KOVOS FALLS

Mark Latham

‘There are countless thousands of regiments of the Imperial Guard. There are untold millions of Imperial Guardsmen, all of whom provide grist for the mill in the eternal war for mankind’s deliverance. Yet there is but one regiment of storm troopers, who stand head and shoulders above the common soldier. Would that the schola progenium could provide more of them.’

– Commissar Dmitri Antonov addressing the McIntyre Assembly, 977.M41

The wind whipped furiously across the cavernous mouth of Hangar 11, its howl drowning out the screech of las-fire. Three men fell to the first salvo, as the storm troopers swooped into the vast opening on glowing grav-chutes.

The hive scum scrambled in disarray, trying in vain to mount an effective counter-assault, but managing only to make a din as they fired high-calibre stub guns in blind panic. All fifteen of the foe lay dead or dying before the final trooper made planetfall, and the Hell’s Rejects unhitched their grav-chutes and took up defensive positions.

‘Valdimar, Kraster – take point,’ hissed Sergeant Godric. The two storm troopers darted to cover, hellguns readied against any further threats.

Trooper Sorokin kicked at one of the fresh corpses on the hangar deck. ‘Renegades,’ he spat. Turning the body over, the dead man’s bared chest revealed a pattern of scars, carved into his torso in a series of blasphemous sigils. ‘Heretics! This gets better and better.’

‘All who turn from the Emperor’s light are heretics, Sorokin. How far they have fallen matters not to us.’ Godric was taciturn as always, and Sorokin only nodded in response.

‘The only things I hate more than greenskins is heretics,’ muttered Trooper Kraster, who had seen more than his fair share of fighting against both.

The orbital drop had been treacherous. The storm was fierce, and the only safe landing point on the principal hive was three miles up. It was a testament to the storm troopers’ skill that they had found their landing site, avoiding the auto-defence weapons in the process. This was Kovos Rising, a black, cyclopean spear thrusting from the surface of the world amidst a cluster of smaller hives. With the hangar secured, the storm troopers quickly took stock of their equipment and muttered thanks to the Emperor for a safe drop, before heading across the landing bay. Godric led the way, his bionic eye cutting through the darkness. When they reached the far side of the hangar, Godric led his squad through obfuscating shadows until they reached a large bulkhead set in a plasteel wall some fifteen metres high. The coast seemingly clear, the troopers flicked their visors up and stood easy.

Godric looked at his men. ‘We’re close to the spire, but we have to expect stiff resistance from hostiles. We’ll have to do this the hard way.’

‘What’s new, sergeant?’ grinned Valdimar. He was a giant of a man, who looked as though he could wrestle a Catachan devil into submission.

‘Remember your objectives, and take no unnecessary risks,’ Godric said, sternly.

‘Yes sir!’ The response came as one from the assembled troopers.

‘Okay, McLeod, get this door open. We’re going in – and remember, all of you; the scum behind these doors have turned from the Emperor’s light. If they get in our way, show no mercy.’

‘Mercy is weakness!’ came the refrain, accompanied a moment later by the grinding of hydraulics as the heavy bulkhead swung open, revealing a narrow corridor ahead. The passage was bathed in blood-red light; the only sound the steady whirring of filtration pumps and the clunking of vast, antiquated steam pipes.

‘Two-by-two formation,’ said Godric. ‘Sorokin, you’re with me. Tarek, Joachim, take the rear. Let’s go.’

The route to the Wall had been perilous, but not as dangerous as Godric had feared. Using access tunnels from the manufactorum, the storm troopers had managed to locate the most isolated group of sentries, and Kraster and Sorokin had made short work of them before beckoning the others down onto the main gantry. Now the Wall was before them – plasteel panels, coated in ceramite, standing sixty metres high and at least six metres thick, with a perimeter stretching for miles around. Bulkheads permeated its exterior at regular intervals, each crowned by auto-defence units. The Wall was a physical barrier between the noble dwellings of the upper spire and the squalid manufactora, celerions and hab-blocks of the rest of the hive, and now it stood between the Hell’s Rejects and their mission.

With barely a word, the Hell’s Rejects took up defensive postures around one of the bulkheads, claiming cover where they could. The wind whipped up around them, billowing from the vast void between the outer railings and an unfathomable drop beyond. McLeod took up a position next to the control panel of the bulkhead, nervously operating the controls under the watchful eye of the sentry gun. He thrice intoned a blessing to the Omnissiah, before patching his Imperial identi-chit into the dormant servo-skull behind the panel. A red eye blinked into life.

‘Imperial Guard Storm Trooper Squad Identified. Authorisation?’

Godric stepped forward, and spoke to the servo-skull as loudly and clearly as he dared given the hostile environs.

‘Squad Godric. sixty-sixth storm trooper company. Imperial Override Alpha 11759.’

The inner workings of the grim automaton whirred and clicked.

‘Welcome to Kovos Spire.’

The door swung open with a loud clunk. Even before the first storm trooper had stepped beyond the threshold, footsteps and shouts could be heard close by as gangers were alerted by the noise. The most treasured prize of all for these heretics lay within the spire, and they would stop at nothing to gain access. Godric ushered the last man through the door, and only just had time to see it closed as the first rounds ricocheted off the armoured bulkhead.

Before long, the storm troopers were stepping into what seemed like another world. Despite the hardships and unrest beyond the Wall, in the spire those noble lords and ladies who had not managed to flee the hive still existed within airy halls, with as much food, drink and finery as they could desire. Well-dressed administrators and lordlings stepped aside for the storm troopers, looks of distaste upon their faces at the appearance of the Hell’s Rejects. Godric was saluted by a captain of the Kovosian household guard, a man who looked a little past his peak.

‘Captain Tarvin, sir, at your service,’ he said. ‘I am to escort you to Governor Marchinus.’

Tarvin led the way through the brightly-lit halls, past domiciles, offices and rec-rooms, and up several flowing staircases.

‘How many men do you have, Tarvin?’ asked Godric.

‘A few days ago I had a hundred, sir. Now I have twenty-two.’

Godric nodded grimly. The fighting across the planet had been fierce and retribution swift, as hive after hive had fallen to open rebellion.

‘You know why we are here?’ Godric’s question was a leading one – this was not a mercy mission, and he would brook no requests for rescue.

‘We picked up the same signal, sir. Adeptus Mechanicus emergency protocols. We couldn’t decipher it, but we know where it came from.’

‘Good. And the governor? He’ll cooperate in the fulfilment of our mission?’

Tarvin checked himself before replying. ‘Governor Marchinus is… He will do his duty, sir.’

Through twisting corridors they strode, before reaching the command centre of the spire. Tarvin announced the Hell’s Rejects as ‘Storm Trooper Squad Godric,’ and took his position by the door.

Before Godric’s men was a well-equipped control room, with a massive viewport on one side looking out over the other hives, and the turmoil of a world at war. The governor stood with his back to them, gazing upon his shattered domain.

‘I have spent a lifetime building this world, as did my father and grandfather before me,’ said the governor. His high-pitched voice was quavering. ‘And now look at it… all in ruin. Irrecoverable, they say… such a pity.’ He turned to face Godric. The man was broken. His brow was heavily lined, and his eyes were wild, darting about like Torvelid swamptoads in their holes. ‘You’ve come to save me from my own world? A world that has turned on me like a wayward son?’

‘We have come to find the source of the Adeptus Mechanicus emergency transmission, located somewhere in Kovos Rising,’ replied Godric in a measured tone.

‘Fine, fine,’ said the governor, evidently misunderstanding or wilfully ignoring Godric. ‘But you must realise there is still much to do before I can leave. Why don’t you go and make sure the hangar is secure, and I shall prepare my people.’

Godric chanced an impatient look over his shoulder at Tarvin, who returned his gaze, shaking his head.

‘You do that, Lord Marchinus,’ said Godric, stepping back towards the door. ‘Do I have your permission to employ your household guard in the operation?’

Marchinus was already beckoning in half a dozen attendants and bureaucrats, each more exotically attired than the last, and all wearing quite vacant expressions.

‘Hmm? Oh, yes, yes. Go and talk to Tarquin. Or was it Tarvin? Go, go – and report to me the moment my shuttle is ready. You will be rewarded for this, Godwyn, mark my words. I have friends on Terra, you know.’

Godric left hastily, and pulled Tarvin to one side as soon as the door was closed.

‘The governor is mad, Tarvin. You should have told me.’

Tarvin shrugged. ‘It is not my place to judge my Lord Governor. Protocol demands that you seek an audience. Duty demands that I protect him to the end.’

‘Let him pomp and preen with his courtiers. Marchinus is no longer in control. I will allow him to die on his own world, in the service of the Emperor – others would not be so merciful. Your duty now lies in serving me; the Emperor’s will is more important than all of the inhabitants of this spire, understood?’

Tarvin could only nod sullenly. ‘I will do my duty, sir.’

‘As do we all, for only in death does duty end. Now, show me where this transmission came from.’

Tarvin and four hand-picked men accompanied the storm trooper squad. Any more and their numbers would be impossible to conceal, even in the labyrinthine passageways of the hive. Their mission would lead them to the underhive, a perilous journey into the bowels of Kovos Rising; outside the spire’s artificial environment of tranquillity and high culture was a vast city ravaged by corruption, suffering and violence. Tarvin had revealed that a delegation from Mars had been labouring over excavations at the hive’s foundations since before the rebellion, and had lost contact with the spire shortly after the fighting had begun.

The household soldiers guided the squad through endless corridors, machine shops, storied warehouses and boiling-hot forges. Through almost every bulkhead and in every other corridor, pockets of resistance were met with extreme prejudice. Hive gangers and once-loyal soldiers hunkered behind shabby barricades, launching furious assaults upon the Hell’s Rejects whenever they were encountered. The storm troopers went about their business with grim efficiency, taking down a heretic with every shot from their supercharged lasguns, and standing unflinching as stubber fire rattled against their carapace armour.

The deeper they delved, the bolder the hive scum seemed to grow, and the more outlandish their appearance. Tattoos and scarification seemed to be commonplace, confirming that Kovos Rising had indeed succumbed to heresy. They shouted curses against the immortal Emperor, which served only to make Sergeant Godric deliver his wrath with greater alacrity. After the first few encounters, Trooper Siegfried advanced to the head of the squad, his flamer laying waste to dozens of renegades in the tight confines of the hive’s corridors. Siegfried had always favoured the flamer as a weapon, and was marked by his permanently blackened face and armour – scorch-marks that he insisted could not be washed off ‘for luck’.

The Hell’s Rejects advanced in this way for what seemed like an eternity. When they reached Manufactorum Sixty, in a district Tarvin told them was called Forge Landing, Godric gave the order to halt.

‘If we carry on this path it’ll take us an hour or more to fight through more of these corridors. We’ve been lucky so far, but we need to reach the underhive soon or our time – not to mention our luck – might just run out. Captain Tarvin says we can cut through this factory and continue through one of the old extraction tunnels. If we meet resistance, it’s las-fire only – this manufactorum houses fuel tanks, and if they ignite they could blow us to the Emperor’s mercy and back.’

Trooper ‘Lucky’ Ishmael looked sullen at this instruction and slung his plasma gun over his shoulder forlornly, as though parting with his first-born child. Siegfried was similarly sullen as he unloaded the promethium canisters from his flamer, just in case..

The doors to the manufactorum were large enough to drive a Shadowsword through, and the storm troopers parted them but a fraction. Beyond lay a dark, cavernous workshop. Conveyor belts and pulleys reached up high into the gloom. Emergency lumen flickered and showers of sparks from broken machinery flashed intermittently. Stairs and walkways encircled the factory, spiralling around the vast tanks of volatile fuel. With the factory workers dead or rioting, and so many of the containment systems down, the silos represented a serious threat to the stability of the hive’s upper levels. Trooper Thyrus whistled in awe, and Godric silenced him with a glower from his good eye..

Soundlessly, the squad skirted the vast chamber towards the steel-shod stairway.

‘Tarek, scout ahead and report back if there’s trouble. Everyone else, proceed with caution,’ said Godric.

Tarek scurried down the stairs, silent as a cat. He was an expert tracker and stealthy scout, and he took no more than a dozen steps before he had melded into the shadows and disappeared from view.

Progress was arduous. The stairs were littered with detritus and corpses, and many steps were missing, damaged, or slick with blood, making the footing treacherous. On the seventeenth level they were forced to duck beneath suspended bodies of factory workers, hanging from long chains. On the sixteenth they had to deploy rappel lines to cross a missing section of steel walkway. When they arrived at level fifteen, they were met at the top of the stairway by Tarek.

‘Guard station, directly below,’ Tarek said, his voice hushed. ‘Five men, all armed. There’s only one way in.’

‘Must’ve been the old foreman’s post,’ said Godric. ‘We do this quick and quiet – hand-to-hand. Tarek, you lead, I’ll follow. Valdimar, Sorokin and Joachim, you know what to do. The rest of you, pistols ready. Tarvin, same goes for your men. If we fail, then our only hope of keeping this quiet is light arms fire. Understand?’

The Hell’s Rejects muttered obeisance, and Godric drew his power sword.

‘The Emperor protects.’

The five chosen men crouched on the threshold of the guard station. A double door, one side hanging off its hinges, stood between them and their quarry. Shrieking voices could be heard from within – gangers who had given themselves over to some kind of dark cult, and were now debauched and high on stimms. Tarek held up a hand to ready the advance party, waiting for an opening. When it came, he jerked his hand forwards and, as one, the five Hell’s Rejects dashed into the guardroom.

Tarek, the smallest and nimblest of the group, made it all the way to the comms panel before the drunken gangers knew what was happening. A tall, scarred ganger with outrageous spiked hair idled by an intercom. Tarek slit his throat and shut down the comm-unit before his target even knew he was there. Two more moved towards him clumsily, while the other two scrambled for their stubbers.

Between the gangers and their weapons stood Valdimar and Joachim ‘the Fist’. Valdimar fended off the clumsy knife slashes of the nearest assailant, reached down with his massive hands, and lifted the ganger from the ground by his head, breaking his neck with one violent wrench before tossing him aside like a broken doll. Joachim needed no assistance either – the plasteel knuckle-studs on his gauntlets glinted in the flickering torchlight as he delivered a rough death to the cultist before him. Joachim had earned his nickname at the Jones Crispin insurrection, where he had held off a crowd of rebels bare-fisted until reinforcements arrived. He needed little encouragement to use his talents.

The two that had turned on Tarek had barely registered the deaths of their compatriots. One of them was gnashing his teeth and slashing at the Tallarn-born trooper with a crude pick. The other was fumbling at his holster for a pistol. Tarek backed away, drawing them on – too late, the gangers realised why Tarek did not attack them himself. A tempered blade was thrust through the neck of the first ganger, whilst the second’s hand was removed by another blade before his holster was unfastened. Sorokin stood between them, and spun around with the grace of a consummate duellist to decapitate both foes. Sorokin was Godric’s right-hand man and the most flamboyant member of the squad. His father had been a colonel of the Vostroyan Firstborn and Sorokin carried a pair of adamantine blades in honour of the progenitor he never knew.

Godric strode towards the comms panel, scanning the room with his bionic eye for any signs of enemy surveillance or traps. Satisfied, he sheathed his unused sword and beckoned the rest of the squad into the guard station. Kraster stayed crouched by the door, keeping watch on the gantry.

‘Good work,’ said Godric. ‘Now secure the room. Tarek, see if there’s anything worth scavenging from these scum. McLeod – take a look at that comms unit. If you can patch in and take out the enemy relays for a while, it might buy us some more time.’

‘Sir, if I may?’ It was Tarvin, stepping over the body of a dead ganger, and taking pains to avoid the pool of blood that crawled slowly across the floor. ‘If I have my bearings right, we’re near to a derelict sector, sealed long ago. I don’t think anyone even knows it exists any more. If I can find the old panoptical station and access the maintenance shafts, we can clear at least three or four levels without enemy contact.’

Godric weighed up his options – he knew his men hadn’t seen the worst of the fighting yet, and their progress had been too slow so far.

‘Okay, Tarvin – take Tarek with you, and find the way.’

The Hell’s Rejects kept themselves mainly to long-abandoned service tunnels, lifts used only by tech-servitors, and reactivated sections of derelict hab-blocks known only to the hive’s administrators. Once, these vast chambers and winding tunnels had teemed with life, but as the metropolis had grown ever upwards, entire districts had been abandoned due to poverty, disease or simple undesirability. Forgotten for generations and sealed off from gang intrusion, they now provided relatively safe passage for Godric’s men as they descended hundreds of levels to the underhive.

Days passed in this manner, the storm troopers meeting scattered resistance along the way, before they reached level thirteen. The very air emanating from the darkness beneath them seemed stale and cloying. Tarvin told the storm troopers that there would be no more secret paths from this point on, and the way ahead would be dangerous. The Adeptus Mechanicus signal originated from a mining platform that sat above the sump on the lowest level.

‘So what’s on level one?’ laughed Thyrus. ‘Don’t tell me some poor sops live in the sump?’

‘Level one is quarantined,’ replied Tarvin, with utmost seriousness. ‘It has long been forbidden to access that level. If anything does live below it, in the foundations of the hive… well, let’s just say we don’t want it getting out.’

‘What are we waiting for?’ interjected Valdimar. ‘We’ve been sneaking around like sewer rats for days. I want to crack the heads of some underhive scum!’

You’ll get your chance sooner that you think,’ interrupted McLeod. ‘Five blips heading our way – foot of the stairway.’

The Hell’s Rejects needed no instruction. Silently, they spread out across the gantry, melding into the shadows. Valdimar, remarkably stealthy for a big man, padded down the stairs, the steel treads making barely sounds beneath his feet. Tarek peered over the rail, eying up his prey. As soon as the team heard the unmistakeable sounds of Valdimar engaging the enemy, Tarek clipped a rappel line to the metal handrail and leapt over the edge. The sounds of combat were over in seconds, and the remainder of the squad began their descent down the long flight of stairs. At the bottom, Tarvin’s men gaped in awe at the sight of Valdimar and Tarek, and the five bodies at their feet. Valdimar dragged the gangers into the shadows where they would remain undiscovered for a while, and wiped the blood from his gloves. He looked content.

The way through the red zone was dangerous indeed. Every cavernous promenade, cramped shanty town and network of tiny engineering tunnels was awash with rebels. Underhive gangers roamed in packs, or cavorted around trash fires. The bodies of Kovosian household soldiers littered the route, and more than once the storm troopers were forced to change direction to avoid detection. Where the enemy were concentrated, there seemed to be great carnivals of heresy, orgies of violence and depravity as half-naked cultists leapt and writhed to the beat of distant drums. Shouts of ecstasy mingled with screams of terror as loyalist prisoners were tortured and roasted over hellish fires. And from the deepest shadows, Godric’s men were forced to watch, too few in number to face such rebellion head-on. They saw thousands of heretics from all walks of life, and who knew how many more danced and cavorted on the lower levels. Godric’s face was sepulchral, and he bade Tarvin to lead his men onwards, deeper into the belly of the beast.

The same story could be found throughout the underhive, but the darkness within the souls of the revellers seemed to grow as the storm troopers got closer to the lower reaches. There was a madness eating away at the denizens of Kovos Rising, and Godric began to believe that flattening the planet through orbital bombardment was the only way of sanctifying this place of evil. Even the structure of the underhive seemed to twist and change as the Hell’s Rejects ventured deeper – warped effigies and blasphemous scrawlings marked every tunnel; great metal spikes jutted from walls at impossible heights, adorned with chains from which hung flayed bodies.

‘If we truly are the Hell’s Rejects,’ muttered Thyrus, ‘then it can’t be long before this place spits us out.’

At the entrance to a deserted cargo hangar, Captain Tarvin signalled the storm troopers to stop.

‘This is level five. To get lower, there’s only one route, and it leads through the old sector house. Unfortunately, it has long been taken over by criminals from the biggest gangs in the underhive. It was a no-go area before the rebellion, so now…’

Godric growled, conveying his impatience more clearly than any words.

‘If we get to the hangar bay doors, we can reach a skywalk,’ said Tarvin, nervously. ‘We can get to the mining levels from outside the hive, and we’ll only have to get past a few isolated outposts. I reckon it’s a better option than fighting our way through these corridors.’

‘Aye,’ said Godric, ‘but there’s a battle raging out there. We’ll be exposed to fire from all sides.’

‘Possibly,’ nodded Tarvin. ‘We also have to hope that the enemy aren’t watching from the viewing stations and outer platforms – we’ll be out in the open if we’re spotted.’

Godric conferred with Sorokin, before turning back to Tarvin. ‘The Emperor protects,’ he said.

The air was awash with bullets and las-fire. Valdimar dragged Tarvin bodily across the gantry and into cover as gangers peppered the storm troopers with autogun fire. The rappel descent had already claimed its first victim – Lavalis, one of Tarvin’s men, had misjudged the distance and broken both of his legs as he crashed into a plasteel railing. His pain had been short-lived as a stray stub round took him through the eye. From the moment they had leapt from the old hangar, the Hell’s Rejects had met opposition from the elements and the natives alike. The wind had threatened to blow them over the edge of the platform into the sulphur pits below, while a large patrol of cult gangers had spotted them almost as soon as they had touched down on the walkway.

Trooper Ishmael advanced as far forwards as he dared and found a vantage point amid a pile of scrap barricades. As soon as the solid slugs of the gangers had stopped ricocheting off his cover, he unleashed a fusillade of searing plasma at the enemy. The gangers flinched from the onslaught, unused to such ferocious opposition, and their pause for thought allowed the remainder of the storm troopers to advance in good order, picking off foes with every shot. When finally the two sides closed, it looked as though the gangers may attempt to engage the Imperial trespassers in hand-to-hand combat, but any such notion was quashed when Siegfried stepped to the front of his unit, flamer in hand, and engulfed the gangers’ makeshift defences with blazing promethium.

With the enemy routed, the Hell’s Rejects regrouped. Captain Tarvin looked out across the landscape he called home. The walls of the kilometres-high Kovos Rising loomed at their backs, whilst ahead of them the planet burned beneath a crimson sky. Some ten kilometres away, a second hive lay in ruins, its top quarter struck from its body, fires burning from every crack and crevice. Beyond that, bombs fell, troops fought and men sold their lives dearly.

‘That’s Spiridov Hive,’ said Tarvin, ruefully, almost to himself. ‘I was born there.’

Tarvin was afforded no time to grieve as Godric gave the order to move on. The skywalk split into two further ones, with one fork looping around back to the hive, and the other descending to ground level via stairways and maintenance lifts. It was this path the storm troopers took, finding themselves on the outskirts of a huge refinery on the planet’s surface.

‘No sign of the workers,’ said Tarvin, his voice raised against the incessant thundering of explosions and the thrumming of automated industrial machinery. ‘Looks like the path is clear.’

‘Can you get us back inside?’ asked Godric.

‘Yes, but we need to find the maintenance entrance. From there we should be able to reach the mines unhindered.’

The search was brief, and finally Tarvin hooked up a security cipher to the access panel of a ceramite-plated bulkhead. It felt strange being at ground level outside a hive – most of the millions who dwelt within Kovos Rising had never set foot outside, nor even beyond the limitations of their own hab-zones. Yet the Hell’s Rejects had traversed the length and breadth of the cyclopean city, and now sought to re-enter the bowels of the soaring structure.

Once inside, Tarvin led the troopers in single file through a maze of dark, cramped access tunnels. Their progress was monitored by the glassy, lifeless eyes of engineering servitors, which stood silently, plugged into service niches in the walls. These cybernetic workers awaited the return of their overseers, most of whom were undoubtedly dead. The route twisted and turned, dipped and ascended, and gradually the environs began to alter. The Imperial icons, devotional shrines and industrial fixings that adorned every inch of wall became less prominent, until the walls were smooth. Though corroded with age, the rooms and passages that the troopers traversed seemed no longer to be of Imperial design. Finally, they descended yet another level in a rickety service lift, and emerged into a large, low-ceilinged chamber with carved stone walls and a flagged floor.

‘What is this place?’ asked Sorokin.

‘The threshold to the Forbidden Deeps,’ replied Tarvin. ‘Few have ever looked upon these chambers. I myself believed them to be the stuff of stories until recently.’

‘Are they xenos-built?’ asked Tarek, suspiciously.

‘No. I am told they were built by the first Terran colonists, in the time of the Great Crusade. Some of our most powerful geothermic processors are ported into archeotech down here – even the tech-adepts have no idea how they work, but we thank the Emperor that they do.’

‘No time for history lessons,’ Godric said. ‘Lead on, captain.’

‘I’ll do my best, sir, but from here on I know as much as you.’

‘Very well,’ Godric said. With two simple hand gestures, Godric gave the Hell’s Rejects their orders – the squad fanned out into a reconnaissance formation, and stepped fearlessly into the gloom.

The chamber was vast. Excavations were evident from the unearthed rubble that lined the hewn pit in the centre of the cavern, piled high around tall columns of polished stone. From that dig-site, large tendrils of pipes and power cables seemed to grow organically, grasping at the farthest reaches of the chamber. Beyond them, vague silhouettes of digging machinery served to emphasise the size of the room. Portable lumens still stood within and about the gaping hole, providing scant light in the gloomy cavern, but illuminating the object of the storm troopers’ mission. Between the compact generators and crates of tools was a bulkhead of strange design, partially uncovered by a now-absent workforce. Tiny blinking lights flickered around it, and a dormant screen was recessed into its frame, above three partially opened panels.

The troopers spread out around the platform by which they had entered, and crept down to ground level. Only when McLeod signalled that there were no readings on his bio-scanner did the troopers relax, and approach the ancient portal with awe.

‘McLeod, I want this examined immediately. See if you can get it open.’ McLeod nodded in response, and set to work with his equipment. As he worked, his bio-scanner began to glow faintly. Godric took the device from McLeod.

‘Keep at it. I’ll see to this,’ he told the young trooper. Godric studied the scanner intently. ‘One blip detected, two hundred metres – it’s slow, but it’s heading this way. Men, take up defensive positions – I want a secure perimeter. And move those lumens. I want to see what we’re up against.’

Within the vast excavation pit, the storm troopers scurried like insects, too few in number to defend such a large area effectively against a determined foe. Now they were approached by a single enemy, and thus went about their business confidently. That confidence, however, was shattered as soon as the lumens were moved to cast their light around the chamber. As the shadows shrank back from the illumination, humanoid forms were revealed standing all around the edges of the cavernous room. Light gleamed off metal, and the storm troopers stared at hundreds of servitors, of all classes and designations. Some carried fearsome weapons in place of arms, whilst most were equipped with grappling arms, rock drills and buzz-saws. Not one of them moved, instead standing sentry, dormant and silent as the grave.

The storm troopers clenched their guns and took up firing positions. That the servitors could be hostile did not bear thinking about, and the blip on the bio-scanner was still moving towards them. The eerie silence in the room was broken by Trooper McLeod, who had carried on working, oblivious to the danger.

‘Got it!’ he said. And his words were accompanied by an electronic thrum and a faint glow of light from the bulkhead’s access panel. Godric hushed him immediately, and McLeod looked momentarily sheepish.

‘Why isn’t it open?’ Godric whispered.

‘Sir, that will take some time. I don’t understand the tech… but we’ve got power at least.’

‘Step away from that panel, trooper!’ A metallic voice rang out from the darkness. The Hell’s Rejects readied their weapons, trusting to their targeting reticules to pick up any sign of movement.

‘And lower your weapons.’

This time the command was accompanied by movement. As one, six of the Rejects trained their weapons on the target, which shuffled towards the crater with an awkward gait.

The lumen revealed the deep-red robes of a tech-priest of Mars, but the storm troopers relaxed only slightly. The figure that approached them was not the most reassuring one. The red robes hid something both more than and less than human. Metallic tendrils snaked from beneath the hunchbacked creature’s hood and sleeves, and its one bionic hand held a long-hafted power axe, upon which it leaned heavily as it traversed the sloping sides of the crater. Even from a distance, the tech-priests breathing apparatus was audible as a regular hiss-click.

‘Halt!’ barked Godric. ‘My men will open fire unless you identify yourself.’

The tech-priest checked his advance, and paused momentarily before responding.

‘I am Magos Explorator Korech,’ he said. As he spoke, a small servo-skull flitted out of the shadows behind him and approached Godric, its anti-gravitic drive purring. It stopped a metre away from the sergeant, and projected a holographic display in the air before him. Godric’s bionic eye translated the coded identification readout for him, and he nodded.

‘Approach, magos. We meet at last.’

The storm troopers had never seen anything like it. The thought that their forebears, tens of thousands of years ago, could have wrought such a flawless technological wonder was astounding.

The door had led to an underground complex, evidently built to withstand the most ardent assault. Korech led the storm troopers through twisting corridors and room after room, flanked by his ominous gun-servitor bodyguard. When eventually they reached the central chamber, they could barely comprehend what they beheld.

‘This is the reason we are here,’ said the magos. ‘This is – was – a standard template construct system. It is barely functioning, but I have been able to piece together fragments of data for perhaps several dozen templates.’

‘Throne of the Emperor…’ muttered Godric. ‘Are you saying there are new templates here?’

‘Impossible to confirm. The data is largely encoded. The templates may be new, or may be already known to us. My equipment here is insufficient for the task. The data must be restored and returned to the explorator fleet for further study. It will take many years to translate this material, damaged as it is.’

