stumps.

Fire had gutted the nest’s interior and killed the hive-queen, though residual traces of excreted pheromone resins had been strong enough to guide the vespidae back home. Whether pure instinct or a desire to die within its former home had driven the creature to ascend the muddy ridges of the hillside would never be known, but whatever ambition had driven it to complete its upward odyssey was to be thwarted. Its body finally succumbed to the paralysing toxin, injected with a murderer’s thoroughness, and the vespidae ceased its upward climb. It sat unmoving on a flattened berm of earth beneath a shattered terrace of reflective stone. Jutting lengths of rusted steelwork radiated from the wall, like spread fingers with the ends burned black.

The creature appeared to be dead, but its belly and flanks still rippled with motion. Its head bulged and swelled as its internal structure seemed to rove within its exoskeleton with a frantic desire to reshape itself. Wriggling motion shook its carapace, undulant pressure bending its flexible segments outwards as though they sought to fly away and abandon its dying form. A chitinous plate detached from the creature’s body and beneath it writhed a gelatinous, worm-like extrusion, a parasitic passenger sating its newborn hunger by feasting on its host’s internal organs.

The cannibalising organism pulled itself from the shell of its birth vessel, its flesh already hardening in the air. From translucency to opacity in a heartbeat, its rapidly forming carapace was a riot of shimmering hues, a wondrous oil spill of colours designed to beguile and entrance. The cracked and husked-out remains of its vespidae host crumbled under the weight of the growing creature, its morphogenesis progressing at a staggering rate.

From a split along the middle, gossamer wings unfolded, dragonfly-long in proportion to its body and edged with a membranous web of trailing cilia. With its wings beginning to beat, a segmented tail of shimmering gold and jet unfolded from beneath the cuckoo creature to give it perfect symmetry.

Though its birth had been horrific and needlessly cruel, its final form was undeniably beautiful. An elegant swan hatched from a bloody carcass, a reminder that even the most terrible cruelty can fashion the greatest beauty.

An iron-shod boot slammed down, crushing the newborn creature into the mud beneath its tread. Brutal proof – if proof were needed – that the living world existed with no thoughts of compassion, justice or mercy.

The owner of the boot, clad in the hulking plates of Cataphractii Terminator armour, stared at the smoke-wreathed mountain and the golden citadel crowning its summit. Unaware of the tiny life he had just snuffed out, Forrix scanned the blasted terraces of the Cadmean Citadel, grudgingly admiring the elegance with which it had been integrated into the local topology and the surrounding city. The warmasons of the Imperial Fists were cold and efficient, but their master understood the first maxim of the victor: that the best people to leave in the wake of your campaigns were those who did not feel they had been conquered.

It was a maxim to which the Iron Warriors paid little heed.

‘The conqueror makes fair his walls, and all should welcome him as a liberator,’ said Forrix, looking back over his shoulder to the wide valley below. Sawtooth fortifications surrounded the citadel in jagged layers of razorwire and pugnacious walls, bludgeoning their way across the lower town and tearing through habitations, agriculture, industry and places of wondrous natural beauty with equal aplomb. Redoubts, bunkers, and high-walled donjons grew like rocky stalagmites in a dripping cave, and a pall of smoke hung low over the dusty red valley like a shroud.

The lower reaches of the promontory at the heart of the great starport were now clad in metal, each dawn revealing a higher course of steelwork and scaffolds that crept uphill like a spreading cancer that would climb and climb until the red-and-ochre skin of the mountain was entirely encased. Freshly laid funicular rails came with the steelwork, heavy-gauge tracks that would allow mighty bombards and howitzers to be raised into battery positions hacked into the stepped bedrock. Thus far the Basilisk workhorses of the siege train had shouldered the bulk of the barrage work, but the heavier guns were only days away from being brought high enough to lob fat cauldrons of high explosive into the heart of the citadel.

And when that happened, it was all over.

No fortress could long resist when the lords of the artilleryman’s craft were brought to bear. The Iron Warriors would flatten Dorn’s mountain and erase all trace of the Cadmean Citadel, heedless of the technological marvels worked into its walls.

Forrix watched the progress of a group of captured city folk hauling long lengths of steel-wound cable uphill, sweating and bloodied by the effort and driven by the whips of Obax Zakayo. Behind them, clawed and spider-limbed construction engines drilled into the mountain to lace its structure with the bolts, fasteners and clamps required of the siegemasters behind them. There was a relentless and pleasing regularity to the work, a dance of logistics, effort and planning that only those versed in the arts of making and unmaking fortifications could appreciate. Amid the brutality, the slavery, the misery and the rape of the landscape there was art and there was beauty of a strange, under-appreciated kind.

