Contents

Cover

The Place of Pain and Healing – Justin D Hill

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

THE PLACE OF PAIN AND HEALING

Justin D Hill

I

A century before, these rough wool fibres had been shorn from giant yaks on the planet of Fenris. They had been rubbed, steam-pressed and boiled in successive rounds of rigorous processing till the individual fibres had matted into one impenetrable military-grade felt. The sections of felt served in a small but vital role, as dampers in the magazines of the Space Wolves Chapter’s void fleet. But now the strike cruiser’s magazines in which they reside are empty. The pallets of fyceline propellant are bare, the cartridges spent in massive broadsides, and the piles of disused felt are stacked in the corner of one magazine aboard Alpha IX, Fang of Fenris, where they act as crude bedding for the dirt-smeared form of Whiteshield Minka Lesk.

Minka lies pale and still and dirt-smeared. She might be a corpse, but for the occasional sign of life. A twitch, a flicker of eyelids, a half-formed word that could be alarm, or anger, or fear. Or all of those together, for during the battle there was no time to make sense of what she was going through. The Battle of Cadia is a tangle of nightmare moments, twisted and bound and tightened into an ugly, cancerous lump. But now her brain starts to tug at the loose ends, trying to unravel it, trying to process it all.

To sanitise the insane.

In one dream she is squatting in the sally port of the eastern gates of Kasr Myrak, hundreds of other Whiteshields around her – packed like sheep, clutching their lasrifles in trembling fingers. The skies of Cadia have always been a nightmare bruise of swirling purple – as the Eye of Terror stared down at them – and they have grown up thinking that there could be no worse a sight. But now they know that they were wrong.

Hell has vomited a host of spiked and barnacled and rusted hulks into orbit above them. The skies are thick with enmity, and searchlights illuminate faces, tentacles and screaming maws of fanged teeth howling despair down onto the planet.

This is something they will tell their grandchildren of, if they live… which looks doubtful at this particular moment in time, because the Black Fleet smothers Cadia like a swarm of cockroaches, blotting out the light and hope and any chance of reinforcement. The dark sky strobes with fire and lance-strikes as it hails its fury down at the planet.

Minka and the other Whiteshields have never experienced anything like this. The void shield bubble crackles and fizzes as energy trails ground themselves. But they know enough to know that this is just a prelude, a prologue, a preliminary, a preparation.

The enemy’s gunners are seeking a weak point, and the tension builds as the void generators whine with effort. Above the Western Bastion, the blue bubble fails with a pop of pressure. Klaxons wail. Flames leap up, and a sudden lightning storm hammers down. Eruptions rip through the whole massive edifice, and then the thin blue shell of the void shield returns. But even the commanders are rattled. Their vox-enhanced voices carry over the huddled heads of the Whiteshields. Medicae teams run past them, shouting instructions to one another.

The casualties are clearly severe. Units are already being redeployed. The shock trooper platoons next to them move off along the barricades.

‘Fill the gap!’ The order goes out and the Whiteshields shuffle sideways. Their lines stretch thinner. They’re on their own now.

The onslaught drags on. The stress becomes too much for some. They cry out in terror, weep silently or fire wild shots into the night sky.

‘Hold fire!’ Another order goes out, and grim discipline returns. But each time the void shields crackle, Minka is sure they will fail. She is beyond terrified. She presses her eyes closed, tries to recite her catechism, to recall things her mother told her, to run through the many codes of her Whiteshield training. But she is shaking so much her teeth rattle within her skull and she cannot get the words out. It is all she can do to hold onto her lasrifle.

In desperation she reaches inside her flak armour. Her fingers close over the items within, and she presses them into her palm. The hard metal shapes are deeply familiar. One is an autorifle hard round; the other is a cheap press-metal image of Saint Katherine picked up on a scholam field trip to the Adepta Sororitas abbey, perching on the crags above Kasr Batrok.

She prays to Saint Katherine of the Order of Our Martyred Lady and feels a moment’s calm spread through her body. She focuses on this moment of calm, and at last her teeth come to rest, and the words start to tumble out.

She prays with a fervency she has never known before. She doesn’t ask for much.

‘Just let it begin,’ she begs, and petitions for courage and strength and a clean end, when it should come. ‘And let me take a heretic with me,’ she asks. It is a little thing to trouble a saint with. It is all she dares to hope for. ‘Saint Katherine, please do not let me die a Whiteshield.’

There is another devastating lance-strike hitting the outer defences, and suddenly a whole section of wall lifts up into the air as tunnel mines erupt along its length. The blast throws her down onto her face. They’re all struggling to get up as a whistle blows and the call goes out: ‘Breach! Breach!’

And then that dream ends as suddenly as a human life. And another begins.

Minka is weeks into the battle. She is lying on a pile of rubble with the crumbled edifices of habs rising up on either side. She is in the ruins of her city, Kasr Myrak.

‘Shock troops’, they are called, but it seems that all they are doing is falling back from one brief defensive point to another.

Las-bolts stitch the air above her head. She hunkers face down in the rubble. They have dubbed the army of heretics and penal convicts ‘the Unnamed’. It’s better to put a moniker to them. To separate yourself from them. To draw clear lines of distinction. But there are hundreds of thousands of them, and a few hundred are clambering over the barricade Minka abandoned twenty seconds ago, just fifty yards up the remains of Brewhouse Straat.

And she has to kill as many of them as she can, before they kill her.

Above her, to the left, comes the resonant thud-thud of a heavy bolter team, firing through the remains of the eponymous brewhouse. The bass-note rattle dislodges a stream of dust from the loose debris. Brass shells clatter down through the ruins. The stink of alcohol mixes with fyceline and ozone. The rockcrete dust catches in her throat.

Through the smoke and flames, she searches for a target.

She picks a man crossing the intersection. His head is hunched as if he’s running into a storm. So much about him is familiar – scuffed and torn fabric boots, scavenged flak armour, Munitorum-issue overalls. He looks like he spent a past life as factorum labourer. She lines him up in her scope, and he looks up, as if he senses her staring at him. For a moment she looks him in the face and recoils. His face is a mask of horror. She takes it all in – the tattoos, the piercings, his lipless mouth, the scream of hatred.

The salvo strikes true, but the cultist does not falter. He leaps over dead and burning bodies, a bloodstained knife in his fist, powering towards her, spittle flying from the corners of his mouth.

Minka keeps her finger on the trigger till the stream of las-bolts blinds her.

Ten feet from her, he falls. She can hear him cursing and snarling. She wants to finish him off, but there’s no time because another face leers up where he has been. This time the face is of a girl her own age, her scalp crudely shaved, her humanity defaced with heretical symbols carved into her bleeding cheeks.

