Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

THE UNSUNG WAR

NO HERO

THE PATH TO GLORY

A COMMON GROUND

THE EMPEROR’S WRATH

WAKING THE DRAGON

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY

HOW VIDO LEARNED THE TRICK

THE FIRSTBORN DAUGHTER

MERCY

AT THE SIGN OF THE BRAZEN CLAW

About the Authors

A Black Library Publication

Introduction

Welcome to the first volume of the brand new Inferno!

When it was initially released between 1997 and 2004, Inferno! was Black Library’s bi-monthly magazine that was packed full of comics, short stories and artwork. It was also where many of our established authors published their first stories before going on to greatness.

For twenty years, Black Library has celebrated and nurtured some incredible talent; something that we’re very proud of. Many of our authors have come to us through the submission process, and it’s been amazing to watch them grow into the authors they are today. Two of those aforementioned authors, David Annandale and Josh Reynolds, have stories in this anthology and continue to thrill readers with their exploration of Games Workshop’s many universes.

Alongside them are some fantastic up-and-coming writers, who we hope will go on to be the future faces of Black Library. Whether they’re already established names in fantasy and science-fiction or newer authors just beginning their writing journey, we’re delighted to be working with them.

It’s always exciting to watch new authors start to explore the expanses of the Mortal Realms or the depths of the Dark Imperium. Each one brings a unique perspective and approach through their writing – whether they choose to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Astra Militarum, unleash the righteous fury of the Sisters of Battle, or give us heroes with questionable intentions.

That’s why, for our 20th anniversary, we wanted to launch a book that both celebrates our history and our future. As a regular anthology, Inferno! will be packed with new content by up-and-coming Black Library authors as well as fan favourites.

This is just the beginning, we’ve got a long way to go. So, grab your sword and your lasgun, and say your prayers to the Emperor. Trust me, you’re going to need them!

Charlotte Llewelyn-Wells

Submissions Editor, May 2018.

THE UNSUNG WAR

David Annandale

David Annandale is well known for his macabre and sinister writing. He has explored both the universes of Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar with a highly lyrical and evocative style of storytelling.

In ‘The Unsung War’, Primaris Ultramarines Aetius and Calenius face impossible odds against two of the Imperium’s deadliest foes. This is a tragedy of duty, honour and sacrifice as the brothers take a stand against the ruin of humanity.

The Rat crawled over metal and between shadows. She was, she thought, moving towards death. She hoped it would be a good one. There wasn’t much else left to hope.

The Rat had fled when the gods and monsters invaded her world. She had burrowed underground, as far and as fast as she could go. Only, in truth, there was no underground, and she was not truly a rat. She was a human, doing her best to disappear into the metal embrace of the freighter Summons of Faith. The gods and monsters, though, were real. They had torn apart her conception of reality, and she had run in terror. She had become the best Rat she could be, and she was a good one, because she was still alive.

Sebastia Hoven had thought of herself as the Rat for almost twenty years now. She had come by the name honestly, and it was more than a name. It was a calling. It was also a kind of revenge. She had been born to a life aboard voidships but fated to serfdom. From her earliest childhood she had served on the lowest decks, the most insignificant menial but the fastest student. She had come to know the bodies and veins of freighters with absolute certainty. She did not think of them as extensions of her own form; rather she was a parasite, infecting a host for her own benefit. She moved through their corridors and shafts like a ghost. Her skills grew with her knowledge. She saw everything. She observed officers. With awed envy, she witnessed the power and the agency of the merchant captains who commanded the destinies of the ships and everyone aboard. In their lives, she saw what she most desired, but could never have.

But there were some things the Rat could have. Scavenger, smuggler, thief, she moved from ship to ship, rarely seen and never noticed. Her targets were modest, more important to those who bought her services than missed by her victims. It was a life that was good enough that she did not want to part with it.

She had boarded the Summons of Faith at its last port of call. It was a target of convenience. It was bound for the Skopos System, and there was a commission waiting for her there. The Summons was in the right place at the right time for her, and she had seized the chance. While aboard, she thought, she would see what her host had to offer her by way of further scavenging.

She had seen much more than she had expected. She had seen the crew. She had seen the officers, and their faces had troubled her. Their eyes had been too fervid. They did not behave like merchants. As she observed them, she had moved from puzzlement to deep anxiety and revulsion. And there were noises coming from the cargo holds. Noises she was too frightened to investigate.

Then the gods had come, fearsome in their righteousness, raining fire upon their foes and terrible to behold. She had heard stories of the Adeptus Astartes, but she had never seen them before. The colossi in blue armour marched through the corridors of the freighter like the embodiments of war itself, and the Rat wanted no part of war. She was frightened of the gods, and her first instinct had been to stay hidden from their sight as they brought it to the Summons. She feared their judgement.

She feared the monsters who had come next even more. These were monsters of beauty and grace and cruelty, monsters whose weapons flayed the flesh with storms of crystals.

She had fled. She hid. She could hide for a long time in the bowels of a voidship.

But not forever. If the monsters wanted to find her, they would. So, finally, she had decided to face the gods.

The crawlspace wasn’t even a shaft. It was a thin, winding vein formed by the gaps between giant conduits. It was the space between the lines of a schematic, a region of the ship that was not forgotten because no one except her thought of it as existing. But if the monsters decided to look for her, they would find her even here. She had faith in their terrible abilities. She had seen what they could do. They had come to the Summons of Faith with beauty and terror, elegance and cruelty. There were clearly no limits to what they were willing to do. She dared not hope there were any limits on what they could do.

The Rat felt the space through which she moved narrow. Metal brushed her hair, its caress no more than a whisper, but a whisper with the threat of millions of tonnes that would crush her to nothing if it ever moved. She thumbed her glowstick on, and its faint light pushed back the darkness. The Rat was on her stomach, on top of a coolant pipe. Above her was a ventilation conduit ten feet wide. Ahead, the two pipes drew near to each other, the space between them vanishingly small. She had travelled this way before, though. She knew that if she sucked her breath in, the width would be just enough for her to squeeze through.

The sound of the ship’s inner workings filled her ears. It was an almost-physical wall of metallic throbbing. Grace notes of escaping steam, the grind of metal and the flare of electrical sparks cut jagged slashes through the deeper rumble of the freighter’s heartbeat. The ship was wounded, bleeding from a hundred injuries, but it was not dead yet. It was still heading for Skopos.

Either the ship, or the beings aboard it, had to be stopped. She had seen enough to know that. She had seen the horrors. ‘Do this,’ she whispered to herself. ‘You have to. Do this, and earn a good death.’

That would be her greatest theft. Her greatest victory.

‘I wonder why the drukhari are keeping us alive,’ Calenus said.

Sergeant Aetius raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s hardly a mystery,’ he said.

‘I know what they would like to do, but I question the tactical decision.’

‘They will subordinate strategy to cruelty whenever they can. They think they can.’ He stopped himself from saying, Are they wrong? That would have been his shame speaking. The shame of having failed his command. The shame of seeing all but one of the battle-brothers of his Intercessor squad killed, surprised by one enemy as they battled another. The shame was made manifest by the scars on his armour. Its emblems were scorched by fire damage and the ceramite sliced and chipped by the drukhari rifles’ withering hail of neurotoxic crystal shards.

Aetius scanned the confines of the cell again, searching for the means of escape that he and Calenus had already determined did not exist. The drukhari had taken their weapons and sealed them in a cargo tank. The walls were smooth, the locked door a yard thick, and the hatch in the ceiling, at least twenty feet up, was unreachable. Aetius and Calenus had tried punching their way through the metal. They had dented it, but it was too thick.

No way out, Aetius thought, but held his tongue. To let his shame control his words would be to compound his failure. And Calenus was right. By keeping the Primaris Space Marines alive, the drukhari had erred. Somehow, Aetius would teach them the cost of their mistake.

With a faint grind, the hatch in the ceiling turned. Aetius nodded at Calenus, and they took up combat stances facing each other, ready to seize whatever foe dropped into the tank. The hatch opened, and a mortal face appeared.

‘My lords…’ The woman croaked when she spoke, as if her voice had rusted with disuse. She cleared her throat and tried again, still rasping. ‘Come to free you. Going to try.’

Aetius exchanged a look with Calenus. He scrutinised the woman. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I am the Ra– Sebastia Hoven, my lord.’

‘Are you part of the crew?’

‘No!’ The tank echoed with her horrified whisper. Her terror was a positive sign. Her features, dark with grease and oil, were entirely human.

Aetius shared another look with Calenus. The other Intercessor’s shrug, so minute it was undetectable to mortal eyes, was expressive: What choice do we have?

‘Can you reach the door to our prison?’ Aetius asked.

Hoven shook her head.

‘Guarded.’

‘Do you know where our weapons are?’ Calenus asked.

She nodded.

‘You are very well informed,’ said Aetius.

‘I know the ship. No secrets from me. I can be your eyes where you cannot go.’

‘Do you know what is in the lower hold?’

Hoven shuddered. ‘Some secrets not for me. I don’t look.’

‘What has happened to the… crew?’ Aetius asked, spitting the last word.

‘Imprisoned. Lower hold still sealed.’

‘How well guarded is the crew?’

‘Not heavily. The…’ She hesitated.

‘They are called the drukhari,’ Aetius told her.

‘They watch you. Much more interested in you. Enough for them to lock the crew away. No escape for them.’

‘Can you free them?’

‘Some.’ She did not sound happy at the prospect. ‘Enough for them to free the others if they move quickly.’

‘They will,’ said Aetius. ‘Do it, then. Free them. And when the guard responds, come for us.’

‘Yes, my lord.’ She pulled back into the darkness beyond the hatch.

‘Is she part of the genestealer cult?’ Calenus asked.

‘I don’t think so. Her fear of the crew seems genuine. She seems entirely human.’ He grimaced, acknowledging the impressions meant little. ‘If she isn’t, we will be no worse off than we are now. If she does what I asked, the advantage of surprise swings back to us from the drukhari.’

‘We’ll need it.’

Aetius nodded. The odds were not in their favour. The genestealer cult his squad had tracked to the Summons of Faith was a large one. The Ultramarines had made good progress in the battle, but the cultists had pressed them hard.

‘How much of the cult is still alive, do you think?’ said Calenus.

‘At least half.’ And the drukhari had lost little of their complement in the attack.

‘Enough for our purposes? For us to use the foes against each other?’

Aetius ran through strategies based on his incomplete knowledge of the battlefield. The calculations were difficult. There were so many variables, and so much chance in play. ‘We will have to make sure they are strong enough,’ he said.

‘The balance will be a delicate one,’ said Calenus.

Aetius nodded. He compared what he knew of the two xenos forces. ‘The genestealer cult is not strong enough as it stands,’ he said.

‘Desperate measures, then.’

‘Yes. We will have to undo some of our earlier good work.’

‘If we get out.’

‘Yes.’ Aetius moved to the door. He stood just to its left, ready to spring, listening, feeling the vibrations in the ship, waiting for change.

He did not have to wait long. The changes came, and he read the new sounds. He felt the distant grind of opening doors, followed quickly by several more. Then shouts, coming closer. There were snarls and guttural cries, more bestial than human, the hybrid cultists losing their humanity in answer to the call of the Great Devourer. The other voices spoke a language utterly inhuman and musical, lilting and beautiful, yet these were also voices that were utterly corrupt and cruel. And there were the snaps of energy weapons, and the impacts of bullets.

‘The battle has been joined,’ said Calenus, listening too.

‘It will not be properly joined until we are there as well,’ Aetius said.

Time was short. They could not afford to let the drukhari gain the upper hand and wipe out the cultists.

About to put his helmet on, Aetius paused and looked at Calenus. He saw his own frustration and purpose mirrored back at him. His battle-brother was clean-shaven, his features hewn from granite and noble as marble. His eyes glittered with the need to avenge fallen comrades.

Aetius and Calenus’ role in the Imperium’s great struggle had come down to this single ship. This was their war.

‘Two against hundreds,’ Calenus said.

‘A worthy fight.’ Aetius grinned. ‘Worthy of song.’

Calenus shrugged. ‘I will leave the songs to the Space Wolves.’

‘Agreed. I will be satisfied with the poetry of victory.’

They waited with growing impatience and growing confidence. Hoven had freed the genestealer cultists. She was a good judge of what she could do. She would come and free them too.

After another few minutes, there was the hard clank of unlocking latches, a hiss of hydraulic pistons, and the door to the cargo tank opened. Aetius and Calenus lunged through. The short corridor beyond was clear. The sounds of combat came from their right, towards the stern, and from the upper decks. The air of the freighter was still smoky with the smouldering fires of the earlier battle. Now too there was the sharp sting of freshly burned fyceline and the ozone stab of energy beams.

Hoven, her face a rigid mask of fright barely suppressed by determination, stood on the other side of the corridor a short distance down from the tank. Beside her was the open door to a utility passage. It was barely a hall, the sort of space that was forgotten by all aboard except the serfs who would use it to reach rarely serviced corners of the ship. Hoven slipped through the door. The two Primaris Space Marines followed.

Hoven’s route was just barely wide enough for the Intercessors to pass through. Walking sideways, they were able to avoid scraping their Mark X armour against the walls and signalling their presence. The journey was a short one. Hoven took branches to the left, then to the right, and then kicked open a grille to drop down into a storage chamber. The Intercessors’ weapons were here, placed on top of cargo pallets like the war trophies they were.

Aetius murmured litanies of praise and war as he claimed his bolt rifle and its chainblade bayonet. He ran a gauntlet over the barrel, frowning at the marks that defaced the artistry of the gun. Every blemish was an insult he vowed to avenge. He checked his bolter’s clip and slammed it home, then he turned to Calenus, who saluted, forearm against chest, ready for their impossible war.

‘How far are we from the Skopos System?’ Aetius asked Hoven. ‘I believe the ship translated into the warp shortly after we boarded?’

Hoven nodded, and Aetius grimaced. That explained why the squad had lost contact with the frigate Avenger’s Wrath early into the battle. Another failure, he thought. The Intercessors had fought towards the bridge, but had been just a bit too slow.

‘We came through the nearest Mandeville point to Skopos just before the drukhari attacked,’ Hoven said. ‘At the ship’s current speed, we should reach the system in perhaps two standard days.’

‘Not long enough,’ said Calenus.

‘No,’ Aetius agreed. Not with the odds they were facing. ‘We need contingencies.’ He turned to Hoven. ‘You can travel through a voidship. What can you do with one?’

‘I’m not sure. I’ve never tried to do anything.’

‘You may have to. Head for the bridge, but remain hidden until I call.’ He explained what he would need her to do.

‘As you will, lord,’ said Hoven, and she disappeared back up into the vent.

‘I’ve been evaluating probable outcomes based on the odds against us,’ Calenus said.

‘As have I.’

‘There are too many variables to gauge the chances of victory.’

‘But you have one certainty, the same one I do, regarding our fate.’

Calenus nodded.

‘If my legacy is the record that my squad was lost under my command, then that is only justice,’ Aetius said. ‘It will be enough for me if I can know, in the end, that I redeemed that shame.’

‘If you need redemption, brother-sergeant, then so do I. If no one knows of our victory but ourselves, I can still ask for no greater boon.’

Aetius clapped him on the pauldron in solidarity, and they marched out of the chamber, the pounding of ceramite boots booming against the walls of the corridor. The sounds of war called to them from above, from the freighter’s superstructure. The distant vibrations of conflict were a summons as powerful as a clarion blast, but they resisted. There was work to be done first.

‘I would never have conceived of knowingly taking this action,’ Calenus said as they reached a stairwell and started down, taking the steps three at a time.

‘Nor I,’ said Aetius. ‘I hesitate to call this strategy sound. But I will call the risk necessary.’

They descended to the lowest level of the holds. They had come to undo the first action they had taken after the squad’s boarding torpedo had breached the hull of the Summons of Faith.

On the lowest deck, they ran a few hundred yards to stern, where the passage ended in a crumpled barrier of collapsed metal. Everything beyond this point was sealed, the lower reaches of the ship completely quarantined. Before anything else, before even attempting to seize the bridge, this area had been the highest priority of the Intercessor squad. Now it was again.

Aetius leaned against the crumpled wreckage, trying to hear beyond the barrier.

‘Anything?’ Calenus asked.

‘The faint sound of clawing.’

‘We knew we hadn’t killed them all.’

‘No, just that we had them contained.’ Undoing that victory left a sour taste in Aetius’ mouth. He nodded to Calenus and stepped away.

The Intercessor fixed a melta bomb to the barricade, then they retreated back up the corridor to observe the burn. The charge melted deep into the barrier, leaving a crater glowing white-hot, and the entire barricade began to crack. The breach was not complete, but the clawing from the other side became frenzied. The sound of tearing metal reached the Ultramarines.

‘Another?’ Calenus asked.

‘No. We gave them enough to work with. They’ll get through. We could use a bit of a delay.’

They took the stairwell up again, grimly eager as they ran. They had already begun to fight back, but now they would truly join the battle.

The Summons of Faith was an ancient ship, indifferently maintained. It had been gnawed by time, turned into an old and porous bone. It was not built to withstand battle, especially not within its own corridors. Klaxons wailed across its length as Aetius and Calenus made their way up the decks of the superstructure. A weak vessel to begin with, fractured in the initial combat against the genestealer cult, wounded again by the arrival of the drukhari, now it moaned in terminal pain as another war tore at its integrity. Secondary fires spread unchecked. Broken pipes hissed steam and flame into the corridors, and lighting wavered as power fluctuated. Crosswinds at intersections, the sign of a fracturing hull, fanned the fires, and in the moments of relative quiet, Aetius could hear the high-pitched whistle of escaping atmosphere.

Whenever the Ultramarines crossed paths with a servitor attempting to repair the damage, they cut the monotasked cyborg down. They undercut the ship’s ability to staunch its wounds, and so pushed it closer to death.

‘Why have the drukhari stayed with the ship?’ Calenus wondered.

‘I think they plan to use it for a larger prize,’ said Aetius. ‘They need it, like the genestealer cult, to reach Skopos. There are much richer hunting grounds for them there. This freighter is not much of a trophy in its own right.’

‘They simply need it to hold together long enough to reach Skopos.’

‘Exactly.’ Aetius put his fist through the skull of another servitor that sought to douse the flames roaring through the corridor.

They reached the top decks of the superstructure. The region adjacent to the bridge had become an abyss of war.

Three levels of decking had collapsed. The space before the bridge doors was a canyon of jagged metal and flame. Genestealer cultists swarmed over the ruins while their drukhari foe seemed to dance. From where she hid in the ceiling above the threshold of the bridge, it was as if the drukhari flickered before the Rat’s eyes, never still, their way of war one continuous movement, one never-ending death blow. Their weapons sent a murderous wind of black projectiles across the canyon from the bridge, slicing cultists open, pouring their blood over the shattered slopes of the decks. The cultists died, but there were many of them, and every few seconds their numbers managed to overwhelm a drukhari, catching the pale, beautiful monsters in the crossfire of lasrifles, or smashing their elegant dance with shotgun blasts.

There was no order to the battlefield, but there were patterns of movement. The deadly vortex of the drukhari cut back and forth across the mass of the cultists, and the cultists hurled themselves into a pursuit of the attackers.

The Rat hid in the ductwork of the ceiling, watching the monsters tear each other apart. Seeing them now in battle, she wondered how she had ever thought the cultists were human. Their skin clung too closely to misshapen skulls. Many had fangs and clawed limbs. Some had too many arms. In all of them, there was the sense of horrors about to erupt from within the weak disguise they wore. The Rat gave thanks to the Emperor that they had never known she was aboard. She had never made contact, but she had heard them speak, and felt now that if they had addressed her, she, in some way, would have been tainted by the mere sound of their words.

The bridge doors had been breached. They hung open, and the fringes of the battle moved back and forth across the threshold. Both sides wanted control of the bridge, and neither wanted to destroy it, but the ferocity of the struggle meant that damage was occurring. From the Rat’s hiding place, she could move easily to a position on the other side of the bulkhead and track its condition. She could see the workstation she needed to reach, but she could not act just yet. She would be seen and stopped.

Though there were variations in the tides of battle from moment to moment, the drukhari were gradually gaining the upper hand. They were too skilled, too swift. Numbers would not be enough to defeat them. The cultists needed something more.

Then something more arrived. Aetius and Calenus appeared at the torn end of a corridor midway up the pit. They hit the battlefield with the force of a lightning strike, and their bolter fire ripped the drukhari apart.

The moment of surprise was brief, but it mattered. Aetius killed two drukhari before either force knew what was happening. He caught them in mid-leap, the graceful arcs of their movement turning into broken tumbles. A drukhari wych to his right was just beginning to turn his way when he swung the bolter around, and his stream of shells cut her in half.

He saw two other wyches come at Calenus. The Intercessor blocked the first’s initial strike, but the second slashed under his raised arms, the blade cutting through his chest-plate and plunging into his lungs. Aetius came to his battle-brother’s aid and fired, his bolter rounds blasting one attacker away. The other leapt from the stream of fire, and from the left and right came volleys from splinter rifles. The minute crystals hit Aetius’ armour like a sandstorm, their barbs pockmarking his ceramite, the concentrated bursts punching deeper, bringing the neurotoxins closer to contact with his flesh.

Aetius and Calenus leapt forward, off the ragged edge of the hall decking and into the crater. They moved at a run, firing back at the kabalite warriors. They did not shoot at the cultists. At first, the xenos hybrids attacked them as well as the drukhari. Many were armed with rocket launchers, and the missiles they loosed exploded against the weakening walls of the ship. The power fluctuations wracking the vessel became more violent, its systems cutting out completely for fractions of a second. Calenus threw himself to the left as a rocket slammed into the deck a few yards from him. He and Aetius charged through the wash of flame and rubble, and instead of firing back at the cultist, they brought down the drukhari that had closed in on him. Aetius saw the look of surprise on the abomination’s misshapen features.

‘I think they’re beginning to notice what we’re doing,’ he said.

As the Primaris Space Marines made their way up the bridgeside slope of the crater, the cultists that had been shooting at them redirected their fire. Their savage bursts joined with the precision shots of the Ultramarines, and the balance of the struggle began to change. The drukhari evaded most of what the cultists could throw at them, but Aetius and Calenus tracked their manoeuvres and blew them apart.

The drukhari turned their wrath on the Space Marines. They recognised the greater threat and the tactics that were turning the battlefield against them. Aetius saw rage in their movements and in their pallid faces. When the drukhari had first boarded the Summons of Faith, they had caught the Ultramarines by surprise, trapping the squad between two hostile forces. That these two lone survivors had dared turn the tables on the drukhari and catch them in the same manner was an insult too much to bear.

Aetius and Calenus were a spear tip aimed at the bridge, forcing the drukhari into a defensive mode alien to their nature. The xenos cursed the Ultramarines in their lilting tongue. While the wyches still leapt and cut back and forth across the crater, flaying cultists with their blades, most of the kabalites formed up at the entrance to the bridge and set down a wall of suppressive splinter fire. Aetius ducked under an overhang of metal, pushed back by the storm of neurotoxic crystals.

One of the kabalites shouted at the Intercessors, his anger turning the musical language into a vicious snarl.

‘I don’t think he likes our trick of forcing them to fight the genestealers,’ said Calenus.

‘He’ll like the next one even less,’ said Aetius. When the squad had been at full strength, the drukhari had still overcome the Ultramarines and the genestealer cult. Aetius needed something more on the battlefield, something that had not been present in the first engagement. Something that had been locked away. Something that he and Calenus had freed.

It arrived with a feral roar and the scream of tearing metal. The patriarch of the genestealer cult burst up from the bottom of the crater. The monster was huge, multi-armed, with claws that could tear open a Chimera. With it were other purestrain genestealers, monstrosities as distilled and absolute as the foul beauty of the drukhari. When the patriarch roared, every cultist answered in worship and obedience. The cultists attacked the drukhari with renewed frenzy. The kabalite fire pushed them back for another moment, and then the genestealers shot up the sides of the crater and into the drukhari defenders. With one hand, the patriarch tore the head off a kabalite. Its other arms seized another drukhari and gutted him.

The barrier collapsed. The drukhari fell back, inside the bridge, and now the tide was truly against them.

Aetius climbed to the level of the bridge with Calenus.

‘This battle’s outcome is assured,’ said Calenus.

‘Then it is time to change that certainty again,’ said Aetius.

They opened fire on the genestealers.

Their shells slammed into the spine of the patriarch. The monster reared back and spun around, still holding kabalite corpses. Aetius moved away from Calenus, dividing the monster’s attention while their rounds converged at the centre of the creature’s mass. Viscous alien blood poured from wounds punched through its thick, grey hide. The patriarch lunged at Aetius, while two of its escorts went for Calenus.

Aetius charged at the patriarch, ducked beneath its claws and fired upwards, blasting away its lower jaw. The creature sideswiped him with a staggering blow, its claws punching through a weakened seam in his armour and shattering his fused ribcage, driving shards of bone into his organs. He kept his feet and dragged his chainblade bayonet along the patriarch’s flank as he rounded the foe, then launched a quick volley at one of Calenus’ attackers.

Calenus finished off the second, then joined him, driving back the patriarch again.

‘Moment of truth,’ Aetius told him. The next actions of the drukhari would determine whether he had been wrong to release the monsters.

The question was whether it was anger or self-preservation that would drive the drukhari. Aetius had based his strategy on the latter being true.

It was.

Though Aetius could imagine the reluctance with which they acted, the drukhari turned their fire away from the Ultramarines and concentrated on the purestrain genestealers.

The patriarch raged before the entrance to the bridge. It managed to grab Aetius. He unleashed point-blank fire into its thorax while Calenus severed one of its clawed hands with his chainblade. A wych jumped onto its shoulder and sank her sword into its spine. It snapped an arm back and crushed her before she could leap away.

The patriarch slashed at the Primaris Space Marines again. It was viciously fast, and Calenus, breathing through torn lungs, was slower than he had been. The monster’s strike sent him flying. Aetius caught him at the last moment and hauled him back from the edge of the crater. He loosed a blast of shells at the monster’s face. It recoiled, whipping its skull away from the mass-reactive hell, and its retreat bought the Ultramarines a few more seconds.

Calenus’ breathing was a hollow rattle through the grille of his helm. There were deep claw gouges in his chest-plate. The battle was talking its toll on both of them. Aetius’ blood burned with the effort of keeping the effects of the drukhari neurotoxins at bay, and his reaction times were more sluggish than they should have been.

The drukhari killed two more purestrain genestealers, and threw everything they had at the patriarch, even as the cultists took more of them down. The enemies of the Imperium were shredding each other. Aetius looked upon his handiwork. It was pleasing. But it wasn’t enough. The entrance to the bridge was still blocked, and the balance of destruction was ephemeral. Either the genestealers or the drukhari would gain the upper hand, or they would both turn on the Ultramarines.

Aetius refused to give them the chance to make that decision.

The ship’s power wavered again. The battlefield was plunged into darkness for a moment and Aetius’ footing became unstable as the artificial gravity trembled. The patriarch charged Aetius, knocked him into the air over the crater and seized him in a vice-like grip.

‘Now, citizen!’ Aetius boomed through his vox-speakers, calling to Hoven, trusting her to have reached her position. ‘Do it now!’

The monster had his arms pinned. Bleeding from a dozen wounds, the lower part of its skull mangled, its ferocity was undiminished.

It closed a fist over his head. Aetius’ helm began to crack.

The Rat was in position. The workstation was on the port side of the bridge, away from the entrance and the swirl of combat. The Rat was among the predators, and they ignored her. What she had to do was simple. The damage-control runes on the pict screens that surrounded her were screaming for her to take this very action. The ship was burning. There was fire everywhere. Something drastic had to be done, but the remedy was too severe to be performed automatically by a servitor. One stood before the consoles, inert, its function surpassed by events. When she heard Aetius’ shout, the Rat shoved the servitor aside and faced the emergency venting procedure. Two levers to override the fail-safe protocols. A third to open the ship to the void. Or so she thought. She moved the levers one after the other, uttering a prayer to the Emperor that she was not mistaken.

Explosive bolts blew off hatches. Containment fields shut down and cargo bays gaped. A massive blow shook the entire length of the Summons of Faith’s hull as its atmosphere erupted into space. A hurricane twisted through its corridors. The sudden shock was too much for the damaged ship. The superstructure, critically damaged by the war waged within, gave away completely. The entire bow-ward side exploded, and the rest of the bulkheads collapsed in the last moments of artificial gravity. Then the power failed.

Just before the dark came down, the Rat dived beneath the console as the ceiling of the bridge fell in.

Aetius’ eye-lenses compensated for the sudden night as death came for the Summons of Faith. The gravity failed and the patriarch floated upwards. It flailed, reaching for an anchor point, and released Aetius’ right arm. He raised his bolter and sent shells blasting through the monster’s skull. The creature went limp. Aetius used the mass of the corpse to push himself down, and his boots mag-locked him to the decking. Above him, the hull was open to the void. Flaming gases dissipated into the cold and airless night. Genestealer cultists and drukhari cartwheeled away from the ship, weightless, carried by the gale-force winds.

Their armour clamping them firmly to the ragged deck, Aetius and Calenus riddled the xenos bodies with shells. Behind them, there was only wreckage where the bridge had been.

The calm after the storm descended upon the battlefield like a sarcophagus lid. So much of the vessel’s superstructure had torn away that Aetius could look out across the full expanse of the hull.

A faint vibration thrummed in the decking.

‘The engines are still running,’ said Calenus.

Aetius nodded. ‘The ship might yet reach its destination,’ he said. ‘And so will we, after a fashion.’

His power plant was straining to keep oxygen flowing to his lungs, but there were too many tears in the seals of his armour and the poisons of the drukhari continued to eat at his blood. He thought he might live for another hour, perhaps two, but no more than that.

‘The war is over, and we stand,’ said Aetius. They would still be standing when they died, locked into position by their armour. The thought pleased him. He and Calenus would be sentinels past the end.

‘No songs for this war,’ said Calenus.

‘What need of song when we have honour?’ Aetius said, and he smiled, knowing he had, in the end, done his duty.

The captain’s saviour pod, accessible from the bridge, had still been in working order. The Rat manoeuvred it over the wreckage of the Summons of Faith’s superstructure. She moved away from the ship, and it responded well. She would, she thought, be able to reach Skopos. She didn’t think of any purpose beyond immediate survival.

But as she left the dark tomb behind, she saw the two figures standing guard atop the ruin, motionless and proud. Two warriors had ended two invasions heading for Skopos. The image of the guardians stayed before her mind’s eye as the vessel dropped into night, and the vision gave her purpose.

‘I will bear witness,’ she murmured.

‘I will bear witness,’ she vowed.

NO HERO

Peter McLean

An established fantasy author, Peter McLean’s dark and gritty style brings the realities of war in the 41st millennium to life in ‘No Hero’. On the cruel jungle world of Vardan IV, a young Guardsman experiences the horror of conflict for the first time against an overwhelming greenskin horde.

Told in an unusually ambiguous first person perspective, this story examines what it truly means to be a hero in a universe where few heroic acts are remembered.

On distant Vardan IV, the brave men and women of the Astra Militarum have successfully commenced their strategic redeployment. Our glorious Imperial Navy are even now lifting troops and noteworthy civilians for transit to new fronts, where fresh opportunities to serve the glory of the Imperium await them! The redeployment from Vardan IV is a major victory for mankind!

The Emperor protects!

– From the Imperial newsreel archives
of the Officio Prefectus

The withdrawal is underway at last. The greenskin menace is unstoppable, and I can only praise the Emperor’s name that the warmaster has finally seen sense and signalled a full retreat.

I have lost two million men on Vardan IV.

– From the field notes of Lord General
Militant Leopold D’Vangion

Holy God Emperor, I beseech you, deliver us from this terrible place.

– Colonel Noriego, Reslian 45th

I don’t know if anyone will ever read this journal, but I’m going to start writing it anyway. There’s nothing else to do, other than sit in my tent and sweat and wait for it to be over. It’s that or listen to Corporal Cully and Sergeant Rachain make fun of people, but after six months in D Company I’m tired of the pair of them. They’re fine soldiers but their sense of humour revolves around making up cruel names for everyone, and I don’t like it. At least they’re not in my platoon – that’s something, I suppose.

It’s so hot in the tent that I’m feeling faint even as I write, this despite the rain drumming down. The air itself is like liquid, the humidity making my combat fatigues stick to me in the most disgusting way. There hasn’t been a single day in the last six months when it hasn’t been like this, and the nights are no better. Our advance firebase is deep in the jungle, hundreds of miles away from the landing fields where even now the massive transports are evacuating whole regiments up to the orbiting troop ships.

Praise the Emperor, we’re getting out of this hell.

The first wave of Valkyries came an hour ago and took C Company away with them, heading for those blessed landing fields. It’ll be our turn soon, thank the Golden Throne. The rampaging horde of orks is less than twenty miles away from our camp now, so the scouts have reported, and there are vast numbers of them.

Vast. Too many to fight any more. The firebase will be overrun.

The order to evacuate Vardan IV came at the very last moment, but I’m just thankful that it came at all. I’m praying that our Valkyrie gets here before the greenskins do. I cannot wait to get in that carrier, and if I never see another ork again in my life it will be too soon.

I’m still alive. Somehow, dear journal, I survived it. This is what happened:

Our turn finally came to board the Valkyries. I was with Corporal Rikkards and the rest of One Section. The sergeant was with Two Section in the craft after ours. The lieutenant had already gone, no surprises there.

I clambered on board with Jannek ahead of me and Straub behind lugging his vox-caster, all of us jostling for position even though we knew there would be room for everyone. There were only ten of us in the section including the corporal, and the Valkyrie swallowed us and our gear with ease. Not in comfort, admittedly, but I wasn’t complaining. No one was.

Karrel and Varus pulled the hinged benches down on their scissor mounts and we all promptly took our helmets off and put them on the benches to sit on. We had to fly over the rapidly approaching orks to get to the landing fields, and one thing we had learned very quickly on Vardan IV is that greenskins like to shoot at anything that moves, including Valkyries. Once you’ve seen your first man hit from below by a spray of bullets coming up through the floor between his legs, you learn to sit on your helmet when you’re flying over the jungle.

‘Shove up,’ Cialella said as she lumped down next to me.

I grunted and moved a bit, but not much. I couldn’t really, with Lopata looming on my other side. He was a ridiculously big man – Cully had called him ‘ogryn’, but not where Lopata was likely to hear and make something of it. Even Cully was wary of Lopata.

‘Shove up,’ Cialella complained.

‘I’ll shove it up yours in a minute,’ I snapped at her, and Corporal Rikkards glared at us both.

‘Be quiet, the pair of you,’ he said.

I muttered an apology. It was like an oven in the idling Valkyrie, and everyone was short-tempered, and scared that the greenskins were going to charge into the camp shooting at any minute, and utterly overwhelmed with relief to be leaving alive, all at once. Brendahl was the last one in, and then the Navy gunner slammed the side door of the Valkyrie closed behind him and took up position behind his door-mounted heavy bolter. Varus mopped her face with a greasy rag, making it even dirtier than it had been. Blashak, by far the oldest of us at nearly thirty Terran-standard, coughed into his fist.

That was it, we really were getting out at last.

The Valkyrie’s twin engines began to scream, and the heavy carrier shuddered as it lifted vertically off the ground in a swirling cloud of dust and wind-blown debris. I could just see out of the door-gunner’s firing slit from where I was sitting, and I watched the thick foliage of the jungle canopy drop away beneath us as we lifted. We hovered for a moment while the pilot vectored the engines for horizontal flight, then sudden acceleration shoved me hard against Lopata’s meaty shoulder. I don’t think he even noticed.

We were still flying at a relatively low altitude, but the wind rushing in through the gun ports in the doors was blissfully cool now that the aircraft had picked up speed, and everyone started to relax as the temperature in the crew bay dropped. I could hear distant gunfire over the noise of the engines as the greenskins wasted ammo trying to shoot us down, but we were high enough to be out of range of their small-arms fire.

‘Sorry I shoved you,’ Cialella said.

‘Forget it,’ I said, and smiled at her. ‘Sorry I snapped at you.’

Cialella was all right, and a crack shot too. She was the nearest thing One Section had to a proper sniper, even if she didn’t warrant a specialist marksman’s long-las. I sighed with sheer relief. This was the closest I had come to being comfortable and happy in over six months.

The feeling was wonderful, and it lasted right up until the missile hit us.

We must have been right over the orks, and they were already taking potshots at us, but we knew they couldn’t hurt us now. Only I guess whichever warband was directly below us just then had heavy weapons.

Bad luck, that was all it was. The pilots wouldn’t have known what hit them. I don’t know much about it myself, truth be told.

All I remember is that the front of the Valkyrie exploded in a shrieking fireball and then we were falling out of the sky, screaming as the wind tore through the crew bay.

I don’t know what happened after that.

I woke up with my head in Cialella’s lap, or what would have been her lap if she’d still had any legs.

She was very, very dead.

So was Straub, who was on top of me with a huge chunk of shattered metal sticking out of his forehead like a single, twisted horn. The floor of the crew bay was slanted at a crazy angle and the whole interior of the carrier was sticky with blood. I couldn’t move.

I could hear someone moving about, then the clang of an equipment locker swinging shut.

‘Help me,’ I croaked. ‘Who’s there? Please, help me.’

‘Sorry, boy, I thought you were dead too,’ Lopata’s voice said.

I saw his huge hairy hands reach down and hook Straub’s body under the armpits, then the big man hauled the corpse off me and tossed it unceremoniously aside.

‘I don’t know how I’m not,’ I said. ‘Is anyone else alive?’

‘Yeah, the corporal is, but he’s hurt, and Jannek is hurt far worse,’ Lopata said. ‘Varus and Blashak seem to be all right, and one of the Navy gunners made it too. Everyone else is paste.’

Seven of us had survived the crash, then. It didn’t seem possible.

‘It’s a miracle,’ I whispered. ‘The Emperor protects.’

Lopata shrugged and helped me to sit up.

‘Varus reckons we came down on top of the jungle canopy and sort of slid across the top of the trees for half a mile or so, and that slowed us down enough that we weren’t all pulped when the craft hit the ground. Pure luck, she says.’

‘Oh, how would she know?’ I muttered as I pulled myself the rest of the way up and tried to wipe as much of Cialella’s blood off my face as I could.

‘She looked at the trees – reckons she knows woodcraft and all that stuff,’ Lopata said. ‘She’s a scout, after all.’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

Varus had only been made up to scout two weeks ago after Darrup had been killed in an ork ambush, and in my opinion it had gone to her head. I took an unsteady step and the world spun around me, making me clutch at a broken piece of the Valkyrie’s twisted fuselage to hold myself up.

‘Steady there,’ Lopata said, grabbing my arm in a hand that went all the way around it with ease. ‘You must have taken a hell of a blow to the head – you’ve been unconscious for hours. It’s why I thought you didn’t make it.’

I grunted, just glad the other survivors hadn’t already been rescued before I woke up. I would have been left behind for dead, if that had happened. That made me frown as I thought about it.

‘Why haven’t we been picked up yet?’

Lopata just shrugged.

‘We’ve been written off as lost in action, the corporal says, and we’ve no way to tell anyone otherwise. The cockpit… well, isn’t there any more, so we’ve got no vox and no distress beacon. We were going to move out on foot once I’d finished scavenging kit.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘What about Straub’s field set?’

‘Some of it’s sticking out of his head, and the rest is smashed to bits,’ Lopata said.

‘Oh,’ I said again.

‘Reckon you can walk yet?’

I tried a tentative step towards the hole in the side of the aircraft where the crew bay door had been torn off. My vision was a bit blurry and my head was throbbing, but nothing seemed to be broken. I offered up a silent prayer of thanks to the Emperor for my deliverance.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ll be all right. Thanks for pulling me out of there.’

I climbed carefully down out of the wreckage and into a steaming jungle clearing that was strewn with bits of the shattered Valkyrie. The jungle stank of rot and the promethium that was slowly dripping from the carrier’s ruptured fuel tanks. I could only thank the Emperor that we hadn’t all gone up in a fireball.

Corporal Rikkards was sitting on a fallen tree trunk, with the surviving Navy door-gunner not far away from him. Blashak was away by the edge of the treeline, and I could see Varus staring up at the canopy, as though still trying to work out how we were alive at all. Lopata followed me out of the wreckage with four lasguns in his arms.

‘Look who I found,’ he said, grinning.

Corporal Rikkards looked at me in surprise.

‘Thought you were dead, boy,’ he said.

He was nursing his left arm. Blashak, our squad medic, had bandaged it up for him, wrapping his left hand in a great ball of dressings that told me the wound must be pretty bad.

‘No, sir,’ I said.

‘I can see that now, boy,’ Rikkards said, and winced as he moved. ‘What did you get, Lopata?’

‘Four more lasguns,’ he said. ‘At least we can have one each now, and I’ve salvaged a fair bit of ammo too. And a Navy flare pistol, in case we can think of a use for it.’

‘Good,’ Rikkards said. ‘Stack them with the rations. We need to move out soon.’

‘You really don’t think anyone’s going to come looking for us, corporal?’ I asked.

‘No, I really don’t,’ Rikkards said. ‘You can see the state of the craft as well as I can – no one’s going to be expecting any survivors from that.’

I sighed. He was right. The front half of the Valkyrie had been obliterated. If it hadn’t been for the Emperor’s Grace and the thickness of the jungle canopy we would all be dead. As it was, it seemed our plummet from the sky and subsequent slide across the treetops had carried us well away from the orks. I couldn’t hear any shooting in the distance, or anything at all except the hooting and screaming of the hideous simians and fierce avians that infested the jungle.

‘Corporal,’ Blashak called over to where Rikkards was sitting.

Blashak was hunkered down on his haunches in the shade of the trees, bent over the prone figure of Jannek, with a medi-kit open on the ground beside him.

‘What?’

‘Jannek isn’t in a fit state to be moved,’ Blashak said. ‘This is way beyond anything I can do with field dressings. I don’t think he’s going to make it.’

Rikkards wiped his good hand over his face and looked away.

‘No, I don’t think he is either,’ he said.

‘Well, what are we going to do with him?’

‘You know what we’re going to do with him, Blashak,’ the corporal said. ‘We… Oh Throne, I’ve got the seniority, haven’t I? Where’s the lieutenant when you actually want him for once? I suppose I’ll have to do it.’

He climbed off the tree trunk and walked over to where Jannek lay. Jannek was alive but only just, impaled through the gut by a long piece of the Valkyrie’s broken airframe. His breathing was shallow and weak, and he was the colour of rancid milk.

Blashak looked up at the corporal and shook his head.

‘There’s nothing I can do,’ he said again. ‘I’m sorry. I tried, but…’

He gestured helplessly at the critically wounded man.

‘I know.’

Corporal Rikkards bowed his head in prayer for a moment, and drew his laspistol.

‘The Emperor’s Mercy,’ he said, and shot Jannek through the head.

‘You can’t do that!’ the Navy door-gunner protested, leaping to his feet from where he had been sitting with his back to the fallen tree.

He looked down at Jannek for a moment, then took a step away from the corporal.

Rikkards shrugged.

‘Just did,’ he said. ‘And anyway, yes I can. You know the regulations as well as I do – if a man is wounded and can’t continue, if it would be a mercy to end his suffering or if his condition presents a clear and present danger to his comrades, the senior officer present is empowered to administer the Emperor’s Mercy.’

‘All the same…’ the gunner started.

Lopata put a huge hand on the Navy man’s shoulder. The gunner swallowed.

‘You don’t want to make a fuss about this, Navy boy,’ Lopata said quietly. ‘You survived the crash with us, so you’re one of us now. And we don’t make a fuss. Otherwise maybe you didn’t survive the crash, you understand me?’

The gunner nodded. He still looked a bit sick, but he had obviously taken the big man’s meaning. Regimental legend had it that Lopata had been some sort of big-time ganger back home, or at least an enforcer for someone who was. A man who broke people’s kneecaps for money, or worse. Right then I could well believe it.

‘The name’s Civatte,’ the Navy man said. ‘Gunner, second class.’

‘Welcome to the glorious Reslian Forty-Fifth,’ Rikkards said. ‘You’re in the army now, and I’m in charge. Right you lot, share out the gear and get ready to move. We’re getting to those landing fields and onto a transport even if we have to walk.’

We had to walk, all right. We walked for four days.

The heat was almost intolerable. The entire jungle steamed with humidity, and the stench of rotting vegetation filled the foetid air, half choking us. I cursed under my breath and wiped uselessly at the thick film of sweat that covered my unshaven face, dislodging a pale, translucent arachnid from my left ear. I hadn’t even felt it. In half-formed words I cursed the constant rain, cursed my waterlogged boots that felt like they were made of lead, and the straps of the heavy pack that bit into my shoulders through my sodden combat jacket. I cursed the ever-present biting insects that tried to settle on every inch of exposed skin. I could feel them trying to suck out the lifeblood that somehow kept me moving hour after hour through this living nightmare.

I dug my canteen out of my pack and took a pull on it, but the water was warm and brackish and metallic-tasting from the container. I grimaced, and made myself drink it anyway.

The Navy man, Civatte, was ahead of me, struggling with his pack and muttering pitifully to himself every step of the way. His fancy Navy boots had half rotted away in the often knee-deep mud and he was walking with a pronounced limp, favouring his left foot heavily. Neither the man nor his boots were built for marching, and it looked to me like he might not last too much longer.

Four days of forced marches in this terrible terrain and vile weather were hard enough on infantry troopers like us. For the Navy flyer, it must have been pure hell.

Varus was adamant that we were going the right way, but I didn’t see how she could be so sure. So much of our kit had been destroyed in the crash that we were without even the most basic things that every infantry trooper takes for granted, like compasses and lamp packs. We could have been a hundred miles behind the ork lines by then without knowing it. All we could do was put our faith in the scout and pray to the Emperor for His guidance.

‘It’s getting late,’ Varus said over her shoulder. ‘We’d better start looking for somewhere to make camp before we lose the light.’

It got dark very quickly in the jungle, and the canopy overhead was so thick that no moonlight made it through after dark. Trying to move after sundown was impossible.

Corporal Rikkards grunted agreement, his face haggard and drawn. This was his first full command, and the strain of that and his wound was taking its toll on him. I had a nasty feeling the wound was infected, his hand starting to rot under the ball of now-filthy bandages. He hadn’t said anything, but I could smell it sometimes. That worried me – Blashak was only a field medic orderly, not a proper doctor, and he didn’t have the skill or equipment to perform a field amputation. Not one that the corporal would be likely to survive, anyway. None of the rest of us had any medical training at all.

Civatte fell forward suddenly, his foot snagged on a fine wire. The rest of us dived clear with a split second to spare before the clutch of grenades went off, blowing the Navy gunner into the air like a limp rag doll. He fell heavily in a rain of mud and shrapnel, his body bloodied and broken.

‘Nobody move,’ Rikkards whispered hoarsely, raising his head a fraction of an inch from the thick mud in which he lay.

I eased off the safety of my lasgun, my eyes sweeping the dense undergrowth for any sign of movement. Rikkards was inching his way towards me on his stomach, his laspistol clutched in his good hand. Something jumped in the bushes behind the prone corporal and I squeezed off a short burst over his head, the stock of the weapon held tight to my shoulder. The superheated rounds tore through the undergrowth, shredding the fern-like plants into cellulose shrapnel. The small purple simian that had moved gave a final twitch and lay still, its dismembered corpse resembling a scale model of Civatte.

‘You’re getting twitchy, boy,’ Rikkards cautioned me sternly.

‘Sorry, sir,’ I said.

Varus got slowly to her feet and tried to wipe the coating of mud from her face. She was caked with it, wet and foul-smelling. We all were, now.

‘Keep your eyes open for any more wires,’ she warned, tucking a loose strand of dirty brown hair back under her helmet.

Rikkards nodded. ‘Let’s move,’ he said. ‘If there were any greenskins still around they’d have been on us by now. That booby trap could have been months old for all we know.’

I nodded and followed him as Varus took point again, Lopata at my side and Blashak on the six.

‘Where are we, corporal?’ Blashak complained, his eyes scanning the ground for more tripwires as he walked. ‘If we’re as far behind our lines as we’re supposed to be we should have run into someone by now.’

‘Think you could do better, Blashak?’ the corporal snapped. ‘You couldn’t track your way out of your own boot.’

Blashak shot him a filthy look and fell into sullen silence behind us. Dusk was settling in fast now, but at least the rain had finally stopped. Mist rose through the trees to cast a ghostly pallor over the jungle. Varus was leading us up an increasingly steep incline, winding through undergrowth thick enough for us to have to use our bayonets as machetes in several places.

She brought us to a halt a few minutes later with a silently raised hand, then turned to speak to the corporal in a low voice.

‘The trees are thinning out up ahead,’ she said. ‘Go carefully, we could step out into a ork camp any minute. There’s no telling how the front line’s altered by now.’

We moved silent as spectres, creeping through the trees to be confronted with a sight that brought us up short in our tracks. The heavy vegetation gave out suddenly a few feet from a cliff edge. Ahead of us, the ground dropped sharply away into a valley obscured by thick banks of drifting mist. On all sides the jungle continued into the dwindling distance, and only the Emperor and the orks knew what lay in the valley below.

‘Where are we?’ Blashak demanded, rounding on Varus with an angry look on his face.

She looked up him and shook her head.

‘I honestly have no idea,’ she admitted. ‘I’m sorry.’

Corporal Rikkards sank onto the ground and sat staring out across the misty valley as the light grew steadily worse, cradling his rotting hand in his lap. His face was blank and hopeless, drained of every feeling except pain. He had trusted in Varus as our only hope of making it to the landing fields – we all had – and now this. There was no way of knowing how long we had been walking in the wrong direction.

Blashak leaned his lasgun against a tree and stared at the scout.

‘We’re dead,’ he stated bluntly.

Varus nodded silently. ‘That’s a pretty accurate assessment of the situation, Trooper Blashak,’ she said. ‘We are dead, well and truly. We could’ve been heading the wrong way since we crashed for all I know. Some scout, aren’t I?’

She began to cry suddenly, just stood there weeping silently and looking out across the alien valley. I didn’t much like Varus, but right then I wanted to put my arms around her, just hold her and comfort her, but I didn’t dare. She would probably have knifed me if I had touched her. I sat down beside the corporal instead, and shared my last lho-stick with him while trying not to notice the smell of his hand. After a while Varus came and sat too, and we watched the darkness settle in.

‘We may as well stop here for the night,’ Rikkards said after a while, drowning the end of the stick in the mud.

‘We may as well all drop dead,’ Blashak snapped. ‘Stop prolonging the inevitable and get it over with.’

Lopata turned with a speed you wouldn’t expect from such a big man, and punched Blashak in the face hard enough to knock him down.

‘Shut up,’ he growled. ‘You just shut up, Blashak.’ He stood over the fallen man with his huge hands balled into fists and a look of fury on his face. ‘Varus did her best. What have you done, except complain?’

‘Stow it, Lopata,’ Rikkards said. ‘It’s not worth it. Let’s make camp here and see if it looks any better in the morning.’

Of course it didn’t look any better in the morning.

Dawn brought the first rain of the day, reeking and poisonous, and I woke from my exhausted sleep with my hand resting on the grip of my lasgun and the left side of my face pillowed on my mud-covered pack. It was hot already, and the rain steamed in the early morning light.

I lifted my head from the pack and sat up, looking around for the others. Varus was sitting on the ridge, staring out across the valley with her helmet off and her hair hanging around her face in a dirty matted curtain. Blashak and Lopata were making a point of ignoring each other. There was no sign of Rikkards.

‘Where’s the corporal?’ I asked as I rummaged uselessly through my pack for something to eat. We had finished the last of our ration packs the previous day.

‘Latrine,’ Varus said, which meant he’d gone into the undergrowth somewhere to do his business.

We had all been too tired and depressed the previous night for anyone to feel like digging a regulation latrine pit. I got up and went over to where she sat.

‘Got anything to eat?’ I asked her.

‘These are edible,’ she said, and passed me a handful of small, wizened fruits with diseased-looking greyish skin.

I popped a few into my mouth and chewed, wincing at the bitter taste.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I didn’t say they were good,’ she admitted. ‘Nothing here is, is it?’

I was trying to think of some words to say to her when there was a sudden yell from somewhere in the undergrowth about fifty feet away from the camp, the corporal’s voice, followed by the crack of a laspistol.

‘Orks!’ he bellowed.

We grabbed our weapons and threw ourselves into cover in the heavy vegetation, trying to make out shapes in the impenetrable green and the steaming rain. The corporal’s laspistol fired again, twice, then fell silent.

Something moved in the trees, something big.

Really big.

In the Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer there is a section called ‘Patrols & Ambushing’ that details the correct use of the bayonet to make silent kills. There’s an illustration there, and I remember it very clearly, that shows a proud Imperial Guardsman bayonetting an ork. The ork is about four feet tall and pot-bellied, and rather comical-looking.

Orks are not four feet tall, or pot-bellied, or even remotely funny.

The smallest ork warrior I have ever seen was eight feet tall and four hundred pounds of lean, murderous muscle. Some are much bigger than that.

Orks are terrifying.

I squeezed off a short burst but missed, the pouring rain spoiling my aim. I tried to line up on the place I had seen movement again, cursing the appalling conditions. Just then something burst up out of the undergrowth right in front of me, something huge and green and reeking.

The ork towered over me. Nine feet of pure hate with a massive, jagged axe in its fist. It was so close to me that the muzzle of my lasgun was almost touching its stomach. Its foul breath washed over me from its gaping mouth, two yellow, broken tusks jutting up from its enormously protruding lower jaw. I froze, but the Emperor moved me just enough to make my trigger finger clamp down in sheer panic.

I must have emptied half of my lasgun’s power pack into the ork on full auto, at point-blank range.

It exploded, covering me in foul ichor and chunks of sizzling burned meat. I fell to my knees, retching and gasping in horror and relief. I could hear shooting from my right, Blashak shouting obscenities as he fired. I dropped and crawled that way, cradling my lasgun, and came up on the medic’s flank.

‘I only clipped it,’ he hissed. ‘Keep your head down.’

‘Where?’

‘Three o’clock – or it was, anyway.’

I nodded and readied my weapon. Visibility was down to about ten yards in the pounding rain, but a fully grown ork is hard to miss. I spotted it, creeping through the undergrowth and hefting what I can only describe as a home-made heavy stubber. The weapon was boxy and ugly, badly welded together from what looked like scrap metal, and, inexplicably, spray-painted bright red. There was a huge drum-pattern magazine attached to it, though, and I had no doubt that it worked. I raised my lasgun just as the ork saw us.

It opened up immediately and tried to aim afterwards, giving Blashak and I time to flatten ourselves to the filthy mud underfoot. The noise of the ork weapon was deafening, and it bucked and kicked like a live thing even in the xenos brute’s massive hands. Heavy-calibre explosive shells screamed over our heads and cut down a tree behind us as the stubber showered sparks furiously. Blashak returned fire as best he could from his prone position, but missed.

I noticed the ork already had a long las-burn across the meat of its left shoulder, where the medic had clipped it earlier, but the wound didn’t seem to be slowing it down at all. The ork scurried into cover to reload, and I broke and ran in an attempt to outflank it, Blashak shooting to cover me as I went. I ducked behind the thick trunk of a huge tree just in time, as the ork’s monstrous stubber started to roar again. I had the shot from there, and I put a tight burst into the beast’s back.

Las-rounds tore through it, spinning it around with the stubber still firing. I threw myself down in panic as great chunks were blasted out of the tree I was hiding behind. The greenskin was hunched over and snarling, badly wounded but somehow still not dead. The toughness of orks is prodigious, but this was ridiculous.

Blashak started shooting again and earned himself a deafening return blast from the stubber for his troubles. Sparks flew from the massive weapon, which suddenly jammed with a horrible grinding noise. I seized the moment, sprang out of cover and blew the ork apart with a long burst of full auto.

I leaned against my tree for a long moment, gasping for breath.

‘Clear,’ I said at last, and Blashak stood up in a thicket of ferns.

‘It’s gone quiet,’ he said, and I nodded.

The ork guns were so loud we would have heard any within a mile at least, and there was no las-fire anymore either. I took the opportunity to slot a fresh power pack into my lasgun.

‘We need to regroup, find the others,’ I said.

We retraced our path through the undergrowth, listening. Blashak stopped, and put a hand on my arm to hold me.

‘I hear something,’ he said. ‘It’s coming from over there.’

I followed him to the edge of a small clearing, and there Lopata was facing down an ork in single combat. The ork had a broad-bladed, serrated knife clutched in its massive hand, and Lopata had his bayonet, his lasgun lost somewhere in the undergrowth. Lopata was so huge they looked almost evenly matched, and each snarled at the other as they circled. The ork roared and lunged, its knife plunging towards Lopata’s chest, but the big man wasn’t there any more.

He spun with the trained skill of a knife fighter and jammed aside the ork’s forearm with his own, blocking the stabbing thrust, and at the same time his other hand came down and plunged his bayonet into the meat of the creature’s muscular shoulder. The ork bellowed in rage and backhanded Lopata across the side of the head, knocking him down into the reeking mud. I raised my lasgun.

‘No!’ Lopata shouted.

He was on his feet again now, circling once more, and the look of savage joy in his eyes told me that he would be very unhappy with me if I shot the ork. He had something to prove here, I could tell, to the ork or to himself or maybe to the whole galaxy.

‘Come here,’ he hissed. ‘Come here, you ugly pig.’

I glanced across the clearing and saw Varus standing there watching too, her weapon lowered. There was no more shooting coming from anywhere, so this had to be the last of them. Lopata was going one-to-one with an ork with blades, and that was something to see. That was something special.

‘Go on, big lad!’ Blashak yelled, grinning as though the previous night’s altercation between him and Lopata had never happened.

To see a human fight an ork on its own terms was inspiring, stuff to stir the blood. The ork feinted with its heavy knife then slashed back the other way with astonishing speed, and opened a long, red cut in Lopata’s left arm. The big man hissed and kicked out hard enough to take the door off a Chimera, buckling the ork’s knee.

‘Lo-pa-ta! Lo-pa-ta!’ I started to chant, and the others took it up until we were shouting and clapping and stamping like the audience at a stadium fight back home.

The monster took a limping step, snarling with hatred. Lopata’s arm was running red but he barely seemed aware of it. He laughed even as the blood dripped from his fingers.

‘I’m playing to the home crowd here, piggy,’ he taunted the ork.

The ork crouched and sprang at Lopata, but instead of rolling away Lopata surged into its leap with his bayonet up. The ork crashed into him but now it was screaming, and Lopata put both hands on the bayonet that was hilt-deep in its chest and heaved it downwards with all his might. The ork tore open from sternum to crotch, and great ropes of reeking purple intestines spilled out of it as it fell. Lopata fought his way to his feet and kicked the dying ork away from him with a smile of vicious, blood-drenched triumph.

‘Now you can shoot it,’ he told me.

I put a las-round through the thing’s forehead, and it fell quiet.

Varus let out a long breath, then turned away and vomited into a stand of ferns. Blashak shook his head in amazement.

‘Nicely done, mate,’ he said.

Lopata just grinned, trying to get his breath back.

‘Are we sure that’s all of them?’ I asked, after a moment.

Blashak nodded. ‘There were only four of them – Varus got the other one. A scouting party, I reckon, though scouting what I don’t know.’

I shrugged, then a thought struck me. ‘Where’s the corporal?’

Blashak looked at me. ‘Yeah, about that,’ he said, after a moment. ‘There’s bad ways to go, then there’s an ork catching you with your trousers down. Literally.’

I swallowed. I couldn’t think of anything worse, and I really didn’t know what to say to that.

‘Oh,’ I said feebly.

That made us four, then.

‘Now what do we do?’ Varus asked. ‘Who’s in command?’

She had the seniority, as the only scout, but she had only been a scout for two weeks and she didn’t seem very sure of herself any more.

‘I am, of course,’ Lopata said. He pointed at the butchered ork lying at his feet. ‘Anyone want to argue about that?’

I sighed. That was how the greenskins settled things. The biggest and strongest one in any group was automatically in charge. If that sort of thinking was starting to seem reasonable then we had definitely been on Vardan IV too long, but we all nodded just the same. Lopata’s blood was up and he was still holding his dripping bayonet, and I don’t think any of us wanted to argue with him just then.

Blashak nodded and took the medi-kit out of his pack.

‘All right, boss,’ he said. ‘Let me see to your arm, then you can tell us what we do now.’

Lopata thought about that while Blashak cleaned and dressed his wound and Varus retrieved his fallen lasgun for him, then he made his decision.

‘Those orks were scouts, like you said, and they were coming this way. Scouting something. I don’t know what, but I reckon we’ll find it down in that valley. That’s the way we’ll go, find what they were looking for and see if it’s anything we can use.’

‘Yes, boss,’ Blashak said, and nodded.

Varus had a look about her like she wanted to argue, but given that she still felt guilty about getting us lost in the first place I supposed she thought better of it. Personally, by then I would have followed anyone who seemed to have even a vague idea of what to do. I nodded as well.

‘Right, boss,’ I said.

We left Corporal Rikkards where he had fallen. An undignified end, I know, but there was nothing we could do about it now. Lopata led us to the edge of the cliff and we gradually wound our way down the perilous slope, using the heavy undergrowth to keep from sliding to the bottom on our backs. The rain was coming down in hot sheets by then, washing away the increasingly unstable footing, and in the end it was all we could do to get to the bottom in one piece as the deluge turned the slope underfoot into a shifting quagmire.