Godric nodded, and looked around the chamber. Trails of power cables spilled from every console like guts from a dying soldier. The magos had patched every data port and power conduit with his ancient and thrice-blessed equipment, and was running data sequences constantly, with logis-skulls and calculus servitors overseeing the most tedious work. It was hard to take in – this room had once been a marvel of technology, from a time when anything was possible. Now, it was in such disrepair that perhaps it would never yield its secrets. The magos would search like a zealot for even partial confirmation of a new design hidden away within the corrupted data – should he find it, his contribution to the glory of the Imperium would be assured, whether the design was for a star-destroying las-weapon or a new type of prosthetic limb. So avaricious were the tech-priests in their pursuit of STC technology that a deep longing for technological discovery was , for many, their only remaining human trait.

Godric noticed that Tarvin and his men were close by. One of the soldiers looked like he was about to pass out from the wonder of it all.

‘You, private. What’s your name? Vilkas?’ The private nodded. ‘Make yourself useful and stand watch by the main entrance. I want to know if there’s any movement out there.’ The private saluted and scurried off. Better to give men like that something to do, Godric knew.

‘How are we going to get this off-world?’ asked Captain Tarvin. ‘Surely we can’t risk transmitting such information to the fleet?’

‘No, captain, we cannot. And besides, this console long ago lost the ability to send such transmissions. To think, it was the ignorance of men that wrought such damage. How could they deliberately harm such treasure? And then to bury it beneath a million tonnes of rockcrete… it is inconceivable.’

‘From what I understand, they had their reasons,’ growled Godric, already tiring of this mechanical man and his obsession.

‘The answer to the captain’s question,’ continued Korech, ‘is that we must record as much data as possible in a physical form, and take it off-world ourselves.’

‘And how much of it is there?’ asked Godric.

‘Come, I will show you.’

The magos led the way to a side chamber, where CAT units scuttered about the troopers’ feet and servo-scribes slaved away transcribing data that was meaningless to the uninformed observer. The magos waved a metallic arm at a pile of hard-copy material – thick ledgers, holo-crystals, data-slates and porta-drives galore, lying in crates and cupboards. The scribes worked ceaselessly on more reams of parchment, ready to be threaded into further books. If the storm troopers had all filled their packs with this material, they would still have to make dozens of trips.

‘There is more, of course. I expect to have three times this amount before I am done.’

‘Emperor’s teeth!’ snapped Godric. ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on? Every inch of this hive is crawling with heretic scum. Even if they don’t find us down here, we have to get past them to find an extraction point. There has to be another way.’

‘Negative, sergeant. You have seen my servitors – they will form a guard of honour for our labours. In three days’ time we will take our work to the abandoned factory outside the walls of the hive, where my servitors will secure a perimeter and we can await extraction. Given the nature of the cargo, I am sure no effort will be spared.’

The magos’s logic was sound, if a little hopeful – Godric had no faith in the servitors’ ability to hold off a determined foe for long.

‘Any vox-cast we send to the fleet will be intercepted, so we only get one shot. That means three days is too long, magos. If we wait that long, the war will be over and the fleet will have abandoned us to our fate. We may be the best, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t expendable.’

The magos’s working audibly whirred and clicked as he considered this.

‘Then you will take what you can, and we will hold off the enemy until you return. There are Adeptus Astartes present, yes? They will surely suffice…’ He trailed off, distracted by the arrival of the two gun servitors that had been left in the control room.

‘You were not summoned. Return to your posts.’

The emergency lumens flickered and went out, and the room was lit by the muzzle flash from the servitors’ heavy bolters. The storm troopers scattered, flicking down their visors to activate the night-fighting settings, and returning fire before Godric could even give the order. The servitors proved difficult to take down with their armoured bodies, but a salvo from Ishmael’s plasma gun ended the fracas. Alarms sounded and blood-red lights flickered to life.

Godric quickly surveyed the scene. One of Tarvin’s soldiers was dead. The magos was injured, but was already heaving himself to his feet. Kraster had taken a glancing hit as a heavy round had exploded near to his head, and his visor was smashed apart. He indicated that he was all right – a few more scars wouldn’t hurt that face. Most importantly of all, some of the template material had been damaged. At least one thick ledger burned, and the contents of the crates were scattered across the floor. The servo-scribes lay lifeless, as if deactivated.

‘What’s going on? Is this what your “army” can do?’ roared Godric.

‘Negative. We are under attack. I must reach the control room. You must protect the STC!’

Godric barked an order to his men to join Vilkas at the complex entrance, and helped the magos back to the control room. In the half-light the magos worked to bring one of the ancient consoles to life. No sooner had he done so, than a scream of amplified feedback echoed through the corridors, as defunct communication devices seemed to activate of their own accord. The screech was replaced by a static hiss, followed by a sinister, booming voice that everyone in the complex could here.

‘Worms. Insects. Lapdogs of the False Emperor. Did you think you were safe? Did you think we would not find you? I see you. I see your doom!’

Something in the voice set Godric’s teeth on edge. Never had he heard such malice. It made him angry. If anyone was going to make threats, it would be him.

‘Magos, where’s that signal coming from?’

‘Unclear. But whatever it is, it also has control of my servitors. My devices are not responding. My blessed machines are corrupted and… No!’ If the magos’s mechanical voice was capable of sounding afraid, it would have done at that moment. Godric saw the dials and screens that the magos had been working on flickering and oscillating uncontrollably.

‘The enemy is activating the STC through my equipment. No, no, no! Omnissiah, preserve us!’

‘Magos, take hold of yourself. Use your skill and fight back. I’ll get my men to take every hard copy we have and get to the extraction point. Seal this place behind us and hold out until we return.’

‘Negative. This malign interference… It is too powerful. There is only once course of action, though I may be cursed forevermore.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘There is evil here. An ancient evil, that seeks to corrupt the STC to its own ends. I must activate the power core and destroy the complex. Logic dictates that there is no other recourse.’

Godric was at a loss. To be party to the destruction of an STC system, even one as damaged and infirm as this, was tantamount to heresy. But on the other hand, to let such a system fall into enemy hands would be worse. He knew what he had to do.

In minutes he had gathered his men together, and had them stowing every hard copy they could lay their hands on into packs and pouches. They would have to discard valuable ammunition to make room for data-crystals and loose parchments, but each of those objects had the potential to be worth their lives a hundred times over.

As they made for the exit of the chamber that had provided safe haven for such a short time, Godric turned back to Magos Korech once more. The tech-priest worked furiously, the mechadendrites that had once made him look like a hunchback now free and whipping around him, turning dials and interfacing with a machine of unfathomable complexity. The magos did not acknowledge Godric – his course of action was set, and he would see the complex destroyed.

Outside the complex, the Hell’s Rejects had expected enemy forces to be waiting for them, but instead they were met by ominous silence and pitch darkness. They manned the lumens once more – the dormant servitors still stood around the cavern, waiting for an order from their master that would never come. But with the threat of outside manipulation of these mechanical workers looming, the storm troopers were edgy.

‘How proud you must be to have served your Emperor so well.’ The voice came suddenly; it reverberated around the cavern, deep and ominous. The storm troopers shone lights around them, but could see no signs of movement.

‘Show yourself!’ Godric barked.

‘Gladly,’ said the voice. ‘But first, Sergeant Godric, why don’t you and your men lower your weapons? I am alone, after all. I only want the opportunity to parley.’

‘If you know me, then you must have access to restricted information. I must assume you are an enemy until proven otherwise. Show yourself.’ How did the enemy know his name?

‘You leave me little choice, it seems.’

No sooner had the voice fallen silent than the clanking of heavy machinery and the whirring of gyros filled the air. The cacophony was sudden and violent, and the storm troopers recoiled, weapons at the ready. Then, from the shadows, the black shapes of the servitors began to slope and shuffle forwards, as though the darkness itself had come alive. Glowing red eyes flickered into life, fixing the Guardsmen with impassive gazes.

The servitors advanced, mechanical arms grasping for the nearest storm troopers. As the first gun-servitor levelled a heavy stubber at the squad, Trooper Joachim opened fire. The reactionary shot sparked a fire-frenzy. The storm troopers unleashed volley after volley. Some broke through the Guardsmen’s defensive line and were met by Valdimar, who set about three servitors with a metal bar almost as tall as himself, knocking them backwards with great sweeping blows. Tarek and Kraster cleared a path for Siegfried, who levelled his flamer and washed a swathe of servitors with cleansing fire, melting flesh from metal skeletons. Despite these efforts, a servitor with a huge grasping claw took hold of McLeod, yanking him backwards towards the shadows. Godric stepped forward this time, lopping off its metal claw at the elbow with his power sword. He pulled McLeod behind cover.

‘Regroup!’ he yelled. ‘We have what we came for – fighting withdrawal!’

The storm troopers formed a loose line, edging back towards the higher ground from where they had entered, firing at the servitors with well-placed shots. Just as soon as they reached the edge of the excavation pit, the servitors stopped their advance. Joachim was the last to fire a shot, and looked apologetically at his sergeant.

‘Keep going, stop for nothing!’ roared Godric.

‘Why the hurry?’ The voice again; and accompanying it, the thrum of a generator signalled the activation of low-level emergency lighting. The servitors stood outlined in the dull orange light. There were more of them than the storm troopers had first thought – at least thirty now stood in and around the pit, a dozen lying prone or destroyed in the cold earth, and scores more standing behind, sluggishly awakening, ready to join the fight. As one, the storm troopers turned, realising that the voice had come from behind them.

Godric’s hand tightened around the hilt of his sword. The stranger stood between them and the exit ramp. He was a towering figure, clad in archaic power armour. A ragged cowl was pulled over his face, but could not disguise the glint of metal beneath and the bionic eye that glowed like a hot coal. He brandished a massive chainsword in his right hand, and a bolt pistol was holstered at his hip. His deep blue armour was battered and worn, covered in studs, grime and gruesome trophies – yet the insignia emblazoned on his shoulder pad was plain to see – a many-headed snake in bright green.

‘It is sad, is it not, when one’s best-laid plans do not bear fruit?’ said the Space Marine. ‘If this world is to be lost, I will at least take the STC. The damnation of this planet and the capture of such a prize will be some small consolation to me. Hand them over, and I may yet grant you an easy death.’

For a moment, no one spoke, and no one moved. But defiance swelled from the pit of Godric’s stomach. His faith in the Emperor overwhelmed his fear, and his indignation at the presence of such a blasphemy fuelled his rage.

‘Traitor Space Marine!’ he cried. ‘Hell’s Rejects – take him down!’

The hail of las-fire lit the cavern like sheets of lightning, and yet the enemy advanced, shielding his face with a power-armoured gauntlet and powering up his chainsword. As he stepped forward, so too did the growing crowd of servitors – the storm troopers were trapped.

‘Siegfried, Valdimar, hold those servitors off. Everyone else, kill the traitor! Protect the STC!’

The two troopers peeled off from the line and turned on the servitors. Great gouts of flame issued from Siegfried’s flamer, while Valdimar laid down relentless salvos of las-fire. The others focused on the Chaos Space Marine, but their desperation grew as their weapons barely slowed their hulking adversary. Even when a round seemed to pierce his power armour, he kept coming like a juggernaut of destruction. Suddenly he was amidst the storm troopers, hacking with his massive chainsword. Joachim was the first to fall. As viscera sprayed the earth, the Hell’s Rejects scattered. Kraster tried to level his lasgun at the back of the Space Marine’s head at point-blank range, but the foe had preternatural instincts and the trooper was decapitated by a backwards swing of the chainsword before he could pull the trigger. The bolt pistol was in the Space Marine’s other hand now, and even as Thyrus shouted a string of obscenities at the enemy, an explosive round buried itself into his chest and opened his ribcage.

With desperation verging on madness, Godric took up his power sword and launched himself at the foe. His powerful strike was met by an even more powerful riposte. The energy of Godric’s weapon could not best the Astartes-pattern chainsword, and the force of the blow jarred Godric’s arm. As seasoned a veteran as he was, the sergeant knew he could not win this fight. Even as he contemplated defeat, the Space Marine’s right foot slammed into his chest, knocking him to the ground and driving the breath out of him. Godric looked around, his bionic eye overcoming his blurred vision and shattered visor. The Space Marine was already over him, ignoring the attentions of the remaining Hell’s Rejects, and raising his chainsword for the killing blow. The weapon arced through the air towards him – to Godric it seemed to be in slow motion. Then salvation came.

Sorokin had drawn his own blades, and his adamantine sword interjected the arc of the Space Marine’s chainsword, diverting the blow harmlessly to the ground beside Godric. The traitor Space Marine thought for an instant of ignoring this new annoyance, but Sorokin’s shorter blade followed through with a strike that found a weak spot in the Space Marine’s armour where a hot-shot blast had struck home. The Chaos Space Marine roared with pain and fury as the blade pierced his side, and spun around to swipe at his assailant, but Sorokin darted aside, and held up his swords in salute. This was the moment he had been born for. This son of Vostroya had waited his whole life to live up to his late father’s legacy.

‘Go,’ he shouted to Godric. ‘Go now.’ Then he turned to the traitor, and screamed at the top of his lungs, ‘For the Emperor!’

‘My sentiments exactly,’ replied the traitor, his booming voice thick with irony.

The traitor took the bait. And yet even Sorokin, with his immense skill at arms, could not hope to withstand the power of a Space Marine. Godric was pulled to his feet by Ishmael and McLeod, and in that instant Sorokin was already flagging. The speed of the giant was inconceivable, and Sorokin dared not trade blows with his adversary directly for fear of his prodigious strength.

‘Come on, sir, we have to go!’ cried McLeod.

Ishmael shouted for Valdimar and Siegfried to follow. Tarvin and his men were nowhere to be seen. Godric could not blame them for running from the Traitor Space Marine. He knew that he should have done the same.

Siegfried heeded the call to retreat. His flamer was out of promethium and had been discarded – he now fired his laspistol at anything that moved, and clubbed at nearby servitors with its grip when they came to close. Valdimar also came running. The big man was wounded, but alive. As Godric’s orders died in the din of the fighting, Valdimar made for the exit, but as he did so he was caught in the grip of a gyro-strengthened arm. A servitor had him in its grasp, and even as Valdimar struggled to shake free, others came. Soon Valdimar was buried beneath four servitors, then five, then six. For a moment it looked as though his lauded strength would see him break loose, as he staggered to his feet, knocking two of the servitors aside; but before any of the remaining Hell’s Rejects could reach him, he was brought low again by more of the mindless cyborgs, and didn’t rise again.

Godric ordered McLeod to make for the exit, with Ishmael in support. He chanced one last look back at Sorokin, who had fought valiantly against a foe that was beyond him, and was now paying the price.

Sorokin had been clipped by the whirring blades of the traitor’s chainsword, and in a split second his arm was cleaved from his body. Sorokin went down on his knees with a cry of pain. Godric was consumed by rage, but was powerless in the face of the foe. The sergeant knew Sorokin was lost, but his bionic eye showed him the hidden facts – the grenades on Sorokin’s belt were primed and ready to detonate. Godric saw the tide of blood-soaked servitors scrabbling towards him, and duty to the Imperium had to come first. With a heavy heart he bundled Siegfried, McLeod and Ishmael through the exit. They raced through the cramped engineering tunnels once more. Servitors awoke from their long slumber and grasped at them from the walls, whilst the tunnels reverberated to the sounds of Sorokin’s final screams, followed by the deafening report of three krak grenades exploding.

The four Hell’s Rejects crashed through the exit, and were back on the surface. The bombs still dropped, albeit closer now. The bulkhead behind them reverberated to the sound of hammer-blows from thwarted servitors.

‘McLeod, I want a vox-cast now! Locate us an extraction point.’

‘Godric…’ came another voice nearby. Godric looked around for a new enemy, and saw only Tarvin and one of his men, shot to pieces. Tarvin still lived, just barely.

‘What happened?’ asked Godric, stooping down to speak to the dying soldier.

‘A-Ambush,’ he said, coughing on his own blood. ‘Private Vilkas… he went with them. He went with the renegades. We… we refused to betray the Emperor.’

Godric shook his head. He had been so confident of victory, and now all around him was death and treachery.

‘You have done your duty, captain. Be strong.’

‘No… No, sir. I have kept something from you. I must repent…’ said Tarvin, almost whispering now. ‘We knew something was wrong. We… we suspected Marchinus was… was in contact with an unknown enemy. The men… they began to talk of defection. Some went into… into the wastes. The corruption runs deep, sergeant. I let my duty to my lord cloud my judgement.’

‘You should have told me, Tarvin.’

‘The Alpha Legion told us that it would come to this; that the Imperium would reject us and destroy our world. But even though… my hive lies… sundered, my family dead, I will not believe that they are right. But by my inaction, I… I failed the Emperor.’

‘The enemy’s words are twisted,’ said Godric.

‘I-I am sorry.’ With that, the life left Tarvin’s body.

‘Come on sir, the vox-cast is sent,’ said McLeod. ‘The enemy will have heard it too – we have to get out of here.’

The ramp to landing pad was only yards away. The sound of the explosions from the orbital bombardment was deafening.

Godric, Ishmael, Siegfried and McLeod had made it to the extraction point, harried all the way by hive cultists. They were two miles from the hive now, amidst a vast field of towering processing units. Kovos Rising still dominated the skyline behind them, but now it was aflame. Thick smoke obscured the sky above them, creating a ceiling of black, undulating coils that blotted the sun. The remaining Hell’s Rejects had climbed to the cargo pad, and were now on the final sky-gantry between them and salvation. The vox-cast sent by McLeod had ended with one simple message: Data recovered. Evidence of heretical influence overwhelming. Corruption of officials impossible to rule out. Extraction requested. Recommend purge of Kovos Rising.

Cultists followed them still, skirting the edge of the long walkway, just out of range. The Hell’s Rejects were down to sidearms now, and their ammo was low. Their legs, burning with the pain of the day’s exertions, almost failed them, but they could not afford to stop now.

The smoke above them parted as an Aquila shuttle dropped towards the landing pad. Godric urged McLeod to go ahead while he and the others covered his escape. The young trooper obeyed eagerly, and made for the pad as fast as his weary legs would carry him.

The cultists’ autogun-fire was ineffectual at this range, and shots pinged around the Hell’s Rejects. Unflinching, they stood sentry to ensure the data was taken to safety; yet no sooner had complacency set in than their worst fears were realised. Three dark shapes moved on the edges of the gantry, and were moving closer. As they emerged from the drifting smoke, the Hell’s Rejects looked in horror upon not one, but three traitor Space Marines. Sorokin’s killer yet lived, and he led two of his foul kin, who looked every bit as formidable. Before the storm troopers could react to the new threat, one of the traitors’ boltguns roared, felling Siegfried in an instant. Godric looked over his shoulder – McLeod was almost at the landing pad, but the shuttle was unsteady in the gale, and had still not touched down. Out of desperation, he lobbed a frag grenade towards the Space Marines, which he knew would only slow them down at best.

‘We must hold them off, whatever the cost,’ said Godric.

Ishmael tried his best to hide his dismay. Then he took his trusty plasma gun from its sling. ‘I’ve been saving the last of the plasma core’s charge sir. I reckon this’ll see to ‘em.’

‘Good man. Let’s do this!’

When they emerged from their ramshackle cover, the Space Marines were almost upon them. Lucky Ishmael’s plasma gun fizzed, and a ball of blinding blue energy found its mark, tearing through power armour and slaying one of the monsters outright. The cultists behind had found their courage with the arrival of their masters, and were also charging towards the landing pad, but checked themselves when the Chaos Space Marine fell. Ishmael blazed away with wild abandon, felling three cultists and winging Sorokin’s killer before the plasma core expired. Then his luck ran out as a bolter round pierced his helmet and his head exploded in a mist of blood and shattered armaplas. Godric stepped back, firing his laspistol to the bitter end until he too ran out of ammunition. He threw the pistol at the nearest Space Marine in sheer defiance. The traitor was on him in a heartbeat and grabbed him by the throat. The sergeant pulled his combat knife from its scabbard and tried in vain to stab at the traitor, who disarmed him with ease and plunged the knife into Godric’s own shoulder, before hoisting the storm trooper into the air by his throat.

‘It is over, Imperial dog. This planet is doomed to Exterminatus by your own hand, and we claim the souls of its billion souls for the dark gods. As you die, know that I am going to destroy the STC data and make your last soldier suffer like no other.’

Godric’s good eye rolled back into his head as he was choked, and he saw the other Chaos Space Marine stride past them towards the landing pad. Then he started to laugh. The sound gurgled in his throat at first, then erupted into a snort of defiance and jubilation.

‘What is funny, you maggot?’ asked the traitor. But his question was cut short as both he and Godric were knocked to the floor by a tremendous impact. The cultists scattered, some thrown over the edge of the sky-gantry to their doom. Godric managed to roll away from his tormentor and looked around for a weapon. But it was hardly necessary.

He had seen the tiny crimson specks burst through the smoke clouds like drops of blood rain, and had watched as they had plummeted closer and closer, until the unmistakeable forms of Adeptus Astartes Assault Marines could be discerned. He had held out long enough – the Blood Angels strike force had finally arrived, dropping from the sky on their jump packs and crashing into the traitors with the fury of angels. The Chaos Space Marines were defiant to the end, but against such odds it was fruitless. Godric picked himself up and peered over the railing at the processing plant far below where traitors clashed with Blood Angels as the very ground beneath them was sundered by the ferocity of the bombardment. The sons of Sanguinius did not need to engage, for the planet was doomed by the orbital strikes, but they fought all the same – for honour, revenge, or perhaps something deeper.

Godric was yanked to his feet by a massive, red-gloved hand.

‘Sergeant Godric? You have fought well – the honour of returning the data to the fleet is yours.’

With no further word, the angelic Space Marine jetted off the sky-gantry, his jump pack belching flame as he dropped to the ground to join the battle. His four battle-brothers followed, leaving Godric saluting his saviours dumbly.

As the Aquila reached orbit, Godric took one last look at the monitor to see the planet below burning. It looked like hell. He chuckled mirthlessly at the irony. When would it ever end?

Sergeant Godric had earned the nickname ‘Hell’s Reject’ twenty years ago on Armageddon, when he had been the only surviving trooper of his squad in the defence of Hades Hive. Since then he had fought countless missions, with over a hundred troopers passing through his command. Every time he sold them the lie, that they were the Hell’s Rejects, that they could survive anything, because hell itself would spit them out. But in truth, he knew that surviving massacre after bloody massacre was his curse, and that few, if any, of his men would live long following him.

He looked at McLeod next to him – little more than a boy, really. Would he survive their next mission? Would he be as successful as Sorokin, and stay alive long enough to be counted as Godric’s friend? The sergeant almost hoped not – he did not want to see another friend die.

He leaned back and closed his good eye. Whatever purpose the Emperor had for him, he hoped it would become evident soon. He was the Hell’s Reject, and he was paying for his destiny in the blood of his men.

Gilead’s Curse

Chapter 12

This talk of sand makes me thirsty, and the sands of time continue to shift under me. I fear that my time is running out, that it has run out. All my hours and days are borrowed now, so let me borrow a little more of yours to get me to the end of this tale.

Lubricate my throat with a cup more of that good wine I know you keep below stairs, and I will round off this tale in the best way I know how, weaving the strands together one last time for this, my last audience, my final tale-telling.

I relish it, but my throat is parched, as parched as that boy’s was in the professor’s study high in the college rooms in the University of Nuln. He’s dead, too, of course. I would have loved to have heard this story from his lips. He told it like no other, they say… But I am getting ahead of myself.

I’ll give the ending away, if I’m not careful, and all a storyteller has, in the end, is the care with which he tells his tale, and the climax he reaches in its telling. When it is his last tale, the one by which he will be, forever, remembered then care in the telling must be paramount.

Good, my glass is full, once more. Now draw a sip yourself; I should spill such a full cup before it reaches my lips with my unsteady hand.

Enough, enough, any more and you’ll drain the cup. The rest is mine, just as the rest of this story is yours, yours to treasure or repeat, or to do with as you will. Only, do this last thing for me: remember it, and in remembering it, remember who told it to you. It’s a wondrous tale, however badly an old bard recites it.

Laban raised his fingers and placed them on one of the small panes of glass high up in the bedroom window. It was as fragile as a sheet of spun sugar, so fine that it could not be measured with precision callipers, but finer than a baby’s hair, certainly. It disintegrated almost before his fingers touched it, and he was left with a residue of the finest dust, like a pale-yellow powder filling the whorls of his fingerprints.

‘It moved,’ said Surn Strallan.

The sound of his voice made everyone else in the room turn to him, and he wondered whether he could bear the gaze of so many extraordinary eyes upon him. He wanted, very badly, to blink, but found that he could not, dared not. If he blinked then he would die. If he breathed, he would die. He was going to die… He was going to die.

When he blinked, he noticed that his eyes felt very dry, and when he spoke, he noticed that his tongue felt like sandpaper against his lips and teeth and the roof of his mouth.

‘I thought the carvings on the things moved,’ he said, gesturing, weakly, with one limp hand, at the table with the hourglasses on it. ‘That isn’t possible is it?’

Mondelblatt looked at Strallan and made an odd, strangled noise in the back of his throat. The boy was suddenly less afraid that he was going to die and more afraid that he would find himself in a room with a dead professor, which was, in actual fact, a bigger nightmare than being in a room with a live professor. Mondelblatt noticed the boy’s disquiet.

‘Don’t you recognise a dying man’s laugh?’ he asked, laughing again, and choking horribly.

Strallan said nothing. He did not like the old man, and, of all things, preferred not to engage with him.

‘You watch glass spontaneously turn to sand, and you wonder what remains to be proven impossible,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘Strange boy. A pragmatist of a sort, I suppose, but odd, nevertheless.’

Laban and Fithvael crossed to the alcove with its table of hourglasses, and picked one up, each. The one in Laban’s hand disintegrated. The glass, by the same strange alchemy as the window glass, returned to its natural state, and the sand poured down his clothes and onto his boots. He shook it off in disgust, and tossed away the plain, brass frame that had housed the timepiece.

Fithvael had picked up a larger, heavier piece, and something very strange did seem to be happening to the ornate, carved frame. It was made of what looked like bone, and was carved with winged scarabs and serpents twined around the tops and bottoms of the columns, rendered in mirror images of each other that stood at the four corners of the timepiece, connecting the bases. This hourglass was of a particularly ancient type that had to be turned over, entirely, rather than the bulbs being simply rotated in a static frame with a constant top and a constant bottom.

Fithvael thought about what Mondelblatt had said before, about ashes and dust and sand. The hourglass was large and heavy. The glass was very old and very thick, but, because it had spent hundreds or thousands of years in motion, the glass had never sunk, as old pane glass did, which was always thicker at the bottom than at the top, where gravity had been able to act on the dense liquid over protracted periods of time. This glass was of equal thickness, of equal density throughout.

It was rare glass and extremely beautiful.

Fithvael looked at it as he held it in his hands.

He thought to turn it over. He thought to start the sands of time moving once more. He thought to break whatever spell had been cast.

Could it really be as simple as that? Could he stop what had been begun?

Gilead looked to Fithvael, and then to Laban and Mondelblatt. They knew what he was going to do.

Surn Strallan took a little longer to realise what was about to happen.

Surn Strallan was more afraid than he had ever thought possible, and, very probably, more afraid than all the other people present in the professor’s rooms put together.

Then he saw something.

He didn’t know whether he saw it because he saw it, or whether he saw it because he had lost his mind, but he could not help himself. He had to speak.

‘There!’ he said. ‘It moved.’

All over the city of Nuln things began to stir, small things, almost imperceptible things. It began with a winged insect hovering around the head of a child in the Reik Platz. He swatted at it, happily, playing with it, not sure how to identify this kind of creature that he had never seen in his short life.

The bright-green, iridescent wings buzzed in the air, humming as the bug, as big as the boy’s hand, avoided the child’s reach, circled, made figures of eight around his father’s sloping shoulders, and then flew up into the sky and headed towards the university.

It was a locust, and had emerged from a street sign just north of the Commercial Way and west of the Town Hall.

The adults close to the child were so intent on their business and so subdued by their circumstances that they failed to notice the oddity. When he spoke of it later, the boy got a scolding from his mother and a clipped ear from his father for telling lies, serious lies in such terrible times, but he had seen it, and he knew that he had.

The long line of scarab beetles that walked the length of Haupstrasse, end to end, in the ridge of the gutter, went entirely unnoticed and unmolested.

The serpents that uncoiled from the street lamps along the Wandstrasse, found their way underground via the storm drains and run-off grilles that punctuated the wider streets, and no one noticed that they were missing from the castings on the lamps, or from the wrought-iron grilles or from the carvings on foundation stones and boot scrapers, door furniture and street furniture, shop signs and architectural ornamentation.

Bugs and beasts and reptiles gathered and collected in swarms and slithers and clouds, unheeded, unnoticed.

They knew not that they had been dormant, trapped in stone and iron, in wood and words, in paint and pictures. They knew not what they were or where. They knew only that they were newly awake, and that they had been awakened with a purpose, and they knew what that purpose was and why, and they knew who and what they served, and they questioned it not.

The wind did not blow through the city as it should, and the Reik did not flow as it always had.