Wake!

A boot roughly nudges Minka. The voice is muffled and distant, the accent almost unintelligible. Girl, wake! Wake!

The voice is insistent. But it comes to her as if through a layer of ice.

Minka cannot respond. She knows her duty, even in her dreams. In her mind there is a battle to fight. A planet to save. A verdict to overturn. And in her dreams heretic after heretic assails her. Men. Women. Minors.

The fighting becomes so desperate that the battle is reduced to bayonet work – the most terrible form of battle. The fight is all instinct, terror-lent strength, training. Her enemy are mad with battle-stimms. Their dying fingers loosen their grip from about her throat as she drives the blade in. But she is Cadian and drilled, and she fights harder and with discipline. The terror grips just as close, even in a dream, and she twitches and moans under the heavy felt sheets. And then it is all too much, even for her sleeping mind, and for solace it reaches back to before the Black Crusade.

II

Minka is sitting on a hillside, propped up against her backpack. The Black Crusade will not happen for three or more years and this moment is like a soothing balm, a drawn breath, a blessing. But it is more than that: this is a moment of hope and possibility because her team have reached the final and Minka hangs on the instructor’s every word.

His name is Burgozi. War has chewed him up and spat him out again. He’s missing an eye and part of his nose, one hand and two fingers off the other, and his torso is criss-crossed with scars. It looks as though parts of his body have been zipped back together. But he stands before them, hands on hips.

‘This is your first live-round training,’ he calls out through scarred lips. He lifts an autorifle in his hand and disengages the magazine, flicks a hard round out with the stump of his middle finger, and holds it up between thumb and stump. ‘Hard round, ferro-polymer. Twenty-two calibre. If it hits you in the wrong place, this can kill.’

He lets those words sink in. Minka nods. So do the rest of her team as he explains the rules. This is Cadia, everything is serious. But even as she listens and nods, Minka’s young mind wanders. Under her palm she feels the wiry hill grass.

And then the talk is over. Burgozi slips the round back into the magazine, and slams the magazine back into the rifle.

‘Right. Prize goes to the team that get first blood.’

The rival team are from Kasr Batrok. They are confident, assured, patient as they file off down the hill. They have a couple of sniper-trained members, still wearing their camouflage suits of grass and lichen.

‘Think they’re trying to trick us?’ Darage, the lad next to her, says. He’s young, like her, with dark hair. They’ve been on camp for two weeks now, and he has not shaved, and a few strands of fluff jut out from his chin and upper lip.

Minka watches the other team and shakes her head. She doesn’t know if they’re trying to spook them, but she knows that Kasr Batrok is richer, bigger and better-defended than Kasr Myrak – and she feels both the pressure and the sense that they are the underdogs.

‘We’ll show them,’ she tells Darage.

They have till nightfall to play this out. The tension builds as the day wears on. Minka’s leading the flanking team. She’s lying on her front at the base of a tree when she sees something in the mist ahead. She waits, then aims and fires. She doesn’t even consider that she might be about to wound another Cadian. This has been her life, and this is just another form of training.

As soon as her salvo ends, she shifts position.

Just in time. One of the other band returns fire. Minka presses herself down as tracers hiss overhead. Her magazine is still hot from the recent firing. And then there is silence.

Minutes tick by. Minka’s palms are wet. Her body aches. She crawls forward, desperate for a glimpse of her enemy. And then someone punches her in the left leg. It is sudden and unexpected. She spins about, thinking it is that idiot Grazon, but no one is there, and it takes a moment for the understanding to dawn.

She has been shot. She is the first blood.

All the realisations take a moment to process as she closes her eyes. The instructor lifts the whistle and blows a single note.

Then the shock kicks in. A medic crouches over Minka’s leg, cutting away the trouser and exposing the wound. ‘Tell me your name,’ the medic says as she presses a needle into Minka’s thigh. The woman keeps asking her questions as the suppressants take effect.

Minka is too shaken to speak. She gets a first sight of the wound and she feels sick. But nothing makes her as sick as the sight of the Kasr Batrok team standing to congratulate each other.

Minka cannot look her teammates in the eye. The medic sees the pain in her eyes. ‘Next time,’ she tells her.

III

Her dream tips her straight back to the moment the tunnel mines ripped through the curtain walls. ‘Breach!’ the shout goes as fragments of rockcrete fly up into the air. A storm of whistles blow as Minka pushes herself back up, grabs her lasrifle and slings it over her shoulder as she scrambles over the rubble. The earth is breaking as the spiralling teeth of assault drills surface within the wall and assault doors slam down and heretics swarm out.

Minka grasps a length of rebar embedded in the debris and uses it to haul herself forwards. A moment later she’s halfway up a treacherous tumble of rock and scree, and she must get to the top before the swarming heretics. Shrapnel rips through the smoke and dust. Las-bolts hiss through the air. Minka scrambles upwards. Her mouth is full of dust and grit.

Darage is stronger than her. He pushes forward, loses his footing, and sets off an avalanche of debris which buries him alive.

Minka is next. The way to the top lies along a slab of shattered battlements, as long and thick as a cargo-12. She steps upon the slab and it tilts. The rock is so finely balanced that it moves beneath her weight. She can hear the heretics and she is rigid with terror as the rock trembles with her.

You are a coward, she tells herself in disgust. No one is harder on herself. But fear is human, and humanity is what she fights for. And fighting is what she has been raised to do.

A mortar shell lands behind her. There are shouts of impatience and pain and terror. Minka can hear the ragged cries of the Unnamed on the other side of the ruins. She cannot wait. This is a deadly race to reach the ridgeline. She clambers higher as a face looms up from the other side.

She has made it just in time.

Minka fires, point-blank, and sees close up what a las-bolt does to a human face.

IV

Girl, wake! the voice comes again, but Minka cannot leave as her memories funnel her towards Cadia’s final moments. She stands alone, holding up the broken form of Captain Rath Sturm as the world starts to crack, and warp spawn pour through the rents in reality.

The clouds swirl over her head and in the air above, something dreadful is materialising. It is a malevolent form, an apparition of hell, and Minka knows that there is no way she can fight it. Dread flows off it like smoke. Daemonfire flickers up its naked torso.

She reaches for the image of Saint Katherine hanging about her neck as its clawed hands reach out. In the palms are the faces of men and women and children that Minka knows. They are her neighbours, friends, family, and their screaming mouths are filled with flaming maggots that overflow and drip towards her.

The claws are brass brigandine. The scales rattle with the sound of chattering teeth. Of a tossed skull sliding down a bloody heap.

She holds the press-metal image, and shouts back in defiance.