At last the rain stopped and the incline reduced to a manageable gradient, and we found ourselves in even denser jungle than before. We unsheathed our bayonets and slowly hacked a path forwards, cursing with every step as the alien flora tore at our clothes and skin. We had barely gone fifty yards when an impossible sight stopped us dead in our tracks.

A settlement.

The wall of foliage ended suddenly where it had been hacked away, the stumps glistening wet after the pouring rain. People were moving around in the settlement, children running and playing in the muddy streets. Prefab buildings stood up on short stilts, their walls rotting and damp, and beyond them the watery sunlight glinted off small, cultivated paddy fields.

It was a settlement full of Imperial civilians.

‘What the…?’ Varus started.

‘I thought we evacuated all the civvies?’ I said.

‘Didn’t you hear the commissar?’ Blashak sneered. ‘The noteworthy civilians, he said. The Administratum, that means, and the folk with money. This lot…’

He tailed off, and just shrugged.

‘They’ve been abandoned,’ Lopata said. ‘Too deep into greenskin country to get out, maybe, or just overlooked in the panic. Either way, they’ve been left for dead just like we have. And there are orks coming this way.’

I watched the children playing.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, they haven’t been abandoned. Not yet. We’re here.’

‘There’s four of us,’ Blashak pointed out.

‘That’s right, there’s four of us,’ I said, rounding on him in sudden anger. ‘Four of the indomitable Astra Militarum, with lasguns and grenades and plenty of ammo, and a man who killed an ork in single combat.’

‘I did that,’ Lopata said, nodding proudly to himself. ‘Me. I’m not scared of a few greenskins. We’ll look after them for a bit.’

I was scared of orks, and I doubted it would only be a few of them, but I nodded anyway. It was the right thing to do. The Emperor protects, and we were the Emperor’s instruments in that valley.

It was our duty.

‘So we stay, then?’ Varus asked.

‘We stay,’ Lopata said. ‘We’re not getting out anyway, now. I say we die well.’

He shouldered his lasgun and marched out of the foliage and into the settlement with the three of us behind him.

We slept in the largest of the prefabs that night, the one that belonged to the settlement’s head woman, taking it in turns to keep the watch. Varus had rigged the perimeter late that afternoon, using her scout training to set tripwires attached to frag grenades at each likely entry point. That left us low on throwable ordnance, but we all agreed with her that it was the best course of action.

The colonists were keeping their children inside now, as much as they could anyway. The very young ones, the ones who were too young to understand why we were there, were excited to have real soldiers in their settlement. The others looked at us with the same wary fear as their parents.

It was obvious that this remote place had been untouched by the fighting until now, and the settlers knew that if we were there then the war couldn’t be far behind us. No one mentioned the evacuation, and it soon became clear the settlers knew nothing about it. The place didn’t even have a vox-station. We kept quiet rather than tell them how their own side had left them behind to die.

All the same, I thought they might be starting to suspect something along those lines. There were only four of us, and we were filthy and hungry and quite clearly cut off from our own forces. The head woman had been gracious, welcoming, even grateful to us, but I could see the quiet terror hiding behind her ancient grey eyes.

My chrono read four a.m. when Blashak shook me awake for my turn on watch.

‘You’re up,’ he said, and went through to the back to grab some sleep while he could.

I took my lasgun and went and sat on the rickety wooden steps in front of the house. All the buildings in the settlement were standard-pattern prefabs but they had been raised up on thick wooden pilings to keep the water from coming in when the rains were heavy. Even that early in the day the humidity was already crushing and the jungle stank of rot and despair, but at least it wasn’t raining yet. I checked my lasgun methodically, oiled the moving parts and picked muck out of the fixed sights with a cracked thumbnail, reciting the Litany of Durability over the precious weapon as I worked. It was nothing special in itself, just a mass-stamped M35 Short Pattern lasgun with a skeletal metal stock, but I knew it was the difference between life and death.

It says in the Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer that the lasgun is the most precious item in a Guardsman’s possession, and I truly believe it. It’s not just a weapon, although of course it is that and a very good one too. The lasgun, I firmly believe, is the mortal instrument of the Emperor’s will. Every shot is a prayer to His eternal glory, every kill an affirmation of His divinity and the ultimate divinity of mankind. The lasgun is the very heart and soul of an Imperial Guardsman.

Satisfied at last, I leaned back against the damp wall behind me, watching the perimeter. It started to get light, and the jungle woke around me in a chorus of birdsong and the chattering of simians. It was strangely beautiful, as Vardan IV often was when the chaotic roar of war faded away. I smiled to myself as I watched the sun rise over the trees.

‘What’re you smiling about?’ a woman’s voice asked me.

I turned and looked down towards the muddy street, and saw a woman peering up at me. She had a jug of water from the communal well balanced on her hip, and a little boy of four or five years clinging to her skirts. His feet were bare, and splashed with mud.

‘It’s a nice morning,’ I said, for want of anything better.

‘Go back to the house, Rami,’ the woman told her son, and she waited until he had trotted out of earshot before she spoke to me again. ‘We’re going to die, aren’t we?’ she said.

‘I…’ I started. Yes, they probably were. We all probably were, but I knew it wouldn’t help anyone to tell her that. ‘No, you’re not,’ I said at last.

‘Why not?’

I patted my lasgun and smiled. ‘We’re the Astra Militarum.’

She snorted and turned away, obviously not impressed. Lopata might have impressed her, with his size and the sheer raw power of him, or maybe Varus with her stealth and cunning, or even Blashak with his age and experience, but not me. I’m nothing special, I have to admit, but I am a Guardsman.

‘Hey,’ I called after her, and she stopped and turned to look back at me. I realised I had no idea what to say to her. ‘Stay inside today, if you can,’ I managed after a moment. ‘Keep your children indoors, at least.’

She just nodded, and went on her way.

I watched the sun rising through the morning mist, and thought about the children. Each of them just one amongst countless billions, utterly insignificant. Each one a pure, brilliant spark of life, precious to the Emperor if not to His Imperium.

It was maybe an hour later when the first of Varus’ booby traps detonated. I dived off the steps into cover with my lasgun in my hands as a fireball blew out of the foliage fifty yards away, throwing chunks of ork into the mud at the edge of the settlement. I sighted and fired into the dense undergrowth, one, two, three closely grouped shots. My training sergeant would have been pleased with that grouping, although I doubt he would have said so. Something big grunted and fell over. Undergrowth rustled to my left, then there was a deafening roar as one of the orks’ primitive stubbers opened up.

Massive bullets stitched their way across the muddy street in front of me, throwing up plumes of water and muck with each explosive impact. I rolled and sighted again, and squeezed off a short burst into the impenetrable wall of jungle. More las-shots cracked from my left flank and I realised the others had come out of the prefab through the back way and got into cover, and were now returning fire.

‘Cover me!’ Lopata yelled.

I opened up on full auto, spraying the foliage until it steamed. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lopata rear up and hurl a grenade, his powerful arm sending it sailing into the jungle. It exploded with a roar, and silence fell.

‘Clear,’ Varus called after a count of twenty, and I slowly got to my feet with my lasgun still held warily in front of me.

Orks are huge and terrifying but they aren’t particularly clever, and once they start shooting there’s no stopping them. If there had been any left out there they would still have been blasting away at us.

‘Varus, secure the perimeter,’ Lopata ordered.

She ran doubled over, her lasgun ready at her hip, but the calm held. The scout disappeared into the undergrowth without a sound. I let out a long breath and lowered my weapon.

‘Good shooting, boy,’ Blashak said. ‘Reckon you got one at least.’

I looked at the older man, trying to work out if he was mocking me or not. I shrugged.

‘Thanks.’

He clapped me on the shoulder.

Lopata came out of cover with his lasgun over his shoulder in the parade ground style, a big grin on his face.

‘Looks like the booby traps did their job,’ he said, as though they had been his idea and not Varus’. ‘I knew they would.’

I understood then why Lopata had never made corporal. The arrogance of the man was staggering, and he just didn’t have the right temperament for even a junior command role.

‘Yes, boss,’ I said, and kept my thoughts to myself.

I’ll admit it now, but I’d always been a bit scared of Lopata. The whole business about him having been a ganger back home was all too believable.

Varus came back then, and reported what she had found.

‘Four orks, boss,’ she said. ‘All dead. From the bodies, I reckon the boy got two of them, and the grenades took care of the other two.’

The boy. I sighed. I was the youngest member of the platoon, but I was getting tired of hearing that by then.

‘I’ve got a name,’ I protested.

‘Course you have,’ she smirked, and turned away.

I really didn’t much like Varus either.

‘Now what?’ Blashak asked.

Lopata shrugged.

‘Dig in,’ he said. ‘Those must have just been more scouts, but that’s two scout parties they’ve sent out now that haven’t come back. Sooner or later even greenskins are going to start thinking that’s a bit odd. Sooner or later they’re going to want to come and find out why that is, and it won’t just be four of them next time.’

‘Yes, boss,’ we chorused, and went to set about it.

It was the worst sort of ground for digging in, and within an hour my foxhole had a foot of water in the bottom of it. Lopata had the right of it, though, for all that. With only the four of us, very few grenades and no heavy weapons, we needed every possible advantage we could wring out of the miserable terrain.

All day we held the settlement, watching and waiting for orks that didn’t come. Nerves fraying, we ate the food the colonists gave us and watched the sky gradually darken overhead. Lopata was just finishing sucking sticky rice off his fingers when Varus cocked her head and held up a hand for silence.

‘I hear something,’ she whispered.

We froze, hands creeping towards our weapons.

‘Sounds like…’ Blashak started.

‘Engines,’ Lopata said, and leapt to his feet. ‘That’s a Valkyrie!’

‘I guess not quite everyone has left yet after all,’ Varus said. ‘What happened to that flare pistol? Quickly!’

‘My pack, in the house,’ Blashak said.

He hauled himself out of the foxhole we were sharing and dashed across the street and into the prefab.

‘Come on, come on!’ Lopata shouted.

Blashak was back a moment later with the bulky Navy pistol in his hand. Lopata snatched it off him and checked it over quickly, making sure the flare charge was correctly chambered. We only had the one.

‘Where is it?’ Lopata muttered, scanning the rapidly darkening sky. ‘Don’t do this to me, where are you?’

‘Lights, there!’ Varus said, pointing urgently.

I could see the Valkyrie’s running lights moving in the distance, its trajectory indicating that it would pass within a couple of miles of the settlement. Lopata lifted the pistol in both hands and aimed it straight up, trying to work out the best moment to make sure the Valkyrie actually saw us.

‘Here goes nothing,’ he said, and squeezed the trigger.

The pistol kicked in his hand and hurled the Navy distress flare into the sky. It blossomed crimson in the darkness overhead, illuminating the jungle canopy for a good mile around our position. If the greenskins didn’t know where we were before, they did now.

The flare began to slowly float down, but the Valkyrie was already banking towards us and beginning to shed altitude as it came. The Guard don’t use distress flares, so the carrier’s crew must have taken us for fellow Navy men shot down over the jungle, and that brought them running. We scattered as the heavy carrier came in over the settlement and hovered, the downwash from its powerful twin engines throwing up fantails of muddy water from the ground. Lopata waved his arms frantically over his head, and the aircraft’s nose-mounted searchlight stabbed on and bathed him in harsh white light.

A moment later the Valkyrie came in to land and the roar of its engines faded to an idling throb as the pilot throttled down. The side hatch opened and a woman in Navy uniform stuck her head out.

‘Guard!’ Lopata shouted. ‘We’re Guard! Reslian Forty-Fifth. We could really use a ride out of here.’

The Navy woman nodded.

‘You haven’t half cut it fine,’ she said. ‘The last transport leaves tomorrow, and we’re on it. How many of you?’

‘Four,’ Lopata said.

‘I’ve only got three spaces, but… I’ll make it work, fly low if I have to. Get in.’

I stared at Lopata as the sick realisation dawned on me, cursing my own stupid naivety.

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘I thought… I thought we were asking them to help us with the orks, not…’

‘What?’ Lopata spat at me. ‘This is our ticket out, you idiot. This is our salvation!’

I turned and pointed at the buildings of the settlement.

‘What about their salvation, Lopata?’

‘Life’s tough,’ the big man said. ‘They were going to die anyway – all this means is we don’t have to die with them. Now shut up and get in that carrier.’

‘We can’t just leave them,’ I said.

‘Not our problem,’ Blashak said. ‘Get in the damn carrier, boy.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘That’s an order,’ Lopata said.

‘No,’ I said again. ‘What happened to “I say we die well”, Lopata?’

‘You know what’s better than a good death, you stupid boot?’ he shouted at me. ‘Not dying, that’s what!’

I looked up and met his eyes. Lopata was scared, I realised. Everyone was, especially me. Some of the younger children had crept out of their prefabs to gawp at the Valkyrie in chattering excitement. I shook my head and pointed at the children.

‘I’m not leaving them,’ I said. ‘I mean it.’

‘Are you mudfoots coming or not?’ the Navy woman demanded. ‘I’m not missing that transport for the sake of your argument! Get in now or we’re going without you.’

‘We’re coming,’ Lopata said, and hauled himself up into the crew bay of the waiting carrier with Blashak right behind him.

Varus put a hand on the hatchway and turned to look at me.

‘Last chance, hero,’ she said.

I shook my head.

‘I’m no hero,’ I said, and turned my back on her. ‘I’m just not a coward.’

Behind me, engines screamed as the Valkyrie lifted off without me.

So that’s what happened.

I think this will probably be my last journal entry. It’s midnight now, and in the morning the orks will come, and find me waiting for them.

I’m no hero, and I’m not looking for a medal. No one will ever even know that I did this, or that these people were left for dead by the high command. Just like those children, I am one amongst countless billions. Utterly insignificant. No one will ever know my name. I know the people back home don’t want to hear anything but rousing victory speeches.

And they never will.

If anyone does ever find this journal, tell my mother that I love her.

Tell her that I love her, and I’m sorry. I had to stay, Ma. This is why I was saved in the crash, I’m sure of it.

I’m no hero, but the Emperor protects, and I am the instrument of His will. While there are civilians still here and in need of that protection, the Emperor expects me to do my duty. There are so many children here.

I turn nineteen tomorrow.

It’s going to be quite a day.

THE PATH TO GLORY

Evan Dicken

Evan Dicken wrote his very first Warhammer story after discovering the original Inferno!, so it feels very fitting to have his debut Black Library story in the new iteration of the magazine that inspired him.

This story is based on a relatively minor piece of lore from the background of Age of Sigmar around the fall of the Lantic Empire, as the Age of Chaos descends on the Mortal Realms. Evan’s three very different characters think they’re doing the right thing for their crumbling empire, but whether they’re reliable narrators of this tragedy is another question entirely.

Sulla

‘Hold the line!’ Captain Sulla shouted over the roar of combat. The Lantic forces drowned in a sea of blades, their ragged shield-wall battered by the unreasoning tides of battle. Sulla swung her heavy greatsword, sprays of blood rising like startled birds as she hacked at the press.

Azakul the Winnower’s host seemed without end. Chaos marauders pushed forward, their faces bent around armatures of rage, spitting blood and teeth as they beat at the Lantic line. Sulla screamed back at them – insults, curses, oaths, but no prayers.

She would never make that mistake again.

A shrieking face emerged from the press. Standing a head taller than his fellows, the marauder champion was cloud pale, his beard woven with Lantic medals similar to the ones glittering on Sulla’s breastplate. He howled a corrupted legionary battle hymn as he brought his maul whistling down. Rather than block the blow, Sulla retreated a step, grinning as the champion overextended himself and stumbled forward. She raised her greatsword like a spear so the momentum of the man’s charge impaled him on the long blade, bringing them face to face. She could see he was young, the blasphemous sigils etched into his flesh still red and raw – a recent convert, then, one of the poor souls Empress Xerastia had meant to rescue.

His breath was hot on her cheek.

‘Die, traitor.’

With a scowl, Sulla twisted her sword, dragging it through the marauder’s chest before kicking him back into his comrades. The battle eddied around her as the Chaos forces drew back, uncertain.

Leaning on her sword, Sulla scanned the battle. The Lantic lines looked to be holding, a thin ribbon of gold arrayed against the fury of Azakul’s horde. The hot breeze carried hints of powder and oiled metal from the left flank, where the legion’s few cannons were ranged on the dune behind the scarred bulk of Old Tiberius, their last surviving steam tank. Like the heart of an ageing yet trusty warhorse, Tiberius’ boiler had burst as it slogged through the rusty orange sand of Chamon’s iron desert, but rather than abandon the steam tank, the legion had dragged it up onto the dune to serve as a bulwark against the Chaos forces.

Pride blossomed in Sulla’s chest – even alone, surrounded, and betrayed by their god, the Lantic Empire didn’t abandon its own. Her people may be dying, but they were dying like heroes.

‘Captain!’ It was Ardahir, the standard bearer for the empress’ personal legion. A red-spotted bandage covered the ruin of his left eye, his gilded armour chipped and battered. He carried a blade in one hand, the other bound to the ragged Lantic banner. Limping up, he thrust his chin at the centre of the horde. ‘They made it! Empress Xerastia faces the Winnower.’

Sulla squinted through the clouds of rust kicked up by the battle. The trackless iron desert had obscured the legion’s movements from the many Chaos warbands that roamed Chamon, but it was hell to fight in. They’d been just three days’ march from Uliashtai when the Winnower found them. Empress Xerastia had chosen to fight rather than lead another horde to the City of Gears.

Sulla caught a flash of gold amidst the tarnished murk, the empress’ armour glimmering like a coin tossed into a murky fountain.

Empress Xerastia’s plan had worked, in a way. The last remnants of the Lantic Legions had been too enticing a prize for the Winnower. The Chaos lord had committed his horde to the charge while Xerastia sneaked a cadre of hand-picked knights around to cut the head from the blasphemous host. But Azakul’s horde had been far larger than expected, its ranks swollen with traitors and fools.

‘She’s surrounded.’ Sulla gave Ardahir an anxious frown. ‘Does General Kelephon know?’

‘The general’s dead.’ The standard bearer winced. ‘Damn chimera broke through on the right, would’ve rolled up our entire flank if Kelephon hadn’t led the command battalion into the breach.’

Anger rose like bile in Sulla’s throat. Kelephon had been a pompous ass, but no coward – far better than most of the Lantic nobles who’d purchased their commissions. Another death to lay at Sigmar’s feet. The god’s treachery burned in her memory, Sulla’s anger so hot and bright she felt as if it would burst from her in a spray of flame.

‘Who’s in charge, then?’ she asked.

The standard bearer cocked his head.

‘No.’ Sulla’s mouth was dry, her scalp hot and prickly. ‘All of them?’

‘Afraid so.’ Ardahir glanced nervously towards the beleaguered Lantic lines. ‘Don’t mean to rush you, captain.’

Sulla cursed. Empress Xerastia’s expedition to lift the siege of Uliashtai had been doomed from the start. The legion had fought its way to a dozen former Lantic cities only to find them destroyed or gone over to Chaos. Khemal, Nehaj, Thun – the names of the traitorous cities burned in Sulla’s memory. She’d even heard rumours that some of the Eshunnaic Legion had defected after the fall of the Gilded Steamgird, but that had to be impossible…

When word had come that the mages in Uliashtai still resisted the tides of Chaos, Sulla had dared let herself be swept up by Xerastia’s blind hope. In the end, it had been a choice between dying by slow cuts or risking everything.

It was the same choice Sulla faced now.

Bright flashes marked the distant ridge where Empress Xerastia fought Azakul the Winnower. A few knights remained at her side, but they were cut off, buried by rank upon rank of dark-armoured warriors. The Chaos horde turned back on itself like a snake devouring its tail in an attempt to reach the Lantic empress. If Sulla called a retreat, the legion would survive, battered but intact.

She discarded the thought with a fierce scowl. She was no traitor, no coward.

‘Captain, your orders?’ Ardahir asked.

‘Sigmar might have abandoned the empire, but I won’t.’ She nodded at Ardahir. ‘Give the call to dress ranks. We advance.’

There were no more horses, so Sulla and the surviving greatswords formed the point of the charge; blade, axe and bow arrayed in staggered ranks behind. Spearmen screened the advance, holding back the screaming flood while the artillery launched a ragged fusillade to clear the way, Old Tiberius’ cannon booming like a funeral drum.

Fury lent strength to Sulla’s swings, her blade in constant motion. Many thought the greatsword a weapon of pure strength. They hacked and chopped at their foes, wielding the blade with all the finesse of an orruk, never understanding greatswords required more care, more finesse than the lightest duelling sabre.

Sulla cut into the seething press of bodies. Chaos came as a roiling throng, fierce but unordered, each warrior seeking to catch the attention of their dark gods, but their ferocity was no match for Lantic discipline.

Sulla’s limbs burned, her greatsword as heavy as a steam tank. The air was thick with scents of blood, viscera and oiled steel. Her boots slipped on spilled entrails, her blade shrieked across pitted steel to nest in flesh. She was close enough to smell the foul exhalations of her foes, to see the flicker of fear in their eyes as her weapon came slashing down.

And Sulla exalted in it.

She might not be able to set her blade at Sigmar’s throat or strike down the traitorous Lofnir Fyreslayers who had destroyed the Gilded Steamgird, but she could kill the enemies of her people, here and now, stroke by bloody stroke. She and her comrades painted the corroded desert sand a bright crimson, draping the high iron dunes in a shroud of twisted bodies.

The marauders drew back, fleeing before the men and women in tattered gold. Sulla stumbled, her legs weak as wet clay, but a hand steadied her. She glanced back to see Ardahir, his standard torn but unbowed.

The surviving Lantic soldiers were like statues covered in blood and flecks of rust. They closed ranks behind her, faces grim. Sulla turned to see a phalanx of heavily armoured warriors, shields marked with the ruinous powers’ twisted sigils, their helmets worked into the visages of fearsome beasts. She shouted the order to advance, already breaking into a run. She didn’t need to look back to know the others followed – they were Lantic, they wouldn’t abandon her.

A Chaos warrior with a helmet like a snarling steelcat raised his shield to catch her blow, but Sulla reversed her swing, dropping low to hammer her blade into the back of the warrior’s knee. She leapt over the toppling man to bury her greatsword in the helmet of the traitor behind him.

Sulla didn’t even see the axe coming. A heavy weight crashed into her side. Sulla’s breastplate took the worst of the blow, but it still knocked her from her feet. Sulla rolled on the ground, her mouth filling with bloody iron sand as she struggled to draw breath. The Chaos warrior raised his axe for the killing blow.

A shadow fell over her, a curtain of heavy brocade draping over her face. She swatted the fabric before realising it was the Lantic banner. Ardahir had lunged from behind, driving the spike at the end of the banner pole into the traitor’s throat. With a snarl, the Chaos warrior hacked down, cutting the banner pole in half.

Sulla rose with a strangled shout, her greatsword sweeping up to take off the enemy’s head. Lantic soldiers surged past, matching the fierceness of Azakul’s guard. For a moment, Sulla thought they could turn the tide, but there were too many foes, there were always too many.

Beyond the mass of Chaos warriors, atop a ridge, Empress Xerastia battled alone, her armour bright against the rusty backdrop. She fought with spear and shield in the ancient fashion, the duardin runes inscribed in their gleaming surfaces burning like miniature suns as she parried blows from the Winnower’s flail. Tall as she was, the empress seemed a slight thing when ranged against the Chaos warlord’s dark bulk. The Winnower’s armour was a labyrinth of interlocking plates. Strips of steel and bronze slithered like serpents, blurring Azakul’s outline. The Winnower moved with a puppet’s jerky grace, seeming to hang from invisible strings as he pivoted to bring his flail arcing around once more.

Xerastia rolled aside, driving her spear into the Winnower’s side. Azakul’s backswing knocked the empress’ winged helm from her head. The blow left Xerastia’s hair matted with gore, her one eye blackened and bloody, the empress’ expression showing no fear, no pain. With a defiant shout, Xerastia released her shield to put both hands on her spear, forcing the blade deeper into Azakul’s chest.

The Chaos warlord’s scream was surprisingly human. He caught Xerastia by the throat, the clawed talons of his gauntlet gouging bloody rivulets in the empress’ flesh as he bent Xerastia slowly back.

It seemed impossible, but even over the din Sulla could hear the crack of Xerastia’s spine breaking.

Bitter rage bubbled up through the cracks in Sulla’s reason. She threw herself at the dark-armoured ranks, cursing her traitorous limbs for lacking strength to reach her empress.

With a roar of triumph, Azakul flung Xerastia away. A cry went up from the Lantic troops, but there was no way to reach her. The Winnower swayed on his feet, black ichor dripping from the wound at his side as he shambled towards the dying Lantic empress.

With a sound like a snapping banner, a flash of azure lightning streaked down from the roiling copper clouds above to strike Xerastia’s body. Sulla blinked away flickering after-images, and saw the ridge where her empress had lain was scorched and empty.

‘It’s over, captain.’ Ardahir pulled her back.

Sulla struggled free of his grip, but strong hands took hold of her – soldiers in Lantic gold, their expressions hard and bitter. Sulla saw bloodied arms and bandaged knees, faces caked in sand-gritted gore, her comrades almost indistinguishable from the marauders they fought.

‘We need to go,’ Ardahir shouted. ‘Before the Winnower’s host regroups.’

Sulla drew in a shuddering breath. It was if a giant hand pressed down upon her, the mad strength bleeding away to leave nothing but hollow exhaustion.

‘The empire doesn’t abandon its own,’ she shouted as they dragged her from the battlefield.

‘Take a look, captain.’ Ardahir almost spat the words. ‘There’s none of our own left to abandon.’

Kaslon

Monsters came and monsters died. Transfixed by precise lines of golden light, bisected by sheets of sorcerous energy, their bones transmuted to lead, the teeming mass of Chaos fell before the power of the Gilded Order. Kaslon stood in the great pattern, his chant lending strength to the master mages at its centre. As a sorcerer of rank, Kaslon was entitled to one of the vertices; apprentices were relegated to lines and connecting points, reduced to mere conduits.

The mages stood between the horde and the shanty town that had sprung up outside the rune-covered walls of Uliashtai – the City of Gears, stronghold of the Gilded Order. More than a hundred mages of rank, all who remained of the Order, were arrayed upon the sacred geometry.

Birdlike daemons slipped through the air, gouts of green balefire licking around the edges of the mages’ wards. Kaslon swallowed against the sudden upswell of fear, willing his power along the lines and vertices of the pattern’s radiant formulae.

With a wave of her withered hand, Grandmaster Lek sent bladed parabolas arcing into the bird daemons, who fell like dying embers. In concert with the other masters Lek struck the ground with her staff, and white gold lines radiated from the points of the pattern, carving through the horde outside the city walls.

Kaslon tried not to look at the Lantic refugees crowded outside Uliashtai’s high walls. The refugees had come in their tens of thousands, but the autarch had ordered the gates closed before retreating to his palace, and a great shanty town had sprouted up outside. Although the Gilded Order’s sorcery was mighty, it was not kind.

At last, as it had a hundred times before, the gibbering mass retreated before the sacred geometries of metal. It had become something of a formula – the mages of the Gilded Order would decimate the horde, then Skayne Bloodtongue and his warlocks would spend weeks drawing more creatures from the twisted realms of Chaos. Over and over the pattern played out.

Except this time, something was different.

It came first as a tremor, a fractal splintering along the outer edges of Kaslon’s wards. One of the apprentices fell to her knees, a hand pressed to her forehead.

‘Keep the pattern!’ Grandmaster Lek called.

Kaslon glanced to the pattern and found its lines bowed, razor straightness skewed as if viewed through a concave mirror. He felt his concentration slip and desperately tried to sing the lines back to congruence.

The horizon seemed to shiver, and there, streaking from the ruins of the Gilded Steamgird on bladed disks, were not a score of Chaos sorcerers, but a hundred, Skayne Bloodtongue at their head.

The Chaos lord was armoured in a patchwork of scintillating scales that caught the sunlight, twisting and reflecting it like a spray of broken glass. Constellations of light spun around Bloodtongue, his slightest movement accompanied by bursts of prismatic colour. The sorcerer’s hair was wild and unkempt, his craggy brow, deep-set eyes and crooked grin giving his features a kindly, almost grandfatherly cast.

Kaslon knew better than to be fooled.

The ground shifted at the sorcerers’ passing, the air above rippling like a heat mirage. Lek brought her staff crashing down once more, but the lines that emerged were skewed and weak, the perfect symmetry of the pattern twisted beyond repair.

It was too much. Kaslon stumbled away, hands raised to shield his eyes from the maddening distortion. He watched horrified as the apprentices along the lines intersecting his vertices erupted in columns of bilious flames.

Lek sang a shield of intersecting wards only to have the lines twist back, pinioning her to the ground. Arcs of golden light sprang from the disorganised pattern, cutting many of Bloodtongue’s warlocks from the air, but the survivors came on undaunted, the skein of reality warping before them.

There was no time for consideration, no time for shame, only the need to escape. Kaslon sang the Golden Mean, rising into the air on a spiral of gilded steel. He glanced back to see the mages of the Gilded Order dying where they stood. Like candles raised against a storm, their sorceries were feeble, flickering things, easily snuffed. Kaslon looked away, cheeks burning. The pattern was broken, there was nothing to be done.

He crested the wall near the city’s eastern gate, barely able to halt his descent. Uliashtai spread before him like the innards of a massive timepiece, streets, blocks, even entire districts rearranged by the methodical rotation of ancestor gears.

It was just after noon, the great golden expanse of Clock Street a perfect line leading between the only two fixed points in Uliashtai: the Gilded Tower at the eastern end of the city and the Autarch’s Palace in the west. Visitors often became lost in the shifting paths, baffled by directions that changed depending on the time of day. They thought the city disordered, anarchic, but there was a rhythm to Uliashtai, a complex and beautiful pattern that allowed those who understood it to traverse the city with surprising speed.

Kaslon had come over the wall near the eastern gate, so the Gilded Tower was nearby. He made for it. The tower would be safe; the survivors could regroup, strike back. Unfortunately, Clock Street thronged with terrified citizens.

‘What’s happening?’ A woman in cogtender leathers caught Kaslon’s sleeve.

‘Bloodtongue, he’s…’ Kaslon chewed his lip. What had Bloodtongue done? It seemed impossible that the Chaos lord had conjured so great a working. The ritual alone must have taken months, how had the masters not sensed it?

‘Will the walls fall?’ An old man with a spring-winding crook hobbled from the crowd. ‘Should we make for the Underway?’

‘Have to go through the palace to get to the Underway,’ the woman said with a scowl. ‘And the autarch has that place locked up tighter than a duardin vault.’

‘We must stay calm.’ Kaslon used a harmonic cadence to lend his voice strength and resonance. It was as much for his benefit as the crowd’s. The people were too frightened for Kaslon to transmute their nervous energy to true calm, so he settled for directing it towards a purpose, threading his speech with rhythms of command. ‘Go back to your homes, arm yourselves and await word. I must return to the tower.’

For a moment, Kaslon worried he might have to resort to more invasive sorcery, but thankfully the crowd dispersed with only a few anxious glances at the walls. When they had cleared a path, Kaslon hurried off.

The tower rose like the fist of Sigmar, a monument to perfection, its every curve, every angle in perfect symmetry. There were no doors or windows, only the subtle interplay of dimensions, the walls composed of interlocking tesseracts. Kaslon picked the closest one and followed one of its shifting faces into the tower.

The interior was honeycombed with libraries and workshops, repositories nested within classrooms within great halls, all separate, all together. Kaslon sent a globe of glowing silver spiralling up through the overlapping planes of the tower, a call to any who might yet remain.

When he received no answer, he conjured another, and another, quick as the stutter of a dying glowbug. Bloodtongue couldn’t have annihilated the whole Order. Lips numb, Kaslon mounted the steps to the Auracularium at the tower’s apex. Formerly, it had been barred to all save masters, but there was no one to stop him.

Scores of cochlear spines studded the long, vaulted chamber, rising through the mirrored ceiling and into the open air beyond. There was one for each gilded tower in the Lantic Empire. Once they had hummed with life, bearing messages from the cities across the Mortal Realms – Chamon, Hysh, Aqshy, and beyond. Kaslon walked the length of the chamber, pausing to rest his hand upon each as he passed, feeling, pleading for the vibrations that would tell him he wasn’t alone. But the spines lay still and dead.

All save one.

The quiver was slight, barely an echo, but Kaslon recognised the tell-tale rhythms of an Order cipher. He pressed trembling fingers to the vibrating metal, lips pursed as he translated the message.

All is lost.

The empire has fallen.

Flee to Azyr. In Sigmar’s name, flee.

Before it is too late.

The message repeated, over and over. Kaslon stepped back, the air seeming too thin to fill his lungs. The masters must have received the warning, they must have known Uliashtai stood alone, and yet they’d said nothing.

Comprehension settled on Kaslon like a shroud.

To leave Uliashtai would be to admit the sacred geometries were flawed. The masters had put their faith in reason, blinded by familiar patterns, but Chaos knew no order, no pattern. Bloodtongue couldn’t defeat their logic, so he had changed the rules of reality.

Kaslon staggered from the Auracularium. Everything seemed strange to him. The great orreries, tracking the motion of the Mortal Realms; tall pillars of steel and silver; walls inscribed with immutable constants in delicate gold filigree; vast libraries, their broad shelves creaking with millennia of collected knowledge, all useless. Bloodtongue would shatter Kaslon’s geometries as easily as he had Grandmaster Lek’s.

He needed something more powerful, and he needed it quickly. The layered wards on Uliashtai’s walls kept the horde at bay for the moment, but without mages to defend and repair the apotropaic formulae, it was only a matter of time before Bloodtongue bludgeoned his way inside.

Kaslon ventured into the depths of the Gilded Tower, to where the Order locked away the most powerful and dangerous artefacts. There was no time for caution, so he made for the greatest concentration of sorcerous energy.

Stumbling down a flight of uneven stairs, Kaslon found himself in a room unlike any other. It seemed to have no walls, no ceiling, the floor soft and yielding. Strange fractals blossomed in the gloom, tugging at Kaslon’s eyes, their razor-edged intricacy surrounding him like an embrace. Something rested at their centre – a shadow, long and thin as a serpent’s slitted eye.

Kaslon stretched out a hand, flinching back at the flash of golden light. The masters had warded whatever was in this room. They couldn’t countenance any flaw in their design, any truth they couldn’t bind and quantify, so, like the message, they had hidden it away.

Kaslon tore into the wards, singing errors into their design, tiny faults that slipped into the cracks and uncoupled the chains of logic. Such blasphemy would have brought every mage in the tower down on him, but Kaslon was alone.

As the last of the protections fell away, he plunged his hand into the heart of the fractals, drawing forth a long, jagged staff. Fashioned of hard crystal, it seemed to shift in his hands, a riot of interdependent patterns sparkling within. He could feel the power radiating from it – more, he could see the promise. The staff contained multitudes, infinity writ small, bounded, yet somehow also without end.

Kaslon strode from the tower, heading for the eastern gate, staff in hand. It was all so clear now, how rigidity had destroyed the Order, how it had doomed their city, their empire.

‘Master Kaslon, praise Sigmar you survived.’ Relief was plain on the guard captain’s face as Kaslon climbed the stairs to the eastern gatehouse. ‘Bloodtongue’s creatures are swarming like locusts, but they can’t breach the walls.’

Kaslon surveyed the battlefield from atop the crenellated gatehouse. Uliashtai’s walls still held, millennia of overlapping wards proof against Bloodtongue’s sorcery for the moment. Twisted forms capered through the streets of the shanty town outside, tearing into the fleeing refugees. A mob had gathered outside the eastern gate, hammering at the great golden expanse while, inside, the guards watched with numb resignation. They had their orders, their foolish, inflexible orders. The guards were Lantic, there was no question – they would die rather than abandon their posts.

Not unless Kaslon made them.

The wards along the wall were ancient and powerful, but Kaslon knew their weakness. Like the people they shielded, they were hard, but brittle. It was delicate work, threading inconsistencies into the logical framework, but Kaslon drew upon the staff, spiralling down into its arcane fractals, each new revelation like a jolt of lightning down his spine.

Cracks began to form, wards flickering as the constants that bound them frayed. Kaslon could see it all, the fallacies, the inconsistencies. The masters had been wrong, they had all been wrong.

‘What are you doing?’ The guard captain stepped forward, hand straying to his sword hilt.

‘Saving us all.’ Kaslon let out a long breath as the gate burst open.

The guards came at him with swords and spears, their blades skittering from his wards in showers of sparks. With a sad grin, he turned to them. ‘The walls are breaking. There is nothing left. Spread the word – only the Underway remains open. Flee.’

And at last, they did.

Kaslon rode a twisting spiral down to the gate, spreading his arms wide to welcome the refugees. They came in a mad rush, filling the plaza inside the gate in a throng, their expressions wild and panicked.

‘You must remain calm.’ This time, Kaslon dispensed with subtlety, imbuing his words with enough magical force to cut through the babble. Normally, he would have been hard pressed to affect a dozen people with so blunt an enchantment, but the staff magnified Kaslon’s power. The refugees turned almost as one, eyes wide, mouths hanging open as Kaslon’s sorcerous command pressed down on them.

Kaslon tried not to wince at their glazed expressions. To lay such a compulsion on Lantic citizens went against everything the Order stood for, but if the decision was between dominating his people or watching them die, Kaslon knew what he would choose.

The mob parted as he strode towards the gate. Many of the refugees were inside, but the creatures of Chaos would be quick to follow.

He was surprised to see the flash of steel beyond the gate. A small force of men and women in Lantic gold had formed a cordon across the broken portal, holding the gate so the refugees could flee inside.

They were a ragtag bunch, their armour battered, their tabards almost unrecognisable beneath layers of blood and grime. At their fore stood a tall woman with tarnished silver captain’s stripes picked out on her breastplate. Helmetless, her dark hair was cut short in the legionary fashion, her expression sharp as the notched greatsword she swung in bloody arcs. The lines of her long face were picked out in dusty filigree, her scowl seeming bone deep.

For all her fury, Kaslon saw the legionaries would soon be overwhelmed. He drew on the staff, using the power within to lend strength to his sorceries.

He struck the ground with his staff, lines of force radiating out, shifting, transmuting. Chaos spawn floundered in earth gone suddenly soft, drowning in quicksilver. Spikes of liquid steel arced up from the ground to carve into the horde, as a golden lattice formed between the legionaries and their attackers.

The Lantic soldiers fell back, surprised, the captain calling out orders.

‘Quick, to the gate. My spells won’t hold them long!’ Kaslon shouted. The staff was like a living thing, writhing in his grasp, struggling to wrest free of Kaslon’s sorcerous bonds.

The legionaries rushed past, the captain stopping beside Kaslon while her soldiers filed inside.

‘Thank you,’ she said, her expression guarded. ‘You’re of the Gilded Order?’

Kaslon nodded, still struggling to cut the flow of energy from the staff. It was like trying to dam a river midstream.

‘My name’s Sulla. I command what’s left of the empress’ legion,’ she said.

‘Kaslon,’ he gritted out, sighing as the staff finally quieted.

‘We saw your battle with the Chaos sorcerers. How many Order mages remain?’

‘I may be the last.’ Kaslon turned back towards the gate. ‘Uliashtai has fallen. I can lead you from the city, but we must hurry.’

She snorted. ‘You’ll get no argument from me.’

Together, they hurried through the gate, Sulla already calling to her soldiers. ‘Ardahir, have the legionaries keep the people together, we need to move quickly.’

A small man clutching a broken staff nodded, and began shouting orders. With Kaslon’s enchantments tamping down their fear, the crowd fell in with no argument.

Sulla watched them, frowning. ‘Those people were screaming their heads off just five minutes ago. What did you do to them?’

Kaslon kept his expression neutral. ‘I did what was necessary.’

Sulla opened her mouth as if to speak, but her words were drowned out by the shriek of tearing metal.

‘They come!’ Kaslon shouted, already making for the far end of the plaza.

Sulla followed, her long legs easily keeping pace. ‘We’ll hold them off. You lead the others to safety.’

‘No need.’ Kaslon regarded the toothy border where the gate plaza’s ancestor gear met that of Clock Street. Already the street was almost blocked, the wall of a huge storehouse obstructing more than half of the entrance as the gears ticked their inexorable progress. ‘Get your people through that opening. In another minute or two Bloodtongue’s creatures will have to tear through half a district to catch us.’

Sulla raised an eyebrow.

‘This is Uliashtai.’ Kaslon spread his arms. ‘The city defends itself.’

With Kaslon’s enchantments and Sulla’s legionaries driving the crowd the refugees made good time, the stragglers slipping through the thin opening just as the first of Bloodtongue’s creatures burst into the plaza.

‘We must make for the Autarch’s Palace,’ Kaslon said. ‘The Underway opens beneath.’

Sulla’s scowl relaxed a fraction. ‘Lead the way, mage.’

They hurried through the shifting city, the distant roars of Chaos monstrosities urging them on. More people joined them from the surrounding houses and storefronts.

‘We’re making good time.’ Sulla joined Kaslon at the front of the column. ‘I set a dozen legionaries at the back to round up stragglers.’

‘I’m grateful for you and your soldiers, captain.’ He glanced at her uniform. ‘I thought the Lantic Legions were lost.’

‘We were,’ Sulla replied.

‘What are you doing in Uliashtai?’

She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘We came to save you.’

Livius

Livius awoke among the dead. Corpses sprawled across silken divans, lay draped across marble balustrades, and were wedged amidst the larger gears of the palace’s clockwork. Some bodies were prepared as if for a funeral, although whoever had begun the ritual appeared to have either died or fled before the transmutation from flesh to metal could begin.

Livius called for his mother, his father, anyone, but his throat was dry, his voice a weak croak. His last memory was of stumbling to his knees, Countess Ikara shrieking as blood came pouring from her mouth. With a groan, he rolled over. It took him some time to rise, and even longer to find an unopened bottle of wine.

Not that Livius wanted to get drunk, he just knew better than to trust the water.

The Autarch’s Palace was unnaturally quiet. Gone was the music and laughter, the whispers, the raised voices and drunken slurs, the clash of duelling sabres. Blood and vomit stained the nobles’ fine robes a muddy brown, their exposed flesh covered with weeping sores. Livius’ memories came on like a nightmare.

The siege had done nothing to lessen the autarch’s already acute paranoia, and he had ordered the palace sealed at the first signs of plague, ancestor gears churning, every egress barred by heavy steel shutters. No one questioned his decision. Rumour had it that the sickness was worse in the streets, but few had any interest in venturing out to see. To leave court was to give rivals the chance to plot in your absence. Great families had been undone by less, and Livius’ family was far from great.

It had been too late. Death stalked the vaulted halls, the gear-lined chambers, snatching up people without regard for wealth or station. Livius had been one of the first to succumb, to no one’s surprise.

He stumbled past the bloated corpse of Baron Haakon, surrounded by the bodies of a dozen of his moon-faced progeny. A fat man even before the plague, the Baron’s skin had split to reveal rotting abscesses, red-tinged bile staining the thick carpet beneath.

Livius took a long pull from his bottle. Then again, perhaps he did want to get drunk.

A sudden bout of dizziness left Livius leaning against the wall, panting. He took a long drink to steady himself then stumbled down the hall towards the duelling floor. Alive or dead, his mother would be there.

Livius felt a flush of familiar embarrassment as he stepped into the enormous duelling hall. The chamber was circular, stepped seats surrounding a floor studded with raised gears. Livius winced as he recalled the one and only time he’d stepped onto a duelling gear. It’d been over a stumble on the dance floor that jostled Countess Atia’s skirts. Livius had been so nervous, his legs trembling, his skin seeming too tight. Atia had barely needed to take a step before he’d lost his footing, stumbling from the gear without her even needing to draw blood. Worse than the laughter were the beatings his mother had given him under the guise of ‘training’, as if bruises and broken fingers could wipe away the stain of embarrassment.

The memory stung Livius’ eyes like smoke. He drained the last few drops of wine then tossed the bottle aside. It made a very satisfying crash.

He found his mother sprawled across a sparring gear, Widowbane, the family sabre, clutched in her rotting fist as if she planned to cut the plague’s throat. Livius knew the sight should make him sad, or glad, or relieved, but he couldn’t seem to summon even the barest flicker of emotion.

Livius stepped up onto the gear and squatted next to the corpse, eyeing the rune-inscribed sabre. It might have been his imagination, but he could have sworn his mother’s pale, glassy eyes followed him as he moved.

‘Our family has boasted heroes, kings, emperors. You’re not even worthy to speak their names.’ His mother’s voice echoed in Livius’ thoughts. ‘I’ll die before I pass Widowbane to you.’

‘You never could be wrong, mother.’ Livius pried the rune-inscribed blade from her grip, wondering if she’d died just to spite him.

He half expected sparks, or light, or flames, something to mark Widowbane as special. Family legend said the blade was a gift from Sigmar himself, transmuted from the bones of a hundredfold great-granduncle who had died nobly on some hoary battlefield of old.

Nothing happened, so Livius ran through some forms, drunkenness blurring his movements, and causing him to stumble.

Sloppy. Disgusting. An orruk could do better.

He winced, shoulders high.

You’re an embarrassment to the empire, to our family.

‘You’re an embarrassment!’ He whirled on his mother, stabbing down. Widowbane slid into her chest, necrotic flesh parting like clouds before the enchanted blade. He slashed at her again and again. ‘Commoners die in plagues, mother. Not nobles, not heroes. What does that make you?’

The exertion left Livius lightheaded. He overbalanced, ankle twisting to send him toppling from the gear. It was only a foot or so to the floor, but Livius landed awkwardly, skinning one knee on the tiles, Widowbane clattering from his grip.

Face burning, he snatched up the sword and stumbled from the chamber, his mother’s laughter chasing him from the hall.

Livius ran until his legs gave out, then slumped against the wall, gasping. Thankfully, the palace was silent save for the slow rasp of ancestor gears. He could feel their cold regard, blood calling to blood, however distant, however diluted. Transmuted from the flesh and bone of those who had come before, the Autarch’s Palace was the work of generations. Like his mother, the palace despised weakness, and Livius was nothing if not weak.

He sat for a long time, legs drawn up, face pressed against his knees as he had when he was very small, before his mother had found him and given his backside a dozen welts with the flat of Widowbane. But mother was gone, now, wasn’t she?

Dully, Livius wondered if they were all gone. It seemed impossible Livius was the only survivor. He pushed himself to his feet, wiping a sleeve across his face. ‘Time to find out.’

The corpses were fresher in the throne room. They were piled thick around the high articulated columns, splayed across the carpet, slumped in the shadowed alcoves where oaths and betrayals had been wrought in whispered tones. It made sense they would have gathered here at the last. Livius would have come himself if the sickness hadn’t overcome him so quickly. With morbid amusement, he wondered whether his father had been disappointed or relieved Livius had been the first to succumb.

He found the old man stretched out below the autarch’s dais, one beringed hand outflung as if to claw his way up the stairs. The plague had yellowed his father’s ruddy skin and made dark the hollows of his eyes, but the old man’s expression maintained an air of impatient irritation, like he’d taken death’s measure and found it wanting.

‘It seems fitting.’ Livius stepped over his father’s corpse, glancing up at the throne. ‘All your schemes and intrigues, and here you are, still sprawled at the autarch’s feet.’

At least I tried, boy.

‘Fair, fair,’ Livius nodded. The reply was typical of his father – when the old man deigned to notice Livius at all it was usually to berate him.

Sharp as a spoon, this one. You never had the mind for intrigue.

‘And yet, here I am.’ Livius clucked his tongue. ‘And there you are.’

And why do you think that is, boy?

Livius swallowed, unsure. How had he been the only one to survive?

Think you fought off the plague all on your own? That you were spared because you’re special? His father’s chuckle was thick and wet. You weren’t worth killing.

‘I’ll show you what I’m worth.’ Livius turned away from his father to climb the dais steps.

The Autarch of Uliashtai sat slumped on the edge of his throne, awash in gold embroidered robes now far too large for his plague-ravaged frame. His breastplate was embossed with silver cogs, arranged in a way that they seemed to be turning as Livius approached. Next to the meticulous finery of Uliashtai’s ruler, Livius seemed a beggar in tattered linen, his doublet stained with blood and bile.

The autarch had been a hero in his youth, fighting alongside his niece, Empress Xerastia, even as Chaos devoured the Mortal Realms. He had slain warlords and beasts, set scores of daemons and monsters screeching into oblivion. Beloved of the gods, the autarch had risen high, wielding powers beyond mortal comprehension, but the fall of the Steamgird had broken him, left the man bitter and paranoid. Instead of marching forth, the autarch had retreated from the world, locking his court inside the palace’s ancient walls.

‘And none of it saved you,’ Livius said, his voice little more than a whisper. His barest touch was enough to send the autarch’s body toppling down the stairs. Livius froze, mortified, but the blank faces of the dead held no admonition. He let out a long slow breath, then sat in the autarch’s throne.

He grinned down at his father. ‘Do you see me now?’

But the old man would never see, none of them would.

Livius had dreamed of this day. Now, he saw how foolish, how worthless it all was. He drew up his legs, pressed his face to his knees, and wept.

He had no idea how long he sat that way, but he must have fallen asleep, for a great hammering snatched him from fevered dreams. He stumbled to his feet, almost pitching headlong from the dais.

It had to be Skayne Bloodtongue, Chaos come at last. But no, the palace was still sealed, he would have felt if the gates were breached. Widowbane in hand, Livius stumbled down the stairs, stepping gingerly over his father. Thankfully, the old man remained quiet.

At the far balcony, Livius saw dark fingers of smoke curling up from inside the city walls. Bloodtongue’s creatures rampaged through the churning gears of the outer city, their progress marked by flashes of green-and-yellow balefire as they battled both the defenders and each other.

Livius glanced down, surprised to see not daemons, but a great mass of people below. Men and women in legionary gold assaulted the palace gate with a makeshift ram, to little effect. After a few moments, a robed man stepped from the crowd. Rolling back his sleeves to display dark skin inlaid with the delicate filigree of the Gilded Order, he brandished a crystal staff at the gate, unleashing a torrent of jagged lines.

But the gate was more than just iron and bronze, it was blood, and bone, and flesh – the souls of a thousand thousand Lantic heroes. They would not yield.

Livius called out, but his voice was too weak, so he staggered back to the throne, gripping the armrests with nervous strength. There were people below, his people, and the Lantic didn’t abandon their own.

He concentrated, willing the gears to turn, the gate to open. For a moment, he feared his blood was too weak, that the ancestor gears would fail to recognise him. Then, slowly, grudgingly, they began to move.

It was torture. Livius could feel their gaze upon him – queens, kings, autarchs, emperors, empresses in a long line stretching back to the beginning. Who was he to sit upon their throne? To command their obedience? Livius felt naked, exposed, worse than worthless.

Then came the pain. Their disdain raged through him like cold fire. Livius must have blacked out, because the next thing he knew there were people in the throne room.

Strong hands lifted him from the throne. ‘This one’s alive.’

Livius opened his eyes to see a tall, sharp-faced woman in the uniform of a Lantic captain. She wore a greatsword strapped to her back, and although her armour was battered to almost shapelessness, Livius could just make out the markings of the empress’ personal legion on her breastplate.

She set him down with surprising gentleness, tipping a canteen of warm water to his lips.

Livius drank greedily. The Gilded mage stepped into his vision, kneeling to offer a hunk of stale bread.

‘Careful, careful,’ the sorcerer’s voice seemed to resonate within Livius’ thoughts. ‘You’ll make yourself sick.’

‘You opened the gates?’ the captain asked.

Livius’ mouth was too full to respond, so he just nodded.

‘What happened here?’ the sorcerer asked.

Livius swallowed a large mouthful. ‘Plague.’

‘Strange.’ The sorcerer pursed his lips. ‘There was no sickness in the city.’

‘What does it matter?’ the captain said angrily. ‘They’re dead. And we’ll join them if we don’t keep moving.’

The sorcerer ignored her. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Livius. I am – was part of the autarch’s court.’ He took a bite, then looked around. ‘Now, I don’t know.’

‘We don’t have time for this,’ the captain said.

The sorcerer pressed a hand to his chest. ‘I’m Kaslon, and my impatient friend here is Captain Sulla.’

Livius stood unsteadily, nodding his thanks to them both.

‘Where is the Underway?’ Sulla asked.

‘Careful, that’s no way to address your emperor,’ Kaslon said.

Sulla took a step back, her mouth working. ‘You can’t mean…?’

‘He is of the blood.’ Kaslon leant on his odd crystal staff to offer Livius a deep bow. ‘Do you know of any other surviving nobility, captain?’

Livius swallowed, feeling his stomach clench. How many times had he dreamed of this? In the quiet, desperate moments when his parents’ expectations pressed in around him, when embarrassment burned like fire in his cheeks, when his failures and disappointments piled so high they seemed to blot out the sun? He’d fantasised about becoming emperor, but not like this, never like this.

Thankfully, he was able to lurch away before the vomit came boiling up. When he turned back, red-faced and ashamed, they were all kneeling.

‘Emperor Livius,’ Sulla said, her tone forced. ‘Your people need you.’

Kaslon

Kaslon stared into the latticed depths of the staff, drinking in the jagged interplay of its facets. He could feel the hint of a pattern lurking just beyond his ability to grasp. He would not repeat the Order’s mistakes. The masters had been unable to accept anything outside the narrow bounds of their logic. But knowledge had no bounds, no limits. Kaslon understood that now, just as he understood that to truly defeat Chaos he would first need to understand it.

‘They’re almost here.’ The hard rasp of Sulla’s voice broke Kaslon from his contemplation. She was leaning over the throne room balcony, scowling out at the city beyond.

He glanced up, frowning. ‘And the refugees?’

‘Still coming,’ she said with only the barest of flinches. The city guard had spread word of the Underway, and with the Autarch’s Palace lying open the people of Uliashtai had come in their hundreds and thousands, desperate to escape Bloodtongue’s creatures.

‘We must close the gates,’ Kaslon said almost without thinking.

Sulla’s scowl was sharp enough to etch glass. ‘And abandon our people?’

‘Better than losing everyone.’ Kaslon glanced at Livius.

The new emperor frowned, looking as if he was about to faint. Although eating had restored some of the young noble’s colour, it had done nothing to dispel the nervous flightiness that seemed to cling to him like a miasma.

‘I don’t think I can,’ Livius stammered. ‘Close the gate, I mean.’

‘What?’ Sulla asked.

‘I’m sorry,’ Livius said. ‘Opening the Palace nearly killed me.’

‘Then it’s settled.’ Sulla gave Kaslon a hard look. ‘The gates stay open.’

‘And what will we do when Bloodtongue’s monsters come shrieking down the Underway after us? We can’t outdistance them, not with all these people.’ Kaslon laid a hand on Livius’ shoulder, threading his words with lines of compulsion. He could feel them loop around the young noble’s scattered thoughts, then draw tight, leaving no room for fear or doubt. ‘You must try, emperor.’

‘I will try,’ Livius repeated.

Sulla made a disgusted rattle in the back of her throat. ‘I can’t believe a Lantic Emperor would–’

‘There’s more than honour at stake, here.’ Kaslon spoke over her. ‘The empire is dead, captain. Now isn’t the time to cling to tired doctrines, we’re facing extinction.’ He flicked his hand at the burning city visible beyond the balcony. ‘More than extinction, they will erase us from history.’

Sulla’s hands made white-knuckled fists at her side. ‘And what will we tell those inside the palace who have friends and family outside?’

‘Tell them it’s a necessary sacrifice,’ Kaslon said. ‘They’re Lantic, they’ll understand.’

Sulla looked to Livius, who trembled under the captain’s gaze.

‘I’m the emperor.’ The young noble’s voice was as thin as gold foil. ‘I’m responsible.’

‘Fine.’ Sulla flicked an angry hand towards the crowd gathered in the autarch’s court. ‘Then you tell them you’re leaving the city to die.’

With a terrified nod, Livius took a few steps up the dais.

Kaslon summoned the power for a spell, already tugging at the threads that would give Livius courage, but a strong hand fell on his shoulder, the grip painfully tight.

‘I looked the other way in the plaza.’ Sulla’s breath was hot on Kaslon’s ear. ‘I won’t again. We’re Lantic, mage, we stand free – to the end.’

Kaslon felt a momentary flash of irritation. It seemed the captain and her soldiers were too strong-willed to succumb to arcane compulsion. He gave a sour nod, and let the power bleed away.

‘I’m glad we have an understanding.’ The pressure on Kaslon’s shoulder relaxed.

‘My people,’ Livius looked like a caged animal, shoulders high, gaze darting around the chamber. ‘You don’t know me, but I am your emperor.’

That got the crowd’s attention.

‘Bloodtongue’s horde is inside the walls. They’ll be here soon.’ Livius swallowed, glancing at Kaslon for support. ‘We… we must flee. If I don’t close the palace gates now, Bloodtongue will–’

‘We can’t abandon the city!’ Shouts trickled from the back of the chamber. ‘My brother is still outside!’

Livius blanched. ‘I know we’re Lantic, but maybe just this once we could–’

‘Coward!’ The crowd took up the cry. ‘Traitor!’

‘I order you to flee!’ Livius was red-faced now, his voice high and desperate. ‘I’m your emperor. I’m your emperor!’

‘Are you satisfied?’ Kaslon pulled free of Sulla’s grasp. ‘The emperor has made his choice, or don’t you follow orders any more, captain?’

Sulla’s glare was deadly, but she gave a tight nod. ‘I’ll have my people restore order, explain why we need to close the palace gates. If there’s one thing the Lantic people understand, it’s sacrifice.’

Livius collapsed into the autarch’s throne, looking ready to vomit again.

‘Fine speech, boy.’ Sulla stalked off, abandoning all pretence of deference.

‘You made the right choice.’ Kaslon stepped up to lay a hand on Livius’ arm.

‘What does it matter?’ Livius put his face in his hands. ‘What does any of it matter?’

‘You showed bravery,’ Kaslon said, acutely aware the court was full of the corpses of Livius’ friends and family. He glanced at the autarch’s throne. ‘But there are trials, yet.’

‘The gates.’ Livius’ face crumpled.

‘You are emperor,’ Kaslon said.

Like a man facing his own execution, Livius straightened, fingers curling around the toothed cogs set into the arms of the throne. Shudders wracked the young noble’s body. Sweat broke out on his face as he convulsed upon the autuarch’s throne, a thin line of blood trickling from his nose.

Kaslon wanted to reach out, to use his powers to aid the young man, but the ancestor gears would not turn for sorcery. Only blood would tell.

So he waited, hands tight upon the staff, his throat dry as the iron desert.

Livius cried out, his back arching so sharply Kaslon feared it might snap, but, at last, the great gears began to move.

The first cries rose from outside the palace. At first surprised, they quickly turned furious as the gates slammed down.

Jaw clenched so tightly he feared his teeth might crack, Kaslon helped Livius down from the throne. The young noble was barely conscious, his feet slipping on the smooth marble stairs.

‘See, father, see,’ Livius muttered as Kaslon half carried him from the throne room and down through the spiralling galleries that led to the Underway.

Sulla’s soldiers had begun herding the refugees towards their escape. They marched down the stairs, shoulders hunched, muttering and surly. Grim men and women in tarnished legionary gold moved among the crowd. Their gazes raked over Kaslon, sharp as blades, but he paid them no mind. The Lantic soldiers would do their duty.

With a tight frown Kaslon followed, knowing that if he looked back, even for a moment, all was lost.

Runes lit the vaulted shadows of the Underway. Constructed long ago as a show of friendship between man and duardin, it burrowed beneath Chamon’s metal skin in a perfect line, connecting Uliashtai to the hold of their old allies in the Lofnir lodge.

Kaslon could feel it in his bones: the meticulous care in every line, every column perfectly arranged, nothing out of place. It was like standing between mirrors, flawless reflections retreating to infinity. The Gilded Order had worked hand in hand with the Auric Runemasters of the duardin, just as they had on the Gilded Steamgird, the great wall that had protected the empire since time immemorial. That was before the Lofnir lodge had betrayed them, brought the Steamgird crashing down and the Lantic Empire along with it.

The tunnel was quiet save for the echoing footfalls of the refugee column, silent now that the wails of those left behind had faded into the distance. The survivors clumped together in ragged bunches, eyes downcast as they hurried along, blind to the marvels around them. Massive metal statues lined the tunnel – heroes of the Empire, their armour picked out in golden foil, their shoulders broad and unbowed. Their eyes seemed to follow Kaslon as he passed, the heat of their steely gaze like a fire at his back.

He grunted. Let them judge him; the empire they knew was gone.

Kaslon gripped his staff tighter, leaning on it for support. The answer lay within its prismatic depths, he was sure of it. The power to save his people, to master Chaos. Kaslon knew he could find the truth.

He just needed more time.

Livius

‘We must stop,’ Livius said. It felt like days since he’d last rested, perhaps longer – they had been unable to mark time in the unchanging twilight of the Underway.

‘The Azyr Realmgate is but a few hours’ march,’ Kaslon said, shielding his eyes from the bright coppery sun overhead, as the refugees emerged from the Lofnir lodge’s massive gate in a staggering mass, blinking against the glare.

‘What use is reaching it if half our number are dead from exhaustion?’ Livius glanced back along the ragged column. He could see the exhaustion dragging in their every step, the quiet desperation that hung about them like a fog.

‘I agree with Livius,’ Sulla said. ‘We lost too many in the lodge. To press on would be suicide.’