The people had learned not to talk of the famine, of the plague, whatever it might be. It had been going on for too long, it had been too hard. They had lost their old and their young, and the children had stopped coming and the creatures were all dead. The gardens did not grow, food was bland and dry and unappetising, and all anyone could do was survive. There was nothing to talk about, nothing to celebrate. When there is nothing to live for, life is no longer cause for celebration on its own.

Everyone felt the stillness. Everyone felt that the air was too dry, and everyone saw that the water was too dull and too still, and no one talked about it. They believed, and they assumed what their neighbours believed, that this was just the next phase, that this was what they were used to, that this was attrition. Nothing need be said.

Mothers noticed that their fractious children produced no tears, no stringy snot, no drool. They noticed that their thirst was unquenchable and that they rubbed red and sore their dust-dry eyes. Their skin had lost its plumpness, and cheeks pinched in an attempt at good humour remained sunken for too long.

When they looked at their hands, the few women who had clung to any shred of vanity wondered why their skin looked so dry and old, and why their nails were so ridged and flaking. They wondered why their hair frizzed and flew away, despite there being no wind to catch it. They wondered why their gums seemed to have shrunk and their teeth to have spread. They looked at their reflections and touched their faces, and wondered why they looked so damned old.

The men wondered why they didn’t sweat or pee, and why, when they blinked, their eyes were sore. They wondered where they’d get their next drink to soothe their parched mouths and throats.

They should have done more than wonder.

They should have gathered or rallied. They should have evacuated or battened down the hatches. They should have hidden or defended themselves. They did none of those things. They had not the will.

They did not look down at the black-carapaced scarabs, or up at the iridescent wings of the locusts. They did not notice the absence of the symbols, sigils and totems that were suddenly missing from where they had long been carved, embossed and painted. They saw nothing, because they had not the energy to see.

The war of attrition was over, and they had already lost.

The Liche Priest, his staff held vertically in front of him, spoke. The words were unlike anything a human had ever heard and lived to tell of. The sounds held no real breath, nothing honestly inhaled and warmed by the flesh of a body and exhaled, nothing de-oxygenated. The sounds, for they could hardly be described as words, seemed not to begin or end in any meaningful way. Where no vocal cords exist or where they are desiccated to the consistency of the catgut used by the poorest of luthiers on the cheapest of their instruments, it is hard to imagine anything more than a squawk or a rasp. When the instrument is a fleshless hollow of ancient bone, and the gut and sinew of the strings are as if they had been left in the desert for a thousand years to harden and tighten, it is difficult to imagine any cadence or rhythm in the vocal instrument, any passion or fervour, any intonation, anything that might resemble a speech pattern.

The only advantage the Liche Priest had, and it was small enough, was that his cranium and chest cavities were remarkably large, and the mechanism he used to move air across his hardened tissues generated a frequency that, while the sound was discordant and layered in the strangest way, it was, at least, tuned low, rather than shrill.

Noises emanated from the Liche Priest’s skeleton, not just from his wide-open mouth, but leaking out in thrums and whistles from anywhere that bones and sinews met in configurations that allowed sounds to be generated. As they came, the air in the cellar began to move, slowly whipping a dust cloud out of the mortar that had been lost from the wall dividing this room from the one below the bawdy house.

The dust scoured the walls of the room generating more particles. It swept over and around the fallen bricks, corroding them in mere minutes, and those motes and specks joined the sandstorm that was powering around the room blasting all of the surfaces, including the bones of the three figures present.

The Liche Priest continued with his incantations as the storm raged around him. The displacement of air in the room adding to the volume and intensity of his words as they swept through his chest cavity and out through his mouth, between his ribs, squeezing between the vertebrae of his spine, squeaking and squealing like a badly played viol-cello string, squawking and spitting like the ill-judged breath of a beginner trying to master a reed instrument.

The words ended. The Liche Priest closed his mouth, but the squeals and squawks continued on, supplemented by similar sounds made by the configurations of bones and connective tissues of the two Tomb Guards, the differences in their bodies evident in the tonal qualities of the sounds they produced.

The Liche Priest raised both of his arms high in the air, his staff wielded firmly in his right hand. The wind that had formed the sand and dust into an impenetrable cloud gathered around his figure in a tornado, and, as the air at its epicentre stilled, and as the air around it ceased to move, as all the movement was contained in that spinning vortex of gritty particulates, the sounds abated, all but the hissing and shushing of dust and sand particles moving through the air and grinding against one another.

The Liche Priest leaned out high over the sarcophagus with his staff, and the tornado travelled its length before spreading out in a low flat-bottomed cloud above the tomb, the stilled sand suspended in the air by some unearthly magic.

Utter silence prevailed once more, until the wooden outer casing of the ancient casket began to creak, its fibres so old and so dry it was held together only by the magic that suffused it. It creaked and spat like new wood being split as the lid of the vessel separated from the base and the top half levitated slowly up towards the sand cloud.

The air did not move, so that no scent escaped from beneath the lid. There was no taint of the musk oils used to anoint the Tomb King, no aroma of the unguents used to prepare the skin for mummification, no scent of the bandages used to wrap the precious body.

The Liche Priest lowered his arms and slumped slightly at the shoulders as if fatigued. Then he lifted his skull once more, and his arms came up, slowly and steadily, to shoulder height, and, with them, came the second lid, the top half of a second vessel, snugly fitted inside the first.

This was richly painted and ornamented in turquoise and gold, arterial blood-red and black. It was covered in elaborate hieroglyphs, but also bore images of feet and hands and a face, and was recognisably masculine, handsome, warlike. The crossed hands carried weapons, one in each hand, and elaborate armour of segmented gold and turquoise adorned the majority of the figure, including its chest and limbs.

The inner casket had been made millennia before of reed pulp, and was lightweight, but strong. The material was versatile, and could be sculpted and moulded, so more closely resembled the form of a human man than did the wooden sarcophagus that protected it.

If the body inside the sarcophagus had ever been human it was a long time ago, a very, very long time ago, when the elves and dwarfs still ruled their corners of the world, and before mankind had prospered. If the body inside the sarcophagus had ever been human it was before the Empire had been founded and settled, in times unremembered by any human lore.

Beneath the painted casket lay a mummified body wrapped in woven layers of ancient reeds, long since dried of any moisture they once contained.

The Liche Priest lowered his arms again, but this time his shoulders and head did not drop. This time he signalled to the Tomb Guards, who stepped away from the vessel and strode back to the shelves that held the canopic jars. As they did so, the Liche Priest walked the length of the sarcophagus from head to foot, slicing his blade through the centre of the reeds. Where they were cut, the edges sprang up and separated, and began to curl away from what was beneath, as if shrinking from having been pulled too tightly across the body for too long.

When all of the canopic jars were standing on the plinth around the sarcophagus, the Liche Priest cast his arms in the direction of the painted lid, which flew across the cellar to be caught by the Tomb Guards who placed it on the shelves. Then the wooden sarcophagus lid flew towards them, and they caught and stored that, too.

As they took up their places again, at the shoulders of the Tomb King, the Liche Priest set the sands in motion once more, this time driving them around the perimeter of the room in a great swirling stream like a swarm or a comet. He stood in its path, at the head of the opened sarcophagus and opened his mouth once more, generating a storm of sound incorporating the chanting, fluting, bellowing and squawking made by his skeleton, and the shushing, hissing and scouring noises made by the action of the sand and dust on his bones and sinews. The music, for it was a kind of extraordinary, controlled tune, however discordant, filled the room, making the walls throb, making the canopic jars vibrate.

One by one, they began to open. Some lost the mud and earth that they were sealed with. It simply disintegrated back to sand and dust, drawn to the great swirling mass of the stuff that careened around the room, finding its extraordinary path through the Liche Priest as he turned and writhed to control its path and the music he made with it. In other instances, it was the clay of the pots that desiccated first, the jars themselves that were too fragile, too friable to withstand the frequency of a particular note, and crumbled or shattered.

Whatever caused the jars to break or to open, their contents were activated by the strange magic that the Liche Priest was summoning with his sands of time, and soon the room was full of more of them, more beings, more ethereal figures, more impossible, incomplete, undead warriors. They stood and turned, and they looked around. They stared down at themselves for a moment, or across at each other, and then they dressed ranks around the sarcophagus and prepared for their master to appear.

They had been waiting for a long time, but as long, as impossibly long, as it had been, they had not forgotten. They had never forgotten what they had waited for, or why they had waited. They needed no words of reminder or of explanation. One look at themselves, one look at each other, one look at the Tomb Guards standing beside them, one look at the Liche Priest, one glance at the tomb or at the Tomb King that lay within, was all that any of them needed, and they were the least of them. They were the least of them and they required no order, no command. Their purpose was clear.

The Liche Priest, all his preparatory work complete, stepped out of the swirling sandstorm that continued to chase its way around the perimeter of the room, tearing at the banners that hung in their sconces on the wall, shredding them to nothing. The chant of his mouth and the wailing of the bones and sinews of his skeleton ceased as he took his place once more at the head of the mummified body of the Tomb King.

He turned to face the sandstorm as it raged past him, and he threw back his head and thrust his arms high into the air. The rush of sand was almost deafening. The particulates collided one with another, and with the walls of the room, scouring and sanding and buffeting for all they were worth, and then the tone changed from a shushing and hissing to an odd whispered squeak. The particles of sand changed colour from yellow to green, and some changed to darker browns and even to black. They grew too, and their movement in the air slowed.

The sounds changed again to the chittering clicking of swarming insects, as wing cases buzzed and crashed, and a million insects beat a path around and around the room in a shrill cacophony. The flightless bugs, carried as far as momentum would take them, began to fall through the flying bodies of their winged cousins, dropping to the ground onto six legs or eight, springing into action: scorpions thrust their stings high over their backs and brought their great foreclaws together in threatening postures, and spiders flexed their leg joints and bobbed their abdomens, spinning silk in preparation of long climbs back to the surface of the city.

Then the locusts began to do their work. They stopped flying around the room, and began to fly into the walls of the chamber, devouring the remains of the bricks and ragstones that separated this chamber beneath the university from others, giving the Tomb King and his minions access to all the underground rooms and byways of the city of Nuln.

The lecture halls were empty, so were the seminar rooms, and the studies, and the libraries. The students stayed in their rooms or in each others’ rooms. They skulked nervously, unsure of where they should be. Some of the youngest and the most nervous, and some of the richest, left the city, entirely, by any means they could manage. Many simply slung a few belongings onto their backs and walked out of Nuln by the nearest gates, and some found that the nearest gates were not manned.

All of the windows of the university had begun to turn to sand. The change was not visible from outside the buildings. Everything looked remarkably normal. No one glanced at the buildings, but if they did, where once they would have seen black windows, now they might see black holes where the window glass had, until very recently, been, and they would not have noticed the difference. A very keen eye might have realised that there were no glints or reflections off the glass, but there were no keen eyes left in Nuln, or anywhere else in the Empire. Fatigue had set in, fatigue and dread and apathy.

The students standing and sitting in the rooms of the university had noticed. The students sitting at their narrow desks around the perimeter of the library, under the high windows, had noticed when sand had begun to trickle down onto the pages of their open books. The students sitting in tutorials had noticed the hissing and shushing of moving sand, and had turned when they had felt draughts on the backs of their necks from the glass-less windows.

Every room in the university that had a window also contained a pile of sand, and some of the grandest lecture theatres, meeting rooms, libraries and refectories with entire walls of windows soon housed great drifts and dunes of shifting sand, but were, in all other regards, deserted.

Once the glass was gone, the plaster began to crumble, the moisture leaching away, as if by magic, leaving nothing behind for the dust to cling to. When the plaster had drifted and trickled away into its own pale dunes, the naked walls remained, made of block and brick and ragstone, of flint and cob and render, made, in short, of dust and sand, and water.

Fithvael still held the ancient hourglass in his hand, but Surn Strallan was pointing past him at the collection of instruments that stood, silent, on the table in the alcove. The glass bulbs in one or two of the smallest had already perished, returned to the sands from which they had been made, and the materials had commingled with their contents making strange marbled patterns of varying coloured sands: streaks of light in dark, and dark in light, yellow in grey, and black in orange, and pearly iridescent white in a rich sepia sand.

‘There!’ said Strallan, waving his pointing finger, or perhaps it waved because he was nervous; perhaps it merely shook.

He tried to lick his lips, to moisten them, but he could find no saliva in his mouth, and could generate none in his throat.

He had never thought that the inability to sweat could be such a handicap. He had a great urge to wipe the sweat that should have appeared on his brow away with his sleeve, but none had risen there. He wished that it had. He was filled with fear and dread that it had not, and the fear was increased when still the sweat would not come.

A great, black, gleaming scorpion, its carapace grinding almost audibly against the dark, grey sand from which it emerged, crawled over the lip of the table, extending its sting towards them.

Then a spider, cast in the brass of one of the tall, slender ornate frames of a particularly grand hourglass revivified, stretched high in its leg joints and began, almost lazily to descend to the sand below.

Suddenly a locust, its wing cases clicking, flew from the same hourglass, and the flat, narrow head of a snake bobbed up from behind, glossy and golden, its eyes blinking, and a forked tongue darting from between lipless jaws.

A host of black scarabs swarmed over the remaining timepieces as one of the largest of the old frames disintegrated into its component parts: hundreds of bugs, painstakingly carved from ancient bog oak that had been waxed and handled for hundreds of years, so that its patina was reflected in the impossibly glossy backs of the dung beetles as they dropped to the floor and began to scuttle around the room, looking for a route down, looking for their master.

Then Strallan’s attention was drawn back to the ancient hourglass in Fithvael’s hand as the glass finally disintegrated, and he was left holding the symmetrical frame. The sand of the glass was so fine as to be the finest of dust particles, floating in the sunbeams that penetrated the glass-less windows of the room, and dancing in the air. Not falling, but apparently weightless, they drifted through the air like perfect, magical glitter motes.

Strallan expected the sand, captured in the glass globes for a millennium, or perhaps longer, to shower to the floor to be ground underfoot, but more magic happened, as the boy gasped for another breath.

Every grain of sand, every particle, every speck, expanded in the air like a sponge in water. Every one of the thousands of tiny grains trapped inside the globes of glass unfurled and blossomed, passing from the ovum stage to nymph to adult locust in the blink of an eye, except that Surn Strallan no longer had the ability to blink.

Each grain became an entity a hundred times the size that it had appeared to be in the airtight, watertight glass globes that had housed them since before the dawn of modern memory. Each one exploded in size and colour and intensity. Each one squeaked and chittered, each one spread its wings and each one added to the yellow, green, speckled swarm that began to rise around the old elf warrior.

He felt the flesh crawl across his hands, and a slight constriction around his wrists, and he looked down, but he could see nothing through the cloud of flitting insects that, with one mind, was forming frantic figures, exercising one consciousness, shaping one collective body with which to escape the room and find a way to the Tomb King.

Fithvael was no longer holding the hourglass, and yet he had not dropped it. It had come alive in his hands, filled the air with dust and insects, and, when the swarm cleared, he found that his hands and arms were covered in more of them, in a crust of creeping scarabs. He raised his hands and thrust them away from his body, and, in that action, a host of the hard, black bodies fell away. Some of them spread their wings, mid-air and joined the other flying forms that were fleeing the room. Others fell to the floor and scuttled across rugs and over feet, clicking and scratching against the floorboards, finding the gaps between them and the fissures and knots that would allow them egress.

The snakes that wove and coiled around Fithvael’s wrists and forearms, sprung newly formed from the ancient hourglass frame, flexed and constricted, but the warrior elf’s flesh was strong and firm, and no harm was done to him, other than a slight tingling of his fingertips. He pulled his dagger from its scabbard at his waist, and inveigled the tip of the blade between the first serpent’s scaly skin and the cloth of his shirt. The sharp blade cut cleanly through several coils of snake, rending the cloth against his skin, and slicing a long, neat, narrow line into his own flesh, just deep enough to draw a bead of blood.

He repeated the process three times more, ridding himself of the snakes that fell in pieces through the air. As they were cut, they appeared to be as complete as they could possibly be, with perfect, glossy scales, gleaming eyes and the appearance of healthy, muscular bodies, but, as they fell, it became clear that they produced no blood, nor any fluids of any kind. As they tumbled, the scales petrified, the muscles withered and the bones desiccated, and, finally, only dust drifted to the floor.

‘It’s happening,’ said Mondelblatt.

Surn Strallan, Fithvael, Laban and Gilead turned to the professor, who wheezed his strange, disconcerting laugh, and then Gilead, his eyes widening slightly, slowly drew his sword. Fithvael circled away to his comrade’s left and Laban looked from one to the other. Surn Strallan did not know what to do. He looked at Mondelblatt, at the table that seemed to heave under the weight of too much sand of too many colours and of the armoured bodies of far too many exotic insects. Then he looked, one by one, at the elves, who were circling the professor, all wielding weapons, but none actually attacking. Finally, he looked down at his body.

He squeaked and jumped, involuntarily, and started a strange hopping dance, patting at his arms and torso, slapping and flailing to relieve himself of the creatures that, finding nowhere else to go had begun to climb up over his boots and breeches, and were finding their way up his shirtsleeves and jerkin. He had been so unnerved for so long, so immobile, so rooted, that to react, to respond honestly and urgently was a relief. He could not bear the notion that he might go the way of Mondelblatt.

Fithvael had freed himself of the creatures that had materialised out of the hourglass he had been holding, and none had invaded Gilead’s or Laban’s persons. There was no apparent reason why, except that they were other, except that they were elf and not human.

The insects were infesting Surn Strallan, though.

They gathered and swarmed, and liked the collective consciousness. They sought to escape the confines of first the hourglasses and then the professor’s rooms, as the magic that suffused the air of Nuln, the magic that leached out of the cellar beneath the university, the magic that had travelled through time and space, through millennia and thousands of miles, animated the Tomb King’s familiars.

They wove their inexorable pathways downwards between floorboards, through crevices, behind wainscots and under doorjambs. They circled the room, and when they could not find a way down, they found a way out through the glass-less windows, and followed exterior walls down to the ground level, and hence into storm drains and grilles and down through gratings and vents.

Gilead signalled to Laban to follow the creatures, and the young elf first looked out of the window and then thrust Surn Strallan aside so that he could open the door and quit the professor’s apartments. As he did so, the swarm, with its single mind, took sudden notice, halted in mid-air, and changed direction, hurtling past a still startled Strallan and following the elf. To his surprise and delight, most of the bugs that still crawled about his person took the hint and followed their brethren out through the door.

Mondelblatt’s strange, strangled laugh came again, weaker and breathier than ever. Fithvael looked to Gilead, and Gilead shrugged. Neither one of them had wielded his weapon. It was difficult to know just how to fight this particular enemy.

Mondelblatt stood in the doorway to his bedroom his hands eight or ten inches from his body on each side, his feet slightly apart. His head was tilted a little to the left, and he looked almost beatific. There was the illusion of a halo around his head as light shone in from a small window above and behind him.

He might have looked like a god had he not looked so nearly like a monster. He was covered, from head to foot, in creeping, crawling insects. They climbed over one another and wove paths between their neighbours, covering every inch of his body. As he blinked, they dropped from his eyelids, onto his cheeks, which dislodged others moving there, which fell to his chest, sending yet more cascading down over his paunch onto his thighs and down to his shoes, from where they simply began their ascents once more.

It was not malice, but expediency that had caused them to land on the old man. He moved little, if at all. He was an easy target. He was prey. The hive mind knew it. They took advantage of him.

This was a plague like any other, a curse like any famine: the old, the young, the weak and the tender die first and most easily, and it was Professor Mondelblatt’s turn.

There was no target for the elves to attack. If they thrust their blades at his body, they were as likely to do the old man damage as they were to kill the insects, and if the bugs died there would simply be more of them, and yet more.

Gilead took a long, slow breath, and he stilled. Fithvael took a step back, and away. He looked at Surn Strallan, and, seeing that he continued to struggle, he quickly sheathed his weapon and began to flick and toss the last of the insects from the boy’s clothes.

Gilead flicked the tip of his sword at Mondelblatt’s legs, first, and then at his arms. He began, in small, regular movements to weave a path over and over the professor’s limbs, inserting his blade beneath two or three overlapping bugs and, with a turn of his wrist, tossing them free. The bugs chittered and clicked. They opened their wing cases and seemed to spring on their legs or shrug or sidestep, but one by one, or in twos and threes, Gilead began to dislodge the creatures.

Some of the insects suffered the loss of limbs or wings during the operation, one or two were dissected, some crumbled to dust under the auspices of Gilead’s blade, but Mondelblatt suffered too.

He was still, because he was old, but no one is truly still, and the ancient least of all, even the shallow breaths of an old man will lead to the bobbing of his head or the shrugging of his shoulders, and old sinews, tired muscles and unresponsive nerves lead to spasms and jerks and palsies that cannot be helped.

Gilead read the warning signs of the professor’s tics as well as he might, but not well enough, and, inevitably, the old man suffered a nick here and a slice there. A trickle of blood oozed from a wound in his wrist, and a sliced knuckle wept and dripped. Several long narrow traces were left in his right forearm and a piece of flesh the size of the last joint of a little finger came away from the hollow of his shoulder above his clavicle.

Mondelblatt did not complain.

He laughed once or twice, but the last time that strange sound emerged from his maw, a spider slipped between his broken teeth, and he did not like the sensation of it on his dry tongue. He could not spit it out, because without saliva, nor sufficient breath, he was unable to propel the thing away, so he resorted, finally, to biting into the bitter tasting, loathsome creature, which fell to ashen dust in his mouth.

Two minutes passed, and Gilead, his sympathy much heightened for the plight of the old man, and his will to do him no further harm fully engaged, was, in the gathering of his next breath, shadow-fast. There would be no more breathing as he suddenly saw every locust, every scarab, every spider, every scorpion and beetle in stark detail. He saw and could predict every move that every one of them would make, and could tease them off Mondelblatt’s clothes and skin virtually effortlessly, skewering many of them as he flicked them into the air to land on the second blade that he had drawn ready. When he could collect no more, when the blade was full, he flicked them off with a swishing arc of the blade. For his next round, he simply used the first blade to throw the bugs aside, and the second to dissect them as they hung before him mid-air, as if he had all the time in the world to finish them off.

There were no more accidents, and no more of the professor’s blood was drawn or spilt and no more flesh was excised, but when the battle was over, the old man fell to the floor, pale and ill.

Fithvael dropped to his knees beside the old man, as Gilead breathed once more and sheathed his weapons. Strallan stared, and stared.

‘You should blink,’ said Gilead, ‘for I know I am no longer shadow-fast.’

‘What?’ asked Strallan, still staring.

‘He’s dying,’ said Fithvael.

‘He can’t be,’ said Strallan.

Fithvael and Gilead both turned to the boy, who dropped his head to his chest, embarrassed. He didn’t want the old man to die, not because he pitied him, but because he feared him.

‘They’ve killed him,’ said Fithvael, pushing up the wide linen sleeve of the old man’s shirt to show a series of pinprick holes in his pale, papery skin. ‘The scorpions carry poison in their stings. Shadow-fast isn’t fast enough.’

‘His riddles were our only answers,’ said Gilead.

‘We have the map,’ said Strallan from the doorway where he’d taken up his position, as if ready and more than willing to leave.

Gilead and Fithvael looked at him.

‘And?’ asked Fithvael after several moments, during which, once again, Strallan failed to blink.

Strallan’s cheeks paled, and then flushed. He swallowed a dry, saliva-less swallow that almost made him choke, and then he said, ‘And the cart.’

‘Good,’ said Fithvael, looking at Gilead, and then down at Mondelblatt, before he turned his gaze back on Surn Strallan, ‘and?’

Strallan stared back at Fithvael as if searching the old elf’s face for the answer. He shuffled his feet in the sand that had spread across the floor of the apartments. Then he stopped and pointed downwards.

‘There’s the sand,’ he said. ‘The cart made sand, too.’

‘And?’ asked Fithvael, lifting Mondelblatt into his arms.

‘Ulric’s teeth!’ said Strallan. ‘Must we?’

‘Must we what?’ asked Fithvael, placing the professor gently on his bed, folding the street map and tucking it into his jacket. Gilead continued silently to follow the exchange between the human boy and his old mentor, while filling his pockets with the many colours and types of sand that had erupted from the hourglasses.

‘Must we follow the wretched insects? Must we follow the creatures that killed the old man? Must we?’

‘Indeed we must,’ said Fithvael.

‘We,’ said Gilead. ‘Not you.’

‘Not me?’ asked Surn Strallan, ready to sigh with an unwelcome mixture of relief and disappointment.

‘You should remain here to look after the professor, make him as comfortable as you can in his final hours.’

Relief and disappointment turned to horror in Surn Strallan’s eyes.

‘No,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I’m not done, yet. I won’t be put away. I won’t be put to bed. I won’t be left for dead. Not now elf, not yet.’

‘It’s time for you to rest,’ said Gilead more kindly.

‘How can I rest?’ asked Mondelblatt, ‘when I’m the only fool that remembers the power of the amulet?’

Laban’s descent was almost vertical, out of Mondelblatt’s apartments and down the stairs, past the exterior door through a low, adjacent arch and down narrow, curving, stone steps, illuminated by slender beams of golden light that cast an uneven grid pattern up the steps.

Laban moved slowly, cautiously as he heard the odd sounds that emanated from below the building.

He found himself in a simple storage cellar, but the yellow light appeared to be seeping between the stones of the end wall against which a series of trunks and boxes were piled in a haphazard fashion. The insects that he had followed were disappearing, one or two at a time, into those narrow shafts of yellow light. Laban moved the boxes quickly, and put his hand against the wall, which was vibrating. The mortar, turning to sand and disintegrating, trickled freely from the joins between the stones, letting more light and more sound escape, while allowing the insects to infiltrate in greater numbers. Soon they were all gone, and Laban was alone.

The elf could hardly hear the desiccated mortar falling over the sound of the clicking and squeaking and chittering of the insects. He recognised the swarming sounds that he had heard in Mondelblatt’s rooms when Fithvael had unwittingly released the locusts from the hourglass, but this was on a bigger scale. This was on a very much bigger scale. The insects that he had followed down to this place represented only a tiny fraction of the host swarm.

Despite the scale of the swarm sounds, they too were overshadowed by other yet more disturbing noises, cries and bellows unlike anything the elf had ever witnessed. He thought the sounds must be organic; they were somehow bestial, sentient, almost musical, despite their discordance, for they had a strange, rhythmic quality not unlike speech or a melody. He knew, however, that they could not be human. They were tuned too low for the human voice, and the beginnings and ends of the sounds were too indistinct, and besides they represented no language that he had ever heard. It was the accompaniment that truly baffled the elf though, it was the squeaks and bellows, and odd, reedy outbursts that disconcerted him.

Then the vibrations in the wall turned to rumbling and shaking, and Laban lifted his hand away, and took three or four hasty strides backwards in alarm.

The entire building shook to its core, the golden light blazed, and the wall came tumbling down.

The room beneath the university was ablaze with golden light, the walls had all fallen away and the swarm of insects wove a mesmerising pattern through the air. The dressed ranks of warriors clung to their weapons, ready to act upon their master’s every command, the Tomb Guards stood at his shoulders, expectant, and the Liche Priest prepared himself for his last, great rite.

As he reached out over the mummy of the Tomb King, a great cloud of golden locusts rose and dispersed back into the swarm, having devoured the woven blanket of reeds that served as his shroud.

Then the shadows fell, the long, lean, noble shadows, the shadows of three elf warriors armed and ready to enter the fray.

Gilead arrived behind Laban as the young elf looked into the brightly lit room at the rite unfolding there. He was facing south, and had not been detected by the party of undead as the swarm surrounded them and they, too, faced south, the direction of their homelands. His shadow fell short of the dividing wall that now lay in pieces all around him.

Fithvael carried Mondelblatt into the cellar, and Surn Strallan, pale and unsteady on his feet, followed them. The old elf placed the professor carefully on the floor against a remaining pillar, and indicated that Strallan should tend to him, but within seconds, several locusts were already picking at the papery flesh of Mondelblatt’s face and eating the linen of his shirt. Strallan tried to beat them away, but one or two simply switched allegiance, settling on the boy’s wafting hands.

Gilead approached, his fist closed around something. He knelt low to the ground and began to move his hand as if he were writing. A trickle of multi-coloured sand emerged from the space he made between his long slender index finger and thumb, and Strallan realised that the elf was indeed writing something.

The locusts on his hands hopped once, twice and then darted away, as if stung by some unseen swat.

Strallan looked down at the trails and loops and swirls of sand. He could not read the elf words, but they wove the most beautiful pattern he had ever seen, and they seemed to scintillate somehow and glimmer with power. It was something like the way that Fithvael had used his voice. It was some sort of spell, some warding magic. Surn Strallan didn’t understand what it truly was, but he was very glad that it was there.

Gilead very quickly surrounded the two huddled figures with more of the writing until they were warded on all sides, and then he sprinkled the little sand that remained in his hand over them, as if he were anointing them, speaking lyrical words in his own tongue that sounded magical to Stallan’s ears and made Mondelblatt sigh.

Then Fithvael, Laban and Gilead stood together, and walked towards the undead host, knowing where they must attack, and wondering who would turn first. They stood for a moment, casting their long, elegant shadows into the room, over the Tomb King in his sarcophagus and over the host that stood to protect him.