V

A death rattle sounds through the Fang of Fenris, outnumbered as plasma generators strain to keep life-support systems running.

In the debris field of St Josmane’s Hope, a motley picket of armoured frigates and merchantmen lie in ambush. They are deformed by allegiance to the Ruinous Powers, a midnight host of gnarled and pitted battle cruisers, daemonic battle monitors trailing scraps of broken chains and void-embalmed cadavers impaled upon their blighted superstructures.

Each time the Space Wolves cruiser’s lance batteries fire, the corridors and hangars are thrown into darkness. Superheated oxygen burns like promethium, filling corridors with death. Fist-sized globules of molten steel cut through bulkhead and flesh, while the vacuum of space turns those exposed to it, within seconds, into ghastly husks of frozen and dehydrated flesh. Systems fail in sparks and flames, and the heretic fleet surges forward, sensing an easy kill.

It is an unfair match.

The Astartes cruiser is wounded, surrounded and outnumbered, but it smashes through the bleeding wreckage of heretic jackals. It flees for the Mandeville point, plumes of atmosphere and smoke swirling in its wake as survivors are dragged down to the medicae hall.

It is a gloomy space set deep in the heart of the strike cruiser: the lumens light a scene of misery and pain, the stillness broken by the hiss of blood pumps, amputation saws, the crackle of cauterising irons, the moans of the wounded trapped in amniotic dreams. Casualties have long since overflowed the main chamber and the corridors surrounding it, and Medicae Birgir picks his way through them. Their pale faces stare up at him as breath steams from his grille-vents. Here and there he pauses, his augmetics plugging into the data-sockets and case histories scrolling in his ocular feed.

‘Lord medicae!’ a voice calls.

Birgir turns as Chapter-thrall Hallr limps towards him. The failed Space Wolves aspirant is a misshapen lump, his body hunched and muscle-bound, his jutting face malformed with the failed gene-splicing. But there is a keen, angry light in his blue eyes.

‘There is a problem!’ he hisses through fanged teeth.

Birgir has been running on stimms for months. It takes a moment for him to recall the details. Hallr is in charge of the two stowaways. The two Cadians. Brought from the planet by Brother Skarp-Hedin.

Birgir pauses. He is weary beyond belief, but this is how he fights for the Imperium, keeping warriors alive for the next battle.

He nods, and speaks in a voice faint with exhaustion. ‘I will come and see.’

The superstructure groans and buckles as Birgir follows Hallr through the corridors to the magazine. Power has been diverted from the habitable levels to keep the strike cruiser’s shields alive. Only critical life-support systems are still running. The air is thin, their breaths steam in the darkness. The walls gleam with a film of frost, icicles stabbing down from the low metal ceilings, glittering in the darkness of the shell-chamber’s vaulting.

Birgir had never seen the magazine empty before. He stands in wonder, looking about him. The stink of fyceline hangs in the chamber, but there is not a single charge left.

‘This way,’ the Chapter-thrall says and points towards a distant point of light where the two humans from Cadia are lying on a bed of felt mats. They make their way towards them.

Medicae Birgir bends over the first. It is a male. His mechadendrite feels its way across the skull-plate. It finds the data-socket. A spool of medical information floods into Birgir’s data-banks.

Captain Rath Sturm. Formerly 101st Airborne, promoted to 94th Kasrkin.

The medical notes stored within the skull-mounted data-spool are typical for a veteran warrior. There’s all manner of documentary evidence. Sex, name, number, rank, unit, survival assessment rates, and a spool of addenda that have been added by medicaes over the years: minor injuries, organ trouble, a series of precancerous rad-boils that had been removed, biopsied and cauterised.

As Medicae Birgir runs through the information, his shoulder-mounted mechadendrites pull the felt bedding aside and he assesses the captain’s current health. There are numerous cuts, severe bruises and abrasions, laser burns, field-treated impact wounds and three oblique anterior fractures in the lower three sternovertebral ribs.

Nothing life-threatening.

A severe shot of stimms brings the captain suddenly awake. He groans with pain as he takes a breath. He sounds like a drowning man reaching air, gulping in panic.

‘What is your name?’ Birgir asks.

Sturm moans. Birgir repeats his question, but the man clutches Birgir’s arms and sucks in shallow breaths.

‘What is your name, trooper?’ he asks.

There is a long pause before at last the answer comes to him. ‘It is Rath. Rath Sturm. Captain Rath Sturm.’

‘Can you move your arms?’ The medicae’s voice is flat. ‘I need you to answer me. Are you hurt? Is this your blood?’

‘Some of it. That hurts,’ Sturm says with a hiss as Birgir finishes his checks.

‘Understood,’ the medicae replies. ‘This will take your pain.’ A needle slides into Sturm’s arm and administers a direct dose of suppressants, vitamins and nutrients. ‘Well done, captain,’ he says as he moves on to the next bed.

The female is not much more than a girl. She is stiff beneath the sheets. His mechadendrites assess her vital statistics. There is a burn down the middle of her palm, and numerous other cuts, burns, abrasions – but there are no life-threatening injuries. All are healing as expected, except for the fact that her heart is running at a hundred and thirty beats per minute and her blood pressure is dangerously high.

A mechadendrite lifts her eyelid while another shines a light into her eye. No pupillary dilation in either eye. He runs through a series of tests, but there is no response. She twitches and moans.

Chapter-thrall Hallr has spent hours watching her and there is fear in his eyes. ‘Is she possessed?’ he whispers.

The medicae shakes his head. He has seen many things since he left the icy plains of Fenris, but this girl is something of a mystery.

‘Can you wake her?’ Hallr demands.

Birgir is wary of giving her too much, but nothing else works. At last he says, ‘I will give her a short measure.’

The stimms do not take long to kick in. Minka sits bolt upright. Her eyes blink suddenly open, and she sucks in a deep breath, like one surfacing at last from deep, deep water.

‘Girl. What is your name?’

She cannot get enough oxygen into her lungs. The medicae puts a hand to her shoulder and she flinches.

‘I am Medicae Birgir. You are safe. Can you tell me your name?’

Minka’s muscles are tense. She is hyperventilating, her hands flailing.

‘Calm,’ he tells her. ‘You are safe. Tell me your name and rank. Tell me where you fought. Is this your blood?’

She pushes him away.

‘You are aboard the Fang of Fenris,’ he tells her. ‘You are safe. You need to eat and drink. I am Medicae Birgir. You are safe. Can you tell me your name? Calm,’ he repeats. ‘Speak. Tell me your name and rank. Tell me where you fought. Are you bleeding?’

She cannot answer, and Birgir cannot stay.

Time passes. She cannot get enough oxygen into her lungs. Panic rises within her and she starts to moan in shock. There are no words to express what she feels. She remembers and her agony is a dreadful raw, animal sound.

