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More Chaos Space Marines from Black Library

SONS OF THE HYDRA
by Rob Sanders

SHROUD OF NIGHT
by Andy Clark

LUCIUS – THE FAULTLESS BLADE
by Ian St. Martin

• FABIUS BILE •
by Josh Reynolds
BOOK 1 – PRIMOGENITOR
BOOK 2 – CLONELORD

• BLACK LEGION •
by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
BOOK 1 – THE TALON OF HORUS
BOOK 2 – BLACK LEGION

• AHRIMAN •
by John French
BOOK 1 – AHRIMAN: EXILE
BOOK 2 – AHRIMAN: SORCERER
BOOK 3 – AHRIMAN: UNCHANGED

NIGHT LORDS: THE OMNIBUS
by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
(Contains the novels Soul Hunter, Blood Reaver and Void Stalker)

KHÂRN: THE RED PATH
by Chris Dows

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by Anthony Reynolds
(Contains the novels Dark Apostle, Dark Disciple and Dark Creed)

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SPACE MARINE BATTLES: THE SIEGE OF CASTELLAX
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PERFECTION
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CHOSEN OF KHORNE
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More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library

The Beast Arises

1: I AM SLAUGHTER

2: PREDATOR, PREY

3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS

4: THE LAST WALL

5: THRONEWORLD

6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

8: THE BEAST MUST DIE

9: WATCHERS IN DEATH

10: THE LAST SON OF DORN

11: SHADOW OF ULLANOR

12: THE BEHEADING

Space Marine Battles

WAR OF THE FANG
A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang

THE WORLD ENGINE
An Astral Knights novel

DAMNOS
An Ultramarines collection

DAMOCLES
Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Ultramarines novellas Blood Oath, Broken Sword, Black Leviathan and Hunter’s Snare

OVERFIEND
Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master

ARMAGEDDON
Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire

Legends of the Dark Millennium

ASTRA MILITARUM
An Astra Militarum collection

ULTRAMARINES
An Ultramarines collection

FARSIGHT
A Tau Empire novella

SONS OF CORAX
A Raven Guard collection

SPACE WOLVES
A Space Wolves collection

Visit blacklibrary.com for the full range of novels, novellas, audio dramas and Quick Reads, along with many other exclusive products

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

I: Solace

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

II: The Manse

Chapter Five

III: Dark Imperium

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

IV: Eye’s Edge

Chapter Nine

V: The Weeping Veil

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

VI: The Gate Breaks

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

VII: Castellans

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

VIII: Iron Shades

Chapter Twenty

IX: Plague Planet

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Black Legion’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of His inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that He may never truly die.

Yet even in His deathless state, the Emperor continues His eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

With many thanks to Nick Kyme for his expert editorial guidance, and to Guy Haley for helping sort out where everyone is and why.

I imagined that I had encountered all possible cruelties.

For a long time, I had understood the worst pain was to be denied that for which we thirsted. The centuries passed, each colder than the last, and that knowledge was the sharpest thorn my father had left in our flesh.

But I have been wrong so often before, and so I was again then. In those days, once the Despoiler had broken the wheel of fate and our jail’s walls crumbled around us, we learned just how far we still had to go.

The greatest cruelty, you see, was not being deprived of what we wanted. The greatest cruelty, as it turned out, was being given it.

– Attributed to the primarch Mortarion

I: SOLACE

CHAPTER ONE

‘One, two, three.’

He moves, slowly. His claw reaches out, pushing through debris. Lights flicker – sulphur-yellow, intermittent like a failing heartbeat.

‘Four, five.’

He does not want to count. His lips move, unbidden, rehearsing well-trodden paths, stabilising his nervous system. Numbers have power – the subtle know this – but still he does not want to do it.

‘Six.’

He pushes himself free of the piles of metal, the heaps of flesh and iron. His boots, cloven like devil hooves, find purchase and push back. He drags himself out of the ruins, his breath wheezing through a rusted vox-grille.

‘Seven.’

That is the perfect number, the one that signifies the accomplishment and the end, but also the conception and then the process. It gives him strength, though he does not wish it to. It has always given him strength, even before the long change, and he dimly remembers this. Now, it is just a habit. So many things are just habits now.