The swarm would not, could not, touch the elves. They gathered in a tornado around them, but could do no more, and, from the eye of the storm, the elves were content to forge onwards, cutting and slicing through the heaving mass of insects, killing few by comparison to the very great numbers that engulfed them, but closing the distance between themselves and their true adversaries.

The swarm afforded the Liche Priest time.

With two sharp thrusts of his staff in the air, he turned the dressed ranks of the undead warriors to left and right of the sarcophagus, confident that his troops would make short work of the foe.

Then the Liche Priest also turned to face the elves, and, with a third broad, arcing swing of his staff he dismissed the swarm, sending it forth into the city, sending it out to do his bidding, to take the streets, to rid Nuln of all that was organic and wasteful, of all that would putrefy and taint.

The dressed ranks of undead had turned, as one, with their narrow shields and spears and their curved swords, with their naked skeletal bodies, ragless and without armour, but with cuffs and headpieces, with anklets and simple badges of allegiance. The Tomb Guards turned to face each other across the widest part of the sarcophagus, ready to perish for their king, to end their millennia of immortality that he might begin another long reign, restored to this ancient city.

Gilead took point, his shield strapped across his back, wielding both of his blades. He cut wide and fast and repeatedly, separating jaws, wrists, kneecaps and ribs, and marking and bruising shields. Nothing died.

Nothing died because nothing lived.

To left and right of him, Fithvael and Laban, each a yard behind and to the side ploughed into the undead host with equal vigour. Laban reasoned that he might sever heads, but managed, in most cases, only to dislodge them, or leave them rocking or wobbling on their spines. Still nothing died.

The skeleton warriors opened their mouths and allowed their surging actions to create their battle cries, the air moving through their torsos as they lunged at the elves with their spears and defended themselves with their shields. There was a cacophony of bone on bone, and bone on sinew, and bone on elf steel, and still nothing died.

Gilead severed a spine, a shoulder joint and an elbow of one of the creatures as ribs dislocated and hung from a wilting sternum, and still the creature thrust its spear at the elf’s throat, catching the lobe of his ear and a lock of his hair as it passed.

‘Duck!’ shouted Laban as a spear flew hard at Fithvael’s left shoulder, and, as he lowered his body and the spear passed harmlessly over him, the host regrouped, the first rank turning, as one, and the second stepping into the fray.

Laban was attacked by a broader, squatter creature with a taller headdress and shorter weapon, a bright, curved sword that he used to thrust and hack at the young elf. Laban could do little more than parry and swing, and try to return strike for strike.

There was no point thrusting.

Thrusting is for flesh. Thrusting is to pierce skin and muscle, and to damage organs and to spill blood. To thrust into a skeleton is to risk missing. To destroy these creatures the elves must dismember and decapitate, they must separate bone from sinew and scatter the component parts of the skeletal beasts.

Gilead and Fithvael swung and hacked by instinct when they saw the figures that confronted them. Laban, appalled, parried and reacted, defended too much and attacked too little.

The blow came to his thigh, and it came with the squealing of a sinew in his attacker’s shoulder and a hard, high whistle between ribs swinging through the air. The fluting of air through teeth was nothing compared to the impact sound, the wet thud of metal slicing hard, bloody muscle.

Laban cried out, and Gilead turned.

The skeleton warrior had aimed for the femoral artery, but he was not dealing with a human foe, and he had missed. The blood that came was from a minor vein, so, although the wound was painful, and, deep in the thigh muscle, was somewhat inconvenient, it was by no means fatal.

Gilead’s fury was boundless, but it was nothing compared to Laban’s embarrassment. The young elf had wanted nothing more than to impress his illustrious cousin, and he felt that, so far, he had singularly failed to do so. He had fought decently against the skaven, but it had been a war of attrition rather than a great victory. Besides, he had made an utter fool of himself in front of the humans in the tavern the previous night. He would not, could not be defeated by these… these creatures.

Before Gilead could come to Laban’s rescue the young elf had swung his sword twice more and discarded his shield in favour of drawing a second blade. He disarmed the skeleton with the curved sword, sliced through its spine in two places, above and below its ribcage, took out both of its knees and separated its jaw. Then he inserted the longer of his two blades between two of its ribs, forcibly removed the entire ribcage and, swinging his sword high, flung it over the heads of the host that was stamping and agitating to join the battle.

The remainder of the creature’s bones were suddenly inanimate, tumbling to the floor to be kicked out of the way by the bony feet of the horde that filled the breach.

Laban did not falter.

Suddenly, his anger quenched, calm returned, and as fast as he had been dismembering the warrior that had wounded him, he was faster yet, swinging both of his blades in a perfect rhythm, crossing and recrossing their paths so that no weapon could penetrate, and every stroke hit a target: an arm here, a leg there, ribs smashed, shoulders dislocated, vertebrae dislodged, jaws separated, joints rent.

Within seconds, they began to fall. Broken skeletal bodies began to tumble, clogging up the fighting stage so that they were kicked out of the way or hauled, unceremoniously, and flung to one side or the other by their comrades.

Then it happened.

He didn’t know how, or even why, and for what felt like minutes, he didn’t even realise that the state had engulfed him. He thought that some strange magic had occurred, that the rest of the world as he knew it had come to a strange, halting stop, that everything was happening in remarkably slow motion, as if the skeleton warriors were fighting their way through some otherworldly viscous substance and not through air, and yet, he could move freely and easily. He realised, too, that he seemed not to need to inhale for minutes at a time, or to blink for that matter, and that he had complete control.

When he realised that he was shadow-fast, Laban almost lost control of the situation, taking the heads of two of the foe in one oddly satisfying, but far too exaggerated arc of his long sword. He reined himself in, smiled and looked to Gilead.

When Gilead smiled back, moving at his own speed in this world that seemed so slow, Laban knew that his cousin, too, was shadow-fast, that they were kindred in that place, in that time, in that battle, and he knew that he had come home.

As the two elves made their ways through the ranks of skeleton warriors to left and right of the sarcophagus, moving faster than he could register their movements, with Fithvael tidying up behind them, ensuring that every last warrior was truly despatched, the Liche Priest turned back to the sarcophagus, raising his arms once more, and with them a second maelstrom.

A wind swept up around him, disturbing the remaining sands and lifting some of the lightest of the bones dislodged from the bodies of the skeleton warriors. The Liche Priest stepped into the fast-moving air, flexed the great cavity that was his chest and opened his mouth.

First he must protect his king and then he must complete his rite of summoning.

As Gilead and Laban fought the skeleton warriors, as Fithvael faithfully followed in their footsteps ensuring that their work was complete, Surn Strallan shielded Professor Mondelblatt in the lea of the pillar as best he could. The old man seemed not to grow any weaker, although he continued to cough and wheeze periodically, and Strallan made sure that he didn’t move, that he remained within the elf wards, that he didn’t cross them or smudge them or in any way disturb the magic that he knew Gilead had created around them. Without those words, he feared that they would already be dead.

Then the Liche Priest summoned a new wind.

Strallan heard it first. He heard it in the vibrations of sinew against bone. He heard it in the thrum of chest cavities and the squeak of cartilage, and he heard it in every movement of every skeleton that swung a weapon or wielded a shield, and he feared that wind.

When he felt it, he feared it more, and when he heard the faint hissing and shushing of sand moving against stone, he feared it more than he could have believed.

The insects had gone, flown away. Some had seemed to take other routes through fissures between the stones of walls below ground, or up through the ceiling above, but most flew clean past Strallan and Mondelblatt’s resting place and up the stairs that they had descended to this subterranean hellhole, for that was how the boy characterised it, that was how he would talk about it, if his ordeal were ever over.

For long moments, he dared not look down at the floor around them, but when he did dare, he was not surprised by what he saw. The lines of the script that Gilead had drawn there were indistinct. The characters that the elf had made with the stream of sand had blurred and smudged, and, in some places, there were only random smears of sand, tiny drifts and streaks caused by the action of the wind on the dusty substance. The sand was dull too, having lost its gleam, its magic.

Strallan did not draw attention to their predicament, he did not need to. Mondelblatt leaned in to him and coughed his ancient man’s laugh.

‘Ephemeral,’ he said. ‘Sand. That’s how I like it.’

The last of the skeleton warriors were smashed and broken with none to collect the bones for burial, for internment, for another battle in another age. It mattered not.

It mattered not, for the Liche Priest was prepared.

As the last of the skeleton warriors fell, the lids of the reed pulp inner sarcophagus and the wooden tomb flew back to hover over the mummified remains of the Tomb King. His shroud of reeds had been decimated by the locusts so his jewelled and polished armour and weapons, his ornate and ornamented garments, his headdress and jewels of office would all be marred by dust and time and decay if the rites of summoning were not completed as planned.

It was imperative that the Liche Priest complete the rites. It must be.

The Liche Priest raised his arms, and allowed one last, long scream to emanate from his mouth, accompanied by the inevitable cacophony that radiated from his skeleton. It ended when the lids were back in place.

When it was done, the Liche Priest stepped a little away from the head of the great casket to the north of the room closer to where Mondelblatt and Strallan hunched against the pillar, so that they could see him clearly for the first time.

Then the Tomb Guards rotated away from their master, turning their backs on his closed casket, ready to defend his honour that he might yet rise.

Laban was on the right of the tomb. His thigh ached and his vision blurred as he descended from the realms of the shadow-fast back to a more normal state. He blinked, and willed himself to maintain the strength and speed that had seen him destroy so many with such ease.

The Tomb Guard appeared to be looking at him through sightless eyes, although his curved sword came up and his feet spread a little apart to enable him to swing effectively.

There was nothing but blood in the Tomb Guard’s consciousness, nothing but vermillion, arterial blood, the blood whose letting would cleanse the filthy beast before him. He sliced at Laban’s neck, but it was narrower than he expected, and the elf was taller, but slighter of frame, and the strike was sorely misjudged. The whistle that accompanied the strike was shrill, but broken, as if there was some fault in the machine that was not a machine, as if there was already some weakness, as if the Tomb Guard had already suffered some injury.

Laban ducked easily and adjusted for the second swing without attempting to make one of his own. When it came, it was to his groin, to the femoral artery, to where it might be had the elf been human. He was not human, and his artery was not so close to the surface nor so anterior to the joint. Again, a surefooted sidestep and a parry, and Laban was safe, uninjured. Again, the Tomb Guard’s body seemed to betray him, seemed not to be in tune with itself. There was a jarring squeak, but still Laban could not identify its exact source.

The young elf guessed, rightly, that the next attack would be to his abdomen, to the iliac, and he adjusted for the undead warrior’s knowledge of human anatomy, and took the parry early, riposting effectively, and getting in a counter-attack and a second strike with his sinister blade. Now he had a fight on his hands. If he didn’t redress the balance soon, the undead creature might make an attempt at the mesenteric artery, and, even if he missed badly, his attack would be central to the elf’s body, and was bound to be messy, if not fatal for Laban.

The Tomb Guard was fast and dedicated, but his approach was not subtle. He had no interest in disabling or disarming the elf, his aim was to spill his blood, his arterial blood, and nothing else would do. Laban could ensure that the beast had no hope of accomplishing that feat, while carrying out a long, slow war of attrition of his own.

He began at the Tomb Guard’s extremities, taking finger bones, a kneecap, a number of teeth, with the edge of his sword slicing across them, drawing them sideways, making them slant and whistle when he moved his skull through the air.

Yet still there remained that strange, atonal, half-hearted squeak.

Laban took some delight in detaching the radius from one arm and the ulna from the other, playing with the Tomb Guard who blundered on, aiming at the same three targets over and over again, and consistently missing them by several inches, when he could be inflicting any number of flesh wounds with considerable success.

Gilead’s assailant was less ponderous and more versatile, she was also bigger and more brutal, but Gilead was faster.

Gilead was shadow-fast.

As the Tomb Guard hacked and swung and thrust at Gilead, as she parried and blocked and countered, he wove a dizzying array of sword strokes around and through her frame, with almost too much finesse. Only when he began to hack and slash, only when he swung and struck did he begin to disassemble the skeletal figure before him. When her left arm was gone, she wore her shield high at her shoulder. When several of her ribs were gone she adjusted the balance of her body. When she lost a kneecap she locked out her leg and did not bend it again, but as hard as she fought, and as long as she struggled, she could not defeat Gilead.

Finally, he switched his balance from his right foot to his left, drawing her to one side and away from the sarcophagus so that he could get in behind her. There he tucked his sword close to his own body, his arm flat across his stomach, and, with all his strength, he drew his blade between her vertebrae, severing it between the pelvis and the ribcage. He thrust his knee up into her pelvis and kicked her broken knee, and the bottom half of her body disengaged and toppled. Her head turned and she looked startled as her upper body began to drop.

Gilead pulled his sword arm back across his body, and a second solid stroke separated two of the Tomb Guards vertebrae just above her intact collarbones. She was still looking at him, surprise and horror on her face, when her skull fell to the stone floor, cracked and rolled away.

Laban attacked at the Tomb Guard’s left shoulder joint, having dislodged the shield, which hung at a steep angle and was pulling his assailant off-balance now that he had only half of his major bones still intact. The humerus dropped and hung limply by a length of taut sinew that should have perished centuries before. The arm was useless, and as the Tomb Guard tried to bring his weapon around for another attack, this time to Laban’s femoral, his body squeaked once more.

Laban had learned not to thrust, and yet his instincts told him otherwise. He was tired and his thigh was sore, and he wanted the battle to be over. There was more to do, there was still a city to save. The battle was not over, and the elf wanted nothing more than to despatch this creature and move on. His intuition told him to thrust, to lunge, and that was what he did. He avoided the golden girdle that hung from its pelvis, aiming higher, and he drove the tip of his sword squarely into the tenth thoracic vertebra. As he was about to strike it, Laban realised that the bone was a slightly different colour from the rest of the skeleton. It was browner and had a less solid appearance.

As the tip of his sword connected with the bone, it shattered to dust. The vertebra above it dropped, suddenly, causing the bones below to jump and twitch and the pelvis to rock unsteadily. Then the remaining vertebra above the break cascaded down, creating a domino effect.

The shock on the Tomb Guard’s face was palpable, despite him having no flesh with which to form a living expression. As the bones in his spine lost the memory of their placement, they had nothing left to cling to, and they fell to the floor like so many dice or runes, like the bones carried in some shaman’s pouch. Once the spine was gone, the ribcage fell and shattered on the floor, and then the skull, with its shocked expression crashed to the stone flags, breaking into three dished pieces.

Fithvael stood before the Liche Priest at the head of the newly sealed sarcophagus. The undead monster was all but spent of his magical energies, his mystical resources. It was as much as he could do to continue to control the swarm that was flying out in two great arcs around Nuln, following, above ground, the course of the ancient city that had once belonged to the Tomb King, some of which remained in the undercrofts and cellars of the nether-city.

The elf and the undead sorcerer faced one another. Fithvael’s eyes were locked on the shaman’s skull, where its eyes should have been, and he thought that he could read something there, some warning, some threat, something terrible.

The warrior elf wanted to fell the undead creature, but he knew that he could not, should not, must not. His hand closed around the hilt of his sword, his warm, flat palm wrapping around the cool grip, the two becoming one with long years of familiarity in a moment. Then he let go his grasp, flexed his fingers and rested his hand at his side. He swung his shield across his back and stood before the creature unarmed and with no means of defence.

The Liche Priest stood still. No sound emanated from him, not from his mouth and not from any of the joints in his bones and sinews that sang when he moved with the winds that he generated.

The Liche Priest was generating nothing below ground, nothing in this chamber. The bones of the skeleton warriors lay cold and grey on the floor of the cellar, which no longer glowed with the golden light that had so recently suffused the atmosphere. The Tomb Guards had mounted their final stand, but were falling fast at Gilead’s and Laban’s hands, and their undead bones would soon be mingled with those of the ranks who had fallen before them. The room would soon be dark and silent, and the tomb would be inert, once more, so where was the energy being diverted to? Where was the danger?

What was happening above while the elves were below?

The great city of Nuln was like a ghost town when the creatures began to pour up from below the ground, from the cellars beneath the university. They divided and spread east and west. To the west, they crossed the Reik Platz where the market had broken up, the stalls and barrows abandoned, and followed the Commercial Way towards the Altgate and the old city wall. To the west, the route above ground did not so neatly follow the route below ground, and the creatures crawled and slithered and flew a less direct path, crossing roads at odd angles, cutting corners and traversing alleys, almost as if they were tacking, like sailboats catching the prevailing winds. The arc was less smooth, but the intent was to reach Temple Gate, creating an almost perfect semicircle with the Wandstrasse at its diameter, engulfing the university and the College of Engineering and encompassing most of Neuestadt.

If the Liche Priest could resurrect the Tomb King, when the Liche Priest resurrected the Tomb King, he would control a vast power base at the heart of the city, and from there, anything was possible.

Already the university was all but abandoned. The trickle of students leaving had turned into a steady flow and then a torrent, and by the middle of the afternoon, the professors were leaving on the grounds that if there were no students to teach, there was no reason to stay. They did not speak of the sand, of the piles and drifts of sand in all the rooms and the dunes that were beginning to ebb and flow in the quads. They talked of the old man, though, in whispered tones. They talked of Mondelblatt and his obsession, and they blamed him.

‘Water,’ said Mondelblatt.

‘There is none,’ said Strallan.

‘Stupid boy,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I can make water, if I can be trusted, of course.’

Laban and Gilead exchanged glances and then looked at Fithvael once more. Gilead gestured, and Laban touched the old warrior gently on the arm.

‘What?’ asked Fithvael.

‘You are needed, te Tuin,’ said Laban.

‘I bear no title,’ said Fithvael.

‘You have earned it,’ said Gilead. ‘The boy is right. I have need of you.’

Laban side-stepped into Fithvael’s position as the elf, reluctantly, stood down, tearing his eyes away from the Liche Priest’s faceless skull only at the last moment.

Laban could not see what his mentor had been looking at. The skull looked inert to him, vacant, possessed of no thought or intent.

Fithvael pulled the map from inside his shirt as he and Gilead stepped towards the two humans huddled against the pillar.

‘Water,’ said Mondelblatt, again. ‘You must trust me to make water.’

‘Water?’ asked Gilead.

‘Hand me the amulet,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘It is time to make use of the stone.’

Then the wind came. It started with the cart. It started with the sand that had collected around the cartwheels, locking the vehicle in place. It started to whip up motes of dust and then it began to shift drifts of sand. It spread throughout the city, and then it spread beyond the city.

A new wind came in from the south, from the road that the cart had driven in on. The wind collected up the sand, everything left in the wake of the cart, and it drove it into Nuln, sweeping it up the streets and boulevards, and whipping it up into clouds and mini-tornadoes. The sand hissed and shushed and tumbled. It collected and drifted and built up, and then it moved on again, driven by the warm winds, driven from the south.

As the insects in the Liche Priest’s swarm found their sentry points, gathered in their ranks and prepared to attack and decimate the city and any inhabitants they could find, the grains and motes and specks of sand and dust rose into the air, swelled, and grew.

Then they fell to the ground, slithered away as hatchlings, or pupated, grew wings and flew, or crawled away on six new legs or eight. There was no end to the numbers of new creatures that could be born of the desert sands and no end to the sands that could be resurrected from the dying buildings in the great city.

The Liche Priest’s cold, eyeless stare did not falter. Laban’s face was no more than two feet away and he could detect nothing there, no movement, no emotion, no intellect. He could sense nothing.

Gilead looked once more at Mondelblatt, questioning the old man’s honesty with his eyes, knowing that he could trust the professor or not, but that the last time he had trusted him he had been duped.

Gilead was an old being. He understood balance and he understood humans.

He reached his slender thumb and finger into the top of his boot and pulled something out. He held it up between his thumb and forefinger, and Strallan gasped and sighed.

Surn Strallan burst into silent tears. He made no noise, nor did his face crumble, but the tears flowed freely from his wide-open eyes and he drooled from loose lips. He felt his boots and shirt fill with the sweat that he should have been secreting for the last dozen hours, and the experience made him feel oddly calm. He did not even care that he found himself sitting in a very large pool, of Mondelblatt’s waste, and when he looked at the old man, he too was crying.

‘Write in it,’ said Mondelblatt, gesturing with one palsied hand at the pool of liquid gathering around the human pair. Then he held his hand out, palm upwards and waited.

Finally, Gilead dropped the amulet into the old man’s palm and thrust his hand into one of his pockets. He turned to look at the Liche Priest and Laban, considered for a moment what he might inscribe, and then began.

He held his hand like a writing tool only an inch or so above the shallow pool, and began to allow the sand to trickle between his finger and thumb in a concentrated stream. The sand was grey, but turned to a blackish purple and glittered as it hit the liquid. It seemed to petrify, turning instantly to something permanent, to a glossy crystalline ridge standing slightly proud of the stone surface of the floor.

Fithvael did not need to turn when the sound came. He was already watching the Liche Priest. As soon as the first of the sand hit the old man’s urine and the young man’s sweat and tears, the old elf knew that some strange force was working its magic, that between them, the alchemy of the humans, and of the elves and of this great city were somehow working in concert to fight the Liche Priest and his evil intentions.

The noise did not come as the other noises had come from winds generated by the Liche Priest, from air moving through the cavities of his body. The noise came from the cracking of bone on bone and of bone on sinew. The terrible noise came from failure and from the Liche Priest recognising his defeat. The sound of bones breaking echoed through the dark basement as the Liche Priest flagellated his body with his staff of office. He wielded it against his limbs and ribs and back, and, with his final impact, he broke his own skull.

All the while, he made no other sound. All the while, the air in the cellar was still, for there were no words to accompany this rite, no celebration, no incantation, no music.

‘More sand,’ said Mondelblatt after several long moments of silence. ‘You must have more sand.’

All of the sand was gone. There would be no sand to be found anywhere in the city of Nuln, no matter who searched for it, for it had all been generated by the Southlanders and it had all been turned by them into an army of familiars for the Tomb King.

All the sand was gone, except for the sand that resided in Gilead’s pockets, the sand that even the Liche Priest had not the power to influence.

Mondelblatt shooed Surn Strallan out of the puddle that they had both made, and then gestured for a hand. Laban stepped forward, but Fithvael lifted the old, damp man into his arms before the young elf was able.

‘Draw the map,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘Draw the map of where Mr Fithvael found all the bugs. Draw it in our puddle… Do it.’

Gilead filled his hand with the sand in his pocket, when Strallan grabbed hold of the elf’s wrist. Gilead looked down at the boy’s hand and then into his face.

Strallan swallowed. He was a little afraid, but it was, nevertheless, a great pleasure to swallow saliva after many hours with only dust in his mouth.

‘North’s that way,’ said Strallan, pointing over Gilead’s left shoulder.

‘The boy has a point,’ said Mondelblatt, breaking into his choking laugh, which came, on this occasion with an odd gurgling sound.

Gilead shifted his position, studied the map, and began to draw.

He drew a line to represent the Wandstrasse first. It formed a firm, solid ridge of square sepia crystals as soon as it hit the liquid. Then he drew two arcing arms, not quite meeting, which were somehow a deep, dark blue. Then he filled in the areas inside the semicircle, which showed in a variety of hues and textures, the sizes and shapes of the crystals varying dramatically, but beginning to form a beautiful and accurate representation of that part of the city. Finally, Gilead drew a trapezium that joined the two arms to complete the semicircle. It stood firm and grey and somehow staunch and permanent where the university should be, and it completed the map.

A large drop of water fell from the stairwell behind the pillar where they were all sitting or standing, or squatting. Then another, and another. In a matter of seconds they could hear the rain drumming and pelting and sloshing down the steps.

Mondelblatt, still held firmly in Fithvael’s arms, stabbed his finger into the air above his head, and, taking the hint, the old elf strode out of the cellar and began to climb the steps. They were soaked to the skin before they were halfway up them.

The rain rolled over the old city wall of the Wandstrasse as if from nowhere. The sky turned black and the heavens opened, and the water poured in sheets, straight down, shredding everything in its vertical path and rinsing away the residue.

Gossamer wings dissolved on contact with single vast drops so heavy the sound of thousands of them landing together on the cobbled streets was enough to send shockwaves through the wing cases and carapaces of the insects that had not been hit by the rain yet, incapacitating them, stunning them, and killing them in their millions. Then the rains came and washed away the carcasses, battering them against stone streets and iron storm drains, shredding them into millions of pieces, rendering them down to wet dust.

They had waited thousands of years, trapped in sand, stored in hourglasses, baked in deserts, had been brought back to life by magic and atmospheric pressure and humidity and luck, and a thousand other quirks, and by fate and by the auspices of the Liche Priest and by timing, and now the rains had come.

The Southlanders measured time in water. Mondelblatt measured time in sand.

Mondelblatt insisted that Fithvael carry him through the city, in order to see, for himself, the damage that was done, and to know that Nuln would survive, and that it would survive because of the fifty years that he had spent as a scholar. He died as Fithvael carried him across the Glory Bridge on the way to the Temple Shrine of Morr. The hand, still clutching the amulet, fell away, the fingers loosened, and the stone fell into the River Reik. The rain was falling so heavily that the sound of it falling was heard by no one, and the splash it made when it entered the turbulent water below went unnoticed. The old elf gathered Mondelblatt’s arm back onto his chest, and thought that it was fitting that the professor should die at the very spot where the drowned, dragged out of the River Reik, were displayed for identification. Mondelblatt would have thought it fitting, too.

Surn Strallan wanted to stay with Gilead, except that he was afraid of the elf, more than he was afraid of Fithvael, but perhaps a little less than he feared the professor, certainly less than he feared a dying professor. When he was dismissed by Gilead, there was nothing for it, but to leave, although he wasn’t entirely sure where he should go. He wanted to go back to the Bridge Watch House to gloat, except that was foolish, and he’d never be hailed a hero. Perhaps the South Gate? They’d mock him, but he belonged there. He’d never be able to prove his part in what had happened that day, but he stood a greater chance with these men than with any others.

He walked through the rain, wetter than wet, wetter than he had ever been, his skin stinging under the weight of the raindrops and the volume of them falling. When he reached the halfway mark on the Great Bridge he stopped and looked over the side. The wind blew and the River Reik was high and throbbing, foam peaking and running off the surging waves. He put his hand on the capping stone of the waist-high wall and it felt solid under his hand. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he knew this marked the turning point of everything. The famine was over. The next harvest would be better. Prosperity would return to the Empire.

Gilead sent Laban back to Mondelblatt’s rooms to lie on the old man’s bed and rest his leg. When he got there, the rain was lashing in at the glass-less windows and the floor was swimming in water. It was no longer a wooden floor made of planks, but had a hard shell-like sheen, a shiny gloss, the residue of the sand, now harmless, inert, even beautiful, like a great oil slick cast across the room.

Gilead stood on the steps of the cellar and watched the rain fall. The casket was still there, the sarcophagus that might yet yield some unknown, evil force.

It rained and it rained, and it rained. The cellar was ankle-deep in water in moments, and then it was knee-deep. Within minutes, Gilead had to climb higher up the steps lest he be standing in water. When he left, the cellar was under water, as were all the oldest parts of the city, all the parts that had been in existence before the current history of Nuln had begun, all the ancient cellars and undercrofts that had once belonged to other forces, other beings, undead, unnatural things that always lurked somewhere and might one day return. One day.

They had taken this day, Gilead’s day, and he had turned them away. They would not try again in his lifetime.

There’s a relief.

The cursed tale must only be told once by any bard, and the timing is all. Too soon and the curse might just come true, and not just for the teller; too late, and the tale might go untold. I am satisfied. I feel the end drawing swiftly on… I feel the end… Just a breath or two, now… my friends… I am content to go… My tale is told…

You will not remember… me… Try to remember the tale… Do remember Gilead… and Fithvael too… Such a noble man… Elf…

One last… I think… One last… One…

The hand that moments before had been holding a beaker with an inch of wine left in the bottom relaxed and the arm fell away. The beaker had been taken by another, seeing the old dame weaken, taken by someone who wanted the wine more than he cared that the old woman was dying. She’d been rambling for long enough, and he longed for the silence and the chance to sleep.

The wine was as cheap as everything else in the grotty doss-house in the back streets of the small town west of Bolgasgrad. For this was Kislev, cold and bleak and unforgiving. There were no beds, only benches and floorspace, and it was better to be close to other warm bodies, except that her body wouldn’t be warm for long, so her value was gone.

‘I thought she’d never stop,’ said the short, wide proprietor, wiping beakers with a filthy rag.

‘Do you suppose it was as dull as it sounded?’ asked his brother. ‘It could have been a long list, a woman’s list of need, of want, of demand for all the passion in that creaky old voice.’

‘What was the language, the accent?’

‘Empire, to be sure,’

‘They have no fire in their bellies, no adventure, no passion,’ said the proprietor.

‘It’s true,’ said his brother. ‘Nothing ever happens in the Empire. If you want a real story, Kislev’s the place.’

‘I wonder what she was doing here, an old dame like that?’

‘Did she pay in advance?’ asked the brother.

‘Yes,’ said the proprietor. ‘I suppose her business here was no other business of ours. If I’d known she’d drone on for days, with hardly a break, I’d have kept her out, and never mind her copper coin.’

With that, he dropped his dirty rag into the beaker he was wiping, strode over to where the old woman was slumped in her chair, lifted her frail corpse easily over one shoulder and took her out of his establishment. She had been tiresome these last few days, droning on in her foreign language that none could understand, never allowing for a moment’s silence, but, at least she had added to the warmth in the room.