Rath knows exactly how she feels. He drags himself from under the felt matting, and pulls himself across the frozen decking. Her body is stiff and unyielding. He holds her as the waves of shock and grief run through her. He ignores the pain in his ribs as she struggles against him.

‘Breathe slowly,’ he tells her as she starts to retch as the tremors eventually slow. ‘They’re just dreams.’ He holds her close. ‘Hush,’ he says. ‘It’s over.’

‘What’s wrong with me?’ she rasps.

‘It’s the stimms,’ Rath tells her.

‘I feel awful,’ she says. Her teeth rattle as she shivers convulsively. ‘Was he trying to poison me?’

Rath laughs and it makes him wince. ‘He had to bring you back.’

‘Throne!’ she says, and starts to retch again. All that comes out is a thin black bile. She wipes the strands away and spits the taste out. ‘I dare not lie down.’

‘You should.’

She squats down next to him. She is pale and sweating. ‘I had terrible dreams.’

‘They’re just dreams,’ Rath says again. He does not sound like he believes himself. She looks away, and her eyes fall on the misshapen form of Hallr. She looks away again and thinks, Look what the Imperium has done to us all.

She remembers Instructor Burgozi from her Whiteshield days, and what his service had done to him. The missing fingers, the scars, the sense of having failed. She feels tears start to well up. Her throat tightens, her lips press together, and she bites her tongue as she tries to hold them back. She tastes blood but she does not allow those tears to fall. She takes a deep breath and stands up. The truth is she dare not close her eyes because she knows what terrors lie there.

She whispers, ‘We lost, didn’t we?’

His throat is too tight to speak. All he can do is nod. Now, as far as either of them know, they are the only two Cadians left alive, and they have failed their millennia-long trust.

This pain they share is worse than living.

It is a long time before Minka can speak. ‘We should have died.’

He nods slowly.

VI

Minka has been walking for hours. She is in the seventh emptied shell-chamber when the voice speaks to her. It is deep and sonorous, and it reverberates through the dark chamber.

She freezes.

She had thought she was alone, but as she turns, she sees a giant is standing only a few yards from her. He is so large and square that it feels as though a wall has just spoken to her. It seems impossible that someone of such size would move so silently. But he is there.

A Space Marine, not dressed in battleplate, but in a black fabric, studded with metal plugs about his chest and arms and legs. Her eyes pick details out from the darkness. Tall, rangy despite a hyper-developed musculature, an over-large face, beard plaited and twined with beads and bones.

He speaks again. ‘You are recovered.’

She has to shake herself before she can speak. ‘Yes,’ she stutters.

He crouches down. Even so, his face is higher than hers. He has the same monobrow that Hallr has. It gives his deep-set eyes a bestial and serious look. His face is so large, she thinks, it’s like looking at an ogryn.

‘It is I, Skarp-Hedin. You walked straight past me.’

She pauses to consider. So much has happened but the name is familiar, and then she remembers. It is the Space Wolf who brought her and Rath up from the planet.

‘You look well,’ he says.

‘I am.’

He nods slowly. ‘You are Cadian?’

She has always said this with pride, but now she hesitates before answering. ‘Yes. I am. Well, I was.’

‘Was?’

She nods.

‘Either you are Cadian, or you are not.’

She hesitates. ‘But we failed.’

His mouth is closed, but the tips of fangs protrude from under his closed lips. He nods thoughtfully, as if savouring her words. His presence is so awesome she feels compelled to speak just to fill the silence.

‘I find myself doubting everything that I have been told.’

‘And what were you told?’

‘We were the gatekeepers. We held the madness at bay. It was a heavy task, but my forefathers never failed. But now. Cadia. It’s gone.’ She looks at him, doubting her own sanity. ‘It has gone, hasn’t it?’

It is hard to judge how old the Astartes are, but Skarp-Hedin’s ice-blue eyes are old and wise, and there is sadness buried within them. But he does not answer.

‘Cadia – it broke. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘So we lost.’

‘Lost?’

‘Yes. The Cadian Gate. All of it,’ she says, as if this were obvious, but then words fail her.

‘“Lost”. I do not know this word.’ He smiles and she realises he is joking, but his smile is a terrifying sight: his oversized mouth opens to a maw of fangs. ‘You have a short life, Cadian. Mine is likely to be a little longer. At night on my world, when I was a boy, I would sit and look up at the night sky, and occasionally there were streaks of light. Stars, falling from the void. The best we can hope for is a short flash of brilliance. Some of us burn a little longer, and brighter, than others. If you think that you have lost, then it will be so.

‘But you are here talking to me! And you are alive, and as long as you can fight, the battle is not over.’

She pauses. At last she says, ‘So… we keep fighting?’

‘Why would you stop?’ he says.

She thinks on this and remembers that day when she was shot in the leg. She remembers the arrogance of the Kasr Batrok Whiteshields. And she remembers the look on the medic’s face as he bandaged her leg. ‘Next time,’ he’d said to her. And he was right. A year later the two teams met again in the final, and this time it was the Kasr Myrak team who won the bout.

Being Cadian, she thinks, is about more than a bloodline or a planet. It is a mindset and a method: to fight and to advance, whatever the odds.

She starts to speak, but he puts up his hand, and sniffs the air. She strains the darkness to try and gauge what he has sensed; feels nothing for a long time, but he is clearly listening to something beyond her.

‘We have reached the Mandeville point, Upsilon Nine,’ he says.

‘And what is that?’

‘It is the point where we transition into the warp.’

‘What is the warp?’

He pauses. ‘It is a way of moving through space. To fold distance.’

She nods as she adds this to her learning. Then she feels the transition in the pit of her stomach and it makes her feel sick.

There is a long pause. Skarp-Hedin closes his eyes. ‘It is done,’ he says at last. ‘They are out there, searching for our souls. Can you feel them?’

She shakes her head.

He looks about. ‘No matter. They are there. They will always be there. As long as there is someone to fight, then there is yet hope for humanity. That grit that allowed your people to defend your home world for ten thousand years. That is your inheritance. You must pass it on.’ He pauses, listening – but not to her – and then stands suddenly. ‘I am needed.’

He turns abruptly and starts to stride away. His footsteps are silent. With each stride he fades into the darkness, and leaves her standing alone.

Minka calls out after him. ‘Space Wolf. Where are we going?’

He does not turn, but his voice comes back to her. ‘I cannot tell you.’

Minka pauses and takes in a deep breath. The stimms are starting to wear off, at last. ‘I suppose there will be another battle to fight.’

His distant voice is a rumble. ‘While you are alive, there is always another battle.’