Livius shivered at the memory of the Lofnir lodge’s vast empty halls and vacant chambers, its duardin inhabitants having abandoned the great bronze citadel in their mad lust for ur-gold. The channels and sluices had overflowed, molten iron spilling onto the broad thoroughfares, drowning the duardin halls and forges in a mass of cooling slag. Many of the refugees had been overcome by the fumes, tumbling from the high bridges to disappear into the deep red of Chamon’s lifeblood. Livius would have been one of them if Sulla hadn’t ordered her legionaries to carry him. Thankfully, the lodge was stifling, and Livius’ humiliated flush was mistaken for heat stroke.

‘If Bloodtongue catches us, we’ll lose everyone,’ Kaslon said.

‘It would take him days to cross the Ringing Hills overland.’ Sulla stepped up to glare down at the mage. ‘And the palace gates are barred, remember?’

They looked to Livius. Responsibility hung like a noose around his neck, slowly strangling him. He chewed his lower lip, glancing at the jagged horizon. ‘Is that the Steamgird?’

Sulla grunted. ‘What’s left of it.’

‘We’ll rest there,’ Livius said.

Perhaps an hour later they collapsed in the derelict shadow of the Gilded Steamgird, its broken walls still bristling with the shattered remnants of cannons, arc casters, galvanic trip hammers, organ guns, and other war dynamos.

‘The empire will never see its like again.’ Sulla sat next to Livius, passing him a canteen.

The water was warm and tasted of rust, but Livius drank greedily before passing it back. ‘The Lofnir, why do you think they did it?’

‘Why do duardin do anything?’ Sulla shrugged. ‘Their reason doesn’t concern me, only their actions. And they will pay for those.’

The barely leashed anger in Captain Sulla’s voice made Livius uncomfortable. It reminded him too much of his mother. So he changed the subject. ‘You fought with Empress Xerastia?’

Sulla straightened a bit. ‘I did.’

‘What was she like?’

‘Xerastia?’ She sat quietly for a long while. ‘She was a hero.’

‘I’m sorry about back at the palace, I just couldn’t see any other way.’ He glanced away. ‘I’m no hero.’

‘I think the time for heroes is long past.’ She gave a tight smile, then clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Now get some rest, emperor. It might be your last chance.’

It seemed like Livius had just closed his eyes when he was shaken awake, but the sun was already slipping below the horizon.

Kaslon loomed over him. ‘He comes – Skayne Bloodtongue.’

Livius jolted up, rubbing his eyes. ‘Through the tunnel? So quickly?’

Kaslon frowned. ‘No. He comes overland.’

‘Impossible.’ A nearby shadow resolved into Captain Sulla. ‘The Ringing Hills would take days to cross.’

‘With Chaos, nothing is impossible,’ Kaslon said with a thin smile. ‘Bloodtongue flies. He hunts us with a small force.’

‘How small a force?’ Sulla asked, one hand drifting to the hilt of her greatsword.

‘I don’t know,’ Kaslon replied, gaze flicking to his staff. ‘I can only sense the echoes of his coming.’

Sulla made a fist, her grin as fierce as it was sudden. ‘This is our chance.’

Livius blinked.

‘Don’t you see?’ she said. ‘Bloodtongue overreaches. My soldiers and I can set an ambush, cut the head from the serpent!’

‘You may be all that remains of your legion,’ Kaslon said, his words taking on a deep, resonant quality. They seemed to slip inside Livius’ skull to echo through his thoughts. ‘We can’t afford to risk–’

‘I don’t follow your orders, mage. And if you try to enchant me again, I’ll break your legs and leave you for Bloodtongue.’ Sulla’s voice was low and threatening. She looked at Livius, her expression furious as she thrust her chin at Kaslon. ‘I saw it back at the city, this one’s been using sorcery to get his way.’

‘It was necessary.’ Kaslon crossed his arms. ‘Just like it’s necessary that we stay together.’

Livius glanced between them, wanting to run even though he knew there was no escape. Back at the palace, when Kaslon had spoken, Livius had felt, if not heroic, then brave, at least. He’d felt like the mage believed in him, like they all believed in him.

Just another lie.

A strange calmness settled on Livius. What did it matter? There was no escape. What did any of it matter? The only real choice that remained was how they would die.

Livius looked to Sulla, and nodded. ‘Go.’

She turned away, already shouting orders.

‘She’s going to get them all killed,’ Kaslon said.

‘They want to die like heroes,’ Livius said quietly. ‘I’d be a poor emperor if I didn’t let them.’

‘We should make sure their sacrifice isn’t in vain.’ Disdain whetted Kaslon’s words to razor sharpness, but the resonance was gone from his voice.

Livius took a long, slow breath, wondering if he should have gone with Sulla and put an end to his sad charade of a reign, but knowing he was still too much of a coward. ‘Wake the others. We make for the realmgate.’

Sulla

The fury shrieked as Sulla pinioned it with her greatsword, its filthy claws slashing bare inches from her face. Bloodtongue had brought with him a flock of the batlike humanoids, their membranous wings propelling them through the air. Sulla had fought monsters and daemons before – red-skinned devils with blades of pitted steel, great bronze-clad monstrosities that scattered men like pebbles – but none of it had prepared her for the speed and viciousness of the furies’ attack.

They clawed through the air like vultures, their high, teeth-gritting shrieks seeming to bore into Sulla’s skull as they darted through the dusky shadows. The first volley of crossbow bolts had downed a score of the monsters, but not nearly enough. Men and women fell, gutted by jagged talons, blood gurgling from slashed throats and ruined mouths.

With a snarl, Sulla twisted her blade, ripping it free from the monster in a spray of stinking ichor. It fell away to flop on the ground like a landed fish. Her soldiers reacted quickly, forming a rough phalanx to fend off the furies’ attack with spear and pike while the crossbows reloaded. Ardahir stood among them, shouting encouragement as he waved the broken banner pole above his head. The sight conjured a wild joy in Sulla’s breast. She was no leader, no politician, spending lives like coin; she was a soldier, she belonged in the press.

Here, at least, everything made sense.

Something flashed through her peripheral vision and she pivoted, bringing her blade around in a tight arc. Another monster came diving down, clawed hands and feet flexing to snatch Sulla up. Her slash left the fury with bleeding stumps and her backswing hammered it to the ground.

She twisted as another fury shrieked by, letting the sword’s momentum carry the blade around in a looping cut. It struck one of the creature’s wings, cleaving through muscle and bone. The thing’s shrieking ceased as she swept the sword down to divide its body neatly in half.

Panting, she scanned the ruins of the Steamgird, stalking through the scaffolded shadows, her blade at the ready. Kaslon had said the furies were Bloodtongue’s hunting hounds, but where was the huntsman?

It was the Chaos sorcerer’s armour that caught Sulla’s eye. It glittered like cut glass in the light of the setting sun, oil-slick colours sliding across the laminated scales. Skayne Bloodtongue floated over the battle on a disc of barbed flesh, watching with an air of detached interest.

Sulla crept closer, sheathing her sword to work her fingers into the carved runes of one of the cracked pillars of the Steamgird. Bloodtongue hovered perhaps ten yards above her, apparently blind to all but the desperate combat below. It seemed strange he hadn’t yet intervened, but Sulla was beyond questioning the motives of a madman.

The shouts of Sulla’s comrades lent urgency to her climb. Every pained cry was a knife dragged across her flesh. There would be a reckoning. Bloodtongue, the Winnower, the Lofnir lodge, even Sigmar. Somehow, she would find a way to make them pay.

The jagged metal cut Sulla’s fingers, hot runnels of blood trickling down her forearms. At last, she reached a ledge above Bloodtongue, who continued to hover above the battle. There was no time to judge the distance, so she drew her blade and jumped.

The Chaos sorcerer turned at the last moment, his eyebrows raised in an expression that seemed more amused than surprised. Sulla’s strike skittered from Bloodtongue’s armour in a spray of chromatic sparks. It was as if she’d struck an iron wall. Sulla rebounded from the sorcerer, her arms flailing as she tipped backwards through empty air.

Bloodtongue caught her by the shoulder. The sorcerer’s grip was light, but Sulla felt as if she’d been dropped into a forge, multicoloured flames licking across her skin, her every muscle contorted in agony.

Bloodtongue pursed his lips, inspecting Sulla as if she were a piece of fine metalwork. She wanted to hack his wizened face to pieces, but her limbs hung loose and liquid at her sides. It took all her strength just to maintain a hold on her greatsword.

Bloodtongue grinned at her, gesturing towards the packed ranks of Lantic veterans.

Sulla followed the line of his pointing finger, unable to do more than snarl as the realisation hit home. Bloodtongue’s monstrous hounds hadn’t been hunting Sulla’s soldiers, they’d been herding them.

Slowly, the Chaos sorcerer opened his outstretched hand, a ball of roiling balefire glowing between his spread fingers. Then, like a doting grandfather about to share a secret, he winked at Sulla.

Livius

‘We have to help them.’ Livius glowered at Kaslon. The surviving refugees crowded in a ragged circle around them, a few thousand, perhaps less – all that remained of the Lantic Empire. They muttered, casting glances at the battle taking place a few miles distant.

‘She’s dead. They’re all dead,’ Kaslon said.

‘Because we abandoned them.’ Livius glanced at the mage’s staff. It was unsettling how the thing seemed to shift and change, the outline blurring as if seen through warped glass.

Kaslon’s expression turned strange. ‘I thought you understood.’

Livius felt a nervous flutter in his chest as he regarded the mage. The Gilded Order were supposed to serve the empire, but Kaslon seemed different – wilder, less restrained. He glanced towards the distant shadow of the Azyr Realmgate. How easy it would be to just turn his back on Sulla. Still, Livius only had to look at the tired column of refugees to remember the screams of those they’d abandoned back at the palace.

Somehow worse was his memory of the cold scrutiny of the ancestor gears as he’d slunk into the Underway, the first emperor in Lantic history to flee without a fight. Not for the first time, Livius wished the plague hadn’t spared him. He was no emperor, no hero. From the moment he’d sat upon the autarch’s throne, every decision had been a mistake. There was no place for him among the ancestor gears, no glorious page in the Lantic histories. If he survived it would be as an embarrassment, the emperor who let everything fall to ruin.

Better to die, to be forgotten.

‘My people, hear me!’ He faced the gathered refugees, pointing Widowbane at the Azyr Realmgate. ‘There lies safety.’

It took all Livius’ willpower to keep his arm from trembling as he turned to the battle. ‘And there our comrades fight alone. I won’t think less of any who wish to press on to the realmgate, but I am going to stand with my people, my empire.’

The refugees were all watching him now. Kaslon gave an irritated grunt, but Livius pressed on. ‘We are of gold and steel, of fire and light. We are Lantic. Although our foes may rob us of our homes, our lives, they cannot take who we are, what we stand for. Not unless we let them.’

It was a poor speech, cobbled together from some third-dynasty romances Livius had read as a child. For a long moment, the refugees stood in silence, then, from the back came a ragged cheer. It spread like wildfire. People shook their makeshift weapons and roared, already streaming towards the battle.

Livius took a step back, surprised. ‘It worked.’

‘Of course it worked.’ Kaslon snapped back. ‘They’re Lantic.’

Livius turned towards the mage. ‘And you?’

‘I can hardly go through the realmgate alone.’ The sorcerer’s sour expression was spoiled by a slight upturn at the corner of his mouth. ‘What would I tell Sigmar?’

Livius clapped him on the shoulder, grinning despite the terror twisting in his gut. He was going to die. They were all going to die.

Kaslon winced as a flash of distant balefire lit the darkening sky an unhealthy green. ‘They’re not going to make it in time.’

‘Can you?’ Livius asked.

The mage gave a tight nod.

‘Will you be able to hold Bloodtongue until we arrive?’

‘On my own?’ Kaslon’s gaze flicked to the staff. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Do it.’ Livius’ mouth was dry, his fingers buzzing. What did it matter? The empire was gone, better to disappear with it.

Kaslon gripped the staff. Muttering incantations under his breath, the mage conjured a thread of glowing silver. It streaked from Kaslon’s outstretched hand towards the distant battle, straight as a surveyor’s line. Kaslon glanced back at Livius, then, with a pained expression, tugged on the line and was whisked away.

With a deep breath, Livius jogged after. He knew he should be terrified – death was almost certain, now – but the only feeling he could summon was relief.

It would all be over soon.

Kaslon

Kaslon could feel the heat of Bloodtongue’s power. The Chaos sorcerer burned like a tiny star, his aura flickering with bursts of mad energy as he showered the Lantic soldiers with gouts of balefire.

Kaslon hit the ground at a run, feet already tracing lines and vertices. He sketched a triangle ward to shield the soldiers from Bloodtongue’s coarse sorcery. There was still strength in the sacred geometry, more now that Kaslon understood its limitations.

A golden pyramid sprung up around the surviving Lantic legionaries, Bloodtongue’s balefire flickering across its sharp edges. The Chaos sorcerer redoubled his effort, brilliant blue-green flames so bright Kaslon had to look away.

The crystal staff was like a living thing, squirming in Kaslon’s grasp. He could sense the power within, galaxies of untapped energy, but there was too much risk. There was a way to circumscribe the maelstrom, to use Chaos without being used in turn. Kaslon knew he could discover it.

He just needed more time.

Kaslon moved along lines and axes, shoring up his wards with more complicated shapes. Intricate polyhedrals sprang into being, their edges curling like the legs of dying insects before the fury of Bloodtongue’s arcane attack.

The Chaos sorcerer slid through the sky, bludgeoning Kaslon’s wards from every angle, the barrage of spells like stones flung without skill or finesse. As the sorcerer flitted by, Kaslon saw that he held the limp form of Captain Sulla. He could sense the weak pulse of life within her, snared by Bloodtongue’s enervating grasp.

Balefire licked around Kaslon’s feet, the heat growing painful. Blisters formed on his hands, the skin of his face hot and tight from the heat.

No matter Kaslon’s skill, the Chaos sorcerer was simply too powerful. Strangely, the realisation came tinged not with fear or sorrow, but a vague sense of disappointment. Kaslon had just begun to plumb the depths of this new understanding, just begun to grasp the infinite complexity of true sorcery.

He could not die like this.

With a snarl, Kaslon reached for the power in the staff. It came in a torrent, unbridled and uncontrollable. Kaslon did not shape the spell so much as unleash it.

Bloodtongue’s sorceries were devoured by skewed geometries of light, balefire dissipating along jagged lines and uneven vertices, warp bolts lost along twisting paths, arcing back up on themselves.

The tide of madness spread, enveloping the furies and the Lantic troops.

Kaslon could hear them screaming, mutating, but their voices were distant, little more than a fading echo against the power that roared through him. Everything was so clear. The staff was not a conduit, it was a lens, a way to better understand the truth. There could be order without balance, law without symmetry. The lack of a pattern did not preclude understanding, it only complicated it.

Kaslon tried to strike at the Chaos sorcerer, but the flying disc was too quick. Bloodtongue dodged Kaslon’s jagged warp blasts with contemptuous ease. It was like trying to crush a fly with a trebuchet. The energies in the staff were powerful, but difficult to control. Alone, Kaslon still had no chance against the Chaos sorcerer.

Except Kaslon wasn’t alone.

Shielding his eyes from the glare of balefire, Kaslon saw that Bloodtongue still held Sulla. Desperately, he set a tendril of power looping around the captain and, pressing the staff to his forehead, abandoned his wards to tear at the spell that bound Sulla.

Kaslon felt the sorcerous bindings snap a moment before a wave of arcane force knocked him tumbling backwards. There was a moment of sickening disorientation, then the ground hammered the breath from him, setting bright comets streaking across his vision.

He looked up to see Bloodtongue hovering above him. Lambent energy gathered around the sorcerer’s free hand, but Sulla was already moving. Freed of Bloodtongue’s enchantment she brought her greatsword around one-handed, hacking down not at the Chaos sorcerer, but at the disc that bore him.

Sulla’s blade bit deep. The disc wove drunkenly for a moment, then plummeted to the ground.

The roar in Kaslon’s head was replaced by ragged shouts. Dully, he turned to see a mob of refugees surge across the rubble, Livius at their head. They were met by the shambling forms of the Lantic soldiers, their bodies warped by Kaslon’s sorcery, merged with furies in an unholy amalgamation of man and beast. The burst of Chaos energy had spared only a few of the legionaries. Led by the sergeant with the broken standard, they hacked through former comrades, weeping as they did.

Screaming the names of their murdered kin, the refugees beat at the abominations with hammers, stones, axes, even bare fists, not caring that the twisted legionaries reaped a bloody harvest.

Kaslon staggered to his feet in time to see a spray of prismatic sparks. Captain Sulla howled a Lantic battle hymn as she slashed at Bloodtongue, her blade skittering from his armour. Bloodtongue flung a bolt of energy at her and it took all of Kaslon’s strength to send the blast streaking away. For all Sulla’s fury, her swings seemed to barely stagger the Chaos sorcerer. Bitterness nested in Kaslon’s breast – even now, he was too weak to defeat Bloodtongue, and without an enchanted blade, Sulla wouldn’t be able to cut through the wards that surrounded the Chaos sorcerer.

That was when Livius leapt from atop a pile of rubble. The young noble made no pretence towards self-preservation, screaming like a madman as he brought his sabre down, two-handed. With a flash of runic light, the blade sheared through the scaled plate on Bloodtongue’s shoulder.

The sorcerer reeled back, hands already bright with balefire. He raised them to strike Livius.

Head ringing, Kaslon drew on the staff, letting the mad power fill him. His skin burned, the gold filigree inlaid in his flesh glowing white hot. Screaming, Kaslon fought to leash the nested infinities, to channel them into a single word.

‘Stop!’ The word hit Bloodtongue like a spear, pinioning him for the span of a heartbeat.

Sulla threw her greatsword aside to seize the Chaos sorcerer, locking him in a great bear hug. Hair burning, she lifted Bloodtongue from the ground as Livius drove his sabre up and under the sorcerer’s ribs. The rune-inscribed steel hissed like a quenched blade as the curved tip of the sabre burst from Bloodtongue’s neck in an oily spray of blood. Livius gave the blade one last twist before drawing it forth.

Skayne Bloodtongue slid to the ground, unmoving.

Kaslon staggered to their side, catching Sulla as she bent to pick up her sword and almost collapsed. Livius slipped under her other arm.

Kaslon was relieved to see that none of the corrupted legionaries had survived, although the rubble was strewn with many Lantic corpses.

They limped towards the survivors – about a dozen soldiers and a few score refugees.

‘You came for us,’ Sulla whispered through blackened lips. ‘I’m sorry for doubting you – both of you.’

‘We don’t abandon our own,’ Livius said.

Kaslon let out a long breath. ‘No, I suppose we don’t.’

Sulla

The Azyr Realmgate was huge beyond reckoning. It rose from the mist-shrouded valley like the cenotaph of a long forgotten god, the few ragged bits of the Gilded Steamgird that surrounded it seeming little more than a child’s toys strewn about the coppery hills. It glowed with a soft, azure light, an intricate arch of steel standing without apparent regard for logic or gravity. The gate itself was inlaid with veins of metal filigree, gold and silver twining between polished gems to form bright points and constellations, a mirror of the night sky above.

It was almost dawn when they reached the gate, a small, shambling mass of exhausted folk, threadbare as their clothes. Sulla leaned against one of the massive steel columns that formed the base of the arch, using her greatsword as a prop. Livius murmured encouraging words to the few survivors while Kaslon limped forward to press a hand to the gate itself.

Sulla regarded her companions, chewing her already ragged lip. As much as she hated to admit it, she’d misjudged them. She’d thought Kaslon heartless, and Livius a coward and a fool, but it had been Sulla who’d led her people into a trap, and Sulla who’d failed to save them. Bitterness burned like a coal in her breast as she scowled up at the realmgate. No, it had been Sigmar’s failure, Sigmar’s betrayal that had done this to them.

Sulla was just a soldier, he was a god.

‘Captain,’ Ardahir came limping up, still leaning on the blackened haft of his banner pole. ‘Can I talk to you about something?’

Sulla glanced up, nodding.

‘It’s about the mage.’ He glanced at Kaslon. ‘I’m not sure exactly what I saw, but during the battle, I swear he–’

The realmgate crackled with cobalt lighting. With a stricken cry, Kaslon stumbled back, a smoking hand clutched to his chest.

Sulla pushed off the wall, at his side in a moment, Livius on her heels. ‘What is it?’

‘The realmgate.’ Kaslon’s words were almost a sob. ‘He’s barred it.’

‘I don’t understand. Who?’ Livius asked.

‘Who do you think?’ Sulla didn’t even bother to hide her anger.

Kaslon’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Livius crumpled to the ground, knees drawn up to his chest and face pressed into his hands as he rocked back and forth.

The scream rose from deep within Sulla’s chest, rattling up her throat to burst forth in an inarticulate roar – part rage, part despair. To come so far, to overcome so much only to fall to this final betrayal. She swung her greatsword at the realmgate, eyes burning, her fury lending strength to the blow.

Sulla’s blade snapped in half.

With a snarl she tossed it aside, beating at the massive steel gate with her fists, but either Sigmar didn’t hear, or he didn’t care.

‘Captain. Captain!’ Ardahir shouted.

Sulla turned on him, fists raised, but stopped as she saw what the sergeant was pointing at.

Dawn set the copper hills aglow. Arrayed upon the sloping ridgeline was a vast host. Weapons glittered in the sunlight, horses stomped and snorted as armoured knights jostled for position. Banners snapped in the morning breeze, tall and proud. It seemed impossible – there was the golden lion of the Thunnic Legion, the sparrow and sun of the Khemal Legion, even the snarling silver dragon of Eshunna, the city where Sulla had grown up.

She blinked back tears, her throat thick. They’d finally come for her. The empire didn’t abandon its own.

Then she noticed the eight-pointed stars, the streaks of blood and ichor across the banners, the leering faces, the dark forms of daemons and beasts among the gathered host. At the head was Empress Xerastia’s banner, affixed to a cross of black iron with General Kelephon’s severed head spiked at the top.

At last, Sulla understood. ‘It’s him. He’s come.’

Livius stood, rubbing his eyes. ‘Who?’

‘Azakul the Winnower.’

She knelt to retrieve her broken greatsword. The few surviving refugees huddled in a tight mass, Ardahir and his soldiers at the fore. Unable to even muster the strength to weep, they watched the horde advance, marching down the coppery slope in a maelstrom of waving blades and howling faces.

The forerunners of the host stopped well out of bowshot, not that Sulla or the others had any arrows left. As if by some silent signal, the uproar ceased, the horde parting as Azakul the Winnower emerged.

He came slowly, striding across the broken ground with the uneven, marionette gait Sulla remembered, his flail flung almost casually over one shoulder. He halted a few dozen paces away, then extended one hand and beckoned Sulla closer.

‘I think he wants to talk,’ Livius said.

‘We don’t want to hear anything that bastard has to say,’ Sergeant Ardahir barked back.

‘What choice do we have?’ Kaslon asked.

Sulla realised they were all looking at her. She gave a savage grin. ‘Maybe he wants to surrender.’

No one laughed, but she hadn’t expected them to. ‘Sergeant, keep order until we come back.’

Ardahir’s frown cut deep lines across his scarred face, but he gave a quick nod.

The Winnower spread his arms as she, Kaslon and Livius approached. They stopped half a dozen paces away.

‘Come to finish what you started?’ Sulla asked.

‘Yes.’ The Winnower’s voice was surprisingly soft. With a sigh, he removed his helmet, revealing an unexpectedly mild face – small and round-cheeked with a weak chin and a widow’s peak of thinning brown hair – more like what Sulla would’ve expected from a clerk than a bloody-handed warlord. She found herself staring at the Chaos lord’s unremarkable features. The stories said he never removed his armour, and now Sulla knew why. Only Azakul’s eyes hinted at his true nature. Deep set, they were as dark as coal, but caught the light like an animal’s, flashing yellow as the warlord regarded Sulla and her companions. ‘Well, come on, then,’ Livius shouted. ‘Kill us!’

‘Kill you?’ The Winnower laughed, rocking back on his heels. ‘And waste such talent?’

Sulla spat at his feet. ‘Fine, we’ll kill you.’

‘Ah, but you can’t.’ The Winnower nodded back at his warhost. ‘Look, there – not a single one of them doesn’t want me dead. But they don’t have the strength. So they must bide their time, just as you must.’

‘You murdered my empress,’ Sulla said.

‘Xerastia was a worthy foe, I drank many toasts to her.’ The Winnower pressed a gauntleted hand to his side. ‘You were there. You saw. I fought her face to face, no trickery, no guile.’

‘What of our people?’ Kaslon spoke for the first time, his voice tentative, unsure.

The Winnower laughed again. ‘Look upon my host, mage. I count many more of your people among them than that paltry band cowering behind you.’

‘Traitors,’ Sulla snapped back.

‘Are they?’ the Winnower asked. ‘Traitors to what? To the empire that failed them? The gods that abandoned them? No, captain, it is they who were betrayed. I offer them a chance for justice, for vengeance, just as I offer it to you.’ He turned, arms spread as if to embrace his host. ‘All are here because they wish to be.’

Sulla could summon no reply. She wanted to charge the Winnower, to work her broken blade into the cracks in his armour and carve out his twisted heart, but she knew she was too tired, too weak.

‘Why us?’ Livius asked.

‘Bloodtongue was a senile old fool, clinging to scraps of power. With him gone, nothing stands in my way.’ The Winnower brushed back a loose lock of hair, an unnervingly human gesture. ‘You have fought, you have triumphed, the chaff has fallen away.’

‘You offer nothing but madness,’ Kaslon said.

The Winnower straightened. ‘I offer the truth. Not the gods’ truth, but your truth. I think you have already seen the promise, mage. I can help you understand, give you time to explore realms of which you’ve never even dreamed.’

Kaslon’s hands tightened on his staff, his expression troubled.

‘And me?’ Livius strode over to stare up at the Chaos lord, seemingly unafraid. ‘What do you offer me, mighty Azakul?’

The Winnower knelt, coming face to face with the young noble. ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

He held up a hand, fingers spread. ‘You will live or die as you choose, absent of judgement or expectation. I offer you the chance to leave your past behind, to tear free of the smothering weave of history.’

Livius took a surprised step back. ‘What of the others?’

‘I would be a fool to turn away such fine prospects.’ The Winnower stood. ‘The choice is theirs. The choice is always theirs. Unlike the coward who cowers behind this realmgate, my gods do not abandon their true servants.’

Sulla glanced at Kaslon, then Livius. They had stood by her, fought by her side. She owed them far more loyalty than she did Sigmar.

‘We could rebuild the empire.’ Kaslon broke the silence.

‘Or not,’ Livius said.

Sulla knuckled her brow, unsure.

Azakul crossed his arms. ‘Follow me, captain, and you’ll have the chance to kill more followers of Chaos than you ever did fighting for your empire.’

Sulla met her companions’ gazes, knowing they were thinking the same as she. Would it be better to die alone, unavenged and unremembered, or risk everything? The choice never really changed.

‘After all we’ve done, all we can yet do for the empire,’ Kaslon seemed to draw strength from the pronouncement, standing taller, ‘to throw our lives away would be the true betrayal.’

‘What does it matter?’ Livius massaged the back of his neck, wincing. ‘Xerastia, the autarch, the Masters of the Gilded Order, they all died, and for what? No one will remember them, no one will care. Whatever is left of the Lantic Empire is there.’ He gestured at the Winnower’s horde.

‘So that’s it, then?’ Sulla asked, looking at Livius and Kaslon in turn. ‘We join him?’

Slowly, they both nodded.

She glanced at the Winnower. ‘This doesn’t mean I won’t kill you.’

‘I would expect nothing less,’ Azakul replied.

The ritual was surprisingly painless. There was nothing to renounce, nothing to swear to, the Winnower simply looked into each of their eyes, one by one. His gaze seemed to bore into Sulla’s soul, but she stared back, daring him to doubt her conviction.

After a long moment he nodded. ‘You are finally ready.’

He extended a hand to touch her forehead, leaving behind a tiny brand with a hiss of sizzling flesh. Strength flowed into Sulla, the pain of her wounds receding. She hadn’t realised how tired she was. Exhaustion had become a silent companion, only recognised by its absence. What few doubts remained were swept away in the rush of renewed confidence. She would see justice done, visit bloody accounting on those who had betrayed her people.

She looked at Livius and Kaslon and knew they felt the same.

They had limped out to meet Azakul the Winnower. They walked back, heads high.

Sulla spread her arms, grinning. She couldn’t wait to tell Ardahir and the others – they could march with comrades again, rejoin the Lantic Legions. The empire wasn’t gone; it had simply changed.

A hurled stone hit just above her eye, glancing off her forehead in a spray of blood. Sulla stumbled back, confused. More missiles followed, legionaries and refugees throwing masonry and hunks of slag.

‘Ungrateful.’ With a quick gesture, Kaslon raised a shield of prismatic force.

The survivors charged, their faces bent around armatures of rage, spitting blood and curses as they beat at Sulla and her companions.

She pivoted out of the way of a woman with a notched axe, coming face to face with Sergeant Ardahir.

His banner pole cracked across her shoulder in a blow that would have broken bone had Sulla not been imbued with new, unnatural vigour.

‘Die, traitor.’ There was no friendship in Ardahir’s voice, no comprehension. He had seen all that Sulla had seen, suffered all she had suffered, and yet, he still couldn’t understand. Worse, she knew he never would.

Tears stinging her eyes, Sulla slid the broken blade of her greatsword into the joint between Ardahir’s breastplate and pauldron, driving it through muscle and bone to make a red ruin of the sergeant’s chest. He fell back, blood spreading like wings across the coppery ground.

There was an azure flash, the smell of ozone. Sulla threw up an arm to shield her eyes as a bolt of lightning streaked down. When her vision cleared, Ardahir was gone, a streak of molten copper all that remained. Sulla shrieked her fury at the sky, brandishing her broken blade. But, as ever, Sigmar paid her no heed.

The few surviving refugees fled towards the realmgate, even knowing it was closed, even knowing their god cared nothing for them.

It made Sulla sick to watch.

‘After all we’ve done, all we’ve sacrificed.’ Kaslon sported a new bruise on his cheek, a shadow against his dark skin. He touched it, then winced, glaring at the refugees. ‘They wouldn’t even hear us out.’

‘What do we do?’ Livius was panting, his doublet stained with slashes of red, although judging from the two men lying at his feet, Sulla doubted any was his. ‘Azakul will massacre them.’

‘They made their choice,’ Sulla said, her voice thick. Livius was right, Azakul’s followers would revel in the slaughter. Sulla had seen it before, when Xerastia had ‘liberated’ Eshunna, Sulla’s home. The Lantic Legions had driven Chaos from the city only to find flayed skins draped across the walls like festival banners, familiar streets lined with ruined bodies. The survivors had shuffled from the ruins – eyeless, tongueless, their mangled hands outstretched, pleading for release.

And Sulla had given it to them.

‘It would be a mercy.’ Sulla’s knuckles whitened on the hilt of her broken sword. ‘We owe them that much, at least.’

‘I don’t know if I can,’ Livius said, his shoulders hunched as if to ward away a chill.

Sulla nodded at the corpses at his feet. ‘You already have.’

For once, Kaslon was silent, his expression like someone had buried a dagger in his ribs.

‘We don’t abandon our own,’ Sulla said, already striding towards the remaining refugees. She didn’t need to look back to know Livius and Kaslon followed.

Some of the refugees fought back, snarling like steelcats as they came. Sulla gave them quick deaths. Merciful, honourable deaths.

The others burned.

Kaslon’s eyes glimmered in the reflected balefire, tear tracks cutting silver lines down his cheeks. A few of the refugees ran, and Livius cut them down, crying out with each slash, one arm thrown across his face as if to blind himself to the slaughter.

They watched until the last of Kaslon’s balefire had faded, leaving nothing but blackened smears upon the realmgate. Sulla looked to Kaslon and Livius, seeing her pain mirrored in their red-rimmed gazes.

‘We did the right thing,’ Kaslon spoke slowly, as if trying to convince himself.

‘There was no place for them.’ Livius rubbed a hand across his patchy stubble. ‘Not any more.’

Sulla realised her hands were clenched at her sides, her whole body tensed as if to flee. Then, with a feeling of shaky relief, she realised they were done running, now and forever.

‘What now?’ Livius asked.

‘What I said back at the Steamgird – I was wrong,’ Sulla said. ‘The time for heroes is far from over.’

Livius blew out a shaky breath. ‘I’m no more a hero than I am an emperor.’

‘We’ll see.’ Sulla scowled at the blackened carnage. ‘I’m going to need help killing Azakul, and you’re the only two I trust.’

‘Lead on, captain.’ Kaslon gestured at the Chaos horde, leaning on his staff as if it were the only thing keeping him upright.

Together, they walked away from the Azyr Realmgate. A cheer rose from the Winnower’s horde, welcoming them home.

A COMMON GROUND

Mike Brooks

Science-fiction author Mike Brooks has a knack for bringing a touch of humanity to places where it’s usually lacking. Compassion and consideration might not be words that are commonly associated with the ruthless gangers of Necromunda, but it’s a theme that Mike skilfully explores in ‘A Common Ground’.

Goliath ganger Jaxx might be a stimm-fuelled pit fighter, but there are many reasons why he steps into the ring. When a mysterious woman offers Jaxx a chance at glory, as well as revenge against his conniving fight master, Jaxx must decide whether it’s worth the price of his life.

Krugg threw a punch at his face.

It was a sloppy, looping roundhouse, high on power but low on accuracy or efficiency. Jaxx raised his left arm, took the blow high on his ribs and clamped his arm down on it, then head, body, head as he drove his fist home repeatedly. Krugg’s nose broke on the second punch to his face, the cartilage giving way with a crunching noise, and he staggered, now blinded by tears. Jaxx kicked Krugg’s right leg out from under him, grabbed the back of the other man’s head and pulled it down into his own rising knee. Something cracked – certainly a couple of teeth, possibly the whole jaw – and Krugg slumped to the ground, out cold.

The crowd roared.

Jaxx turned on the spot, scanning his surroundings with the expert eye of a professional, assessing his situation. The melee had broken down into a number of individual brawls as fighters squared off with old rivals or new enemies against whom they wanted to prove themselves. Everyone else was still on their feet; Krugg was strong, even for a Goliath, and the crowd loved him, but he was never going to be anything more than a makeweight. He’d never learned how to fight smart, and he’d taken so many blows to the head now the odds were good that he never would. He hadn’t been much of a challenge.

The rest of the field, though… They were another matter.

Gugard ‘Harm’s’ Wei was exchanging blows with old Strong-Arm Tym. Tym was losing his hair but not his reflexes; he expertly slipped one of Wei’s punches and landed a short hook to the ribs, staggering the Orlock fighter. Grag Greffin had taken Fat Nox off his feet with some manner of trip or throw, and was now sprawled atop his larger adversary, raining blows down on his head. That didn’t look like it should take much longer to resolve, but Nox was so large it would be difficult for Grag to keep him on his back. Beyond them, the tiny form of Malady Kaw ducked a kick from the wild man known only as Kill Wrath; she looked desperately outmatched, but Jaxx knew enough about Kaw to think that contest would be evens at best.

He stole a quick look over at the owner’s box, low down and close to the action for the most exhilarating view. There was Drost Khouren, their insincere snake smile spread across their hairless face, their eyes hidden behind glare goggles and their true motives buried beneath layer upon layer of fake laughs and false concern. Khouren ran the most lucrative fights on all of Necromunda, or so rumour had it, and Jaxx could quite believe it judging by the crowd they’d pulled in today. Not just the locals, either, packed up against the wire barriers and screaming for blood. He was sure he’d seen the glittering mask of Scorpia, the infamous poison mistress of Skull Marsh, and the bright yellow coats of some of the Gamma Zone Crew.

And then there were Khouren’s companions.

One of them was some uphive nob, a striking-looking spire-type of indeterminate gender wearing the sigil of House Ko’Iron. They had asymmetrically cut, pure white hair that flowed down one side of their head, and a high-collared coat with gold brocade. Khouren’s fights would bring the high and mighty down from their gilded palaces, that was common knowledge. The other two were odder still, strange sorts even by the standards of nobles. The man was tall, pale and willow-thin, so slender it looked a strong breath could break a limb. The woman beside him was a study in opposites: not short, but certainly shorter, and she must have weighed at least three times what he did, with skin as dark as Jaxx’s own. Both wore sparkling diadems that covered their foreheads, nearly but not quite identical, but while the man’s gaze spoke of languid boredom, the woman’s was focused and intense.

Khouren was watching him. The impresario hadn’t been giving Jaxx his due, he knew that. There was no better contender to Graw Hammerhand, yet Khouren had as good as asked Jaxx to throw this fight, had told him not to even use his stimms.

That wasn’t going to happen. Jaxx was going to give this crowd a display of such violence that the outcry to see him challenge the Hammerhand would be so great not even Khouren could slither aside from it.

He took a quick, three-step run-up and punted Greffin in the head as hard as he could. The other fighter’s head snapped sideways and he slumped off Nox into the packed dirt that had soaked up the blood from so many previous bouts. Jaxx picked Greffin up, wrapped his huge arm around the other man’s throat from behind and squeezed. He was tall enough to hoist Greffin clean off his feet and hold him there, his legs jerking weakly.

It was overkill, of course, but Jaxx wanted there to be no doubt in anyone’s mind about what he was capable of. He held on to Greffin’s limp, twitching form until Fat Nox hauled his carcass back to his feet. Then, and only then, when Nox had laid eyes on him, did Jaxx let Greffin drop, staring Nox down all the while.

Nox pumped his stimms and charged.

He had to. The whole crowd had just seen Jaxx save him from a beating. Nox had to show, right here and now, that he was the better fighter, that he hadn’t needed saving.

Jaxx’s adrenaline spiked, but he didn’t hit his own stimms. He had one dose, and he wasn’t going to waste it on Nox. He set his feet, drew his right fist back as if to receive the bull rush, and then at the last moment threw himself bodily at Nox’s feet instead.

Nox’s boot caught Jaxx in the ribs, a sharp flash of pain, but Nox couldn’t arrest his momentum: he tripped and landed hard on his face, the breath flying out of him with a stentorian grunt. Jaxx scrambled back up and threw himself onto the other Goliath’s back, smothering him. He didn’t try to punch; Nox wouldn’t feel it. He didn’t try to choke; while in the grip of his stimms, Nox could pry Jaxx’s arm loose and maybe pull him right off. All Jaxx needed to do was keep Nox down, stay out of reach and let him burn through his stimm rush, then finish him.

Nox braced his arms underneath him and surged upwards with a roar, knocking Jaxx to the dirt.

Jaxx rolled away from the massive boot that stamped down where his chest had been a moment before, then got his legs under him and came up into a crouch. Nox was screaming and foaming at the mouth, his irises nearly lost in the wild whites of his wide eyes. He lunged forwards, fingers outstretched to grab and throttle, but Jaxx erupted from his crouch and drove his shoulder into Nox’s gut with an impact that nearly winded Jaxx himself. For a moment they were locked on a knife’s edge of balance, Jaxx’s legs straining and Nox’s fingers clawing at his back, looking for some form of leverage.

Then, bellowing with the effort, Jaxx straightened his knees and hoisted Nox bodily off the ground over his shoulder. He held the other Goliath there for a second, just to prove that he could, then jackknifed his body and drove Nox down into the dirt again, back first, with Jaxx on top.

The breath exploded from Nox’s lungs again, but this time all that followed was a wheeze. His eyes were rolling back, Jaxx saw as he raised his fist. The stimms had burned out; it was always a short hit, and Nox had been running on little oxygen for most of it.

Nox tried to raise his arms to ward off the blows, but he was only half-aware of what was going on now. Jaxx tried to make it quick. He slammed one punch into Nox’s face to stun him, then grabbed the other man’s head and turned it sideways as Nox flailed limply. One more blow right behind the ear and Nox went still, out cold.

Jaxx pushed himself up. He’d taken two hits to the ribs – the punch from Krugg and the kick from Nox when he’d tripped – but otherwise he was pretty much unscathed. He looked around again.

Strong-Arm Tym was prone and unmoving. Kill Wrath was on his back screaming, one arm bent at entirely the wrong angle. Harm’s Wei faced off with Malady Kaw. As Jaxx watched, Kaw darted in, feinted low and then went high, pop-pop in Wei’s face with a one-two of punches, then jumped up and delivered a flying knee to Wei’s jaw. She landed, waited, watched to see how her opponent reacted rather than rushing to press home her attack. Wei staggered back, clearly disorientated, and Kaw slid forwards again.

Wei stumbled into arm’s reach, and Jaxx punched him as hard as he could in the back of the head. Wei dropped like he’d been hit with a power maul, and didn’t move.

‘Mine!’ Kaw shouted at Jaxx, pointing at Wei with fury writ large on what was visible of her face behind her long, dark hair. She wasn’t happy that he’d finished Wei himself.

Jaxx just raised his hands and beckoned her forwards. ‘Just Kaw and Jaxx, now.’

Malady Kaw smiled, revealing too-sharp white teeth. She had a tendency to bite, if she got close enough. Rumour was she’d cooked and eaten a man once, before she’d ended up on the fight circuit.

Jaxx set himself. He wasn’t as fast as her, he knew that. He simply needed to be fast enough. He could take ten punches from Kaw and still win, so long as he could just land one. His arms wouldn’t break as easily as Kill Wrath’s, either. The big fight with Hammerhand was in reach, so long as he didn’t lose his focus.

Not yet…

Kaw darted in and back, testing his reflexes. Jaxx had a huge reach advantage, but she’d try to make him overcommit, then change direction, possibly slide behind him. He flicked out a jab, a shade slower than usual. Kaw swayed like a blindsnake zeroing in on the heat signature of its prey, rushed him, jinked, landed a kick to his inner thigh and was away again before he could catch hold of her.

‘Kaw! Kaw! Kaw!’ bayed the crowd.

It stung, and looked good for the fans, but nothing more. She’d need to hit him with half a hundred of those before it would damage his mobility. Jaxx turned to follow her, teeth bared and growling. He wanted her to think he was already frustrated.

Not yet…

‘Kaw! Kaw! Kaw!’

Malady Kaw spun on the spot, just out of his reach, arms outstretched and hair flying, playing to the crowd. Then her sharp grin tightened and she moved again.

Now.

Jaxx hit his stimms.

There was the usual instant of silver pain, then the gushing, throbbing red tide that awakened every nerve and stretched every synapse…

…and then a sudden, rushing hollowness that sucked the strength from his limbs. Jaxx staggered, blinking, as the world began to tilt to the right. What…?

Kaw was on him, a giggling flurry of blows, too fast to see. Pop-pop-pop, in his face, maddening, painful. Everything was on fire, the touch of air on his skin hurt. Kaw’s punches felt like thunder hammers landing on his exposed flesh. Jaxx heard himself screaming. He lashed out blindly, overwhelmed by an alien panic, missed completely and lurched sideways. Which way was up? Where was…?

Kaw was in front of him, jumping off the ground, arms splayed for balance, hair fanning out into a dark halo around her head and the tip of one metal-capped boot flashing towards his face–

Khouren set Jaxx up!

He’d raged at Khouren when the impresario had shown their face in the recovery rooms afterwards. The medicae had backed out, leaving Jaxx to face down Khouren and their minders.

Khouren spiked Jaxx’s stimms!

Ah, Khouren had replied, smiling their snake smile, but I told you that you weren’t ready. I make the fights, Jaxx, not you. And now Malady Kaw will face Graw Hammerhand, and you can have your redemption arc. Another fight or two, and then if Graw still reigns, you can have him, and you’ll have lost nothing. And if Kaw unseats him… Well then. Khouren spread their hands and their smile widened. Then you get to prove that tonight was a fluke. I imagine that will be a popular showdown. Just think of the money we’ll make!

Jaxx had bitten back his response. He’d wanted to get up off the gurney, to grab Khouren’s neck and squeeze until that smirking, bald head popped right off. He might have tried it as well, despite the minders and their autopistols, but he’d still been suffering the after-effects of the spiked stimms. He hadn’t been sure he could even walk to Khouren in a straight line, let alone lay hands on them, so he’d simply ground his teeth, lain back and closed his eyes until he heard the tap-tap-tap of Khouren’s shoes departing again, walking back down the hallway through which so many bleeding and broken bodies had been dragged. Not all of Khouren’s fights were unarmed, and the losers of those bouts didn’t tend to get any sort of redemption, unless the tales of the Emperor’s mercy were true.

Now Jaxx lay in the dark, fuming at injustice as the last of the spiked drugs drained out of his system. Fuming at injustice, and questioning himself. Were his wins tainted? How often did Khouren intervene? Was Krugg’s apparent inability to capitalise on his immense physical gifts just because Khouren paid him off to be an imposing stooge to other fighters? It was hard to believe a Goliath would lose voluntarily, but a living was a living…

Footsteps, in the hallway. Slow, measured, careful. Jaxx sat up cautiously, trying to keep the creak of the bed under him to a minimum. What if Khouren had decided that Jaxx was too great a risk now, that he might try to blow open the crooked operation, or just try to kill Khouren? What if they’d sent someone to see that Jaxx died overnight from ‘complications’? Mad Dody Bralle had passed away in her sleep a while back when she’d lost a fight, not long after she’d had a bitter dispute with Khouren about pay, and suddenly that didn’t seem quite so innocent.

Jaxx rolled his shoulders, flexed his arms and took an exploratory deep breath. He still felt like he’d taken a full-body beating, but he’d be a nasty surprise for anyone expecting a sleeping target.

The door handle turned. The door began to swing open. Jaxx tensed. He saw the shape of a hand reach through and fumble along the wall…

Fingers reached the activation stud, and the lumen in the ceiling snapped into life. Jaxx’s recovery room – sterile, white-tiled, easily cleaned of bodily fluids – jumped into view around him. He blinked in the sudden glare, his heartbeat pounding in his ears.

‘Ah, there you are. Excellent.’

The voice was dry and slightly weary, with an accent Jaxx had never heard before. He squinted, forcing his eyes to focus, and brought the speaker into view.

It was the woman who’d been sitting in the box with Drost Khouren.

She edged into the room and nudged the door shut behind her, not taking her eyes from him. She wore a dress: a flowing, lace-edged affair of midnight-purple, with silver details that twinkled like the displays of shadowlight worms and matched the diadem that still adorned her forehead. She held a cane in her right hand, but didn’t look to be leaning on it overmuch, despite her weight. In fact she held herself very straight as she studied him, her dark eyes bright in her jowly face.

‘Who is woman?’ Jaxx grunted, relaxing a little. He wasn’t prepared to rule anything out, but this certainly seemed like a particularly unlikely candidate to be an assassin in the pay of Drost Khouren.

‘Lady Chettamandey Vula Brobantis,’ she replied promptly. She cocked her head to one side. ‘And you are? You were announced earlier, but the noise of the crowd quite drowned it out.’

Jaxx bit back a flash of anger. People hadn’t even heard his name! ‘Jaxx. What is…’ He groped for what she’d just said, but the unfamiliar syllables slipped aside from his recollection. ‘What is lady doing here?’

She placed her cane in front of her, clasped both her hands together and leaned on it. ‘You can call me Chetta, if that helps. Well, Jaxx, I came here because I thought we might be able to help each other.’

Jaxx frowned. Everyone in Hive Primus knew that ‘help each other’ meant ‘you help me’.

‘How did Chetta get in here?’

‘I have my resources,’ Chetta smiled, revealing a row of blunt, white teeth. ‘Tell me, Jaxx, did you choose this life?’

No harm to that question. Jaxx shrugged. ‘Near enough. Jaxx is no slave. Jaxx’s vat brother lost an arm to the furnaces, can’t work, needs to eat. Jaxx’s vat sister won the right to bear real children, not vat grown, but children need to eat too. Jaxx can make good money by fighting.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought it was a long-term career, though,’ Chetta said mildly.

Jaxx laughed. ‘Chetta doesn’t know about House Goliath. Grow quick, work hard, die young. Burn bright, but fast. Goliaths need rejuvenat to get anything close to the lifespan that other houses get normally.’ He shrugged, and spat on the floor. ‘Does Chetta see much rejuvenat here?’

‘It doesn’t seem a likely place for it, I’ll grant you,’ Chetta said with a wry smile. She tapped one finger on the head of her cane, as though thinking. ‘It’s a strange coincidence, Jaxx. You see, my family too have been… altered, I suppose you might say. Bred and shaped for the benefit of others, over the years. So although our situations may seem vastly different, I think we share something in that regard.’

Jaxx looked her up and down. ‘Someone meant for Chetta to grow like that?’

‘This is a side-effect, you idiot boy!’ Chetta snapped. She stepped forwards, heedless of the immense size disparity between them, and glared at him. Jaxx, bristling at her words, met her gaze and abruptly found himself unsure. Chetta’s eyes were hard, cold and utterly fearless. She could either obliterate him with minimal effort, or was so deranged that she was wholly convinced that she could.

Jaxx swallowed the angry words that danced on the edge of his tongue. Caution sharpened a fighter, prevented them from making stupid mistakes. Better to assume that Chetta had some ability or resources he didn’t know about. Perhaps she was a wyrd? His skin crawled at the thought, but it would fit with her previous words.

‘Chetta said something about her and Jaxx helping each other,’ he said, keeping his voice level.

‘Why do you talk like that, anyway?’ Chetta asked, ignoring him. ‘What’s wrong with saying “you”?’

‘Who is “you”?’ Jaxx laughed. ‘You, Chetta? You, women? You, nobles? You, everyone-who-isn’t-Jaxx? Other houses speak sideways, think backwards, walk at angles. Goliaths talk straight and act true. Goliaths have no time for misunderstandings.’ He grunted. ‘Goliaths have no time.’

Chetta nodded. ‘And your apparent aversion to the word “I”? There surely can’t be any confusion about that.’

Jaxx shrugged. ‘Jaxx won’t live long. Jaxx needs his name to be remembered.’

Chetta nodded again, thoughtfully. ‘You looked to be doing very well today, Jaxx. You were making an impression, but then something seemed to go wrong. The woman who beat you – Kaw… She was skilled, but you looked to be in trouble before she’d even really touched you.’

‘Drost Khouren spiked Jaxx’s stimms,’ Jaxx growled. ‘Drost Khouren wanted Jaxx to lose this fight.’

‘That can’t be good for a fighter looking to make a name for himself on a limited timescale,’ Chetta observed, her dark eyes studying Jaxx’s face. ‘I imagine you’re not happy with them at the moment.’

Jaxx held his tongue. This Chetta had been sitting next to Drost Khouren, after all. There was no reason to incriminate himself in front of her: for all he knew, she could go straight back and tell the impresario exactly what he had said to her. It seemed a ridiculously convoluted plot, but Jaxx knew that other people didn’t think as Goliaths did. You couldn’t trust them to be straightforward.

‘Are you fighting again tomorrow, Jaxx?’ Chetta asked when he didn’t reply.

‘Not scheduled to,’ Jaxx grunted. ‘Tomorrow is mainly weapons.’

‘Weapons?’ Chetta raised an eyebrow. ‘That fence around the pit… That doesn’t look very high. I’d wager a fighter could get over it, if they wanted to.’

‘Could do,’ Jaxx said, frowning at her. ‘Especially on stimms. But a fighter who goes into the crowd will be killed. Better to fight in the pit – that way a fighter might win, and live. Everyone knows that. The fence is only there to prevent fighters going into the crowd accidentally.’

Chetta smiled, the creases in her cheeks deepening as she did so. ‘So if you were to fight tomorrow, with weapons, no one would be expecting you to go over the fence and, say, brutally cut down Drost Khouren as revenge for the game they played with you today? And you would be able to do it?’

Jaxx’s heart started beating faster. He swallowed. ‘No one would expect it. And yes, Jaxx could do it. But why would Chetta want that?’

She stepped in close to him and brought her face so near to his that he could smell her breath. She smelled… dry. And alien.

‘I don’t care about Drost Khouren, Jaxx, but they seem unpleasant enough for me not to shed a tear at their passing. And I certainly wouldn’t want any harm to come to my noble host of Ko’Iron. But the other man sitting with me today, my husband…’ She paused, and licked her teeth. ‘Him, I very much need to die.’

Jaxx just stared at her.

‘He is as guilty as anyone of the manipulation of my family, Jaxx,’ Chetta said, and now there was an edge to her voice. ‘We have two children, Felicia and Ranovel, the only two who have survived, and he’d arranged marriages for them before they were even born, based on what is best… not for them, but for our family. The same way as my marriage to him was arranged. It is all political, and I will not stand for it. Not for the children who came from my own body.’

‘Chetta is asking Jaxx to die to solve her problem,’ Jaxx growled. ‘Chetta offers nothing.’

‘You’re going to die soon anyway, Jaxx,’ Chetta said simply. ‘You’ve said so yourself. But do this for me and I shall ensure that your death will be quick and painless, and I shall also ensure that your brother, your sister and her children, and her children’s children, should they have any, will never want for anything again.’

Jaxx stared at her. To be Goliath was to fight and claw for what you could get in the short time allotted to you. To have as much as you needed – no, as much as you wanted – without effort… That was what dreams were made of. That was the rallying call that dragged the young pups into the gangs, searching for glory and quick riches. To be able to bestow that upon his kin would make Jaxx’s name a byword for greatness. They would never need to endure the searing heat of the furnaces, or take beatings at the whim of people like Khouren. That would be a gift worth dying for. No true Goliath feared their own death, for it would come soon enough no matter what they did; they merely feared wasting it.

Jaxx licked lips that had suddenly become dry with nervous anticipation. ‘How? How would Chetta do that?’

Chetta shrugged. ‘I have more money than you can dream is possible. I can easily ensure your family are provided for. I could find another way to achieve my ends, I suppose, but my husband being tragically cut down because he was in the way of a raging fighter seeking to avenge an entirely unrelated slight… It would be very hard for that to be traced back to me.’

‘Someone might have seen Chetta come in here,’ Jaxx pointed out.

‘Someone did,’ Chetta said with a smile. ‘They won’t be telling anyone about it. Should Drost Khouren survive tomorrow, they may have to hire a new guard.’ She extended a hand. ‘But it’s true that I will be missed if I stay here much longer. I’ve made you an offer, Jaxx. Carry out your side of it and I swear on the honour of the house of my birth, the house of my marriage, and on my eye that I shall carry out mine.’

Jaxx hadn’t heard that phrase before, but he was increasingly coming to the conclusion that Chetta must be from off-world. Her accent was too strange for anything else.

He’d sought to be remembered, and to provide for his family. That was all Jaxx had ever wanted from life. Drost Khouren had betrayed him once already; the snake couldn’t be trusted not to do it again. Next time, perhaps Jaxx wouldn’t wake up again afterwards.

Jaxx reached out his hand and engulfed hers.

Khouren hadn’t liked it, of course. Blade fights are dangerous, they’d said, as though Jaxx hadn’t known that, and you’ve had no training. You’re too valuable to waste like this.

One fight, Jaxx had demanded. One fight, today, with proper stimms, or Jaxx walks away from all Khouren’s fights, forever.

Khouren had looked at him for a long time, saying nothing. Then they’d raised where their eyebrows would have been if they’d had hair, pursed their lips and nodded once. Jaxx didn’t bluff, and he’d counted on Khouren knowing that. He’d counted on Khouren figuring that it was better to make what money they could off a stubborn fool than lose them completely. After all, Jaxx had told the truth to Chetta: he was no slave, and could walk away if he wanted to go back to a no-name life in the foundries.

As the doors went up and he strode forwards into the light cast by the strip lumens overhead, hearing the baying of the crowd, Jaxx wondered if Khouren would have doctored his opponent at all. And if they had, would they have made sure that Jaxx would walk away unscathed, or that he’d become a bloody lesson to those who thought they could dictate terms to the impresario?

Jaxx had a cleaver, the shaft a yard long and the head half that, wicked-edged and with a hook on the pole. His opponent, he saw, was a fighter in ragged Cawdor robes, a long knife in each hand. Reach and strength against speed, two weapons and, presumably, some degree of skill. A fight that, in theory at least, could go either way. If Khouren had interfered, they hadn’t made it obvious.

The horn sounded. Jaxx’s opponent advanced, his knives moving in a whirling defence pattern, the two blades slipping around and between his fingers like dazzling nets of plasteel. He could make it look good, then, at any rate.

Jaxx circled, looking for the right opening. His opponent circled with him, still well out of range, but already looking to stay on the huge cleaver’s offside. Jaxx kept moving, ignoring the shouts of the crowd, their screams for blood. They’d get it, when he was ready.

A few more steps to the right, and his opponent’s back was directly to the owner’s box. Drost Khouren was there, flanked by the Ko’Iron noble on one side and Chetta and her husband on the other. They were right down at the front today, pretty much on a level with the pit floor itself, as close to the action as they could be. Perhaps Chetta had insisted on it.

Khouren was leaning forwards, elbows resting on their knees, chin resting on their steepled fingers, and appeared to be studying the combatants intently, so far as anything could be told with their gaze hidden by their glare goggles. The fence behind which they sat was a chain-link plasteel mesh, the links thin enough not to obscure vision too much but strong enough to take the weight of a heavy body being thrown against them. It was braced at intervals by solid metal poles, topped with a broad, flat rail of the same substance to further strengthen it, and was perfectly secure… so long as no one tried to go over it. And why would they? All of Drost Khouren’s fighters were volunteers. No one came here to run away.

Now.

Jaxx hit his stimms.

There was the usual instant of silver pain, then the gushing, throbbing red tide that awakened every nerve and stretched every synapse, and this time, oh this time, it didn’t fade but kept on coursing through his body. He was invincible. He was invulnerable.

He was a god.

He charged. His muscles leapt to respond, pushing harder and faster and further than they ever could normally. He flew over the ground, the rush of the drugs reducing the sudden roar of the crowd to a dull whine, but he knew it was there; he knew they were screaming approval and chanting his name.

His adversary’s showy guard faltered uncertainly. Jaxx saw the man’s pockmarked face distort, oh so slowly thanks to his heightened reflexes, and morph into an expression of terror. To stand and face Jaxx’s charge would be to die: even if he drove his knives home, even if he found the jugular, the heart, a lung, the femoral artery, he’d still be dead. The other fighter knew that and scrambled aside, hoping to slip the cleaver’s blow, to stay clear of Jaxx’s reach until the stimms wore off.

But Jaxx wasn’t aiming for him.

He ignored the panicked knifeman, didn’t change direction. Beyond the fence, expressions of joyous bloodlust or studious concentration slipped first into confusion, then, on the smarter ones, into fear and alarm. They had mere moments to realise that Jaxx was coming for them, and none of them reacted fast enough.

Jaxx leapt. His momentum and stimm-boosted muscles carried him halfway up the fence, and he grabbed the top with his free hand, hauling himself up through sheer muscle power to get one boot onto the rail. Even stimms wouldn’t help him balance there, but all he needed to do was push off again and jump down, right into the owner’s box.

‘Drooooooooosssssssst!’

He landed like the wrath of a vengeful deity, scattering the rich and well-to-do like a frag grenade amongst sump rats. Screams, screams everywhere. Sheer, blind panic. A sober-suited man in a vaguely military uniform was fumbling a pistol out of a holster, but too slowly, far too slowly.

It was so very easy for Jaxx to swing for Drost Khouren, miss slightly and send the cleaver into the body of the tall, thin man cowering next to them.

The cleaver’s edge was good, and it had not just its own considerable weight behind it but the drug-enhanced muscles of a Goliath pit fighter. It smashed through ribs, pulped organs, shattered the man’s spine and emerged the other side in a shower of blood and viscera that spattered all over Chetta as she threw her hands up to shield herself.

Khouren turned and dived the other way. Jaxx reached out, grabbed them by the back of their long coat and hauled them back. Khouren tried to wriggle out of the garment, twisting their arms to get away, but Jaxx reached round them with the cleaver and sank the hook into the far side of Khouren’s belly.

Khouren screamed, and didn’t stop screaming as Jaxx dragged the hook right across them. The bitter stench of offal filled the air.

A gun fired. Sharp, stabbing pains erupted in Jaxx’s back as other shots whistled around him. He whirled, dropping the gutted Khouren. The stimm rush was starting to fade, the world was becoming cold and shrunken, but the man who’d shot him had emptied the clip of his autopistol and Jaxx was still on his feet. He raised the cleaver, the weight now dragging at his arm but still usable…

Chetta appeared in front of him. She’d snatched off her diadem – it was held in her left hand – and in the middle of her forehead was…

…an eye?

It opened.

Jaxx blinked at it in shock. Brain numbed by the stimm rush, his body rebelling against the drug withdrawal and the gunshot wounds now bleeding out down his back, he stopped in his tracks and stared stupidly at this terrifying, impossible orb of darkness.

The world seemed to stretch, and then Jaxx was everything.

And then Jaxx was nothing.

‘Milady!’

Tomas Thornen stumbled forwards, slamming a new clip into his autopistol. ‘Get back! Get back!’

‘Stand down, Tomas,’ Chetta said heavily, replacing her diadem to once more hide her pineal eye. ‘He’s dead.’

She could have been talking about her husband or about Jaxx, although there would only really be any credible doubt about the status of one of them. Jaxx had fallen backwards, first his sanity and then his very life blasted from him by her warp gaze. She’d promised him that death would be swift and painless, and that was the best she could do. Given that she’d obviously never spoken to anyone who’d actually been killed by it, she couldn’t know for sure.