He gets back to his feet. Detritus sheds from his back, clattering on the deck. Warning klaxons are sounding from somewhere, muffled and broken. A length of cable as thick as a torso hangs from the roof, glittering with a weak mantle of sparks. The grav field is off-kilter. He feels lighter than he should. His old plate should be heavy. It is crusted with the patina of age, thickened and fleshed, scabbed with boils and laced with glistening strings of pulled marrow.

He staggers over to a servitor station and sees the wretched operator fused to the deck, its fingers locked into a cat’s cradle of sensor plugs. It’s dead now, the last strobes of its cortex blown out, which is probably for the best.

He presses fat fingers to the command console, summoning status runes across greasy picter crystals.

He sees that the ship lives. He sees that Solace’s enemy is no longer in view. He wonders how much he aided the starship, or if this is just one more sign that things are running away from him.

‘Dragan,’ he voxes, and gets nothing but static back over the link.

Others are beginning to stir now. He sees one of his kindred emerge from under a sagging beam, helm lenses glowing vivid green in the dark. He sees a servitor twitch back into life, its bulbous stomach spilling across a disc-shaped tactical column. He sees a Little Lord plop down from a fizzing cluster of cabling. It shrieks as it splats on the deck, and he gathers it up carefully. It coos at him, and then nuzzles into the crutch of his elbow, snickering needle-teeth.

He is beginning to remember now. He is beginning to piece things together again. Is he slower now than he once was?

The Little Lord starts to lick the blood from his cracked ceramite.

Of course he’s slower. Everything is slowing down, congested, like running through water. That’s the Gift, of course. That’s one of the great objectives.

Vorx turns on his heel, patting the Little Lord absently.

‘Lumens, if you please,’ he grunts. ‘Get us moving.’

The bridge responds. Crew stagger out of the dark, pull themselves up from behind half-melted cogitator stations, wipe sweat and mucus from their eyes.

Around them, Solace starts to come to life. It’s hard to kill a ship like this. It’s hard to kill any of them.

‘One,’ he mutters, starting again.

Dragan gets to his knees, snarling. A gun-crew slave staggers over to him, perhaps trying to help him. This is a conceit, and he shoves the emaciated human into the wall, hears the faint snap of something osseous breaking. Then he’s turning, drawing himself up to his full height. The gun cavern yawns away from him, its roof lost in dark clouds, draped with rotting cables like spider threads.

Something big has detonated, hard enough to fry Solace’s grav-generators and throw the virtual axis off-kilter. The ship’s a big, bulky beast, so the damage must have been catastrophic, and close.

He slaps the side of his helm, then again, hard enough to knock some sense back into his incoming visual field. His mood is dark, and he wonders if the explosion was somehow his failure – if so, that’ll be more fodder for Vorx.

The gun gangs are coming back to life. Several dozen lie in the murk of the deck, limbs severed or ribcages smashed. A chain-mounted lumen swings lazily over them like a censer. The nearest gun barrel – a two-hundred-metre-long iron howitzer – rears up through the miasma towards its gunwale sheath. Recoil columns splay out, lodged deep into the substructure. Much of the breech is still made of black metal, a metre thick at its thinnest point, crushingly heavy. Only the edges show creeping evidence of the biological – strands of hair-thin follicles worming away, glacially slowly. They’ll get there in the end, consuming the inorganic and replacing it with the tougher stuff of sinew and cord.

Six metres away, Gunnery Captain Kodad regains his feet. He’s one of the more senior of the Unchanged, and something like a uniform still clings to his hefty frame. His skin is white-grey and boils cluster at his neckline, but he might even pass for human-normal in some of the grimier Imperial hives.

Dragan looks into his smeary adjuster-lens, then down the long rows of howitzers.

‘What’s the damage?’ he growls.

‘Significant,’ Kodad whispers. He always whispers now – some wasting Gift in his vocal cords, most likely. ‘It will take time.’

Dragan grunts. He can smell promethium, mingled with heavier aromas. Solace is bleeding somewhere.

‘Did you get a salvo off?’ he asks.

Kodad looks at him. His black-in-black eyes are unblinking. ‘Six, lord.’

‘Six.’

‘Rather proud of the crews, lord.’

Dragan grunts again. ‘Not good enough, though, was it?’ he snarls, and stalks out towards the exit aperture. His boots suck at the soft fleshy stuff on the deck – the permanent soup of swill that bubbles and ferments in every crevice. ‘I’ll be back in an hour. Any guns still out of action, I’ll flay the loader teams. Get it done.’