‘Admiring your handiwork again, triarch?’ said Barban Falk, climbing into the shielded observation post below the ruined outwork that marked the point where the Imperial Fists had first broken the earth of this world.

‘No, admiring theirs,’ he replied, jerking his head uphill. Smoke hung over the citadel, its walls pocked and scarred by shell-fire, but already wreathed in a haze of ancient mechanisms of self-repair. Driving dust squalls and oppressed sunshine rippled in the mirage of its void shields, throwing up splintered rainbows of distorted light.

‘You always did like living dangerously, didn’t you, Forrix?’ said Falk, the enormous bulk of their armour filling the small space.

Forrix didn’t have to ask what he meant.

Since the debacle at Phall, to speak of the sons of Dorn with anything other than hate was to invite terrible retribution from the Lord of Iron. Had it been anyone else, Forrix wouldn’t have spoken, but as far as any Iron Warrior ever trusted another, he trusted Barban Falk.

‘I know you think the same,’ he said.

‘True, but I know better than to voice it.’

‘You always played the politics better than I did,’ admitted Forrix.

‘Yet you hold a position in the Trident and have the ear of the primarch.’

‘Precious few of us can claim that now,’ said Forrix, with an honesty that surprised him.

Falk shrugged, no easy feat in such a bulky suit of armour. His monstrous Terminator plates were chevroned with gold and jet, and the smoothness of the heavy, barrel-vaulted pauldrons was in stark contrast to the war-worn condition of Forrix’s armour. Falk’s battle gear had originally been crafted for Warsmith Dantioch of the 51st Expedition, but after the triple disasters of Gholghis, Stratopolae and Krak Fiorina it had been reassigned to a more deserving wearer. Like Phall, no Iron Warrior now mentioned Dantioch. His legacy was utterly expunged; his name a byword for failure on an epic scale.

‘I do not claim to understand our master’s mind, but I can read the tides of his anger,’ said Falk, flexing the chisel-like fingers of his power fist, as though carefully weighing his next words. ‘Tides that grow ever stronger and more frequent.’

‘How are the western approaches?’ asked Forrix, unwilling to address Falk’s comment.

Falk chuckled. ‘Do you think I am trying to entrap you, Forrix?’ said the giant warrior, running a hand over his oil-dark hair and narrowing his already hooded eyes. ‘You think I seek to goad you into careless words I can then report back to the primarch? If I had any feelings to be hurt, they would be bleeding to death right now.’

Forrix allowed himself a thin smile. ‘No, I don’t think that,’ he said.

‘Well you should,’ said Falk. ‘I’d betray you in a heartbeat if I thought it would earn me a place in the Trident. Especially now that Golg’s a corpse and Berossus is as good as a corpse and isn’t likely to be elevated.’

‘Complete the western approaches in the next day and you might get your wish.’

Falk nodded and pulled a waxy sheet of rolled parchment from the kilt of baked leather at his waist. He passed it to Forrix, who pulled it open and cast his eye over Falk’s schematics.

‘The work is proceeding as planned,’ said Falk, his pride and vaunting ambition plain. ‘The breaching batteries will be in place by sundown tonight, and ground-penetrating auspex readings suggest a wall density that will require a sixteen-hour bombardment to carve a practicable breach in the half-moon bastion.’

Forrix let his eyes wander the interleaved lines on Falk’s plans, the angles of approach, the interlocking fire pockets, the dead zones and the enfilading redoubts; admiring the brutal functional architecture of his fellow warsmith’s plans.

‘I see you favour extra storm bastions over breaching batteries,’ he said.

Falk had always preferred the blunt directness of frontal assault over the relentless mathematics of a carefully planned approach. Where Forrix viewed the reduction of a fortress as a rigorously applied equation, Falk saw it as a pugilistic battle where both fighters pounded until one was forced to yield.

An unsubtle mindset, but an effective one.

Many beyond the Legion believed this to be the Iron Warriors only means of waging war, but the Lord of Iron was far more subtle than that. Mathematics and the precise application of force made up the bulk of his campaigning, but the brute application of violence made far more dramatic remembrance.