The wolves would have her now, and good riddance.

THE SIEGE OF CASTELLAX: AN EXTRACT

Clint Werner

It came lumbering out of the void, a great darkness that blotted out the stars with its advance. A leviathan from space, a behemoth that roared between worlds like a vengeful devil. It had been born in the cauldron of an angry cosmos, a slab of rock and metal seventy kilo-metres in diameter, a fledgling planet that had never found its place and so had been cast into the emptiness between galaxies.

There, in the darkness, savage intelligences had found it, had descended upon this abandoned almost-world and through their barbaric technology had given it purpose, a place in the cosmos. A place of horror, havoc and destruction.

The Vulture was like a fly buzzing about the wings of a hawk, the disparity between the patrol ship and the rok was so immense. The rok was vast enough to exert its own gravitational pull on the ship, dragging her slowly towards it, affording the terrified crew an increasingly clear view of their mammoth adversary.

The rok was pitted and scarred, pockmarked with the impacts of smaller asteroids against its surface, gouged by the crude excavations of the orks. Towers and bunkers projected from the asteroid’s surface, hangars gaped in the walls of its canyons, gun emplacements bristled from its jagged mountains. Cyclopean engines, their exhausts a hundred metres wide, projected from the rok’s sides, spitting streams of atomic fire as the orks inside the asteroid struggled to direct its trajectory, to exert some measure of control upon the elemental force they had attempted to enslave.

It was a futile effort. The best the orks could do was cause the rok to revolve, to spin on its axis as it hurtled through the void. For the xenos, however, it was enough, allowing them to adjust the position of their heaviest guns and bring them to bear against those victims unfortunate enough to encounter the rok.

The crew of the Vulture was almost upon the rok before they were aware of their peril. The deranged array of guns and missile batteries the orks had fitted to the hollowed-out asteroid opened fire in a savage burst of destruction. An armada of alien craft exploded from the canyon hangars and from launch craters littering the surface. The rok had provided shelter to a ramshackle flotilla of smaller ork ships, an ugly assortment of scrap metal that somehow managed to be space-worthy. What the ork ships lacked in grace, they made up for in firepower. Some of the weapons they boasted were so massive that the ships which carried them fairly disintegrated the moment they fired.

It was punishment the frigate’s void shields were never meant to handle. More and more of the alien barrage was getting through, ripping Bodras’s ship apart.

The Vulture reeled as another broadside smashed into her. The ship’s artificial gravity struggled to compensate for the rolling vessel, creating a wild confusion of forces upon the bridge. Bodras watched as one of his bodyguards hurtled forwards, then was grabbed and dragged by a malfunctioning inertia dampener. The screaming man smashed into the wall as though he’d been fired from a torpedo tube, his ribcage collapsing as the dampener tried to pull his body through the bulkhead.

The captain took another pull of his jug and shuddered. Squashed like a bug wasn’t a pretty way to die.

‘Damage report,’ he snarled at the bloodied men down in the crew pits. Between overloaded circuits, dislodged machinery and debris from the ship’s infrastructure, not a man in the pit had escaped some sort of injury. The dead had been unceremoniously dumped onto the walkway where the inertia dampener grabbed hold of them. The worst of the wounded had been similarly disposed of until Bodras ordered the practice stopped. Even if they were in the way, the wounded had to be shown some consideration. It was bad for morale if they weren’t.

Lieutenant Collorus studied one of the flickering pict screens and cried back to the command throne. ‘There is a hull breach aft, exposing three decks to vacuum. The gravity generators can’t compensate, so we’re vacillating between a seven and ten degree list. Alpha and Beta batteries have been obliterated by direct hits. Gamma battery is still firing but we’ve lost all communication with the gunnery crew.’

‘Send runners,’ Bodras snapped. ‘We need to maintain fire control. The only way we’ll survive is by concentrating our fire!’

Even as he gave the order, Bodras wondered if it would really make any difference.

‘Only one macro-cannon still operational,’ an ensign with a raw gash across his forehead reported, cringing back as his terminal spat a shower of sparks at him. ‘Vox communications have been lost throughout the lower decks!’

Bodras groaned. That would be those filthy missiles the rok had fired into them. The moment they had struck, the crew had breathed a sigh of relief, thinking they were duds. Then the electronic pulses had started, gradually increasing in scope and intensity. Somehow the missiles were both absorbing and projecting energy. The effect was like a massive haywire grenade, shorting out machinery close to the point of impact and utterly severing the lines of communication passing through that part of the ship.

‘Fires in the kitchens, crew barracks and officers’ deck!’ another ensign shouted.

‘Get a fire control team down there,’ Bodras ordered. If a fire was allowed to go unchecked in that part of the frigate, the ship would be effectively cut in two.

‘The team assigned to that area was killed by a hull breach,’ Lieutenant Collorus reported. ‘We’re trying to redirect another team there now.’

‘Don’t try, do!’ Bodras roared. He stared at the view-screen beside him. The rok was slowly closing upon the frigate, rotating to bring an obscenely huge cannon mounted on its surface to bear on the Vulture. Some of the smaller ork ships were scattering, intimidated by the approach of their hulking comrade. Others, too lost in their mindless urge to destroy, continued to swarm about the frigate.

‘More hull breaches in decks nineteen through twenty-four!’

‘Fire control has been hit! Can’t raise fire control!’

‘Last macro-cannon has gone silent!’

‘Delta battery reports two plasma batteries have overheated!’

Bodras turned the jug upside down, draining the last few drops from the bottom. He tossed the empty vessel aside, watching as the inertia dampener caught it and smashed it against the bulkhead.

‘Report to Castellax,’ the captain said, his voice cold as he watched the rok rotate into position. ‘Tell them we’ve occupied the orks as long as we can.’

Bodras watched as a brilliant glow gathered in the mouth of the rok’s oversized cannon.

‘Tell our dread masters they can expect some company real soon,’ Bodras spat. He glanced down at his elegant jacket. It was such a shame that so fine a garment was going to be ruined.

Mummified husks of humanity, bound in sinews of steel and garbed in mantles of iron, mouths stretched wide in frozen screams, the Eternal Choir loomed from the vaulted heights, incense dripping from their desiccated chests, madness crawling in their shrivelled eyes. Each servitor was bolted fast to the face of a curved pillar, their broken arms wrapped about the obverse side. A low chant hissed from the throats of the automatons, a sibilance that somehow melded the harmony of song to the howling of beasts.

The monstrous chant swept across the grim chamber below. Promethium lamps cast an infernal glow, sending weird shadows slithering about the pillars and dancing along the heavily adorned walls. Bas relief battles raged anew as the play of crimson light and black shadow swept across them, once more igniting the ancient campaigns of Sebastus IV and Olympia. Power-armoured giants contested bloodied battlegrounds, their gilded bolters and chainswords glistening with reflected light. Stone Titans rained destruction upon screaming masses of humanity, thorny towers bristling with armaments wrought carnage upon Space Marines of the Imperial Fists Legion while gloating killers adorned in the heraldry of the Iron Warriors visited doom upon those striving to escape the trap.

Everywhere in the frescoes, one terrifying visage was repeated. The glowering countenance of an Iron Warrior encased in baroque Terminator armour, wielding a storm bolter and a power claw encrusted with shining rubies. Half the Space Marine’s face was flesh, the rest was nought save a snarling skull of metal. Wherever the hulking warrior appeared, there the enemy lay heaped and torn about his feet. Always there was a sense of malignance and power in his piercing stare.

Seated in a throne of pure diamond, clear as ice and strong as adamantium, its legs shaped into clawed feet and its back carved into folded wings, the half-faced monster from the wall cast a steely gaze across the gloom. The flesh of his face was puckered and raw, scarred with hideous burns and the corrosive caress of things beyond human imagining. The metal of his exposed skull bristled with cables and power feeds, a nest of synthetic serpents that coiled about the Iron Warrior’s neck before sinking into sockets scattered across the bulky armour he wore. Even in rest, safe within the halls of the Iron Bastion, mightiest fortress-keep on Castellax, Warsmith Andraaz kept himself locked inside his ancient suit of Terminator armour. It was whispered that his body hadn’t stirred from the plasteel and ceramite shell in five millennia.

To either side of the throne towered the hulk of another Space Marine encased in Terminator armour, a member of the elite Rending Guard. Bodyguard to the Warsmith, the Terminators were veterans of countless campaigns, their armour studded with battle honours and draped in trophies torn from the bodies of their conquests. When the Terminators committed themselves to combat, it was only on the express command of Andraaz. They recognised no other authority short of Perturabo himself.

The Warsmith stretched out his hand, closing the armoured gauntlet into a fist and smashed it down against the immense table of obsidian which dominated the centre of the chamber. The crazed network of glowing wires and relays streaming through the semi-transparent rock blinked as the impact sent a tremor through the table.

‘Enough,’ Andraaz growled, his voice like a metallic scratch. The word echoed through a suddenly silent room, even the chanting of the servitors retreating before the monster’s anger.

Seated about the obsidian table, a half-dozen armoured giants shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. Masters of life and death, gods of destruction and doom to the millions of slaves entombed upon Castellax, the Iron Warriors felt their hearts quicken as Andraaz focused his ire upon them.

‘It does not matter how the filthy xenos infiltrated the system,’ Andraaz hissed, turning the red lens of his synthetic eye upon the man seated to his right.

Broad of build, massive of frame, Captain Morax, Skylord of Castellax, glared spitefully at his opposite across the table. Morax ran a jewelled glove through the stubble of hair covering his scalp, wiping away the beads of perspiration gathering there. ‘Honoured Warsmith,’ Morax said, sucking at the moist fingers of his glove, ‘I was merely observing that if control of the fleet had been shared with my administration, then these intruders would have been dealt with much sooner.’ A trace of a smile curled the Skylord’s flaccid cheeks as he watched his rival across the table react to his taunt.

‘That is a dangerous insinuation, Sky-rat,’ the other Iron Warrior spat. Admiral Nostraz was a towering man whose face was, if anything, even more scarred than that of Andraaz, though he hadn’t augmented any of his mutilations with cybernetic implants. ‘The raider fleets stand as ready for action as they ever have.’ His eyes darkened and his voice dripped with menace. ‘Or perhaps you would prefer we send half our ships out every time we hear a noise or one of our tankers is overdue?’

‘It is a sad thing to see timidity masquerading as strategy,’ Morax said, grinning. Nostraz’s eyes narrowed into murderous slits and he lurched up from his chair.

‘The Warsmith said there was to be an end to this squabbling!’ roared the Iron Warrior seated to the left of Andraaz. Captain Gamgin was a vicious specimen of savagery, one arm a mass of gears and cables bound in plasteel plate and armaplas fibres, one leg given over to a grumbling bundle of machinery, his lower jaw a set of piston-driven steel fangs. The Ruinous Powers had been quite attentive to Gamgin over the millennia, corrupting his body with fierce mutations. Each time the warp corruption settled into his flesh, a bit more of Gamgin had been cut away and replaced by metal. The millions of conscript soldiers Gamgin maintained on Castellax held that the first part of him that had been changed to steel was his heart. Only one purpose beat there now: complete and merciless loyalty to Andraaz.

Both Nostraz and Morax shifted their hateful gaze from one another to Gamgin. As much as the two rivals might hate each other, their mutual contempt for Gamgin and envy at his favour with the Warsmith gave them common cause. At the slightest nod from Morax, Nostraz pointed at the shifting pattern of lights displayed above the surface of the obsidian table. It was a three-dimensional star-map of the Castellax system, not a true hologram but rather a projection of the table’s weird elements. As Nostraz pointed, the table reacted, shifting and magnifying one portion of the starfield while allowing the rest of the map to recede.

‘The orks struck from the fringe of the system, in the vicinity of Impex V. The high proportion of asteroids in that sector has always been a detriment to our sensors.’ The admiral gestured and brought the image of an old Imperial frigate into view. ‘Our initial response, a single system patrol sentry, was overwhelmed by the intruders. They have since penetrated the static defences surrounding the ice-moon and its neighbours. Mostly through the crude callousness of their assaults. They think nothing of driving their smaller ships straight into the waiting guns of a satellite and obliterating the position with the debris of their own comrades.’ At the snap of his fingers a dozen more ships appeared on the map, each image slowly collapsing into a menagerie of lights gradually streaming towards Impex V. ‘The second wave consists of five Infidel-class raiders and seven system-defence destroyers. They will engage the orks. After whetting the aliens’ appetite for battle, the raiders will withdraw, using their greater speed to outdistance the destroyers. They will maintain a presence just beyond the enemy guns while the orks are occupied with the destroyers. With the greenskins busy, the raiders will use their macro-cannon to pick them off from afar.’

‘And if the xenos have weaponry able to match the range of the macro-cannons? Or if the orks have infiltrated in numbers capable of focusing on both elements of your fleet?’ The questions came from a scowling man, his richly adorned armour studded with battle honours and the leathery trophies of past conquests. Over-Captain Vallax, his face split by the jagged scar of a World Eater’s chainaxe, his long hair shifting in hue as his emotions darkened, leaned over the obsidian table. The Over-Captain’s gauntlet touched a line of ships further towards the core of the system.

‘I see these possibilities have already occurred to you,’ Vallax mused. As he touched the lights, each was revealed as another vessel in the Castellax fleet. In all, there were fifty-nine ships in the second line Nostraz had established.

The admiral nodded his head. ‘The second wave has a two-fold purpose. The first is to engage the xenos, but more importantly they are to gauge their numbers and deployment.’

‘Orks don’t have any rational deployment,’ scoffed the ghoulish Skintaker Algol, Slavemaster of Castellax. The Iron Warrior’s armour was lost beneath the hideous folds of the cloak he wore, a garment fashioned from human skin flayed from slaves. The stink of blood still clung to the freshest patches of Algol’s vestment. When the aroma wore off, he would stalk back into the strip mines in search of fresher replacements.

‘Rational or not, we need to know where they are,’ Morax snapped back. ‘Our sensors can’t give us proper intelligence for that sector, and there is too much psychic disturbance in the area for the Navigators on our ships to provide us with anything useful.’

Captain Rhodaan stood and faced the Skylord. ‘What about using the Speaker?’ he suggested. Morax ran his glove across his scalp again, hesitating to answer the question.

When the question was answered, it was Warsmith Andraaz who spoke. ‘The Speaker may be needed for other duties.’

A dull, mechanical rasp crackled from the end of the table. Alone among those gathered in the war room, the speaker wasn’t an Iron Warrior, but rather a withered shell of humanity. Pale, corpse-like flesh fused to a mechanical armature, its gaping mouth housing the meshwork of a vox-caster, the servitor was acting as the proxy for the only member of Castellax’s hierarchy absent from the chamber. When it spoke, however, all within the room knew they heard the voice of Fabricator Oriax.

‘To focus the Speaker’s thoughts upon such a task would require a drastic change to the chemical mixture in its bath. To safely perform such a procedure would take days. To unsafely perform such a procedure might kill it. Or, even worse, return it to awareness.’

There was no emotion on the corpse-face of the servitor as it transmitted Oriax’s words, but a flicker of uneasiness crossed the countenance of each Iron Warrior who heard them. Veterans of thousands of wars, victorious conquerors of hundreds of worlds, they knew better than to tamper with an alpha-grade psyker, especially after what they had done to him.

‘Using the Speaker is out of the question,’ Andraaz declared. ‘We will proceed with Admiral Nostraz’s plan.’

Three scarred and battered Infidel-class raiders raced across the stellar emptiness. Behind them, the ships abandoned wounded comrades and slower support vessels, consigning each to the doubtful mercies of the orks. Survival, not loyalty, was the law of the moment. Flee now, or remain forever with the dead.

From the bridge of the Requiem, Arch-Commander Vortsk watched as the survivors drew steadily closer to the defensive line his fleet had established. The old pirate’s brow knitted with dismay, disturbing the nest of cables implanted into his forehead that hardwired his mind with the cogitators of his battleship. He could feel his vessel’s agitation pulsing through the wires, like a hound smelling blood. The Requiem was an old hand at slaughter, having perpetrated thousands of atrocities in her time, both for and against the decaying Imperium. Since defecting after the Badab War, the battleship’s lust for violence had only grown. Vortsk sometimes wondered if her time in the Eye of Terror had endowed his ship with a consciousness of her own.

‘Patience,’ Vortsk whispered, his fingers tapping against the command baton resting in his lap. ‘You shall glut your hunger soon enough, my sweet.’

The Arch-Commander forced the ship’s agitation into his subconscious and focused his attention upon the pict screens scattered about his control-nest. The armoured, tomb-like pod was ringed with flickering displays, cycling through views of every deck on the battleship. Vortsk ignored these and the thousands of relays transmitting views of the Requiem’s exterior hull. What interested him were the long-range observium reports, the transmissions from the fleeing raiders and the vox-chatter of the on-coming enemy.

Together, the data created a fearsome picture. The raiders and their destroyer escorts had encountered a far bigger mass of orks than the doomed Vulture had reported. The rok was still active, but now it served as just another warship in an armada that dwarfed the combined might of the entire Castellax fleet. If the data from the raiders was to be trusted, the aliens had infiltrated the system with three hundred vessels of destroyer-size or greater, including two monstrosities boasting a mass approaching that of an Oberon-class battleship.

There were other ork vessels operating deep in the system. An alien species as wild and vicious as the orks rarely maintained focus and cohesion, and the invaders of Castellax were no different. Small splinters of the armada were attacking the remote mining outposts scattered through the planetoids at the fringe of the system, while a hulking kill kroozer had been closing upon the Impex V station when the last message was transmitted from the ice-moon.

Vortsk scowled as he examined the data. The odds were against the human fleet, but he knew there was more to securing victory than simple numerical advantage. The human mind was organised, analytical and calculating. That of the ork was simple barbarous instinct, with no greater thought than closing with an enemy and giving immediate battle.

The Arch-Commander studied the pict screens displaying the proximity of the ork forces. While some of the armada had lingered behind to finish off the abandoned destroyers and crippled raiders, a small number of ships were pursuing the three raiders that had escaped. Vortsk licked his lips as he saw that among the pursuers was one of the big battleship analogues. The ork armada as a whole might outnumber the human fleet, but in the present circumstance, the advantage belonged to Vortsk. There were only a half-dozen escorts with the ork battleship, none of them larger than a frigate. Even allowing for the ork propensity to pile ridiculous amounts of armament onto their ships, the human battle line had them outgunned twenty to one.

‘Raise the captains of the Pride and the Damnation,’ Vortsk said, hissing into the vox-sceptre which would convey his order to the bridge surrounding his command-crypt.

‘What about the Vindictive?’ a sub-altern’s question crackled back. Vortsk smiled as he glanced again at the positions of the approaching ships.

‘Maintain strict silence as regards the Vindictive,’ Vortsk said. ‘It is best that her captain doesn’t know our plans.’

Arch-Commander Vortsk felt a shiver of excitement crackle down his steel spine as he watched the pict screens. The raiders and their pursuers had only just drawn within range of the battle line’s guns. Instead of losing momentum, the ork pursuers had picked up speed. Vortsk smiled as he imagined the desperate efforts the aliens had made to force this last burst from their ships. They were so eager to sate their appetite for battle that they were charging headlong into destruction.

Only one thing more was needed to complete the trap and, by prearranged conspiracy, the Pride and Damnation provided what Vortsk required. As soon as the three raiders were within range of the fleet’s heavy guns, the Pride and Damnation fired upon the Vindictive. The close-range barrage tore through the raider’s void shields, smashing into her engines and leaving her a cripple.

Predictably, as her betrayers raced away and left her behind them, the Vindictive blasted away at them with the few guns she could bring to bear in such an unexpected emergency. Her fire was ineffectual as far as punishing her betrayers, but it did serve the purpose Vortsk needed it to. It reminded the pursuing orks that, though crippled, the Vindictive was still very much alive.

Vortsk’s breathing became shallow, his mind feeling the eagerness of his ship as he watched the drama playing out upon the pict screen. The Vindictive abandoned her vengeful fusillade and turned her guns back upon the approaching orks, unleashing a desperate and futile barrage into the grotesque battleship. The crackle of energy shields intercepted most of the raider’s fire, what little penetrated did nothing more than scratch the battleship’s armoured hull.

The frantic efforts of the Vindictive to save herself did ensure she had the orks’ full and undivided attention. The battleship and her escorts closed upon her like a pack of wolves. Vortsk grinned, lifting the vox-sceptre to his trembling mouth. ‘Arch-Commander Vortsk to all ships,’ he said. ‘The orks are engaging the Vindictive. When they close to three kilometres of her, open fire. All batteries are to concentrate upon the battleship designated as Target Omega.’

Dim memories of his pampered childhood flashed through Vortsk’s mind as he waited for the aliens to close the distance. He remembered waiting impatiently for his father, a noble of Decima X’s ruling cadre, to bring home the traditional grox-hide cassock each St. Julian’s day. The same unbearable eagerness gripped him now. He could almost hear the Requiem growling in expectation.

‘Unleash hell!’ Vortsk hissed into the vox-sceptre as the orks finally came within range. From every ship in the fleet, a withering barrage of macro-cannon, lances, plasma batteries and lasers slammed into Target Omega. The ork battleship seemed to glow like a tiny sun as its shields struggled against the awesome violence. Two of its escorts, whether by accident or design, diverted into the path of the barrage and were almost instantly gutted by the concentrated fire.

Target Omega, venting vapour from breaches in her hull, fires rippling across her starboard side, began to turn, shifting away from the Vindictive.

‘Close with Target Omega,’ Vortsk screamed into his vox-sceptre. ‘Don’t let it get away!’ He could hear the blood pounding in his heart. The idea that the ork ship could survive the initial barrage wasn’t half as repugnant as the idea that it might escape from his trap.

The fire coming from Target Omega was far less than what the battleship had been directing against the Vindictive. Vortsk smiled. The initial assault must have obliterated most of the xenos gun batteries. More than ever, he was determined not to allow the ship to escape. Gripping his vox-sceptre, he demanded greater speed from his ships.

In the blink of an eye, the situation suddenly, horribly, changed.

The front of Target Omega burst apart in a great fireball. At first, Vortsk thought it was the result of damage inflicted upon the battleship by his fleet, but he was quickly forced to think again. From the smoke and debris, a dozen bulky assault ships erupted onto his pict screens. He felt his insides grow cold as the Requiem’s cogitators analyzed the fast, fat-bodied vessels. The ugly ships were almost all engine except for the immense mass of armour piled up about their prows.

Ram ships! As that hideous realisation came to him, a second explosion ripped through Target Omega. A smaller flotilla of ork craft burst from the battleship’s portside, racing straight towards Vortsk’s fleet. As they streaked away from the battleship, the larger vessel began to roll, its stability overwhelmed by the violent, speedy launch of its cargo.

Target Omega wasn’t a battleship at all. It was an assault carrier!

Panic crackled across the displays monitoring communications within Vortsk’s fleet. The ram ships, impossibly fast with their oversized engines, were smashing into the human vessels almost before their crews were aware they were being attacked. The ork craft charged straight into the fleet, breaching hulls with their armoured prows. More than the actual damage they inflicted, it was the confusion they wrought upon the fleet. Even as he tried to exert his authority and bring cohesion back into his force, Vortsk was seeing segments of his command scatter. Pirates and renegades, traitors to a man, there was no loyalty to bind them to the battle.

‘Arch-Commander!’ the screaming voice of the Requiem’s captain echoed from the vox-casters within the command-crypt. ‘Target Omega is losing integrity. She’s breaking up!’

Vortsk looked over at the pict screen showing the clearest view of the ork craft. With the loss of stability, the slow roll had turned into an apocalyptic vision. The spine of the ship had snapped in the middle of its roll, turning the scrap-work mass of metal into a spiralling corkscrew of shrapnel. Shrapnel hurtling directly towards the Requiem.

‘Evasive manoeuvres,’ Vortsk growled. Even as he spoke, however, he could feel the Requiem cry out. The battleship shuddered as one of the rampaging ork ram ships slammed into her side.

‘Hull breach in decks fifty through fifty-five,’ the captain’s voice cried out. ‘The ork ship has buried itself in our starboard!’

Vortsk closed his eyes, pulling the information he needed from the Requiem’s cogitators. The drag of the ork ship would compromise her manoeuvrability, too much so for her to escape the spiralling wreckage of Target Omega.

The Arch-Commander raised the vox-sceptre one last time. ‘All weapon batteries, open fire on Target Omega.’

The order tasted like ash on his tongue. Even the firepower of an Oberon-class battleship wouldn’t help them now. The best they could hope for was that the Requiem’s armour would hold and they wouldn’t suffer so much damage that they’d be left immobile and defenceless when the rest of the ork armada showed up.

‘Damn xenos,’ Vortsk thought bitterly.

‘They used my own trick on me.’

‘Grim Lord, there can be no question that the orks will penetrate the second line of defence.’ Admiral Nostraz’s voice was subdued as he made the pessimistic report. He bowed his head in contrition as the Warsmith stirred upon his translucent throne.

‘How long can we expect the third line to hold?’ Andraaz demanded.

Skylord Morax reached out and brought the cluster of lights representing the third of Castellax’s defence fleets into focus. ‘Raiders and slaveships,’ he grumbled. ‘Nothing here that can possibly stand up to the orks.’

‘Then the aliens will make planetfall?’ Captain Gamgin asked, a trace of anticipation and eagerness in his tone. After five generations of training, he was curious to see how his janissaries would perform against an enemy more formidable than a rabble of feral slaves.

Morax ran his glove across his scalp and glowered at Gamgin. ‘An armada that size might have a billion howling greenskins. If they make planetfall…’

‘We will destroy them,’ Andraaz stated, his voice brooking no argument. His red eye focused upon the youngest of his war council. Sergeant Ipos was the only member of the inner-circle who had been created with hybrid gene-seed, a necessity for a Legion whose own genetic material was rife with corruption and mutation. Despite the admixture of gene-seed, Ipos had proven himself a brilliant strategist and tactician, as well as a shrewd political manipulator. He had used a careful campaign of conspiracy and subterfuge to worm his way into his position as Castellan of the Iron Bastion, one long coveted by full-blooded Iron Warriors like Algol and Vallax.

Ipos rose from his chair, sweeping his gauntlet across the surface of the table. The starfield faded. In its place appeared an orbital view of Castellax itself, its satellites and space stations. Another sweep of Ipos’s hand and hundreds of lights began swarming around the world.

‘We shouldn’t expect a concentrated attack by the orks for several hours, perhaps even days,’ Ipos declared. ‘Until their warlord exerts its influence, the xenos will attack by individual squadrons, each warboss trying to cheat its fellows of loot and glory. We can exploit that.’

Admiral Nostraz smirked at the last statement. ‘How do we do that, half-breed?’ he grumbled.

Ipos ignored the admiral, directing his attention instead to the other Iron Warriors. ‘We can’t keep the orks from making planetfall. What we can do is prevent them from gaining a firm foothold once they are here.’ He pointed to the ring of defence satellites and armed weapons stations orbiting the planet. ‘If we adjust the orbits of five per cent of our installations we can present the orks with deliberate gaps in the defences. Eager for plunder, the xenos will use those gaps to try and reach the surface as quickly as possible.’

‘You want to make it easier for the orks to reach Castellax?’ Algol almost choked on the words, such was his incredulity.

The sergeant shook his head and made an adjustment to the illuminated display. Now some of the swarming lights were streaming down towards Castellax. ‘By focusing the orks into pre-arranged windows of opportunity, we will funnel them into specific areas of the planet. Far from the industrial centres, though we will need to present the orks with some lesser installations to maintain their interest. As the xenos converge upon these sacrificial settlements, the Air Cohort will deploy and bomb them into oblivion. We’ll be able to destroy the first wave of orks piecemeal, a tactic which Skylord Morax’s squadrons should be fully capable of implementing.’

Morax clapped his hands together, almost chortling with pleasure as he imagined the glory which would belong to his Air Cohort. ‘Indeed, indeed. We’ll burn down every xenos that sets one foot on Castellax!’

Over-Captain Vallax leaned over the table, studying the pattern of lights swirling about the projected planet. ‘That might settle for the vanguard, but you don’t expect the entire armada to hit us at the same time. I’ve fought orks. They might be stupid, but they’re also cunning. They won’t fall for the same bait twice.’

‘Afraid of getting your chainaxe dirty?’ Morax chuckled, waving his jewelled glove at the Over-Captain. ‘By the time the orks figure out what to do next, our surviving ships will be well on their way to Medrengard for help.’

‘The Third Grand Company fights its own battles, Skylord,’ Vallax snapped. ‘To contemplate anything less is cowardice.’

‘I shall quote you when the warlords of Medrengard demand to know why their shipments of arms are behind schedule,’ Admiral Nostraz retorted. ‘If the greenskins are allowed to set up a siege of even a few months, production will grind to a halt.’

‘We might manage food for the slaves,’ Algol said, pondering the problem. ‘Synthetics will last out for the better part of a year and can be supplemented, but water will be a problem. The only extra water supplies we can tap into are those at the embryo farms and that will deprive us of our next generation of workers. Unless we go out and collect our own on a large scale. Like in the good old days.’

‘Castellax has been fortified against full assault by the False Emperor’s minions,’ the crackling drone of Oriax’s servitor announced. ‘We are the sons of the Iron Cage. We are the Betrayers of Isstvan. However great the xenos horde, it shall break upon our walls.’