Azariel Brobantis on the other hand, Novator of House Brobantis and her dear husband, had been virtually bisected by the brute’s weapon. A web of influence and power that encompassed a quarter of the galaxy hadn’t helped him against an enormous man with a sharp axe. It was a lesson worth remembering.

‘Milady, are you hurt?’ Tomas asked desperately.

‘I’m… fine.’ She squatted down by Azariel’s body, traced her fingers down his face. Part of her tenderness was genuine. She’d never loved Azariel, not as she’d heard the emotion described. Sometimes she wondered if Navigators were so far beyond human that they’d lost the ability to love. But he and she had been close, once, until he’d taken to ignoring her warnings and dismissing her concerns.

‘You poor man,’ she murmured, ‘that it should come to this. I told you Necromunda was a lawless place, and that this was a foolish extravagance.’

‘Milady?’

The panic around them was dying down as the rest of the crowd became aware that the cleaver-wielding maniac was dead, or at least not moving. Nearby, others were looking wary for a different reason: Chetta had revealed herself as a mutant, and there would certainly be some ignorant fools who either hadn’t heard of Navigators or viewed that they knew better than the Emperor on the subject.

‘I think it may be time for us to leave, Tomas,’ Chetta said urgently, getting back to her feet and wiping at nonexistent tears, ‘before this situation breaks down. See if you can find our host – I think I saw him running that way.’ She pointed towards the exit.

She watched Tomas rush off, looking for Adelard Ko’Iron. It was a shame, but he’d have to go. He was a nice boy, but he’d just let his master be killed in front of him, which wasn’t the mark of a good bodyguard, and some form of irrational rage would be expected of her as a grieving widow. She’d warned Azariel about Tomas’ shortcomings, but he’d ignored her. More proof that he really hadn’t been the right person to be steering Brobantis any more.

Chetta sighed and turned away from her husband’s corpse. ‘You can come out now, DeShelle.’

DeShelle DuVoir, Chetta’s personal aide, peered over the back of the seats where she’d hidden the moment Jaxx had come charging at them. The girl wasn’t brave, but she was sensible, which counted for a lot in Chetta’s eyes. She was discreet, too, which counted for even more.

‘We need to go,’ Chetta said, heading towards the stairs that led to the exit. ‘But before we leave this planet I’ll need you to find the family of the man who killed my husband. Jaxx, I think he was announced as. Given what’s just happened here, it shouldn’t be hard to track down those associated with him.’

‘And what do you want me to do, milady?’ DeShelle asked. Her eyes were wide and she was clearly shocked at what had just happened, but her training kicked in and she was ready to serve, just as she should be. It would probably help her, to be fair.

‘I cannot risk being held on this planet,’ Chetta said, trying to put the right level of grief into her voice. DeShelle would pick up on either too much or too little, and work out that Chetta hadn’t been either as surprised or as unhappy about Azariel’s death as she should have been. If she realised that Chetta had expected this, much less orchestrated it… Well, ambition was rife in House Brobantis, and personal loyalty went only so far, as Chetta herself had just demonstrated. ‘I just killed a man–’

‘In self-defence!’

‘I am not prepared to take that risk!’ Chetta snapped, then softened her tone. ‘DeShelle, I am a Navigator, and these people are not enlightened. Find the man’s family and pay them off so there is no risk of them calling for an investigation into the actions of the mutant.’ She waved a hand airily. ‘Ten thousand of the local currency should suffice.’

‘I should imagine so, milady,’ DeShelle said in a small voice. She knew the value of the local money, and knew that was a fortune. Chetta did too, but she could pretend that she did not.

‘See to it,’ Chetta said, glaring at the steps up to the exit as though they had personally affronted her. ‘The sooner we can be in the warp and away from this ghastly planet, the happier I shall be. I have a husband to mourn, and I will not do that here, in the place of his death.’

And I have a house to put in order…

THE EMPEROR’S WRATH

Steven B Fischer

As a flash fiction author, Steven B Fischer often presents the reader with an alternative perspective and asks us to reconsider what we think we know. This story of disillusionment and discovery does just that.

Caius is full of hatred for the Imperium that he believes murdered his parents and brought ruin to his home world. Having spent his youth dodging the brutal regime of the local militia known as The Emperor’s Wrath, the sudden arrival of Imperial drop-ships signals nothing more than the return of a hated enemy. But when fighting erupts and Caius is caught in the middle, he’s forced to confront the realisation that the Imperium he knows might not represent the entire truth.

The first lasgun round shattered the window. The second blew a hole through the door.

‘Open in the name of the Emperor’s Wrath!’ a voice called through the charred fissure, accompanied by the scent of scorched metal and ash.

Caius stared from beneath his parents’ bed and hugged the two children beside him even tighter. Rhea and Remus were too young to understand. To see that the world around them was crumbling.

In the centre of the room, Father levelled a laspistol at the door, shaking slightly on clumsy pneumatic legs, fire in his violet eyes. A crimson banner adorned the wall behind him, emblazoned in silver with a skull bearing outstretched wings – the same sigil that marked the old, faded uniform in his wardrobe.

‘Damned militia,’ he growled. ‘They bear His name. They bear His emblem. Now they burn half His planet and usurp His governor.’

Beside him, Mother grasped an effigy of the Emperor, the words of a prayer streaming silently from her lips. ‘You knew there were risks when you advised a ceasefire.’

‘Yes,’ Father scoffed. ‘But I expected betrayal from the rebels, not the governor’s own forces.’

An explosion rocked the room, and the door burst into a cloud of smoke. Through the opening, soldiers stormed into the apartment, clad in grey body armour, toting lasguns in their hands. Caius felt Rhea squirm beside him and clasped his hand over the girl’s mouth before she could cry out.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ Father warned, voice calm despite the shaking of his palsied hand. ‘We serve the same Emperor.’

Across the room, a black-armoured figure stepped forward, blood and soot across his face, ice and shadow in his smile. ‘My Emperor does not condone surrender,’ he muttered as the weapon in his hands roared to life.

Caius held his siblings close as their parents fell to the ground and the soldiers retreated from the room, the silver skulls on their helmets gleaming crimson in the light of a burning city, mirroring the dark pools that spread across the floor.

Ten years later, Halcyon still smouldered.

Caius padded through the night-soaked city, flitting between crumbling buildings and refuse-strewn alleyways. Behind him, Rhea and Remus darted through the rubble, black hair and grey eyes just two more shadows in a city full of darkness.

Caius traced the fractured remains of buildings that had once soared towards the heavens. Towards a sky that used to be full of starlight, but tonight was swimming with metal. A cloud of steel and flame descended over Halcyon, twisting and swelling like an immeasurable wave. Thousands of ships marked with the Imperial skull, a flock of dark-winged carrion fowl come to feast on the planet’s carcass.

Caius brushed the pistol at his waist, that same sigil embossed on its pommel. He hated that skull, but he’d kept the weapon. An old, heavy brute, inlaid with silver and gold and workmanship too fine for an agri world like Halcyon. The only thing the Imperium had ever given his father, after he had given it all of himself.

Beside him, Rhea stared into the sky, Remus close behind with a tattered blanket stretched over his shoulders. Neither child spoke – neither had spoken since the night their parents died – but their eyes asked the question for them.

Caius sighed. There was no use masking the truth. ‘The Imperium has returned to Halcyon, and they’re going to burn it to the ground.’

Beneath his feet, the fractured statue of some tortured saint lay covered in dirt and lichen. His parents had followed the Imperium’s cult, but its god was no more loyal than its armies. The Emperor’s Wrath killed without regard for piety, and now their masters had returned to finish the job. Their only hope was to flee.

Above their heads, the sky swarmed with darting ships, jostling to drop points on the ground. Escape meant slipping through that mess, and Petyr Unger was the only captain who stood half a chance. Caius had run contraband for him for years, and if any ship could evade an Imperial blockade, it was his. Three years back, he’d had the chance to sell Unger out when the Emperor’s Wrath caught wind of a weapons drop to a rival gang. Caius had chosen a set of broken ribs and a knife across his belly instead. The captain wasn’t sentimental, but he hoped their history would earn him a chance to buy his way on board.

Caius gripped his father’s pistol. Unger had mentioned more than once that it was a pretty weapon – he’d even tried to buy it on a few occasions. Hopefully, that offer was still on the table. His hand shook slightly at the thought of parting with the weapon, before Rhea darted up beside him and Remus paused atop the ruins on the side of the street. It would be a small price to pay for saving their lives.

The hangar floor was littered with bodies, blood slicks mingling with spilled voidcraft fluid, the scent of burnt fuel and flesh heavy in the air. Caius crawled to the lip of the catwalk, struggling to make out the shapes that stalked below in the dim twilight of the hangar’s flickering lumens.

A groan filled the air, and a body on the floor writhed with pain. A man walked swiftly from the shadows, his green helmet and dirty, grey fatigues both adorned with a dark-winged skull. Caius recognised the sneer on his face – the soldier who’d tried to gut him a few years back. Unger’s hangar was well outside Emperor’s Wrath territory, but the impending assault must have emboldened the faction. The soldier stepped up to the man on the floor and delivered a boot to his face to silence his screaming.

Caius leaned over the ledge and caught sight of the ship below. He recognised the Starshadow’s burnished, black metal and breathed a sigh of relief. If Unger’s ship was still in the hangar, maybe he was, too, stowed away inside, waiting for the Emperor’s Wrath to move on before making his escape.

Behind him, Rhea inched her way forward. ‘Don’t move,’ Caius whispered, motioning to the alcove where Remus still hid. ‘I’ll be back.’

Caius lowered himself over the ledge and dropped down between the Starshadow’s massive turbines, scrambling across the hull to a maintenance hatch nearby. Once inside, he raced through the narrow shaft, clambering over sparking wires and leaky fluid lines towards the ship’s bridge.

Unger would be there. He had to be. It was their only chance. Caius kicked his way through a rusted hatch, heart racing before his stomach dropped into his feet.

Unger was dead – tied to his captain’s throne, limbs bound with tubing stripped from the bridge’s machinery. Blood wept from a gaping hole in his chest, trailing down his arms and dripping from his fingers. A hole that looked like it had been made slowly. Across his forehead, someone had gouged a skull into his skin, this one wreathed in flame.

On the floor, five more bodies lay similarly marked, the remnants of the Starshadow’s crew. Caius closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. When he opened them, a shadow moved behind him.

‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ a sneering voice asked.

Caius’ hand darted towards his pistol, before the butt of a lasgun smashed into his head, and his world began to swim.

‘The Emperor is coming,’ the voice whispered. ‘It’s only fitting that his subjects help us welcome him.’

Caius woke to the hangar’s flickering lumens, head throbbing, with the taste of blood in his mouth. The cold stone floor grated against his shoulders, wrists burning from the wire that bound him to a cargo crate. That sneering face leaned over him, grinning, close enough that he could smell the soldier’s rancid breath. Behind him, a small crowd of Emperor’s Wrath gathered.

Caius spat, spraying blood across the man’s face, then threw himself forward against his restraints, but the soldier only laughed, licking the splatters of blood from his lips.

‘Don’t worry. We tied them tight.’ He pulled a jagged knife from the scabbard at his waist, its long, black blade already streaked with crimson, and pointed towards a body slouched against the wall, defiled just like the Starshadow’s crew. ‘We wouldn’t want you squirming too much.’

Behind the man’s twisted face, two sets of grey eyes watched from the shadows, and Rhea crawled towards the lip of the ledge. Caius swallowed and shook his head. He was going to die, but they didn’t need to.

‘Run,’ he mouthed, as the blade dropped towards his chest.

The sound of gunfire rang through the hangar, and the sneer on the soldier’s face melted into confusion as clusters of red bloomed across his chest and his blade clattered to the ground.

The remaining soldiers spun towards the sound of the attack, a few managing to lift their weapons before a hail of lasgun fire consumed them. One sent a salvo back before taking a shot through his neck, and a second sprinted away from the firefight. A crimson-armoured body knocked him to the ground, blood spurting into the air as a long, silver blade sprouted from his chest.

Caius pulled against his restraints. Across the hangar, a dozen men strode towards him, crimson helmets and armour gleaming, far too well kept for Halcyon militia. One bore a banner on a stave across his back, an Imperial skull mounted over crossed swords.

Steel bit into Caius’ wrists as he stretched and snatched the knife off the ground. He sawed madly at the wire above his head, feeling the metal give way just as a bright lumen fell across his face.

‘Got a live one.’

Caius tensed. These men had gunned down a dozen Imperial militia; there was no reason to think they wouldn’t do worse to him. He launched himself onto the soldier, and the man collapsed under the surprise of his attack before regaining his composure and slamming an armoured gauntlet into Caius’ ribs. Caius rolled to the side and pulled out his pistol, only to find himself staring into the muzzle of a lasgun. A second soldier’s boot burst from the shadows, sending his pistol spinning before pinning him to the ground.

The first soldier approached slowly, touching the cut on his cheek where Caius’ knife had grazed him. ‘Close,’ he murmured with a grin. ‘But you’ll have to do better than that to kill me.’

The boot on Caius’ chest pressed more firmly into the ground, forcing the breath from his lungs and leaving him gasping.

‘Let the boy breathe,’ a deep voice bellowed. ‘He can’t tell us anything if he’s suffocated.’

Caius looked up at an aging, grizzled soldier. The man stared at him over a short-cropped beard and a face strewn with scars, twirling Caius’ pistol around the fingers of one hand. In his other, a long, silver sword dripped with blood, and a stack of gold chevrons rested on his sleeve. His violet eyes burned bright, just like Father’s.

‘Let him up, Jost,’ the man grumbled, glancing at the wire trailing from Caius’ wrists. ‘And get that rifle out of his face, Marset. He’s not going to hurt you unless you’re slow enough to let him catch you with that knife again.’

‘Course, sarge,’ the soldiers mumbled. Caius scrambled to his knees as they backed away.

‘Easy,’ the sergeant warned. ‘Just because I haven’t shot you yet, doesn’t mean I’m not going to.’ He stared at Caius’ pistol with recognition. ‘Where’d you get this?’

Caius turned and spat. He didn’t owe them an explanation.

The man laughed. Not a cruel laugh, but a dangerous one. ‘A little defiance. Not necessarily a bad thing. But if you want to give me a reason not to kill you, you better do it fast.’ He looked down at Caius’ wrists again. ‘You’re not one of them, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t the enemy.’

Something boiled inside Caius, and he tried to shut his mouth, but the words spilled out. ‘Them? You talk about them like you aren’t the same thing. Like you don’t serve the same master.’

The good humour dropped from the sergeant’s face. ‘You don’t know what you speak of, so you best not carry on.’ He levelled the pistol at Caius’ chest. ‘I’ll ask you once more. Where’d you get this weapon?’

Caius took a deep breath, catching sight of Rhea and Remus on the ledge above him. He was no good to them dead. They’d lost enough family already. ‘It was my father’s.’

Surprise crossed the sergeant’s face. ‘His name?’

‘Gaius Maristratus.’

Slowly, the sergeant lowered the pistol, something softening in his expression. ‘A tall man, your father? About my height?’

‘Maybe once,’ Caius replied. ‘Not after they fit him with iron legs.’

The sergeant grimaced and stepped forward. Caius tightened his grip on the knife, but the man held the pistol out to him, then motioned to his men.

‘Meet the remnants of the Cadian Eleven Hundred and Ninth, Secundus Company. I’m Master Sergeant Hector Armines. I served with your father when he commanded this unit. He was an honourable man and one of my closest friends.’

Caius took the pistol slowly. It was a lie. It had to be. A ploy to make him drop his guard. But why would they need to lie, when they had him at gunpoint already?

The sergeant glanced around the hangar. ‘Trying to get off the surface?’

Caius nodded.

‘A not entirely foolish decision.’ The remainder of the squad shared a collective nod. ‘We’ve been tasked with clearing a corridor to the governor’s palace. There will be medical transports there once we arrive. I’ll do my best to talk you on board.’

Armines motioned at the two soldiers beside him. ‘Jost, Marset. You know the boy already. Keep him close and preferably absent of holes.’ He pointed to the catwalk above the Starshadow. ‘Those Gaius’ children, too?’

Rhea stepped into the light, and Remus followed behind her. Caius nodded.

‘Don’t let them wander off. Not everyone in this city is as blind as my men.’

The two soldiers were surprisingly cordial without their weapons pointed in Caius’ face. Jost strode easily across the rubble-strewn boulevard, long, lanky legs clearing blocks of stone like pebbles. Marset, in contrast, moved like an animal, darting and weaving on a stocky body that seemed wider than tall.

Marset grinned as he vaulted over a toppled statue, violet eyes gleaming against his dark skin. ‘We’ve been itching for a fight. Sarge does his best to keep the drills full speed, but training just can’t match the real thing.’

Jost’s sullen face stretched into a smile as he leaned around the edge of a building, clearing the alley beyond. ‘You seemed to think it was plenty real enough after I broke your jaw.’

Marset scowled.

Caius gripped his pistol firmly and turned to his siblings. He’d never seen the city this still, and it left an unsettled pit in his stomach. ‘Stay close,’ he murmured.

Rhea nodded and took Remus by the hand before a loud boom echoed behind one of the buildings. Caius spun towards it with his weapon raised.

Marset chuckled and placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘That’s one of ours. Basilisk laying somebody low, from the sound of it.’

Jost glanced at the pistol in Caius’ hand. ‘You ever used that thing for real?’

Caius shook his head. He’d learned to fire a dozen weapons before he could write, but he’d never actually killed with one.

The soldier nodded. ‘Aim for the chest, not the head. A round through the lungs will drop them just like one in the brain, but centre of mass gives you a bigger target.’

In the centre of the street, Armines strode casually through the rubble, eyes darting between the squad spread out around him. Caius had seen these soldiers fight, but he wondered how much twelve men could really handle.

‘This is your entire unit?’ he asked Marset.

The soldier laughed. ‘No. Just a veteran squad.’ He glanced over his shoulder at the empty street behind them. ‘The rest of the company’s back there somewhere, but you can’t expect Savlars to keep up with real Cadian troops.’

‘You aren’t all from Cadia?’

Marset shook his head, smile faltering. ‘There is no Cadia. Not any more. And your father isn’t the only soldier we lost over the years. The few of us left are split across other regiments.’ Marset stepped closer and lowered his voice. ‘What happened to your father? I assume he’s dead?’

Caius glanced down, and Remus grasped his hand. ‘Those soldiers back there,’ he explained. ‘They call themselves the Emperor’s Wrath. They killed a lot of people after the governor died.’

His voice trailed off, and Marset’s face hardened with understanding. ‘Monsters,’ he mumbled.

‘Monsters that serve the same Emperor.’

The soldier’s expression turned to stone. ‘They might wear His emblem, but they don’t serve Him.’

Caius opened his mouth to reply, but the sound of gunfire silenced him. Marset dropped behind the remnants of a building, bracing his lasgun atop the crumbling stone as Armines’ voice bellowed through the street.

‘Contact. Dead ahead. Four hundred yards.’

Caius dived behind the low stone wall, dragging Rhea and Remus to the ground as a mix of lasgun discharges and bolts whizzed overhead. He crawled towards Marset, aiming his pistol at the sound of incoming fire.

The soldier shook his head. ‘Pistol’s no good at this range. Don’t waste the ammunition.’ He rolled behind the wall and swapped a new power pack into his weapon before resuming fire. ‘Besides, we’ll have them running soon.’

Down the street, however, their assailants weren’t fleeing. Instead, a few dozen men and women in ragged clothing advanced towards the soldiers, some toting rusting lasguns or bolt-throwers, but most armed with only crude knives and spears. The squad pummelled them with fire, but the mob just moved faster, despite the holes erupting through their bodies. Finally, broken by the vicious salvo, they began to fall, until only a single man continued stumbling forward.

‘Cultists,’ Jost remarked grimly as Armines motioned for the squad to advance.

‘Pumped full of stimms,’ Marset replied, turning to Caius and the children. ‘Keep them close. Hard to tell when these bastards are really down.’

As the squad moved down the street, several bodies crawled towards them, inching along on bloodied arms, trailing legs reduced to smouldering stumps. A woman dragged herself towards Jost with a single, mangled arm. Across her forehead, a crude skull was carved into her skin. Jost waited until she had nearly reached him before he put a las-round through her head.

‘Not as much fun when they can’t fight back,’ Marset said, absent of his usual levity. A worried frown spread across his face.

Beside them, a female Guardsman took up position beside a rusting transport, dark blood oozing from a wound in her shoulder.

‘You all right, Lorne?’ Jost asked, motioning to the streaks of red down her armour.

‘Course,’ she replied, glancing at the wound. ‘It all just looks crimson to me.’

Jost nodded and turned to Caius before kneeling behind a building on the plaza’s perimeter. ‘Blood and fire are our profession,’ he explained. ‘It’s only fitting we wear their colour.’

In the centre of the street, the stumbling man lunged at Armines with a sharpened length of pipe. The sergeant sidestepped the clumsy thrust and knocked the weapon to the ground, then levelled the man with a strike from his gauntlet. Armines kneeled beside him and clasped a hand over his throat.

‘How many of you are there?’ he growled, but the man simply laughed. The sergeant pressed the muzzle of his lasgun against the man’s head and asked again. ‘How many?’

The man mumbled something too quiet to hear, bloodshot eyes darting to and fro. Across his forehead, that same skull sigil dripped blood down his face, just like the ones that had marked Unger’s crew. Armines ground his knee into the man. ‘I can’t hear you.’

Slowly, the man’s babble resolved into words, and Caius felt his stomach drop. ‘The Emperor is coming. All of you will kneel before him.’

Armines frowned, confused. ‘The Emperor sits on Holy Terra.’

The man laughed again, madness in the sound. ‘Not your Emperor. Ours. The Emperor Incarnate.’

With that, he lunged forward, throwing Armines off balance and snatching his crude spear off of the ground. Caius lifted his pistol, but before he could fire, the man had driven the pipe into his own chest.

Caius stared at the dead man’s forehead as Armines pushed himself from the ground. ‘That mark,’ he said. ‘The soldiers at the hangar had done the same thing to the men they killed.’

A shadow crossed Armines’ face, and he nodded slowly. ‘I know you don’t trust us, but there are worse things in this universe than the Imperium.’ He looked down at the body, then turned to his squad. ‘Eyes open. Move quickly. Don’t be skittish on those triggers.’

The governor’s palace towered across Halcyon’s skyline like a mangled, decaying corpse, iron bones and rotting stone flesh laid bare a decade ago. The knot in Caius’ gut should have loosened as they neared the palace, but it only grew, that bloody skull still fresh in his mind. His limbs felt heavy, and his chest starved of breath, as if the air itself had grown thicker here. He told himself it was only nervous excitement, but the tense expressions of the soldiers around him suggested they felt it too.

Rhea and Remus pressed close to him now, an urgency in their steps he hadn’t noticed before. Remus clutched the thin blanket over both their shoulders, as if its fraying threads could hide them from whatever evil waited ahead.

Caius felt the skin on his neck begin to flush, and he whispered to himself, an old mantra Father had taught him as a child. ‘There is no fear, only courage. There is no weakness, only strength. There is no danger…’ He trailed off as the sound of bootfalls caught his ear and turned to see Marset approaching.

‘Only glory,’ the soldier said, completing the mantra. The smile had vanished from his face, replaced by a keen focus that filled Caius with both confidence and fear.

‘The Canticum Bellum,’ Marset whispered, eyes darting between crumbling windows and dark alleyways. ‘Good words, but perhaps silence is best now.’

The soldier had hardly finished speaking before a burst of light erupted from his forehead and gunfire shattered the silence. Rhea pulled Remus to the ground, and Caius dropped beside Marset’s body. The track of a lasgun round smoked through his skull, charred blood and something grey bulging out from within. Caius grasped the soldier and began to shake him before a cold, armoured hand gripped his shoulder.

Jost stared down at his friend, face devoid of emotion but shaking slightly. ‘Don’t waste your time.’

Around them, the squad engaged in a vicious gun battle. Muzzle flashes burst from the windows and rooftops, and dark forms flitted through the shadows, kept at bay by the withering fire of Armines’ squad. Even still, three crimson bodies already lay on the ground beside Marset. In the centre of the street, Armines poured fire into an alley and shouted over the vox.

‘Follow the sergeant!’ Jost ordered, motioning to a building across the street – the only structure that wasn’t swimming with enemy.

Caius grasped Marset’s armour and began to drag, but Jost pulled him away. ‘He wouldn’t give two shits if you saved his body, but you can honour him by not dying, too!’

The soldier dropped to a knee and fired at the silhouettes along the rooftops as Caius pulled Rhea and Remus towards cover. He looked back only once, long enough to watch Jost fall to the ground beside Marset. Long enough to see bodies in grey fatigues and green helmets pour into the street, a telltale skull emblazoned across their chests.

The Emperor’s Wrath charged towards the squad, along with a ragged swarm of men and women, most nearly naked and poorly armed, bodies streaked with bloody symbols. Caius sprinted to the cover of the building, pushing the children through the door and diving in behind them.

‘Emperor’s Wrath!’ he shouted over the roar of gunfire.

Armines was propped up in one of the windows, his lasgun spraying the street. Across the room, Lorne lobbed a frag grenade out a doorway, while her few remaining comrades pumped death through the building’s other orifices.

The sergeant dropped to the ground, swapping the power pack from his weapon. ‘What?’

‘Those soldiers,’ Caius replied. ‘Same faction as the hangar. The Emperor’s Wrath.’

Armines nodded grimly, then returned to the window. ‘Then you’ll take no issue with us killing a few more.’

Caius stared into the street. Armines’ squad was carving the horde apart, but it kept advancing. Beside him, a crimson-armoured soldier fell back from her post, a long, rusted bar extending through her neck, blood pooling on the floor in rhythmic gushes. Rhea scrambled out from the cover of a toppled staircase and slid the fallen soldier’s weapon towards Armines. Flashes of lasgun fire lit his scarred face as he dropped his smoking rifle and snatched the new one off the ground. Beside him, Lorne’s armour was streaked with the blood of fresh wounds.

These soldiers were going to die. There was nothing Caius could do about that. Despite their bravery, despite their resolve, the swarm would overwhelm them. But it didn’t have to end this way for Rhea and Remus. Or for him.

To the north, the bones of the governor’s palace stood tall through the smoke. There was a transport waiting there. A transport that could get them off this planet for good.

Caius stared at the skull-emblem helmet on the corpse beside him. Armines had been his ticket onto that transport, but maybe the helmet would do just as well. He didn’t need them to believe he was a soldier for long. Just long enough to get in the door with his siblings. After that, he didn’t care what happened to him, so long as those two were safe.

Beneath the staircase, Rhea wrapped her brother in her arms. They didn’t deserve to die here. They hadn’t deserved to be born here. Just like their father hadn’t deserved to be maimed and then murdered.

Caius lifted the helmet, but stopped when Armines caught his eye. The sergeant nodded with grim understanding, then pointed to the door at the back of the room. ‘Go,’ he shouted, his voice drowned out by the fire of his soldiers.

Caius rose and reached out to take Remus by the hand, but stopped when the shouts outside the window fell silent. Slowly, the gunfire trickled away, and the swarm retreated from the street, filtering back into the alleyways and behind the surrounding buildings.

‘What’s happening?’ Caius asked.

Armines shook his head. ‘I have no damn idea. But if you’re going to make a go for it, now’s the time.’

Caius nodded, then froze. In the centre of the street, buried beneath mounds of dishevelled bodies, he caught sight of two crimson helmets. Marset and Jost had died trying to protect him. Armines and his soldiers were about to do the same.

‘Why?’ he asked, turning towards the sergeant. ‘Why did you let us come with you? Why have you kept us safe even when we slowed you down?’

The sergeant’s face adopted a worried frown. ‘It’s our duty.’

‘Your duty to who?’ Caius scoffed. ‘The Imperium? The Throne? An Emperor who will never know you exist? How does protecting three children matter to Him?’

Armines was silent for a moment. ‘It doesn’t. But it would matter to your father. And I owe him that, at least.’ The soldier took a deep breath and sighed. ‘He never told you how he lost his legs, did he?

‘I was just a platoon sergeant, then. He was my company commander. We were tied up on some Throne-forsaken hellhole, brimming with xenos and hive-scroungers, and other trash not worth our blood. But we had our orders, and we were nothing if not obedient.

‘My platoon was pinned down, split off from the regiment, and your father’s command squad had got caught up with us. He’d already ordered the company to move on without us – the mission wasn’t worth risking just for our sakes. Somehow, his command squad managed to break through the lines, and he had a chance to regroup with the unit. It would have been the right tactical decision. None of us would have blamed him. We’d already made peace with the fact we were going to die.

‘But instead of leaving, he brought the squad back.’ Armines smiled, the first time Caius had seen his stony face adopt the expression. ‘You should have seen him, boy, rushing back through the breach. I think he scared the enemy witless, lasguns blazing in both hands. He bought us a window, and the platoon turned the tide.’

A shadow crossed Armines’ face, and his mouth settled back into its resident scowl. ‘It cost him, in the end, but he came back for us. Throne, I wish I could have been here to do the same for him. But if I can do it for his blood, that’s good enough for me.’

Armines glanced out the window and shook his head. ‘Enough talking. Get out of here before those bastards change their minds.’

Caius opened his mouth to reply, but the sergeant nudged Remus and Rhea towards the door. ‘Words aren’t worth much at this point, boy. Just get those two on that ship.’

Caius nodded and pulled his siblings through the door. In the sky above, transports streamed towards the governor’s palace. They were close. So close.

A scream rang out through the empty street. It took Caius a moment to register the sound, then another to realise who had produced it. Remus’ mouth hung open, a shaky cry pouring from his lips. Caius turned and followed his gaze down the street.

Through the dust and smoke, something terrible approached, a bloated, twisted form, scraping its way across the rockcrete. The creature was almost as tall as the surrounding buildings, a myriad of long, sinewy legs dragging its bulbous body along. Its head swung atop a writhing neck, ringed by dozens of mandibles like those of an insect, but its face was clearly, horribly human.

Caius tasted bile and copper in his mouth as he realised the thing had once been a man. A man he recognised. The man who had put his parents to death. A red skull dripped in the skin across its chest, just like those adorning the heads of its servants.

Slowly, the horde re-emerged between the buildings, and a single man walked out into the creature’s path. ‘Behold!’ he shouted. ‘The Emperor Incarnate!’ The man spread his arms towards the sky and closed his eyes. ‘All must kneel before a true god!’

In the shadows, the crowd dropped to its knees. The beast, quickened by the man’s shouting, slithered towards him with horrifying speed, its inhuman arms tearing his body apart before delivering the pieces to its waiting maw. A horrible cry erupted from the creature, some twisted mix of human language and the primal scream of the abyss, then it threw itself down the street towards Caius.

Before he could move, the creature was on them. Instinctively, he reached out for his siblings, but Remus had already begun to run. He darted down the street away from the creature, his foot catching on a block of fallen stone and throwing him to the ground.

Caius felt Rhea shift beside him and grabbed hold of her tunic before she could follow.

‘Stay,’ he ordered, pushing her back towards the cover of the doorway.

The earth around Caius shook as the monster rushed past, its legs striking the ground with a sickly rhythm. Its swollen body lurched across the stone, leaving a trail of film that reeked of rotting flesh and burned Caius’ eyes. His vision swam and his ears still rang, as if its scream had lodged inside his head, but he raised his pistol and fired into the beast’s flank.

Rather than slow, however, the monster seemed to speed up, until it towered over Remus and dropped its head towards the ground. A moment before its mandibles closed, a crimson streak flashed through the road, and a burst of lasgun fire erupted into the creature’s face. The monster reared and let out a guttural screech as Armines loosed a deluge of las-rounds up at it.

Caius sprinted towards the sergeant and his brother as Lorne and the squad opened fire behind him. Lasgun rounds splattered across the creature’s torso, starbursts of char erupting on its grey, hairless skin, maggots pouring out from each wound they produced. Screeching, the creature reared up once more and nearly turned away, then dropped back to the ground, swinging a long, black leg and catching Armines with a jagged claw.

The sergeant fell to the ground in a spray of blood as Caius pulled Remus from the creature’s path. A long, clawed leg slammed into the dirt beside him as he spun to face it.

Around the monster, the light itself seemed to shift, as if the abomination were fashioned not just from flesh but shadow too. Its horrible mandibles crashed together only feet from Caius’ face, and he fired his pistol again and again. He watched with satisfaction as the rounds burst across its already-charred skin, and the Emperor Incarnate pulled itself away.

Caius scrambled up from the ground, dragging Remus to the doorway where Rhea waited. To the north, the path to the governor’s palace lay clear, only a few hundred yards across open terrain.

They could make it. They could make it if they ran right now.

Behind them, Armines’ squad peppered the Emperor Incarnate, while the sergeant struggled upright in the middle of the street. The creature staggered, then righted itself and turned back towards the wounded soldier.

‘Wait here,’ Caius muttered, pushing his siblings towards the doorway where Lorne pulled them safely inside.

Caius sprinted towards Armines. The sergeant had risen onto his elbows and drawn his sword, but the Emperor Incarnate had knocked the rifle from his hands. Caius snatched the weapon from the dirt and dropped to a knee beside Armines, pouring fire into the monster. Armines slashed one of its legs with his sword, severing the limb and spraying foetid blood into the air.

Despite the wound, the creature reached out once more, shielding its face with a set of arms. Caius laid into his weapon’s trigger, but each leg he severed was replaced by another. Finally, the weapon in his hands fell silent, and he glanced down at the smoking power pack as the creature lifted him into the air.

Caius watched in horror as the ring of mandibles spread out around him and the monster opened its twisted mouth. Inside, a black and pockmarked tongue flitted between rows of razor-sharp teeth. Caius’ mind rang with the memory of the creature’s scream, and he felt himself retch something sour and rotten. He reached desperately for the pistol at his waist, but was unable to move in the monster’s grip.

Blood dripped from his wrists, crimson drops raining down into the creature’s maw. Its mandibles squirmed madly before him, their jagged points dancing inches from him, when suddenly the creature shuddered, and its hold relaxed a fraction.

Caius wrenched his arm free and ripped his pistol from its holster, pressing the barrel into the monster’s face. When he fired this time, there were no arms to shield it, and the round let loose a spray of thick, black blood. The creature screeched and tried to drop him, but Caius clung to its arm and fired again.

With a horrible shudder, the monster toppled to the ground, its seething legs falling slowly still. Caius struggled beneath the tangle of lifeless limbs, finally staggering into the street. Armines lay on the ground beside him, a long, deep gash across his chest and face. The sergeant’s arm was crushed and bloodied, pinned beneath the monster’s body, still grasping the sword embedded in its belly.

‘Good shooting,’ he muttered, grimacing as a soft laugh escaped his lips.

Caius staggered to the sergeant and pulled the helmet from his head. ‘Pressure,’ he ordered, tearing a piece of his tunic and pressing it into the soldier’s hand.

Behind the massive carcass of the Emperor Incarnate, the sound of lasgun fire rang through the street, accompanied by the shouts of a mob that was no longer kneeling. Armines’ three remaining soldiers circled around the monster’s body, Lorne leading Rhea and Remus while the others fired at the approaching swarm.

‘Best be going, sarge,’ Lorne said. ‘Don’t think our friends are too happy about the welcome we gave their emperor.’

Armines nodded, then let out a groan as she and Caius pulled him from beneath the monster.

Caius stumbled the final few steps to the transport, Armines leaning heavily on his arm. The wide doors of the carrier sat open, a mass of soldiers stretched across its hold in various states of injury. A few medics darted between the bodies, binding wounds and staunching blood with crude tourniquets and cruel-looking needles. Caius grimaced as the scent of blood and excrement assaulted him while Lorne escorted Rhea and Remus on board.

A young man looked up from beside a mangled soldier, a surgeon’s emblem marking his shoulder. He nodded and pointed at Armines. ‘Lay him on the floor. I’ll get to him as soon as I can.’

The sergeant laughed. ‘Like hell you will. Throne itself couldn’t get me to stay on this transport.’

The surgeon’s face wrinkled in confusion as he looked over Caius and the other soldiers. ‘Then I’m not sure what you’re doing here. The rest of you seem serviceable to me.’

Armines motioned with his weapon, and Rhea and Remus stepped up beside Caius. ‘These three would like to hitch a ride.’

The surgeon’s face hardened. ‘This is a military transport, not a civilian rescue mission.’ He looked around the crowded ship. ‘You can see we’re practically full already. We’ll be taking off soon.’

‘Good,’ Armines muttered, tightening his grip around his lasgun. ‘Then they won’t have to wait too long.’

The surgeon opened his mouth to protest, then looked at the rifle in Armines’ hand and shook his head. ‘I don’t have time for this,’ he muttered. ‘When the commissar finds out, it’s your head, not mine.’

Armines laughed again and looked down at the wound stretching across his chest, still oozing blood and caked with filth. ‘I’m not sure he could do much worse to me.’

The surgeon departed to tend to another patient, and Caius ushered Remus and Rhea on board. ‘Thank you,’ he said, turning to the sergeant.

‘Didn’t do it for you,’ Armines replied. ‘But you could have done worse for yourself today. Now get settled in before that prig kicks you off his ship.’

Caius reached out to hand Armines back his helmet, but the sergeant shook his head, looking down at his gaping wound. ‘Not much point, is there? Don’t think I’m leaving this planet alive.’

Armines threw his arm around Lorne, and stumbled back down the gangplank to the plaza outside, where armoured bodies were already digging in.

Caius stared out at the city as Rhea settled onto the floor beside him. Remus sat beside her and stretched the worn blanket once again over her shoulders. This planet had been beautiful, once. A planet worth fighting for. His father died believing that, years ago. Armines’ men died believing that, today.

Caius turned the sergeant’s helmet in his hands, staring at its skull insignia. Beside him, a tired-looking medic leaned over a body with a vial. The soldier mumbled something then pushed the medic away, cradling a bleeding arm and limping towards the door of the transport. These men were willing to die for his planet. These men were willing to die for a planet they’d never seen before today.

Armines’ words rang in Caius’ ears. There are worse things in this universe than the Imperium. There were worse things than dying for something you believed in.

Caius took a deep breath and pushed himself to his feet. Rhea rose beside him and grasped his hand, Remus wrapping his arms around Caius’ waist. They stared at him with those haunting, grey eyes. Eyes that betrayed so much more than words could. Eyes that told him they understood.

‘Stay safe. Protect each other.’ He paused, afraid his voice might break, and pulled both children into a tight embrace. ‘Remember Father and Mother. Remember me.’

The engines of the transport roared to life as Caius ran towards the door, snatching a lasgun from a soldier too dead to use it. He slipped out the door as it began to close, leaping off the edge of the gangplank as the ship lifted from the ground.

He ran towards the familiar, crimson silhouette limping towards the plaza’s perimeter, fastening Armines’ helmet in place. By the time he reached them, the sergeant and his remaining soldiers had settled in behind a row of sandbags, aiming down one of the plaza’s radiating approaches, where a crowd of dirty bodies approached at a run.

Caius knelt beside Armines, bracing his weapon on a pile of crumbled stone. ‘I won’t swear an oath to your Emperor,’ he said. ‘I won’t worship Him, or pray to Him, or whatever it is that you do.’

Armines smiled. A jagged expression, tempered but not extinguished by decades of hardship and war. ‘My Emperor doesn’t require your words. All He asks for is your blood. And theirs.’

Caius stared down the barrel of his lasgun at the waves of approaching cultists and tightened his finger around the trigger. ‘I think I can manage that.’

WAKING THE DRAGON

Josh Reynolds

Josh Reynolds is well known for his numerous tales in the World-That-Was, which he drew to a close in The End Times series. Written for The End Times, this is a previously unreleased tale of dark sorcery, revenge and alliances built on bloodshed.

Lichemaster Heinrich Kemmler is a hunted man with no army worthy of his purpose. Bound to him is the powerful wight, Krell, an ancient Chaos champion in possession of an unslakeable bloodlust. Following a rumour, Kemmler heads for the abandoned Blood Keep – a grim, black fastness surrounded by enough dead to sweep his enemies away. But the keep is no longer uninhabited, and Kemmler and Krell must deal with the new occupants, who may be far more powerful than the necromancer ever imagined.

The great axe flashed and steel parted. The knight was swept from his saddle and sent tumbling through the air, tailing a trail of crimson in his wake as he crashed to the street of the burnt-out mountain village that had once been known as Blenois. Now it was simply another notch on the axe of the being that had killed every inhabitant, from the oldest to the youngest – the creature known as Krell.

As the now riderless steed plunged past, snorting and bucking, Krell turned to face his next opponent. The second knight galloped towards the massive armoured wight, shoulders hunched and lance extended, a war-whoop escaping his lips. Krell watched him come and spun his axe between his hands in preparation.

The lance struck Krell’s baroquely grotesque cuirass straight on and was peeled to flinders at the point of impact. Krell was forced back a half-step, but he lashed out nonetheless, bringing down both horse and rider in a welter of gore. Two of Bretonnia’s finest – dead in as many minutes. The black eye sockets of Krell’s scarred and pitted skull filled with a weird light as he surveyed the blood spreading through the ruinous sigils engraved on the Black Axe. Its bite was jagged and chipped, and the symbols wrought into the blade seemed to tense and flex with fierce urgency.

Krell lowered the weapon almost reluctantly, tearing his gaze from the blood to survey his remaining enemies. They crept through the gloom towards him, war panoply and harnesses clattering. The two knights had been young, eager to make their names by killing the Butcher of Blenois.

The men now approaching were not as confident. Some had faced Krell before. Others were simply more cautious than the rash knights errant had been. They moved slowly through the mist that rose from the damp streets of the burnt-out village, men-at-arms to the fore, shields raised high and behind them, peasants with bows clutched in fear-palsied hands. And still further back, the armoured figures of knights – Duke Tancred’s chosen men, among them warriors who had supped from the fabled Grail and been made strong.

But even chosen men blanched at approaching a creature like Krell, especially in the grounds he’d made his own. Bodies lay strewn amongst the shattered huts, or hung from the crossbars of the many crude gallows that had been erected in the muddy streets. A flock of carrion crows cawed as they dug at the scraps and flew over the approaching men. A hanging garden of corpses had been created to greet Tancred and his followers, and at its centre, Krell waited, axe in hand.

Krell raised his axe in a silent gesture of mocking triumph. In reply, a hoarse voice bellowed an order and arrows were loosed. A dozen cut through the rising evening mist and punched home in Krell’s monstrous form. The wight ignored them and took a step forward, mighty frame tense with anticipation.

‘No, Krell,’ Heinrich Kemmler, sometimes called the Lichemaster, hissed, his words coiling through the mist. ‘Let Tancred come to us, yes?’ Krell paused, and the great axe was lowered. But the wight’s reluctance was noted and Kemmler grimaced in frustration.

He stood some distance behind and above Krell, on the pitched and sagging roof of one of Blenois’ pitiful shacks, his lean, wiry shape hidden by the concealing mists that seemed to emanate from the ragged cloak that swirled and writhed about him, as if caught in a hell-born breeze. Kemmler leaned on his ornately carved staff, his fingers stroking the dangling skulls that hung from it on copper chains that had long ago gone green with verdigris. ‘Damnable liche,’ he muttered, his eyes narrowed beneath the floppy brim of his hat. Sometimes Krell was more trouble than he was worth. The ancient warrior-corpse stank of the foul winds of Nehekhara, and there was a power rippling through his dead frame that intimidated even a man like Kemmler. He had bound Krell with the strongest spells he knew; even so, the wight was barely biddable, especially when there was blood to be spilled. Sometimes, when the necromancer looked at his servant, he thought he saw something else – some looming presence, lurking just over the wight’s shoulder and directing his actions.

Kemmler pushed the thought aside and licked his dry, cracked lips. He longed to unleash Krell, to set the ancient Chaos champion loose on Duke Tancred and his men. The Duke of Quenelles had harried the Lichemaster from one end of the Grey Mountains to the other since the latter’s failed assault on La Maisontaal Abbey – a failure due in no small part to Tancred’s intervention. Kemmler gnashed his yellowed teeth. Yes, he longed to let Krell slip his chains.

As if sensing his master’s thoughts, Krell glanced back up at him. As the creature’s burning hell-spark gaze passed over him, Kemmler said, ‘Tancred is not so much a fool as that, though.’ The duke wanted a confrontation with Krell, which meant that Kemmler would be a fool to allow it. As mad as that desire seemed, Tancred was no lunatic or glory-hungry fool. He was cunning, though.

‘But not quite as cunning as he thinks, oh no,’ Kemmler said, grinning. If he had been, Tancred would have waited to hear from the scouts he’d sent into the village – the ones who now crouched silently below Kemmler, waiting for his signal, their mutilated corpses twitching with a new, necromantic life – and failing that, he’d have fallen back to await daybreak. Instead, the valiant Duke of Quenelles had launched his assault and even now set his armoured boot into Kemmler’s trap. ‘Come on, Tancred. Just a bit closer,’ Kemmler murmured. He raised his staff in both hands in anticipation. ‘Come to me.’

And Tancred did. A horn gave a winding note and arrows flew, striking Krell, rocking him back. The men-at-arms formed a half-moon shape, shields raised and spears extended like hunters advancing on one of the great bears that inhabited the Grey Mountains. They stopped and the formation split, unleashing the pride of Bretonnia. Warhorses charged forward with thunderous speed and weapons were drawn. Tancred rode among them, his great antler-topped helm surrounded by a halo of ribbons of Cathayan silk. He swung a brutal-looking morning star as he galloped past Krell, striking the wight in the head. Krell tottered and lashed out, ripping the shield from the duke’s arm and sending his steed to its knees.

Another knight lunged to fill the gap, his sword ringing as it hammered down on one of Krell’s pauldrons. An axe chopped into the wight’s side and then Kemmler lost sight of his servant as the wight was subsumed in a wave of horse-flesh and armoured warriors. Weapons rang loudly in the ensuing moments of combat. Every living eye was on Krell’s stand. It was time.

Kemmler struck the roof with his staff and gave a great, croaking cry. A deplorable word slipped between his lips, and the air shuddered as it cut through it. The mist thickened and assumed a greasy patina. Corpses twitched and shuddered in the throes of dark resurrection and a weird light blossomed in the ravaged sockets of eyes. Shattered limbs propelled dead weight to its feet and limp fingers clawed blindly for handholds in the ruins of homes. Carrion birds flew upwards, startled by the sudden movement of heretofore stiff feasts. Ruined jaws sagged, releasing agonised exhalations as the bodies of the dead of Blenois shuddered and began to move towards Tancred’s men.

As the echo of his cry rippled through the village, Kemmler flung out a hand and snarled, ‘Take them!’ The dead men, who had been squatting below him, their shapes hidden in the mist, rose and began to stumble forward, weapons raised, a bloody vanguard for his nightmarish force.

Krell smashed a knight from his horse, crumpling the ornate helm the man wore as if it were paper. His axe took another, beheading him. Tancred abandoned his horse, dropping from the saddle and drawing his sword even as he swung the morning star at Krell. Krell whirled, batting aside the spiked ball and chopping at Tancred. Tancred’s sword glowed with a painful light as it connected edge to bite with Krell’s black axe. The skulls on Kemmler’s staff began to chatter and gibber as they sensed the magics clinging to the sword in the duke’s hand, and the Lichemaster suddenly wondered whether Tancred had fallen into his trap, or he and Krell had fallen into the duke’s. The sword was a potent artefact, glowing with baleful magics, sufficient to harm even a creature like Krell. That was likely the reason that the duke seemed so eager to meet the wight in combat.

A moment later, the first of the zombies struck. Dead men barrelled into the living. The bodies dangling from the gallows began to thrash and clutch at the men-at-arms below them, and corpses stirred from the ashes of the burnt shacks, lunging up to grapple with terrified peasants. Tancred stumbled as a dead man grabbed for his sword arm. He managed to wrench his arm free even as Krell struck. Tancred staggered back, his surcoat ripped from the glancing axe blow.

Kemmler gestured towards the duke, and black bolts of energy exploded from his eyes. Before they struck the duke, however, Tancred lunged for Krell. Kemmler’s mystic bolts struck one of the other knights, burning through his armour and crisping the flesh beneath, flinging the man back in a smoking heap. Krell and Tancred struck at each other and the latter was driven to his knees, only saved from death by a hastily interposed sword blade. The mist swirled about them, and for a moment, Kemmler lost sight of them. Cursing, he clambered down from his perch, using the ladder he’d placed earlier. He had hoped to watch the battle from a safe vantage point, but the need to see Tancred dead outweighed his desire to stay free of the fight.

The dead and the living staggered about in a danse macabre, and Kemmler drew his sword as a screaming peasant ran towards him through the mist, mind broken by the onslaught of the dead. The tomb-blade purred in Kemmler’s hand as he swung it out in a lazy arc, opening up the peasant’s throat. Before the man could fall, Kemmler caught him in the chest with his staff, holding him upright. Dark energies surged through the fossilised wood and into the jerking corpse. An ugly light blazed in its eyes and the dead man wheeled about and lunged for one of his former fellows, hands outstretched and fingers hooked like claws.

Men uttered hoarse cries as they flailed about them at the tide of the dead. Kemmler breathed a coiling black tangle of smoke, drawing the newly slain to their feet. They surfaced from the mist and moved to the attack. He leaned heavily on his staff, watching as his puppets clutched and struck at his enemies. Tancred had been separated from Krell by the stumbling dead. He struck about him, and spat curses. Kemmler hoped the dead would drag him down, but Tancred stubbornly held to his feet. So did those knights whom Krell hadn’t dispatched. Indeed, Tancred began to shout orders to his remaining men. The surviving men-at-arms formed a thorny phalanx around Tancred, their shields pressing the dead back and their spears knocking the zombies sprawling.

Kemmler cursed and sheathed his sword. It was time to go. There was nothing to be gained by staying. ‘Krell,’ he said, his voice carrying easily, ‘Come.’ Krell ignored him and his black axe smashed down, bisecting an upraised shield and the man huddled beneath it. ‘Krell,’ Kemmler said again, raising his voice. Arrows plucked at his swirling cloak and tugged at his wide-brimmed hat. More men sought sanctuary behind the hastily erected shield-wall. The dead were outnumbered, and with surprise releasing its fragile grip on the Bretonnians’ minds, they were putting paid to the zombies. Tancred would not die this day, Kemmler realised with grim frustration, but he and Krell just might, unless they could escape while their pursuers were occupied.

‘Krell,’ Kemmler shouted, desperate now. Krell lunged, chopping into the shield-wall, trying to batter his way towards Tancred. ‘Damnation! You’re going to get us killed, you stubborn hunk of gristle!’ Kemmler struck the ground with his staff and raised it up in both hands, pulling at the winds of death that swirled invisibly about the village. The wind rose, shattering the mist and it swept towards Tancred’s men, howling and shrieking as it went. Shapeless spirits, wrenched from the earth by Kemmler’s magics, struck the shield-wall and men pitched backwards as their souls were dragged from their bodies by ethereal claws. For a moment, confusion reigned. Krell stepped back and Kemmler stretched a hand towards him. Withered fingers clenched, and Krell shuddered as the necromancer plucked the threads of the geas that bound the wight to him. ‘Come,’ Kemmler spat.

Krell shivered, but ignored the pull. His axe thundered down, beheading a sprawled man-at-arms. The wight stepped on the body, pulverising the ribcage, as he moved towards Tancred. Kemmler’s veins bulged as he wrestled with the winds of magic that bound Krell. It was like trying to restrain a savage hound, just as the beast had scented blood. Krell fed on death, and he was ever-hungry.

‘I said come with me,’ Kemmler growled, knuckles cracking as he gestured sharply. Krell swung around and for a moment, the Lichemaster thought that Krell might strike him. But the moment passed and the wight strode towards him, leaving the Bretonnians locked in battle with the hungry dead.

They left the battle behind, moving quickly to the outskirts of the village. Kemmler pulled himself into the saddle of a gnaw-bone corpse nag, its bones gleaming whitely through a ragged, crow-picked hide. Its handler was its former owner, a sagging, whey-faced zombie that had once been a merchant who’d had the bad luck to visit the village on the same day that Kemmler and Krell had arrived. Kemmler gestured back at the village and the zombie lurched towards the fray. The dead wouldn’t stay on their feet long, with Kemmler’s departure: his control, while greater than that of most who styled themselves necromancers, was still finite in its reach. Without him, the putrid mockery of life would flee the gelid limbs and the dead would lie down once more. But by that time, he would be gone. The undead horse moved quickly as Kemmler snapped the reins and its lifeless limbs moved smoothly thanks to his magics. Krell kept pace easily, running full tilt at his master’s side. Kemmler had learned that it paid to always have an escape route, even when victory seemed certain.

It wasn’t the first time that they had been forced to retreat, but familiarity did not lessen the sting. Kemmler spat a steady stream of curses. It was proving impossible to rebuild his forces with Tancred harrying them across the mountains. The forces of the Duke of Quenelles, however, grew steadily. If there was one thing that could get the normally fractious Bretonnian lords to unite, it was a chance to gain glory in battling an enemy like the Lichemaster. Men and knights from the regions of Parravon and Montfort flocked to Tancred’s banner and no matter how many Kemmler dispatched and resurrected, the living still outnumbered the dead. The Bretonnians had experience in battling the awakened dead, as Kemmler had discovered to his chagrin. Tancred’s hunt had prevented him from staying in one place long enough to build a significant force.

Behind them, Tancred’s horn sounded – a dull, rumbling growl of sound. The Duke of Quenelles was on the hunt once more, or would be soon. Kemmler hunched low in his saddle and cursed again, urging his steed up the slopes and into the high hills. The night would aid them in their escape, but what good was escape when there was nowhere to run to? If they stopped, Tancred would catch up with them and the whole process would be started again. Krell could butcher the inhabitants of a hundred villages and Kemmler could raise them, but nothing was gained in doling them out piecemeal against Tancred’s hunters.

They needed an army, but there was no place to get one, not that could be reached easily. Mousillon or the ruins of Castle Drachenfels would be ideal, but Tancred had cut him off from those routes. The only direction open to them was east, and what was in the east but the cursed forests of Athel Loren? Kemmler shuddered, thinking of those terrible, close-set trees and the immortal, ethereal shapes that lurked within their embrace.

‘Answer me that, you daemon-infested hulk,’ Kemmler snapped, glaring at the wight that ran at his side. ‘Eh? Where can we go? Tell me that! We need an army, but where is there an army to be had in these cursed mountains…’ Kemmler trailed off as a faint flutter of memory crossed the surface of his mind. ‘Cursed,’ he repeated. Then a feral smile spread across his leathery features. ‘Ha! Yes. Oh my yes,’ he murmured. He wrenched on the reins, turning his corpse-mount about, aiming east. ‘Come, Krell!’

Kemmler galloped up into the crags as black legends flapped through his crooked brain. Blood-soaked stories of fanged horrors descending from their grim keep high in the eastern peaks of the Grey Mountains and of a three-year siege by the men of the Empire, ending in a horrific battle and scattered nightmares. Or perhaps not so scattered – in his wanderings, Kemmler had heard gossipmongers in the mountain villages saying that the black keep with its high stone walls was once again inhabited, that dead men roamed the slopes below it, and that things moved within the barrows that sprouted in its shadow. ‘Blood Keep,’ Kemmler hissed. He glanced at his servant. If Krell recognised the name, he gave no sign. ‘Rumours or no, there’ll be the makings of an army there. An army capable of crushing whatever paltry forces Tancred dares pit against us.’

His head filled with visions of that army – a proper one, not stumbling, rotting peasants but gleaming bone clad in rusty armour and fire-eyed wights. With an army like that, he could sweep down from the Grey Mountains, driving his enemies before him. No more running and skulking like the beggar he had once pretended to be. Tancred would fall, and all of Kemmler’s enemies with him. But not for long, oh no… No, they would rise again, to serve him.

Kemmler gave a croak of laughter. But his good humour evaporated a moment later. How could he have forgotten? A man like him lived and died by rumours. It had been rumours and folk stories that had led him to Krell. He cursed. He should have thought of it sooner. So why hadn’t he? He had passed through the eastern mountains more than once… Why hadn’t he gone to Blood Keep sooner? Not for the first time, Kemmler wondered if he was fully in control of his own fate. He thought again of the shape that seemed to lurk in Krell’s shadow – a phantom presence of malevolent weight and titanic malice. He thought that the same shape padded through his fitful dreams on those rare occasions when sleep came. A vast, bloated charnel thing that whispered to him, indeed had been whispering to him all of his life, even as a young man, since he’d first stumbled upon those badly translated copies of the Books of Nagash in his father’s haphazard ancestral library.

Those books had started him on his journey, the first steps that had seen him defy death in all of its forms, benign or sinister. He had fought rivals and enemies alike, striving to stand alone. The Council of Nine and the Charnel Congress – rival consortiums of necromancers – had faded before his might, their petty grave-magics swept aside by his fierce and singular will. He had pillaged the library of Lady Khemalla of Lahmia in Miragliano and driven the vampiress from her den and the city, and in the crypts beneath Castle Vermisace he had bound the liches of the Black Circle to his service, earning him the sobriquet ‘Lichemaster’.

He had counselled counts, princes and petty kings and gathered a library of necromantic lore second only to the fabled libraries of forsaken Nagashizzar. He had waged a cruel, secret war on men, dwarfs and elves, prying their secret knowledge from them, and with every death rattle and dying sigh, the voice in his head, the pressing thing that had encouraged him and driven him had purred with delight. Until one day, it had gone silent.

Hunched in his saddle, staff caught in the crook of his neck and shoulder, he looked down at his scarred, blistered hands. Most of those scars had been earned in the years after the Battle of Ten Thousand Skulls, as his enemies had taken to calling it. For decades, he had scurried through these hills and those of the Worlds Edge Mountains, half-mad and broken in body and soul.

He had come so far, learned so much, only to have it all snatched away at the last moment by an alliance of those he’d thought beaten. So much knowledge… lost. So many memories of that time had vanished in the fog of his years in the wilderness.

It hadn’t just been his own skill as a scholar that had led him to Krell, no matter how much he liked to tell himself otherwise. Something else – that nagging presence had guided his feet in those years following the Battle of Ten Thousand Skulls, its voice returning, in snatches at first and then growing louder, a demanding drumbeat in his fevered brain. It was quiescent now, but for how long?

What was left of his soul squirmed at the thought and he pushed it aside. In control or not, it didn’t matter. If whatever dark entity was guiding him was choosing now to lead him to Blood Keep, he was willing to let it do so. Pawn, puppet or prince, he was still the Lichemaster and he would have his victory, whatever the cost.

Kemmler pushed his mount to the limits of its durability in the hours following their escape from Blenois. Even with his magics, the dead animal could only run so fast, and night bled into day all too swiftly in the Grey Mountains. From behind them, every so often, came the low wail of Tancred’s horn, but it grew fainter with every hour. In the rocky peaks, their trail would be almost impossible to follow, or so he hoped. Tancred had developed an uncanny ability to turn up just where he was least wanted or expected. Kemmler had hoped to be rid of the persistent and pestiferous duke in Blenois, but yet again Tancred had survived. It was almost as if some dark force were protecting his enemy and setting him on Kemmler’s trail.

Their pace slowed as the sun rose. Kemmler sat huddled in his cloak and his mount stumbled and staggered. Beneath the eye of the sun, the winds of death blew softly, if at all. It took more of Kemmler’s concentration to keep his mount upright and moving. Nonetheless, he did not even think of slowing. Time was of the essence, and no one knew better than a necromancer just how finite a mortal span was. As the day began to give way to evening, they followed the spine of the mountains ever eastwards. It was a familiar enough route for Kemmler, who had wandered these mountains for years following his defeat so long ago. Thoughts of that day occupied him through the heat of the afternoon and into the cool of evening.

He’d learned the benefits of allies that day. Before, he’d been content to be an island alone in a sea of the servile dead. But the alliance that had met him had changed his thinking – squabbling enemies had turned boon companions and the battle had gone against him, though not swiftly and not without cost to his enemies.

He had escaped – no, he had survived. As he always survived. The Lichemaster had persisted, had clung to the shoals of existence by his fingernails and teeth. He had refused to die, refused to fall despite the forces ranged against him. Heinrich Kemmler would not lose his soul to death and damnation easily.

He would not lose it at all.

Fired by these thoughts, he drew strength as he always did from the incessant bubble of anger that nestled in the pit of his heart. His knuckles popped as he tightened his grip on his staff. The thought of his enemies falling before him, like wheat before a scythe, filled him with pleasure. But that pleasure was tinged with bitterness. Triumph was far from certain, and he was one man, alone against a kingdom. He glanced at Krell. No, not alone.

He had summoned many wights in his time. Sometimes they were little more than ambulatory extensions of his will, with no more personality than a skeleton or zombie. At other times, some fragment of their old self remained, albeit twisted and corrupted. But Krell was unique. His whole being vibrated with a rage that even Kemmler found disturbing. Locked inside that dead shell was a soul in a very specific sort of torment. Krell hungered for blood and slaughter, but could only indulge at his master’s whim. He could feel Krell’s yearnings, his need to kill. It made him hard to control, and there were times that Kemmler feared the creature would turn on him, should his spells grow weak.

As if he knew what the necromancer was thinking, Krell looked at him, eye sockets alight with an ugly glow. The jaw sagged in a skeletal grin, and a butcher-block stink rolled out from between the yellowed teeth. ‘Laugh all you want, you mummified brute,’ Kemmler spat. ‘But do not forget who it was that woke you from your prison, eh?’