‘There are enough guns to bring the walls down, even allowing for those damned repair mechanisms,’ replied Falk. ‘Once the wall’s down, I want enough warriors in place to be sure of punching through the breach. They won’t be expecting an escalade in the west.’

‘There’s a reason for that,’ pointed out Forrix. ‘The ground there is steeper and rockier than the other flanks. It won’t be easy to cover that ground quickly enough to avoid getting shot to pieces. And if there are seismic charges in place, they’ll bury you.’

‘There won’t be.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘The Lord of Iron says there will not be.’

‘You have spoken to the primarch?’ asked Forrix, struggling to mask the bilious jealousy flaring in his breast. ‘He has not emerged from his bunker since we made planetfall.’

‘He sends word through the Stonewrought,’ spat Falk, referring to Soltarn Vull Bronn, a warrior of the 45th Grand Battalion whose understanding of stone was such that some whispered it spoke to him, confiding its secrets and opening up its geological wonders to the touch of his entrenching tool. Perturabo, ever quick to recognise raw talent, now favoured Vull Bronn, despite the inferiority of his rank next to the three exalted warsmiths of the Trident who normally attended upon him.

‘Does he send word of the Third Legion?’

Falk shook his head. ‘No, he demands only that Cassander’s men must all be dead and this citadel in ruins before the Phoenician’s warriors arrive.’

Forrix grunted, his measure of the Emperor’s Children’s worth wordlessly expressed. ‘This prosecution will be done with long before then.’

As if to underscore Forrix’s words, the percussive drumbeat of artillery fire echoed from the far side of the mountain. Both warriors looked up as the echoes were carried away by the hot winds whipping around the mountainside. Forrix listened to the rhythm of the guns, as a maestro listens to the orchestra at his command, reading the subtle shifts in pitch and timbre of each weapon. He heard the urgency in the firing and the haste with which each gun was unleashing its explosive ordnance.

‘It’s coming from the north,’ said Forrix, reaching for the helmet mag-locked to his armour.

‘Harkor’s warriors,’ replied Falk.

‘Come on,’ said Forrix, turning and stalking from the observation post.

‘That’s not breaching fire,’ said Falk, arriving at the conclusion Forrix had already reached.

‘No,’ agreed Forrix. ‘The bloody fool’s mounting an escalade.’

Pain. It always came back to pain.

Berossus’s last memory had been of pain, of his life bleeding out through the broken meat-puppet his flesh had become. Bones smashed beyond the ability of any Apothecary to knit, organs pulped with seismic force and the searing heat in his flesh as the fearsome power of his genhanced metabolism tried in vain to undo the mortal wound done to him.

The pain was intense and had never left him, but worse than the pain was the shame of how he had been wounded. Not at the hands of an enemy warrior capable of wreaking harm on a battle-engineered post-human, nor at the hands of a terrible alien creature too hideous and nightmarish for him to overcome.

No, this pain had been wrought by the hands of his primarch.

The blow had been swift, too swift to avoid, and too thorough in its unmaking of his body for him ever to recover. Another had swiftly followed, an unnecessary blow, for he was already dead by any conventional measure of the word. But the IV Legion never did anything half-heartedly, and Perturabo’s attack was that martial philosophy distilled into two swift strikes.

Gulping blood down his ruptured oesophagus and frothing it out through his perforated lungs, Berossus had waited to die as he had lived. Embittered and in pain.

Ever since the war against the Black Judges and the screaming mob of hooded Accusators that had caught him off guard he had lived with pain. Individually, the Accusators were no match for a warrior of the Legiones Astartes, but he had been surrounded by a dozen, each armed with a chain-gavel that could cut armour apart with lethal ease.

Six died before they could touch him, but then their blows began to tell, cutting him apart piece by piece until the tearing teeth of an enemy weapon had all but ripped through his spine. He’d killed them all with the last of his strength before falling to the ground as his legs failed him. The Apothecaries had found him surrounded by their black-hooded bodies and worked wonders on his injured flesh. His body was remade and strengthened with augmetics and nerve grafts, but the pain of the ordeal never left him.

That pain had been eclipsed in one moment of incautious speaking. It had been his misfortune to bring ill-favoured news to the Lord of Iron, whose volatile moods had steadily worsened since the slaughters of Isstvan V. He had known his news was bad, but had hoped his position as a warsmith would keep him from harm.

A foolish hope, for Perturabo’s rages fell on high kings and holy fools alike.

Since then, blackness for the most part.