Warsmith Andraaz stepped away from his throne, steam venting from the coil of cables sunk into his armour as idle servo-motors pulsed into life. The hulking Iron Warrior stalked across the chamber, his Rending Guard falling into step behind him. Andraaz kept one eye fixed upon the obsidian table while his mechanical eye flashed across the faces of his officers.

‘There will be no call for help,’ Andraaz stated. ‘There are those upon Medrengard who believe the Third Grand Company to be weak, that our days of glory and might are behind us, that we are but a sorry remnant of the past!’ The Warsmith drove his fist straight into the middle of the projection, stabbing deep into the sphere representing Castellax. ‘This battle will belong to us, and us alone! We shall exterminate the xenos and send their skulls to Great Perturabo as tribute. There will be no retreat. There will be no surrender. And there will be no mercy.’

‘What of our fleet, Grim Lord?’ Admiral Nostraz asked. ‘If they remain engaged with the orks they will be destroyed and we will lose them all. We can’t replenish our losses without raiders to secure fresh materials.’

‘The Warsmith has already said there will be no retreat,’ Gamgin growled. His temper subsided when he felt Andraaz’s gaze focus upon him. Abased, he sank down into his chair.

‘The fleet will disengage and withdraw to the far side of the sun,’ Andraaz decided. ‘That will put Castellax between them and the ork armada.’

Morax nodded appreciatively at the strategy. ‘With the orks caught up in the planetary fortifications, we can recall the fleet and have it engage the ships the xenos leave in orbit.’ The Skylord cast a sneer in Nostraz’s direction. ‘Or they can withdraw into the warp and get help.’

A cold smile twisted the half of Andraaz’s face that was still flesh. ‘There will be no withdrawal.’

‘But, Grim Lord, many of our ships are crewed by pirate scum,’ objected Nostraz. ‘If one of them should lose nerve, or perceive our situation as being–’

‘There will be no retreat,’ Oriax’s proxy droned, the servitor’s lifeless eyes staring emptily at the ceiling. ‘The Speaker will issue a compulsion to every Navigator in the fleet. They will bite down upon the capsule hidden in their teeth. The poison will put them into a coma until such time as an antidote can be administered.’

Warsmith Andraaz slammed his fist against the obsidian table once more, vanquishing the display in a crackle of sparks. ‘The pirates will have to come to the Iron Bastion for that antidote. Without the Navigators, they dare not tempt the warp. No, my brothers, there will be no retreat from Castellax, no display of weakness to cheer our persecutors.’

The Warsmith turned and slowly marched back to his throne. ‘Castellax belongs to the Third Grand Company of the Iron Warriors Legion. No one will forget that fact. Not the filthy xenos. Not the pawns of the False Emperor. And not the warlords of Medrengard.

‘Castellax is ours. Any who think otherwise live on borrowed time.’

EMPEROR’S DELIVERANCE

Nick Kyme

Blood. There was too much blood.

Athena’s hands were slick with it, right up to the elbows. The crimson morass where she buried her fingers was a man’s chest, the ribs splintered and the organs exposed. She was searching for an artery. It was hard to find in all the viscera and vital fluid. Flickering lumen-strips overhead were weak and ineffective. Athena could barely see the novitiate beside her, handing over surgical tools. Betheniel was almost apologetic – the blades and saws were crude, woefully inadequate, but it was all they had at Emperor’s Deliverance. It was all anyone had in the shadow of Devil’s Ridge on the war-torn world of Armageddon.

Athena held out a steady, blood-soaked hand. She’d tried to wipe it on her smock but the nails were red-rimed, the gore so deeply ingrained it was like her skin was swathed in a patina of rust. With her other hand, she pinched the spewing artery.

‘Clamps, sister. Quickly now.’

An explosion overhead shook the roof of the infirmary, making the novitiate fumble. Some of the tools clattered noisily into the gloom, but she found the clamps.

Athena staunched the bleeding, muttering as she tied off the vein. ‘Fortunate that we don’t require the rib spreaders.’ Most of the man’s chest cavity was gone, torn out by a greenskin bomb. Part of his jaw was missing too.

She addressed Betheniel directly. ‘When a life is at stake we must show resolve, even in the face of danger. Those were Marauders overhead, our Imperial Navy bombers, heading for what’s left of Hades Hive.’

The novitiate nodded, contrite. She recoiled a moment later when Athena threw down a ragged piece of cloth she’d been using to clean her instruments.

‘Throne and Eye!’

‘What is it, sister? Have I done something wrong?’

‘Grant me the fortitude of Saint Katherine…’ she whispered, making the sign of the aquila for the blasphemous outburst. ‘No…’ Athena wiped a hand across her brow, smearing an incarnadine line in the sweat. ‘There’s nothing more we could’ve done.’ She deactivated the medi-cogitator next to the man’s bunk. Cardiac response was negative, blood pressure flat-lined. ‘He’s dead.’

A grey-haired orderly, cheeks peppered with stubble, emerged from the shadows and caught Athena’s attention. Sanson used to be a hiver, a low-labourer in the ‘sinks’ who’d made machine parts all the way into his middle years until Hades was sacked. Calm-headed and meticulous, he made a reliable orderly. He’d made his way quietly through the numerous groaning bodies, the blood and sweat-stained beds, the thousands of wounded that were pouring into the camp’s infirmary every single harrowing day.

‘They have arrived, sister.’

‘At the perimeter?’ Athena was removing her smock as she made for a small basin with its sub-standard sanitising spray and dermal-scrubbers. Two acolytes approached her from either side as she stooped to wash her grubby hands, and took off her medical fatigues. For a few moments, she was naked in the half-light – Athena had long since foregone modesty – until her handmaidens dressed her in white robes and gilded iconography.

When she faced Sanson she was a Sister Hospitaller again, officious and noble in the trappings of the Adepta Sororitas. She clutched a string of rosarius beads to her breast, the sigil of a burning candle swinging from the end. Ornamental armour clad her body, a slim silver breastplate and vambraces. Lastly, she drew a hood over her jet-black hair which was scraped back by scalp locks.

‘Across from the Eumenidies River, yes,’ replied the orderly. Sanson had kept his eyes low and his integrity intact.

A vox-radio was playing somewhere in the shadows. A trooper hunched over, listening to the propaganda messages with the volume turned low.

++…innocence does not exist, only degrees of guilt. Freedom must be earned, it must be fought for. Cowards, the weak and the impure do not deserve to live. Hades was lost on the backs of the craven. Armageddon will only be won by the strong. We of the Marines Malevolent will stand before this menace and we will–++

‘Turn that tripe off,’ Athena scowled at the trooper, a private called Kolber who was wise to do as she asked. ‘I’d rather listen to Yarrick espousing the virtues of resistance that listen to him.’ Captain Vinyar’s rhetoric was fleeting on the vox-band but his propaganda was always directed at the disparagement of the weak and their worthlessness to war.

Angry, she summoned Betheniel, who was attired in the less ostentatious garments of a novitiate. Head bowed, she followed her superior.

‘Shouldn’t this be brought to the attention of Colonel Hauptman?’ Sanson inquired of Athena’s back.

She paused momentarily. The colonel had been responsible for the protection of the camp. He was an officer of the Cadian Fifth, a good soldier and an honourable man who understood the plight of those who couldn’t fight for themselves.

‘Tell him yourself,’ she replied, disappearing into the dark. ‘He’s lying on that slab in front of you.’

With Elias Hauptman dead, it would fall to others to protect Emperor’s Deliverance. Athena saw them at the crest of a muddy rise, waiting at the perimeter of the camp. She tried not to think about the thousands of refugees from Hades Hive housed below her, the wounded and the inadequate block houses, the unsanitary conditions of her infirmary, the dead and the pits where she and the servitor units she was afforded had buried them. Disease and vermin were becoming a problem. She’d taken to carrying a shock maul with her when not in surgery and had a tally of bludgeoned sump rats to rival any hiver.

She felt Betheniel trembling beside her and briefly clutched her hand.

‘Have courage, sister. They are here to keep us safe.’

But as she regarded the towering knights in front of them, their weapons low-slung and ready, the kill-markings and the battered armour, Athena felt doubt… and fear.

There were two of them, both wearing the same gritty yellow and black battle-plate, a winged lightning-strike on their left shoulder guards. Both wore their battle-helms. One was beak-shaped and had been made to look like a shark’s mouth with teeth painted on either side of the cone; the other was plainer, stub-nosed with a vox-grille.

As she bowed, Athena felt their baleful stare and fought to keep the tremor from her voice.

‘I am Sister Superior Athena and this is my novitiate, Betheniel. I am pleased that such august warriors have deemed Emperor’s Deliverance worthy of their protection.’

‘We have not,’ the shark-faced one replied. He spoke flatly, but with an edge like that of the serrated blade scabbarded at his hip. He stepped forward, looking down on the woman at a sharper angle. The pectoral on his plastron read Nemiok in archaic script.

‘I don’t understand.’ There was steel in Athena’s eyes and a defiance that suggested she wouldn’t be cowed by these warriors.

The other spoke. His voice was grating but not as harsh as his comrade’s. ‘Our mission is to take and hold this river, the camp too. Nothing further.’ According to his battle-plate, his name was Varik.

‘So who is charged with defending the camp? I have over twelve thousand refugees, many of whom are wounded, not to mention another thousand Ministorum staff.’

Brother Nemiok leaned in, using all of his bulk and height to intimidate.

‘Look to yourselves, if you’re able.’ He glowered into the distance, unwilling to speak further on the matter.

Athena was shaking her head. Betheniel desperately wanted to leave and even risked pulling at her superior’s arm. She snatched her hand away again at the sister’s scathing glance, which was then turned on the Space Marines.

‘This is unacceptable. I will speak to Colonel Destrier about this–’

Nemiok swung his head around, the gears in his armour plate growling, ‘Begone! And pray the orks do not come.’

Despite herself, Athena backed away. Her heart was pounding. She could barely breathe. ‘I will at least know whom you serve.’

Varik replied before Nemiok decided to do something more than threaten.

‘Captain Vinyar of the Marines Malevolent. Now return to your camp and consider this a warning.’

The discussion was over. If she lingered, there would be violence. It practically exuded from the Space Marines. Betheniel was sobbing, scared to lift her eyes from their boots.

Athena had to help her novitiate back down the muddy slope. Even when they’d reached the relative safety of the camp, the sister superior was still shaking.

While Betheniel sipped from Private Kolber’s flask of grain liquor to steady her nerves, Athena listened to the vox-radio.

++…will not lie to you. We are experiencing Imperial losses in the Eumenidies region of the Diablo Mountains. But though we must surrender ground now, stand fast good citizens, for we shall gather our forces and reclaim it. Be vigilant. Greenskins are at the edge of the Diablo Mountains, but are unlikely to forge a crossing. Resist, fight and we shall win this war together.++

Yarrick’s bombast meant more refugees would be coming in. Athena looked at the ranks of beds and the already overcrowded conditions. Their ‘protectors’ were monsters, masquerading as heroes. She prayed to the Emperor for his mercy.

Nemiok was scouring the mountains for any sign of the orks, one hand on the stock of his combi-bolter as it hung by a strap from his shoulder.

‘Do not do that again, brother.’

Varik was cleaning the dirt from his chainblade and looked up. ‘Do what?’

‘Pander to that woman. She must be made to know her place. Remember your Chapter and duty…’ Nemiok paused to turn and meet his battle-brother’s fierce gaze, ‘…or I shall remind you of it.’

Chastened, Varik only nodded.

Nemiok went to the comm-feed in his ear and listened.

‘Mobile artillery is being moved in on the opposite side of the camp,’ he said a minute later. ‘It seems Captain Vinyar is planning on starting that push a little early.’

He smiled when he saw the tank column emerging from the cloud of dust opposite their sentry position, missile points glistening in the pale sun, but there was no mirth in it, no humour at all.

Rain at Emperor’s Deliverance was only good for washing away the blood. Even then it coalesced in the sink holes and basins of the camp, making the ground muddy and hard to traverse on foot or track. Ravines of the grisly matter ran thick and red, gumming up boots and thickening the air with a metallic smell.

Athena was out in the downpour wearing medical fatigues, having abandoned ceremony in favour of pragmatism. Betheniel was lagging behind on the slope, a storm cloak clutched tight around her tiny frame.

‘I need your help,’ she said to the Space Marine sentries, hoping her directness would get their attention.

Nemiok deigned to look at her. ‘Go on.’

‘The Salvation, it’s a medical transport, has broken down. They’re mired in the earth and have over five hundred wounded aboard. I need to get them to the infirmary as soon as possible. You are stronger than anyone in camp and could get us back on the road quickly. Not protection,’ she explained, showing her palms, ‘just saving lives.’

Nemiok waited. The rain drizzled down Athena’s face, saturating her clothes. She was shivering; so too was her half-drowned novitiate.

‘Please… I know I spoke out of turn yesterday, but it would not take long. I’m begging you. Help us.’

Slowly and deliberately, the Marines Malevolent removed his battle-helm and attached it to his belt by the neck strap. His eyes were pitiless, his mouth sneering. The rain lashed his horrible, scarred face and he did not move, he did not feel. It was like speaking to a slab of granite.

‘No. You can manage without us.’

‘Over five hundred wounded!’ she pleaded. ‘You can save them by doing this, at least give them a chance.’

The sneer turned into a scowl on Nemiok’s face. He drew his spatha. The jagged blade was almost black. No amount of scrubbing would remove the murder stains.

His voice lowered with implicit threat. ‘I abhor weakness.’

Beside him, Varik kept his helmet on and his eyes forwards.

‘What about you?’ Athena asked, ‘Won’t you help us, either?’

Nemiok snapped, snarling, ‘Don’t look to him! I speak for the Marines Malevolent. Go back and pray my mood stays this sanguine.’

Athena stormed off into the rain, catching up to Betheniel several metres farther down the slope.

She returned alone several hours later, bloodied and ragged with fatigue, but kept her distance. It was still raining, though the deluge had lessened.

‘You were right,’ Athena said, without emotion. ‘I dug out the Salvation. It took six labour servitors four hours to do it. We also lost over half the wounded by the time it reached the infirmary.’ Her eyes were like chips of ice, dark as coal in the gloom. ‘I wanted you to know that, to know that a mindless flesh-mech slave showed greater compassion for humanity than the Emperor’s Angels.’

Nemiok said nothing. He didn’t even acknowledge her presence.

Only Varik betrayed his shame with a slight awkward shift in his posture. He was about to tell her to leave, but Athena had already gone.

A blurt of comm-static got Nemiok checking the feed in his ears.

His tone with Varik was like stone. ‘We’re moving.’

Smoke from distant fires smudged the sky above the Diablo Mountains a dirty orange. Burning resolved on the breeze, the stench of munitions, wood and human flesh. There was another odour too, something stagnant, earthy and fungal.

Betheniel huddled her legs close to her body, relieved that her sister superior had returned unharmed.

‘And they said nothing?’

‘Like statues, sister.’ Athena was weary, bone and spirit. ‘I’ve never felt coldness like that before.’

They were sitting outside the infirmary, getting some air. The vox-radio hummed in the background.

++Efforts to repel the orks at the Diablo Mountains have failed. Imperial Guard regiments are already in place on Devil’s Ridge and will halt the greenskins there. Solely as a precaution, civilians south of the River Eumenidies are advised to head away from the mountains and seek shelter. Trust in the Emperor.++

A grim silence fell for a few moments.

A fearful Betheniel, staring up at the crags, interrupted it.

‘That’s close to camp.’ She bit her lip as the years drained off her, leaving behind a little girl afraid of the darkness. ‘Shouldn’t we try to move the injured?’

Athena was resigned. ‘There are too many. We’ll have to make a stand and hope the Guard blockades stop them.’

‘And if they don’t?’

Echoing from the mountains, there emitted such a roar that it swallowed Athena’s response with its fury.

‘WAAAAAAGGH!’

Athena was up on her feet. Her tone was urgent.

‘Back inside.’

After their sojourn outside, the heady stink of sweat, blood and piss hit them like a hammer when they rushed into the infirmary.

Sanson looked up from a tray of bandages and medical gauze.

‘What’s happening?’

Private Kolber was hobbling over to where his sidearm hung from a wall hook.

‘The greenskins are here, aren’t they? The blockade didn’t stop them.’ Only a young man, the trooper had aged a decade in the week he’d been in the infirmary.

Athena had no time for explanations. ‘Lock all doors and shutters,’ she told Sanson. ‘No one goes outside.’

A pair of her fellow Hospitallers began to pray at a small shrine.

Overhead, a piercing whine made them all look up; nearly three thousand heads turned to the sky, pleading for salvation.

‘More bombers?’ asked Betheniel. She was watching the juddering lumen-strips, the dust motes cascading from the ceiling picked out in their flickering light.

The sound was decreasing in pitch.

Athena was slowly shaking her head. ‘Hide! Get to cover!’ she cried, just as the first shells fell.

The ceiling crashed down with an awesome, terrifying din. The praying Hospitallers disappeared under a mountain of debris, rewarded for their piety. Those who were able pressed their hands over their ears. A massive explosion blew out the walls and sent bodies flailing. A second later, the lights went out and panic rushed in along with the dark.

Having survived the initial blast, Athena was staggering through the carnage. Poor Sanson was dead, riddled with shrapnel. It had almost cut him in two. She clung to Betheniel, the only person she could realistically still save, and tried to find a way out.

Another incendiary burst tore across the sister superior, forcing her to the ground as it swept away a host of screaming silhouettes. Something hot splashed across her face. It stank of copper. There was grit too from the churned up earth, some of it too hard and sharp to be mud. She hauled her body up, dragging Betheniel.

Belatedly, she noticed her ears were bleeding. A perpetual monotone deafened her, so she failed to hear the piercing shriek presaging another blast.

It landed further out, throwing up corpses like flesh-rain. Bodies hit the ground bent and broken, entangled with their bunks.

Somewhere, a fire had started. Athena saw the ruddy glow that suggested the twisted remains of men and women strewn about the infirmary floor; she could smell the smoke. It mixed with the reek of cordite from the heavy mortars.

The orks in the mountains don’t use mortars.

Horrified, she realised what was happening. They were in the midst of an Imperial barrage.

Blundering in the darkness, clambering over the dead and dying, her fingers found the edge of a hatch to the outside.

Athena was about to yank on the handle when a thunderous boom filled her senses and she was lofted into the air.

Betheniel was screaming.

Nemiok watched the shells fall with immense satisfaction. As they poured down from Devil’s Ridge, the greenskins were blasted apart. Behind him, the Whirlwinds kept up a relentless barrage, but it was indiscriminate. Structures in the refugee camp were flattened. Some of the humans had taken to running outside as soon as the shelling began.

‘Fools,’ he muttered.

Those not sundered in the bombardment were picked off by the orks that made it through the gauntlet. A horde of the beasts was gathering, returning fire, attempting to mass for a counterattack.

Nemiok racked the slide of his combi-bolter to full auto.

‘Ready, brother?’

‘There are people down there,’ said Varik.

Nemiok was dismissive. ‘There are greenskins too.’

Varik nodded, thumbing the activation stud of his chainblade. They’d been joined by a Marines Malevolent vanguard attached to the armoured column.

Together with their battle-brothers, they descended into the camp.

Athena woke, coughing up blood. Pain sent hot knives down her right side where she’d fractured her ribs. Internal bleeding explained the ruddy sputum. She was groggy as if just punched. Light was filtering in from above. It took her a few seconds to realise it was because the infirmary roof was gone, shredded to nothing. It revealed a grisly scene of prostrate bodies and dismembered limbs. Some were still moving and groaning. Most were still and silent.

She’d been blown several metres from the hatch, which now hung open like a torn scab. Betheniel was nearby, alive but in shock. Her soot-smeared face was fixed in a catatonic grimace of terror.

‘Come on,’ Athena said, soothing. ‘Follow me, sister. Here…’ She held out her hand but had to grasp Betheniel and pull her up. The novitiate staggered, moving warily as if blind.

Together they made it through the ragged hatch, stumbling outside.

Smoke wreathed the camp. A fog thickened it, rolling down from the mountainside and across the river, creating a murky pall that rested over Emperor’s Deliverance like a shroud. Gunfire and screaming raked the breeze, so loud that it made Athena cower at first. There were more of the dead in the muddied, blood-drenched streets. She saw a mother and daughter slumped cold and lifeless, their fingers barely touching. Inside a shattered blockhouse a Guardsman hung over a window-lip trying to get out. A broken helmet sat on the ground just below him and a lasgun dangled from his grasp. Dozens of her fellow sisters, pious women she had known for many years, lay red and open; she had to avert her gaze.

Monsters emerged through the smog with leathern, gnarled green skin. Huge and brutal, they stank of cloying earth and spoiled meat. One with a fat-bladed cleaver, its left arm missing from elbow down and carrying a gash to its forehead, saw them through the carnage. Violence radiated off it so powerfully that it made Athena dizzy.

‘God-Emperor…’ she breathed. The beast roared, tasting prey, and stumbled into a loping run. Armour plates clanked against its muscular body, as did the bones and flesh-trophies it had taken.

Private Kolber was lying in the street too. Athena saw his corpse resolve through a passing belt of smoke.

‘Stay here,’ she said to Betheniel, who nodded dumbly, and rushed towards the dead trooper. It brought her closer to the ork, but also to a gun. She wrenched Kolber’s sidearm from its holster. Backing off until she reached Betheniel, she took aim.

‘Stop,’ she yelled at the beast, more to charge her courage than in any real attempt to stall it. As predicted, the ork kept coming.

Athena fired. The first shot went wide; the second struck the greenskin’s torso. It grunted but didn’t slow. She fired again and again, venting the laspistol’s power pack and praying to hit something vital.

The ork was bleeding and burned, but not dead. The gun whirred, temporarily drained. Athena threw it down and drew her shock maul. Now in killing range, the ork lunged, its cleaver swinging down to cut off her head. Desperately, she threw herself clear and smashed a blow against its knee.

The beast was laughing, about to slay them both when a shadow loomed out of the smog behind it. Athena saw the muzzle flare in slow motion, realising that the bolter’s salvo would hit them too.

‘Throne, no!’ she screamed, diving to the ground and praying her novitiate would do the same.

She heard a cry just after the bolter’s retort and knew it was Betheniel.

‘Engaging left.’ A bark of fire erupted from Nemiok’s bolter, chewing up an ork crawling from a crater. He followed up with a grenade from an under-slung tube launcher, slinging a charging truck tailgate over axle and cooking the driver in the fiery aftermath.

Another, running out of the incendiary smoke, went down missing half of its skull.

‘Threat eliminated,’ uttered Varik, swinging his weapon around as he sought a fresh target.

They were advancing through the camp, methodically gunning down any greenskins in their path. After the bombardment, Emperor’s Deliverance was to be cleansed. No restraint. The order came from Captain Vinyar.

From the left, a burst of heavy bolter fire ripped up a mob of stunted greenskin scavengers, turning them into a visceral mist. Brother Drago was heedless of the humans scurrying into his firing line as he opened up on an ork vehicle wreck and the greenskins trying to liberate a heavy stubber from the rig’s flatbed. Everything disappeared in a massive explosion and the angry flare of the belt-fed cannon.

Out of the smoke clouds a land speeder descended. It hovered in low, engine wash kicking up dirt, aiming its nose-mounted heavy flamer at a ruined blockhouse.

A female refugee, cut up and hobbling, shouted at it to turn around.

‘There are people trapped inside!’

‘Step aside,’ growled the pilot, unleashing a jet of super-heated promethium into the ruin. Burning orks and humans staggered out as the structure burned. Any last resistance was dealt with when the gunner swung around his rail-mounted assault cannon and thumbed the triggers. A salvo of high velocity shells spat from the rotating barrel that blew out the blockhouse’s windows in a glassy storm, killing everything left inside. Then he turned their wrath on the flaming survivors.

Laughter made an ugly sound through Nemiok’s battle-helm as he hailed the gunner’s kills.

‘Wipe them from existence!’ he roared, sighting a group of orks that had escaped the fusillade. He unclipped a grenade and tossed it towards them.

As the greenskins were engulfed by explosion, he called to Varik. ‘Brother, I wish to anoint my blade with their xenos blood!’

Varik nodded, his drawn chainsword burring in his iron grip.

Though battered, the orks charged, cleavers and cutters swinging. Varik sliced the head off one as his battle-brother impaled another. Nemiok then eviscerated a third before Varik finished the last, bifurcating the beast from groin to sternum.

Sheathing his chainsword, Nemiok headed down a narrow street that led into a larger plaza.

‘Hold!’ Varik’s cry fell on deaf ears as he rushed to catch his brother.

Emerging from between a pair of smouldering blockhouses, Nemiok drew a bead on a greenskin’s back. It was already wounded, missing half an arm and badly shot up. It was rushing at a kill the Marines Malevolent couldn’t see and didn’t care about. He scythed the ork down, opening up its back and spine as the mass reactive bolter shells exploded. As it fell, Nemiok saw two females he recognised through his blood-flecked crosshairs. He pulled his finger from the trigger, but it was too late.

Betheniel was dead. Her eyes were open as she lay on her back in a growing pool of blood. The shell shrapnel had only clipped her, but it was enough for a killing blow. Athena held the novitiate in her arms, muttering a prayer.

‘Saint Katherine, I beseech you, bring this faithful soldier to the side of the Emperor. Protect her soul for the journey to the Golden Throne…’

She did not weep. Her resolve was hard as marble. Athena tightened her grip around Private Kolber’s sidearm and stood up. She wasn’t unsteady, nor did she feel any fear or doubt as she approached the armoured giant in yellow and black.

‘You are a disgrace to the aquila,’ she spat, bringing up the laspistol.

The shot was almost point-blank. It made Nemiok grunt and stagger but otherwise left him unscathed. He tore off his helm, uncaring of the battle around them. Underneath, he wore a mask of pure hatred.

‘For that show of strength, I will let you see my face before I execute you,’ he snarled, letting the bolter drop to its strap and drawing his spatha. ‘This will really hurt,’ he promised.

The punch to his unarmoured jaw sent Nemiok reeling and the spatha spiralling from his grasp to land blade down in the earth.

‘You’ve shamed yourself enough.’

Nemiok looked like he was about to reach for another weapon but stopped when Varik shook his head.

‘Killing innocents in cold blood, there is no honour in that.’ Varik turned to Athena.

‘Get out of here. A warzone is no place for a sister of mercy,’ he told her. ‘Stay alive and do some good at least.’ He took the pistol, crushed it. ‘Draw on my brothers a second time and I won’t stay my hand.’

She nodded, realising what Varik had sacrificed so that she could live.

Athena rushed to Betheniel’s side. Another group of refugees had found them and helped lift the body onto an Imperial Guard half-track. They drove off south, away from Devil’s Ridge and the orks. There were still more greenskins thronging the edge of the camp, coming down from the mountains.

She didn’t know what had made Varik intercede. Perhaps there was more compassion in the Space Marines than she realised. It didn’t matter. Compassion wouldn’t win this war. Only Yarrick could do that.

Overhead the barrage began anew, stealing away her thoughts and keeping the orks pinned. It would be several hours before the battle was done. Many more civilians would die. Only a few would know the Emperor’s deliverance.

Varik kept his brother in his sights until he was sure his ire had cooled.

‘You’ll regret that,’ Nemiok told him.

‘You go too far.’

The dense throb of heavy engines interrupted and they looked up to see a squadron of gunships coming down to land in the distance.

‘Now there’ll be trouble,’ Varik muttered.

The gunships were forest green, emblazoned with the snarling head of a firedrake. They belonged to the Salamanders.

Vinyar yanked off a gauntlet as he reclined on his throne in the Marines Malevolent barrack house. It was gloomy within the boxy ferrocrete structure, furnished with all the austerity expected of his puritanical Chapter. The captain kept banners and trophies close at hand. It was the only ornamentation he allowed in the stark chamber, except for a broad strategium table where a host of maps and data-slates were strewn.

He reviewed one, a report of the bombing at Emperor’s Deliverance, not deigning to look at the two warriors standing silently in his presence.

‘How many human casualties?’

‘Around four thousand, sire.’

‘And the orks?’

‘Total annihilation.’

Vinyar set down the slate, smiled at the two warriors.

‘Acceptable losses.’

‘There was also significant structural damage.’

‘Negligible,’ Vinyar waved away any concerns. ‘The greenskins are in retreat, the Marines Malevolent are victorious.’

‘What of Armageddon Command? I have heard talk of sanctions against us.’

Vinyar’s laugh was derisive. ‘Destrier has been reminded of his place and purpose in this war, Brother Varik. There’ll be no further repercussions from him.’

The warriors lingered, prompting the captain to ask, ‘Was there something more?’

Varik awaited Nemiok’s damning account of what had happened with Sister Athena, but his response was surprising.

‘No, sire,’ he rasped, jaw tight.

‘Then you’re dismissed.’

Both warriors saluted, turned on their heel and left.

Vinyar was poring over the maps on his strategium table, planning the next assault, when he heard the barrack house door opening again.

‘Changed your mind, Nemiok?’ he asked, looking up but finding someone else in his chambers. Vinyar sneered. ‘You.’

An onyx-skinned warrior was standing before him, armoured in forest green. A scaled cloak hung from his broad shoulders, attached beneath gilded pauldrons. Iconography of drakes and fire, hammers and anvils emblazoned his battle-plate. His voice was abyssal deep.