Krell turned away, as if in dismissal. Kemmler bit back a snarl. No, Krell wasn’t easily controlled, but he was effective. And his effectiveness would be increased by the addition of an army.

Something scraped on stone, snapping Kemmler out of his reverie. Distant shapes scrambled out of sight, dislodging rocks. Krell lifted his axe, eye sockets burning, and a whisper of a growl escaped his fleshless jaws. Kemmler frowned. They were being watched, but for how long?

Then, the distant wail of a horn reached him. He jerked his mount to a halt. The sound of the horn had not come from behind them. Kemmler’s reptilian eyes narrowed in consternation. Had Tancred somehow managed to get ahead of them? Was the duke aware of their destination? Had those shapes been his men? Kemmler’s lips peeled back from his teeth. He looked at Krell. The wight had stiffened, like a dog catching a scent. The haft of the great axe creaked in the dead warrior’s grip. Kemmler frowned and turned in his saddle, glaring back across the crags that they had just traversed. Everything was bathed in starlight and something large and terrible passed across the silvery face of the moon. Its shriek echoed down and caused Kemmler to shudder. He looked up, following its path, trying to make it out, but before he could, his eyes fell upon a welcome sight.

The crags opened up like the petals of a flower, pulling away from a vicious fang of bifurcated stone that curved towards the sky. The jagged tooth-like peak rose from a barren bowl of rock where a thin scrum of scraggly trees eked out a pallid existence, rising from the evening mist like the crooked fingers of a corpse. It was not simply that the mountains were inhospitable; it was as if something were leeching the very life out of them. Dozens of great stone cairns sat among those trees, resting silently in the shadow of the cracked peak that loomed over them.

Like the antediluvian tribes of what was now the Empire, the primitive Bretonni tribes had built barrows to house their noble dead and those barrows dotted the mountains, near the ruins of long-vanished settlements. The thought filled Kemmler with a sense of dark triumph. If Blood Keep was built atop the remains of an old town or pre-human fortress, as he suspected, then there could be legions of the dead awaiting his call, more even than he had previously imagined. He would have not just an army, but armies. His gaze was drawn upwards. On the taller of the two sections of the peak, Blood Keep waited, dark and silent.

Kemmler reached into his coat, fumbling through spell components and other, less savoury things to find the shape of the old Arabyan spyglass he had carried since a long-ago trek to the Lands of the Dead. He snapped the leather cap off and held it up, peering towards the distant structure.

The keep fell into focus: it was perched like a bird of prey on the edge of the sheared peak, its serpentine battlements thrust out over the void like burrs on a blade. A massive bridge, crafted from stone and wood, linked the lower section of the crag to Blood Keep’s grisly portcullis – great stakes, stained black by long-dried blood, thrust out at tangled angles from the arch of the gate, and from some of them, desiccated, almost mummified bodies still dangled, providing perches for crows and other scavengers. There were plenty of the former circling above the broken parapets and shattered turrets in the moonlight. That implied a food source of some kind. Necromancers were, to a man, keen birdwatchers. Carrion birds could lead a man to all sorts of treasures.

Kemmler wondered how long those bodies had hung there – not for centuries, he knew. Months perhaps, which begged the question, who had decorated the portcullis in such a fashion? The mountain breeze carried a foul effluvium down to him, and he spat. There were bodies somewhere, fresh ones, or nearly so. Perhaps the gossipmongers had been correct, and the Blood Keep was no longer abandoned.

He frowned. There were greenskins aplenty in these mountains, not to mention human bandits. But he didn’t smell orcs, or cooking fires or anything that spoke of living inhabitants. Kemmler twisted in his saddle and looked at Krell, who stood nearby, as still as a statue. As ever, the wight’s mood, if he even had one, was impossible to gauge.

‘Come,’ Kemmler snapped, snapping his mount’s reins. Greenskins or not, Tancred’s men or not, they were too close to turn back now. Carefully, they picked their way down into the gorge below. Mist reached up to greet them. But once they were among the barrows and trees, something caught his eye, dragging his gaze back to the battlements. He raised the spyglass again. In the moonlight, metal glinted. Men in armour, Kemmler realised, as fury bubbled within him. No, not just men: knights.

The horn wailed again, louder this time, coming not from behind them but echoing down from Blood Keep, and through the spyglass, Kemmler saw one of the knights lower a curling ram’s horn as the sound flew out over the crags and slithered through the rocks. The mist swirled, as if disturbed. Sounds rose up from within the trees and barrows. Kemmler cursed. Somehow, somewhen, Tancred had got men ahead of them, however impossible it seemed. Perhaps they had been waiting, just in case. Regardless, it didn’t matter. It was another ambush, but this time, he and Krell were the ones in the trap.

Incensed, Kemmler raised himself in his saddle and shook his staff at the distant figures. ‘You will not stop me! The banner of Blood Keep will be raised and at my command. Quenelles will burn, its people made chattel for my use!’ he roared, his harsh, croaking voice echoing out across the crags. He glared about him, sighting the barrows. ‘There,’ he grated. With an army culled from the barrows, he would see to Tancred’s men once and for all. He could smell the rich aroma of old death rising from the hummocks of stone and hard soil, and he could see the pinpricks of ragged spirits clinging to long-buried remains.

Before he could lose himself, however, feet scraped on the stones and harsh panting rose from the darkness as the ambushers closed in on Kemmler and Krell. Krell readied himself, and just in time, as the first of their attackers reached them a moment later.

They were not Bretonnians.

Filthy rags clung damply to pallid flesh and gangly limbs bent and knuckled the stone as the ghouls burst out of the growing mist with a communal howl. Krell met the first with a sharp blow that bisected the creature as it leapt. Kemmler was forced to draw his tomb-blade as the tide of corpse-eaters poured over Krell and some loped towards the necromancer, fangs bared. His sword stabbed out, catching a ghoul in the gut. Claws tugged at his cloak and he wrenched himself free, hacking wildly. Krell’s armoured fingers slammed down on the head of a ghoul about to leap on Kemmler, and the wight jerked the creature back and hurled it with bone-snapping force into one of its fellows. The horn shrilled again and the surviving ghouls reacted with alacrity, retreating, leaving Kemmler and Krell where they stood. Puffing from his brief exertion, Kemmler licked his lips nervously. He had been taken utterly by surprise by the creatures, with no chance to use either spell or what limited influence his magics sometimes granted him over such foul creatures. The necromancer had seen – and faced – ghouls before, but to see them here was something of a shock. Whole tribes of the verminous creatures lived within the great necropolises of Mousillon, sweeping down into the damned city every time the Chaos moon rode through the night sky, but he had not expected them this far north. The ghouls set up a keening caterwaul a moment later.

Three pairs of torch-like eyes peered out of the dark beneath the trees, and three massive shapes ambled through the mist with simian grace in response to the ghouls’ wailing. They were large beasts, bigger than a man and covered in ropy muscle. Animalistic faces grinned, displaying mouths full of needle fangs. Their greyish flesh was marked by several centuries’ worth of scars and one, the largest of the three, wore a primitive torque about its bull-neck, and several strings of yellowed fangs hung from the loop of filthy gold. They shoved aside the ghouls with snaps and snarls, and the corpse-eaters gave way with mewling and whimpering. Kemmler grunted as the stink of old blood and black magic washed over him. The creatures, despite their bestial appearance, were not ghouls. They were Strigoi – broken and bestial vampires, degraded in form and mind, that were to other vampires as ghouls were to men, and were kings amongst that foul breed.

The largest of the monsters – likely the pack leader, Kemmler judged – pointed a crooked talon at Kemmler and spoke in a guttural language. He blinked, understanding one word in ten. The language was archaic, and Kemmler recognised it from his brief, long-ago study of Al-Muntasir’s translations of the Books of Morath – it was the language of long-buried Strigos. He didn’t bother to reply to the creature’s querulous grunt. Instead, he stepped back from Krell, sheathed his sword, and thumped the ground with the bottom of his staff. ‘Kill them,’ he said. Whatever reason these creatures had for being here, they could not be allowed to stand in his way.

The vampires snarled like wolves and dived forward, claws outstretched. Krell stepped into their path at Kemmler’s gesture. The ancient wight met the Strigoi charge unflinchingly. A blow sent one of the Strigoi sailing backwards and a looping slash with the axe took the hand from the second, causing the creature to reel backwards with a gibbering shriek. The pack leader landed on Krell’s shoulders, its talons digging into the wight’s pauldrons. The Strigoi grabbed either side of Krell’s helm and attempted to wrench the wight’s head off.

As Krell staggered, ghouls rushed towards him, seeking to aid their king. Pale limbs clutched at Krell’s arms and legs, trying to bring him down through sheer weight of numbers. Krell stamped down on a ghoul’s skull, bursting it like a melon and killing the beast instantly. His axe extracted a red toll from the corpse-eaters, even as he grabbed for the Strigoi with his free hand.

Kemmler watched the battle with only one eye, the other firmly fixed on one of the crumbled barrows before him. He could practically smell the ancient corpses within, hidden for long centuries by tightly packed rock and soil. With the Strigoi occupied, he could summon the first recruits for his army. He stretched his hands towards the barrow and something surged past him, startling him. The skulls on his staff began to clatter and hiss, and Kemmler’s eyes widened as he felt the winds of death roil and wash over him, but not as he wished, not under his control. Bony talons punched through the surface of the barrow and clutched at him, grabbing his cloak and arm. Kemmler gave a squawk of surprise and jerked back. Leering skulls pressed through the crumbling wall of rock and dirt, jaws wide in silent screams. Ancient bronze blades stabbed at him and only Kemmler’s quick reflexes saved him from a ruptured belly.

The skeletons followed him as he stumbled back. They forced their way out and struck at him with inhuman precision. Kemmler caught a blow on his staff and clawed for his tomb-blade. He drew it and chopped through a brown, root-wrapped spinal column in one desperate motion.

More barrows were torn open from the inside all around him, the dead struggling into the moonlight with deadly intent burning in their guttering eye sockets. He snarled in frustration, sensing another’s will giving motion to the ancient, withered corpses. The strands of dark magic tensed and writhed through the barrows, stirring the dead to life, but not quite in the way he’d hoped. He set his staff and focused every feral, savage iota of his will, grasping at the taunting necromantic winds with his mind. It was like trying to pry a sword from the hand of a determined opponent. But he was the Lichemaster, and he had broken more than one rival on the altar of death-magic. Unseen or not, this foe would prove no different.

The dead closed in around him, raising battered weapons. Kemmler ignored them, letting his blade hang down, its tip planted in the hard ground. The skulls on his staff chattered shrilly and flopped about wildly. A foul breeze rose, stirring the dank mist that clung to everything. The dead hesitated. Sweat streaked Kemmler’s seamed face as he fought for control. He felt his opponent’s will bend and flex against his, like a serpent attempting to strike the man who held it. It was almost playful, as if the unseen necromancer were content to dangle the dead before Kemmler, taunting him with their control. Kemmler redoubled his efforts as the dead closed in on him. He was no man to be taunted.

Eyes closed, he traced the skeins of dark magic that linked his rival to the newly awakened dead, even as he gathered strength from the sour earth. In any other place, he might have been able to track his opponent through those twisting strings of power, but here, there was simply too much dark magic, and it was the equivalent of tracking smoke through fog. Legions had fought and died here, on these rocks. The essences of their death made this place a sump of necromantic power and Kemmler inhaled it with the desperate, greedy gulping of a man dying of thirst. Power flooded him, burning his veins and setting a cold ache deep in his bones. It was a dangerous thing to draw strength from death, and one misstep could reduce him to something little better than Krell, going from master of death to its servant with one stumble.

He felt his opponent’s will hesitate and retreat, as if surprised by Kemmler’s audacity. Sensing triumph, Kemmler lifted his staff and slammed it down. One by one, the skeletal shapes surrounding him turned their inhuman gazes on the ghouls. Teeth gritted, eyes bulging with strain, Kemmler gestured with his sword and the dead advanced on the corpse-eaters with jerky, awkward speed. Kemmler leaned heavily on his staff, the tomb-blade dragging his arm down as his new minions attacked the ghouls. The creatures howled in shock and agony as bronze blades chopped into their maggoty flesh. As the first ghoul fell, the resistance to Kemmler’s control faded. He savoured his victory for only a moment, before turning his attentions to Krell.

The wight had battled his vampiric opponents to a standstill. All three creatures were bleeding and stumbling as they lunged again and again at Krell, scoring his armour with their claws. Krell had slowed not a step, and his axe whipped through the air with almost lazy disdain, driving the creatures back again and again. Kemmler grunted in satisfaction and thrust out his staff. Armoured skeletons, their skulls and rust-riddled cuirasses perforated by ragged roots, stalked forward, hacking at the Strigoi, who whirled to face these new opponents with cries of alarm.

Kemmler laughed nastily as Krell raised his axe, ready to strike down one of the distracted vampires. Before the blow could fall, the sound of the horn came again, followed by the thunder of galloping hooves. The necromancer spun, sword extended and the words to a spell springing to his lips, as a wedge of knights burst from between two of the larger barrows, scattering ghouls and riding down the dead. Devilish steeds, red-eyed and black-hoofed, clad in bloodstained barding daubed with disturbing icons of necromantic power, snorted and whinnied as the wedge split and thundered around Kemmler and Krell in a circle. The riders, clad in crimson, grotesquely decorated armour, lashed out at ghouls and skeletons alike with lances and swords, while calling out to one another in apparent amusement.

The Strigoi retreated into the forests, the ghouls at their heels as the crimson knights dispatched any too slow or too shocked to get out of the way. Soon, the Lichemaster and his hulking servant were alone, save for the newcomers. The red-eyed horses snorted and pawed the hard ground as the knights brought them to a halt. Kemmler was almost light-headed with the dark pressure emanating from the warriors. They were not men, any more than the Strigoi were. They were creatures steeped in blood and the effluvium of the battlefield. Savage eyes peered out from within cruelly curved helms and the stink of offal and death bled off their armour, which was encrusted with ornately wrought images of slaughter. Kemmler bared his teeth. ‘I see the rumours were correct,’ he said. ‘The masters of Blood Keep have returned. Good.’

One of the knights, clad in armour the colour of midnight, rather than the red of his fellows, urged his stallion forward. His face was hidden within his helm, and his voice echoed oddly as he spoke. ‘And what is good about your current situation, interloper? You trespass on our lands and poach our game.’

‘Game,’ Kemmler repeated. Understanding crept in a moment later. ‘The ghouls,’ he murmured.

‘Aye and their beastly kings – stupid things, all fang and muscle,’ the knight said. ‘But they make adequate sport for a night’s entertainment. You will not be so entertaining, I think. We will break your legs and set you on a short stake.’ The knight’s voice was a barbarous purr, and it sent chills up and down Kemmler’s spine. He spat and Krell stepped forward protectively, a raspy growl echoing from behind his fleshless grin. The knight looked at the wight for a long moment and then back at Kemmler.

‘I think you will do no such thing, kastellan,’ Kemmler said, digging into his memory for the honorific. ‘Instead, I think you will hear me out.’

‘And why would I do that, Heinrich Kemmler?’

‘You know me?’ Kemmler said, surprised. He peered at the Blood Knight through narrowed eyes.

‘I know many men. Your foul little crusade is spoken of from Mousillon to Magritta, Lichemaster,’ the knight said, putting a mocking emphasis on Kemmler’s title.

Stung, Kemmler’s grip tightened on his staff, but he held his temper. ‘You called it a crusade, and thus it is… A dark crusade to crush the petty kings of men and render their cities into tombs, a crusade that I call upon the Order of the Blood Dragon to join! I come to wake the Order of the Dragon from its sleep of ages and set it loose upon the world once more!’

As one, the circle of armoured vampires laughed. Kemmler flinched as the sound of it slithered around him like the constricting coils of a vast serpent. The kastellan raised a hand. ‘And why would we do that? Why would we raise our banner at the behest of a god-twisted beggar and his creaking abomination?’

‘I could compel you,’ Kemmler said softly.

The laughter faded. The kastellan leaned forward, eyes burning behind his visor. ‘Could you now?’ he said. ‘You had difficulty controlling the dried leavings of these ancient barrows, Kemmler. What hope, then, have you of commanding such as us?’

Kemmler gnawed on his lip in frustration. He knew from the creature’s gloating tone that it was his necromantic opponent from earlier. But he had beaten it then, and he could surely beat it again. His staff twitched, but before he could raise it, one of the other knights raised his lance and pricked the side of Kemmler’s neck with the tip. ‘No hope is the answer you were looking for, Lichemaster,’ the kastellan said. The knight sat back in his saddle and looked up at the silvery moon. ‘The night passes quickly. You have deprived us of our intended sport, Kemmler. Thus, you will serve in its stead. Run, little man. Run and pray that we do not catch you.’

‘No,’ Kemmler hissed.

‘What?’ the kastellan said.

‘No!’ Kemmler’s blade came up, chopping aside the lance as he thrust out his staff. Black fire speared from the tip, washing over the kastellan. The knight’s mount reared with a shriek, and the kastellan fought to control it even as he swept out a hand. Kemmler’s flames were snuffed as easily as if they were nothing more than the sparks of a candle. Kemmler was already shouting more incantations as the knights closed in as one.

Krell raised his axe and roared.

The sound of the ancient wight’s voice, so rarely used to its full effect, billowed upwards like the noise of a rockslide, stopping the horses in their tracks and causing the knights to jerk their reins in shock. Krell pointed his axe at the closest of the vampires and words rasped from between his fleshless jaws. The words were indecipherable and unintelligible but their meaning was plain. The kastellan raised his arm and shouted, ‘Hold!’

‘He has challenged us,’ one of the Blood Knights snarled eagerly. ‘The rotting beast challenges us.’ The others murmured in agreement and Kemmler noted with satisfaction that the kastellan’s posture made his displeasure obvious. The creature had wanted a quick kill. Kemmler’s mind raced as he lowered his staff and tomb-blade. He would have to be quick to take advantage of the situation.

‘And so?’ the kastellan barked. ‘Are we children, to take every challenge as a given? That thing is nothing more than a tool, a puppet of this sack of stringy meat and crooked bones,’ he continued, gesturing to Kemmler, who grinned.

‘Oh, Krell is anything but that, kastellan,’ Kemmler crowed. ‘I awoke him, but I do not control him,’ he continued, noting silently that there was some bitter truth in his bluff. ‘And there is no greater warrior in these mountains or beyond than Krell Thrice-Dead, Krell of the Great Axe. Let your warriors fight him, kastellan. Let them learn what true power is… Let them meet Krell’s challenge, unless you are frightened to do so.’

The Blood Dragons growled at this, glaring fiercely at Kemmler, but their attentions were mostly on Krell. The kastellan grunted. Kemmler chuckled. ‘And if he wins, you will throw your banner at my feet,’ he said. The kastellan whipped around, glaring at him. Kemmler’s smile didn’t falter. ‘Or do you fear that your warriors will not prove up to the challenge?’

‘And if they win?’ the kastellan said, finally.

‘Then my power will be at your disposal,’ Kemmler said, inclining his head.

The kastellan gave a bark of laughter. ‘Oh, I will dispose of you, never fear.’ He gestured to one of his knights. ‘Go,’ he growled. The Blood Knight gave a deep howl and spurred his mount forward. His lance dipped, but Krell made no move to step aside. Instead, as he had in Blenois, the wight allowed the lance to strike him and shatter. Krell drove his shoulder into the horse’s chest, toppling the animal and throwing its rider. The vampire sprang to his feet with barely a whisper of sound; his pale features were twisted in a feral snarl as he drew his sword and whipped it out across Krell’s skull. Krell stepped back and the vampire lunged, pressing the attack. The sword flickered like lightning as it scraped filth and sparks from Krell’s armour.

The wight’s hand snapped out and caught the blade. The vampire blinked in shock, but reacted with preternatural swiftness, releasing the weapon and reaching for the dagger at his belt. The great axe sank down, splitting the gargoyle helm and the writhing features beneath before the dagger could be drawn. Krell flung out his arm and flicked the body off his axe as if it were no heavier than a drop of gore. The vampire’s body spun and smashed into the ground.

Krell extended his other hand and crooked a finger. A second Blood Knight slid from his horse and advanced, his shield and cruelly hooked war-axe raised warily. The others had grown quiet with the dispatch of the first, their jeers dwindling as it became obvious that even if Krell heard them, he didn’t appear to care. The second knight paused, and then, with a war-whoop, barrelled forward, smashing into Krell with his shield, his axe flickering out to strike the wight’s arm. Krell twisted aside and caught the vampire in the back with an elbow, nearly flattening him.

The creature jerked around with the grace of a striking snake, his axe chopping a wedge in Krell’s pauldron and rocking the wight on his feet. Krell rolled his shoulder, using his greater strength to yank the axe from his opponent’s grip. But before Krell could employ his own weapon, the vampire chopped down on his wrist with the edge of his shield, causing Krell to drop his axe. Krell reacted without hesitation. The wight’s hands slammed together on either side of the vampire’s bat-winged helm and with a brutal crack, Krell spun the vampire’s head around. The red-armoured warrior fell, twitching. Krell lifted a foot and stomped down on the flopping creature’s cuirass, denting the metal and smashing the torso beneath.

Krell ripped the vampire’s axe from his shoulder and tossed it aside disdainfully. The wight bent and snatched up his own axe and turned back to the gathered vampires, gazing at each in turn. Krell spread his arms and his jawbone sagged in what could only be a mocking expression as no further challengers stepped forward. Kemmler laughed and leaned on his staff. ‘Come, come, who will be next? Step right up, my fine lords. Step up and be put down,’ he cackled.

With a communal growl, two knights set their horses into motion. Twin lances dipped for Krell and the wight slashed out, splitting them with a wide swing of his axe. Kemmler didn’t bother to watch. Krell could dispatch his weight in armoured buffoons, blood-drinkers or no. Kemmler was content to leave him to it; the wight was playing his role perfectly, providing a distraction to the enemy so that Kemmler could deliver the killing blow. Instead, the necromancer concentrated on the weak skeins of dark magic that seeped up from the ground and barrows. The arrival of the Blood Knights had interrupted his control of the barrow-dead and he knew that the kastellan had no more intention of honouring the challenge than Kemmler himself did. Unlike his followers, that one was more cunning than courageous.

Kemmler felt the dead stir sluggishly as he wove threads of control through the soil and rocks, prodding them into motion. He would raise reinforcements from the barrows and vaults of this place. Even vampires would eventually be dragged under by a tide of dead bone. As long as Krell could keep them occupied…

‘As plans go, it has cunning to it,’ the kastellan said. Kemmler looked up, eyes widening slightly. The black-armoured vampire looked down at him from his horse, seemingly unconcerned with the violence Krell was dealing out to his warriors. ‘It was obvious, of course, from the outset that you would attempt it.’

Kemmler grimaced. ‘Then stop me, wound-licker.’

‘And insult added upon insult,’ the kastellan said, leaning forward in his saddle. ‘I could stop you with but a thought, necromancer.’

‘If you could, you would have,’ Kemmler said. Behind the kastellan, a crimson-armoured form hurtled through the air to smash into a barrow, sans head. More of the Blood Knights had joined the fray, both a-horse and on foot. Krell met them all with a creak of battered metal and a rasping roar. Kemmler could almost feel the wight’s bestial satisfaction. ‘I beat you earlier. I can beat you now.’

‘I let you take control. I saw no reason to let you be devoured by ghouls,’ the kastellan said. ‘Besides, I wanted to see what you were capable of for myself. Stories are all well and good, but a wise man trusts only his own eyes.’

Kemmler tensed. He peered up at the vampire speculatively. ‘Why?’

‘Curiosity,’ the vampire said.

Krell plucked a knight from his horse and swung him by his arm against a tree, shattering it. Not releasing the still-struggling vampire, Krell whirled around, whipping the creature into his companions hard enough to wrench the vampire’s arm from its socket. Arm in one hand and his axe in the other, Krell struck out at his opponents. Kemmler and the kastellan watched the melee for a moment. ‘He is most impressive,’ the vampire said.

‘He is more trouble than he’s worth at times,’ Kemmler said sourly. ‘Like any beast, he requires regular feedings.’

‘You seem to have little problem with that,’ the kastellan said. ‘La Maisontaal Abbey, Vercoix, Maturin, and… Blenois, was it?’

Kemmler froze. The vampire chuckled. ‘Tancred survived, by the way.’

Kemmler forced himself to speak. ‘I thought as much.’

‘He’s a determined man, the Duke of Quenelles. Your atrocities inflame him, especially your butchery of the inhabitants of Covreign, in the Forest of Chalons.’

‘I do not recall that particular atrocity,’ Kemmler said slowly.

‘I do, and quite well, in fact. My knights fed well.’ The kastellan turned back to the battle, saying, ‘Just as they fed well near Brionne and Bastonne and then, when you – or rather I – summoned the ghoul swarms and their Strigoi pack-kings into the streets of Mousillon. That is where they came from, those beasts you fought earlier. I kept a few as pets, finding them useful.’ The kastellan looked at the necromancer. ‘Did you ever wonder why so many knights joined Tancred, Kemmler? Your army was crushed at La Maisontaal Abbey. There’s little glory in hunting a fugitive, but Tancred’s numbers swell and swell, no matter how many you dispatch.’

‘You,’ Kemmler said. Krell decapitated another Blood Knight. A horse reared and slammed the wight to one knee with its flailing hooves. Swords flashed and Krell surged to his feet, flinging vampires and horses back.

‘A word in the ear, a whispered hint of horrors unimagined, and men are inflamed with righteous passion. Kemmler the renegade, Kemmler the beaten, broken necromancer becomes a monster undreamt of since the last ride of the Red Duke. Do you feel proud?’

‘Why?’ Kemmler said again. The dead stirred in their barrows and his eyes flashed as anger surged through him. The kastellan didn’t seem to notice.

‘As I said, curiosity,’ the kastellan said. ‘I wanted to test the mettle of the great Lichemaster, to see if the man who came back was as mighty as he had once been. I knew that you would eventually make your way here, for I saw to it that you had no other option. It seemed fitting, and my knights were eager to see their old home. Native soil holds such peculiar power over some of us,’ the vampire went on.

‘Their home,’ Kemmler said. ‘Not yours. Your accent…’

The kastellan said nothing. Kemmler gnawed his lip. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded. When the kastellan still didn’t reply, Kemmler gave a cry and flung up his staff. The skeletons and slaughtered ghouls that the Blood Knights had dispatched rose to their feet as one, reaching up blindly to paw at the vampires and their kastellan both. The latter leapt smoothly from his horse as the beast bucked and shrieked; the vampire drew his blade even as his feet touched the ground and his sword shot out. Kemmler barely managed to interpose his own blade, and his shoulder throbbed with the force of the blow as he stumbled back. Desperate, he again drew power from the death-soaked ground and struck back at the vampire. Their swords clashed and for a moment, they strained against one another. Then the vampire shoved him back and Kemmler staggered. The dead came to his aid, their bronze weapons crashing down on the vampire’s black cuirass. Skeletons were shattered as the vampire swatted them aside and lunged for Kemmler again.

The Lichemaster scrambled aside and the vampire’s sword hacked a divot out of a barrow. Armoured skeletons, fresh from the grave, were broken and smashed as they tried to interpose themselves between Kemmler and his opponent. Kemmler was knocked onto his back by the force of the vampire’s assault and he only just managed to get his staff and sword up, crossing them to catch the vampire’s descending blade. His elbows creaked painfully as the vampire forced his sword downwards. ‘Who am I? Was that your question, Lichemaster?’ the vampire snarled. He reached up to rip his helm off and fling it aside.

Kemmler stared up at the contorted, corpse-like face with its gaunt, aristocratic features and the bare, shorn scalp that writhed with sorcerous energy. Eyes like fiery pits burned into his and thin lips peeled back from a mouthful of fangs. A name swam to the surface of Kemmler’s mind, a name he’d seen etched on a plaque beneath a rotting portrait in the ruins of Drakenhof Castle, so long ago, long before his fall and return.

‘Mannfred Von Carstein,’ Kemmler hissed and the name struck the air like a butcher’s cleaver striking meat. The mist seemed to thicken and draw inwards around them, as if responding to the utterance.

Mannfred Von Carstein. Mannfred, last of the Von Carsteins, best beloved of Vlad’s get, brother to Konrad. Mannfred, who had died at Hel Fenn, but had obviously, inevitably, returned.

‘Yesss,’ Mannfred said as he saw recognition bloom on Kemmler’s face. He hunched forward, pressing his sword down, forcing it towards Kemmler’s sweating face. ‘Do you still think you could compel me, Lichemaster? I, who have led legions of your kind in battle. I, who have bargained with the fell things of Nagashizzar and survived? I am the last true Elector of Sylvania, the High Disciple of Nagash, heir to the empires of both the living and the dead, little man, and you should have run when you had the chance.’

Kemmler looked about desperately. Krell had noticed his distress, but there were too many Blood Knights between the wight and his master. Krell tore through the undead, but he would not reach Kemmler in time. Mannfred’s eyes flickered to the approaching shape of Krell, and then back to Kemmler. ‘Even now, you fight,’ the vampire murmured. ‘You squirm and whine and snap, like a rat in a trap, refusing to surrender to inevitability.’

Kemmler bared his teeth in a defiant rictus. ‘I have fought too hard to surrender to a leech with pretensions of aristocracy,’ the necromancer wheezed. ‘Inevitability is for weaker men. Mortality is for cattle.’

Krell roared and trampled a vampire, even as he swatted another aside with a brutal backhand. Mannfred ignored him, staring down into Kemmler’s eyes. ‘And alliances?’ the vampire said.

Kemmler blinked sweat out of his eyes. ‘What?’

‘Dwarfs and elves, Kemmler, Bretonnians and men of the Empire – we have the same enemies, enemies who sunk me into the fenn and reduced you to a gibbering wreck. We stood alone and were hammered down for our temerity. Would you stand alone again?’ Mannfred suddenly stepped back and lowered his sword. Krell reared up over him, axe cocked for a final, lethal blow.

Kemmler saw it all, in that moment. All of it had been a test. He had been harried and chivvied from place to place, tempered in fires of constant frustration by the creature standing before him. He had been beaten into a shape fitting the designs of this ancient and calculating intelligence, and fury warred with dark admiration in him. Fury at being so manipulated, but admiration for the ease with which it had been done. Admiration won out. He had learned the benefit of allies. Indeed, he had come to Blood Keep seeking them, something whispered to him. It uncoiled in him, as if stirred by what he had just undergone and the quiet whisper pulsed through him.

‘Stop,’ he bellowed, flinging out his staff in a gesture that brought Krell to a shivering halt, the bite of his axe a mere hair’s breadth from Mannfred’s skull. The wight slowly lowered his axe and Mannfred smiled cruelly as Kemmler picked himself up.

‘Why all of this?’ Kemmler asked. ‘If you wanted an alliance you simply had to ask.’

‘And be rebuffed?’ Mannfred said, sheathing his sword. ‘No, I think not. And besides, I had other reasons.’ Bestial shapes crouched on the barrows, looking down at the surviving vampires and Krell and Kemmler.

‘You’re gathering an army,’ Kemmler said, glancing at the ghouls and the hulking Strigoi where they crouched, and then at the Blood Knights. Kemmler looked at Mannfred and saw the thick tendrils of dark death-magic, invisible to all but a necromancer, coiling around him. And something else… The same looming shadow that clung to Krell also guided Mannfred’s footsteps.

Perhaps Mannfred was not as smart as he thought he was. Or perhaps they both served the designs of something far more ancient and far more calculating than themselves. Krell’s gaze met his and for just a moment, Kemmler wondered whether the wight was his servant or his overseer.

‘Not just an army. The last army,’ Mannfred said, eyes glinting in the moonlight. ‘The banner of Blood Keep flies with the standard of the Von Carsteins, Heinrich Kemmler. Will yours join theirs?’ He held out a clawed gauntlet. ‘Are you content to be one man alone? Or will you march with me, to the ruin of our enemies?’

I think I have never been alone, Kemmler thought. And I do not think you were the only one testing me this day. But he did not say that. Instead, he gave a tombstone grin and clasped Mannfred’s hand, sealing their pact as the mist curled around the barrows and the idiot moon shone down.

‘The dragon is awake,’ the Lichemaster said. ‘Let the world know fear.’

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY

Nate Crowley

A debut Black Library author, Nate Crowley’s dark humour creates a twist on the classic idea of two enemies forced to cooperate in dire circumstances. General Nestor Pyrrhus does not think much of the ork warboss he’s been stuck in a trench war with for the last decade. Dubbing himself Colonel Taktikus, the warboss views this as the greatest battle of wits since time began. But when faced with the horror-fuelled nightmare of a tyranid invasion, Pyrrhus must swallow his pride and broker an alliance of last resort to have any hope of surviving the oncoming onslaught.

Nestor blinked away ash-brown rain and tried to imagine, for the fourth time that day, the words with which he would accept his promotion.

The scene was clear in his head: the immense basilica, drenched with light and cheering, the warm kiss of metal as the laurels were set on his brow. But the words would not come. He stood dumbstruck, gaping like a fool before the glaring statues of his forebears. Could he not even muster a little dignity here, in the safety of his daydreams?

Something gave way beneath his boot and he stumbled, dashing the image from his mind. It was the chest of a Guardsman – some unfortunate wirecutter, sunk in the mire and plastered over with battlefield filth. Nestor retched as the stench billowed up from the carcass, but soon steadied himself. The last thing he needed was to lose his stomach in front of Phocus.

‘General Pyrrhus?’ chirped the younger officer from behind Nestor, his voice a perfect facsimile of loyal concern.

‘I’m well, Colonel Phocus,’ he growled, straightening himself and scraping the worst of the muck from his boot. ‘Just acquainting myself with the mood among the troops,’ he added in a mutter to himself, before setting his jaw and looking forward.

Cavernam Tertius was a bloody mess. A mining world that had never lived up to the hopes of the explorators, it had been a dreary backwater even before it had been visited by war. Now, it was little more than a cesspit. But with the segmentum shipyards ever hungry for ore, it was a cesspit which the Mystras VIII, the Golden Eighth, had been consigned to defend for the last ten miserable years.

Frankly, it was madness to stay. Nestor had often, to his dismay, calculated the cost of defending the world: the squandered ammunition alone almost outvalued the meagre ore shipments it guaranteed, while the human disbursement did not bear considering.

Fortunately, the Departmento Munitorum, in its star-spanning majesty, had no appetite to consider it. The immense bureaucracy dealt with arithmetic on a stellar scale, provisioning wars on fronts light years long. On that measureless counting board, Cavernam Tertius was just a drab speck, a bead on the abacus of some lowly, cable-faced wretch. Nestor and all the men and women of the Eighth – of every other regiment in his battlegroup – were insignificant figures, liable to be swept away in a carried digit.

Of course, this would all be bad enough, thought Nestor, if the enemy had some desperate need to take this world. Some relic they were sworn to recover, or a holy city they would give everything to possess. Indeed, anything that could be denied them by the stalwart defenders of mankind. But this was not the case. As Nestor gazed past the water running from the brim of his cap, at the jagged earthworks and belching smokestacks of the enemy lines, he knew the awful truth: they were just here for the fun of it all.

Despite it all, Nestor managed a tight little smile for himself as he resumed his trudge through the bog and signalled for his staff to follow. The stalemate was about to end. And it was going to end in a fashion that nobody – not the drones of the Munitorum, nor the brutish cretins waiting in the trenches ahead, and certainly not that conniving bastard Phocus – could have foreseen. No, this appalling little war was going to end on his terms. And in the slim eventuality he didn’t end up a drinking companion to that poor wirecutter in the mud, it would be the making of his name.

‘Lord General Militant Pyrrhus,’ he murmured under his breath as he reached the agreed spot. ‘Lord General Militant Pyrrhus,’ he repeated, rattling through the words in the same way his men would invoke the Throne before a big push, and closed his eyes. He let the warm light of the basilica linger behind them for a moment, then opened them and thrust his arm into the dull, brown sky.

‘Pax!’ he cried, and let the white rag bunched in his fist unroll into the drizzle.

A long moment of nothing passed – nothing but the sound of the rain, tapping on his epaulettes and spattering the shell-crater puddles. Nestor stood with his head back and his chest out, ready to be split by a bullet, but none came.

Then the xenos appeared. They rose from nowhere, as if from beneath the sludge, unfolding from their haunches until they towered over Nestor’s party. Seen through binoculars, they had always seemed crooked and hunched – awkward, scurrying things. Up close, however, with little more than a lasrifle’s length to keep them at bay, they were monsters.

It wasn’t their size that was so intimidating. Nestor had dealt with renegade ogryns that would have outmassed these things twice over, and for all their bulk, they had just been bigger targets. No, there was something innately threatening about the xenos – something more primally awful about their proportions. Their gangly, sinew-bunched arms, the blunt enormity of their jaws, made them something out of a child’s night terrors – things that wanted to reach out of the dark, pull you away and gobble you up…

Luckily, it took more than monsters to rattle the Golden Eighth. Before the beasts had even risen past their knees, Nestor heard Vatatze’s hellgun power up with a shriek, and the old NCO had leapt out in front of him in a firing crouch. He was grateful as ever for the staff sergeant’s reflexes, but a firefight now would doom them.

‘Stand down,’ cried Nestor to Vatatze, waving a hand at the long rifles slung on the backs of the xenos. ‘They’re snipers. If they’d wanted us dead, they’ve had this whole bloody walk from the trench to put holes in us.’

‘It’s just a ploy,’ added Phocus, uninvited, to the whole of the cohort. ‘They’re trying to put the wind up us while we wait for the parley, is all. Don’t let the brutes get in your head!’

Nestor was furious at the colonel’s interjection. To be talked over in front of his staff was bad enough – but in front of the bloody xenos? The little turd just couldn’t wait to step into his boots, could he? He considered a reprimand, but this was not the time.

Besides, it was hard to concentrate on anything with those dull red eyes regarding him. The beasts had not moved since rising from the mud. Even with Vatatze’s hellgun sweeping across them, they had just stood there, staring with expressionless curiosity, like predators behind plasglass. Nestor hated to admit it to himself, especially after Phocus’ little speech, but they did put the wind right up him.

Particularly uneasy was the fact the enemy was fielding snipers at all. Every tactical codex Nestor had read suggested they preferred to fight at close quarters or, if firearms were involved, via wild onslaughts of mass automatic weapons. The Cavernam posting had soon revealed otherwise. After the first few heads had popped with no enemy in sight, Nestor had quietly amended his manuals, and the men of the Eighth had kept their heads well below the trench parapets.

Examining the sniper closest to him, he wondered how they had never been spotted in the field – especially now, when his party had been walking almost within arm’s length of them. The creature in front of Nestor was a good head taller than him, and it was by no means the largest of the group: the one standing a few feet to the right must have been half the size of a bull grox. And although they wore long sniper’s cloaks, they were little more than gaudy rags, covered in wild splashes of colour like a fool’s mockery of his own regimental camouflage.

‘Staff sergeant,’ said Nestor softly, beckoning the scowling woman to his side, ‘am I losing my eyesight? Look at the colours on those cloaks, and tell me how in the name of Holy Terra we didn’t see these skaffers a mile off.’ Vatatze shrugged and wrinkled her scarred brow, running her eyes across the line of xenos with a look of contempt.

‘Beats me, general. I dunno – you know what they say in the trenches, though.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Word is they’re born like that, sir. They grow underground like fungus, then just pop out from the puddles, gear and all. That’s why we send ’em back there, sir. Doing ’em a favour.’

Nestor replied with a grunt of grim amusement, then fell silent as he noticed, to his immense discomfort, that the sniper was trying to catch his eye. The beast had clearly caught him frowning in consternation at its cloak, and had dipped its head to stare right into his eyes. And although the leathery wasteland of its face was impossible to read for human emotions, he could have sworn on the aquila that it was giving him a knowing smirk.

Withstanding the urge to shiver, Nestor tore his eyes away from the monster, and looked towards the xenos front line. Aside from the usual plumes of smoke from engines and cook fires, the enemy trenches were still eerily quiet. The wind was picking up now, the rain smacking against them in fat streaks, and Nestor felt a cold stab of doubt. There was still no sign of the enemy commander. What if it wasn’t coming at all?

After another minute of unbearable silence, the men began to murmur. Clearly, they were beginning to have similar doubts. He would have to put a stop to things before he was undercut by Phocus yet again. Turning his back to the bestial snipers while Vatatze stared on at them, Nestor straightened himself to address his soaked-through comrades, radiating parade-ground confidence despite his clenching guts.

‘We give it ten minutes from here,’ he decreed, making a point of glancing at his timepiece, ‘and then we make a controlled retreat to our lines. Colonel Phocus will lead, while Staff Sergeant Vatatze will bring up the rear with me. Until then, we wait in silence. Am I understood?’

‘Very clearly, general’ said a voice as low and rumbling as distant shell fire, and Nestor felt his shoulders stiffen. Spinning on his heel, he scanned the wasteland for the source of the voice, but they were still alone with the snipers. Then the voice came again, this time with a guttural chuckle, and Nestor’s eyes shot to the largest of the beasts. In their savage hierarchy, leadership was determined by size alone (‘large means in charge’ was the mnemonic drilled into the marksmen of the Eighth) so surely it was their leader? But the hulk stood sullenly silent.

‘I’m here,’ said the voice from a few feet to the left, and Nestor could barely believe the evidence of his eyes as they flicked to its source – it was the sniper who had smirked at him, calmly addressing him in serviceable Low Gothic.

‘And may I say,’ it continued, the words bubbling up from deep in its boulder chest, ‘what a pleasure it is to meet my adversary in the flesh at last. Shall we… make parley?’

Negotiations were brief.

After the enemy commander had revealed itself, ‘refreshments’ had been called for. A bark from one of the snipers had summoned the atrocious, scampering slave-creatures of the xenos, who had come boiling from some rathole bearing trestles, boards and cans of stinking meat. With the bizarre feast set up, Nestor’s party of eight had taken their places across from the eight xenos, and each side had begun weighing the other up. Phocus had been paired with a vile creature whose left side was a mess of scar tissue and leaky hydraulics; he looked at the thing like he had a mouthful of battery acid. Vatatze, meanwhile, had her elbows on the table, offering a mocking grin to the mountain of green meat opposite, as if she were at ease in the regimental mess. And across from Nestor was the xenos commander.

The thing seemed absurdly proud to be offering its ‘hospitality’, making a long, rambling invitation to the humans to partake in the food and drink available. As the oration lumbered on, it became clear how doggedly rehearsed the creature’s opening lines had been, and how limited its command of Low Gothic really was. Nestor couldn’t help but curl his lip. This was no aberrant mastermind; it was just another beast, foolishly aping the customs of its enemy in the hope some quality might rub off.

Needless to say, nobody touched the food – not even the xenos. By the time the parley began, the tins of charred offal were sodden: sad tokens of civility, awash in rainwater.

Next, their host introduced itself. Intercepted transmissions in the early days of the war had forewarned them of its name: in the alien tongue it was Eats-Face-Of-Face-Eater, and so ‘Face-Eater’ had become the common parlance among the ranks of the Eighth. But in its own head at least, the alien had apparently cultivated another identity.

‘I… am Colonel Taktikus,’ it announced, gesturing proudly at itself with a leathery green claw, and Nestor had to stifle a laugh. This thing called itself a colonel. Now he looked closer, he saw its chest was covered in dented, rusty medals – meaningless things hammered from scrap metal, and looted Imperial insignia on loops of wire. Then, his amusement turned to pure misery. This savage clown, for all its buffoonery, had been the mind keeping him in stalemate for the fading years of his career. His greatest achievement, his entry in the annals of the line of Pyrrhus, was to be the equal of a barbarian playing at soldiers.

As if to hammer home the mockery, the brute’s retinue began chanting. While the creatures seemed insensible to most words in Low Gothic, the name of their commander had drawn an instant and explosive reaction.

‘Kurnel Taktus!’ bellowed one of the other xenos, hammering the flimsy table with the butt of an axe, and the rest joined in. ‘Kurnel Taktus! Kurnel Taktus!’

As the aliens roared, Nestor winced at the stink. Whatever weird chemistry boiled away inside them made their breath nearly unbearable. The smell was somewhere between penal battalion wine and the deep mildew of canvas stored in the damp, with undertones of promethium fumes and rotten meat. It was a relief when Taktikus finally silenced them.

‘Colonel… Taktikus,’ acknowledged Nestor with a sigh, swallowing his distaste. ‘I am General Nestor Pyrrhus–’

‘–commander of the Mystras Eighth,’ finished Taktikus, ‘and director of the Astra Militarum battlegroup on Cavernam Tertius. I know you.’ The alien stumbled over the High Gothic terms, but spoke at least with confidence in their meaning.

‘Well then,’ answered Nestor smoothly, ‘if you know so much, I dare presume you will know why we’re here now?’

‘You are here to offer peace,’ said the brute, with what was definitely a smile this time.

‘On the contrary, my good colonel. We come to invite you to war.

‘Allow me to elaborate,’ said Nestor, as the group of soldiers and monsters huddled over the table in the rain. And so he did.

The doom of Cavernam Tertius had announced itself on a day like any other in the long, grinding war. The Basilisks at Ferghal’s Wood had cut short the dawn bombardment of xenos trenches on the Blackpine Front, citing a missed delivery of shells. The colonel from the 318th Dolmen Blackhands had voxed yet again, requesting the rotation of his men to the rear, and the damn Belisarians were demanding engineers and heavy weapons platoons from the Eighth, after a night raid had nearly made it into their trench on the Dunrust Salient.

‘It’s the same story every bloody day,’ Nestor cursed to Vatatze, his knuckles tightening the sheaf of reports into a grubby crumple. ‘I spend every waking hour telling these boneheads they can’t have the things they need, and if I’m lucky, I get to squeeze in the time to be told the same myself. Throne forbid I ever get five minutes to fight a war.’ Vatatze said nothing, but that was fine – this was their ritual. He would wear himself out ranting about the day’s frustrations, and she would lean in the doorway, inspecting the glowing tip of her lho-stub and occasionally cursing in solidarity.

‘Oh, and speaking of which,’ Nestor continued, in a tone of sarcastic brightness, ‘word’s in from the Munitorum on those reinforcements I requested. Guess what?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Not coming. Again. Just reams of platitude and bloody scripture, imploring me to do more with less, in the Emperor’s name.’ Nestor made the sign of the aquila in a way a commissar would find deeply questionable, and threw the papers to the floor. ‘Frankly, it’s getting to the point where I’m not sure why I bother asking. We’re old news.’

Vatatze nodded her agreement, and aimed a wad of spit into his waste paper basket. Everyone knew their war was a footnote. The massive xenos migration from which their enemies had split was now light years past Cavernam, and deep into the sector interior. Having smashed through the redoubt at Perikal IV, it was now dangerously close to several vital worlds, and was soaking up appalling quantities of materiel as a result. As such, when the bureaucrats did see fit to send something to Nestor’s half-forgotten little conflict, it always came as a surprise, and was almost never what he needed.

‘Hey, general,’ Vatatze quipped, ‘remember the horse guys?’

‘Ugh, don’t remind me of that.’ The last big bolstering, two winters past, had comprised a bulk carrier bearing seventy thousand horsemen from a feral world, who had been handed lasrifles en route, and who had gaped in astonishment at the first tank they had seen.

‘They didn’t exactly turn the tide of the conflict, did they, staff sergeant?’

‘Nope. Horsemeat made for better rations though.’

Nestor laughed then, as he only tended to with Vatatze, and found the strength to continue working through the day’s pile of unfulfillable requests.

After another hour, he put down the papers and rubbed his eyes, feeling a creeping thirst gathering. His glass of morning amasec was down to a fingernail’s depth, dwarfed by the stack of requests he had yet to read.

‘What do you reckon, staff sergeant – would a second glass constitute a problem, or just a habit?’ There was no reply, which was odd. Vatatze was always game for opening a bottle: along with her brutally dispassionate sense for logistics, it was what made her such an invaluable NCO.

‘Staff sergeant?’ he repeated, but there was still no answer. Nestor looked up to find Vatatze staring at a roll of printouts that had just been handed to her by a trembling courier. Her face was as grey and still as stone, which, on an officer who considered leading a charge across no man’s land to be a reasonable afternoon’s recreation, was not a good sign. Wordlessly, she walked over to hand him the papers, before uncorking the bottle of amasec and taking a deep, joyless pull from its neck.

‘Tyranids,’ Nestor said in a husk of a voice, ten minutes later, after reading through the astropath’s report for the third time.

‘Aye,’ Vatatze said, with a bleak smile. There was nothing much more to say. The tyranids would end the war on Cavernam. They were, almost always, the enders of wars. The arrival of one of their swarms put a full stop on a conflict, a vicious inkblot that pooled and spread, erasing all that came before and after. They were profoundly alien, incomprehensible to a degree that made the monsters in the opposing trenches seem brotherly by comparison. They had no insignia, nor logistics, nor language, nor tactics. Just teeth, and claws, and numbers that beckoned giddy madness.

‘The Blackpine offensive, the crossing at Tahl’s Rest, the Dunrust Salient… None of it means a damned thing any more, does it?’

‘No, general,’ Vatatze replied, pouring him a wounded man’s measure of amasec.

‘The war’s over, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Yes it is, general.’

He drank, and his thoughts turned grey. Against the constant, miserable drizzle of the campaign, he had always cupped a flickering hope in his hands. A hope that one day he would outmanoeuvre the xenos, that he would find a way to rout them despite their numbers, and be immortalised as another genius in the line of Pyrrhus. But the tyranids, the Great Devourer, had eaten that future. His only option now was to pull as many civilians as he could off-planet, with as many troops as the carriers would hold, and flee in disgrace.

‘How quickly can we evacuate?’ he asked, mouth dry. But as Vatatze began rattling off a plan based on her almost preternatural memory for planetary statistics, he found himself not listening. A thought had come to him – one that made his head buzz with the rising tide of the amasec. An idea so preposterous that it offered only glory or immediate death – both of which seemed preferable to the options currently on the table.

The tyranids were so alien as to make his monstrous enemies seem brotherly. And he would require a tremendous number of troops to have even a hope of staving them off. The sort of numbers which the Munitorum had denied him for ten years. The sort of numbers, in fact, which his enemy had in abundance…

‘Staff Sergeant Epiphania Vatatze,’ he announced, knowing the use of her hated forename would stop his comrade in the middle of her tally of civilian populations.

‘General Pyrrhus, sir?’

‘I may have just solved all our problems. Bring me whoever knows most about enemy communications, as many logistical specialists as can get here in the next hour and another bottle of amasec.’

‘And Colonel Phocus…?’ Vatatze added, her shrapnel-pocked face creasing into a smile as she pre-empted his thoughts.

‘…can stay blissfully ignorant in his bunk until it’s too late to complain. I’m sure he’ll have his own view of things, but if the bloody tyranids don’t make a case for unilateral action then I’m not sure what will.’

‘So… you offer me death?’ growled Taktikus, picking a sprig of mycelium from between greying tusks as it ruminated on his words. The other xenos had grown bored during Nestor’s explanation of the incoming tyranid swarm, but now they hunched forward, sensing the challenge in their leader’s response.

‘I always offered you death, Taktikus. But so far, to your… credit, you have been unwilling to receive it. Now, however, I fear the tyranids may have an overwhelmingly compelling proposition for us both. What I can therefore offer you, in the light of this development, is a longer and a better fight against the tyranids… If you make war alongside me.’

At this, the brute gave a long and thoughtful rumble, working a claw into the rotten corner of its maw, as if trying to winkle out the logic of the situation. But Nestor knew there could be only one outcome. While Taktikus’ warband were peculiar in their obsession with Imperial doctrine, they were still beasts at heart. Beasts that valued the potential for bloody conflict above all other things. Victory, to them, was incidental – any resources and territory acquired through a fight were secondary to the fight itself. It was why they had stayed committed to a stalemate on Cavernam for ten years, despite full knowledge of how poor a prize the planet would make. Now, that mad alien logic would at last work in Nestor’s favour. Given the choice between a war on two fronts that would be over in days, and a war on a single front that might last a month, the ugly green knot of Taktikus’ mind could only flex towards one conclusion.

‘If you know death certainly is,’ said Taktikus, Low Gothic beginning to fray with the effort of concentration, ‘why look for fighting together us? Surely… no difference, us or tyranid?’

‘Because we are sworn to defend this world in the name of Holy Terra,’ said Nestor, segueing smoothly into the lie. ‘And if we can hold it for even an hour longer through allying with your forces, then we honour the Throne, even as we die.’

Amusingly, this was almost the logic Colonel Phocus had espoused when he had been informed of the looming tyranid threat. A vainglorious, pious bore, the man had been itching to die for the Throne the moment he had heard the news. The only difference was that he wouldn’t countenance an alliance with xenos scum. As far as he was concerned, the only way forward was to evacuate as many civilians as possible who couldn’t hold a lasrifle, then go down fighting both sets of xenos. To even consider alternatives, in his mind, was heresy.

But then, Phocus was not the battlegroup’s general. By the time he had been let in on the plan, with the swarm just days away, there had been no time for extended debate. Nestor’s word, for once, had been law.

Crucially, what neither Phocus nor Taktikus knew was the real goal of the proposed alliance. This was no case of delaying the inevitable. It was a chance to achieve the impossible. While Nestor was by no means certain of the maths, he had an inkling that with Taktikus’ horde at his disposal, there was a slim chance the tyranids (whose already vast numbers he had exaggerated in his report to the beast) might in fact be beaten back.

And if such a miracle was to occur, Taktikus’ forces, after being fed into the meat grinder of the front line, would be so weakened that Nestor could sweep them from the face of the planet. He would be remembered as a defensive mastermind on a par with Dorn or Invictus – and Phocus as the boneheaded naysayer who had tried to impede him.

All it relied upon was for Taktikus to seize the big shiny bauble it had been offered, and give in to its genetic thirst for a big scrap. The enemy commander might have surprised him with snipers and a penchant for language, but there was no helping the nature of the beast. Nestor was certain of the outcome, even as the guttural words emerged in a puff of stench.

‘So be it,’ boomed Taktikus, and let loose a string of battered consonants in its native tongue. ‘An alliance, of orks and men.’

The beast stood to settle the deal, and Nestor allowed himself just a moment to shoot Phocus a look of pure dominance before he too rose from his seat. But in the brief moment his head was turned, chaos erupted on the other side of the table.

The creature to Taktikus’ left – the towering hulk that Nestor had at first taken to be the xenos leader – had gone berserk. Letting out a bowel-loosening roar like a Leman Russ trying to power its way out of a quagmire, the beast drew a monstrous axe from its back and dashed the table before it into splinters.

‘No fight with mans!’ it bellowed as it lunged forward, and for a heartbeat Nestor wondered if he was about to meet his end in the most shockingly simple betrayal in the history of the Astra Militarum. But then, just as suddenly as the beast had erupted, it was smashed sideways by a blur of deep green muscle – Taktikus, moving with terrible, animal agility. The two creatures fell to the mud in an explosion of limbs, and the rest of the xenos contingent began baying in excitement.

The strength of the larger beast was horrifying to behold, but for every blow it landed, the smaller xenos delivered three. The speed, the ruthlessness of the thing, was shocking to witness, and left Nestor with no doubt as to how it maintained authority over its larger fellows. After a furious scramble, Taktikus had the big xenos in a headlock, and a fist wrapped round the largest of its tusks. There was a wet, tearing crack, and the fang came loose in the colonel’s hand. Then, without a moment’s hesitation, the tusk was jammed once, twice and three times into the giant’s neck, springing torrents of thick blood.

Then it was over. Dropping the blood-black tusk in the mud, Taktikus stood back up and sauntered over to the table.

‘Forgive the major, general,’ it said, wiping its hand on its striped cloak and extending it. ‘Their mouth… gets them in trouble sometimes.’

Nestor shook the creature’s great, cold brick of a hand, and caught Phocus scowling from the corner of his eye. Maybe, he thought, these beasts could teach him a thing or two after all.

Less than a week later, Nestor was stood on the turret of his command tank, watching mycetic spores streak through the evening sky.

It was a rare clear evening: Cavernam’s clouds, having parted grudgingly like theatrical curtains, now wallowed in the sun’s weak, orange light as the spores carved fierce gashes in the gulf between them. High up, where the sky faded to deep indigo, smaller puffs of light signalled the destruction of further spores by the planet’s defences. It was all rather beautiful, thought Nestor, although he suspected it was mildly heretical to do so.

Of course, any prettiness would not last. This was just the start. The leviathan vessels of the tyranids were already deep in the system’s gravity well, but would still take weeks to arrive. Nevertheless, they had launched a vast swarm of spores on a hard burn ahead of them, like the slithering feelers of some corpse-pile crawler. Spiny pods grown on vicious biorockets, their only purpose was to slam into the planet, then peel open like rotten fruit to disgorge their innards.

They had no targets, nor any strategy. Wherever the pods landed, their occupants emerged, marshalling in instinctive packs deep in the wilderness. Reports were rife of abominations glimpsed on the edge of searchlights, and Nestor had seen snatches of grainy footage from the scout platoons, the layers of fibrous husk sloughing away, the chitinous shapes clawing themselves clear of sacs of shock-absorbing gel. Needless to say, they were already running short on scouts.

And still the pods came. For now, they were still able to shoot down most of them. Cavernam’s orbital defences had been augmented by the two frigates attached to Nestor’s battlegroup and then – after much negotiation – by Big Animal, the appalling warship that had originally brought Taktikus’ forces to Cavernam, which had spent years skulking in the icy rubble at the system’s edge. Still, it would not be long before their torpedoes were outnumbered by their targets, and as the brood-ships lumbered closer, vomiting a swelling stream of pods from their bellies, orbital space would have to be abandoned entirely.

But while this stage of the defence held, the race was on to bed in for the ground war to come. Most of the main population centres were being evacuated and laced with mines, while the combined forces of the xenos and the Astra Militarum were deploying in rings around the loose triangle of hive-cities deemed defensible. Restructuring a labyrinth of opposing trenches was proving to be a logistical nightmare, but the sheer earth-moving potential of xenos muscle was staggering. Given shovels and simple charts, the beasts – who of course had been offered the outer line of defence out of supposed courteous deference – had thrown up towering earthworks virtually overnight.

A Chimera column rumbled past on squeaking wheels, like beetles beside the bulk of Thriambos, Nestor’s ancient Baneblade. Drawn-faced troopers on their flanks threw salutes up at his turret, although Nestor couldn’t be quite sure if they were for him or for the vehicle itself. Older than his own family line, the gilded colossus had been with the regiment since the breaking of the gates of Krax Prime, and was decorated all over with statuary and inscribed scripture. Nestor caught himself sneering at one of the sculpted lions that adorned the cupola, and sighed with self-disgust. Was he so bitter as to be jealous of a tank? Purging the thought, he found a salute for the men, along with what he hoped was a stern, fatherly smile. Throne knew they’d need the encouragement when the Great Devourer came.

He doubted Taktikus would be having any such problems with morale. While Nestor’s forces were digging in with a grim, tight-lipped anxiety, the xenos lines were alight with revelry. As they rotated from trench duty, the brutes roared and wrestled by the light of bonfires, choffing down rancid meat and bellowing along to what was either music or engine noise. There were rumours that the gunners on Big Animal had turned the orbital defence operation into a drinking game. As far as the xenos were concerned, the eve of annihilation was a festival of pure joy.

For the most part, their lines and the humans’ were as separated in distance as they were in mood, as there was no easy cooperation between the two forces. Nestor’s soldiers hated the beasts they had been fighting for years, and the beasts in turn had nothing but contempt for their fragile new allies. Nestor had been forced to make examples of several officers who had refused to collaborate, and he imagined Taktikus had done the same in his own alarmingly direct fashion.

Tonight, the alliance would face its first acid test. The miners’ barrack-town of Low Digbeth, separated from Imperial lines by half a continent, was due to have its occupants emptied into the hold of a bulk hauler before it could fall to the swarm. What’s more, its former defenders had been recalled to headquarters three days previously, leaving only the town’s former besiegers to oversee evacuation. As far as Taktikus – and indeed Phocus – knew, this was a strategic oversight on Nestor’s part. Privately, however, it was a tray of meat left before a sitting hound: a test of obedience. If the xenos could resist the sport of a perfect massacre, it would put all dissent to rest among Nestor’s staff. If not…

‘Savage Rush,’ said Colonel Phocus behind him, as if conjured by doubt. Nestor was so startled he almost failed to question the non sequitur, but mastered himself enough to give an inscrutable grunt as he turned to face the younger man.

‘Savage Rush,’ repeated the colonel, turning a well-worn green hexagon between his gloved fingers. ‘Pelekys, seventy-fifth edition – If a greenskin token is within six spaces of a civilian token in a sector with no more than eight command points,’ he recited, ‘it automatically moves to the space and gains three materiel. Surely you remember the rule, general?’

‘Of course I remember,’ snapped Nestor. How could he not? Like every other alumnus of the Mystrasian Academy, he’d played that bloody wargame over and over, with its appendices and its token stacks and its insistence that the Adeptus Astartes were the solution to every damned problem. It would be just like Phocus to resort to it now. ‘I remember it as well as you do,’ he continued, ‘but I fail to see its relevance now. Unless of course you’re coming to resolve a rules query, in which case I’d ask you why in the name of Holy Terra you’re mucking about with bits of card when there’s an actual war on.’ To this, Phocus gave an oily smile of false deference.