Muttered voices, sudden stabbing light and a sensation of floating, disembodied on a dark ocean. He felt dislocated, adrift and bereft of all the points of reference he had, until now, taken for granted. Berossus had tried to listen to the beat of his heart, thinking that if he could cling to that metronomic beat then he might have some means, how-
ever transitory, of measuring the passage of time. Yet his heart was silent, and in his timeless madnesses he would often wonder if he had died and was trapped in some heathen limbo. He rejected the thought, but it would return to plague him often, a nagging suspicion that his life was over, yet would not end.

Memories intruded as he floated between life and death, a parade of conquest in service of the Emperor and, latterly, Warmaster Horus. He saw wars fought in the red rain, dug through the flesh of countless worlds, and ripped the meat from the bones of a hundred thousand foes. He saw righteous wars of species survival, fought by the light of Terra’s sun, twist under the transformative pressure of time, becoming wars of conquest, which in time became wars fought for the sake of the vicarious thrill of it.

When had that happened?

How had the martial traditions of the Iron Warriors been perverted so completely?

Berossus knew the answer well enough. Piece by piece, inch by inch, the Emperor’s wars had worn the proud warriors of the IV Legion down to little more than grinding machines bedecked in the blood and mud of the worlds they dragged into compliance. Perturabo’s warriors had done all that had been asked of them and their only reward was to be thrown back to the very wars that were poisoning the heart of their Legion.

And then, the bitterest pill to swallow…

Berossus remembered the words Warmaster Horus had spoken to the Lord of Iron after the wrack of lost Olympia and the news that the wolves of Fenris had been loosed upon the fair isle of Prospero.

‘The use of force alone is a temporary solution,’ Horus had said. ‘It may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again. And the Imperium will not be at peace if we must perpetually reconquer those we have rendered compliant. You, my brother, will ensure that one conquest is enough.’

Perhaps the Warmaster’s words had been intended as a balm for Perturabo’s tortured soul, but so dark a benediction had only driven him deeper into abyssal guilt. What might once have appeared as the basest of treacheries now seemed like the only logical course, and Perturabo had reaffirmed his oaths of loyalty to Horus.

No one knew what else had passed between these two demigods, but when the Iron Warriors had set foot on Isstvan V, it was with a murderous rage that could only be quenched in the blood of those they had once called brothers.

Berossus floated through the chaos of the massacre on the black sand, the savage joy he had taken in the shock of betrayal on the faces of every midnight-skinned Salamander and ivory-faced Raven Guard. Of the Iron Hands, he had seen little, for the Phoenician’s warriors were making sport of them, their debaucheries unseemly but effective.

He remembered killing a Salamanders captain with a close-range blast of his meltagun, relishing the irony of ending his life with fire. The warrior’s helmet had run molten from his face, leaving the skull exposed and as black as the skin that sloughed from the bone like hot oil. Even as he died, the warrior had cursed him in a bubbling series of liquid gasps that made no sense. He’d left the Salamander to choke on his own liquidised flesh, dismissing the curse as a vestigial remnant of his upbringing on a feral world of savage-born reptile hunters.

Drifting in this timeless limbo of pain and isolation, the Salamander’s molten visage returned to haunt his nightmares, a leering skull with coal-red eyes that bored into him with accusatory force. The screaming skull never left him, braying meaningless static and pressing close to his awareness, forcing him to relive the agonies it had known in its final moments.

Behind the skull was another face, a bitter granite-carved mask with cold, blue-steel eyes and a voice before which all else was white noise. It commanded the blackened bone of the Salamander, telling it that Berossus would not die as everything else had died. Even in his disembodied state, Berossus knew these were commands that could not be ignored.

The Salamander’s skull brought life, but most of all it brought pain, its red eyes reducing him to scraps with chanted evocations. Berossus tried to retreat from its calls, but it had strength beyond what was left to him and a hunger for his suffering.

He felt a jolt of screaming agony course around his body, a shuddering paroxysm of electric rebirth, and even as dimensions of space and form coalesced around him he loosed a shuddering roar as he felt the immense power in his limbs.

The world of darkness in which he had existed for what felt like an eternity was washed away in a cascade of painful colours that made him want to close his eyes. The colours bled away, but not his rage, and he shook as he saw the Salamander’s red-eyed skull before him.

Except it wasn’t a Salamander and it wasn’t a skull.