Vorx heads down from the bridge. As he goes, more lumens flicker back on. A grinding hum breaks out erratically from under the blackened deck-plates. Servitors – the name they still give to the panoply of brainstem-clipped monsters who man the low-level functions of the battleship – scuttle and lurch back into life. Some are almost human shaped, with two legs and two arms, and the head they were born with. Most are not. Some are like insects, while others have been almost entirely swallowed into the embrace of the corridor walls, their dried skin fusing with nutrient lines and power cables, until all that remains is a half-glimpsed face. Those faces gape stupidly as Vorx passes, some vestigial recognition response making their jaws twitch.

There was a time, Vorx thinks idly, that life and death were clearly delineated things. The human body would persist for a while, discrete from its fellows, before expiring and returning to the mulch. Now, though, every possible shade between the states of living and dying has been exploited. Half of his crew are, to all intents and purposes, semi-dead, or maybe semi-alive, their required service sustained by amalgams of ancient biotech and even older necromancy.

He glances at one of the buried servitor faces. It has no eyes, no nose, just an open mouth crammed full of electric strobe lines. Its lower lip spasms. Vorx wonders if it can detect his presence. He reaches out and gently presses a withered cheek.

Then he’s moving again. There’s no use pondering these things too deeply. It’s all part of the great panoply, the more-than-infinite variety that he serves and seeks to propagate. In another reality, he might have had the leisure to study these creatures, to see just how far the boundaries of decay and resilience can be taken before the parameters snap, but that is not, of course, his calling.

He works his way down a long spiral stair, wheezing as he goes. His lungs are half full of fluid, and he cannot help but think it a poor Gift. Then again, he has thought other Gifts were poor in the past, only to discover their genius much later.

‘Forgive,’ he says, speaking softly to the Little Lord at his elbow.

The tiny daemon giggles, then farts liquidly into the crook of his armour. That counts as forgiveness, probably.

He reaches his destination. He is a long way down now, buried within the folded heart of Solace’s central chamber-core. It smells rich here, like old soil. He sees pale worms wriggling through the mouldering metalwork, each barely longer than his fingernail. They glow. They have many eyes. And long teeth. Why does a worm need teeth?

He’s doing it again. Too curious – that’s always been his problem.

A door stands before him. It is made of wood. The beams are rotten and pocked with a sieve of beetle holes, and it all smells deeply of another world. Corroding iron bars and hinges creak as the door opens, letting a curtain of deep-green miasma roll across the threshold. He steps inside and enters a dank chamber of mists and mellow putrescence.

Tables, all of them hewn from thick beams of the same rotten wood, groan under the weight of age-spotted books. Candles flicker in their holders, struggling to stay alight against the humidity. Many pairs of tiny eyes blink from the shadows, red and vicious. Clocks tick, archaic mechanisms grind, and a hooked wheel turns slowly against the domed ceiling.

‘Were you damaged?’ Vorx asks.

A figure swivels in the murk, its face partly hidden by a thick cowl. Under those shadows pulses the evidence of many Gifts – boils, buboes, raised veins that throb with black fluid.

‘No, not much,’ the Tallyman Philemon replies, greeting Vorx with a nod. ‘Too far down, here. But you took a beating up there, yes?’

Vorx smiles wryly. ‘We are still alive. Or what passes for it.’ He looks around. He breathes in the rich air, and sees the many Little Lords squatting on high shelves. They grin back at him, chittering and belching. ‘This one took a fall. Perhaps you will look.’

He hands his charge to the Tallyman, who lifts the doughy bag of flesh up to the flickering light and turns it over in his gauntlets.

‘So I see,’ Philemon murmurs to the Little Lord. ‘Perhaps stay here a while. You can assist me.’

He reaches into a bag and pulls out something meaty with an eyelash still attached, before feeding it to the diminutive monster. It gurgles delightedly and hops up to the shelf with the rest of them, where a chattering tussle breaks out.

‘Solace must be wounded,’ Philemon observes, reaching for a taper to light more candles. ‘I feel it even in these bowels.’

‘It will recover,’ Vorx says.

‘What happened?’

‘I do not know.’ Vorx leans against a heavy pile of books – grimoires and ledgers, some open to reveal webs of inked diagrams and tables. ‘I thought we had a contest. They landed a few – raiding parties – but we matched them in the void.’ He shook his head. ‘The truth will emerge.’