‘I suppose it is a rules query of a sort, sir. The rules, of course, being distilled from thousands of years of combat experience, not to mention the tactical insight of Lord Guilliman himself. Quite simply, general, they tell us what to expect from the enemies of the Imperium, and to prevent disasters such as the one which may be about to unfold at Low Digbeth.’

‘Disaster? Do you question my decision?’ spluttered Nestor, incredulous at the youth’s patronising tone. The thing Nestor hated most about the man was his inability to be properly insubordinate; he always had to come at it from an angle.

‘Do you question the nature of the enemy?’ came the reply, loaded smoothly as a shell into a greased barrel, beneath a cocked eyebrow. Nestor’s mouth hung open, half in outrage at Phocus’ challenge, half in horror at the truth of the question. He had left ten thousand civilians in the hands of ruthless monsters, based entirely on intuition, and against the wisdom of the primarchs themselves. Was he mad? Struggling to form a reply, Nestor was almost relieved when Vatatze appeared at the hatch to interrupt the discussion. When he saw her face, though, his heart sank even further.

‘It’s Low Digbeth, sir,’ said Vatatze, with uncharacteristic alarm. ‘The xenos have opened fire.’

‘Get me a live feed now,’ bellowed Nestor over the din of Thriambos’ command deck, as junior officers scurried frantically across his path. If this was going to be the end of his career, he’d at least go out shouting. The vehicle’s comms officer was rummaging desperately at the thicket of controls beside the strategic display unit, mopping sweat from her forehead with a braided cuff as she tried to bring up a secure link. It was hellishly hot inside the tank at the best of times, but the crimson situation lights made it seem to swelter like an oven. Nestor was glad of this at least, as it would disguise the anxious sweat pouring from his temples.

If Taktikus had gone rogue this early, they were all doomed, and yet Phocus stood watching proceedings like a man waiting to be served a feast. The sod didn’t even care about death, so long as he died in the right. As the display unit’s holographic surface crackled to life, he craned forward, squinting for vindication in the resolving static. Sound came first, and it was all Nestor could do not to cringe – from the tinny speakers came the brutal clatter of crude gunfire, the raucous howl of xenos laughter, and under it all, the thin screaming of children.

Nestor put his hands on the table’s edge and sagged forward, his head drooping. He was just clearing his throat to resign his command, when the image snapped into perfect clarity. At the table’s centre, a child wailed in the dirt, clutching a wooden doll to its chest. Lumbering towards them, pitted blade in hand, was a xenos warrior in a fighting crouch. Nestor stared at the image, unwilling to be seen looking away from what he had done, and bit a hole in his lip as the monster snatched the child up by the scruff of the neck.

Then, the unthinkable happened.

Barreling in from out of shot, right into the space the child had occupied just a moment ago, came a monster. A real monster, with limbs like knives and a face (if that was its face) like a mass of writhing intestines. It chittered and reared, lashing out with a barbed tail so quickly that Nestor couldn’t follow the motion. Then the end of the thing’s tail was severed and flopping on the floor, and the ork’s boot was on its neck, stamping down with a liquid crack. And that was that. The brute set the child aside with a motion that might generously be called tender, and sprinted out of view, leaving only a trail of viscous footprints and a receding bellow. With eyes as wide as Nestor’s, the child ran for safety.

‘Horus’ teeth,’ swore Vatatze, to a room too shocked to even register the blasphemy. Phocus simply gawped, as if he had been slapped in the face.

‘Well then, colonel,’ said Nestor quietly, feeling strengthened by the rumble of Thriambos’ ancient reactor as it travelled up his arms. ‘Rather looks like the rules of the game need updating, doesn’t it?’

Nestor swept his eye over the immaculately modelled contours of the strategic map, and let half a breath hiss slowly between his teeth. He counted off the units arrayed round the hives for the fifth time, but still could not find the weakness he was sure in his bones he had missed. Despite the sick dread that rose up from his guts each morning, the war was – for an apocalyptic last stand, at least – going well.

The fall of Low Digbeth had signalled an earlier start to the ground engagement than even the most paranoid of his staff had predicted, and yet still they had been prepared. Within hours of the xenos-led evacuation, creatures had begun rushing from the wilds like ants boiling from a hole, and by the first night the trench-lips had been piled with twitching corpses. Things had only intensified since then, but the lines were holding. Even where they faltered, the sheer ferocity of the defence had ensured that every inch of ground cost the tyranids kilotonnes of biomass.

Nestor looked to the drab grey spires of Primaris Hive, where nearly half his forces were concentrated. Ghostly figures hovered over the model, offering mute reports of the city’s efforts to forge shells from its remaining ore stockpile, while blinking lights signified fresh deployments of artillery in the rear lines. The whole edifice twinkled with defiant life.

Two days ago, he had been prepared for the lights to go off altogether in Primaris, replaced by the virulent purple of infested territory. The city had been caught in a vicious claw, hammered on both sides by waves of tyranids, and denied reinforcements by the eruption of burrowing horrors among the supply lines. The situation had teetered on the very brink of collapse – and then the xenos had swept in. They had come out of nowhere: an armada of ramshackle vehicles driven at maniac speed, carving straight through the western pincer of the enemy advance like spilled plasma. With the tyranids reeling, the Third Karakum Airborne had been able to launch a mass drop operation, securing the ground taken by the xenos, and relieving the siege.

Such strange synergies had boiled up over several fronts. In the mudfields at Dunrust, the tyranids had been stopped in their tracks by the mad, clanking war machines of the xenos, pinned down by hydraulic claws while human sharpshooters finished them off. At Thar’s Bluff, the enemy’s grotesque living artillery had been swarmed by xenos slave creatures, erupting from tunnels as a line of Imperial armour had advanced as a distraction. Time and time again, human precision and xenos ferocity were being boiled up into a brew stronger than it had any right to be.

As the two forces had realised this, their long-term enmity had begun to express itself as brash competition. Where humans held trenches next to the xenos, kill tallies were kept on tall wooden boards, while in Ferghal’s Wood, where the aliens’ exotic artillery had been pooled with Imperial batteries, the bombardiers were engaged in constant one-upmanship over the reload speed, the accuracy, and even the volume of their guns. As far as Nestor was concerned, this was to be encouraged, as it gave his troops something to do other than imagine death beneath a swarm of writhing nightmares.

Before his own thoughts could sink too far in that direction, he was distracted by a shout of protest from across the bunker.

‘Filthy skaffing greenskin!’ barked Vatatze, as the brute sitting opposite her shook with growling laughter. The xenos, one of Taktikus’ retinue, was a crookbacked mess of scars and metal plates that – so far as Nestor could tell – fulfilled its species’ archetype of ‘grizzled NCO’ as thoroughly as Vatatze did for the human race. The two had been engaged in a game of dice for the best part of an hour, playing for lho-stubs and coming up with increasingly profane ways to accuse each other of cheating.

Glancing at the staff sergeant, with her face riven by shrapnel from a xenos grenade and her prosthetic arm gleaming, he saw someone with every reason to put a blade in the creature across from her. And yet, despite all the cursing, she was wearing the same fierce, weights-room grin as she might in human company. That was the astonishing thing about infantry, he mused, as the pair of bruisers set into another exchange of insults. No matter what world – or species – they came from, if you gave them a shared enemy and a way to cheat each other out of smokes, soon enough they’d end up willing to die for each other.

Yes, there had been mutinies. And yes, there had been examples made of those officers who would not cooperate. By and large, however, you could almost forget the members of the alliance had been locked in a brutal trench war for the last decade. On the xenos side especially, there was simply no grudge – while they viewed their new comrades with a mixture of amusement and contempt, they had regarded the war as fantastic sport, and had no scores to settle.

For the more bitter human troopers, this was perplexing – it was hard to hate an enemy that didn’t hate you back, after all. And when it became apparent how recklessly enthusiastic the xenos were to die for the cause, they had been stumped altogether. Nestor would have called the aliens’ attitude suicidal, if it wasn’t so carefree: as far as they were concerned, a violent death was just the ultimate culmination of good living, a mindset that the soldiers of the Astra Militarum could only regard with awe. When a platoon of Taktikus’ self-styled ‘kommandos’ had lured an advancing swarm into an abandoned smelting plant and then overloaded its reactor, creating a fireball six miles across, the hives had shaken with human cheering.

While Vatatze had adapted surprisingly well to this new madness, Colonel Phocus had collapsed entirely. Vindicated by the events at Low Digbeth, Nestor had relegated the upstart to logistical command, where he could be lord and master of biscuit crates and promethium barrels. Of course, the man still droned on about the risks of trusting the xenos, but it was increasingly obvious he was just bitter. And with Phocus exiled from the war room, Nestor found his droning easier and easier to ignore.

It was then that Nestor noticed Taktikus playing with the war map. The ork commander – which had awarded itself several more bottlecap medals since the start of the defence – was pushing a model tank around the Dunrust Salient with a sinewy claw, making contemplative engine noises as it went. Nestor sighed.

‘Taktikus, that’s the Nineteenth Cambrian Heavies, and they belong in sector six – could you please put them back?’

Taktikus snapped its gaze from the table with eyes that made Nestor’s scalp prickle, and he found his hand darting towards his sidearm before the beast’s glare softened.

‘Apologies, general,’ it rumbled, putting the tank company back in place. ‘I was… ronternating strategy.’

‘Of course, we all have our habits,’ conceded Nestor. ‘But perhaps you’d like to share your thoughts with me? And it’s “contemplating”, for future reference.’

Taktikus made the growling noise Nestor had come to translate as ‘let’s agree to disagree’, and gestured for a slave creature to bring food. After inspecting the repast – some sort of dreadful, charred bird with feathers still attached – the xenos commander took a great bite from it as if it were a piece of fruit, and raised a finger.

‘Have you considered…’ it said through a grim mouthful, puffing itself up with parade ground pride, ‘…a full charge at the enemy, with everything we’ve got?’

Nestor shut his eyes momentarily, after catching Vatatze stifling a laugh from the corner of his eye. Taktikus had already asked the question four times that day, with subtly different phrasing each time, and it was beginning to test his patience. Regardless, Nestor took the time once more to explain why, in a frantic defence against an enemy that was coming from everywhere, a massed charge wasn’t always the wisest course of action. The brute nodded along, soaking up every word, with its reverence for Imperial tactics that was almost as endearing as it was pathetic. When Nestor finished by gently suggesting a xenos airstrike on the armoured beasts gathering in the hills north of Secundus Hive, however, Taktikus surprised him.

‘A capital idea,’ agreed the alien, nodding sagely. ‘But doomed to fail. Many spitters in those hills, you see.’ With this, Taktikus mimed the action of the enemy’s anti-aircraft batteries, and shook its head sadly.

‘Instead,’ it enthused, snatching up an Imperial bomber wing from an airfield by its elbow, ‘airstrike from Imperial bombers – more boom, general – with ork planes flying low and light to soak up spit.’ Concluding with a sweep of the model over the hills, and a series of explosion noises that it clearly thought sounded dignified, it replaced the bomber delicately, and grinned over the table at Nestor.

Nestor could only smile back, if a little uncertainly. Although it had been expressed with characteristic crudity, the plan was a solid one, revealing a surprising understanding of Imperial assets, and their place in a combined arms operation. At moments like this, when the creature’s walnut of a mind cracked to reveal a kernel of insight, Nestor could almost respect Taktikus. It almost made him feel less of a fool for being the alien’s equal for all those years.

As he voxed through the order to air command, Nestor felt a twinge of sadness. They might yet actually win this war – and if that happened, it would almost be a shame to wipe the xenos from the face of the world.

Nestor was dreaming of the basilica and the laurels again, when the hammering started. Although he knew he was dreaming, he was furious at the interruption, and tried to shout for it to go away. What came out was something between a croak and a murmur, and the vision began to collapse. All of a sudden, the hands bequeathing the laurel were huge and green and calloused, and the laurel itself was a mass of wriggling gut. The banging continued, and Nestor tried to scream, but his lungs were empty.

‘Ugh,’ he gasped as he awoke, bolt upright and drenched in sweat. Rubbing a hand over his itching stubble, he glanced anxiously around the dim red confines of the room, swimming in confusion until his brain caught up. He was at his desk, in his cabin on Thriambos, and it was day twenty-five of the invasion. Or was it day twenty-six?

The hammering came again, and he jerked round to the cabin door as he realised it was urgent, and real.

‘Wuh… Come in,’ he blurted, trying to sound awake, and rubbing his eyes with the coarse fabric of his uniform cuff.

‘It’s locked,’ said Phocus from outside, and Nestor gritted his teeth as he got up to let him in.

‘What do you want?’ he growled as the colonel stepped into the cramped, sweat-stale cabin. It was some small consolation that the younger officer looked every bit as rough as him, with red-rimmed eyes and a week’s worth of straw-coloured beard on his jaw.

‘You’re making a mistake,’ said Phocus.

‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Nestor in a hollow whisper, daring the man to say more.

‘You’ve doomed yourself,’ answered the upstart, and Nestor struggled to reply. After all, he was probably right.

What Nestor had come to think of as the war’s honeymoon period, when the enemy had just been a mass of chitin to be pulverised by the guns of the alliance, was long gone. The civilian evacuation was over, while the Naval blockade had been forced to retreat out-system, leaving the planet entirely encircled. There would be no reinforcements now, even if some miracle transpired in the halls of the Munitorum. Something in the bellies of the tyranid vessels was curdling the warp, trapping Cavernam deep in shadow. From now until the last body dropped, the planet was a cage in which they were locked, with insects swarming between the bars.

‘You know I’m right,’ pleaded Phocus, causing Nestor’s blood to surge in his veins. ‘There’s been no signal from Secundus Hive since the breach last night, and Primaris might last, what – another three days? We’ve only got ammunition left because we’re running out of hands to fire the guns. The Belisarians are gone, general, and the Eighth itself is down to two-thirds strength. How long–’

‘Good riddance to the Belisarians,’ spat Nestor. ‘All they ever did was beg for kit. And of course we’re losing men, you bloody fool – we’re fighting a war. Besides, we have the orks!’

‘General, sir, with all respect, we can’t rely on those… beasts. I’ll admit they’re tough as tank treads, but they’re not our troops. This is a game of numbers, General Pyrrhus, and they have more bodies they can comfortably lose. If the balance tips, and they smell our weakness–’

‘So don’t let the balance tip, colonel. We keep the orks in the teeth of the enemy, and make sure there are Imperial bayonets behind them when we run out of tyranids.’

‘Nestor, please,’ cried Phocus, forgetting his manners, ‘this is… this is a fantasy. This is madness. I tell you as a loyal officer of the Eighth, there’s another way.’

Nestor’s vision throbbed crimson at its edges. Even now, at the height of the battle that his life had led to, this wretch dared to question him. There was no second option – they would fight with the orks, and by the Throne, they would win. It needed to be real. It was the possibility Nestor had staked everything on, and which would see his name last ten thousand years, as the brightest in the line of Pyrrhus, if it came to pass. This war could still be won, and he’d be damned before he let some snivelling career officer drag him from what little rest he could gather to tell him otherwise.

‘Another way?’ roared Nestor, surging forward and pinning Phocus against the doorway. ‘Doom? I thought that’s what you wanted, boy. A noble death in the name of the Emperor? A chance to put on your shiny officer’s cap and go down under a hill of monsters?’

‘I said you’ve doomed yourself, you old fool,’ hissed Phocus between gritted teeth, with a flash of sympathy in his eye that caused Nestor to waver. ‘I’m ready to die in the Emperor’s name, general. We all are. And I’ll be the first to concede that we’d all have died sooner if you hadn’t made parley with that… thing. But events are coming to an end now, sir. And you’ve still got a way out of this. A way that could save billions of lives.’ Nestor squinted in disbelief, his hands falling to his sides as he wondered if he was still dreaming. After a steadying breath, Phocus continued.

‘There are still ships, general. Fast clippers, message carriers, capable of slipping through the net and making it out-system. What we’ve learned in this campaign – the data we’ve gathered, the insights we’ve gleaned on both sets of xenos – could turn the tide when the tyranids hit the rest of the sector. The Golden Eighth won’t make it, sir, but you might… And you could save a hundred worlds.’

‘Colonel Phocus, what exactly are you proposing?’

‘There’s a clipper fuelled and loaded on the east pad, sir. We can have you on board before dawn, with all remaining aircraft scrambled to cover the launch. Leave Cavernam to me, sir – let me die here. I can overload the hive cores, make a quick end for the troops, and put a hole in the tyranid ranks as we go. It’s… all we can hope to do.’

Nestor stood motionless, his mind tumbling. The thought that he could be away from here, out of the stifling heat of the tank and the moronic discourse of the map room, in a matter of hours, was intoxicating. The thought that he could leave this awful world, this awful war, behind. For a brief moment, he wanted it more than he had ever wanted anything.

But then he caught sight of his grandfather, stern face sculpted in gold, in the cornice above the door. Last of the line of Pyrrhus, said the old man, fleeing the battlefield at the darkest hour. Leaving a lesser, more cunning house to raise the flag come dawn. Coward.

‘Intriguing,’ said Nestor, deathly calm. ‘And what if the situation should happen to improve once I am gone, Phocus? What if you beat the tyranids back, and wipe out the last of the xenos? What then? I suppose that would leave me as a lone deserter, a collaborator with xenos, and you…’

‘No!’ yelled Phocus, raising his hands. ‘We can’t win this war! And the xenos, Taktikus, they’re not what you think. General, please – even if we did win–’

Phocus was silenced then, as Nestor smashed his nose sideways with the butt of his laspistol. A second blow caved in his front teeth, and a third to the back of his skull sent him crumpling to his knees. The colonel raised shaking hands, trying to mumble more lies, but Nestor’s boot sent him sprawling into the corridor. He fled, limping like a beaten dog, leaving Nestor drawing ragged breaths and waving his gun like a club. From the bridge at the passageway’s end, Thriambos’ command crew stared on with horror, and Nestor stared back, before closing the door with a shaking hand.

When the rage had subsided enough to allow speech again, Nestor lifted the receiver of his desk’s vox-rig, and dialled it to an encrypted frequency that only he knew. Holding a palm to the side of his face to keep his grandfather’s from view, he listened to the growling static that rose from the endless synaptic chatter of the tyranids, and waited for the other side to pick up. When it did, there was a brief silence, followed by a curious grunt.

‘General,’ said Taktikus, like a host welcoming a guest to dinner, as gunfire rattled in the distance.

‘Taktikus,’ acknowledged Nestor, his voice hoarse. ‘I require your counsel.’ There was another pause, in which he swore he could hear the commander’s leathery skin stretch into a smile of delight.

‘You… honour me,’ said the alien, clearly taken aback. ‘Have you considered… a full charge at the enemy, with everything we’ve got?’ Nestor couldn’t help but let out a bleak laugh at the response, but Taktikus continued unfazed.

‘The Devourer prepares itself to feed, general. It has sent a new creature. A very big monster, with a big, big mind, on the northern plain. It will come here, and eat us up like grots. But with your tanks…’ said Taktikus, with a twinkle of intrigue, ‘we could punch through. Fight our way to the middle of the swarm, before tyranids can adapt. With the iron of Taktikus, the gold of Pyrrhus. We fight through, and make meat of it! Meat to share!’

Nestor had never heard Taktikus manage such a long speech in one go, but every word was like nectar.

‘And what happens if we do, Taktikus?’

‘The swarm dies. We win the planet. We win the war. Together. But it will need… everything. Every tank. All bombers. And in space. Every gun, all the boom. The ork way.’

‘The ork way…’ mused Nestor, his mind racing. If he pulled this off, he would rewrite rules of war that had stood since the Emperor had walked. Maybe he would even spare Taktikus; he would grant him vassalship under the flag of Mystras, and create a fighting force the likes of which had never been seen. Golden light, tinged with green, now rippled at the edge of vision.

‘So be it,’ he breathed, sounds of glory ringing in his ears. ‘Prepare your vehicles, Taktikus, for we charge at dawn.’

Nestor experienced the battle in flashes, as if in the throes of a fever.

He stood at Thriambos’ turret hatch, soot-streaked rain lashing his face, as he signalled the charge. He felt the machine-spirit howl beneath him as the ancient vehicle advanced, the rumble in his bones as the great gates opened. All around him, the dying city sang a hymn of steel, a battle dirge from the throats of a thousand engines. Armour from a dozen worlds advanced, every hull crowded with grim-faced troops, while among them weaved the rattling, smoke-belching vehicles of his ally.

The orks were glorious, in their own way. Even if they were born in mud, as the men liked to mutter, they came into the world without fear, without a moment’s doubt of their right to win. Without any of the drills or the decorum or the endless bloody manuals of the Astra Militarum, they were everything a soldier could hope to be. To fight alongside them was not just an advantage; it was a thrill.

He screamed into the wind as the first chitinous bodies cracked under the treads, shook his fist at a sky that swarmed with horrors. Thriambos was a ship afloat on a terrible sea, a mass of shrieking things that covered the world from horizon to horizon. They scrabbled at the sides and boiled up onto the hull, but he picked them off with his sidearm, cursing them as they fell back into the morass. Spittle flying from his mouth, he beckoned them on with wild taunts.

He saw tank after tank die, ripped open by the claws of abominations or simply pulled down beneath the gibbering waves. Bombers plunged screaming from the sky, drowning the darkness of the plain in holy light as their payloads went up. Their death-flashes rippled across an ocean of teeth; a galaxy of unblinking eyes.

At some time point in the fugue, Vatatze came to him on the tank’s parapet, face etched with worry. She waved her steel arm at the orks massing at the back of the Imperial column, babbling words he could not hear through the thunder of glory. The words did not matter; how could her words weigh anything, against the voice of war?

Dawn came like a sabre, cleaving black clouds to sear the world with golden light. In that first brightness he saw it, distant and dim with haze: a beast like a mountain, moving with the slow threat of a glacier, lowing a challenge deeper than an earthquake. Reckoning he could lock eyes with the thing across the miles, he lifted the blade of his grandfather and slashed down with a shout that echoed in the voices of orks and men alike. As Thriambos surged forward, he stared ahead at the behemoth as if his gaze could sear its hide. There was no need to look back now, no need to glance around like a trench-hole rat trembling at imagined threats. The enemy was ahead of him, Taktikus was at his side, and they were unstoppable.

New stars blazed in the morning sky, erupting from the bellies of dying voidcraft. Fumes pounded in his lungs, and he was deafened by the rapture of war. Trembling officers brought him reports, but he shouted them away, exalting in the moment. He had been bred for this, had dreamed of this, had lived every crippled moment of his life in the shadow of this incandescence. As Thriambos’ main cannon fired again and again into the wall of flesh ahead, he felt as if it were his own will, the will of his line, conjured into fire.

When at last the hide of the beast cracked, when its innards spilled in a steaming avalanche and it boomed its death-cry, it was as if a clap of thunder had gone off in his head. All around him, men screamed in sudden agony, and the world seemed to twist and shriek. Blinding white consumed his vision, followed by deepest black, and he watched the golden hull of the tank streak by in flashes, as if lit by strobe-light, as he fell from its turret. The ground met him with a lung-crumpling thud, and he waited for the swarm to fall on him, but there was only silence.

All around him were the twitching, ruptured bodies of the enemy. And above them, even as vision faded, he fancied he could see it. Descending from the heavens was the laurel itself, offered by the hands of his forebears. His triumph.

Nestor woke on his side, listening to the wind. Opening his eyes to a murky world, he blinked away stinging muck until it came into focus. All around him, convulsing weakly like crushed insects, were the bodies of the tyranids. And moving among them, putting blades through skulls with the methodical rhythm of harvesters, were orks. Some way off, the gore-blackened hull of Thriambos steamed under a clear sky.

Despite the tranquility of the moment, he felt a surge of panic down his spine at the sight of the vehicle. Of course – he had fallen from the hull! He tried to stand, but his arms would not move; they were lashed together behind his back. Filling his lungs to call out, he fell into a coughing fit, which made his eyes water again. When they cleared, Taktikus was kneeling beside him, admiring Nestor’s sabre as he wiped ichor from its blade.

‘General, you’re awake,’ said the creature, in a tone of pleasant surprise.

‘Taktikus…’ croaked Nestor, voice raw from the battle.

‘Are you going to ask me what happened? I thought… you would have guessed.’

‘The tyranids…’

‘All dead now. Or… scattered.’ Taktikus searched for words, but resorted to mime instead, of an exploding head and creatures running to and fro. ‘Big head bang. Sigh… kick, I think you say? Knocked you out, and most of your troops. Not orks though… Thicker heads.’ With that, the xenos tapped a claw to the side of its cinderblock skull, and grinned.

‘And then?’ said Nestor, head pounding as realisation dawned. To his astonishment, Taktikus looked almost sheepish, like a vast child caught red-handed in an act of minor theft.

‘Well, I betrayed you, of course. The charge, with the tanks. It was… you know… a trick. We held back and… we got you.’

There was an awkward silence, and the xenos grumbled, before continuing. ‘You didn’t think…?’

‘No,’ said Nestor, trying to hide the lie. ‘I had… planned the same.’

‘It was an excellont campaign, still.’

‘It was an excellent campaign, yes, Taktikus.’

Another long silence followed. Taktikus looked curiously at Nestor, and Nestor looked at Taktikus, who was no longer the nightmare hobgoblin he had first met in no man’s land, nor the clownish oaf who had played with model tanks in the war room. No, while his betrayer had plenty of each aspect, it was also something else entirely. He supposed that alien might be the right word for it.

‘I suppose the lesson,’ said Taktikus, with a faint glumness, ‘is something about knowing your enemy? Hmm. Reminds me…’

Then the beast issued a string of throaty barks in its own tongue, and Colonel Phocus was dragged from Thriambos’ shadow, led on a rope by a dull-eyed hulk.

‘Now this one,’ said Taktikus, indicating Phocus with a flick of a claw as the man glared at Nestor through a swollen eye, ‘he knows his enemy. He was a sharp one. In fact, I’m going to keep him.’ It was only then, as Nestor figured out what was about to happen, that his heart truly deflated.

‘Colonel Phocus,’ said Taktikus, with an odd air of ceremonial solemnity. ‘Please tell the general the big Imperial rule about negotiating with xenos?’

‘Don’t,’ mumbled Phocus through broken teeth, and spat blood on the ground.

‘Good,’ said the alien, nodding, and handed the man Nestor’s sabre. ‘Now, teach the general his lesson.’

Phocus trudged forwards, under the inquisitive gaze of the ork. Sighing with what he suspected was relief at last, Nestor closed his eyes and waited for the sabre’s kiss.

HOW VIDO LEARNED THE TRICK

Josh Reynolds

In this second story by Josh Reynolds, it’s time for the servant to put all his skills to use if he wants to survive the arrival of an assassin. It’s a battle of wits between halfling Vido and the mysterious Pike as they search for Zavant Konniger, in a detective story with a twist. Can Vido use what he’s learned to outwit the assassin and save his master? Or will he pay the ultimate price for loyalty?

‘He’s not here, if that’s what you were wondering,’ a voice said, startling Vido even as he entered his master’s study. The voice was smooth, polished and erudite. A rich man’s voice, Vido thought, as he froze in place. But rich men didn’t break into private studies, especially those belonging to Zavant Konniger. Vido nearly choked on the half-chewed lump of Wissenland sausage in his mouth.

‘You are Vido.’ It wasn’t a question. Vido didn’t move. He had been coming into the study to light his master’s fire for the evening and he had an armful of wood. With the instincts of a born street rat, he knew that there was a weapon inches away from sending him to Ranald’s eternal craps game. And where was Zavant? Nowhere in sight, that was where.

He swallowed his sausage and said, ‘Yes?’

‘I hope that wasn’t a question,’ the unseen man said, his voice a velvet purr. ‘I was told that you are quite bright, for a halfling. I would hate for that to be wrong.’

‘Can I turn around?’

‘Another question,’ the man said. ‘My hopes dim. I should simply dispose of you now and be done with it.’

Vido heard the click of some mechanism. He closed his eyes and sucked in a breath. Then, ‘If you intended to kill me, you would have done it the minute I entered the room.’

It was a stab in the dark. But better that than an arrow in the back.

‘Maybe I enjoy talking to my prey,’ the man said mildly. The way he said ‘prey’ would have curled Vido’s hair, if it weren’t already curly. Only men two barrels short a brewery talked like that. Faces spun through his head, old enemies of his employer. Which one was this? The voice didn’t sound familiar. An assassin then, but who was he working for? The crime lord Klasst, perhaps, or maybe the Lady Khemalla, she of the carmine eyes and sharp fangs? Did it even matter?

‘Maybe,’ Vido said. His tongue felt thick, and he was sweating despite the clammy fog rolling in through the open windows. That was how the man had got in. He could smell the Reik, and hear the calls of the watchmen, and the ringing of their bells. None close enough to come to his rescue, drat the luck, even if they had been inclined to answer cries for help in the fog. ‘Or maybe you were hoping I could tell you something.’

There was no answer. Vido began to sweat more, and his throat felt like sandpaper. Then there was a chuckle, and, ‘Are you a gamester, Vido?’

‘I’ve been known to roll the bones, aye,’ he said.

‘Then how would you feel about a wager?’

‘What are the stakes?’ Vido said, licking his lips.

‘Your life,’ the man said. Wood creaked. ‘If you win, you go free. If you lose… Well. I wouldn’t lose, Vido.’

Vido swallowed, a lump sticking in his craw. ‘Can I turn around?’

‘Of course, where are my manners? Turn, turn,’ the man said. Vido did. The man had a buttery complexion that spoke of too much drink and too many sweet things, but his body was lean and lethal-looking. He sat in Konniger’s chair, slumped in a relaxed pose, a small, compact crossbow clutched in one hand. Vido’s eyes lingered on the weapon, and the man smiled. ‘Cathayan,’ he said. ‘They are an ingenious people, with a fondness for intricacy. They have seventy-two words for the concept of assassination, in contrast to the Tileans, who have a mere twelve.’

‘That’s interesting,’ Vido said, his eyes never leaving the wickedly tipped head of the quarrel. ‘Can I put this wood down?’

‘Oh, by all means, please.’

Vido carefully set the pile of wood down, his hand brushing his belt where two throwing blades, crafted to fit a Mootlander’s hand, were sheathed.

The man frowned. ‘Don’t play silly twits with me, Vido. I have little patience. Unsheathe those blades – slowly! – and toss them over here.’

‘I wasn’t, I swear!’ Vido said, raising his hands well away from his belt. At the man’s gesture, he pulled the throwing knives free and tossed them to the floor.

‘And the cheese wire in your sleeve,’ the man said. Ruefully, Vido pulled the garrotte out of his sleeve and dropped it. ‘And the cosh in your trousers.’ Vido sighed and extricated the cosh too. ‘And the razor hidden behind the flat of your belt,’ the man added. Vido smiled weakly and undid his belt and slid the straight razor out of its hidden sheath on the inside.

The man broke into a cheerful smile. ‘Good. Glad to hear it. We shall be friends, I think, Vido. Won’t that be nice? A fellow in your position needs all the help he can get, don’t you agree?’

‘Wholeheartedly,’ Vido said, nodding jerkily. Where was Zavant? His eyes scanned the study, searching for any sign of the sage. Where could he have gone? As far as Vido had known, his master had been in his study, reading some blasted text or other. He had sent Vido out for sausages and cheese for his eventide meal, and Vido knew that he had only been gone for as long as it had taken him to skip down to the night market one street over. Granted, he may have haggled with the cheesemonger for longer than absolutely necessary, but two Karls for a wheel of Stirland Sour? Outrageous! His old dad had taught him principles.

‘Good,’ the man said, interrupting his outraged reverie. ‘You may call me Pike. I will call you Vido, as I have been. Now, let us waste no more time. Where is Zavant Konniger?’

‘I don’t know,’ Vido said automatically. He didn’t, but this wasn’t the first time others had come looking. Vido had standing orders regarding certain persons of unpleasant demeanour. But this Pike was something different, albeit equally unpleasant.

Pike clucked his tongue. ‘Would you lose the bet before we begin the game, Vido? You came up the stairs. I heard you. If he ran out of the room, as I suspect, you would have seen him.’

‘He didn’t! And if I don’t know–’

‘I bet you can find out though, can’t you?’ Pike shifted in the seat. The crossbow didn’t waver. ‘You seem like a smart lad, Vido. How long have you served Konniger, hmm? A few years, isn’t it? You must have picked up a trick or two.’

Vido didn’t reply. Pike grunted. ‘Silence is not an answer, Vido,’ he prompted.

‘I know a thing or three,’ Vido said. More than that, or I’m a plucked hen, he thought, not without some pride. His years in service to Zavant Konniger had been rough ones, no two ways there, but they’d been educational.

‘Show me,’ Pike said, gesturing with his free hand. ‘Show me what you learned from the Great Sage of Altdorf.’

Vido hesitated. ‘What do you want him for?’

‘That’s not part of the wager, Vido,’ Pike chided. ‘Show me.’

Vido gulped and turned. The study was lit by soft oil lamps set into the walls. Shelves stuffed to overflowing with books, parchments and papyri of all sizes and materials lined the walls. Once, Konniger had allowed only a single candle in his study, but Vido had eventually prevailed upon him to use lamps. Konniger’s desk was as cluttered as ever, an avalanche of paper waiting to happen. Some had been disturbed by the night breeze, and he saw a scrawl of names and diagrams, including what looked to be a set of plans for the Grand Temple of Handrich in Marienburg.

The windows were open and the lights were bright. Vido sucked on his teeth. He glanced at Pike. ‘You saw him?’ he said hesitantly.

‘You do not impress me so far, Vido,’ Pike said.

‘You saw him,’ Vido said, taking the threat as assent. ‘That’s why you came in through the window. But he was not at the desk. If you’d seen him at the desk, you’d have shot him from the window.’

Pike had an amused smirk on his face. ‘And how do you know that?’

Vido made a face. ‘There’s mud and dirt on the sill there. The marks on your cuffs and the knees and shins of your trousers are tar and dust. I’ve known enough second-storey men to know what that means. You’re wearing black to hide it, but I’ve got good eyes.’

‘If you want to keep them, you’ll turn them back to the task at hand,’ Pike said mildly.

Vido swallowed, nervous. ‘Where was he?’

‘You tell me.’ Pike was having fun. He was smiling like a boy at a puppet show. Vido wasn’t enjoying playing puppet, however. Where are you? he thought. He went to the windows, trying to remember all of the things that Konniger had hammered into his thick, Moot-born skull. He saw the marks made where Pike had climbed over the sill. He hadn’t used tools. No self-respecting Altdorf burglar would go it bare-handed. Pike was either quite taken with his acrobatic skills, or he didn’t own or couldn’t get the right equipment. There was a gap between the level of the window and the slant of the roof across the alleyway. He saw tiles scraped loose from their moorings by Pike’s weight.

Pike had come across the roof. What was that way? The docks, he knew. That was Klasst’s domain. But Pike didn’t have the look of one of Klasst’s roughs. He didn’t talk like one either. He was certain he could detect the faint strain of an accent.

Vido turned, trying to mimic the expression he’d seen on Konniger’s face thousands of times. He imagined the steely eyes and the hawk-like nose, jutting out from the thin face. The look of complex calculation as patterns emerged seemingly from thin air and arranged themselves neatly before his gaze.

‘I’d appreciate a warning if you’re having stomach problems,’ Pike said. Vido’s face fell and he pushed the heels of his fists into the sides of his head as he tried to think. How would Pike have seen Zavant if he wasn’t at the desk?

He’d have to have been in the room. Not sitting, so… standing?

His eyes flickered up to the mirror set amidst the books on the shelf at an angle from the desk. The mirror was head height for a standing man, and if he’d seen the reflection from a distance, Pike might have made the honest assumption. The only problem was that the mirror was angled up slightly, so that Konniger had a clear look at what was behind him when he was sitting at the desk. It was one of his master’s little tricks – a mirror angled to catch anyone prowling across the roof opposite, if the windows were open and the night clear. Apparently it worked both ways.

Vido turned, looking up. A second mirror sat above the windows. His eyes narrowed in thought. Konniger had ordered a number of mirrors in recent weeks. Vido had assumed that they were for one or another of his master’s inventions.

‘Well?’ Pike said, shifting impatiently in his chair. Zavant’s chair, Vido noted, pulled from behind the desk, likely when the assassin realised that he’d been tricked. But why would Konniger want an assassin to come into his study? And why wouldn’t he warn Vido beforehand?

Vido cleared his throat. ‘Mirrors,’ he said simply. ‘That bit of glass on the wall there?’

‘I know what a mirror is, yes,’ Pike said. He sounded insulted. A muscle in his jaw jumped. Had his accent slipped? Vido filed the thought away. He had to be like Konniger. Everything was important. Every clue had the potential to save his life.

‘No, mirrors,’ Vido said, trying not to look at the crossbow. He gestured, more frantically than he would have liked. ‘You saw a reflection.’

‘So he was in the room,’ Pike said, looking at the mirrors; though he wasn’t looking at Vido, his crossbow never wavered from the halfling. Idly, he pulled a leather pouch out of his coat and flipped it open, revealing a number of twists of dark paper. He snagged one with his lips and extricated it, clamping it between yellow teeth. Vido restrained a grimace. Pike was a silt-weed smoker. It wasn’t proper pipe weed, that, but some dock-fuzz that Marienburgers wrapped in cheap paper and smoked straight. It stained the teeth and eventually the lips.

‘I didn’t say that!’ Vido said. He gauged the line and angle of the mirror over the windows and followed it with his eyes. Another mirror, set into the corner of the wall on the opposite side of the room. His eyebrows jerked up. He was pretty sure that that one was a new one. He pointed to it and swung his arm to the door. ‘Was the door open or closed?’ he said.

‘Open,’ Pike said. He rose from his chair and lit his smoke with a match scratched across Konniger’s desk.

Vido wrinkled his nose at the smell and looked at the lamps, and then at the corridor beyond. Another mirror sat there. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? Something tugged at his memory. Something about lights and mirrors… He snapped his fingers. ‘He wasn’t in the room. He was in the corridor. You saw a reflection of a reflection of a reflection.’ Where there was light, there was a reflection. Part of him wondered if that was why Konniger had agreed to the lamps. Had he been planning something like this? His master was a big one for contingencies. His eyes found the plans for the temple again. The temple was in Marienburg. Pike was smoking cheap Marienburg tobacco. Was there a connection? Konniger would have seen it.

Maybe he had, Vido thought. Maybe that was why he wasn’t here.

‘So where is he now?’ Pike stood behind him, his voice calm and measured.

‘I need to check the corridor. For clues,’ Vido said hurriedly.

‘Chop-chop, halfling,’ Pike said. It was an odd turn of phrase. Not one Vido had heard before, not in Altdorf. Was he an Ostlander? No, the vowels were too smooth. Konniger had made him listen to and memorise the peculiarities of the provincial accents of the Empire, believing it to be important to know everything a man’s voice could tell him.

Vido stepped into the corridor, alert to every creak and groan of the house. Konniger had once sent him a message via the precise squeal of a loose floorboard, and Vido wouldn’t put it past him to try a similar tactic now. But nothing revealed itself. There was nothing in the corridor but the mirrors, angled just so, to better catch and throw a reflection from… Where?

‘Are you planning on telling me why you’re here?’ he said, glancing over his shoulder.

‘Why would I do that? It must be obvious,’ Pike said. ‘Your master has made a certain – ah – individual quite unhappy with his incessant interference. Thus, here we are.’ He glanced up at the wall. ‘Nice mural. Konniger certainly has eclectic tastes.’ He knocked on the wall with a knuckle, indicating the particularly lewd Tilean pastoral landscape featuring satyrs and nymphs at play that stretched from the landing to the study.

‘He knows what he likes,’ Vido muttered, not thinking it worth the bother of mentioning that Konniger only had the mural painted in order to throw potential clients off balance.

‘What he likes is gaudy and cheap. Killing him might just be the most merciful act I’ve ever committed, if this is the sort of thing he thinks is “art”,’ Pike mused.

Vido racked his brain, all too aware of the… Averlander? No, the accent was too liquid. He was definitely a Wastelander. It was the only thing that fitted the man standing behind him with a crossbow in an increasingly twitchy hand. He looked to the floor. Zavant insisted on thick carpets. Said it muffled noise, but they also tended to hold tracks about as well as Talabec mud. Vido uttered a yelp and fell on all fours. ‘Footprints!’

He traced the faint outlines. Small, thin, Zavant’s, he was certain. Zavant wore soft-soled boots of Bretonnian leather when in the city, and the imprint they left was distinctive to one who had polished them as often as Vido. He looked up. Three mirrors, one on each side of the corridor and a third on the far wall. ‘He stood here and held up a light,’ he said, gesturing. ‘It carried his image down the hall, into the study. You saw him. He was turned away, facing that mirror. You saw him and thought he had his back to you, but in reality, he could see you just fine, once you got into sight of the first mirror in the study!’

Pike blinked. ‘What?’

‘It has to do with the shape of the mirrors and the amount of light,’ Vido said smugly, even though he didn’t have the first idea what Konniger had been on about. He looked up at the mirror that Konniger must have stared into. How long had he been standing there before Pike took the bait?

‘I wouldn’t sound so pleased. You still haven’t won the wager, Vido,’ Pike said. Vido’s pleasure evaporated. ‘He tricked me. Very well, I accept that. False pride is no sort of pride. Where is he?’

‘I–’ Vido began. He hesitated.

Pike smiled. ‘He could only have gone one way, isn’t that right? He could only have gone down those stairs which you have so recently ascended.’ The assassin’s smile faded. ‘Thus, one may infer that you told me a fib, Vido. That you saw Konniger and have been keeping me distracted while he – what? – goes for help? Or is he simply scurrying to some hidey-hole like the rat he is?’

‘He didn’t go past me, I swear!’ Vido said, raising his hands. He began to back away. If he could make it to the stairs–

‘Stop sidling, Vido. Those who sidle come to bad ends.’ Pike stepped forward, his hand snapping out and his fingers tangling in the front of Vido’s doublet.

Vido grabbed the assassin’s wrist, his thick thumb stabbing the pressure point where the palm met the wrist: another thing Konniger had taught him. Pike yelped as Vido twisted his arm around. The crossbow went off, slicing the air and nipping a curl of Vido’s hair off his head. Pike sank to one knee and Vido released him and threw himself to the side. He’d learned the art of the harmless tumble as a sprat, and those lessons stood him in good stead, allowing him to carom off the wall and bounce to his feet behind the killer. He ran as fast as he could towards the study.

Pike rose to his feet, cursing. Vido was already at the desk as the assassin followed him into the room. The telltale wasp-hum that heralded his arrival said that he had reloaded his crossbow on the move. It was Vido’s turn to yelp as the bolt dug a groove in the desk even as he narrowly snatched up Konniger’s silver letter opener. Spinning the thin, light blade with a practised gesture, he sent it wobbling through the air towards Pike. The assassin flinched, giving Vido enough time to scramble out of the open window.

The night was damp and the air stank. Vido hooked his fingers into the brick and began climbing with every ounce of speed his sturdy frame possessed. If he could make it to the roof, Pike would never catch him. If, if, if.

A cough alerted him. He glanced down. Pike had leaned backwards out of the window, his crossbow aimed upwards, a rag held over his mouth to combat the Altdorf effluvium. The bolt skidded across Vido’s backside and shoulder, making him howl. Pain shooting through his limbs, he scampered awkwardly up onto the sloping, slippery tiles of the roof. He climbed towards the bulky shape of the chimney, blood running down his trouser leg.

As his hand touched brick, he turned. The slope of Bleaker Street descended away from him in a serpentine length of roofs and chimneys and soft torchlight. He pulled himself behind the stack and tried to ignore the pain in his shoulder and backside in order to devise a scheme to get himself out of his current situation. From the other side of the chimney, he could hear Pike cursing as he climbed. It was harder for a man, even as experienced a second-storey man as the assassin seemed to be, to climb than a halfling. Big-jobs were too heavy to ascend quickly, something that had saved Vido more than once in his previous identity.

‘Not this time though, hey?’ he muttered sourly. Where was Konniger? He had hoped that this was some plan of his, but more and more it was looking like Vido was on his own. ‘As per bloody usual,’ he spat.

‘Is that you whining, Vido?’ Pike said. Vido risked a look. The assassin crouched on the edge of the roof, his crossbow resting on his knee. ‘Going to join your master? If you lead me to him, I might forget the indignity of having to chase you up here.’

Vido called out, ‘Really?’

‘No. Not really,’ Pike said, raising the crossbow. ‘I see you, you hairy-footed little sneak-thief.’

Vido pressed himself flat against the chimney. ‘Wait, wait, wait!’ he shouted.

‘No more waiting, Vido,’ Pike said. Tiles creaked beneath his weight as he moved. ‘No more distractions.’

‘You still don’t know where Konniger is!’

‘Can you tell me?’

‘No.’

‘Goodbye, Vido,’ Pike said, much closer now.

‘At least tell me who hired you,’ Vido tried, wondering whether or not he could fit into the chimney. ‘Don’t let me die with a mystery in my head, please. I’ve had too much of mysteries…’

‘That’s an odd sort of mercy.’ Pike sounded amused. If anything, that was worse than Pike angry.

‘Tell me,’ Vido said, eyes darting around frantically, looking for a way out.

‘Oh, Vido, if I could I would, but I can’t so I won’t,’ Pike said. ‘Would you be willing to move from behind the chimney, Vido? I’d hate to miss again.’

‘Sorry, if I could I would, but–’

‘Yes, yes,’ Pike said testily. The crossbow hummed. Vido flinched as the bolt stabbed into the tile he’d been standing on seconds earlier. He swung around the chimney, scraping his cheek. Gasping, he hauled himself up top.

‘Ah-ah, Vido, there’s no escape from Pike,’ the assassin said. Vido felt a hand seize his ankle and he screamed and lashed out with his other foot. He heard a crunch and then the hiss of a crossbow firing and then another scream, and then he was slithering down the chimney, his mouth and eyes filled with soot. Coughing and gagging, he tried to control his fall. Blindly he shoved his hands and feet out, twisting, trying desperately to find a grip. Skin was shaved off his palms and the calloused soles of his feet lost a layer of thickness as the rough, fire-worn brick gouged and bit him. Pain flared in his shoulder and haunch, and he coughed out a groan. Chest heaving, he hung braced, thanking all the gods he knew that he hadn’t had time to light that fire.

There was no sound from above, save for a clatter. He was a sitting duck if Pike decided to fire down at him, however. Carefully, with grunts and curses aplenty, Vido began to scuff himself down, barely moving, hoping his caution didn’t get him killed. If he could make it to the bottom, he’d reach the study hearth, and from there, a quick run for the stairs…

It seemed to take an eternity, right up until the moment one foot began to slide up of its own volition, his heel skidding on a patch of thick char. His head slipped down and his feet went up as he cried out. Stars spun crazily overhead and then he was striking the smoke shelf and spinning down into the study hearth in an explosion of ash and soot.

‘Ow,’ Vido moaned.

‘Indeed,’ a voice said.

Vido hastily scrubbed at his watering eyes. The first thing he saw was a pair of men’s boots. They were slim, dark boots of Bretonnian leather, enclosing thin feet. His heart wobbled in his chest. The boots didn’t belong to Pike.

‘Master,’ he said, reaching out desperately. ‘An assassin–’

‘Has been dispatched,’ Zavant Konniger said. ‘You are quite safe, Vido. You always were, in fact.’

‘He almost killed me,’ Vido said harshly, picking himself up. Konniger didn’t offer to help him.

‘But he didn’t. Nor would he have. I was watching the entire time,’ Konniger said, picking up his pipe and filling the bowl. A regular-sized crossbow, its bright metal smudged dull by ash, sat on the desk. Konniger lit his pipe. Vido patted ineffectually at himself. ‘You’re getting soot all over my study, Vido.’

‘Hang your study!’ Vido erupted. ‘What do you mean you were watching? Where were you?’

‘Surely you can surmise my location, based on the clues you gathered earlier,’ Konniger said, unperturbed by his dogsbody’s outburst. He clucked and pulled his chair back around his desk and sat down, still sucking on his pipe.

Vido gaped at him, mouth opening and closing like that of a hooked fish. ‘What?’ Konniger smiled thinly and gestured for Vido to proceed. Vido flushed. ‘Fine,’ he snapped, still unsteady on his feet. ‘Where is he?’

‘On the roof, one assumes, unless he’s rolled off into the alleyway. We shall check in a moment,’ Konniger said.

‘You shot him?’

‘If I hadn’t, we would not be speaking,’ Konniger said mildly.

‘You were on the roof,’ Vido said uncertainly. Konniger raised a finger, but Vido hurried on before the sage could interrupt. ‘The opposite roof, I mean.’ Vido’s brow furrowed. ‘But that doesn’t make sense. If you were there, wouldn’t he have–’ Realisation dawned and Vido snapped his fingers. ‘You did run past me,’ he said accusingly.

‘Did I?’

Vido stood in the centre of the study, fuming. ‘You had to have! There’s no other way you could have got out!’

‘Then indeed I must have,’ Konniger said, puffing on his pipe, long fingers intertwined over his stomach. ‘What is it that I always say, Vido?’

‘Don’t rob the cadavers?’

‘I believe I shout that. Try again,’ Konniger said. The trace of a smile ghosted across his lean features.

‘Go through his pockets?’

Konniger sighed. ‘No. When all other possibilities have been eliminated, no matter what remains, no matter how impossible, that is the truth.’

‘I have never once, in my life, heard you say that,’ Vido said.

‘Obviously you weren’t listening as attentively as you claimed, then,’ Konniger said sharply. ‘You are quite observant when you wish to be, Vido, but in other cases, such as while sneaking one of the sausages you went out to procure for my evening meal whilst squirreling away the remainder of the coin I gave you into the hollow spot beneath the kitchen hearth–’ Vido grimaced guiltily as Konniger went on. ‘Your attentions were diverted and focused. It was child’s play to slip past you and out the still-open door. Earlier in the day, while on my morning constitutional, I noticed our friend Pike following me, likely to determine our address. Satisfied that he had the right residence – a fact I made sure of, gleaning his intent as I had – I then stepped out, placed my crossbow and a supply of quarrels on the opposite roof, and returned to set my trap.’

‘The mirrors, you mean. You used me for bait, didn’t you?’ Vido said, feeling put on.

‘Of course I did. One does not draw the wolf into the gorge without a tied kid, Vido,’ Konniger said sternly. ‘And draw him in I certainly needed to do.’ Konniger leaned back and pressed his fingers together beneath his chin. ‘I chafe at nooses, and someone is drawing one with several knots tight about me, for reasons that are, as yet, hypothetical and uncertain.’ His eyes gleamed in the soft light of the study, and Vido knew he was looking at the plans for the temple of Handrich. ‘Tell me about this particular knot, Vido.’

Vido hesitated. ‘He was from Marienburg.’

Konniger grunted. ‘Explain.’

‘His accent,’ Vido said. ‘I couldn’t pin it down at first, but I’d wager my old dad’s horse and cart that he’s – was – a Wastelander.’

‘Go on,’ Konniger said, gesturing smoothly.

‘That crossbow of his… It was foreign. Not even Klasst can afford to arm his boys with those, but they’re ten a penny in Marienburg, from what I hear.’

‘Hardly ten a penny,’ Konniger murmured.

‘His twists,’ Vido said. He mimed smoking. ‘Right-thinking folks smoke a pipe, or even one of them Cathayan smoke-flutes. Only fellows I ever seen that smoked those twists were Marienburgers. They get the weed cheap on the docks, and the prisoners on Rijker’s Isle use them for currency.’ He stopped, looking at Konniger expectantly.

‘Adequate, if circumstantial,’ Konniger said, nodding. ‘Disappointingly, you missed the most obvious clue, of course.’

‘What?’ Vido said, annoyed.

‘Mud on the sill,’ Konniger said, gesturing lazily to the window sill. ‘It is from the River Reik, as you no doubt surmised, but if you had tasted it, you would have noted a distinct tang of brine, thus illuminating its origins as where the river spills into the Manaanspoort Sea.’ Konniger bobbed to his feet.

‘Who sent him, master?’ Vido said. His rear and shoulder ached, and the blood had dried, sticking his clothes to him. Konniger retrieved the healer’s kit that he kept on hand for emergencies from his desk. He knelt before Vido and began the process of seeing to his wounds.

‘If I knew that, I would never have drawn him into a trap, Vido.’

‘But you know now, right?’ Vido said. ‘I mean, all that stuff – you know now?’

Konniger frowned. ‘I might have, had you managed to keep him in the study and keep him talking as I intended, you Moot-born clod. Sometimes I despair of you, Vido. I left you all the signs necessary for you to divine my plan and adapt your behaviour accordingly. And what did you do? You scurried out the window at the first opportunity and forced my hand.’

Vido swallowed and flushed at his master’s harsh tone. ‘I didn’t do so badly as all that, did I?’ he protested.

‘I wasn’t finished,’ Konniger snapped. ‘Despite your idiocy, you displayed a remarkable grasp of the observational sciences.’ He hesitated. ‘All in all, you performed satisfactorily, I suppose.’

‘Master?’ Vido said questioningly.

Konniger sighed. ‘Good job, Vido.’

THE FIRSTBORN DAUGHTER

Filip Wiltgren

Sweden-based Filip Wiltgren uses the classic fallen idol trope to explore internal strength, belief and loyalty, in a story that warns against putting your heroes on a pedestal.

In the middle of an ongoing war against rebelling planetary forces, Ekaterina Idra must overcome her own doubts and those of her peers to prove she’s the equal of every officer in the Astra Militarum. When given the chance to work with her idol, Idra must come to terms with the realisation that temptation taints all.

Major Jorun Haskel is everything Lieutenant Ekaterina Idra wants to be. Respected officer. Fearless leader. Doubly decorated with the Star of Saint Nadalya. His merit list is the stuff of campfire legends, and Lieutenant Idra is about to save his life.

The Vostroyan 262nd Firstborn Regiment’s position is a smudge of smoke on the horizon, a grey thread against the grey clouds.

‘A big fire,’ Sergeant Mathis Lokhov says, stroking his drooping moustache. ‘Will they be alive?’

‘The Emperor willing,’ Idra replies. ‘How long?’

‘Ten minutes,’ her driver says. ‘Unless we hit another gorge.’

Idra wants to tell him to speed up, but resists the urge. The men of Idra’s light platoon already resent being commanded by a woman. Even the low-born treat her with contempt. She bites back a harsh word and holds on as the Chimera’s tracks churn the razorgrass into paste.

‘I will not disgrace this family!’ Ekaterina’s father rages. ‘Eight children and not a single son!’

‘Calm yourself, Rhyslan,’ her uncle replies. The stack of empty rahzvod glasses before Davut Idrov puts a lie to his words. He, too, has sired only daughters. No Idrov line has produced a firstborn son to send away as atonement for Vostroya’s sins.

Ekaterina peeks from behind the massive oak of the chamber door. The door is black with age, hard as stone, brought by the patriarchs of the Idrov family from worlds where trees grow. From Holy Terra, her nana says. Ekaterina wonders if the Techtriarchs will take their holy doors away when they can’t send a son to battle.

‘What can we do?’ Uncle Davut says. It’s almost a whisper. ‘Even if our wives would bear a son now, he won’t be old enough for the coming draft.’

The silence stretches, a moment of infinite weight. Even the crackling of the fire is muted.

‘We will atone for our sins,’ Ekaterina’s father says. ‘We will send our firstborn to serve the Emperor.’

‘Rhyslan,’ Uncle Davut says, ‘you have no firstborn.’

‘I do.’ Her father raises his voice.

‘Ekaterina!’ he shouts.

The 262nd’s command post is a rockcrete bunker. Grey, like everything on this Throne-forsaken world. Grey skies, grey razorgrass, grey uniforms on the Tovogan dead that litter the ground. Only the bloodworms are red. The bloodworms, and the greatcoats of the fallen Vostroyans.

Lieutenant Idra steps out of her command Chimera. Mud stains the outside of the boxy APC, blending with the pale blue hull and covering the red Vostroyan unit markings. The Chimera’s multi-laser tracks across the plain, the gunner searching for targets. But everything here is already dead. Everything except Major Haskel and a handful of his men.

Haskel perches on a slab of blasted rock. His red coat is smeared with mud, his armour scorched by a lasgun blast. His short, black moustache droops, and greasy black hair pokes out from beneath his bearskin shako. Only his weapons are immaculate.

He’s holding a power sword across his knees, cleaning it. The Crystal Sword, an ancient weapon as legendary as the major himself. The fist-sized ruby embedded in its pommel is cracked, a hairline fracture in the shape of the Imperial aquila. Idra knows this. Tales of the Eye of the Eagle, and the Crystal Sword, are barracks lore among the Firstborn on Tovoga. The major keeps rubbing at the spotless blade. A drop of old blood stains the aquila on the sword’s crossguard.

The major’s men are walking among the dead, looking for those who aren’t. There aren’t many of them, neither Firstborn, nor living.

A Firstborn of the 262nd, a giant of a man with his lasgun slung over his back and a huge, serrated axe in his hand, walks past, between Idra and her command Chimera. He doesn’t even look up. Neither does the major. The giant lifts his axe, brings it down on the head of a Tovogan rebel. Bone crunches. A moan Idra wasn’t even aware of is cut short.

‘Major Haskel, sir,’ she says. The major continues to wipe his sword with a grey rag, the torn-off sleeve of a Tovogan militia uniform. Idra waits silently beside her Chimera, keeping her face expressionless. It isn’t the first time she has been snubbed by a Vostroyan soldier. Her anger is a quiet, simmering flame deep inside her. No part of it touches her face. Anger is for those who can afford it. So she waits, impassionate, while her outrider squad, a stinking, petro-chem Tauros and two Tovogan bikes that tend to fail, drive in lazy circles around the outskirts of the battlefield. The major polishes his sword. Idra’s men look at him, enthralled. Idra wonders if he’s ignoring her because she’s–

‘A woman,’ says Haskel. ‘In the uniform of a Firstborn.’

His voice is like crushed glass and rock. Haskel’s giant spits. A few of Idra’s men snicker. Sergeant Lokhov’s glare silences them.

Idra doesn’t react. It is a challenge she’s faced hundreds of times. She has her own way of dealing with it.

She snaps to attention.

‘Lieutenant Ekaterina Idra,’ she says, saluting. ‘Light platoon, Eleventh Company, Vostroyan Eighty-Sixth Firstborn.’

The major looks up from his sword, fixes a sharp gaze on Idra. His eyes are grey, and bloodshot. His attention makes her want to squirm. She forces herself to remain still. Expects him to laugh at her. Propose to buy her a drink and show her to his barracks.

‘Can you fight?’ Major Haskel says.

‘Sir?’ says Idra, confused.

‘Can you kill traitors?’ asks Haskel.

Idra nods, curtly.

‘For the Emperor, for Vostroya and for humanity,’ she says, making the sign of the aquila.

‘Good,’ says Haskel. He grins, showing too many teeth.

‘You are mad, Rhyslan Idrov.’ The lord hetman’s voice is quiet, but everyone in the council chamber hears. Ekaterina is sure of it.

‘I request my right, as a voyarin and a Vostroyan,’ says her father. ‘I demand the right to pay my family’s debt with our firstborn.’

‘You have no firstborn,’ says the lord hetman. ‘Your family will produce sons for the next generation. I will forget this conversation.’

Her father doesn’t move. Ekaterina doesn’t move beside him.

‘A woman can’t fight,’ says the hetman.

‘She is my firstborn,’ says Ekaterina’s father. ‘She can fight. By Saint Nadalya’s Grace, I ask the right to prove it.’

The hetman’s face colours, blood rising in his cheeks like paint dripping into the sky. A voyarin, the lowest of the nobles, contradicting a hetman.

‘Try whatever you want,’ the hetman says. ‘You will fail.’ He raises his hand to wave the council guards forward.

Her father nods. Ekaterina charges.

Her finger pokes the hetman twice in the gut before his guards manage to react, twice more before they pull her away. Beneath his red greatcoat, the hetman is surprisingly thin. His guards yell, four of them wrestling Ekaterina to the ground. The hetman bellows in rage. The courtiers shout. Only Ekaterina is silent, her sole noise a bitten-back cough as the guards slam her into the hall’s polished marble floor.

‘My firstborn can fight,’ says her father. ‘I demand my right.’

The lord hetman stares at them, his cap askew, grey hair sticking out, hate plain on his face. Her father doesn’t flinch. Ekaterina tries not to.

‘The warp take your right,’ the hetman growls. ‘The ashen wastes will take your firstborn.’

Ekaterina’s father smiles, a cold, dark, hungry expression.

The entire 262nd consists of Major Haskel and seven men. All of them look like rejects from a Vostroyan horror show. All of them look lethal. The giant with the axe. A thin, ghoulish Firstborn, half his face a mess of burns, the other black with soot. A marksman missing his left hand, his brass augmetics tarnished. They’re walking the battlefield, between the husks of Tovogan Chimera APCs and Leman Russ tanks, stepping over enemy dead.

The men of Idra’s platoon follow, their rescue mission transformed into a burial detail, the collection of the weapons of the fallen and carrying the Vostroyan dead to the bunker. The rockcrete stains red with blood. At least the dead are fresh, their flesh unspoiled by bloodworms. A lot of the Tovogans already squirm with the creatures’ larvae. On the horizon, silhouetted against the storm clouds, a pair of Thunderbolts strafe Tovogan positions. Two black dots rising and falling. Suddenly, one flashes into a pinprick of light and falls, trailing smoke.