The Techmarine’s eye lenses were whirring optics, enlarged orbs of clicking armatures and rotating ruby lenses mounted on a bulbous apparatus of bronze and silver. His helm was blackened iron and a trio of hissing pneumatics crouched at his shoulders like obedient stingers of metal and dripping fluids.

‘Who are you?’ he said, his voice a grating bark that sounded nothing like he remembered.

‘I am Galian Carron, and you are in my war-forge,’ said the Tech-marine, who stepped back with a wary flinch as Berossus shook in the unbreakable fetters that bound him. Carron was looking up at him, for he was taller by far than the Techmarine. Grey-fleshed servitors and heavy lifter gear stood around him, some before him, some behind him – though how he could see them was, at present, a mystery. A host of robed acolytes bearing oiled platters, upon which were a variety of cogs, gear and machine parts knelt behind Carron; the Techmarine’s devotees.

No, not Carron’s devotees.

His.

‘Why am I here?’ asked Berossus, feeling unfamiliar walls of cold iron pressing in around him, a life-preserving womb and a sarcophagus all in one. Claustrophobic madness extended a tendril into his mind, and found itself welcome.

‘You are here because the Lord of Iron willed it so,’ said Carron.

‘You lie,’ said Berossus, desperate and yet hopeful. ‘He killed me.’

‘No, he has transformed you.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Berossus.

‘By his own hand he has remade you in his image,’ said Carron as one of his wheezing pneumatics reached up and took hold of a rubberised control box. At the press of a button, the fetters binding Berossus’s limbs unclamped with a mechanised sound of grinding metal. His legs, twin columns of iron, steel and fibre-bundle muscles were his again to command, and he took a ponderous step forwards, knowing, with his first, that there would be no release from this entombment in an iron coffin.

The sound of his splay-clawed footfalls rang from the floor plates of the war-forge with a boom of metal on metal. His arms, a monumental hammer and a heavy-barrelled rotor cannon spun in time with his thoughts.

‘I am alive?’ asked Berossus, not yet ready to believe it.

‘Better,’ said Carron. ‘You are a Dreadnought.’

Holding the citadel had never been a possibility, Captain Felix Cassander of the Imperial Fists knew, but that had never been the point. The Iron Warriors were the enemy, and though his thoughts still balked at the thought of the Legiones Astartes turning upon one another, the enemy had to be fought.

Yes, the citadel must eventually fall, but Cassander did not hold with the notion of the unwinnable fight, the noble last stand or poetic notions of self-sacrifice. There was always a way to win or at least a way to cheat death, but even he had to admit that there was only the faintest hope of them surviving much longer.

Cassander was not a man to whom pessimism came easily, but it was taking considerable effort of will to keep its dark touch from infecting his thoughts.

When the Iron Warriors finally overcame the citadel’s ancient defences and broke open its walls they would run amok. They would slaughter his warriors, the heroic men and women of this world that had chosen to stand with them, and the refugees from the murder fields below.
Fifty-two Imperial Fists and thirteen thousand men, women and children were crammed within the citadel’s walls.

When the end came, their deaths would not be quick and they would not be painless, but there was no talk of surrender or terms, no seditious mutterings to erode morale and no thought other than resisting these bastard invaders.

The Iron Warriors… our brothers…

No history told who had built this marvel atop the mountain, though the engineers and artisans who had raised its living walls must surely have been the greatest minds of their age. Wrought from stone and rock unknown to this world and laced with technologies whose secrets not even the Mechanicum could fathom, its walls reacted to damage like living tissue. Shell impacts would scab over with liquid silicates, and moments later the wall beneath would be whole again. Only when the hurt was so sustained and so catastrophic would any site of damage be irreparable. Attackers found the wall reacting to them with spiked extrusions of living rock, or were swallowed whole as the stonework opened up beneath them. Against any conventional foe, the fortress would have been, for all intents and purposes, impregnable and indestructible.

But the Iron Warriors were not conventional foes.

Lord Dorn had chosen the living citadel as the site upon which to plant the Aquila, not as a symbol of Imperial dominance, but a seat of governance to be shared by all. He had brought the planet’s former rulers into the establishment of an ordered government, allowing the people to choose their own planetary governor, a respected civic leader named Endric Cadmus. Cassander smiled at the memory, thinking that perhaps some of the philosophy of the XIII Legion’s primarch had permeated the Imperial Fists after all.