A flash of understanding runs through her. She is not just the end of a great fighting legacy; she will also be its beginning.

VII

Minka retraces her steps through the cavernous magazines of the strike cruiser. She has been walking for hours. She is deathly tired when she sees the pile of felt mats in the dim light.

Hallr has gone and Rath is alone. He is asleep. She lies down and uses both hands to pull one of the heavy mats on top of her. It is ingrained with grease and the stains of spilt unguents. It’s a distinctively military scent as its weight presses down upon her. It is the odour of quartermasters’ offices and Militarum storage facilities from Fenris to Armageddon, Cadia to the Eastern Fringe. It is a smell that reminds her of Cadia, and her father.

As soon as she closes her eyes, the stink of the mats colours her unconscious. In her dreams she is knee-high in her childhood hab. Her mother cleans each part of her lasrifle and lays them all out on the table. She’s threading the barrel back onto the stock when her father comes home. He is dead tired. His face is pale, his hands and jacket ingrained with military unguents. But he will not rest.

‘Come,’ he tells Minka, and puts out a hand and takes hers in his.

It is a sacred night on Cadia, when the unnamed dead are remembered, where those without graves are honoured. Incinerator bins are burning around the perimeter of the kasr walls, the silhouettes of Cadians standing around them, dark against the flames. Her father leads her to the broad rockcrete stairs, worn into trenches by generations of Cadians before her.

Each bowed step is an effort for one so small, but at last they reach the top and he leads her up onto the broad firing step. She turns and the pillbox habs have all fallen away behind them and she feels the wind against her cheeks.

‘Come here,’ he says, and lifts her up in both hands. She looks up but she does not see falling stars, only the Eye of Terror, a baleful bruise in the night sky, glaring down at her.

‘Tell them!’ her father hisses, and she knows what she has to say. It is the word she learnt from her parents, and they from theirs before, all the way back to the first settlement of the planet.

‘Never!’ her memory-self shouts at the Eye of Terror.

A decade later Cadia will fall, but not Minka. She has bled, but she still stands, and she waits.

For next time.

About the Author

Justin D Hill is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Cadia Stands, Cadian Honour and Traitor Rock. He has also written the Necromunda novel Terminal Overkill, the Space Marine Battles novel Storm of Damocles, as well as the short stories ‘Last Step Backwards’, ‘Lost Hope’, ‘The Battle of Tyrok Fields’ and many more. His novels have won a number of prizes, as well as being Washington Post and Sunday Times Books of the Year. He lives ten miles uphill from York, where he is indoctrinating his four children in the 40K lore.

An extract from Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son.

‘I was there at the Siege of Terra,’ Vitrian Messinius would say in his later years.

‘I was there…’ he would add to himself, his words never meant for ears but his own. ‘I was there the day the Imperium died.’

But that was yet to come.

‘To the walls! To the walls! The enemy is coming!’ Captain Messinius, as he was then, led his Space Marines across the Penitent’s Square high up on the Lion’s Gate. ‘Another attack! Repel them! Send them back to the warp!’

Thousands of red-skinned monsters born of fear and sin scaled the outer ramparts, fury and murder incarnate. The mortals they faced quailed. It took the heart of a Space Marine to stand against them without fear, and the Angels of Death were in short supply.

‘Another attack, move, move! To the walls!’

They came in the days after the Avenging Son returned, emerging from nothing, eight legions strong, bringing the bulk of their numbers to bear against the chief entrance to the Imperial Palace. A decapitation strike like no other, and it came perilously close to success.

Messinius’ Space Marines ran to the parapet edging the Penitent’s Square. On many worlds, the square would have been a plaza fit to adorn the centre of any great city. Not on Terra. On the immensity of the Lion’s Gate, it was nothing, one of hundreds of similarly huge spaces. The word ‘gate’ did not suit the scale of the cityscape. The Lion’s Gate’s bulk marched up into the sky, step by titanic step, until it rose far higher than the mountains it had supplanted. The gate had been built by the Emperor Himself, they said. Myths detailed the improbable supernatural feats required to raise it. They were lies, all of them, and belittled the true effort needed to build such an edifice. Though the Lion’s Gate was made to His design and by His command, the soaring monument had been constructed by mortals, with mortal hands and mortal tools. Messinius wished that had been remembered. For men to build this was far more impressive than any godly act of creation. If men could remember that, he believed, then perhaps they would remember their own strength.

The uncanny may not have built the gate, but it threatened to bring it down. Messinius looked over the rampart lip, down to the lower levels thousands of feet below and the spread of the Anterior Barbican.

Upon the stepped fortifications of the Lion’s Gate was armour of every colour and the blood of every loyal primarch. Dozens of regiments stood alongside them. Aircraft filled the sky. Guns boomed from every quarter. In the churning redness on the great roads, processional ways so huge they were akin to prairies cast in rockcrete, were flashes of gold where the Emperor’s Custodian Guard battled. The might of the Imperium was gathered there, in the palace where He dwelt.

There seemed moments on that day when it might not be enough.

The outer ramparts were carpeted in red bodies that writhed and heaved, obscuring the great statues adorning the defences and covering over the guns, an invasive cancer consuming reality. The enemy were legion. There were too many foes to defeat by plan and ruse. Only guns, and will, would see the day won, but the defenders were so pitifully few.

Messinius called a wordless halt, clenched fist raised, seeking the best place to deploy his mixed company, veterans all of the Terran Crusade. Gunships and fighters sped overhead, unleashing deadly light and streams of bombs into the packed daemonic masses. There were innumerable cannons crammed onto the gate, and they all fired, rippling the structure with false earthquakes. Soon the many ships and orbital defences of Terra would add their guns, targeting the very world they were meant to guard, but the attack had come so suddenly; as yet they had had no time to react.

The noise was horrendous. Messinius’ audio dampers were at maximum and still the roar of ordnance stung his ears. Those humans that survived today would be rendered deaf. But he would have welcomed more guns, and louder still, for all the defensive fury of the assailed palace could not drown out the hideous noise of the daemons – their sighing hisses, a billion serpents strong, and chittering, screaming wails. It was not only heard but sensed within the soul, the realms of spirit and of matter were so intertwined. Messinius’ being would be forever stained by it.

Tactical information scrolled down his helmplate, near environs only. He had little strategic overview of the situation. The vox-channels were choked with a hellish screaming that made communication impossible. The noosphere was disrupted by etheric backwash spilling from the immaterial rifts the daemons poured through. Messinius was used to operating on his own. Small-scale, surgical actions were the way of the Adeptus Astartes, but in a battle of this scale, a lack of central coordination would lead inevitably to defeat. This was not like the first Siege, where his kind had fought in Legions.