‘I have spoken with Colonel Destrier,’ he said. ‘I have also witnessed the excessive force used at Emperor’s Deliverance and been told of the civilian casualties.’

‘There is collateral damage in any war,’ protested Vinyar. ‘If I had not acted as punitively as I did, there would still be orks roaming that camp. Besides, cowards are unworthy of being spared.’

The green-armoured warrior had unhitched a thunder hammer from his back and slammed it on the strategium table, cracking data-slates and tearing maps. He was unbuckling a holstered pistol when he said, ‘You misunderstand the purpose of my visit, Vinyar.’ He looked up and his eyes flashed fire-red. ‘This isn’t a discussion.’ He glanced at the gauntlets the Marines Malevolent captain had discarded. ‘Put those back on. I want this to be even.’

Vinyar was belligerent, but reached for his gauntlets anyway. ‘What are you talking about, Tu’Shan?’

‘Penance and restitution,’ said the Chapter Master of the Salamanders. Bones cracked in his neck as he loosened them.

‘I’ll give you one piece of advice,’ he added, clenching and unclenching his fists to work the knuckles. ‘Don’t go for a weapon.’

Then he closed the barrack room door.

THE FANGS OF THE ASP

Josh Reynolds

‘What day is this, Djubti?’ High Queen Khalida asked. Her voice issued from dry, cracked lips like sand sliding through a stone sluice. She blinked eyelids as fragile as papyrus and sucked air into long-shrivelled lungs, flexing her withered fingers. They were fragile looking, but capable of crushing stone. So much had changed.

The wizened, bent shape of the liche priest who served as her advisor turned slightly. Like Khalida herself, and the legions which stood at her back, silent and patient, Djubti was a shrivelled thing, empty of fluid, if not vitality. Dead flesh the colour of dried leather shrunk tight against yellowing bones beneath tattered rags which had once been fine. Decorations of gold and turquoise dangled against a shrunken chest and armlets meant for living limbs sagged and rattled on his bony arms.

‘The Day of Challenge, mighty Queen,’ Djubti said, as if she had not forgotten and his reminder was nothing more than a formality. ‘It is the Day of Scorpions, the Day of Swords.’

‘So soon,’ she murmured. That was why she was out here then. The explanation brought comfort, though not relief. Memories clutched at her, previous days of challenge and challengers both and the dim clangour of long-gone weapons.

She looked up, at the black shape of Nagashizzar, which pierced the body of the horizon like a cancer. Its shadow spread across the slopes of Cripple Peak and the shores of the Sour Sea like some monstrous hand, rendering all within its envelop withered and dead, including the armies which unceasingly patrolled these lands, awaiting an enemy long-extinct. Armies such as hers, stationed here at the very heart of the ancient enemy’s land; it would fall to her to face Nagash first, should he return. That was her burden and her honour, by right of besting the former sentry on a previous Day of Scorpions, so long ago. She had held her place since then, against every challenger on every Day of Scorpions. Today would be no different.

‘It has been a decade since the last, most puissant and cunning lady,’ Djubti said, looking at her. She wondered, idly, what he saw. She had seen her reflection before, in the warped and blasted patches of sand which now dotted the Great Land as well as in the sluggish waters of oasis and river. But the reality of her was always blended in her mind’s eye with the memory of what – of whom – she had been. She saw the living warrior-queen, not the dead thing, the mummified parody of womanhood. Her hands clenched with a crackling of dry linen.

‘Has it?’ she said, not really requiring an answer.

‘Indeed, oh Beloved of Asaph,’ he croaked, air wheezing through his cracked and fleshless jaws. ‘Though I would not wish to insult the High Queen of Lybaras by implying that she had forgotten such, being but a humble scholar and not worthy.’

‘Humble scholar, is it?’ she said.

‘Most humble and indeed, unworthy to stand in the shadow of the wings of the Great Hawk of Lybaras, most beloved and gracious daughter of the Asp goddess,’ Djubti said, leaning on his staff. Merry sparks danced in his otherwise empty eyes. In life, Djubti had advised her grandfather and great-grandfather, or so he claimed. In death, he counselled her.

‘Only a decade,’ she said.

‘Every ten seasons comes the Day of Scorpions, my Queen,’ Djubti said. ‘Like the rains it comes and challengers with it.’ He gestured with his staff and she saw them, marching in silent formation. Spearmen, archers and horsemen were all in evidence and likely had been for some time, the dust of their passage rising high into the sky. She felt a moment’s dismay at the fact that she had not seen them, too lost in her memories.

The tomb-legion stalked across the shore, the poisonous waves of the Sour Sea lapping at bare bones and skeletal hooves and the grinding metal talons of a massive, bestial warsphinx. The leonine statue caused none of the fear in her she would have felt, centuries past when blood still pumped in her veins. Now, its relentless lope merely piqued her curiosity. It was a show of ostentation, to unleash such a war-engine for an occasion such as this. Whoever he was, he obviously had little idea of who she was if he thought to overawe her in such a fashion.

‘Who is it who comes, Djubti?’ she said, not recognising the age-grimed standards that swayed and caught at the light with reflective talons.

‘Ushtep of Rasetra, High Queen, to judge by the falcon on his standard’ the liche priest said. He knew all the standards and who they were borne by. ‘His force is small, but battle-tested. Settra himself has spoken warm praises of his prowess.’

‘Has he,’ Khalida said.

‘No,’ Djubti said mildly. ‘But so Ushtep claims. Even in death, he seeks to elevate himself on the shoulders of others. He thinks that a period guarding this befouled tomb will gain him some influence; it is an honour, after all.’

‘It is my honour,’ Khalida said.

‘So it is,’ Djubti said, ducking his head. ‘But perhaps, my Queen, it is time for another to take your place?’ She looked at him. Djubti made a sound that might have been a sigh. ‘Perhaps not,’ he said.

She ignored Djubti and looked down at her hand, her once slim fingers now reduced to linen shrouded talons. The loss of her beauty, of her life, bothered her not at all, a fact which in its turn did bother her, though in no way she could grasp. Her living years were as a dream, rags and tatters of colourful memory which occasionally swam to the black surface of her mind.

‘Speak softly and only into the ears of those inclined to listen,’ Neferata murmured as they watched the acrobats perform in the feast-hall of the great palace of Lahmia. They sat together on a pile of sumptuous pillows, set onto one of the many raised dais’s that dotted the hall. Among the worthies gathered amidst the stone columns and silken curtains below were men of noble birth from across the width and breadth of the Great Land. The motion of Neferata’s hand plucked them from obscurity in the same manner as another woman might choose sweetmeats. ‘Look there my little hawk, where Lord Ushtep of Rasetra and Imrathepis of Numas, third in line for the throne of that city, plot, for instance.’

‘How do you know they are plotting?’ Khalida had asked. Her eyes never left the men.

Neferata chuckled and stroked the nape of her cousin’s neck with an easy, familiar gesture. ‘How could they be doing otherwise, given the tension between those two cities?’ She raised a hand and Khalida saw a shave-headed servant thread through the crowd towards the two men. ‘Likely, they intend to use that tension in order to raise their cachet amongst their own circles. Games within games, my little hawk,’ she said.

‘What will you do?’ Khalida asked, intrigued.

‘I will help them, of course,’ Neferata said. ‘I will have them both in my debt and Lahmia will benefit greatly from that.’

‘What if they do not want your help?’

‘One of them will,’ Neferata said confidently, ‘even if he must go behind his co-conspirator’s back to get it.’ She looked at Khalida and smiled. ‘Men think themselves wise if they know how to wage war, but none are so wise as those who recognise that war has more than one form.’ She gestured smoothly. ‘War has levels and fields undreamt by bull-headed generals and power-drunk kings.’ She pulled Khalida to her and kissed the top of her head. ‘Every war, every fight, has more than one front, Khalida. You would do well to remember that…’

Khalida blinked away the fraying strands of memory and looked around, trying to re-familiarise herself with the present. It was hard, sometimes, to recognise the here and now. There were some among the risen dead of Nehekhara who could not, and spent their days in death as they had in life, unable to discern the change which had been forcibly wrought upon them. Servants, collections of bone and rags, stood immoveable around her, the brown bones of their arms bent against the poles of the ancient sunscreen they held over her head, a head no longer capable of feeling the sun. Behind them, the legions of Lybaras stood, waiting for her orders. Not all of them, to be sure, for she was no longer the Queen, but one queen among all the risen queens and kings of that fallen city.

She touched her face and then her palm fell to the pommel of the khopesh stabbed into the dry earth before her. Her other hand was still wrapped tight around the comforting length of her staff of office. It was called the Venom Staff, and it was to be wielded only by the Beloved of Asaph, first among the servants of the Asp goddess. Serpentine shapes coiled the length of the staff, intertwining so intricately that it was impossible to tell where one began and others ended. It was a thing of beauty, and sadness as well, for there would never be another Beloved of Asaph. All of her servants were dead, and the dead held their offices forever. She so-rarely released it from her grip that sand had collected in the dips and runnels where her fingers met metal. She set herself, one hand on the khopesh, one on the staff, and waited for the arrival of her latest opponent.

Drums thumped as Ushtep’s legion drew to a halt some distance away. The warsphinx was a looming presence, its brooding features glaring at Khalida’s forces. The drums gave a rattle and then a chariot rolled forward, pulled by skeletal horses. Ushtep wore a cloak of hammered brass feathers over his mummified shape, and his helm was fashioned to resemble a hawk’s head. A large shield decorated one arm and a khopesh, much more elaborately engraved than hers, nestled in the crook of his other arm. The chariot creaked to a halt at a point halfway between their two forces. Ushtep gestured sharply and a warrior who was more bone than flesh hopped from the chariot and strode forward, his king’s standard held high to catch the light of the sun as it dipped below the twisted peaks of Nagashizzar.

‘King Ushtep, Mighty Falcon of Rasetra, Settra’s Strong Hand in the South, Master of the Fortress of Vengeful Souls, High King of the Sweltering Jungles, Champion of the Charnel Valley, Prince of All Princes and King Among Kings does request that High Queen Khalida, Queen of Lybaras, set low her standards and release her oaths and move hence from these demesnes,’ the herald croaked.

Khalida’s face cracked into a smile. It was an old trick, that. Forgoing the recitation of your opponent’s titles was as sure a way of annoying them as any. Ushtep was an old hand at challenges, or perhaps simply arrogant. Either way, the insult rolled off her back. She had heard worse and there was more at stake here than honour. She forestalled her own herald, a liche clad in the raiment of one of Lybaras’ long-extinct scholars, from replying and stepped forward, uprooting her khopesh as she strode to meet her opponent. ‘Be careful, my lady,’ Djubti said softly. Khalida did not reply.

‘Remember the parable of the asp and the falcon, cousin. The falcon carried the asp over the river, but when they were in the air, the asp struck. As they fell, the falcon cried out, ‘But why? Now we will both die!’ to which the asp replied, ‘It is my nature.’ When your opponent smiles in triumph, spit into his teeth. When he laughs loud, laugh louder,’ Neferata said, reclining on her cushion. Khalida sprawled beside her, sword across her knees and sweat dripping down her face. ‘Spite is your greatest weapon, besides your mind, because in spite, all things are possible. Kings can be made to grovel for spite. Peasants may be raised to lofty heights and the strongest warrior gutted, all for spite.’ Neferata smiled and tapped two fingers against Khalida’s sword. ‘Spite, my little hawk, is whimsy sharpened to a killing point and with it you will be unpredictable.’

‘I don’t know if I have that much hate in me,’ Khalida said.

‘Deep wells fill slowly,’ Neferata said, stroking her hair.

Ushtep’s herald backed away as she approached. The bony grimace looked nervous, despite its lack of flesh. Khalida tensed and sprang. Her khopesh licked out and cut the head from the standard, dropping Ushtep’s banner into the dust. Ushtep snarled a dusty curse and leapt from his chariot with inhuman agility. He swatted his herald aside and came at her, all pretence to formality banished in the face of her disrespect.

Normally, the ritual leading up to the combat would have taken hours, as both parties recited their lineage and titles and their armies assembled in the proper formation to watch as their commanders met in single combat. But Khalida had long since grown tired of ritual and formality, and she wanted the farce over and done with. She had more important matters to attend to.

Khalida interposed her khopesh, blocking Ushtep’s blow easily. Their blades locked and the staff twirled in her hand, beating down on his hastily interposed shield. She jerked him off-balance with a sway of her hips and pivoted, driving a heel into his knee. He wore no armour over his legs, and the ancient bone cracked. Ushtep staggered. Khalida spun around him, catching him in the back of the skull with her staff, sending him stumbling forward. Before he could regain his balance, she was on him. Her khopesh chopped down through his shield arm, sawing through bone and ornamental armlets alike.

Ushtep groaned in frustration as his arm was dragged to the ground by the weight of the shield. He wobbled back, withered face twisted in a rictus snarl. He swung his blade awkwardly. The khopesh was an unwieldy weapon, especially when your centre of gravity had been badly thrown off. She blocked his blow and sent her blade spinning, taking his with it. Both sank solidly in the soft ground of the shore. She grabbed her staff in her hands and jabbed him, breaking his collarbone and cracking ribs. Wildly, he clutched at her. She stepped back and knocked his legs out from under him with bone-splintering force. He fell face-down, his falcon helm tumbling from his head.

Neferata clapped her hands once, sharply. Khalida lowered her practice blade and stepped back. Her opponent remained where he was, face-down on the ground, as the Queen of Lahmia approached. Khalida didn’t resist as her cousin took the blade from her hands and strutted towards the fallen man. Neferata put one sandaled foot on the back of the warrior’s head and gestured with the blade. ‘Why do you back away? You had him beaten.’

‘It was not honourable,’ Khalida said defensively. ‘It is not meet for a warrior to–’

‘You are not a warrior, little hawk. You are a queen. For your enemies, there can be no mercy without abject surrender. There is no honour in being a ruler. There is only strength.’ Neferata pressed down with her foot, shoving the unresisting man’s face into the dirt. ‘Remember that.’

‘I remember,’ Khalida whispered. Almost gently, she put her foot on the back of Ushtep’s neck. ‘Yield, Prince of Rasetra, or I will grind your bones to powder and fling them into the Sour Sea, so that you might wile away our eternal twilight in the bellies of the fish.’

Ushtep hissed and his remaining hand tore at the ground in a futile frenzy. Then, abruptly, he went still. ‘I… yield,’ he croaked.

‘Louder,’ Khalida said, setting the butt of her staff against his skull.

‘I yield, curse you!’ Ushtep howled.

Khalida stepped back and Ushtep’s herald and charioteer hurried to help him up. ‘Return then, Prince of Rasetra, from whence you came,’ she said with overt formality. ‘I shall take this to remember you by.’ She snatched an ornately crafted and engraved golden blade from his belt and he did not protest, merely glaring at her. She turned, having little interest in watching Ushtep’s retreat. It would have little of the pomp of his arrival, that much was certain.

‘You humiliated him,’ Djubti said, as she approached. His tone wasn’t quite one of disapproval, but it was close. Behind her, she heard the dull crump of drums signalling the retreat of Ushtep’s army. She glanced over her shoulder. They moved more slowly going than they had coming, shuffling in defeat, heads bowed and steps uncertain.

‘And what if I did?’ Khalida said. She cocked her head. ‘He insulted me.’

Djubti said, ‘By forgetting your titles?’

‘No, by daring to demand I turn over my responsibilities to him,’ Khalida said. If she had possessed saliva, she would have spat. ‘As if such a puling wretch as that would be able to stand against the Arch Necromancer when he returns…’

‘If he returns,’ Djubti said sharply.

Khalida looked at him. ‘The dead do not dream, Djubti. When he returns, he must be fought and with every ounce of fury we whom he ripped from our tombs can muster. Ushtep’s fury pales to mine. He was not worthy.’

‘It is not for you to decide–’ Djubti began.

‘No. It is a decision for the gods, and they have obviously made it,’ Khalida said. The liche priest’s words stung, more than she cared to admit. That he had said them before did not lessen that sting.

He was correct, of course. That was the bit that stuck. It was the nagging hook of doubt that caused her to hesitate. Djubti was right. There were other things that needed doing. The Great Land was at war, and had been since Nagash had shifted the dust of ages from their eyes and set them all stumbling into the harsh light of day. Thousands of kings and queens, generation upon generation of rulers had awoken at once and been set loose into a land that was as dead as they. In those first few months, wars had raged in every city, from Numas to Ka-Sabar, king against king, legions of bone and memory clashing in parody of long-forgotten conflicts. Old grudges were renewed and new grudges nurtured, even after the coming of Settra, first and greatest.

Khalida had fought her share of battles, but the opponent she most desired to test herself against was not to hand. She had no need to prove her superiority against the tomb-dust kings of Lybaras who had preceded her.

‘You do not speak for the gods, Khalida,’ Djubti said.

‘I see you too have forgotten my titles,’ Khalida said.

‘Why do we stay here, my lady?’ he said.

‘Someone must, Djubti,’ Khalida said. She thrust her staff towards Cripple Peak. ‘Someone must stand before the gates of Nagashizzar and hold them closed. So Settra has decreed. Could a cretin like Ushtep do that?’

‘Your certainty of his return has become an obsession,’ Djubti said.

‘And so,’ she said. ‘If it has, it is not unfounded. His name is whispered in the living streets of Araby and beyond.’

‘How do you know what is whispered among the living?’ Djubti said softly.

Khalida hesitated, suddenly remembering that she had not chosen Djubti to serve her. He had been chosen, certainly, but not by her. Settra’s servants moved among the Awakened Kings, passing along the edicts of the King of Kings; they could battle one another, but none could raise arms against Settra the Imperishable; the liche priests saw to that. ‘I have agents among them. Men-merchants, nomads, treasure-hunters some of them-who watch for signs of Nagash–’

‘Such is forbidden!’ Djubti thundered, all trace of humour gone. ‘The Living and the Dead do not mix, save in war, Khalida. That was Settra’s Twelfth Edict in the Third Year of Awakening!’

‘Then the edict was wrongly issued,’ Khalida rasped. A sigh swept through her legion, like a rustle of fronds in the evening breeze. To question the King of Kings was not unheard of. Lesser kings had done so. They were dust now, ground beneath the wheels of Settra’s war-chariot. ‘Nagash stirs, old liche,’ Khalida continued, thumping the ground with her staff. ‘I can feel him in my bones. We all can, if we but have the wit to listen. His black soul scratches at the deep places of our minds like a rodent in a granary. Nagash calls and those of his blood have heeded him. That is what the living say.’

‘Those of his–’ Djubti began. His face wrinkled. ‘Neferata,’ he said, flatly.

‘Perhaps,’ Khalida said, lifting her chin.

‘Was Sartosa not enough? Or the scouring of Bel-Aliad?’ Djubti said, leaning heavily on his staff. ‘Has your obsession blinded you to common sense?’

‘Has yours?’ Khalida countered. Without waiting for a reply, she turned on her heel and left him staring after her. She moved through the fleshless ranks of her legion, ignoring the awkward obeisance of the long-dead soldiers of Lybaras. Once upon a time she would have revelled in it, but now it struck her only as hollow mockery. Nagash had trapped them in a parody of life, in chains of unchanging tradition, and for Khalida that was a crueller torment than even the dull ache of un-life.

And, as ever, when that torment became too much, she retreated into memory. All those awakened by Nagash’s spell so many long years past did so, even mighty Settra. It was an open, shared secret, a painful cord that bound all of the Awakened together, commoner, noble and king alike. Memories swept around them and within them like vapour, inundating fleshless skulls and teasing out old habits. There were kings who held banquets of petrified food and dust, even as others engaged in meaningless courtship rituals or conspiracies. None of it mattered, but tradition held the dead far more tightly than it had the living.

‘Tradition can be a cage,’ Neferata said, tossing aside the scroll. ‘It binds us tight to unwelcome guests and muffles wisdom.’

‘It can also give us strength, my cousin,’ Khalida said, picking up the scroll. ‘It makes sense of the insensible and draws order from chaos.’

‘Hmp,’ Neferata grunted, reclining on her divan. ‘Tradition is a trap, little hawk, and nothing more. It holds as tightly and sinks as deeply as the fangs of the asp.’

‘A trap,’ Khalida murmured. For Neferata, life had been a trap. Everything was a cage, to keep her from doing as she wished. Every tradition was a bar, every friendship a chain. Now she was beyond it all. She looked around. A sour moon gleamed down, caressing crag and wall. She had unconsciously made her way to the gates of Nagashizzar, now long since forced wide, in the hours since her defeat of Ushtep. She had done so many times, though whether Djubti knew that or not, she couldn’t say. There was a prickle on her shrouded flesh, a faint stirring in her spirit.

She looked around the courtyard of Nagash’s cursed citadel, taking in the vast walls and leering skulls carved into them. There were piles of the real thing in the high alcoves, and where once they would have glowed with sorcerous fire they now sat blackened and silent. Mighty towers, now long since crumbling, rose towards the night sky like the withered fingers of a sprawled corpse and there was a layer of filth covering everything, like that which might be on an untended tomb. Most avoided this place, a place even the dead feared. She could not. Not so long as there was a chance–

Rocks rattled. Dark shapes, small and swift, ran through the shadows and red eyes gleamed. Khalida smiled and thumped the ground of the ruined citadel’s courtyard with her staff. ‘Come out, Keeskit. I see you there.’

The rat-thing shambled into the light, hairy body shrouded in a cloak the colour of the stones. Paw-hands rested on the pommels of two serrated daggers which were sheathed on either stunted hip. A hairless tail lashed and a rag-wrapped muzzle split, revealing yellowed teeth. It chattered at her in its own tongue with a mish-mash of Arabyan and Cathayan words, oft-repeated and with odd pauses. She replied in kind, unafraid of the dozens of scurrying shapes which surrounded her.

They knew better, now.

Indeed, after that lesson had been taught, and more congenial contact established, these ratkin were almost easier to deal with than her fellow kings and queens. Certainly less greedy; they only wanted the mountain and the abn-i-khat which nestled in its bowels. As Khalida had no use for either, she was happy to let them mine it unmolested in return for information from further to the north. They had burrows throughout the mountains, and little occurred there that they did not have some knowledge of.

Keeskit was the only survivor of that original meeting, but not for much longer, Khalida judged. There was silver in his muzzle and his bow was unsteady. One of his followers would kill him soon, she thought, or perhaps one of the ghouls that the ratkin incessantly warred with. She felt a twinge of sadness at the thought for all that Keeskit was a foul little thing. When she had been alive, everything seemed to move so slowly, but now…

As they spoke, Keeskit gestured and one of the other ratkin brought forward several human heads, much the worse for wear. They were withered things, drained of all fluid and badly mutilated. She yanked the golden blade she had taken from Ushtep and tossed it to Keeskit, who accepted it with a chitter and a flourish. It was always good to reward service. She thanked the ratkin and they left her there with the heads. She stared down at them, wondering what they would say if they could talk. Would they curse the one who had sent them?

‘How many,’ she whispered, her voice as dry as sand. ‘How many will you send, cousin? How many men will spill their blood on these slopes before you come yourself?’ She looked up, examining the tall turrets and crooked spires of the dead citadel.

The tall minarets of Bel-Aliad the Beautiful cracked and fell beneath the relentless tread of the warsphinxes of the Great Land. Arkhan the Black had fled to the borders of Araby after being ousted from Khemri and the legions of Settra had followed.

Khalida stalked through the flames, her khopesh and staff sweeping out in opposite directions to cut down the leaping ghouls that sought to stall her advance. They bore Neferata’s stink, the black bile of Nagash’s blood. Ghouls swarmed around her, biting and snarling and she danced and slew, leaving a red trail in her wake.

And then a tall form, swathed in black iron and red robes, was cutting at her with a black blade. She caught the blade on her staff and swept her khopesh out, drawing sparks from a scarred and pitted cuirass. Her attacker staggered. She whirled, cracking him across his fleshless jaw with her staff. She recognised him now, recognised the stink of the charnel magics that permeated his cursed form – Arkhan the Black, Arkhan the Accursed. Was Neferata aiding him, she wondered, or had he come to take her city from her even as Settra’s legions had come to take it from him?

She made to hit him again when a pale hand encircled her staff and jerked her back. Khalida turned, khopesh licking out. A straight-edge sword caught the khopesh and held it. Khalida’s dead eyes widened. ‘You,’ she spat, her voice hoarse from centuries of disuse.

‘You,’ Neferata, once Queen of Lahmia, said, her own eyes widening and the snarl slipping from her features. Khalida jerked her staff free of her cousin’s grasp and twisted her wrist, ripping the blade from Neferata’s hand. Neferata leapt back as the staff came down, cracking the ancient stone of the street. In her cousin’s face, Khalida saw something foul writhing, another face superimposed over Neferata’s features, now gone feral after long years feeding at the human trough. The face mouthed hateful curses as Neferata sprang for her, claws extended like those of some great cat. Khalida stretched out a hand, catching Neferata’s throat. She held the hissing, spitting thing that had once been her cousin, her mother and sister in all but name, and tried to find some sign of the woman, the queen she had been.

The black blade came down on Khalida’s arm, nearly severing it, and Neferata rolled free. Khalida spun, following her, and Arkhan stepped between her and her prey, sword extended. ‘Finish her, Neferata,’ Arkhan wheezed and his voice was like oil on rocks or the flutter of bats’ wings. Khalida turned, waiting for Neferata’s attack. It did not come.

Instead, Neferata ran.

She had run. Run from Bel-Aliad to Copher, from city to city, fleeing the Wars of Death. Khalida, bound to Settra’s service, had not been able to follow her cousin. ‘Are you still my cousin?’ she said to the empty courtyard. Part of her wanted to believe otherwise. Part of her raged against the abominations that her cousin and the courtiers of Lahmia had become. That part of her had not died when she had, gasping out her life on the tip of Neferata’s sword, her ears filled with the sound of her cousin’s begging.

Neferata had begged her to live. Had pleaded with her, had offered up her tainted blood. Khalida had refused and had… died. The end result, however, was the same. She looked at her hand again, at the black veins, clogged with rotten blood and the way her flesh flaked and peeled beneath linen wrappings. Her muscles cracked and her bones clicked and she felt nothing either way. She was not a person but an automaton, no more human now than the beast-headed ushabti which stalked beside Settra’s legions.

That part of her that was consumed by righteous anger had kept her moving when so many of the other Awakened had retreated into dreams and their tombs to hide from the new day that Nagash had forced upon them. She had marched beside Settra, seeking to punish the servants of Nagash. When the liche priests had found signs of the blood-drinkers amongst the pale men of the western shores, she had been in the first war-galley to set sail from Zandri. And in Sartosa, she had again seen her cousin and the thing that rode her. It had crawled into her skin and wore her face and mind like armour.

‘You took my wings, Neferata,’ Khalida rasped, hatred burning through her shrunken veins. ‘You made me crawl. Now I will return the favour. Crawl, cousin, crawl.’ Around them, Sartosa burned, even as Bel-Aliad had burned. The fleets of Zandri had come for the men of the west, and they would be punished for thinking that the seas were theirs to ply.

‘Never,’ Neferata shrieked, kicking Khalida in the midsection. Khalida staggered and Neferata lunged, predator’s talons sinking into her midsection. Off-balance, Khalida locked a hand on Neferata’s throat and tore her away. She flung the hissing vampire from the aqueduct.

Below, the dead surrounded the vampire as she staggered to her feet. Looking down at her, Khalida again saw that second face, that ghostly daemon’s mask, even as she had in Bel-Aliad. It leered up at her like a jackal hidden among the rocks of Neferata’s soul. She leapt down and strode forward, lashing out with her staff and catching Neferata on the chin. Neferata hurtled backwards, bouncing off a column. Still, the face clung to her like sweat. Still it leered at Khalida, taunting her silently.

‘Nehekhara is dead, Neferata and all her people with her; why should you escape the fate of the Great Land? Why should you walk in twilight, while your people suffer in darkness?’ she asked, but she already knew the answer. Neferata lived because she was damned and the author of that damnation still plucked at the spider-strands of her soul.

‘Because I am Queen,’ Neferata snarled, lunging up.

Khalida shuddered, leaning on her staff. Neferata had beaten her there, as well. Had left her broken, but not destroyed. She had not seen Neferata since then. Settra’s scourging of the wild coasts and the waters of the Great Ocean had driven the blood-drinkers inland, into the mountains where such beasts belonged.

No. Not beasts, no matter how much she wished to dismiss them as such. Even gripped by her murderous desires, Neferata had been much as Khalida recalled. She was haughty, cunning, cruel… but her cousin still. Khalida had come to realise that even hate gutters low, given enough time. No matter how much you fanned the flames, how many desperate breaths you gave to the dimming fire, even hate burned down to embers. Three times she had faced her cousin, and twice Neferata had resisted the final blow, despite the thing which drove her.

Why? Time and again, Neferata stayed her hand.

‘What possessed you, cousin?’ she said to the stones. ‘What possesses you still?’

There was no response. There never was. But she knew the answer nevertheless.