Cassander and his fellow Imperial Fists had escorted the expeditionary iterators and remembrancers as they went from cities to far-flung townships, spreading word of the Emperor to a people ripe to embrace the Imperial Truth. It had been a glorious time, and when Lord Dorn announced that he was to lead the VII Legion to fresh campaigns, the populace had mourned his departure like the loss of a loved one.

He remembered the pride that filled him when the primarch had given him the solemn duty of standing with his battle company as sentinels to the newly compliant world, a potent sign that this was a world under the protection of the Imperial Fists. But that honourable gesture was to have consequences that not even Lord Dorn could have foreseen.

Cassander wiped dust from his scarred face and spat a mouthful of the wretched stuff to the ground, where it bubbled with a chemical hiss. His helmet was long gone; a bolt-round had punched through the faceplate and blown out in a spray of blood, bone and ceramite. Techmarine Scanion had died early in the fight, and without his direction the forge-servitors were of only limited use when it came to repair work. A few Mechanicum adepts remained, but they spent their days in the heart of the citadel, plumbing its secrets as though there were still a chance they might live to relay anything they might find.

Cassander’s features were careworn, as though abraded by the constant winds that scoured every smooth surface on this planet and gave it the texture of coarse sand. Eyes of deep brown that had seen the order of the galaxy overturned without any power to change it were deep-set and melancholic, his cheeks scar-blackened with the explosive passage of the bolt-round that had taken his helm.

When the order came to return to Terra, Cassander began preparations to depart immediately, but the sudden death of his vessel’s Navigator had left them stranded until a replacement could be despatched. The following day, word of the Warmaster’s treachery and the massacre on Isstvan V reached them, throwing Cassander’s world into free-fall.

Pride in an honourable assignment was replaced by frustration and bitter disappointment that they could not fight alongside their brothers, could not call Horus to account for his perfidy and punish those who had trampled their oaths of loyalty into the dust.

But the chance to make war on the traitorous allies of Horus had come soon enough.

The Iron Warriors made planetfall in the wake of a saturation bombardment that reduced the valley and the agri-settlements filling its fertile deltas to ash. Magma bombs and mass drivers boiled away the rivers and reduced fecund earth to arid dust. The Cadmean Citadel was left untouched, and Cassander still found it difficult to believe that such a precise bombardment was possible.

He knew why, of course.

The Iron Warriors could not pass up this chance to humble the sons of Dorn, and Cassander had rallied his men with grim certitude as the bulk landers of the IV Legion descended on towering columns of firelight.

The technological cunning of the ancient fortress builders, married to the artfully wrought geography and the courage of the defenders, had kept the Iron Warriors at bay for almost three months, but now Cassander’s defiance was almost at an end. With three-quarters of his Company slain, and thousands of mortal soldiers dead, he was running out of ways to fight. The citadel had few heavy guns remaining to keep the Iron Warriors from bringing their artillery superiority to bear and overwhelming the citadel’s inbuilt defence mechanisms.

The traitors could not be denied for much longer, but every day Cassander’s warriors stayed alive kept the enemy from redeploying and bringing their strength to bear elsewhere.

A poor measure of success, but it was all Cassander had left.

He shook off such pessimism, knowing it did not become a warrior of the Imperial Fists to wallow in self pity, and moved to the edge of the northernmost bastion. Once its gleaming ramparts had been a proud example of the military engineer’s art. Now they were chewed up ruins-in-waiting. Locris and Kastor crouched behind the largest nubs of dusty stone, golden giants amid the hundreds of dusty ochre-clad local militiamen. Cassander had broken up his few remaining squads, deploying his men throughout the defence to bolster each section of wall and provide strength of heart to the thousands of soldiers who fought alongside them.

The sky strobed with concussive impacts that buckled the air with their force. High explosives on ballistic trajectories flashed and screeched as their impact violence was dissipated by the void-umbra. The shields on the southern approaches were close to failing, but thankfully the enemy wasn’t concentrating fire there.

Locris looked up as Cassander hunkered down in the lee of the rampart, and Kastor gave him a nod of acknowledgement.

‘They’re eager today,’ said Kastor, as a thunderous detonation rocked the base of the wall. Kinetic dampers in the citadel’s plunging foundations transferred the power of the blast deep into the bedrock of the mountain and the smell of metal shavings and oily secretions wafted up from the silicate scabs forming over the craters. Rock fragments rained down onto the ramparts, blanketing the long line of soldiers in yet more red dust.