He called up a company-wide vox-cast and spoke to his warriors. They were not his Chapter-kin, but they would listen. The primarch himself had commanded that they do so.

‘Reinforce the mortals,’ he said. ‘Their morale is wavering. Position yourselves every fifty yards. Cover the whole of the south-facing front. Let them see you.’ He directed his warriors by chopping at the air with his left hand. His right, bearing an inactive power fist, hung heavily at his side. ‘Assault Squad Antiocles, back forty yards, single firing line. Prepare to engage enemy breakthroughs only on my mark. Devastators, split to demi-squads and take up high ground, sergeant and sub-squad prime’s discretion as to positioning and target. Remember our objective, heavy infliction of casualties. We kill as many as we can, we retreat, then hold at the Penitent’s Arch until further notice. Command squad, with me.’

Command squad was too grand a title for the mismatched crew Messinius had gathered around himself. His own officers were light years away, if they still lived.

‘Doveskamor, Tidominus,’ he said to the two Aurora Marines with him. ‘Take the left.’

‘Yes, captain,’ they voxed, and jogged away, their green armour glinting orange in the hell-light of the invasion.

The rest of his scratch squad was comprised of a communications specialist from the Death Spectres, an Omega Marine with a penchant for plasma weaponry, and a Raptor holding an ancient standard he’d taken from a dusty display.

‘Why did you take that, Brother Kryvesh?’ Messinius asked, as they moved forward.

‘The palace is full of such relics,’ said the Raptor. ‘It seems only right to put them to use. No one else wanted it.’

Messinius stared at him.

‘What? If the gate falls, we’ll have more to worry about than my minor indiscretion. It’ll be good for morale.’

The squads were splitting to join the standard humans. Such was the noise many of the men on the wall had not noticed their arrival, and a ripple of surprise went along the line as they appeared at their sides. Messinius was glad to see they seemed more firm when they turned their eyes back outwards.

‘Anzigus,’ he said to the Death Spectre. ‘Hold back, facilitate communication within the company. Maximum signal gain. This interference will only get worse. See if you can get us patched in to wider theatre command. I’ll take a hardline if you can find one.’

‘Yes, captain,’ said Anzigus. He bowed a helm that was bulbous with additional equipment. He already had the access flap of the bulky vox-unit on his arm open. He withdrew, the aerials on his power plant extending. He headed towards a systems nexus on the far wall of the plaza, where soaring buttresses pushed back against the immense weight bearing down upon them.

Messinius watched him go. He knew next to nothing about Anzigus. He spoke little, and when he did, his voice was funereal. His Chapter was mysterious, but the same lack of familiarity held true for many of these warriors, thrown together by miraculous events. Over their years lost wandering in the warp, Messinius had come to see some as friends as well as comrades, others he hardly knew, and none he knew so well as his own Chapter brothers. But they would stand together. They were Space Marines. They had fought by the returned primarch’s side, and in that they shared a bond. They would not stint in their duty now.

Messinius chose a spot on the wall, directing his other veterans to left and right. Kryvesh he sent to the mortal officer’s side. He looked down again, out past the enemy and over the outer palace. Spires stretched away in every direction. Smoke rose from all over the landscape. Some of it was new, the work of the daemon horde, but Terra had been burning for weeks. The Astronomican had failed. The galaxy was split in two. Behind them in the sky turned the great palace gyre, its deep eye marking out the throne room of the Emperor Himself.

‘Sir!’ A member of the Palatine Guard shouted over the din. He pointed downwards, to the left. Messinius followed his wavering finger. Three hundred feet below, daemons were climbing. They came upwards in a triangle tipped by a brute with a double rack of horns. It clambered hand over hand, far faster than should be possible, flying upwards, as if it touched the side of the towering gate only as a concession to reality. A Space Marine with claw locks could not have climbed that fast.

‘Soldiers of the Imperium! The enemy is upon us!’

He looked to the mortals. Their faces were blanched with fear. Their weapons shook. Their bravery was commendable nonetheless. Not one of them attempted to run, though a wave of terror preceded the unnatural things clambering up towards them.

‘We shall not turn away from our duty, no matter how fearful the foe, or how dire our fates may be,’ he said. ‘Behind us is the Sanctum of the Emperor Himself. As He has watched over you, now it is your turn to stand in guardianship over Him.’

The creatures were drawing closer. Through a sliding, magnified window on his display, Messinius looked into the yellow and cunning eyes of their leader. A long tongue lolled permanently from the thing’s mouth, licking at the wall, tasting the terror of the beings it protected.

Boltgun actions clicked. His men leaned over the parapet, towering over the mortals as the Lion’s Gate towered over the Ultimate Wall. A wealth of targeting data was exchanged, warrior to warrior, as each chose a unique mark. No bolt would be wasted in the opening fusillade. They could hear the creatures’ individual shrieks and growls, all wordless, but their meaning was clear: blood, blood, blood. Blood and skulls.

Messinius sneered at them. He ignited his power fist with a swift jerk. He always preferred the visceral thrill of manual activation. Motors came to full life. Lightning crackled around it. He aimed downwards with his bolt pistol. A reticule danced over diabolical faces, each a copy of all the others. These things were not real. They were not alive. They were projections of a false god. The Librarian Atramo had named them maladies. A spiritual sickness wearing ersatz flesh.

He reminded himself to be wary. Contempt was as thick as any armour, but these things were deadly, for all their unreality.

He knew. He had fought the Neverborn many times before.

‘While He lives,’ Messinius shouted, boosting his voxmitter gain to maximal, ‘we stand!’

‘For He of Terra!’ the humans shouted, their battle cry loud enough to be heard over the booming of guns.

‘For He of Terra,’ said Messinius. ‘Fire!’ he shouted.

The Space Marines fired first. Boltguns spoke, spitting spikes of rocket flare into the foe. Bolts slammed into daemon bodies, bursting them apart. Black viscera exploded away. Black ichor showered those coming after. The daemons’ false souls screamed back whence they came, though their bones and offal tumbled down like those of any truly living foe.

Las-beams speared next, and the space between the wall top and the scaling party filled with violence. The daemons were unnaturally resilient, protected from death by the energies of the warp, and though many were felled, others weathered the fire, and clambered up still, unharmed and uncaring of their dead. Messinius no longer needed his helm’s magnification to see into the daemon champion’s eyes. It stared at him, its smile a promise of death. The terror that preceded them was replaced by the urge to violence, and that gripped them all, foe and friend. The baseline humans began to lose their discipline. A man turned and shot his comrade, and was shot down in turn. Kryvesh banged the foot of his borrowed banner and called them back into line. Elsewhere, his warriors sang; not their Chapter warsongs, but battle hymns known to all. Wavering human voices joined them. The feelings of violence abated, just enough.