Philemon reaches up to scratch his chin. Something pops, and his fingers glisten. ‘Where does it leave us?’

‘A long way from where we need to be.’

Philemon pauses, and the abacus at his belt clinks. ‘Dangerous.’

‘No more so than normal,’ says Vorx. ‘Run the numbers, will you?’

‘If you want.’

‘I need to trust a little more.’

Philemon gives him a severe look. ‘You do, siegemaster. You trust.’

‘All I have left, I think sometimes.’

‘It’s all beginning. I told you that. When the scales tip. You could be happier about it.’

Vorx chews at his lip. He can taste blood in his mouth, a thick soup made tangy by acid and gut-rot. ‘Which way do they tip, though, eh?’ he ruminates, running a finger down the spine of the nearest book. ‘We could be sliding down the wrong path. We have done it before.’

Philemon snorts, and shoots him an exasperated, though oddly affectionate, glance. ‘There are creatures, aquatic hunters, that are required to move at all times, or they die. That is our model. We stay in the void, we will die. Or Solace will kill you. Or Dragan will, or Garstag. If you pause here, if you think, if you hesitate, they will be feeding your guts to their familiars.’

Vorx does not smile. ‘You’ve been saying the same thing to me for a hundred years.’

‘This year, then, I hope you will listen.’

Vorx shrugs. His upper lip twitches, catching on the corroded flecks of his inner helm. He cannot take the helm off anymore. Very few of his warband can, at least those who have been Unbroken for some time. They are no longer body and ceramite, but an increasingly intimate meld of the two. That is one of the many hundred reasons they are so hard to kill – their fusion with their protection is so much more complete than that enjoyed by their Imperial cousins.

‘Run the numbers,’ he says.

‘They can only tell you so much,’ says Philemon.

‘Better than nothing at all.’

Vorx looks up at the Little Lord, now snoring contentedly, with flecks of skin and keratin on its rolling stomach. He can smell the decay, the falling away of the parchment, the slow collapse of the deck beneath and the roof above.

A number is eternal. It is a form, not a body. It is the last thing left, when the mind is rotted into a soup of tendrils, only fit for the gluttons of the deep bilge. You can hold on to a number. He wonders sometimes if even the Deathlord does just that, as if a number were a reminder of another possible life in another possible galaxy. He remembers what his master told him on the Plague Planet, and wonders if he somehow saw this coming. There are those who underestimate Mortarion’s subtlety.

‘I need to know,’ he says, turning away from the books and the mould. ‘Do this for me, please.’

‘Of course,’ says the Tallyman, watching him go. ‘Whatever you want.’

CHAPTER TWO

The ship is moving.

The Cultivator of the enginarium, Rhoe Twe, has succeeded in firing the third furnace, and there is fire and ichor chundering down the tubes again. More of the lanterns come on, flickering first then throwing out that familiar dirty-yellow glow from behind glass panels.

The Population is stirring. Many of them were killed, either by hard-round void barrage or by the Corpse-spawn who got on board after the shields were knocked out, but there are thousands living in the dark deeps and it is hard to get all of them. They have white skin that sags from their calcified cartilage, black-in-black eyes and fingers made long and tough from the things they have to prise open. Some of them might still be technically human, though most have moved on to alternative taxonomic classes. The variety is interesting.

They dwell in the parts of Solace that few of the Unbroken have reason to travel into, save perhaps for sport or to hunt. The ship is huge, and so there are many of these places.

When the ship’s hull was laid down in the 34th millennium on the forge world Lashte, it was named Undying Valour. It entered service with Battlefleet Archon less than a year after structure completion, commanded by an inexperienced captain named Lutrecia Prask. Its complement of more than thirty thousand ratings was largely drawn from Naval levy stations strung out beyond the Mourn Ring, and was graded as competent by four subsequent inspection visits. Like all Corinus-class cruisers, it was heavily armed, with lance and macrocannon arrays out of proportion to its relatively underweight shielding. It transpired that the class gradually fell out of favour with Imperial commanders, though the Undying Valour served with distinction for another five hundred years, gaining a kill ratio marginally higher than its reputation indicated likely.

Prask died in an engagement less than twenty years after assuming command, and was replaced by a succession of captains promoted from the lower decks. A cruiser-class ship was a world of its own, and only the very greatest battleships regularly recruited senior officers from outside the hull – most captains were born, raised and trained on the ship they would later command. The last of the line, Orthan Hemmo, was of this tradition, and was said to have loved the ship more than his own children, of which there were twenty before circumstances intervened to curtail his commendable contribution to the replenishment of Imperial numbers.