‘Too eager,’ agreed Locris. ‘Something’s happening, the pace has changed.’

Like Cassander, Locris went bareheaded; the same shrapnel fragment that split his battle helm in two had given him the long scar down his cheek and taken his left eye. The scar made him roguish, the eye piratical. Both were wounds to be avenged.

The plastron, pauldrons and greaves of Kastor’s armour were scorched black where the firestorm of an incendiary projectile had peeled the paint from its plates as he shielded a group of wounded soldiers with his body.

‘What do you think, captain? The Digger?’ asked Kastor.

‘I told you, Symeon’s squad spotted the Digger in the east today,’ said Locris. ‘This feels like Scrapper’s men.’

Cassander gripped the hilt of his sword and peered through a split in the rampart, where webs of connective stone tissue had failed to set, watching the uphill avalanche of burnished iron plate through a haze of dust. Smoke-wreathed artillery pits in sheltered batteries far below hurled high-velocity projectiles ahead of the climbing Iron Warriors, while mobile guns on walker platforms struggled to keep up with the assault force. This fresh attack was a salutatory reminder that Perturabo’s sons were warriors first and foremost, siege specialists second. Cassander watched their movements, fluid and aggressive, disciplined yet driven by core-deep fury.

Where had such raw hate come from?

They had taken to distinguishing between the Iron Warriors detachments by giving their commanders derogatory appellations based on their most apparent characteristics. The Digger’s men were bent-backed shovellers, methodical, precise and unstinting in their labours, the Malingerer kept his men in their dugouts as his artillery dropped tonnes of munitions on the citadel, the Voyeur liked to watch proceedings from a spike-topped blockhouse in the centre of the valley.

‘I think you’re right, Locris,’ said Cassander.

Unlike his fellow commanders, Scrapper liked to throw his men at the walls if so much as a sniff of an assault opportunity presented itself. Where other Iron Warriors displayed a measure of caution towards the citadel’s defences and an appreciation for the careful, step-by-step methodology of siege warfare, Scrapper liked to get his legionaries bloody in the swirling crucible of combat.

Cassander dropped back into cover as a whining solid slug zipped overhead.

‘Makes it easier, I suppose,’ noted Kastor. ‘His men have no fire discipline worth a damn.’

‘Maybe not, but they’re hard fighters,’ said Cassander. ‘We give them insulting names, but don’t ever underestimate them.’

‘Duly noted, captain,’ said Kastor, placing a fist in the centre of his scorched breastplate.

Locris held up a spoon-handled detonator trigger and said, ‘You want the pleasure of these ones, captain?’

Cassander risked another glance through the rampart as the citadel’s artillery pieces opened up on the advancing Iron Warriors. Those guns alone weren’t going to make much of a dent in the assault force, but any thinning of the ranks could only be a good thing.

‘You do it,’ he said. ‘You’ve more than earned it.’

Locris grinned and mashed the trigger, detonating the last of the seismic mines dug into the northern slopes at the forefront of the Iron Warriors attack. Mushrooming blasts of tectonic shockwaves ripped a three-hundred-metre section of the mountain away and sent it tumbling downhill in a storm of pulverised rock.

Cassander relished the sight of scores of split-open bodies carried downhill in the raging avalanche, and pressed the throat bead of his borrowed vox.

‘All Fists – any movement in your sectors?’

Each of his section leaders replied in the negative, lending further credence to his growing certainty that this was Scrapper’s latest attempt to break the citadel open with a surprise assault. The tempo of the unequal artillery duel picked up as the Iron Warriors drew ever closer, climbing through the deep ditch carved by the seismic mines.

‘Symeon, Esdras, Phyros,’ said Cassander into his throat mic.
‘Re-deploy your men to the northern bastion immediately.’

The enemy artillery shifted their aim as the Iron Warriors closed the last hundred metres between them and the wall. Shells screamed on direct flight paths, slamming into the wall with pounding hammerblows that shook the foundations of the mountain itself. A pressure wave of impact blew up and over the wall and the heat of incendiaries burned at the silicate scabs fighting to resist the detonations.

Cassander knew this was the last chance he would have to blunt the assault force before the Iron Warriors were tearing at the defenders.

‘Wait until they reach the closest markers,’ he ordered, bellowing in a voice that could reach from one end of the Phalanx’s training halls to the other. ‘Make every shot count or it won’t be Perturabo’s whelps you need to worry about!’

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Stefan Kopinski

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