Then the things were over the parapet and on them. Messinius saw Tidominus carried down by a group of daemons, his unit signum replaced by a mortis rune in his helm. The enemy champion was racing at him. Messinius emptied his bolt pistol into its face, blowing half of it away into a fine mist of daemonic ichor. Still it leapt, hurling itself twenty feet over the parapet. Messinius fell back, keeping the creature in sight, targeting skating over his helmplate as the machine-spirit tried to maintain a target lock. Threat indicators trilled, shifting up their priority spectrum.

The daemon held up its enormous gnarled hands. Smoke whirled in the space between, coalescing into a two-handed sword almost as tall as Messinius. By the time its hoofed feet cracked the paving slabs of the square, the creature’s weapon was solid. Vapour streaming from its ruined face, it pointed the broadsword at Messinius and hissed a wordless challenge.

‘Accepted,’ said Messinius, and moved in to attack.

The creature was fast, and punishingly strong. Messinius parried its first strike with an outward push of his palm, fingers spread. Energy crackled. The boom generated by the meeting of human technology and the sorceries of the warp was loud enough to out-compete the guns, but though the impact sent pain lancing up Messinius’ arm, the daemon was not staggered, and pressed in a follow-up attack, swinging the massive sword around its head as if it weighed nothing.

Messinius countered more aggressively this time, punching in to the strike. Another thunderous detonation. Disruption fields shattered matter, but the daemon was not wholly real, and the effect upon it was lesser than it would be upon a natural foe. Nevertheless, this time it was thrown backwards by the blow. Smoke poured from the edge of its blade. It licked black blood from its arm and snarled. Messinius was ready when it leapt: opening his fist, ignoring the sword as it clashed against his pauldron and sheared off a peeling of ceramite, he grabbed the beast about its middle.

The Bloodletters of Khorne were rangy things, all bone and ropey muscle, no space within them for organs. The false god of war had no need for them to eat or breathe, or to give the semblance of being able to do so. They were made only to kill, and to strike fear in the hearts of those they faced. Their waists were solid, and slender, and easily encompassed by Messinius’ power fist. It squirmed in his grip, throwing Messinius’ arm about. Servo motors in his joints locked, supplementary muscle fibres strained, but the White Consul stood firm.

‘Tell your master he is not welcome on Terra,’ he said. His words were calm, a deliberate defiance of the waves of rage pulsing off the daemon.

He closed his hand.

The daemon’s midriff exploded. The top half fell down, still hissing and thrashing. Its sword clanged off the paving and broke into shards, brittle now it was separated from its wielder. They were pieces of the same thing, sword and beast. Apart, the weapon could not survive long.

Messinius cast down the lower portion of the daemon. There were dozens of the things atop the wall, battling with his warriors and the human soldiery. In the second he paused he saw Doveskamor hacked down as he stood over the body of his brother, pieces of armour bouncing across the ground. He saw a group of Palatine Sentinels corner a daemon with their bayonets. He saw a dozen humans cut down by eldritch swords.

Where the humans kept their distance, their ranged weapons took a toll upon the Neverborn. Where the daemons got among them, they triumphed more often than not, even against his Space Marines. Support fire rained down sporadically from above, its usefulness restricted by the difficulty of picking targets from the swirling melee. At the western edge of the line, the heavy weapons were more telling, knocking daemons off the wall before they crested the parapet and preventing them from circling around the back of the Imperial forces. Only his equipment allowed Messinius to see this. Without the helm feeds of his warriors and the limited access he had to the Lion Gate’s auspectoria, he would have been blind, lost in the immediate clash of arms and sprays of blood. He would have remained where he was, fighting. He would not have seen that there were more groups of daemons pouring upwards. He would not have given his order, and then he would have died.

‘Squad Antiocles, engage,’ he said. He smashed a charging daemon into fragments, yanked another back the instant before it gutted a mortal soldier, and stamped its skull flat, while switching again to his company vox-net. ‘All units, fall back to the Penitent’s Arch. Take the mortals with you.’

His assault squad fell from the sky on burning jets, kicking daemons down and shooting them with their plasma and bolt pistols. A roar of promethium from a flamer blasted three bloodletters to ash.

‘Fall back! Fall back!’ Messinius commanded, his words beating time with his blows. ‘Assault Squad Antiocles to cover. Devastators maintain overhead fire.’

Squad Antiocles drove the enemy back. Tactical Space Marines were retreating from the parapet, dragging human soldiers with them. An Ultramarine walked backwards past him, firing his bolter one-handed, a wounded member of the Palatine Guard draped over his right shoulder.

‘Fall back! Fall back!’ Messinius roared. He grabbed a human by the arm and yanked him hard away from the monster trying to slay him, almost throwing him across the square. He pivoted and punched, slamming the man’s opponent in the face with a crackling bang that catapulted its broken corpse over the wall edge. ‘Fall back!’

Mortal soldiers broke and ran while Squad Antiocles held off the foe. Telling to begin with, in moments the assault squad’s momentum was broken, and again more bloodletters were leaping over the edge of the rampart. The Space Marines fired in retreat, covering each other in pairs as they crossed the square diagonally to the Penitent’s Arch. The mortals were getting the idea, running between the Adeptus Astartes and mostly staying out of their fire corridor. With the fight now concentrated around Squad Antiocles, the Devastators were more effective, blasting down the daemons before they could bring their weight of numbers to bear upon Antiocles. Sporadic bursts of fire from the retreating Tactical Marines added to the effect, and for a short period the number of daemons entering the square did not increase.

Messinius tarried a moment, rounding up more of the humans who were either too embattled or deaf to his orders to get out. He reached three still firing over the parapet’s edge and pulled them away. A daemon reared over the parapet and he crushed its skull, but a second leapt up and cleaved hard into his fist, and power fled the weapon. Messinius pumped three bolts into its neck, decapitating it. He moved back.

His power fist was ruined. The daemon’s cut had sliced right through the ceramite, breaking the power field generator and most of the weapon’s strength-boosting apparatus, making it a dead weight. He said a quick thanks to the machine’s departed spirit and smashed the top of his bolt pistol against the quick seal release, at the same time disengaging the power feeds by way of neural link. The clamps holding the power fist to his upper arm came loose and it slid to the floor with a clang, leaving his right arm clad in his standard ceramite gauntlet. A century together. A fine weapon. He had no time to mourn it.

‘Fall back!’ he shouted. ‘Fall back to the Penitent’s Arch!’