Those circumstances came at the battle of the Borghesh Channel, a vicious encounter in which the Imperium lost twenty vessels and had its grip loosened on three subsectors. By the time retribution fleets overwhelmed the region more than sixty standard years later, there was no sign of the Undying Valour at its last reported coordinates – only a slowly spinning core of metal to which Hemmo’s deep-frozen corpse was, it was rumoured later, nailed on tight.

And that was that. The Corinus class continued their long decline in Imperial service. When variants reappeared in the sporadic warfare of later centuries, they had been changed by the heavy corrosion of the Eye, sporting modifications and eruptions that baffled, excited and appalled the tech-priests who studied them. One unnamed scholar, toiling away in some obscure forge world’s collation citadel, amended his report on these studies, changing the term Corinus to Repulsive, possibly as some recondite form of Martian humour. The Mechanicus, not being a humorous order, took up the emendation as purely literal, and like some spreading organic virus, it became the preferred classification for what remained a rare class of warship within Imperial zones of control.

Vorx did not seize the Undying Valour. By the time he became its master, it was already Solace and was already growing, changing, spiralling slowly down those deep wells of the Eye and soaking up their bottomless malice. For more than five thousand years it steeped in that soul liquor, its spars flexing, its innards burning, its hull plates blistering. Its old core began to reform, untouched by daemon-wrights or renegade Techmarines but impelled by its own semi-dormant creative impulse. Like so much else in that realm of dreams, physical form began to suffuse with the matter of souls.

Now it breathes. It has respiration, it has circulation. It has whims and it has moods. If it turns against you, you find corridors suddenly choked with bulging plates and boiling pits of run-off oil. Crew go missing from time to time, even from the ranks of the Unbroken. Sometimes they are discovered much later – bits of armour, stains on the deck, a faint smell of satisfied ingestion.

Solace must be placated. It must be nourished, and it must be tended. If that is done, then it will fight for you, and it is very good at that. It is bulkier than it once was, heavier and thicker, and caked with steadily accumulated daemorganic detritus, so much so that the old weakness in defence is no longer really there. It is a monster. It is a killing beast, a void-wallower, a devourer of the Corpse-spawn’s empty iron machines.

But it is not invincible. It has been hurt now. Its skeleton has been partly exposed, and huge strips of flesh burned into ash. It is off-centre, listing with its grav-pull askew as the stars wheel slowly around it. It gasps, sending plumes of red-tinged smoke seeping into the void. Its main plasma thrusters are black and cold, though Rhoe Twe has kindled the third furnace now.

The levels aft of the plasma generators are still dark. Kledo hurries through them, accompanied by four of his Unbroken bodyguards. His armour is badly damaged, the needle-arrays twisted and leaking, and there are sparks of strange electricity snaking over the plate. He is carrying two functional weapons, one in each hand. The first is a bolt pistol, its muzzle fashioned into the gaping jaws of some venomous species of blind-slug. The second is attached to his forearm, an old narthecium with its scissor-saw mandibles intact and the vacuum chamber working at near-optimal performance. That is a rare thing, and its owner is keen to use it.

‘Up ahead,’ growls one of the bodyguard, an Unbroken captain named Golkh.

Golkh limps. One of his legs is wasted away within its armour-shell, yet still supports his considerable bulk. The bones are shot to powder, the muscles are a stringy mess, and yet he still walks. Such mysteries.

Kledo does not respond. He already senses what he has come for. He can smell it, somehow, amid the rich tapestry of stinks in the underbelly of the starship. A Surgeon of the Death Guard learns to navigate by smells – the acrid puff of terror, the sweet and drawn-out fug of despair, the perennially exciting moment when a barren body is first infected, and the infinite joys are unleashed within its bloodstreams and limbic systems.

The Population are scattering before him, splashing off into the darkness. They are like rats, squeezing into every hole that will take them. The rusted iron of Solace’s skeleton is intricate here, but still hot after the bombardment. There are places open to the void, and they must go carefully.

They passed the carcass of a boarding torpedo some way back, burning in defiance of the void’s vacuum. Its livery was a deep sable, displaying the Chapter symbol of the Iron Shades of the Shoba death world.