The Chimera is filled with the rifles, blades and pistols of the 262nd. They are heirlooms, hundreds of years old. Their loss would be a blow to the honour of all Vostroya. They will ride in the Chimera. Idra’s men will ride on top, or cram into the unarmed and unarmoured Tovogan steel-wheeled trucks – unreliable vehicles, captured from the enemy. Always the best equipment for the light platoon. Idra is despised by more powerful men than those in her command. Her remaining transport, a captured Tovogan Taurox missing its turret, is for the major and his men.

Sergeant Lokhov carries the last of the dead Firstborn into the bunker. Idra recognises him, a low-born boy from Krikov Hive, a replacement from her own draft that landed a few weeks ago. Sarkhan or Kharkhan, she can’t remember his name. His torso has been hacked almost in half.

‘Major?’ Idra asks, holding out her igniter.

‘You do the honour,’ says Major Haskel. One of Idra’s men gasps, another curses. Major Haskel doesn’t react, so neither does Idra. Her men hiss and curse quietly, but their awe of the major overcomes their distaste for her. When Idra orders them into formation they form up crisply, the major’s seven in a line facing the war-scarred bunker, Idra’s platoon behind them. Sergeant Lokhov reads the catechism. To fight for the Emperor, to carry His will to the enemy, to follow the Tenets and the Creed. To pay the debt. Idra drops the igniter.

The bunker flames anew, fire consuming the flesh and bones of Firstborn. It isn’t a proper funeral, but better than leaving them for the bloodworms. When the platoon leaves, the pillar of flame reaches for the skies.

‘She will not survive,’ Davut Idrov says. ‘An untrained girl.’

‘I will train her,’ Ekaterina’s father says. He’s holding one of the twelve knives of the Idrov clan, an oddly balanced piece of silver-engraved steel. For five hundred generations, the Idrov firstborn have been given a knife by their fathers when they embarked on their draft. Twelve Idrov knives have returned to Vostroya.

‘What does Lumila say?’ Uncle Davut asks.

‘She understands,’ Ekaterina’s father says. He gives Ekaterina the knife, corrects her grip. Her fingers are very small around the steel hilt.

‘Don’t hold it as a shield,’ her father says. ‘This is a knife for slaying, not for brawling.’

The knife is heavy in her hand.

Idra hates the steppe. Bleak razorgrass dunes as far as the eye can see. The short, spiky grass will cut through anything given time, even the tracks on a Chimera. The tech-priests curse the grass and pray over the vehicles. Still the grass prevails. There is no cover, unless you come across one of the deep gorges that fill with flash-floods every time there is rain. Mud that gets into everything, then freezes. Clean your lasgun at every stop, or risk a misfire. Clean the vehicles’ engines, too, or haul them by hand. Top it off with a governor who’s gone traitor, refusing the tithe to the Emperor, and convinced his population to follow him. A bad leader and weak-willed natives, refusing the service of the Imperium. Now fighting for their lives on their own world because they did not wish to go fight elsewhere.

But every human has their place in the Emperor’s Holy Order. Purge the heretics, kill the traitors, and the rest will come back into the fold. It is the way of the Throne, to eradicate those tainted by treason, and let the merely guileless pay their penalty and serve. And the Tovogans are decent fighters, too. Not as good as the Firstborn, but decent.

The vox-bead in Idra’s ear crackles, Wisniak’s voice coming in fits and hisses. He’s Idra’s lead scout and best marksman, and one of the few men who judges her by her record. She can barely see the rear of his scouting Tauros. The unarmoured body of the vehicle is hidden in the folds in the land. Only its top-mounted autocannon is visible, floating amongst the razorgrass.

‘Sir,’ he says. ‘There’s a convoy coming.’

‘Ours?’

‘No, sir. Drawn by mule-beasts. I see a Chimera with rebel markings.’

Idra grins, claps the shoulder of her Chimera’s driver, and points to where a short gully begins. Beside her, Sergeant Lokhov nods approvingly.

‘Get into cover,’ Idra tells Wisniak. ‘We’ll find a spot to ambush them.’

The caravan follows what passes for a road on Tovoga: a pair of deeply rutted tracks in a gully. Idra lies on the ridge, overlooking the shallow bend in the road, her platoon dismounting and readying behind her. The razorgrass cuts through her uniform, nicking her skin. Stay here long enough and her blood will attract the worms. Another reason to hate this place. The lead wagon is a half a mile away.

She scans the caravan through her magnoculars. Twenty heavy carts pulled by the big, six-legged mule-beasts. Two Chimeras, armed with inferior Tovogan lascannons. A war wagon.

The war wagon is dangerous. Like everything here, it is grey. A three-storey, heavily armoured tower rolling on eight steel wheels, each wheel as large as a Chimera. The sides are dotted with firing ports. The top is a fighting platform, with a pair of twin-mounted heavy bolters and a set of lascannons in a Hydra’s anti-air quad mount. The gunners’ heads are indistinct black dots behind the guns’ splinter shields.

‘A squad in each Chimera,’ says Idra. ‘At least four more in the war wagon. Eighty to a hundred troops. Five heavy weapons.’

‘Make that ten, with the squad heavy weapons,’ says Sergeant Lokhov beside her.

‘Set Wisniak and Nye where the road bends,’ says Idra, indicating her snipers. ‘Take out the gunners on the fighting platform. One squad and the Chimera in front to block their route. Half-squad at the very rear to stop them from retreating. Situate the platoon’s remaining three and a half squads to pour fire down onto them, then move the blocking squad up to the opposite hill once they take cover. Trap them in the crossfire.’

‘Doable,’ says Lokhov. ‘Hard but doable.’

‘They might surrender,’ says Idra. ‘The colonel wants prisoners.’

Heavy boots crunch on the razorgrass behind her.

‘Considering your strategies, lieutenant?’ Major Haskel’s gravel-and-glass voice cuts through their discussion. The Taurox he’s been riding in stands idling behind Idra’s command Chimera, both hidden from the rebels in a fold in the ground. But Haskel’s standing on the ridge, silhouetted against the approaching storm, daring the heretics to spot him.

‘Yes, sir,’ Idra says.

Haskel glances at the approaching caravan, the Chimeras, the war wagon. His mouth turns up at the corners.

‘We charge,’ he says.

Idra pushes away the annoyance that floods her at Haskel’s casual disregard for her plan. Because it is a good plan. Even if the enemy would prove stronger than expected, the Firstborn can inflict heavy losses while taking minimal casualties themselves, and still have a way of disengaging while blocking the enemy’s pursuit.

Haskel’s idea of charging a stronger enemy is dangerous. Charging a stronger enemy in a fortified war wagon is insane. Sergeant Lokhov’s eyes go wide. Yet Haskel stands unconcerned. Defiant. And Idra realises why he is a hero.

This man knows no fear, his certainty absolute, contagious. Idra’s men keep glancing at him, walk taller when he’s present, parade when he looks their way. They whisper his name as a talisman: the Emperor and Haskel, Haskel and the Emperor. The men will charge, they will fight, and they will win. They are the carriers of the Emperor’s retribution. With Major Haskel to lead them, they cannot lose.

The caravan rumbles closer. Idra can see the individual drovers huddling beneath their grey cloaks. She feels herself grinning in anticipation, straightens. A bead of blood runs down her chin where the razorgrass cut her.

‘Firstborn,’ says Major Haskel. The lead cart passes his position. He lifts his sword to the skies.

‘Charge!’ Haskel screams.

The 86th charges. The world explodes around them.

‘It’s impossible,’ Ekaterina says.

‘Nothing is impossible,’ her father replies. The gun dummy in the middle of the room disagrees. Ekaterina stalks around the steel coffers set out as cover, her Idrov knife resting comfortably in her hand. The Idrov great hall’s oaken doors are shut. This moment is for Ekaterina and the gun dummy. She has to kill it before it shoots her.

It pivots, its low-power las-trainer flashing and adding another painful burn to the collection already on her skin. Her shirt and trousers are pocked with black circles where the thin material has burned away. Ekaterina curses. Her father resets the dummy.

‘Again,’ he says. He doesn’t correct her language.

‘It’s too fast,’ says Ekaterina. ‘I can’t reach it.’

‘Then don’t try,’ her father says. ‘Use your mind. You are high-born. You will be a leader. Think.’

Ekaterina pauses, thinks. The gun dummy twists on its pedestal, pointing the las-trainer at imaginary targets. It turns away from her.

Ekaterina steps out from behind her cover. She throws her knife.

They scream as they charge. Around them, the razorgrass burns from lasgun hits. But the slope is long, and steep. Firstborn stumble, fall, roll down to be met by bolter shells and lasgun blasts. Idra’s men start to waver, slow, start to take cover behind the low rocks that dot the slope.

The gully has become a death trap. If they stay on the slopes the Tovogans will kill them. The gun ports in the war wagon are open, spewing lasgun fire at the charging Vostroyans. Idra’s Tauros is trying to distract it, but its autocannon shells bounce off the war wagon like gravel. The hits sound like a demented drummer hammering away at a steel door.

An explosion throws Idra forward. An enemy lascannon has found her Tauros. Its autocannons fall silent.

She grabs a Firstborn crouching behind a rock, forces him up.

‘Move or die,’ she screams. A bolter shell removes the man’s head. She lets the body fall, rushes forward herself, firing her lasgun one-handed. The sword-bayonet at its end weighs it down, and all she hits is grass.

Sergeant Lokhov forces a squad into motion. The Tovogan heavy bolters churn up the slope around them, yet the Firstborn run through it. They are no longer screaming in defiance.

Forward, forward and downward. To stop is to die. Their only chance is amongst the carts, where the war wagon’s guns can’t reach them. Idra’s legs pound the ground. She stumbles, razorgrass tearing open her uniform, but gets up, keeps running.

‘For the Emperor and Vostroya!’ she shouts. The bolters drown out her voice.

She grabs another man, pulls him out from behind the cover of a large rock. He starts to curse her, but the rebel Chimera has found his hiding place and reduces the rock to glowing slag. The man and Idra both yell, plunging downward.

They make it into the cover of one of the carts. Its mule-beast lies twitching in its yoke, a hole the size of Idra’s head spilling its bloody guts onto the ground. Its dead drover lies beside it, torn apart by an explosion. For a moment everything is stillness. On the slope, her men keep dying, but the Tovogan bolters can’t reach beneath the carts and the Chimera hasn’t noticed her, rumbling up to disgorge a squad of Tovogan infantry.

Somewhere, Haskel’s glass-and-gravel voice is howling, a sound of hatred and bloodthirst. It is accompanied by screams of fear.

Idra pokes her head around the edge of the cart’s towering wheel. The Tovogan infantry have their backs to her, firing up-slope at her men. She kills four before the others realise the danger and turn their guns on her. Again, she takes cover beneath the cart, its broad wheels and low-slung, iron loading bed sheltering her.

Over her head, the cart’s tarpaulin has split, revealing metal crates covered in shipping labels and the unmistakable warning sign for active melta weapons. Idra grins.

‘Distract them,’ she orders her trooper. The Firstborn nods and pulls out his pistol. He’s lost his lasrifle. He’s lost his tall bearskin shako. His head looks small and vulnerable without it. A lasgun blast scores the earth beside him, another drills into the cart above him.

Idra jumps up. Instantly the air is filled with lasgun fire. A blast hits her chest carapace, melting the armaplast. Idra ignores it – she’s used to getting hit, her chest marred with faded scars from las-trainers. She grabs the crate and pulls. It won’t budge. She hangs on it, yanking, while las-blasts scorch the cart all around her. Then something snaps above. The crate slides away, gathers speed, crashes to the ground. Idra rolls clear and lands amid a flow of oval objects.

The crate is full of melta bombs.

They’re the poor, Tovogan version. Large and clumsy, with a twist fuse and four magnetic hooks. Idra grabs a bomb, twists the fuse and hurls it at the Chimera. It bounces, rolls a few feet. The detonation is a wave of heat, showering molten metal in Idra’s direction. She dives into the razorgrass, putting her arms before her face. When she raises her head, her greatcoat is smouldering.

‘Keep firing,’ she shouts, but her backup lies still, a smoking hole burned through his face, a charred exit wound in the back of his neck.

The Tovogans’ las-blasts crack into the wagon, the wheel, the crate. Burning shrapnel blasted free from the wagon mixes with spent bolter casings dropping from the war wagon behind it. Both rain down on Idra. She is trapped.

‘Lick.’ Babayev holds forth his boot, the sole towards Ekaterina. The boot is covered in mud and ash from the training platoon’s morning run. Babayev is the platoon’s acting sergeant for the week, a low-born from Tharkov Hive, bossing it over a high-born woman. The other boys in her platoon snicker.

‘Lick, Idra,’ says Babayev.

Ekaterina has her knife, the Idrov knife her father made for her. She considers killing Babayev, but that would get her removed from the Astra Militarum. She will die before disgracing the family.

‘You were given an order, private,’ Babayev says. He’s a big man, one of the oldest in the training regiment. The other boys look up to him. They are waiting for the chance to turn on Ekaterina, to prove that she is no Firstborn.

‘No,’ she says, setting her feet and raising her arms. In the end, there is stillness and blood.

Idra fires from behind the cover of the cart’s huge wheel, but the Tovogans in the Chimera fire back tenfold. She hits one, and he falls, screaming, but another soldier takes his place. All they need is to hit her once.

A great, enraged bellow snarls its way past the sound of lasguns. Haskel, charging from up the line of wagons. He is covered in gore, his golden chest-plate the same blood-red as his flapping and tattered greatcoat. Only his sword is spotless, its power field flickering in black and red. He’s howling, face deformed by hatred, sprinting for the Tovogan Chimera.

Idra realises that he won’t make it. The heavy bolters atop the war wagon are shifting their aim, the trail of bolter shells mere yards behind the major.

To hide is to die. To fight the enemies of the Emperor is to live. She scoops up an armload of melta bombs, running before she’s even consciously decided on her action. Running for the towering war wagon.

Lasgun blasts chase her, but she is invulnerable, a red shadow dancing across the ground, beyond fear, beyond pain. There is only the war wagon, and the melta bombs in her arms. A las-blast flashes before her eyes, turning the world white, then black. She keeps running, twisting the fuses by feel, as she dives below the war wagon. Its wheels run on four metal drive shafts, each as thick as her thigh. She slaps the first melta bomb to the closest shaft, next to the giant wheel, ducks beneath it, slaps the second on the next shaft. Runs, doubled over, the bottom of the war wagon inches above her head.

She can feel the timers ticking, small vibrations from the steel spheres in her hands. Three more steps, two.

Behind her, the first melta explodes, washing her with light and heat. The second goes, the blast wave pushing her forward. She slaps her last two meltas on the third drive shaft and rolls beneath it, thrown forward by the blast behind her, curling up, throwing both her arms over her head.

The last meltas explode, almost on top of her. The heat is like diving into a factorum furnace, like bathing in the heart of a nova star. The air is sucked from Idra’s lungs. She sees the wheels fall away from the war wagon, its armoured sides leaning down, the entire wagon tipping away from her. Everything goes black.

Ekaterina groans. Breathing hurts. Moving hurts more.

‘Stand to!’ The duty recruit’s call echoes throughout the barracks. Captain Twarienko bursts through the double doors. He is their lord and master, a veteran and the voyarin of the whole training regiment. All the Firstborn stand at attention, their red tunics glittering like blood. Ekaterina fights to her feet, forces herself to stand straight. Twarienko stops before her.

‘It is the Emperor’s will that a private obeys a sergeant,’ Twarienko says. ‘Are you aware of this?’

‘Yes,’ says Ekaterina.

‘You refused an order by a superior officer,’ Twarienko says.

‘Yes,’ replies Ekaterina. No excuses. No begging.

‘Taking responsibility for one’s actions is an admirable trait, encouraged in Firstborn and required in leaders,’ Twarienko says. ‘And a leader is responsible for the welfare of his men. Recruit Babayev, you are stripped of your rank. Recruit Idra, administrative punishment.’

Twarienko glares at the assembled Firstborn. ‘And the next recruit to lay a hand on another without my permission will be hung like a meat-rat and fed to the grox, is that clear?’

‘Yes, captain!’ the recruits shout.

Smoke. The metallic smell of burning razorgrass. Pain. Cold wetness on her face. Lieutenant Idra forces her eyes open.

‘So you’re still with us,’ Sergeant Lokhov says.

‘Uncle Mathis,’ Idra says. She tries to sit up, but Lokhov pushes her back down.

‘Lie still and let the medicament do its work,’ he says, checking the read-out on the medi-pack.

‘We won,’ says Idra. She should be joyous, but all she feels is tired, and a tiny bit surprised at being alive.

‘By His grace,’ answers Lokhov, making the sign of the aquila. ‘There was great sacrifice.’

‘The war wagon?’

‘Spilled its contents like a broken skull,’ says Lokhov. ‘The major has been mopping up.’

A scream sounds, ends abruptly. Idra forces herself to stand. Her golden chest carapace is black, the gash where it melted and ran still hot to the touch. She ignores it, like she has ignored so many pains in her life, and staggers to where Major Haskel is raising his sword. Its power field flickers and the drover on his knees before the major screams. Then the Crystal Sword descends, the scream ends. There is a line of dead Tovogans stretching to the left, a gaggle of prisoners to the right. The giant from the 262nd and the marksman with the brass augmetics drag a new prisoner forward. The major lifts the Crystal Sword.

‘Major Haskel, sir,’ says Idra. She has to shout it twice before the major reacts. ‘The colonel’s standing order is to bring prisoners whenever possible.’

‘We have no use for prisoners,’ the major replies. His face is a twisted grimace of vengeance.

‘They know things,’ Idra says.

‘They’ll know death,’ the major says. His sword descends. The Tovogan dies in silence. Haskel’s men drag the next one forward.

‘The Emperor is the Light of Humanity,’ Ekaterina screams. Her arms burn, the gravel is cold beneath her hands. Her arms shake, pain radiating from them. She ignores it, pushing against the ground, pushing herself upward.

‘Nine hundred eighty-nine,’ says the lord assessor. Ekaterina breathes in as she lowers herself towards the ground. Towards, but never touching. A thin, cold wind blows between her uniform and the rocks.

‘He once walked among men–’ Ekaterina’s voice falters, her arms refuse to budge. Her teeth grind against each other.

‘–but He has always been divine!’ She pushes at the ground with her will and her anger until her arms start to move.

‘Nine hundred ninety,’ says the lord assessor. Ekaterina’s arms falter once more. All she can feel is pain. But she is used to pain. She forces them to move again. Up, down, up, down, her breath coming in ragged gasps.

‘Recite,’ says the lord hetman.

‘It is the duty–’ Pain. Breathe in. Pain. Breathe out. ‘–the duty of the faithful–’ Breathe in. Pain. ‘–duty of the faithful, to obey–’ Pain. Breath. Pain. ‘–obey the authority of the Imperial Government–’

‘I cannot hear you,’ says the lord hetman.

Pain. Breath. Hate. ‘–the Imperial Government–’ Pain. Breath. Hate. ‘–and their superiors, who speak in the Emperor’s name.’

‘And don’t you forget it,’ says the lord hetman.

His face is red. Ekaterina’s is white. Of them all, the lord assessor is the most animated.

‘A thousand,’ he says. Ekaterina’s arms are locked, rigid as tent-poles. The lord assessor helps her up.

‘Go, girl,’ he says, not unkindly.

Ekaterina sways, her feet feeling a million miles away, her arms lumps of dead flesh. She forces herself to control her breath. Forces away the pain and the darkness threatening to claim her.

‘Am I Firstborn?’ she asks.

The lord assessor nods.

‘For now,’ he says.

Lieutenant Ekaterina Idra fills her cup with steaming ohx. The smell of powdered grox meat and spices usually calms her. Now she has to fight to keep her hands steady, keep the anger boiling inside her from reaching her face.

Sixteen of her men are dead, another twelve are in the arms of the medicae. Fully half her platoon gone. An officer is responsible for her men. Their lives belong to the Emperor; the officer’s duty is to Him, to make sure that His followers’ sacrifice isn’t wasted. There is a grand ceremony in Colonel Shostkov’s command quarters, celebrating Major Haskel’s victory over the Tovogan traitors.

Sergeant Lokhov barges into Idra’s quarters, trailing a flood of grey, Tovogan dust.

‘You look like you encountered chernobog and lost your father’s sword,’ he says.

‘High losses,’ Idra answers. She offers him the chair. Her quarters are spartan. A bed. A desk. A weapons locker. An image of the Throne, the Emperor radiant upon it, Saint Nadalya, patron saint of Vostroya, standing by His left hand. On a bare shelf are two printed tomes: the Treatis Elatii, the Grey Lady’s sacred text, and the Vostroyan version of the Tactica Imperium.

‘There are always losses,’ says Lokhov. He strokes his ragged moustache. A nervous habit.

‘Not like this.’ Idra’s anger shines through.

Lokhov purses his mouth, as if he wants to say something, but doesn’t. Instead, he brings out a flask of Tovogan black distilled. It looks like mud and tastes like petro-chem fumes. Far beneath the purity of Vostroyan rahzvod, even the cheap Mushovy rahzvod.

‘No good plan,’ he says, pouring a splash into Idra’s ohx, ‘survives contact with a superior officer.’

‘He’s a hero,’ Idra says.

‘So are you,’ Lokhov says. ‘The major mentioned you to the colonel.’

‘That I lost half my platoon?’

‘That you took out a war wagon.’

Idra shakes her head.

‘There’s something wrong there,’ she says. ‘Jorun Haskel is a responsible leader. His defence of Rittas during the Convalen campaign – holding the Froth River Bridge for two days so the One Hundred and Ninth could fight its way across. His push to relieve the Third Army, killing a heretic champion. This man… His entire regiment gone, abandoning a perfect ambush to charge headfirst against a stronger enemy. Today…’

Idra stares at the aquila on her wall, at the Emperor radiant.

‘Today he was more interested in killing than in winning,’ she says.

‘Ekaterina,’ says Lokhov in a low voice. ‘Do not share your thoughts with anyone.’

‘Only my uncle.’ Idra grins without humour.

‘It’s good for you that I have fond memories of the girl I carried on my shoulders,’ Lokhov says. ‘If the commissar would hear you…’

He doesn’t have to finish. Ekaterina remembers what a commissar can do. Remembers the bolt pistol pointed at her head.

‘Can’t do anything,’ she says. ‘No one will listen to a woman, and a shiny at that.’

‘Not so shiny any more,’ Lokhov says. ‘The tales of you taking down that war wagon are spreading. And you weren’t a shiny before that. You paid your dues on Vostroya, and in your father’s house. Any man with eyes in his head should see that.’

Idra snorts, but Lokhov looks serious.

‘They should,’ he repeats, and rises, leaving the flask of black distilled on her desk.

‘Will you ask around?’ Idra says. ‘Find out what’s happened to the major?’

‘I will keep my ears unstuffed.’ Lokhov picks up his shako, placing the tall fur hat on his head.

‘Thank you, Uncle Mathis,’ Idra says. ‘And uncle?’

‘Yes?’

‘Be careful.’

Lokhov nods, and leaves.

‘Be careful,’ Captain Twarienko says. Ekaterina looks up, surprised. The barracks are empty, the men in the mess hall. Only Ekaterina remains, acting sergeant, going over the duty roster.

‘You cannot be blind to those around you,’ Twarienko continues. ‘A leader must know which among his men are dangerous.’

‘Babayev?’ Ekaterina says.

‘Babayev,’ Twarienko confirms.

The plan is to infiltrate the city of Dolemino after dark. There’s a company of Tovogans out there, harassing the Firstborn regiments in the area. Haskel is sure that they’re based in Dolemino, a mining community twenty miles ahead of the 86th’s position. Colonel Shostkov has given Haskel command of two companies in order to trap and eradicate the Tovogans. Haskel’s plan is to lure them with an easy kill, then block their retreat with his own companies while the colonel rushes in with the rest of the regiment and surrounds them while they’re distracted. A bold plan for a large catch on a small bait, the colonel claims. Idra’s platoon is the bait.

‘It ain’t right,’ grumbles one of her men, Radivil. He’s been with the platoon a long time, lost a lot of friends yesterday. His comrades agree.

‘Shouldn’t be us,’ one says. Others nod.

‘Sixth platoon hasn’t been out in a month,’ Radivil says. ‘Let them be heroes.’

Idra stands. The small storage room is cluttered, filled to the walls with crates, and men packing, stuffing their combat harnesses with charge packs, frag grenades, rations. A lot less rations than charge packs. Idra approves of their training. A charge pack can save your life, a ration will only fill your stomach. Still, she’s the leader. She needs to stop their grumbling, crush this sentiment right now, before it spreads. Before Commissar Grotschalk hears it.

‘It is the duty of the faithful,’ she says, ‘to obey the rule of the Imperial Government, and follow the orders of their superiors who speak in the Emperor’s name.’

The grumbling increases in volume. They don’t like what they hear. For a moment, Idra wonders if they’re going to shoot her. Accidents happen. She buries the thought. Digs for what she believes in.

‘We are Firstborn,’ Idra shouts. Heads come up. They’re listening. ‘We are here because of the infinite mercy of the Emperor, which gives every faithful human a place in His divine order. We have been given the chance to atone for the sins of our fathers. Are you going to complain of the dangers on the path to redemption?

‘We are Firstborn. We serve the Emperor’s will, and He wills us to find that traitor company, pin it until the major arrives, and then wipe them out. This is what we are going to do. And if you don’t dare to follow where a woman leads, then you can khekking well join the Krieg Death Corps and hide in a hole!’

Some of them look ashamed. A lot of them grumble. But when Idra orders them to fall in, they pick up their kit and march to the waiting Chimeras.

‘In the name of the Divine Emperor and Holy Terra.’ The commissar’s voice is soft, sing-song. Almost like a priest’s. His accent, from the Schola Excubitos on Terrax, sounds strange to Ekaterina’s ears. The bolt pistol in his hand is freshly oiled, the bore cleaned and huge, a gaping hole pointing at her head. This will be the gun that kills her. Ekaterina stands at attention, her fear a deep, cold stone inside her. She pushes it down into the depths of her soul, stands straight. She will not shame her family.

‘The crime is wilful slaughter of a fellow recruit,’ says the commissar. ‘The punishment is death. Does the court wish to speak?’

‘No,’ spits the lord hetman. He pushed for the crime to be named murder.

The lord assessor lifts his tall shako, scratches at the ash-blond hair beneath.

‘The exercise was under battlefield conditions,’ he says.

‘It is the duty of the faithful,’ says Captain Twarienko, ‘to follow the orders of their superiors who speak in the Emperor’s name.’

‘Does the recruit wish to speak?’ the commissar asks.

‘I would ask for my knife back,’ says Ekaterina.

The commissar bends, yanks the blade from Babayev’s cold, bloodless throat. The knife is still stained with a sheen of grey ash from their march. The commissar thumbs the safety rune on his bolt pistol.

‘Your reputation precedes you,’ he says, with a glance at the lord hetman. Then he very carefully hands Ekaterina her knife.

The red greatcoats look like black ink in the darkness. Only the occasional swaying shadow betrays the presence of the Vostroyans among the ruins. The broken walls of Dolemino rise around them, craters from orbital bombardment providing cover.

‘Shoot and fade,’ whispers Idra to her men. ‘We’re not here to be heroes. Save that for when the regiment arrives.’

Kolczak, her vox-operator, gives her a nod. He’s already voxed it in. Now all they need to do is wait until the regiment comes, then engage, draw the Tovogans in, and keep them from spotting the approaching 86th Firstborn.

The traitor forces are arrayed in a semicircle, protected by bombed-out buildings. Slabs of fallen rockcrete shelter their meagre fires. They’re burning mule-beast dung and petro-chem fuel for warmth. A reinforced company, from what Idra can see. Lots of men, line platoons interspaced with heavy weapon squads, their lascannons stacked atop boxes of charge packs.

‘Nye,’ she voxes. ‘Anything?’

‘No,’ her sniper says.

‘Wisniak?’

‘Nothing here, sir.’

They’re posted at opposite ends of the town, Nye in a cracked bell tower, Wisniak atop the old mine elevator. Not much of an outer perimeter, but it will have to do. If the entire Tovogan company is here, there won’t be a need for a perimeter. Another twenty minutes and the major will be here with reinforcements, the Emperor willing.

Someone shouts, a challenge in the lilting Low Gothic of the Tovogans. There is a clatter, the grunt of men struggling. A las-blast illuminates the sky. Around the fires, men are standing up. The light platoon has been spotted.

‘The Emperor and Vostroya!’ Idra shouts. The night flashes into brightness as the Vostroyans fire. Tovogans fall screaming. They’re in the open, illuminated, surrounded by an invisible enemy. The Vostroyans are the best city fighters in the Imperium. The Tovogans are meat-rats for the slaughter.

‘Sir!’ Wisniak’s voice whispers in Idra’s vox-bead. ‘Company. Lots of it.’

‘Ours?’ Idra asks.

‘No, sir, Tovogans. An entire company just exited one of the mine shafts.’

‘Kolczak, vox it in,’ Idra orders. ‘Second squad, fifth squad, pivot right.’

‘Sir!’ It’s Nye. ‘Motion. Vehicles coming into town, Demolishers, a full company, and Hellhounds. They’re swinging around the south.’

‘Sir!’ Wisniak sounds stressed. ‘Another company just exited. More are coming.’

‘Kolczak,’ says Idra. She’s firing her lasgun, too busy to spare a glance at the vox-man. The Tovogans are getting organised, advancing by platoons, one laying down cover fire, the other rushing. Their officer yells them onward, waving a chainsword over his head. Stupid. Idra drops him with a blast from her lasgun. She throws herself flat behind a broken wall as his men retaliate, blasts and bolter shells chewing pieces from her shelter.

Star shells illuminate the sky, making shadows dance crazily over the town.

‘Sir!’ says Nye. ‘I count twenty Chimeras heading your way. Four companies, more incoming.’

The battle has just grown out of proportion. The amount of troops concentrated in this town is way too much to merely harass the Firstborn; the Tovogans are building their forces for a full-scale assault. The 86th isn’t strong enough to destroy such a force alone. They’re walking into a steelspine hive, and like steelspines with their thick, black spines and razor mandibles, the Tovogans will stab them to pieces.

‘Kolczak, get Colonel Shostkov on the vox. Call off the attack,’ yells Idra. Kolczak doesn’t reply. She grabs him, and his arm comes off, cleanly seared away. The front of Kolczak’s body is missing, the vox-caster’s ornate case a puddle of molten metal.

From behind comes the roar of tank engines. The lead Tovogan platoons rush towards the thin line of Vostroyans.

‘The duty of a soldier of the Astra Militarum,’ the recruit company’s commissar lectures, ‘is to carry out the will of the Emperor.’

Ekaterina doesn’t know the commissar’s name. To the recruits, he’s simply ‘the Commissar’. Twarienko may threaten them with grox-feed, but the Commissar will shoot them at the first sign of treason.

‘The duty of a leader,’ says the commissar, ‘is to ensure that His will be carried out in the most effective way possible. Any deviation from this is treason.’

‘Do not fail,’ says Twarienko. ‘You have your orders. Bring all of your men through to the other side, or don’t come back. This exercise is under battlefield conditions. You will get no help. Understood?’

‘Yes, captain,’ the cadets say.

They are fresh from the scholam, their red uniforms trimmed with gold, the golden badges on their fur shakos gleaming. Only Ekaterina’s uniform is worn. Only Ekaterina has commanded previously. She is Firstborn, having survived the ash wastes and the recruit regiment. She is high-born, destined for command. Of all the lieutenant cadets, only Ekaterina is familiar with her troops. Only Ekaterina’s troops hate her.

‘To me, to me! The Emperor and Vostroya!’ Idra’s voice cuts through the flickering darkness. Her men respond, falling back to her position. The line contracts, Vostroyans moving and firing, firing and dying, always towards the familiar voice of command. They no longer care that she’s a woman. They no longer care that she’s a shiny. She’s a beacon of authority in a night that’s gone bright and bloody.

The Firstborn are racing the Tovogans, a line contracting into a knot before the hammer strikes it. Ten, fifteen, twenty, Idra’s Firstborn make a circle of red and gold, their bearskin shakos sticking up behind lasguns and stone. A tiny fortress of flesh and courage.

The Tovogans will overwhelm them. Their line is sweeping up to the edges of the ruined factorum that shelters the Vostroyans. In the midst of the Tovogan line stands a man in the black coat of a commissar, with a helmet on his head. A star shell detonates above, making the commissar’s coat shine with two clear blue lines, the mark of the Tovogan traitors. There is a large hole blasted in the coat, the traitor’s uniform visible beneath. And Idra knows what she’s going to do.

They are given las-trainers and ohx rations. Full packs and rebreather masks. Orders.

Make it across the ruins of Gurilov Hive alive.

That’s all.

‘Fix bayonets!’

Two dozen Firstborn stop firing. Two dozen Vostroyan sword bayonets, each the length of an arm, are clicked beneath lasgun barrels. The Tovogans reach the edge of the factorum, slow. They’re cautious of the sudden stillness, wary of the enemy. They’ve fought Firstborn before.

‘Wait.’ Idra’s whisper is a harsh sound in the silence. ‘Pick a target. Kill them. Then charge. We break out to the north.’

The Tovogans come closer. The man in the dead commissar’s coat is in their centre, chainsword in one hand, laspistol in the other. Idra has found her target. She aims.

‘Fire!’ she says, but her target slips, her las-blast striking the wall behind him.

‘The Emperor and Vostroya,’ she screams. ‘Charge!’ Around her, the Vostroyans yell, surge, rush forward.

The Tovogans hesitate. In that moment, the Vostroyans are amongst them, stabbing, slashing, firing at point-blank range. Idra jumps over a rusty steel beam, lands lightly. The false commissar is in front of her. An officer, a Tovogan captain’s uniform beneath the black coat. His chainsword screams. Idra blocks with her gun. The chainsword’s teeth bite into it, tearing chunks of wood from the stock. She lets it drag her weapon upward, holds it with one hand, draws her knife with the other…

Plunges the knife into the Tovogan’s unprotected chin. A sharp thrust, up and over. The Tovogan jerks, his fingers going limp and releasing his sword. Idra yanks out her knife.

‘Forward!’ she yells. ‘Forward, men of Saint Nadalya!’

Behind them the rubble lights up as the first Tovogan Hellhound covers it with burning promethium death.

They run, a knot of men in red and gold, black shakos bobbing through the ruins. They’re among the enemy now, hidden in plain sight. Behind them, the Tovogans fire on each other, unaware that the ruins are empty. The Firstborn are firing as they run, killing small groups of Tovogans, avoiding larger ones. A las-blast takes down a Firstborn and his comrades grab him, drag him forward with them. Idra checks for a pulse, finds a gaping hole in the armour, large enough to shove her fist into.

‘Dead,’ she says, and they drop the soldier, muttering a quick prayer for his sacrifice while moving, always moving. To stop is to die, to fight is to live. This is a time for the living. There will be a time for the dead later.

Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen. Her troops fall. They carry the wounded, leave the dead, scavenging only grenades and charge packs.

Sergeant Lokhov ties the grenades into bundles, cracks the activation runes. He wipes blood from his eyes as he works. When the Firstborn move, they leave their improvised mines behind. They can follow the Tovogans’ advance by the resulting explosions.

Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve. Idra orders her men forward, forward and onward. The town burns, rockcrete covered with promethium flames shining as bright as star shells. The night is no longer their friend; it has become a butcher, and they meat for the slaughter. Eleven. Radivil falls, wounded, and they can’t recover him. Idra leaves him prone in an intersection, huddling behind a chunk of stone cut with the Imperial eagle, firing at the approaching Tovogans. She promises herself to return and moves away.

‘Stand to!’ The voice screaming from Idra’s vox-bead is like gravel on crushed glass.

‘Major Haskel, sir,’ Idra voxes. ‘The town is overrun, we need to redeploy.’

‘No!’ the major growls. ‘Kill! Forward until you can bathe in their blood!’

‘Sir!’ shouts Idra, and a shape jumps through a broken window before her.

It is barely human, a flowing, moving, red-and-gold terror charging the traitors, its voice screaming hate and promising death. Haskel’s sword flashes, red and black, cuts through a Tovogan trooper, decapitates his partner, splits the lascannon and the gut of the soldier behind them. This isn’t a man, this is a force of fury, the Emperor come to life, a sword of bloody retribution, leading a tide of men, and the sight of him killing fills Idra with fear and admiration. It feels like riding an ash-snake, a need to hang on at all costs, lest it turn and eat you.

‘Light platoon, about face!’ Idra shouts, charging after the major. Her men turn, joining the wave of Firstborn flowing behind Haskel.

They run up to the intersection where Radivil crouches behind his makeshift barricade, his leg a bloody pulp, bone visible through his tattered trousers. A Tovogan Leman Russ clanks towards him, the commander’s head poking through the open hatch.

Haskel charges. He grabs the tank’s side-armour and dances upward like a wave of red fire. His sword rams into the tank commander, forcing the corpse down into the tank. Haskel dives in behind, stabbing. His dangling legs are briefly illuminated by the flashes of his bolt pistol. Then he re-emerges, the Crystal Sword trailing a spray of bloody ruin. He glances down at Idra, his face twisted into a grin of too many teeth. For a split second, Idra thinks he will kill her, but then a Tovogan fires on the major, drawing his attention, and Haskel is off again, charging into fierce bolter fire.

They kill, and they kill, and they kill, the night bright with burning vehicles and the shine of spilled blood. Still the Tovogans come. Firstborn rally to Idra’s call, die, rally again. She loses track of Haskel, loses track of her men. A lasgun scorches her shoulder, a chainsword bites into her newly repaired chest carapace. Her greatcoat catches fire and Sergeant Lokhov tears it off, burning his hands in the process. There is no end to the Tovogans.

Idra glimpses Colonel Shostkov leading a charge, his command squad a fist of men around the 86th’s banner. She sees Commissar Grotschalk whipping a wounded Firstborn forward with his pistol, then shooting the man when he turns to flee. Still the Tovogans come.

The night is a hell of death, a monster chewing its way through the 86th. Idra assaults a Taurox, drops a krak grenade through the driver’s hatch, doesn’t stop to see it burn. Sergeant Lokhov pulls her back from the flame of a Hellhound. She sees Wisniak firing point-blank into the back of a line of Tovogans too busy, too pinned, to notice him. Still the Tovogans come.

The ground shakes beneath the heavy threads of their attacking tanks, the town blazes with the fire from their flamethrowers. They die, and they die, and the Firstborn die with them until the very ground erupts with the fires of hell.

A screaming whine, louder than even the firefight, fills the air. Then the town starts to disintegrate.

‘Emperor’s teeth!’ cries Idra. Lokhov pulls her down, into a hole, the very hole where Radivil made his stand an hour, a lifetime, ago. Wisniak drops in behind them.

‘Bombards,’ yells Lokhov. ‘The One Thousand and Fifty-First Siege Regiment!’

‘They’re firing on us!’ Idra shouts. The ground is shaking, throwing them into the air with each blast.

‘They’re razing the town!’ Lokhov shouts back. His voice is almost inaudible among the explosions. Wisniak holds his hands over his ears, pressing his head down into the ground. Idra tries to stand up but Lokhov pulls her down again.

‘You’re hurt enough already,’ he shouts into her ear. A Firstborn Sentinel rushes by, steel legs churning, its pilot trying to outrun the barrage. A bombard shell drops into the cab, turning the machine into flying shrapnel. Idra ducks, remaining in the hole as the 1051st pounds the town into rubble, then pounds the rubble into dust.

Darkness returns. The night is no longer rent by huge explosions.

‘To me,’ Idra calls. ‘To me, Firstborn! For the Emperor and Vostroya!’

Men crawl from the ruins, red coats grey with dust, gold armour red with blood. Five, ten, twenty. The knot around Idra grows. She starts splitting men into squads, sending them to secure parts of the town.

There isn’t much to secure. The city of Dolemino no longer exists, the ruins turned into piles of dust and gravel. Firstborn crawl over them, digging firing positions, dragging wounded to safety.

‘Lieutenant.’ The medic looks almost shamefaced at interrupting her.

‘What?’ Idra says.

‘Your side, sir,’ he replies, pointing. Idra glances down, then looks again. A piece of tank armour protrudes from her side, through her carapace. Her golden armour is black with old blood.

‘Throne and Emperor,’ she curses.

‘You’d better sit down, sir,’ the medic says.

In the west, the pale, greyish Tovogan dawn arrives.

Gurilov Hive stretches before them, broken fingers of black steel poking towards the Vostroyan sky. The frozen ash shifts as Ekaterina steps upon it, toxic black motes swirling into the air. Without a rebreather mask, it would kill her.

‘Forward,’ she commands her platoon. The men remain standing, weighted down by their packs and masks. Ekaterina wonders if she should repeat her command. But that would be showing weakness before a pack of wild grox. She glares at them instead, until one man steps forward.

Babayev adjusts his pack and starts marching. The men fall into line behind him, and Ekaterina notices their gear. They’re all carrying swords.

The medical station’s ceiling is grey like the Tovogan sky. The medic-apprentice changes Idra’s bandages, praying over her wounds. Around her, bunks are filled with wounded Firstborn. Someone is praying to Saint Nadalya, a deep baritone of supplication. Vidrun Wisniak sits by Idra’s bunk, carving a whorl on his mule-beast leather gun belt. The belt is full of them.

‘Another kill mark?’ Idra asks her sniper.

‘Yah,’ says Wisniak. Then he registers who he’s talking to, changes his tone. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘How many?’ Idra asks.

‘Twenty-nine,’ says Wisniak. ‘I lost track. Not counting those.’

‘Why are you here, Wisniak?’

The marksman sheathes his knife, inspects his lasgun.

‘Sergeant said to watch you,’ he says.

‘Since when does a Firstborn officer need watching in a Vostroyan medicae chamber?’

‘Lots of people are unhappy, sir,’ Wisniak says. ‘Half of the regiment’s wiped out. Colonel’s dead, flag-major’s dead, commissar’s dead. Even the psyker is dead.’

The scale of their losses stuns Idra. Four full companies, and the regiment’s entire leadership, gone?

‘Who’s in command?’

Wisniak shrugs, as if it is no concern of his.

‘I expect they’ll tell us, sir. Or maybe you are.’

The medic ties off Idra’s bandages, pulls out an injector. Blue and red fluids slosh around in the cylinders.

‘The Throne protects you,’ he says, and stabs Idra in the thigh. The world fades into the sky grey of the ceiling.

‘Ekaterina.’ Idra floats towards consciousness, slips, fades back into the comfortable grey warmth. Is dragged up by a hand shaking her shoulder. ‘Ekaterina.’

Sergeant Lokhov stands by her bunk. He’s in full field gear, lasgun cradled in one hand, shaking her with the other. His armour and coat are still covered in blood and dust from the battle at Dolemino.

‘I’m awake,’ says Idra. It comes out all garbled, like talking with a mouth full of ohx and mashed oats.

‘Half the regiment’s gone,’ Lokhov says. ‘Fourth Company is down to a single squad. The Eighth lost all of their tanks. And we’re moving out.’

‘Moving where?’ asks Idra.

‘Dolemino,’ says Lokhov. ‘Going to hunt the remaining Tovogans. We’re moving with no support.’

The news hits Idra like a spear of ice.

‘What about artillery?’ she asks.

Lokhov shakes his head.

‘General command got ash-pox when they heard about the One Thousand and Fifty-First shelling our position. Threatened to have the colonel court-martialled, except the colonel was already dead.’

‘Who commands?’

‘Haskel,’ says Lokhov. He turns to spit, remembers himself, swallows instead.

‘He’s taking the regiment out. We’re going to clear out the mines. Make sure the Tovogans can’t use them as a staging area against us.’

The Firstborn in the next bunk moans. His face is covered with cloth. Only his mouth and part of his singed moustache stick out through the bandages. His right arm ends at the elbow. Pus seeps through the bandage there.

‘What about the other commanders?’ Idra asks.

‘Trzewik is dead, Kaluza lost an arm and both legs, Orkacz is following Haskel’s lead. And ’Trina…’

‘Yes?’ says Idra.

‘It was Haskel who ordered the strike by the One Thousand and Fifty-First. That big brute of his dragged the colonel’s vox-man away and one of Haskel’s other men voxed it in. Didn’t mention us being in the target zone.’

‘Emperor’s mercy!’ Idra curses.

‘It gets worse,’ Lokhov says. ‘Sorokov in Third Company saw Haskel and his brute following the colonel into the charge. The line broke, the colonel and Haskel remaining to hold off the traitor’s counter-attack. Next time Sorokov sees him, Haskel’s slaughtering his way through a line of Tovogans and there’s no sign of the colonel or the command squad.’

‘He left them to die,’ Idra says. Lokhov nods.

‘More interested in killing than in winning,’ the sergeant says. He picks up his pack, slings his lasgun over his shoulder. ‘We’ve lost the commander and the commissar. Haskel’s men are threatening to execute anyone who doesn’t follow. There’s no one to stop them.’

Idra goes cold, memories burning through her mind. A leader killed. A subordinate taking command. You cannot be blind to those around you. A leader has to know which of her men are dangerous. She sits up, the stitches in her side straining against her shifting skin. Warmth starts to seep from her wound, blood staining the bandages.

‘I’ll go reach general command,’ Idra says. ‘And uncle…’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t get yourself killed.’

Ekaterina labours to breathe through her rebreather mask. With every step, the ashes of Gurilov Hive swirl up, clogging the filters. Behind her, the men are cursing. Pegasov yanks his mask off, breathes, starts to cough.

‘Idiot!’ Ekaterina slides down the slope she’s been climbing, yanks the mask from his hands and presses it over his face. ‘Do that again and I’ll have you court-martialled for stupidity!’ Pegasov glares at her, but refastens his mask. Ekaterina starts to climb again.

They make it over the hump, start down the ash-slope on the other side, half sliding, half falling. A hundred yards beneath the summit, a slab of broken rockcrete sticks out over the abyss. Ekaterina calls for a halt. She glances over the edge.

It is a long way down, where steel spars spear up from the ground. Like a field of broken teeth, waiting for the unwary. She plots the route, following thin trails with her eyes.

‘Move out,’ she says. ‘There, then down left, and over to the other side.’

Her men don’t react. They stand in a half-circle between her and the sloping mound of ash. Behind her is the long drop into the abyss.

Babayev draws his sword.

‘Lieutenant!’ Sergeant Dalsik, the regimental vox-operator is wild-eyed. His thin, waxed moustache trembles. Idra hobbles up to him, follows him to the vox-room.

The halls are empty, every able-bodied man in the regiment gone with Haskel. Dalsik shoves a chair in front of the vox-set, rests his broken arm on the table, presses the runes, turns the wheels.

‘Eighty-Sixth Firstborn, Eighty-Sixth Firstborn. Emperor’s mercy, Dalsik, answer!’

It’s Lokhov’s voice. There’s something in it that Idra’s never heard before. Desperation.

‘Lokhov, we’re here,’ Dalsik says. Only crackle comes from the vox-set.

‘Eighty-Sixth, Eighty-Sixth,’ Dalsik says. ‘Lokhov, can you hear me?’

Sergeant Lokhov’s voice comes muted, like he’s talking from the bottom of a lake of ash. Explosions and bolter fire wash over it.

‘Traitors,’ Lokhov says. ‘Got us–’ Heavy bolter fire drowns him out, an extended bakka-bakka-bak. ‘–get the One Thousand and Fifty-First, get them to shell Dolemino.’ More bolter fire. ‘–all going to die!’

The vox falls silent.

‘Get him back,’ Idra says.

Dalsik twirls the dials.

‘Can’t,’ he says. ‘Sir.’

Idra bites back a retort.

‘I’m coming, uncle,’ she says, softly. ‘We’re going to relieve you.’

‘With what troops?’ Dalsik asks, and Idra grins, a cold, hard, hungry expression.

There aren’t any Firstborn in the barracks. Everyone that’s left is in the medical station. Idra walks among them. Some of them lack arms, others legs. Some are burned. A lot of them are dying. Idra is going to ask them to die quicker.

‘Firstborn!’ she yells. ‘Vostroyans!’

Heads come up around her. Eyes open. Moans escape parched lips.

‘We have been betrayed,’ Idra says. ‘Our regiment is trapped in the rubble of Dolemino, our brothers fighting for their lives with no relief available. There are Firstborn dying out there, without support, without rescue. The closest forces, if general command is willing to release them, are four hours away. We are not.’

She pauses, lets it sink in.

‘It is the duty of the faithful to obey the will of the Emperor, and the Emperor wills every human to have a place in His divine order. We are here, we are alive, by His grace and His mercy. We are here because it is His will that we be here, outside the trap that has snapped shut around our brothers.’

She coughs, blood splattering her lips. She wipes it away, forces herself to stand straight.

‘You are hurt,’ she says. ‘You are in pain. You can let that pain rule you, or you can honour Vostroya and stand to fight against the enemies of the Emperor.

‘We are Firstborn. We are the Hammer of the Emperor. Our brothers are dying. Now get up, and save them.’

Idra turns, and starts to march. Behind her, every soldier able to hold a gun follows.

They are an army of the dying. Red and gold, interspaced with the white of bandages, dotted with more red. Twice, they’ve stopped to leave dead behind. They’re not even halfway to Dolemino.

They’re riding into battle atop soft Tovogan transports, a hundred men who can barely hold a lasgun. They go to fight for their regiment, for their planet, and for the Emperor. Idra is leading them to die. She is immensely proud of them all.

Pillars of smoke rise from the ruins of Dolemino. Scattered shots and las-blasts echo among the broken walls. A trail of dead Firstborn lead into the town.

‘Double line,’ Idra says. ‘Those who can walk on their own help those who can’t.’

She leads by example, supporting a wounded missile gunner.

‘Thank you, sir,’ the Firstborn says, struggling with his launcher. The brass tip of a krak missile glitters in the tube.

‘Vostroya and the Emperor!’ The scream is drowned out by a massive explosion. Somewhere in front of Idra, Firstborn are dying.

Idra’s men move, hobble forward as fast as they can. Their lines are straight, their lasguns ready. They stop.

Ahead of them, a clump of Firstborn are running. Half a company, maybe. And a big, burly sergeant in their middle, directing their flight.

‘Uncle,’ Idra shouts. ‘Sergeant Lokhov.’

Lokhov stops, looks confused. Spots the reinforcements.

‘By the Throne!’ he breathes. ‘Run, girl!’

Behind him comes the growl of massive engines, and the crunch of steel threads. Over a pile of broken rockcrete rumbles a Leman Russ.

‘Fire!’ screams Lokhov.

The missile gunner goes down on one knee, the launcher coming up. Idra recognises the markings of the 86th Firstborn on the Leman Russ.

‘Hold fire!’ she shouts, clapping the gunner on the shoulder. ‘Hold fire!’

Standing in the tank’s hatch, like a martyr emerging from the maw of a beast, is Major Jorun Haskel.

He sees the line of Firstborn. His grin shows too many teeth, the tongue lolling between them impossibly long. He howls, an inhuman sound of splintering glass.

The lines of Firstborn waver, fear visibly slicing through them. Idra feels the hair on her neck and arms like a thousand needles. The monster emerging from the tank wears Haskel’s skin, Haskel’s face, but it can’t be human, it can’t be Firstborn. Whatever that thing is, it is an abomination against all of humanity, an affront to the Emperor. Idra’s stomach churns, her legs shake, but her hate for the monster that’s killed her men burns fiercely through her, driving the fear away with red-hot rage.

‘Die!’ she rasps, lifting her lasgun.

The Leman Russ opens fire.

Its heavy bolters spit flame, carving into the line of Firstborn. The missile gunner is cut in half, bolts blasting from his back to splatter against Idra’s chest armour. Both of them fall, as the tank advances, its engine impossibly loud. The bolters seek Firstborn flesh, tearing into the wounded, their white bandages overflowing with red.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ Haskel howls. The tank’s guns keep blazing.

Idra struggles up from beneath the dead gunner. She hoists the missile launcher. The tank is almost upon her. It is so close that there is no need to aim. She pulls the trigger.

The missile whooshes out, flames enveloping her, the explosion turning the entire world red.

Silence.

There is a soft, high-pitched whine in her ears, red before her eyes.

She’s on her back, pain lacerating through her.

Faint screams cut through the silence.

Idra blinks. The world snaps back into focus. Haskel stands a few yards from her, on the other side of the burning Leman Russ. His uniform is ripped, his naked flesh thicker than any skin has a right to be, sliced into geometric slabs, red scar tissue visible between them, obscene symbols carved into them. He hoists one of Idra’s wounded into the air with one hand, slams him into the ground, breaks his back. Hacks the Crystal Sword into the dying man in passing.

The hand holding the ancient power sword is crowned by long, black claws. Budding horns adorn the major’s head. His blue tongue stretches below his chin. Whatever Jorun Haskel is, it is no longer human. More interested in killing than in winning, indeed.

Fear of the monster battles the rage in Idra’s heart, crushing her questions between them. What manner of disease can turn a Firstborn hero into a beast like this? She tries to push the thought away, is frozen in indecision.

The Firstborn around Idra cringe, waver. Idra wants to shout them forward, wants to lift her lasgun and fire upon the thing, but her legs shake, her arms refuse to move. Calling upon the aid of the Throne, she lifts the lasgun, but it refuses to fire. Around her, the Vostroyan line breaks.

Haskel is stalking the Firstborn. Their las-blasts can’t touch him, flying past him or scorching him with no more effect than las-trainers. A Firstborn dies beneath Haskel’s sword, the man’s head rolling away, a surprised expression on its face. Haskel slides down the pile of rubble, reaches for his next victim.

Lokhov.

The sergeant swings his sword-bayonet, but the major parries, his powered blade slicing through the common steel of the sergeant’s weapon. The major lifts his sword over his head.

Idra bellows. She hurls her lasgun at Haskel, the stock bouncing off his head. The monster turns, rage dripping off Haskel like sweat.

‘Lieutenant,’ he says. The sound of his voice makes Idra’s skin crawl. It goes beyond gravel and glass; it is the crunch of bones among splintered steel. No human throat can produce a sound like that.

‘You threw away your gun,’ Haskel says. He’s stalking her, his legs bending in the wrong direction. The Crystal Sword hums, flickering between black and red.

‘I don’t need a gun,’ Idra says. Her side bleeds. She’s backing up, searching for a weapon.

All she has is her knife.

Ekaterina stands poised. Everything is clear in her mind. Her back is to the abyss, her front to Babayev.

‘This is treason,’ she says. ‘The Emperor will curse you.’

‘The Emperor,’ says Babayev, ‘doesn’t want women among His Firstborn.’

His sword is a low-born’s blade, poor quality. It will probably break when he stabs her.

‘You could have let things be,’ Babayev says. ‘But no.’

‘Captain Twarienko will punish you,’ Ekaterina says. ‘It is the duty of the faithful–’

‘The lord hetman will be happy,’ Babayev says. ‘I see how he looks at you. Maybe he’ll make me a voyarin. A poor boy becoming a voyarin, eh?’

Ekaterina searches for a way to charge, to disarm Babayev, but they have trained together. He has enough respect for her to be careful, pushing her towards the edge, sliding step by sliding step.

Her foot reaches the edge, her heel hanging in the air.

‘Nowhere to run,’ says Babayev. He’s grinning. He lifts his sword for a killing stroke.

Ekaterina throws her knife.

The knife leaves Lieutenant Idra’s hand with all the power she can muster. It flies true, burying itself in Haskel’s throat.

He grins.

‘Good,’ he says, his voice rasping worse than ever. ‘You are a killer.’

‘You are a traitor,’ Idra says.

‘I am strong!’ Haskel bellows. ‘I am Vostroya’s honour. I am blood and death.’

He stops, fingers Idra’s knife in his throat. Tries to pull it out, but it’s stuck in the hard, red folds of his too-thick skin.

‘You lack the power,’ he says. ‘Think of what you could do if you had the strength.’

‘The Emperor is my strength,’ Idra says, but her voice shakes.

She’s climbing, scrambling backward as Haskel steps towards her. A steelspine stalking a meat-rat.

In the street, below the ruins of the factorum she’s climbing, Idra’s troops are fighting Haskel’s giant. The man is cleaving them with his axe, shrugging off lasgun hits. The axe moves with his hand, is his hand, the blackened steel part of his flesh, the blade a great upside-down cone, like the markings on Haskel’s flesh.

‘Join me,’ says Haskel. ‘You have the will. Think of what you could do with the strength. Think of the enemies of Vostroya, dying by your hand.’

‘The Emperor is my will,’ says Idra. ‘He is my strength and my protection.’

Her hand lands on a smooth stone, a piece of a cracked Imperial eagle. She grabs the aquila, a cold, heavy weight in her hand. Haskel grins, his too-many teeth sharp as daggers.

‘You are a killer,’ he says. ‘And the Emperor cannot protect you. But join me, and you will have the power to protect yourself. No more grovelling before disdainful officers. No more struggling while those who’d support you sit back and drink and laugh and your men die.’

‘You are a traitor,’ says Idra.

Haskel nods.

‘The world is full of traitors,’ he says. ‘Become one of my men, and you could be killing them by the thousands. We will purge this planet of them, no matter what uniform they wear. We will fill the void with rivers of blood and send the souls of the dead screaming into the warp.’

‘Heresy!’ shouts Idra.

‘Truth!’ growls Haskel. ‘You think the Emperor will protect you? He cannot protect you. He is a shell of a man inside a shell of a machine, and with every battle He orders, every death He causes, He’s pushing us closer to the Ruin. You think this is the path of murder? This is the path of honour, of courage, of the will to fight. This is where all roads lead, but not all roads are the same. You can choose to bathe in blood, or have others bathe in yours.’

‘Lies and heresy,’ says Idra, still backing away.

Her foot slips. She is at the top of the mound of rubble. Behind her gapes an abyss of broken rockcrete. There is nowhere else to go. Haskel licks his teeth. There is hunger in his expression, a terrible hunger.

‘The Emperor cannot protect you,’ he says. He lifts the Crystal Sword, the ruby in its grip sparkling.

A giant explosion rips through the Leman Russ. Haskel’s gaze darts to the flaming wreck. For a split second, his weight shifts.

Ekaterina Idra charges. Haskel twists, fast as a blindsnake, but she is inside his reach, lifting the piece of the aquila, slamming it into the knife caught in the folds of Haskel’s throat.

They fall. Two bodies tumbling down the long, jagged slope. Tumbling towards the burning Leman Russ.

Idra lands dazed, her hand closing on the warm grip of an active power sword.

A bellow of rage chases the fog from her mind. Haskel’s giant.

The man charges, his axe trailing gore. But as he closes, Idra twists aside, lifts the Crystal Sword. It shears clear through the giant’s massive bulk, spilling black blood onto the stones. The giant falls. Behind Idra comes a rasping laugh.

The laugh turns into a cough, then a gasp. Major Haskel is lying on his side, legs and arms bent at unnatural angles, Idra’s knife buried deep in his throat, its tip protruding from the back of the major’s neck. Still, he does not die.

‘I serve the Emperor,’ says Idra. She walks over to the major, lifts the Crystal Sword.

‘For the Emperor, and Vostroya,’ she says.

A look of regret passes over the major’s face. His tongue twitches.

‘For Vostroya,’ he whispers. The sword comes down.

Ekaterina’s men stand in a huddle around the corpse. She kicks Babayev’s sword over the edge. Stares at her recruits.

‘You will,’ she says, ‘khekking move when I say you move. Now pick that traitor up, and khekking move.’

They move.

There are no Tovogans left in Dolemino. The town is silent but for the whispers of the Firstborn as they collect their dead.

‘Idra,’ her men whisper. ‘Ekaterina Idra. Blessed. Blessed by the Emperor.’

As Lieutenant Ekaterina Idra helps her men gather the multitude of dead, she does not feel blessed.

Her bed is hard. Her weapons locker has been removed. The image of the Throne, the Emperor radiant upon it, still hangs on her wall. The Treatis Elatii lies open in Idra’s lap, but she’s too distracted to read. Besides, she knows most of it by heart.

At least they’ve let her out of the cell.

The door opens. For a moment, she thinks it’s Lokhov. But no, it’s the commissar. She strides into the room, a presence of black upon black, her pale face hidden in the shadows beneath her black cap. She speaks without preamble, her voice hard as ice.

‘You disobeyed your superior officer,’ she says. ‘And killed him.’ It is a statement, not a question.

Idra nods. The stitches in her side have come out, but moving still hurts. She’ll be damned if she shows it to this non-Vostroyan, though. So she snaps to attention, ignoring the jab of pain in her ribs.

‘No excuses?’ the commissar asks.

‘He was a traitor,’ Idra says.

‘How did you know?’ says the commissar. ‘Before you saw him at Dolemino.’

‘He was more interested in killing than in winning,’ Idra says. She’s told the story before.

The commissar barks a short laugh. If a bolter could laugh, this would be the sound.

‘Killing is what we do, lieutenant,’ she says.

‘We kill for the Emperor,’ says Idra.

‘That we do,’ the commissar says. She smiles, a faint glimmer of teeth beneath the shadowy brim of her hat. ‘Very well, lieutenant, the investigation has proven your story. You are freed from suspicion, although I dare say you have made a fool of a number of highly ranked men, and rank seldom appreciates being wrong.’

She turns to leave, but Idra stops her.

‘May I have my knife back?’ she says, and the commissar grins a feral grin. She hands Idra’s knife back to her, hilt first.

‘And I believe,’ the commissar says, ‘that this is yours by right of conquest.’