He slammed a fresh clip into his bolt pistol. Squad Antiocles were being pushed back. The Devastators walked their fire closer in to the combat. A heavy bolter blasted half a dozen daemons into stinking meat. A missile blew, lifting more into the air. Messinius fell back himself now, leaving it to the last moment before ordering the Assault Marines to leap from the fray. Their jets ignited, driving back the daemons with washes of flame, and they lifted up over his head, leaving four of their brothers dead on the ground. Devastator fire hammered down from above. Anti-personnel weapons set into casemates and swivel turrets on the walls joined in, but the daemons mounted higher and higher in a wave of red that flooded over the parapet.

‘Run!’ he shouted at the straggling human soldiery. ‘Run and survive! Your service is not yet done!’

The Penitent’s Arch led from the square onto a wall walk that curved around to another layer of defences. His Space Marines were already making a firing line across the entrance. A gate could be extended across the arch, sealing the walk from the square, but Messinius refrained from requesting it be closed, as the humans were still streaming past the Adeptus Astartes. Kryvesh waved the banner, whirling it through the air to attract the terrified mortals. The Space Marines fired constantly into the mass of daemons sprinting after them, exhausting their ammunition supplies. Shattered false bodies tumbled down, shot from the front and above, yet still they came, overtaking and dismembering the last warriors fleeing away from the parapet.

Squad Antiocles roared through the arch, landing behind their brethren. Messinius passed between them. For a moment he surveyed the tide of coming fury. Endless red-skinned monsters filling the square like a lake of spilled blood, washing over a score of brightly armoured Space Marine corpses left behind in the retreat. Several hundred humans lay alongside them.

He opened a vox-channel to Gate Command.

‘Wall batteries three-seven-three through three-seven-six, target sector nine five eighty-three, Penitent’s Square, western edge. Five-minute bombardment.’

‘On whose order?’

‘Captain Vitrian Messinius, White Consuls Chapter, Tenth Company. I have the primarch’s authority.’ As he dealt with gunnery control, he was also datapulsing a request for resupply, and checking through layered data screeds.

‘Voice print and signum ident match. Transponder codes valid. We obey.’

The far side of the square erupted in a wall of flame. Heavy cannon shells detonated in a string along the rampart. High-energy beams sliced into the square, turning stone and metal instantly to superheated gas. The approaching daemons were annihilated. A few bolt-rounds cracked off as the last daemons nearing the Space Marine line were put down.

‘Company, cease fire. Conserve ammunition.’ Nobody heard him. Nobody could. He re-sent the order via vox-script. The boltguns cut out.

Penitent’s Square was a cauldron of fire so intense he could feel the heat through his battleplate’s ceramite. The ground shook under his feet and he considered the possibility that the wall would give way. The noise was so all-consuming the idea of speech lost relevance. For five minutes the Lion’s Gate tore madly at its own hide, ripping out chunks of itself in a bid to scrape free the parasites infesting its fabric, then, as suddenly as it had begun, the bombardment ceased.

Where the Penitent’s Square had been, a twisted mass of black metal and shattered stone remained. So formidable were the defences of the Lion’s Gate that the structure beneath had not been penetrated, but it was like this, in small bursts of destruction, that they could lose this war.

Messinius accessed the gate’s noosphere. No daemons had as yet rounded the projecting Penitent’s Spur to come up against their new position. When the attack came again, which it would, it would come from the front.

An ammunition train raced down the walkway from the fortress interior and came to a squealing stop fifty yards away. Medicae personnel jumped down. A Space Marine Apothecary came with them. Human peons rushed about with heavy sack bags full of bolter magazines, passing them out to the transhumans. Spent magazines clattered to the floor. New ones were slammed home. Messinius contacted his squad leaders, taking a quick census of his surviving men, not trusting the digits that read ‘Company Casualties 23%’ blinking in the upper right of his visual field.

Through the smoke given off by burning metal on the far side of the ruined square, he saw movement. Auspex returns tripped his armour’s machine-spirit, and it blinked warnings in his helm.

<threat detected.>

‘They’re coming again,’ he said.

‘My lord?’ A soft voice, one that did not belong in that moment. He ignored it.

‘Engage at fifty-yard range. Make every shot count.’

The ammunition train was hurriedly relieved of their allotted supplies, and sped off, bearing the worst-wounded, to aid whichever beleaguered unit needed it next.

‘Stand ready.’

‘My lord?’ The voice became more insistent.

The voidships in orbit were beginning to fire. Their targeting systems were perturbed by the boiling warp energy and the vortex in constant motion over the Imperial Palace, and many shots went wide, crashing down into the Anterior Barbican, a few falling as far out as Magnifican.

Red monsters bounded towards them, as numerous as before, as if their efforts to thin them had been for naught.

‘Fire,’ he said coldly.

‘My lord, your duty rotation begins in half an hour. You told me to wake you.’

This time he heard. Bolters boomed. Messinius froze them with a thought, and with another he shut down the hypnomat entirely.

Vitrian Messinius awoke groggily.

‘My lord,’ his servant said. Selwin, he was called. ‘You are returned from your recollections?’

‘I am awake, Selwin, yes,’ Messinius said irritably. His mouth was dry. He wanted to be left alone.

‘Shall I?’ Selwin gestured to the hypnomat.

Messinius nodded and rubbed his face. It felt numb. Selwin flicked a number of toggles on the hypnomat and it powered down, the steady glow of its innards fading to nothing and winking out, taking the immediacy of Messinius’ memories with it.

‘The wall again?’ Selwin asked.

The hypnomat’s primary use was to instil knowledge without active learning on the subject’s part, but it could reawaken memories to be lived again. Full immersion in the hypnomat required cooperation from Messinius’ catalepsean node, and coming out of the half-sleep was never as easy as true waking. Reliving past events dulled his wits. Messinius reminded himself to be guarded. He forgot sometimes that he was not on Sabatine any more. The local saying ‘This is Terra’ encompassed a multitude of sins. Spying was among them.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Personal debriefing.’ He shook his head and unplugged the hypnomat’s input cables from the neural ports set into his arms and neck. ‘Nothing new learned.’

Selwin nodded, then hesitantly said, ‘If I may be so bold as to ask, why do it, my lord, if you expect to learn nothing?’

‘Because I can always be wrong,’ Messinius said. He pointed at the hypnomat. It was a bulky machine set on a trolley, but not too big for an unaltered man to move. ‘Take that away. Inform my armourer I will be with him in a few minutes.’

Selwin bowed. ‘Already done, my lord.’

Click here to buy Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1,D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Darren Tan.

The Place of Pain and Healing © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. The Place of Pain and Healing, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, 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: 978-1-80026-718-3

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.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

the purchaser of a Black Library e-book product (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase a Black Library e-book (“e-book”). The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media.

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.