Kledo knows all the liveries. They have been studying their enemy for a long time, and there are only a thousand-odd Chapters to master. The Iron Shades are a good enemy – tenacious and unrelenting. They have a philosophical disinterest that marks them out from their many peers. Their commitment to martial excellence is aesthetical as much as it is anything – they fight because they believe perfection is achieved through contest.

Kledo knows that this is nonsense. Fighting is mostly pointless, but if it has an end, that end is for some greater political purpose, such as putting the wheezing old super-psychic husk on Terra out of its misery and calling a stop to the whole sorry charade. In itself, considered in the abstract, fighting is little more than belching – a necessary part of life, but hardly the most distinguished.

The smell becomes more intense. He hurries, his boots kicking up slurry. He can see bolt impact craters in the walls, already thickening with milky liquid. Bodies are everywhere, slumped and folded and floating in the scum-topped pools. God of Decay, but they killed a lot of menials.

He enters a hemispherical chamber. A boltgun cracks out, flashing vividly and making the walls and roof burn white. He is hit twice – once in the chest, once in the leg. The aim is good, and he feels the pain of the impacts. His bodyguards return fire instantly, carpeting the far wall with a range of esoteric, more powerful weaponry. He hears grunts from the other side of the inferno and holds his narthecium hand up to halt the destruction. Steam hisses, bilgewater slaps and boils.

Kledo can feel his wounds close over. He can feel the bolt-shells dissolving inside him, burned away by the acids within, and the pus oozing from his glands, coating the wounds and dribbling down the inside of his thick, soft armour-plate. Once, his protective ceramite would have aimed to keep projectiles away from him. Now it absorbs them, sucking them in close, chewing and corroding the layers of diamantine and depleted uranium and cordite and – best of all – the sickly sweet propulsive fluids.

He barely breaks stride. He sees the Iron Shades Space Marine clatter to the floor, his armour riddled with catastrophic damage. Kledo takes in the tactical markers instantly – this one is from the Fifth Battle-Company; void-war specialists. He comes closer and sees the sigils of distinguished service. His armour was already carrying damage, and now it’s just a mess of shards and bloody flecks. He can see a face – gaunt, grey, studded with carapace plugs and honour tattoos. One eye stares at him. The Space Marine’s fingers try to move.

Kledo kneels down close. The smell is overwhelming now.

‘Pretty good,’ he whispers, as the narthecium begins to whine up to speed. ‘You got a long way in.’

The Iron Shade tries to rise, to fight, to reach for a blade. It’s pointless. His sinews are severed, his hearts haemorrhaging.

‘But I’m feeling a bit unreasonable at the moment.’ Kledo selects a needle from the cycler and slots it into the narthecium’s array. He presses it against the flesh of the Space Marine’s neck. ‘A bit put out.’

The Iron Shade almost manages to move, to get to that dagger at his belt that is just so tantalisingly close.

Kledo depresses the plunger. ‘I’d normally be taking your progenoids,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be doing that soon enough.’

The Space Marine’s bloodshot eyes widen. He’s tough, and he’s trained, but there are pains beyond belief, and Kledo knows them all.

‘See, I was already irritated,’ the Surgeon says. ‘And then you shot me.’

The saws spin, and then hover closer. An old, sick light kindles in Kledo’s eyes.

‘So this is going to be horrible,’ he says, and begins.

Dragan is furious. This is not the low-level, habitual fury that animates his every breath and drives his every killing blow, but a precise fury directed at ignorance. They were fighting, and being stretched, and then something happened. He was ripped away, thrown out into darkness as the ship reeled, and now they are… He does not know where they are.

Dragan hates not knowing. His deadliness is built on certainty. He is not as old as some of his brothers. He was not spawned on Barbarus, but on an Imperial world, and that fact worms away at him. You have to prove yourself in this environment, and any little thing can be made into a weapon against you. You have to work to turn those disadvantages into weapons you can use.

And, see, so much of all the old prestige is no better than new shit. It doesn’t matter. Vorx was spawned ten thousand years ago on a world now rendered inert by virus bombs, and Dragan was spawned two thousand years ago on some Imperial hive cluster that is, as far as he knows, still very much in active life. What does that mean? That Vorx has eight thousand more years of experience under his sagging belt?