She lifts the Crystal Sword. The Eye of the Eagle glimmers like blood.

The Tear of Saint Nadalya stands on the launch pad, a big, black, ugly ship, swallowing hordes of Firstborn in crisp red uniforms. Ekaterina Idra shoulders her pack. This is the ship that will take her to the Imperial Navy ship Blessing of Mars, which will transport them to another world. To fight for the Emperor.

A man blocks her path, a familiar face looking down on her.

‘Captain,’ Ekaterina Idra says.

‘Lieutenant,’ Captain Twarienko replies.

They stand there, windblown flakes of ash scattering across the launch pad, the old campaigner and the fresh graduate.

‘Captain,’ says Idra. ‘Why did you defend my actions before the commissar?’

Twarienko twists his moustache.

‘Colonel Sebastev,’ he says, smiling at Idra’s confusion.

‘Sebastev was the first low-born to gain a field commission and survive to return to Vostroya,’ Twarienko says. ‘A good commander, too, and skilled tactician, for all of him being low-born. Now there’s been a score of them. Who knows, maybe there will be a score of female Firstborn one day.’

‘Do you think so, sir?’ asks Idra. She fingers the Idrov knife at her belt. There is no need to remind the captain of what the other Firstborn think of her.

‘If the Emperor wills it,’ says Twarienko and stretches to attention. ‘Stand to!’ he says, and throws her a salute.

Lieutenant Ekaterina Idra returns it with a smile.

MERCY

Danie Ware

Fantasy author Danie Ware brings her love of gaming, re-enactment and Warhammer together in this fast-paced story of the Adepta Sororitas.

In the remnants of an abandoned cathedral, Sister Superior Augusta and her squad pitch their righteous wrath against the brutality of orks. Lured to the outskirts of the Imperium, Augusta must use all her experience to keep her squad alive in a fight where they are outnumbered and outgunned.

The cathedral’s corpse was vast.

Standing in its hollow heart, its darkness vaulted huge above her, Sister Superior Augusta rested one scarlet-gauntleted hand on the bolter at her hip. She said nothing, only scanned this icon of the Emperor’s might, searching for motion, for threat, for any remaining gleam of His Light.

But there was nothing.

This was Ultima Segmentum’s darkest corner, and little reached out here.

Beside her, the missionary Lysimachus Tanichus was speaking in hushed tones. ‘From the last years of the Age of Apostasy, Sister. Or so they say.’ His sibilance coiled in the dark, like echoes of millennia.

Augusta gave a brief acknowledgement and walked carefully through the debris. The air was hot here, clammy with the overgrown jungle-marsh outside; twisted creepers had penetrated the cathedral’s crumbling walls and they writhed across the stonework like the tendrils of Chaos itself. Sweat itched at the fleur-de-lys tattoo on her cheek.

‘Sisters.’ She spoke softly into the vox at her throat. ‘Roll call.’

Five voices came back through the darkness. Augusta’s retinal lenses tracked their locations: blips deployed in a standard sweep-reconnaissance pattern. Her squad were experienced – all except one – and she had complete trust in their worthiness, and in their love for the Emperor. Together, they had carried fist and faith across every segmentum of the galaxy.

Tanichus, fiddling with his rosarius, spoke again. ‘The Emperor’s light had not touched this world in millennia, Sister, not until I came here, carrying His name. The local townspeople told me of the cathedral. It’s a part of their mythology–’

‘I trust you’ve brought them Truth,’ Augusta said. Her authority was unthreatened by the missionary, but she needed to listen – the brief from the canoness on Ophelia VII had listed this world as a potential staging point for Chaos, invading from the Eye of Terror, for witchkin or renegades, for marauding xenos of every kind. Augusta was a twenty-year veteran, her bobbed hair and stern gaze both steel-grey, and her experience made her both sharp and wary.

‘Me serve vivere, Sister,’ Tanichus said. ‘I live to serve.’

‘Sister Jatoya,’ Augusta said into the vox. ‘Anything?’

Her second-in-command responded, ‘No, Sister. If there’s anything here, it’s well hidden.’

‘Check everywhere.’

‘Yes, Sister.’

‘Very well.’ Her touch still on the bolter, eyeing the decaying statues and pillars above her, Augusta gestured for Tanichus to keep speaking.

But he told her only what she already knew: his history with the townspeople, and their rumours of the cathedral. The town held the place taboo, but they’d told Tanichus their local myth – that the ruin had a guardian, an armoured stone icon with a bloodied flower upon its chest. And Tanichus had carried word of this back to the Ecclesiarchy, and to the Sisters.

A member of the Order of the Bloody Rose, Augusta had volunteered for the mission immediately – with the cathedral’s age, it was possible that the icon could be Saint Mina herself. ‘The Emperor has called me,’ she’d said to the canoness. ‘And I must go.’ Perhaps for more political reasons than visionary ones, the canoness had agreed.

Her boots crunching over ancient, fallen masonry, Augusta climbed the steps towards the high altar. Ruin or not, she paused before the top and dropped to one armoured knee, her black cloak billowing and her hand tracing the fleur-de-lys on her armour.

‘Quantus tremor est futurus, quando attingit locum Lucis.’

How great the fear will be, when the Light touches this place!

She felt the missionary shiver as he, too, knelt. Tanichus was a talker, a good man to carry the Emperor’s word, but she was His daughter, and her task was clear.

She would find this icon.

‘Did the townspeople tell you anything further?’ she asked, coming back to her feet. ‘You lived with them for several months.’

‘Only superstitions,’ he told her. ‘If this is your patron saint, Sister, then we must find her without their help.’

Augusta nodded. She gave her squad orders to structure their search, to move in a standard skirmish pattern throughout the cathedral’s cloisters and side-rooms. Sister Viola, the youngest, she ordered to stand guard at the fallen doors. Viola was new from the schola; she was high-hearted and eager to prove herself and that was all very well… but Augusta wanted her close.

‘Yes, Sister.’ Viola, bolter in hand, returned to the doors and took her position, watching the huge and muggy writhe of the outside jungle.

Over the vox, the Sister Superior recited the Litany of Mettle. Whatever was here, they would find it.

In the cathedral’s transept stood a colossal thirty-foot statue, its broken hands raised in the sign of the aquila. It had been carved in full armour and, like all such things, it faced Holy Terra as if it still sought the Light.

But if this was Saint Mina, then she had no face, and her insignia had long since fallen to dust.

Augusta was scanning, carefully looking for age and identity, when the cry came from Viola at the doorway.

‘Sisters!’ The word was soft across the vox, but it carried the faintest of quivers. ‘I see movement!’

Augusta felt the touch of adrenaline and inhaled, enjoying the lift, the first flush of faith – as her briefing had warned her, this was a dangerous place.

‘Be specific,’ she said, turning to crunch back out to the nave, the cathedral’s main aisle. ‘What do you see?’

‘Large force incoming. Seventy, eighty yards. Moving slowly, but heading this way.’ Her voice was taut with fear. ‘It’s hard to see them through the jungle.’

Tanichus followed at Augusta’s shoulder. The missionary had unhooked his lasrifle and looked slightly queasy; she hoped he could shoot straight. ‘Sisters, to me. Kimura, to the doorway. Jatoya, watch the rear.’ Kimura carried the squad’s heavy bolter, and its faster suppression would be critical. ‘Viola, description.’

‘I can’t see well, Sister, but they’re all shoulders. They’re huge!’

‘Space Marines?’ Jatoya’s tone was surprised. ‘Out here?’

But Kimura was at the doorway now, weapon at the ready. Her voice came back over the vox, her tones shuddering with a rising, burning eagerness. ‘They’re not Heretic Astartes, Sisters.’ The words were alight.

‘They’re orks.’

Orks.

If there was one damned xenos that Augusta loathed, it was the ork. Filthy, stinking things, slavering and disorderly; they were as much the enemies of the Throne as any witch or heretic. She could feel her faith unfurling in her heart like a banner – she had a chance to reclaim this holy place, at the edge of the segmentum…

But Augusta’s ruthless discipline was what had kept her alive through twenty years of warfare. She could embrace the love of her Emperor and keep her thoughts clear.

She reached Kimura at the doorway, and used her auspex to look outside.

Many of the incoming beasts were enormous, bigger than the Sisters, armour and all. But this was not the disciplined advance of highly trained soldiers, this was ramshackle, and noisy, and slow. The orks moved more like marauders; they laughed amongst themselves, pushing and shoving and snarling. Their tones were harsh and their voices guttural.

They were hard to see through the steam, through the festooned and looping creepers.

But they were heading straight for the cathedral.

‘Sister!’ Kimura had reached the same conclusion – her voice was tense. Augusta saw her take a sight on the lead ork, anger radiating from her stance as if her armour burned with it.

‘Hold your fire.’

For a moment, she thought Kimura would disobey, but Augusta’s command of her squad was too strong. Instead, Kimura paused, quivering, her finger on the trigger, tracking the orks as they approached.

Behind them now, Viola’s breathing was swift in her vox. She was afraid – and Augusta understood.

But still, the youngest of the squad had to control herself, and quickly.

Swiftly, the Sister Superior gave orders for deployment. Kimura and Caia at the door, Viola and Melia at the front left archway, Jatoya, with her flamer, watching the rear. Augusta herself, Tanichus still with her, took position at the front arch to the right, its window long since put out by the creeper and shattered to forgotten dust.

Outside, the orks advanced, oblivious. A fight had broken out amongst their number, cheered and jeered by those surrounding.

Beneath her helmet, Augusta curled her lip – she had no fear of these beasts, whatever their numbers. Over the vox, she recited the Battle Hymnal and heard her Sisters join her, avidly soft.

‘That Thou wouldst bring them only death,

That Thou shouldst spare none,

That Thou shouldst pardon none

We beseech Thee, destroy them.’

She felt Viola stiffen, felt her courage coalesce. She felt Kimura steady, ready to unleash His wrath on the incoming creatures and their blasphemous intentions…

‘Wait,’ she said, again.

The orks moved closer.

Within heavy bolter range.

Within bolter range.

Any moment now, they would see the crouching Sisters, their blood-scarlet armour and their black-and-white cloaks…

‘Sisters, stay down. Kimura, on my command, full covering suppression. For the Emperor… Fire!’

The orks had no idea what had hit them.

Raiders and warriors alike, everything vanished in a hail of gore and shredding flesh. The heavy bolter howled in Kimura’s hands, and the jungle was ripped to pieces, leaves shining like shrapnel, trees and vines cut clean in half.

One ancient trunk toppled over with a groan, but was stopped by a tangle of creeper. It hung there, creaking, like some huge executioner’s axe.

Kimura’s voice came over the vox, louder now, ‘A morte perpetua, Domine, libra nos!’ The Hymn of Battle raged in tune with the furious barking of the weapon. The Sisters’ voices joined her, rising to crystal-pure harmonics as Kimura visited bloody destruction upon the orks.

Augusta was grinning now, tight and violent beneath her helm. She knew this with every word in her ear, every flash in her blood – this was her worship, her purpose and her life. The Emperor Himself was with her, His fire in her heart, His touch in the creak and weight of her armour, in the bolter in her hand. She was here to unleash His wrath against the despoilers of this forgotten and holy place.

And it felt good.

At her other hip, her heavy chainsword clanked as if begging for release, but not yet… not yet.

She heard Kimura’s singing ring with vehemence as the Sister cut the orks to pieces.

‘From the blasphemy of the Fallen, our Emperor, deliver us!’

But orks, despite many flaws, had no concept of intimidation. They had no interest in the Emperor’s wrath, no tactics, and no sense. Another force might have gone to ground, given covering fire, but not these beasts.

Roaring with outrage, waving what clumsy weapons they had, they simply charged.

Over the singing, Augusta shouted, ‘Kimura, fall back and reload! The rest of you, fire!’

She raised her own bolter, aiming for the largest ork she could see. Greenskins had a very simple rule of leadership – the bigger the beast, the more control it wielded. And if she could take out the leaders, the rest would be easier to kill.

The battle hymn still sounded and she added her voice once again, feeling the music thrill along her nerves like wildfire. A second wave of orks raged forwards, leering and eager.

There seemed to be no end to them.

The beasts were closing fast now, and she could see them clearly: their jutting teeth and green skin, their rusted weapons, their armour all scrappy pieces of ceramite and steel, scrounged from who knew what battlefields.

One had a set of white pauldrons bearing the distinctive fleur-de-lys. Snarling, she blew it away.

But their losses didn’t touch them; they picked up the weapons of their dying and their trampled, and they just kept coming.

Bolters barked and howled in red-gauntleted hands. Tanichus took single shots with his lasrifle, picking his targets carefully. The jungle became a mess of blood and smoke and noise, but still the orks came on, slobbering and shouting, ripping through creepers and fallen trees. To one side, there was a lashing and a gurgle and half a dozen greenskins vanished, shrieking and struggling, below the surface of the marsh. Jeers and calls came from the rest, but they didn’t slow down.

‘There’s too many of them!’ The youngest Sister’s cry broke the hymn’s purity and Augusta felt her squad waver.

She raised her voice to a paean, a clarion call like a holy trumpet, allowing them no pause.

‘Domine, libra nos!’

Shrieking with fury, Viola resumed firing.

But the orks didn’t care. They tore themselves free from the jungle’s tangle and threw themselves at the steps.

The lead ork went backwards in a spray of crimson mist.

The others were already boiling past it. Tanichus kept firing streaks of light past Augusta’s shoulder. Augusta switched to full suppression and heard the bolters of the others, all growling in righteous fury.

Yet the orks still came. They were like a rotting green tide, large creatures and small, no structure, no fear. They bayed and snarled like animals.

The Sisters couldn’t stop them all.

Fury rose in Augusta and was annealed to a magnesium-white flare of righteous wrath. You shall not enter here!

Viola, afraid, screamed the words of the hymnal, the same verse, over and over…

The advance stopped.

Shredded leaves fluttered slowly to the rotting jungle floor.

The orks had paused. Changing magazine with an action so reflexive she barely noticed, Augusta scanned them through her retinal lenses, wondering what in Dominica’s name they were doing.

Had they just been overcome by the holiness of the cathedral itself?

Somehow, she doubted it.

She watched as the creatures at the front moved, taking cover behind toppled statues. She gave the order to keep firing and heard the bolters start again.

The beasts knew the Sisters were here – and they’d responded.

Smart orks? The idea was horrifying.

Yet something down there – the warboss or whatever it was – had intelligence.

It made her wonder if their presence was pure coincidence… and an odd chill went down her back.

The lead orks had taken cover now, and the jungle was ominously quiet. Behind them, through the rising steam, she could see bigger figures, moving forwards. Several had stubby sidearms, luridly decorated; the weapons gave a steady bark of fire. Rounds chewed chunks out of the stone and made the Sisters keep their heads down.

And one of them–

‘Get back from the windows! Take cover!’

Her squad were already on the move, throwing themselves back. They didn’t wait for the ork with the rocket launcher to loose his leering-skull-painted missile… straight into the cathedral nave.

Augusta hit the floor, taking Tanichus down with her.

The world erupted in fire.

She heard the whistling of shrapnel, felt the whoosh of heat that seared her armour and shrivelled her cloak to tatters. The orks would use the cover of the missile to gain entrance to the building, and she was back on her feet even as the flame was dying.

‘Sisters! Roll call!’

Tanichus was scrambling up, charred but unhurt – Augusta had covered as much of his unarmoured body as was possible. He was coughing, fumbling for his lasrifle amidst the settling dust.

Five voices came back to her, making her thank the Emperor Himself for the courage and experience of her squad.

The orks were on them now, piling through the doors, scrambling over the window ledges – if all else failed, Augusta would bring the building down in a final hail of rounds, and kill everything within.

For the glory of the Emperor!

But they were not done yet. They would fight with the Emperor Himself at their backs, and they would fight to their last breath.

‘Kimura–!’

She started to give orders to fall back, for Kimura’s heavy bolter to cover them, but her voice was lost under the detonation of a grenade, impacting right at Kimura’s feet.

The Sister disappeared in a blast of smoke and fragments.

Viola screamed. Chunks of roof tumbled to the floor. Tanichus scrabbled away on his backside, his rifle lost.

Now, the orks were all over the nave. Augusta could see the smaller, darker gretchins, scuttling in among their boots, picking things up and shaking them and biting them, then scurrying gleefully away.

Slinging the bolter, she drew the chainsword and started the mechanism.

It snarled into life like pure impatience, eager for the blasphemers’ blood.

Called by the rasp of the weapon, the Sisters were upon the orks with fists and feet and fury, punching one, kicking it to the floor, then ripping the axe out of its grip and using it on the one behind. Their armour, already red, slicked brighter with colours of death.

But somewhere under the combat-high, Augusta was beginning to understand something: this was not just a random raid, it was too big, too clever, too strong. These orks had come here knowingly.

And they’d come expecting resistance.

A hand grabbed her cloak and pulled her backwards.

She spun the chainsword, slashed through the neck of one ork and into the chest of another. Both went over, one still howling, and her thoughts were forgotten – she had other priorities. Stamping at the impertinent gretchins, she slashed at a third ork, and a fourth. She was wrath incarnate, the rage of the Emperor, carving flesh and bone and armour, and spraying gore like red wine.

Tanichus had vanished, somewhere in the mess.

Sister Jatoya shouted over the vox – the orks had got round behind them.

Clever indeed.

The flamer roared as Jatoya retreated, searing the enemy and sending them screaming, burning, stumbling. The wet and seething creepers started to smoke.

And then, Augusta saw something else.

Warboss.

Throne, the beast was big! Seven and a half feet of pure, green muscle. It had metal in its ears, one lower tooth that jutted over its face, and an almost full set of armour that offered more than one well-known symbol – Blood Angels, Imperial Fists, the eight-pointed emblem of Chaos. It was a champion, and the biggest damned ork she’d ever seen.

And if that thing was out here scavenging, then she was straight out of the schola.

It had a sharp, sly glimmer in its red eyes – and its gaze stopped on Augusta.

She snarled at it, ‘Mori blasphemus fui.’

Die, blasphemer.

Around them, the melee slowed to a fluid dance of blood and blades. From the corner of her eye, Augusta saw Viola punch her scarlet gauntlet clean into an ork’s face, saw the ork rock backwards, then shake itself and grin.

But her attention was still on the leader.

Just as its was on her.

They were the eye of the storm. The ork carried twin axes, each as long as its muscled forearm, and there was a second grenade at its belt.

It said, ‘Sis-tah.’

But the snarl of the chainsword was its only reply.

Not only big, but fast.

Augusta was used to orks being slow, bearing down an enemy by brute force, rather than by speed or skill.

Not this thing.

In her mind, she recited the Litany of Blood – a reflex, a chant of pure focus. It was part of her combat training, something she’d learned at the schola, and it made her sharp, the tool of the might that flowed through her.

But her first side-slash was blocked, then the second, the rasp of the chainsword rising to a scream as the axes caught in its teeth.

The ork didn’t falter. It was controlled and powerful. She went backwards, parrying one blow after another, her boots scattering dust and mess and fallen xenos bodies. And it came after her, its breath as foul as its coated yellow teeth. It was still talking; threats and mockery, but she had no interest in bandying words with it. It was defiler and despoiler, and it would die.

Another blow, and another. She tried to press forwards, but it gave her no gap in which to strike. Around her, the rest of the squad fought with knives and fists, hammering the orks to a bloody green pulp.

She saw one Sister falter, and fall to her knees.

‘Sis-tah.’ Grinning, the monster dropped both axes. It grabbed the chainsword, blades and all, in one massive hand, and tore it out of her grasp.

It threw it aside.

She saw Jatoya’s flamer in the corner of her vision, saw Caia and Melia together pick an ork up bodily and hurl it into a gathering of its fellows, sending all of them scattering to the floor.

They would win this!

It almost made her laugh, the sound like pure, righteous joy. With only her gauntlets, she threw herself at the monster.

But it was too fast – it grabbed her, its chainsword-carved hand around her gorget, and it lifted her clean off the floor.

Furious now, she kicked it.

Again.

Again.

She split the beast’s lip, but its grin only widened, its teeth now streaked with its own blood. Furious, she took its wrist in her grasp and tried to twist and crush its arm, force it to drop her.

It shook her like an errant underling.

‘Sister!’ Across the vox, she heard Jatoya’s cry. Her second in command couldn’t use her flamer but Jatoya barked a clear order at the rest of the squad.

‘Take it down!’

The warboss didn’t care. It shook her again, her armour clattering.

‘Sis-tah,’ it said. ‘Know you. Came to find.’

What?

‘Wait!’ Her voice was a gurgle over the vox.

The beast was laughing at her. ‘We take all. Kill sis-tahs. Take weapons.’

Understanding grew up her spine like ice. She stared at the ork as it shook her for the third time.

Take weapons.

It had known that the Sisters were here!

The fighting around them was beginning to lessen. The orks were faltering, and the Sisters hacked at them without mercy, driving them back. Many of the smaller beasts were dropping their weapons and running away. Jatoya had slung her flamer and fought with her fists alone; Augusta saw her punch an ork in the back of the neck, saw it stumble to its knees.

One red-armoured figure – she couldn’t tell who – was walking through the mess, bolter in hand, putting single shots into struggling heaps. Another was clearing the bodies from the altar steps, and she could see the broken form of Kimura, smoke still rising from the joints in her armour.

Then she saw one Sister click the neck of her helm and remove it, revealing a freckled face and bobbed red hair, all tousled and sweating.

Viola.

Her expression was like acid-carved steel.

‘Put her down.’

Viola raised her bolter, and took clear aim at the ork’s head.

The warboss paused. Augusta saw it look round at its defeated force; saw its red eyes narrow, its lip curl. Then it let her go, and she fell, crashing to her knees on the cathedral floor.

Viola came closer, the bolter aimed and steady.

The ork bared its teeth at her.

Impressed with the new mettle of the youngest Sister, Augusta stood up. She stepped in close to the warboss and said, ‘You knew we were here.’ Talking to the thing made her flesh crawl, but she had to know. ‘How? Who told you?’

‘Sis-tah.’ The warboss looked from Augusta to Viola and back. It cocked its head to one side and said, ‘So fool-ish. So tiny.’

Augusta glared at it. ‘How did you know?’

‘Blood Axes.’ It thumped the crossed-axe symbol on its chest. ‘We kill. Take weapons.’

She held its red gaze. Augusta had heard of the Blood Axes, they traded with humans sometimes – it might explain why this monster was so damned clever. But not how it had known–

Tanichus.

The realisation came like the Light of the Emperor Himself – a ray of pure Truth. Tanichus had been here before – had lived here for months – and only Tanichus had known that the Sisters were coming.

And, as Augusta remembered, he’d used his local knowledge to set the time of their reconnaissance.

He’d told them when to be here.

‘Get the missionary.’ She snapped the command over the vox, saw Caia nod and turn away.

‘What did he offer you?’ she said to the warboss.

It sneered at her, its red eyes cold.

Reached for the grenade at its belt.

She saw the motion, went to kick its wrist – but Viola was faster.

Her face like stone, the youngest Sister shot it clean through the head.

Gore spattered. The huge beast teetered for a second, almost as if startled – then it crashed to the floor like a tree falling. The whole building seemed to shake.

A pool of crimson spread out across the flagstones.

‘Good shot,’ Augusta told the youngest Sister.

Viola grinned.

Behind them, Caia had returned with Tanichus, the missionary almost gibbering with fear.

‘Found him trying to flee,’ Caia said. ‘Scuttling out of the crypt like an insect.’

‘Sister!’ The missionary was white-faced; he looked like he was about to vomit. Her armour still dripping, she walked over to him, closing her hand about his neck just like the ork’s had been about her own.

He looked at her, his eyes wide, his mouth open. ‘Sister Superior, I swear by His Light–’

‘You dare? You dare swear by the Emperor’s name?’ Her hand closed; she felt his breath catch in his throat. ‘I should crush you where you stand.’

‘Sister, please!’

At her feet, the warboss lay dead. The orks were finished and the Sisters had closed ranks at Augusta’s shoulders – the entire cathedral seemed gathered at her back, looking at the missionary.

‘You’ve been here before,’ Augusta said. ‘Lived with the townspeople. You’re the link, Tanichus. You’re the only thing that could have manipulated the pieces. Tell me, did you speak to the orks? Deal with them? Did you lie about the icon? Something to bring us out here, just so the orks could kill us for our weapons.’ She shook him like a rat.

‘Sister, I swear!’

Disgusted, she let him go, watched as Caia’s gauntleted hands closed on his shoulders and forced him to his knees.

‘Sister Kimura died,’ Augusta said. She freed the seal on her helm and took it off, enjoying the relative cool of the marsh-thick air.

Meeting her flat, steel gaze, Tanichus was starting to panic. ‘Please!’

She dropped to one knee, gripped his jaw in one bloody gauntlet and forced him to look at her.

‘Repent, heretic, you may yet save your soul.’

Tanichus was shaking now, his face pale. Sweat shone from his skin.

She’d seen this a hundred times in the suddenly caught-out-and-penitent – the guilt, the fear. And they were exactly the admission she was looking for.

‘Tell me the truth,’ she snarled at him. ‘What deal did you do?’

He was snivelling now, terrified. Words spilled out of him. ‘When I came here,’ he said, ‘the townspeople told me about the orks. The tribe had been destroying the villages, committing such horrors… and they were going to wipe out the town. The people told the orks about the cathedral. Said they could have anything they could find if they just left the town alone. Then I came, and they begged me for my help. They knew that the orks would come back. Knew what would happen to them.’ He seemed almost in tears. ‘They’re just people, Sister, just families. They have lives and fears and hopes. Children growing up.’ His face was etched in pain. ‘I just wanted to help them.’ He held back a sob.

Augusta saw the pity on Viola’s freckled face, saw the stances of the others shift – they knew full well what the orks would have done to the townspeople.

He said, ‘I went to find the orks. I told them that I would bring them weapons, armour, if they just left the people alone. And–’

‘And so you brought them us.’ Augusta’s tone was scathing.

‘You beat them, didn’t you?’ He was pleading with her. ‘You won!’

She contemplated the sobbing man, water tracing clean lines through the filth on his skin, and she understood his pain, the choice he’d made.

But it didn’t change the facts.

‘Lysimachus Tanichus, you are a traitor. You have manipulated the Adepta Sororitas to your own ends. You have betrayed the Ecclesiarchy, and the name of the Emperor.’ Tanichus opened his mouth, but she didn’t want to hear it. ‘And your story misses one critical point – what would have happened if we’d lost?’

‘You’re Sister Superior Augusta Santorus – you don’t lose!’

‘Tell that to Kimura.’

Tanichus glanced at the fallen Sister, then slumped forwards, defeated. He was sniffling. ‘I only wanted to help the people.’

‘You betrayed us to the enemy.’ She backhanded him, her metal gauntlet cutting his cheek. His head snapped sideways, then he looked back up at her, uncomprehending and horrified. ‘You brought us here on a lie. You cost the life of Sister Kimura. You tried to flee the battle. Your guilt is manifest, and your life is forfeit.’

He stared at her, his mouth open.

But she wasn’t done. ‘However, I will say this – this world, Lautis, in the Drusus Marches of the Calixis Sector, is now under the observation and protection of the Order of the Bloody Rose. We claim this cathedral, and all within it, in His name. And we will protect the people – on the assumption that they acknowledge the Emperor of All Mankind.’

Tanichus had fallen forwards. He was shaking, his hands over his face. ‘Please! I knew you’d beat them! I knew!’

‘I will deliver your protection, Tanichus. But you…’ She dragged his head up again. ‘In pythonissam non patieris vivere – I shall not suffer your life.’

‘Sister Superior…’ Viola’s voice came to her ears, not over the vox. ‘He should come back with us, face judgement–’

‘Enough!’ Augusta snapped the order and Viola recoiled. ‘I know exactly what to do with this offal.’

‘Sister,’ Jatoya said, more cautiously. ‘It is not our place–’

‘He has mocked us!’ Augusta barked, furious. ‘Kimura is dead!’

Tanichus threw himself at her feet. ‘Please!’

Viola and Jatoya exchanged a glance.

Augusta reached down with one hand, and dragged the sobbing man back to his feet. ‘You do not take the name of the saint in vain. You do not manipulate the Order to your own ends. And believe me, if the orks had won, both you and your town would still have been destroyed. That warboss would have cut you to pieces and eaten you.’

Tanichus was shaking now. She tore the rosarius out of his grasp, gave it to the closest of her Sisters.

Then she pulled her fleur-de-lys punch-dagger from the front of her armour, and slit Tanichus’ throat.

Augusta felt Viola flinch, though she said nothing. Tanichus gaped and fell, bubbles on his lips, hands to his throat, his blood mingling with that of the dead ork.

His last word, as he hit the floor, was Mercy.

AT THE SIGN OF THE BRAZEN CLAW

Guy Haley

Guy Haley needs little introduction. A Black Library fan favourite, Guy’s engaging and varied style has allowed him to quest far and wide throughout his impressive writing career.

The first part of this new serial draws on classic story-within-a-story narratives, as a group of stranded travellers each relate a different account of the Mortal Realms. This instalment explores the mysteries of the Brazen Claw, a gigantic peak in the shape of a clawed hand, and a fire that must never be allowed to go out.

Near the Amethyst Heights of Shyish there was a lonely pinnacle of rock – not so tall as the mountains six miles distant, but in form remarkable. They called it the Brazen Claw, for it resembled a great limb stretching up from the earth, as if a giant entombed alive had broken the surface of its grave only to perish upon the cusp of freedom.

Nestling in the stone hand was a many-roomed inn. The cupped palm of the claw was the inn’s courtyard. A wide road of boards curled around and away down the Brazen Claw’s arm to the plains a dizzying distance below. The inn was large by the standards of such buildings, and it needed to be, for it played host to travellers heading out from Shyish through the Argent Gate.

The inn adorned the spire of the middle finger like a ring, circling it completely. Stables and outbuildings clustered around the bottoms of the other fingers, and filled up the spaces between. There was space for a hundred guests and all their trappings, but the scale of the claw made the inn seem small.

On brighter days, the sun turned the claw into a gauntlet of brass. No finer view could be found thereabouts, or so it was held. Not that evening. Clouds hid the sun. A storm shrieked from the heart of Shyish towards the realm’s deathly hinterlands, scourging all before it with whips of rain. Wind hooted through the fingers. The claw grasped hail, its lust for the clouds forever denied.

Atop the middle finger a sky dock shook miserably in the storms, its hawsers thrumming, bolts squeaking in timber. A lesser construction would have shaken free, but this was duardin made, and no storm could fell it. Nevertheless, no one waited for passage atop the platform, and the inn was almost empty.

This is the setting for our tale. A claw of stone, black in the rain, a merry inn groaning in the lash of a gathering tempest, and all around the darkness of midnight come early at the edges of the lands of death.

There were five of them in the inn at the beginning. Horrin would remember them until he died. When more immediate memories faded into the haze of years, that night remained forever clear.

Two of the five were Ninian and the stable boy, Barnabas. He knew them better than any other person, Ninian being his wife, while Barnabas, though a foundling, was as good as a son to him.

Of the travellers who made up the rest of the company he knew nothing to begin with other than their names. They sat at tables in front of the bar, both near the fire, but alone.

There first was a venerable duardin with hair and beard so white they shone like silver in the lamplight. The name he signed in the lodging book was Idenkor Stonbrak. An alderman, he said, from a coastal town up Melket way in Ghyran. He said little after giving his name. He spent the evening staring into the fire with his heavy feet upon a stool, while exhausting and refilling his long-stemmed pipe over and over until his head was shrouded in fogs of fragrant smoke.

The second guest was a nervous man of unknown lands, pale as an inhabitant of Shyish yet not a native of that realm, though every living thing became so eventually. Pludu Quasque, he was called. His robes were dirty with hard use, but had once been rich, and the dagger and sword he carried were those of a wealthy man. He muttered spare words over a bowl of soup while casting suspicious glances as readily as wayward boys cast stones.

Horrin peered closely at his ledger, leaning his stout belly against the bar to better fill in the columns. A canopy of rare, Azyrite emberwood gleamed over the counter. The inn being in Shyish where the dead roamed free, expensive charms hung from the canopy, but they rested quietly despite the roaring wind, reassuring Horrin the storm was solely a natural phenomenon. For all the inn’s precarious situation, it was well built, so he ignored its shakings and shudderings, and the insistent drumbeat of hail rapping on the shingles, and the squeak of doors in empty rooms yearning to burst open and leap from their hinges. Draughts teased candle flames into stuttering outrage. Water dribbled down the stone finger rising up through the inn. The smell of rain blew under the door, but inside it was safe, and warm. The fire burned high in the fireplace carved into the rock. The protective sigils around it danced with orange shadows. He glanced at the blaze. Reassured that it burned brightly and had plenty of fuel, he went back to his ledger. The numbers satisfied him. Business was good.

The wind outside built to a throaty roar. The timbers of the inn creaked. An unsecured shutter in one of the upper rooms banged loudly, startling Quasque so hard his hand twitched and upset his bowl.

Ninian rushed over, cloth in hand.

‘Let me get that for you, master,’ she said.

Quasque responded poorly, and flapped his hands. ‘Away, away! Oh, my robe is ruined!’ he said, although the ruination was long done, and the stain hardly worsened it.

Thunder rolled away over the Amethyst Heights in reply to Quasque’s complaints. By Horrin’s reckoning the storm’s full violence would be upon them soon.

‘A hard night,’ said Stonbrak, and puffed some more on his pipe. ‘Fell things are abroad, mark my words.’ His eyes glittered like gems embedded in stone.

As soon as the words were said, the wind battered harder at the inn, rattling the walls with hailstones. The fire died down.

‘Steady, steady, keep burning!’ Horrin muttered to himself.

His heart resumed its normal rhythm as the flames climbed high, then leapt again as the door flexed in its frame.

Barnabas let out a frightened noise and ran around the back of the bar counter.

‘Nobody there,’ said Horrin with forced cheer. He took a nonchalant step along the counter towards his pistol’s hiding place. ‘It’s just the wind.’

Three powerful knocks belied his statement.

‘Wind doesn’t knock!’ said Quasque. He got to his feet, his eyes wide with fear. Horrin’s hand rested on the polished butt of his gun.

‘A traveller then,’ said Horrin.

‘Who’d dare the trip from the plain?’ said Quasque. ‘To walk the stairs in this weather would be to make an open pact with death!’

The door slammed back into the wall with a resounding crack. Quasque fumbled through his robes to find the hilt of his sword, his other straying into his shirt to fetch out an amulet. The duardin narrowed his eyes and worked his mouth around his pipe. He continued staring into the fire, but his hand moved casually to the throat of the jewelled axe hanging from his belt.

A tall figure stood in the doorway. Water streamed from his cloak. The spreading horns upon his head were lit by a flash of lightning. Horrin swallowed.

‘Gods save us!’ whispered Quasque.

The figure stepped into the light of the common room, and threw back his hood. The duardin’s throaty chuckle ground away the thick silence.

‘’Tis but an aelf, skinny and dripping wet!’ He laughed plumes of smoke into the breeze stealing around the traveller. ‘Probably weighs twice as much as usual.’

The traveller closed the door, shutting out the storm and transforming himself from sinister interloper to one of the company.

The aelf carried three bags: two small sacks and one larger pack, which he placed carefully upon the floor. Now he was inside, his horns were revealed as antlers mounted on an ornate helm. He grasped them and lifted the helm from his head. Water ran from blued steel and pattered onto the wooden boards as he set the helmet on a table. A sword of peculiar design sat at his hip. Upon his back in a case was a beautiful unstringed bow. Each of the inn’s occupants were granted the touch of his immortal gaze, and all felt themselves judged.

When he spoke, his voice was one of such mellifluous beauty that tears pricked Horrin’s eyes.

‘My pardon for shocking you, for I can see that I did,’ he said. ‘I merely seek shelter until the sky ship comes. My name is Maesa, of the nomad clans.’ He had fine bearing. As he divested himself of his sopping outerwear, his presence grew. From his gear and his manner, it was obvious he was of high birth.

Stonbrak grunted. He removed his hand from his axe, folded his arms and went back to his endless contemplation of the flame’s unobtainable jewels.

Quasque sat down slowly, eyes wide and mouth working around silent words.

‘It is we who should apologise!’ said Horrin, recovering his wits. ‘We have few of your kind cross our door, and it is such a poor evening we were all amazed to hear your knock.’

‘My mount is sure-footed,’ said the aelf. ‘I had nothing to fear.’ He paused. ‘Am I not welcome?’

Horrin dismissed the aelf’s concerns with a gesture. ‘No, no! All are welcome at the Brazen Claw! Provided they have the means to pay and a disinclination to trouble, of course,’ he said with a smile.

‘But of course,’ said the aelf.

Horrin’s hand moved from the butt of the gun hung below the bar and rested on the countertop. ‘I assume you’re here for the midnight sailing?’

The aelf nodded.

‘I’m afraid it’s been and gone,’ said Horrin regretfully. ‘Master Grindleson ran before the storm and left in double quick time to save his engines. There are no more ships scheduled for tonight.’

‘That is unfortunate,’ said the aelf. He picked up his bags and came further into the inn, stepping down the curved steps from the entrance into the wide pit of the common room.

‘Ah, it happens,’ said Horrin. ‘There’ll be another ship along before evening tomorrow. I never did know a storm here last longer than a day and night, and you know the duardin – they keep to their word whether it’s a blood debt or a timetable. They’ll be here.’

The aelf’s stare flustered him. He fought back the awe his guest engendered in him.

‘What might I get for you, master aelf?’ Horrin asked. ‘It is a vile night to be abroad. I suggest something warm. I have soup, freshly made?’

The aelf shook his head. The gesture was such a simple motion, but possessed grace a human could never match. He took up his bags, but left his helm upon the table near the door, where it watched the company with hollow eyes.

‘I will take warmed wine, with cinnaberry and sweet honey, if you have it.’

Horrin gave a modest smile. ‘We are on the major sky routes to the Argent Gate, my lord, we have victuals to suit every palate here.’

The duardin grunted and shifted in his seat. ‘Aelf diets.’

Maesa glanced at him before walking by Quasque and taking a seat away from the others, yet also within the warm circle of the fire. He rested his pack against the outer wall, took off his bow and placed his two smaller bags near to him: one by his side on the bench, the other on the table by his left hand. It seemed to move in the dancing candle flame.

Maesa’s words snatched Horrin’s attention from the sack. ’Do you have a thimble, made of silver or copper long out of the ground? No iron, nothing of the recent earth, certainly no pottery?’

Horrin glanced questioningly at his wife.

‘I have my grandmother’s old thimble,’ Ninian said. ‘That is of pewter, I think. I do not use it – it is too small for my thumb.’

‘That will suffice,’ said the aelf.

‘For what purpose, my lord?’ asked Horrin.

‘You shall see,’ said Maesa.

Horrin bowed. ‘Then my wife shall fetch it.’

Ninian bustled off, her skirts a rustle.

‘Clean it with pure spirit,’ the aelf called after her. ‘Bring it upon a wooden board. Fill it with the same drink you shall serve me. Do not touch it with anything of iron!’

‘Are there any other stipulations, my lord?’ said Horrin.

‘None. Only to make sure my glass is clean,’ said the aelf. He took a leather pouch from his side and laid it on the table. Coins jingled. ‘My mount requires stabling. He is outside.’

Horrin looked over to the wide-eyed Barnabas and jerked his head. The boy got to his feet and came forward a few faltering steps.

‘Your stable boy?’ asked the aelf.

Horrin nodded. ‘Barnabas, that’s his name.’

‘Not your son, though,’ said Maesa, looking between the man and the boy.

‘Not by blood, but son he is to me nonetheless,’ insisted Horrin.

Maesa turned to Barnabas and spoke in kindly tones. ‘Do not be afraid, Barnabas. The storm is strong, but Aelphis will shelter you, and if any evil comes, you can be sure he will lay down his noble life to protect you. You need only show him where he must sleep and remove his saddle. He will do the rest.’

‘A horse?’ said the boy.

‘A great stag!’ said the aelf, kindling a sense of wonder in them all.

The aelf’s words soothed the boy. Maesa’s amber eyes did not blink. Horrin half suspected magic to be at work, though he could sense none, and the charms set around the bar remained still. Barnabas nodded hesitantly and trotted to the door. He pulled his oilskin from its hook and went outside. The fury of the storm snarled into the room, and he was chased out of the common room with the bang of wood on wood.

‘Masters Stonbrak and Quasque,’ said Horrin, introducing the others as he came to Maesa’s table with a lit taper. ‘They share your situation. They too came for the scheduled flight but missed it on account of its earliness.’ He leaned in and touched the taper to the candle in the clay lamp in front of the aelf.

‘Move that to one side, if you please – my companion dislikes bright lights,’ said Maesa.

‘Companion?’ questioned Horrin.

The aelf held Horrin’s eyes with his own, reached for the bag and undid its drawstring.

Ninian arrived at the table and set the aelf’s drinks down in time to see a tiny, wizened green hand reach out from the bag, grasp the lip and pull it back.

‘Cold. Wet,’ said a whining, petulant voice. ‘Shattercap likes not this bag. Shattercap is not a round of cheese, or a block of bread to be kept in such a pouch.’

A homunculus stalked onto the table. Its skin was the pale green of young leaves, its back hunched. The arms were a little too long for its body, the flat face and the head it adorned a little too small, but otherwise it looked like a tiny man shrunk down so he might be kept in the aelf’s bag.

Horrin leaned away, then back in. He reached out tentatively. The creature hissed at him, and Horrin snatched his fingers back. Ninian’s hand flew up to her mouth and she gasped.

‘Now, now, Shattercap,’ said the aelf. ‘Do not frighten our hosts.’

‘Is it safe?’ said Horrin. He glanced from imp to aelf and back to imp.

‘While he remains under my command, yes,’ said the aelf. ‘And he will do so as long as his geas are respected.’

‘Aha, that explains the thimble,’ said Horrin.

‘The thimble is for his size, but the materials are important, yes,’ said Maesa.

‘Shattercap thirsts, my prince,’ said the creature. It looked up at the aelf with wide eyes. Every part of them was green. The irises were the dark of forest moss, the pupils the near black of water pooled in tree boles, the scleras pale and luminous as insect lights.

‘Go ahead, take your fill,’ said Maesa. He gestured to the thimble.

Shattercap scuttled towards it, making Ninian take a step back. Horrin leaned in nearer, fascinated, so his face was only a few inches from the creature as it suckled at the thimble’s edge.

‘What is he?’ asked Horrin.

‘I’ll tell you what it is.’ Stonbrak thumped over the room. His stumpy frame rolled around an uneven gait, sending his brawny arms swinging out to knock furniture aside. He halted at the table where the aelf sat. ‘This is an aelven princeling, a wanderer of the least trustworthy and most fickle of all his treacherous breed.’ He jabbed the stem of his pipe at Shattercap accusingly. ‘And that is a spite, a malevolent spirit of the forest. It has no place in the realms of civilised folk.’

‘Lands of wights and ghouls not so civilised, says Shattercap,’ said the spite slyly.

Stonbrak’s moustache bristled.

The prince gave the duardin a mild look. ‘I have done you no wrong. Nor has my companion.’

‘You deny it is dangerous?’ asked Stonbrak.

‘A sword is dangerous, but it is safe, so long as it remains in the sheath,’ said the prince.

‘Pah!’ said Stonbrak. ‘Most swords have no mind of their own. This blade here can prick you at will.’

‘I beg you, Master Stonbrak, please do not insult our guest – this is no night for disagreements!’ Horrin made light of the situation, though the spite unnerved him.

‘I should insult him,’ said Stonbrak, ‘for bringing that in here. These aelves cannot be trusted, Master Horrin!’

‘Please,’ said Horrin. ‘Ninian, get our guests a drink, the house will pay! We have a long night ahead.’

Stonbrak jerked out a chair from under the table. Shattercap flinched from the duardin and cradled his thimble of wine protectively. The atmosphere thickened with more than the duardin’s pipe smoke. Shattercap whimpered and crept closer to the aelf.

The bang of the door as Barnabas returned broke the tension. Rain pattered off the stable boy’s oilskin as he hurriedly shut out the storm.

Stonbrak curled his lip.

‘Very well. My apologies,’ said Stonbrak. ‘This storm has frayed my temper.’

‘I accept your apology,’ said Maesa graciously. He extended his hand and indicated the chair Stonbrak had pulled out. ‘Please, you were about to sit.’

Stonbrak nodded and sat himself down. ‘I was. To keep an eye on your pet.’

‘Shattercap no one’s pet!’ said the spite.

‘I tell you what,’ said Horrin, clapping his hands. ‘We’re all strangers here. The storm outside is blowing hard. We can do nothing but wait. Why don’t we pass the time by telling each other a tale or two? Come! Let us sit together – it is more convivial that way.’

Stonbrak would not take his gimlet eyes from the spite, but gave a sour shrug that might have been agreement. Quasque blinked uncertainly, but then came forward and sat at the table with the duardin and the aelf. Horrin stepped back, arms held wide.

‘Barnabas, come listen.’

The stable boy joined the travellers, then Ninian who brought a tray laden with ale and wine. She sat also, and all were close by one another.

‘I’ll start, shall I?’ Horrin was an old hand at this game, having used it many a time to calm nerves in similar storms. It was a fine way of getting his customers to drink more too, and if truth be told he enjoyed the entertainment for its own sake.

‘I’ll tell you the story of how I came to make this place. That’s right,’ he said. ‘I built the inn of the Brazen Claw, but it wasn’t so simple as dragging timber up to the top of this eyrie, and even that wasn’t simple at all…’

Horrin took up a wooden mug of beer, coughed politely into his hand, and began.

‘When I was a young man,’ he said, ‘I decided to run away from home. My father was a tomb warden from Pandanjan. If you don’t know it, it’s a necropolis out to the west, where the living and the dead live side by side, as in so many places in this realm. My father wished for me to follow him into the world of ancient ledgers and endless columns of numbers enumerating the dead. But though I’m Shyish born and bred, and my father’s roots go back to the time of myth, my mother was a landsteer from Ghur. Her people trekked the lands of that realm in giant wagons pulled by beasts we know here only from their bones. I’ve no idea how she came to Shyish, nor why she committed herself in marriage to so dry and dusty a man as my father, yet they knew happiness in their own fashion. She lightened his life with her joy, and passed a little of her wildness into me on the way.

‘Alas, no story truly has a happy ending. My mother died when I was but a boy, and my father, always cold, became colder. A cruelty crept into him that was absent before her death. The afterlife of my mother’s people was far away from the lands where we dwelled, and difficult to enter. He resolved to go there anyway to see her again. I was to remain behind to learn his trade. I disagreed.’ Horrin laughed softly. ‘The day I was to be apprenticed to the tomb wardens, I took leave of my father, Pandanjan and my entire life.

‘I do not know where I intended to go. I was not my father. I did not wish to disturb my mother’s shade, but to drink deep of the well of life. I thought perhaps to go to my mother’s land, and wandered far to find a realmgate that would take me to the right part of Ghur. The Argent Gate I heard might take me where I needed to go, so I set out to find it.

‘At length I came here to the claw. No one lived in these parts then. Sigmar’s light had yet to drive out the darker things that haunt the brown woods of the hills and plain, and so I was alone, and afraid. I headed here for no reason other than I could see the claw over the trees. You can imagine my delight upon glimpsing a small stone hut built at the base, with a garden and animals. I was amazed, for the forest was a dreary place and I had witnessed no living things for several days, so long that I had begun to fear I had strayed too far into unliving countries.

‘An old woman dwelt in the hut. She was as pleased to see me as I was to see her, and came out with a great beam of a smile as soon as I was within hailing distance of her home. She fed me, and I asked her the way to the Argent Gate. Remember then, the duardin of the sky had yet to come to this land. This is what she told me.

‘“Young man,” she said. “The Argent Gate is four days walk from here, out of the forest and over the Plains of Teeth, where howling, hungering things roam.”

‘“Is there a safe way?” I asked.

‘She shrugged, and her ancient bones popped. “I do not know. I have never ventured far from this place. There is a well, and a little life here, and what little I have are counted riches in this country.”

‘She laughed then, as did I,’ Horrin said. ‘Of course I did not know then that the Argent Gate is in the sky, and cannot be reached from the Plain of Teeth, and I don’t think she did either. “Stay the night before you go,” she said. “You will need your strength to see you through.”

‘I offered her the few coins I had, but she reached out a warm hand and closed my fingers around my money. “Hospitality to strangers is its own reward, young man,” she said. A principle I have kept to my whole life since.

‘Nights here are long and cold. Bruised aurorae writhe over the stars, making the trees dance without a breeze. I suffered a restless night haunted by dreams of the things that hunt upon the Plains of Teeth. But I did sleep, and was awoken to a breakfast of fresh eggs, which I devoured gratefully.

‘“I have a favour to ask,” she said to me as I prepared to leave. “If you would please take this basket of food and these two faggots of wood to my husband, who works upon the summit of this rock, I would be grateful.” She pointed upward, to the top of the claw. I was surprised, because she had made no mention of her husband before, and I wondered on the nature of his labours. “I make the journey every day, and though I am still able, I would welcome a rest for one single morning. I am old, and my joints pain me.”’ Horrin smiled ruefully.

‘Foolish,’ whispered Shattercap. ‘You tell stories. Do you never listen to them? Silly fat man.’

‘Hush,’ said Maesa.

‘Well, I was not fat in those days, I assure you,’ said Horrin, taking the interruption in his stride. ‘But besides having the physique of youth, I had its naivety.’ He took a sip of his ale, before continuing.

‘“Of course!” I said to her, happy to repay the woman’s kindness. I took the basket, placed the wood upon my shoulders, and ran up the winding stairs that led to this place for the first time. Back then the spiral road was narrow, more of a spoked ladder, and poorly maintained. The wood was old and grey, and many stairs were missing from the sockets carved into the stony flesh of the arm. My eager bounding became slower and slower the higher I went, and my caution became fear, until I reached the summit and threw myself into the palm of the claw.

‘I stood, amazed. Such a sight! It still stirs me, as if I were cupped in the hand of a god, and that may not be too far from the truth.

‘There was no inn here, of course, only piles of wood like the bundles I carried, and the fireplace.’ He pointed to the fireplace set into the finger incorporated into the inn. ‘It was very old, and already carved with the strange symbols you see there. All of it, lintel, grate and chimney, was hewn into the rock of the claw itself.’

Unlike the meticulous craftsmanship of the inn, everything about the fireplace was out of true, as if the maker had heard what a fireplace was, but had never seen one.

‘The old woman’s husband was as ancient and poverty-struck as his wife. He was astounded as I emerged, panting, into the palm, but his wide-eyed surprise turned to a grin of delight as I approached. He was so pleased to see me I could not help but feel a touch uneasy.’

‘Told you,’ said Shattercap.

Horrin gave him an admonishing look. Shattercap pulled a face.

‘“My my!” The old man said. “A visitor, a boy!”

‘“I have for you this basket of food, and this bundle of sticks,” I said. I dropped the wood and held out the basket. He took it from me, peered within, then set it down. In his other hand he held a poker of plain iron, which he worked in the fire, sending out showers of orange sparks from the chimney slot some hundred feet over our heads.

‘“What do you do here?” I asked him.

‘“Ah, a strange story,” he said. “I tend this fire for I must. It cannot go out. It must be an eternal flame!” he said. “It warms the hand of this giant so he will not wake. The rest of him is safe down below, under the earth, but his upthrust claw here is exposed, and chill. If it gets cold, he will wake.” He winked at me. “And we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

‘I looked at the vastness of the claw. “I suppose not,” I said, and shivered.

‘“Tell me, boy,” he said. “You have done my wife a great service. Do you suppose you could do one for me also?”

‘“Name it, sir,” I said. “Your wife has been very kind.”

‘“The fire cannot be left untended,” he said to me. “But I have not been down to my hut for three long years. I have hunched down over this fire for so long I forget what it is to stand tall. I desire to stretch my back, my legs and maybe,” he laughed and nodded at an alcove in the finger not far from the fire, where a dirty blanket languished, “sleep an hour or so in my bed, maybe within the embraces of my good wife?” He winked again, in a most repulsive and lascivious manner.

‘By then my sense of unease had grown,’ said Horrin. ‘But I felt I owed a debt to these strange people, and what harm could it do, to tend his fire for a few hours? I felt sorry for him. That was my mistake. Remember, I thought myself a man, but I was but a boy, with a callow gullibility.

‘“By all means!” I said. His eyes lit up. He proffered to me his poker.

‘“Then take this fire iron. Make sure the flames die no further than this point here.” He indicated a mark on the rock. “I shall return soon.”’

Horrin smiled sadly. ‘Naturally, he did not return. Ever. I sat all night and then all day tending to the fire, hoping that he would come back, but knowing that he would not. At the dawning of the second morning I went down the stairs here, racing to outpace the fire’s consumption of its fuel. The hut was empty, the couple and their possessions gone, the animals abandoned, though my few things were neatly left for me. In disbelieving terror I ran back up. The fire was burning low. I paid it no heed. I had decided to run. Down the stairs I went, the crack of the dying fire loud in my ears.

‘Upon the third turn of the stair, the ground began to shake. A terrible, low moan issued from the ground. I threw myself to the side. Slipping, I almost fell, but caught the stairs to prevent my fall. The animals at the hut were driven wild with terror – such a cacophony they made for so few! A great crack raced across the ground, then a second, deep and black. I looked to the forest, yearning for its freedom, then I looked above. The arm is huge, I thought. What monster must it belong to? What would it do should it awaken?

‘I realised then what I must do. I would like to say that heroism motivated me, but it was fear – fear that the monster would slay me. I crawled up the stairs. The arm began to shudder. Another moan came from the ground. I reached the palm. The fire was smoking out. The last ember close to dying.

‘The arm swayed. An awful cry, louder than the first, issued from the ground. This was my only chance. I took up a fistful of dried moss, and cast it on the fire, piling kindling upon it. In my panic, I nearly extinguished the last few sparks, and thrust my hands into the warm ash to shift the fuel about, dropping it with singed fingers onto that last, glowing ember, hoping against hope it would catch.

‘Stone ground on stone. I looked up. The fingers were closing! They were straighter when I arrived than they are now. Perhaps the monster had been asleep too long, for as they began to close the little finger broke, and fell away. Blind now with terror, I blew through my snot and my blubbering onto the fire. The shaking grew and grew, the fingers ground and popped. I thought I would die.

‘The fire burst into life anew.

‘The shaking stopped.

‘For a year I was alone, building up the fire, then racing to the ground to collect what wood I could and what food I could find, heaping the fire at night and banking it with turfs so I might sleep a few hours.

‘When the first wanderer came, I had it in mind to do to him what the old man had done to me. But then I thought on my misery, and realised it was only my own foolishness that had condemned me, and that I had no right to make another suffer in my stead. I shared the food I had and explained my situation. The traveller tarried a few days, bringing me food and wood, while I steadfastly refused his offer to tend the fire. “Hospitality to strangers is its own reward, young man,” the old lady had said. I think she meant it. I like to believe they were not bad people. I imagined they had been entrapped in some way and had languished here for years. What could they do? Now it was my turn to tend the fire.’

‘I would have killed them. Eaten their eyes,’ said Shattercap.

‘Does he mean it?’ asked Barnabas.

Maesa nodded.

‘Then you would have been doomed,’ said Horrin. ‘Kindness saved me.

‘The first traveller left. When the second wanderer passed by, I gained a jewel for my kindness. I could not trade it, but its beauty made my life more bearable. The third stayed a month, and helped me build a warm house, which is now a store on the far side of the yard. So with the third, it was with the fourth and the fifth. As each stranger was treated with kindness I too was shown kindness, until one day the duardin of the sky came with an offer. They wished to build a platform for their packet ships here, and use this place as a way station. I agreed, and the inn was my reward. Now people come here every day. I am good to them, so fate is good to me. Always, I have adhered to the rules of hospitality, and because of that I am a rich man, with a fine wife, a good home and servants to help me tend the fire, although I can never leave, and the fire must never, ever go out.’

The fire popped in the grate. A tumble of embers and ash spilled onto the hearth.

‘So you eat much here, that is why you are fat now,’ said Shattercap. ‘That is the point of this story.’

‘That is not the point of the story, small evil,’ said the prince. The spite cringed at his disapproval.

‘Life has been good, these are the wages of kindness,’ said Horrin, lifting up his hand extravagantly. ‘That is the point.’

‘If I am good, will I too grow fat?’ asked Shattercap of Maesa.

‘If you choose to be,’ said Maesa.

‘But I can choose nothing,’ said the spite. ‘You are my master.’

‘Because you have not yet learned your lesson.’

Ninian looked questioningly at Prince Maesa.

‘I am teaching him how not to be wicked,’ said the aelf, and sipped at his wine.

‘You could leave, Master Horrin,’ said Quasque suddenly. He blinked, surprised that he had spoken. ‘Someone else could take on your curse.’

‘I could,’ said Horrin. ‘They could.’

‘Then why are you here?’ hissed Shattercap. ‘Sitting on this horrid rock in all the soaking rain. It makes no sense to Shattercap.’

‘Because I always am here!’ Horrin said with great cheer. ‘And I would be no other place.’ Ninian kissed his cheek fondly, and he placed his arm around her. He raised his beer in salute. ‘I was a foolish boy, but no longer. Brewer, carpenter, farrier – I have learned to be them all. Hundreds of people come here. Tales from every land I hear. Burning a few logs every day is no great price to pay. I am glad for my fate.’

‘Kindness is its own reward,’ said Stonbrak sarcastically. ‘What a fine moral for aelves and weaklings.’

‘You do not believe it to be true, master duardin?’

Stonbrak snorted by way of reply.

‘I’ve got a story for you,’ said Stonbrak. ‘I’ll tell it now.’ He tapped out his pipe on the sole of his massive boot, and scratched a horny fingernail around the bowl, sending flakes of char showering onto the table. Shattercap sneezed and retreated to his master’s side. The prince petted him absent-mindedly, his calm, amber eyes fixed on the duardin’s glowering face.

The duardin pulled out a stained leather pouch of tobacco from his tunic and refilled his pipe. ‘It is a tale of vile, aelven treachery in return for such kindness as you describe. You are wrong, innkeeper, and you will soon hear why.’

About the Authors

David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novels Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar and Vulkan: Lord of Drakes. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, several stories involving the Grey Knights, including Warden of the Blade and Castellan, as well as titles for The Beast Arises and the Space Marine Battles series. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written Neferata: Mortarch of Blood. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

Peter McLean has written the short stories ‘Baphomet by Night’ and ‘No Hero’ for Warhammer 40,000. He grew up in Norwich, where he began story-writing, practising martial arts and practical magic, and lives there still with his wife.

‘The Path to Glory’ is Evan Dicken ’s first story for Black Library. He has been an avid reader of Black Library novels since he found dog-eared copies of Trollslayer , Xenos and First and Only nestled in the “Used Fantasy/Sci-fi” rack of his local gaming store. He still considers himself an avid hobbyist, although the unpainted Chaos Warband languishing in his basement would beg to differ. By day, he studies old Japanese maps and crunches data at The Ohio State University.

Mike Brooks is a speculative fiction author who lives in Nottingham, UK. His fiction for Black Library includes the short stories ‘The Path Unclear’ and ‘Choke Point’, and the novella Wanted: Dead . When not writing, he works for a homelessness charity, plays guitar, sings in a punk band, and DJs wherever anyone will tolerate him.

Steven B Fischer is a writer and medical student living in southern Wisconsin, who enjoys kayaking and backpacking in his free time. ‘The Emperor’s Wrath’ is his first story for Black Library.

Josh Reynolds is the author of the Horus Heresy Primarchs novel Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix, and the audio dramas Blackshields: The False War and Blackshields: The Red Fief. His Warhammer 40,000 work includes Lukas the Trickster, Fabius Bile: Primogenitor, Fabius Bile: Clonelord and Deathstorm, and the novellas Hunter’s Snare and Dante’s Canyon, along with the audio drama Master of the Hunt. He has written many stories set in the Age of Sigmar, including the novels Eight Lamentations: Spear of Shadows, Hallowed Knights: Plague Garden, Nagash: The Undying King and Soul Wars. His tales of the Warhammer old world include The Return of Nagash and The Lord of the End Times, and two Gotrek & Felix novels. He lives and works in Sheffield.

Nate Crowley is a writer and compulsive over-imaginer. He lives in Walsall with his partner and a cat he insists on calling Turkey Boy, where he loves going to the zoo and making good stew. ‘The Enemy of My Enemy’ is Nate’s first story for Black Library, and he has recently impulse-purchased some orks.

Filip Wiltgren is a writer and tabletop game designer based in Sweden. He has previously worked as a journalist, copywriter and communications officer, and when he isn’t writing, he spends time with his wife and kids. ‘The Firstborn Daughter’ is his first story for Black Library.

‘Mercy’ is Danie Ware ’s first story for Black Library. Outside of writing, Danie is a publicist, event organiser and a frequent panel member as an expert on genre marketing and retailing. She has long-held interests in role-playing, re-enactment, vinyl art toys and personal fitness, and lives in Carshalton, south London, with her son and two cats.

Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Wolfsbane and Pharos , the Primarchs novel Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dark Imperium, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity . He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises series. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik , as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat . He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon . He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

A Black Library Publication

This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Lie Setiawan.

Inferno! Volume 1 © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Inferno! Volume 1, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, Age of Sigmar, Necromunda, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.

All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78030-929-3

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.