When she returned to her camp below, Djubti said nothing, for which she was thankful. Weeks bled into months. The camp was a quiet mockery of the military camps she remembered from her youth. Empty tents had been raised for soldiers who no longer needed them and skeletal horses fed dusty fodder and poison water from the Sour Sea. Patrols swept the slopes and valleys and low hills of the region, hunting ghouls and other monsters which sometimes came out of the mountains. She killed a multi-headed chimera in that time and a croaking bat-thing with the horns of a stag. Men with the heads of goats and worse things occasionally boiled out of the dark reaches, braying and snarling.

Her legion met them all and left them to be swallowed by the sands. Too, she met more challengers. A string of petty kings marched or rode to her doorstep, some respectful, others arrogant, down the long decades. With khopesh and staff she struck them all down, one after another. Through it all, Djubti held his own counsel, and the glimmer of suspicion this aroused grew into full flame when, on the next Day of Scorpions, an army five times the size of her own approached.

Hundreds of drums thundered in unison, causing small avalanches and made the ground beneath her feet tremble. Khalida had taken her place at the head of her legion, Djubti by her side. He watched her, as if trying to gauge her reaction. Khalida did not give him the satisfaction of asking the obvious question.

The standards of more than one king rose over the approaching force. Close to a dozen, in fact. If Khalida had been capable of smiling, she might have done so. Some of the standards were familiar, belonging to defeated challengers. Others were new. One, however, stood above them all, the standard of Settra the Imperishable.

‘I warned you,’ Djubti croaked. ‘I warned you, High Queen.’

‘Did you betray me as well?’ Khalida replied. She didn’t look at him. ‘Did you send for him, Djubti? Did you call him to bring me to heel?’

‘Do you think so little of me?’ he said.

Khalida looked at him then. Djubti looked away, his shoulders hunching. She looked back towards the approaching legions. Her legion would not be able to stand long against those which were now arrayed against her. Nonetheless, she would not give up her right. She could not.

A line of chariots rumbled forward, carrying her challengers. Head held high, she walked to meet them. In the centre of the line was a chariot of incomparable ornamentation which bore Settra’s standard. But it was not Settra himself who rode upon it, Khalida realised with a flicker of relief. The dead thing standing tall on the chariot was not the King of Kings, but instead his herald, Nekaph. Glowing eyes blazed out of a fleshless skull, now inscribed with the titles of his master. His jaw did not move, but all could hear his voice nonetheless. The voice was as deep as the sea and as hard as the mountains. ‘Kneel, Khalida of Lybaras. Kneel before the might of Settra the Imperishable, Khemrikhara, King of All Kings of Nehekhara, Lord of the Earth from Horizons Far to Those Near, Monarch of the Sky and Sea, Mighty Lion of the Sands, Great Scorpion of the Dunes, Beautiful Hawk of the Bright Heavens, Emperor of the Shifting Sands and Sweeping Tides, Master of the Great Land,’ Nekaph rumbled, his words humming in her bones. He extended a hand. ‘Kneel, Hawk of Lahmia, kneel Sister-Queen of Lybaras, kneel Beloved Daughter of the Asp goddess. Kneel, or have your skull added to my collection, Mistress of the Serpent Legion.’ Nekaph lifted the great flail that dangled from his other hand for emphasis. Dozens of skulls hung from it, impaled on bronze chains, their sockets alive with hideous awareness.

Khalida knelt, extending her khopesh and staff. Behind her, her legion knelt as well. ‘Welcome, Oh Mighty Voice of Heaven’s Master. Welcome, Herald of the King of Kings and Speaker for the Glorious Dead,’ she said, her voice carrying clearly across the distance.

Nekaph nodded brusquely. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘At least you have not forgotten that.’ The flail clattered. ‘Rise, Hawk of the Poison Dunes. Rise and meet my judgment.’

Khalida rose smoothly. ‘Judgment, Oh Master of Settra’s Wrath? Have I committed an offense?’

‘More than one,’ one of the other kings grated, bones clicking as he gesticulated with pantomime fury. She recognised him as Psashtep of Zandri, one of her challengers from the past few weeks. He motioned sharply with his spear. ‘You dishonour us, Khalida! You make a mockery of Settra’s Edicts!’

‘Have I? Or are you merely squalling like a child who feels his punishment is unfair?’ Khalida said. ‘Come then, Fleet-Master, come and test yourself again and let all gathered here see your failure first-hand.’ She spread her arms in invitation. ‘Come one, come all. Never let it be said that Khalida of Lybaras is unwelcoming of her guests.’

‘She mocks us. See, Nekaph, see how the Hawk screeches at her betters,’ another king rasped. She recognised Ushtep, his arm re-attached.

‘You are no one’s better, bleating goat of Rasetra,’ she said. Ushtep hissed and leapt from his chariot, khopesh in hand. He started forward, but a clatter of Nekaph’s flail stopped him.

‘Enough,’ the Herald said. ‘Silence, petty kings; you barked for Settra’s judgment, and so you shall have it.’ He stepped down from his chariot and moved towards Khalida. As he walked, he spoke. ‘Daughter of the Great Land, you hoard honour as a miser hoards wealth. Such is not meet and such is not the Edict of the Light of Heaven Made Manifest, Blessed Be His Name. Will you surrender your post, daughter?’

‘I will not. I will hold my place until I am beaten on the Day of Scorpions, as the Edict states,’ Khalida said.

‘Such was not the intent,’ Nekaph said solemnly. His wrist bones whispered as they rubbed against one another and the flail of skulls rattled. ‘You must yield, Khalida.’

‘I must not, Herald of the Infinite and Imperishable,’ Khalida said, bowing her head. ‘I cannot.’

Nekaph stopped. She examined him, even as he did the same to her. Nekaph, it was whispered, even now, was not of the Great Land, but instead of the barbarians of the north. Even in death, even stripped of muscle and meat, he was big. His skull, engraved with the Litany of Settra, was imposing and terrible in the ferocity etched into its grin. His flail, as much a sign of office as it was a weapon, clattered softly, as if in warning. The light in his sockets dimmed. ‘Why?’ he said.

Why? The question rattled in her skull. Why? A face within a face swam before her eyes, both familiar, the one loved, the other loathed. ‘Nagash comes. I will face him,’ she said.

‘Nagash is dust,’ Nekaph said.

‘Nagash stirs,’ Khalida said. ‘The wind from the north blows black, Herald of the Imperishable King. My scouts have seen fires in the night and heard the distant rumble of great mechanisms. A charnel wind blows down upon us, whispering his name.’

‘Or perhaps another’s,’ Nekaph said, softly.

Khalida stiffened, uncertain. Nekaph continued. ‘Do you hunt Nagash, or his handmaiden?’ He motioned with the flail. ‘The blood-drinkers have been driven from the Great Land. They have been driven from the lands which surround ours. That is enough.’ Nekaph took a step closer. ‘Settra has decreed such. To hold here, to spy and stalk among the living, is to disobey him, Hawk of Lybaras. They will not return. Nagash will not return. Thus speaks Settra.’

A drum sounded. Khalida turned as her legions rose and those of the assembled kings shifted in anticipation of treachery. Nekaph grabbed her arm. ‘What is this?’ he said, his tone not quite threatening.

‘A warning drum,’ Khalida said, jerking her arm free, ‘From Nagashizzar, Herald.’ Her eyes glowed bright and cold. ‘Someone – something – has come.’ The ratkin had been uncertain, at first, when she offered them the drums. In the years since, they had sounded them less than a handful of times, and never unnecessarily. Deceitful and treacherous as they were, they knew better than to test her patience. Once, a group of barbarians from the north, the Strigoi, had attempted to breach the gates of Nagashizzar. Another time it had been a small group of liches, former servants of Nagash who had not thrown in with Arkhan or one of the less aggrieved Awakened Kings, attempting to infiltrate the citadel and make off with what treasures remained.

Nekaph released her. Abruptly he turned and began to bellow orders. Khalida did not wait for him. She ran, fleet-footed, towards her legions. There was no need to shout orders. Her sub-commanders reacted with drilled precision, ordering the raising of the standards and the legion turned about as she raced through their ranks. As she passed the front rank, they fell in behind her, running with all the inhuman fluidity the dead possessed. She heard the thump-thump of the drums of Nekaph’s legion and knew that the Herald at least would follow her.

The dead travelled fast, when they wished. In life, her legion could run for a day and a night without rest, and she with them, and they could cover twice the distance of any other force. In death, they were faster still. A day and a night passed and the rocky shores of the Sour Sea gave way to the black marshes, where crooked trees rose from oily water. Hummocks of dry, corrupt-looking earth sprouted at intervals. Some of these were barrows, long buried and forgotten by all but the dead. Others were ruins, left over from Nagash’s time as lord of this filthy place. The marsh grass was stiff and dead and as her legions passed across it, a vast sigh went up and in nearby barrows, the bony fingers of the imprisoned dead scratched vainly at the stones.

They reached the slopes of Cripple Peak even as the enemy did, and Khalida felt a flush of something that might have been triumph as she saw the ghostly forms flowing down the slope like an eerie fog. And within that fog, brown, ancient skeletons clad in tattered brown armour moved awkwardly. There were hundreds of them, barely a tenth of the dead of Nagashizzar, but more than enough to give battle to the armies of the tomb kings. The newly-awakened dead moved without the smoothness of those who had made a home in their bones for centuries. Too, these were not the free dead of the Great Land, but enslaved spirits, bound to a single, malignant will. She and every other Nehekharan felt the hammer-blow of that will as the dead of Nagashizzar stalked towards them. No wonder the ratkin had summoned her.

‘Is it him?’ Nekaph demanded even as his chariot rumbled up beside her in a cloud of dust. The other kings followed him, subdued. Even Djubti was silent.

‘I do not know,’ Khalida said. But she did. If she had still been alive, her heart would have been thundering in her chest. Her mind felt as if a damp blanket had settled over it, and her marrow itched inside the hollows of her bones. It felt as if there were mice loose within her, running and chewing. She had felt it before, in Bel-Aliad, in Sartosa and on that first night, when she had woken in her tomb in Lybaras, her spirit wrenched from its eternal flight and chained within the mummified husk prepared by her priests and servants. She looked at Nekaph, and she knew that he felt it as well, as did each and every king, even pitiful examples like Ushtep.

The same magic that controlled the pitiful, savage bones loping towards them had awakened the folk of the Great Land centuries before. Nekaph broke the stillness. His skull tilted back and his jaw sagged as an inhuman roar burst forth from the very roots of him. The chariots of the kings lurched forward, leading their legions to war. Khalida lifted her khopesh and gave a dry, ululating cry. Bows were bent back and arrows punctured the sky as her legion responded with inhuman precision. In life, they could fire three arrows as fast as they could take a step. In death, it was five.

Brown bones slumped, shattered or knocked sprawling by the rain of arrows. The chariots of Nekaph and the rest reached them a moment later. The Herald’s skull-flail snapped out in lethal arcs as he drove into the disorganised mass of the enemy dead. Khalida followed his trail, her khopesh licking out to put an end to those things still capable of movement. The air was thick and she could feel the ghostly fingers of a necromancer prying at her thoughts.

Nekaph staggered on his chariot and she knew something similar was happening to him. To all the kings, she realised a moment later, as Ushtep’s blade barely missed cleaving her skull. The fire in his eyes had changed colour and his lips wriggled like worms on his skull as he attacked her. He was not the only one, and legion turned on legion as the unseen necromancer pulled on the skeins of magics which bound their souls. Khalida wasted no words on Ushtep. Her khopesh flashed, cutting through his spine and he fell in two places, twitching and cursing. One of her own warriors jabbed at her with a spear even as one of the brown-boned dead of Nagashizzar attached her with a crude sword. She caught both weapons on her staff and khopesh and she and her opponents turned in a circle. A blast of crackling fire consumed one a moment later and she swiftly dispatched the other, nodding her thanks to Djubti.

‘Someone plays with us,’ she said.

‘He’ll regret that, soon enough,’ Djubti said. He pointed. ‘The Herald needs help.’

Khalida turned. Nekaph’s chariot was under attack by the wraiths she’d seen earlier. Ghostly warriors crawled all over the Herald’s war-chariot, striking at him with ethereal weapons. He roared and swung his flail, his blows tearing through the foggy substance of the phantoms and dispersing them.

She ran towards the Herald. But someone else got there first.

A pale shape, graceful and lethal, seemed to swim through the air. A sword came down, chopping into the Herald’s collarbone. Nekaph grappled with his attacker as his chariot continued to plunge through the enemy. The Herald was off-balance, but even one-handed, he was as dangerous as anything that stalked the Great Land. He grabbed a handful of black hair, yanking his opponent’s head back and something in Khalida cried out as she recognised her cousin.

Neferata, Queen of the City of the Dawn, had returned to Nehekhara.

She moved like a snake, bending and twisting, her sword flashing up to cut through her hair, sacrificing it for freedom. The sword came around quickly, almost too quickly for Khalida to follow. But not too quickly for her to block as she leapt onto the side of her chariot and interposed her staff. Neferata snarled and her eyes widened. ‘Cousin,’ Khalida said.

‘No!’ Neferata shrieked, flipping backwards onto the skeletal spine of one of the horses pulling the chariot. Khalida stepped onto the front of the chariot without hesitation. Nekaph said something, but she ignored him. She set her foot on the bony shank of the horse and propelled herself towards her cousin. Neferata brought her sword around and the khopesh grated against it. The tableau held for an eye-blink and then both were falling through the air.

Khalida felt her bones burst and re-knit even as she bounded to her feet and lunged through the dust of their impact. Neferata met her, eyes blazing, fangs bared. They strained against one another as chariots and skeletal horsemen swept around them in a wild circle. ‘Surrender, cousin,’ Khalida said. ‘There is no escape this time.’

‘No,’ Neferata said. ‘There is always an escape!’ She drove Khalida back, battering her weapons aside and raising her blade. Khalida waited. Neferata hesitated, the snarl slipping from her face, replaced by – what? ‘Little hawk…’ she began, longing in every syllable.

Then Djubti was there and the moment was lost. The liche priest flung out a hand as he approached and Neferata screamed as her body withered. She staggered back, looking at her hands in horror as her unnatural vitality was drained from her. As Khalida watched, porcelain flesh grew leathery and wrinkled and Neferata’s human face shrank into a beast’s muzzle, like the silently shrieking faces of the desiccated bats she saw sometimes, in the deep places of the mountains. Eyes flashing, Neferata lunged awkwardly at the liche priest, who froze in shock. Only Khalida’s staff, snapping down on her cousin’s back, saved him from having his head torn from his shoulders. She knocked Neferata flat and pressed the butt of her staff to the back of her cousin’s head. Neferata struggled and snapped and snarled, and Khalida saw another form writhing within her, another spirit all tangled up with hers.

Then, abruptly, Neferata fell still. Her flesh filled out, black veins bulging as whatever dark magic held her frozen in time reasserted itself. Khalida stepped back, and Neferata rose, eyes glinting. The desperation that had been etched on her face before was gone. She looked around coolly. ‘Well then,’ she said. ‘I surrender. What now?’

Neferata was quickly bound in chains of bone and bronze, and her mind and spirit tied by the magic of the liche priests. Each king had brought one, and Nekaph had brought several. The last of the Nagashizzar dead had collapsed like puppets with their strings cut when Neferata had fallen and there was no sign of anyone else, dead or alive.

Khalida knew that appearances could be deceiving, especially where her cousin was concerned. Why had she given up so easily? She watched her. Haughty, head held high, Neferata seemed to give no consideration to her captivity. She might as well have been strolling through the gardens of Lahmia.

‘Did you find the magic-users?’ Khalida said as Djubti approached her.

‘You do not believe it was her? She stinks of Nagash’s dark arts,’ Djubti said.

‘It was not her mind I felt, trying to control mine. Have you found them?’

‘No. Nekaph has ordered scouts to search the hills and marsh, but–’

‘He does not care,’ Khalida said. ‘They are gone and we have her, and that is enough.’

Djubti shrugged, his dried flesh creaking. ‘Isn’t it? It is what you wanted, isn’t it?’ He grinned at her, exposing blackened teeth. ‘You are vindicated and avenged, all at once.’

‘Am I?’ Khalida said, looking at Neferata. Nekaph and the other kings had gathered and Neferata was brought before them, surrounded by a web of spears.

‘She is beaten,’ Djubti said.

Neferata flipped the coloured tile and leaned back. ‘What do you see, little hawk?’ she said. Khalida looked at the game-board and shook her head in frustration.

‘I am beaten,’ she said.

‘Are you?’

‘I have no moves left,’ Khalida said, gesturing morosely to the board.

‘There are always moves,’ Neferata said, rising. ‘Here, I will show you. Switch places with me.’

‘There are always moves,’ Khalida said softly.

‘What?’

Khalida ignored him and went to join the others. Nekaph looked at her. ‘It seems, Hawk of Lybaras, that I owe you a debt,’ he said, his skull cocked. Khalida did not reply. Neferata glared at her, as did several of the gathered kings. Nekaph stepped forward, his skull-flail twisting in his grip. ‘Neferata of Lahmia, kneel before the Hand of the Infinite Desert and receive his justice.’

‘Kneel?’ Neferata threw back her head and laughed deeply. ‘Neferata does not kneel, liche. It is you who should kneel before me.’ As she spoke, Khalida felt a deep, old ache in her bones. One of the other kings shuddered and she knew that it was not just Neferata who spoke. She knew what possessed her cousin. They all did, even grim Nekaph, who hesitated and then stepped back. ‘No, I do not kneel, dead things. No, I-I…’ It was Neferata’s turn to hesitate. The fire in her eyes dimmed, and for a moment, just a moment, the evil in her features seemed to dissipate. She shook her head and the fire was back and the malevolence.

‘Kill her,’ a king said. Others took up the cry. It echoed up and down the ranks. ‘Kill the spawn of Nagash!’

Nekaph raised a hand and silence fell. ‘That is Settra’s Edict,’ he said solemnly. ‘Death to the Bringers of Death, Death to those who bear the Taint of Him Who Has Been Struck from the Rolls of the Priesthood, Death to the Drinkers of Blood and the Eaters of Flesh.’ He looked at Neferata. ‘Death, the final death, Neferata of Lahmia, and Usirian will receive thy spirit.’

‘No,’ Khalida said, before she even realised that she had spoken.

Nekaph paused. He looked at her. ‘Speak, Queen of Lybaras.’

‘Neferata is a queen of the Great Land. She is not a dog to be executed,’ Khalida said. ‘She is owed trial by combat.’

‘We owe her nothing,’ Nekaph said.

‘Perhaps, but you said you owed me a debt, Herald of Settra. And this is my payment.’ Khalida thumped the ground with her staff. ‘I, Khalida of Lybaras, Hawk of the Desert, challenge Neferata of Lahmia,’ she called out. ‘If she wins, she is free to leave, as the gods wish it.’

A rumble of protest rose from the gathered kings. Nekaph ignored it. He looked at her. ‘Is this truly what you wish?’ he said.

Khalida looked at Neferata, who was studying her with veiled interest. She looked back at Nekaph. ‘Yes.’

‘So be it.’ Nekaph raised his hand. ‘Neferata of Lahmia, do you accept the challenge of Khalida of Lybaras?’

Khalida looked at her cousin. Neferata met her gaze and her dark eyes narrowed in suspicion. Then, she nodded. Nekaph chopped down with his hand. ‘So be it.’

Khalida stepped past him, well aware of the hostility in the gazes of the audience for the coming performance. Neferata shrugged off her chains as the liche priests mumbled and gestured, releasing the myriad bindings. Neferata’s eyes flickered first to Khalida and then north. Khalida tossed her khopesh at Neferata’s feet.

‘How long must our dance be, cousin?’ she said.

‘I have no intention of dying here,’ Neferata said, scooping the blade up and testing its weight. Khalida circled her slowly, languidly spinning her staff.

‘Why did you come back then?’ Khalida said.

‘My reasons are my own, cousin,’ Neferata said. Sand billowed and then she was slicing through the air, the khopesh biting for Khalida’s head. The staff drove the blade aside and Khalida spun it, driving the butt into Neferata’s belly and knocked her from the air. Neferata sprang to her feet and the blade licked out, cutting into Khalida’s thigh. Neferata dodged the staff, rolling across the sand and bounding up, cutting across Khalida’s back.

Khalida staggered forward and sank to her knees as the khopesh cut the air over her head. Bending backwards, she let the staff shoot through her hands to catch Neferata in the jaw, dropping her flat to the ground. Khalida rose smoothly, turned and lunged, stabbing the ground with the staff as Neferata rolled aside desperately. She came up with a howl and the khopesh drew sparks as it bit into the staff. Cousin strained against cousin for a moment before they broke apart and circled one another.

‘What did you come hunting, cousin?’ Khalida said. ‘You found it, I’d wager, or you’d never have gotten close to us.’

Neferata smiled wickedly. ‘No?’

‘You are a distraction. Wave with the right while stabbing with the left, that was what you taught me,’ Khalida said. ‘You let us capture you, confident that you could escape, and all to distract us from – what? It was not you who controlled the dead, was it?’

‘It is of no moment, now. How long have you waited for this, little hawk?’ Neferata said, avoiding the question. ‘How long have you yearned to have me all to yourself?’

‘Centuries,’ Khalida answered bluntly. ‘You are a question which nags, cousin. I would have answers.’

Neferata looked puzzled. Then she laughed harshly. ‘You are not a child, Khalida. I no longer have to answer your foolish questions.’

‘Do not be afraid to ask questions, little hawk,’ Neferata said, leaning over her as she studied the scrolls. ‘Only by asking can you learn what is necessary.’

‘Why don’t you age?’ Khalida said, not looking up. She felt Neferata tense.

‘I-that is not necessary for you to know.’

‘Are you blessed by the gods?’

Neferata pushed away from the table and laughed softly. ‘Yes, of sorts. Read me what you have written.’

‘It was a poem,’ Khalida said, easily blocking Neferata’s blow.

‘What was a poem? What are you muttering about, liche?’ Neferata hissed, scrambling back as Khalida swung her staff.

‘It was a poem about you, about queens and their masks. You read it at the feast that night and embarrassed me in front of Anhur,’ she said, and Neferata blanched at the mention of her husband’s name. He was one of the few who had not awoken. Anhur of Lybaras remained in his tomb, sleeping. ‘Later, he said it was then that he began to look forward to our marriage.’

‘I-you were always so boyish, never sitting still,’ Neferata said, shaking her head, her eyes unfocused. ‘He needed to see that there was more to you than the warrior. He needed to see that you had a mind and a soul. Not like Lamashizzar.’

Khalida struck. Her staff whistled as it descended towards Neferata’s head. The vampire caught the staff-head in her hand and flung it aside. The khopesh drew dust from Khalida’s side. She stepped back, feeling nothing. ‘Did he weep for me?’ Neferata said nothing. ‘Did you?’ Khalida pressed.

‘I never stopped,’ Neferata hissed, striking with the speed of an asp. It was Khalida’s turn to grab her opponent’s weapon. She jerked Neferata off her feet and sent her tumbling to the ground. Neferata snarled and whirled, backhanding Khalida as she closed. Both women picked themselves up slowly.

‘Yet you continued on,’ Khalida said. ‘Lahmia burned, cousin. And Lybaras, and Khemri and all of the cities of the Great Land, they all burned because of you.’

‘No!’ Neferata screamed, lunging wildly. Khalida interposed her staff, catching the khopesh. No sparks this time. Instead, driven by Neferata’s savage strength, the blade sank into the staff. They spun in a weird parody of a child’s dance.

‘And now you serve him who burned them,’ Khalida said. ‘Now you bow and scrape at the Usurper’s feet; are you his dog, Neferata? Are you a tool,’ Khalida said, forcing Neferata back.

‘No man commands me, living or dead!’ Neferata snapped, wrenching the khopesh free. Blade and staff connected in a flurry of ringing blows. ‘Not Lamashizzar, not these dead kings and certainly not Nagash.’ Neferata winced even as the words left her mouth. Khalida broke from her.

‘The asp conceals its fangs, until it is within striking range. Serve, until you can strike,’ Neferata said, tapping the pile of scrolls with the one she clutched in her hand. ‘The cities strive against one another, pitting strength against strength. But–’

‘War has more than one form,’ Khalida said, repeating her cousin’s words. Neferata smiled and tapped Khalida’s nose with the scroll.

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Weakness can be as deadly a weapon as a sword or spear, if wielded expertly. I show the other cities our weaknesses and let them draw their conclusions, while hiding our strengths. Strike when your opponent believes he is strongest, for that is when he is not paying attention.’

‘I learned much from you cousin,’ Khalida said. ‘I learned to use weakness as a weapon.’

‘Yes, and in the end, it got you killed,’ Neferata spat. The khopesh sang off the staff.

‘You hid your strength. I did not know how far you would go to satisfy your ambition,’ Khalida said. ‘You killed me, cousin, and you killed our people, all for your ambition. Can you do it again?’

‘What?’ Neferata said, hesitating.

Khalida spread her arms. ‘Strike, Neferata. Strike and be free.’ Neferata sprang forward, khopesh raised. But she did not strike. The blade trembled in her hands. Her face contorted as if she were in pain. ‘Strike,’ Khalida hissed, ‘Strike!’

Neferata blinked. Her mouth worked, but no sound came out. Her eyes widened and Khalida wondered what she was seeing. Were the blood-drinkers as prone to waking dreams as the dead? ‘I-I can’t,’ Neferata hissed, the words leaking out from between her fangs.

Khalida closed her eyes. Again she saw the battles of Sartosa and Bel-Aliad and even that first, final, fatal fight with her cousin’s tormented features above her, begging her to live. Neferata had not struck then either, Khalida suddenly recalled. And, remembering, she lunged. Time slowed. She extended her staff forward like a spear. She could easily perforate her cousin’s breastbone and burst her heart with a single thrust. Instead, Khalida twitched her wrists, letting the head of the staff brush Neferata’s side. To any watching, it would appear that she had misjudged the angle of the blow in her eagerness. As she’d hoped, Neferata’s arm instinctively snapped down, trapping her staff. She caught Neferata’s sword arm and released her staff, turning both hands to grappling with her cousin, wrestling for the blade. Neferata hissed and snarled as they fought and Khalida twisted the blade so that it was caught between them. Then, with an exhalation of dusty air, Khalida jerked Neferata forward and was impaled on the curve of the khopesh even as she had been centuries before.

She sank down, dragging Neferata with her. She heard an angry roar from the assembled kings, but paid it no heed. There was no pain, only satisfaction. Weakness was a weapon. Men, dead or alive, did not understand that. Nagash did not understand that. But she did. And she understood one other thing.

Neferata stared down at her. ‘What-what–’

‘You never struck me. Not once,’ Khalida said. ‘Even now, even with him riding you, you did not strike me.’ That hesitation had proved what she had not even dared to hope. It proved that within the fury crouching over her, there was something besides the blood of Nagash. That Neferata was still Neferata, despite everything. Changed, mad, but still the same haughty, cunning, cruel and kind cousin she remembered.

She grabbed Neferata’s hair and pulled her close. ‘Listen to me, cousin. It is my turn to be the teacher. When your opponent smiles in triumph, spit into his teeth and when he laughs loud, laugh louder. Spite is your greatest weapon, besides your mind, because in spite, all things are possible. Kings can be made to grovel for spite. Peasants may be raised to lofty heights and the strongest warrior gutted, all for spite. Spite is whimsy sharpened to a killing point and with it you will be unpredictable.’

‘What are you saying?’ Neferata said, staring at her in incomprehension.

‘Deep wells fill slowly,’ Khalida said, stroking her hair. ‘And they empty quickly.’ She released Neferata. Neferata stood quickly and reeled back. Khalida lay back and twisted her head. Nekaph strode towards them. She raised a hand. ‘Justice is served, Herald of Kings,’ she said. ‘She has won her freedom.’

Nekaph looked down at her. He knew what she had done. She could see it in the glowing pits of his eyes. Would he deny her? Would he strike regardless? ‘Are you certain?’ he said.

‘She has won.’

Nekaph looked at Neferata, who faced him without flinching. Then, with an imperious gesture, he said, ‘You may leave, freely and unmolested, Queen of Lahmia. But if you ever set foot within the Great Land, you will not find me so merciful.’

Neferata smirked and made to speak. But she fell silent as her eyes met Khalida’s. Khalida thought of those who had tried to control her cousin. Kings and priests and gods had failed, and been trod beneath Neferata’s sandaled feet for the trying. What hope had some old dead thing like Nagash? Neferata might serve him now, but she had served Lamashizzar as well, and Lahmia and Nehekhara and Asaph. ‘Neferata does not kneel. No one commands her,’ Khalida said softly, wishing she could smile.

A confused expression passed across Neferata’s face and Khalida knew that her cousin had heard her. Neferata turned and walked away. The legions of the dead stepped aside, forming a corridor of bone and bronze for the last Queen of Lahmia to leave the Great Land.

‘Be true to your ambition, cousin,’ Khalida whispered. ‘Sink your fangs deep and do not let go.’ Then the Queen of Lybaras closed her eyes and fell into the waiting ocean of better times, when a girl had learned the forms of war and weakness from her beloved cousin.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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

Cover illustration by Fares Maese

© Games Workshop Limited, 2012. All rights reserved.

Black Library, the Black Library logo, Games Workshop, the Games Workshop logo and all associated marks, names, characters, illustrations and images from the Warhammer universe are either ®, TM and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2011, variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world. All rights reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-85787-973-8

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise except as expressly permitted under license from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See the Black Library on the internet at

blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at

www.games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 You attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.