No. It does not. It means nothing. Dragan has met creatures birthed at the dawn of the Imperial Age whose voyages in the Eye have given them less subjective life experience than he has. It matters not where one comes from, nor on what world one’s cells first fused together. It only matters what one does once the choked breaths start coming.

In a similar vein, he has thought, from time to time, on the experience of the primarchs. Those demented paragons lived a real life only for a couple of centuries before being hurled back into their elemental prisons. There they squatted amid failure and sucked their yellowing teeth. They consulted grimoires and they built altars. They had less exposure to the realm of the real than he has had.

Thus Dragan cultivates his contempt for the primarchs. Not quite for his own, of course – in the Death Guard, rank and suzerainty still have weight. But even then, there is that old paradox. The Imperials only venerate their primarchs because they are all dead; if any lived, they would soon remember what fools they were and despise them too.

A long time ago, Slert had taken Dragan down to the under-piles of the engine run-off chamber. Slert had found something that piqued his obsessive interest – an insectoid hive, all wattles and hexagons running off into darkness, crammed with buzzing sting-nightmares with jade eyes and dragging flails. The species, it seemed, was entirely novel – some kind of emergent fusion of blowfly and void-wasp. The drones had dragged some of the Population into their colony, injecting larvae under flabby skin as the wretches wriggled and twitched.

Slert had burned his way deep into the hive, ignoring the stings that pumped fresh and welcome poisons into him. In the pulsing heart of that place, he found the queen. The thing was impressively grotesque, swollen beyond reason, with a translucent sac that quivered as it squirted out glossy eggs.

He had shown this to Dragan, as if some great lesson were revealed by it.

‘What is this?’ Dragan asked.

‘Of all the creatures,’ Slert said, ‘this is the only one that never leaves the hive. They feed it. They feed it until its flesh stretches and it cannot get out.’ The Putrifier looked at Dragan in the dark, his rotted deathmask partly hidden behind the swarms. ‘So the queen is the slave.’

It was an unsubtle point. Slert had a tendency to hammer these things home. Back then, though, the observation had more currency. The primarchs were still slumped on their self-made dreamworlds, rolling around in acrimony and self-loathing, and unable to leave them. Only the Despoiler had had the belly fire to strike out beyond the Gate’s reach in numbers, demonstrating at a stroke the indulgence and passivity of the elder order.

Ah, the Despoiler. There is a conundrum.

Dragan goes faster now. He vaults stairs and climbs up through the flickering dark. Everything has changed. The old lords are stirring again, breaking out through the breach carved for them by Abaddon’s ambition. Certainty, honed over millennia, has been fractured. It was never supposed to play out like this, and Dragan suspects that, now they’re out, the old Legion masters will go ahead and foul things up again just as they did before.

That makes him angry. It is the source of much of his current anger. He can no longer cleave to a path that had once seemed utterly secure. He will have to improvise, ride the chances, see just how much stupidity the Lords of Silence will put up with from Vorx before it comes down to blades.

He reaches the antechamber just below the sensorium bridge. He can hear commotion – shouting from the Unchanged, and even growls and barked orders from the Unbroken. Heavy machinery is being dragged around by chain gangs, and it makes the sagging decks shed rust flakes. By the time he reaches the access hatch it has become a cacophony, and the disorder irritates him.

He meets Hovik just before the piston lift to the next level. The ship’s master looks unsteady – she has a gash on her forehead and her hair has come undone from its bun.

‘What happened?’ Dragan asks.

He towers over her. Hovik was once taller, but she is diminishing now, fattening, being crushed into a ball by her plagues. When she breathes it is with a wheeze, and her cheeks are mottled red.

‘I think…’ she begins, then reaches for a bulkhead for support. ‘I think the warp drives.’

Dragan hesitates. ‘Ignited?’

‘Not fully. And I do not know why yet.’ She swallows, and a pop of yellow liquid marks the corner of her mouth. ‘Maybe not the warp drives.’

She is not focusing well. Dragan looks beyond her, up into the lift shaft, from where more thunks of bulky equipment are coming. ‘A mess,’ he spits. ‘Where is the siegemaster?’

‘I do not know.’

‘He’s not on the bridge?’

‘The bridge is a wreck, lord.’

And then he has a brief flicker of concern. Vorx might have died. He might have been crushed by something, destroyed by a hand other than Dragan’s own. He moves towards the elevator entrance, going faster now, ignoring Hovik as she gradually squats down on the deck, retching.

He reaches the access platform and sees the carnage for himself. There are Unbroken corpses among the wreckage, lit by the sparking flash of electrics going off. Armourglass has shattered, flecking the decks with a glinting carpet of shards.

Far above him are octagonal realviewer blisters, clustered like compound eye-lenses. He can see the void through them, and for a moment thinks he catches the dark-grey slab that was the Iron Shades vessel.

But even during the engagement that ship never got properly close. They had pummelled one another from thousands of kilometres away, hurling plasma across a burning void. Only the boarding teams had given the fight anything like a proper character, and Dragan had at least tasted the blood of the enemy before the wrench into oblivion pulled everything apart.

If Hovik was right, something had gone strangely awry. It took hours to prime the warp furnaces. The Navigators needed to be hauled from their incubator cells and plugged into Solace’s nexus. Then again, it was unclear whether Navigators, even the vat-gorged horrors the Legion cultivated, were of much use now. The Corpse-spawn’s beacon is stuttering, run the rumours. Even so, warp drives do not just ignite.

Dragan strides through the detritus. His boot crunches through a supine servitor, and it barely coughs as its femur snaps. He sees the empty throne ahead of him, rising out of a jumble of wreckage. There are serf crew milling around it, trying to clear the worst of the debris away, but the seat itself is empty.

Dragan looks at it. He looks at the way the arms curve out, built for the dimensions of a human-normal but steadily augmented by Solace’s slow mutations so that an Unbroken master can be accommodated in suitable majesty.

He considers the gravid weight of the columns. He notes the faded verdigris on the old copper, and believes he can still make out the eroded impression of an aquila somewhere in all that bulbous metalwork. He sees the sign of the closed lips over the headrest – the sigil of the Lords of Silence – streaked with oil.

The throne cannot remain empty. That is the first principle.

He looks at it for a long time.

Then he hears voices – commands, requests for commands, cries for help. Hovik has followed him in, and other senior crew are crawling back to their stations. A plasma chamber bursts into life, flaring lime-green behind the crystal frontage.

Vorx isn’t here. Someone needs to take charge.

Dragan strides down from the empty throne. ‘Get us augurs,’ he barks at the sensorium pits. ‘We’re blind, and I want eyes.’

He keeps half a glance on the realviewers. The stars look strange.

Where are we? he thinks.

CHAPTER THREE

Garstag is still fighting. He was among the first into action, stalking down the long accessways into the starboard decks above the main gunnery spine. He took the Kardainn with him – six battle-brothers in the same mix of Terminator-class plate. Some is Tartaros pattern, some Cataphractii, some of more obscure provenance or no longer clearly identifiable. They carry flails, mauls and combi-bolters, clattering heavily down the crowded passages with condensation steaming from their vox-grilles.

It was a brave decision to board Solace. The enemy must have been expecting reinforcements at some stage, for even Imperial Space Marines would not be bone-headed enough to take on a fully loaded grand cruiser in scattered squads. The Lords of Silence are a powerful warband, numbering more than six hundred Unbroken and several thousand Unchanged, ably prepared to defend a ship that is more than partly alive and which harbours a vindictive streak towards its old makers. Solace was prepared not for mere raiding, but for invasion. It is equipped for decades of continuous warfare, a ship-borne army in its own right.

So they must have been expecting reinforcements. What happened to prevent it? What had that lurch been, and why were the lumens blown? Why is Solace so badly damaged?

Garstag does not have time to reflect on that. He pushes himself back into a combat stance, shoving aside the shattered remnants of a bulkhead hatch. The Kardainn are knee-deep in filth and broken metal, locked in darkness and only visible from muzzle-flashes and the dark green glow of their helm lenses. This chamber is where the enemy has decided to make their stand – twenty of them, he thinks, Tactical Marines of the Iron Shades Chapter, isolated and cut off and determined to die with honour.

He does not cry out as he cuts into them. They are shouting liberally as they fight back, spewing invective and battle-chants. This seems to animate them – to give their blows added heft. They are skilled and committed, moving fast even in the tight confines and plentiful wreckage. Garstag sees a Space Marine vault across a collapsed beam and empty his bolter into the oncoming charge of Brannad, one of the Kardainn, which slows his advance significantly.

But they are fighting a losing battle. The very environment is raised against them – glowing tentacles burst from the foaming water, grasping at their legs and arms. There are Little Lords in the rafters, and they throw themselves at the warriors with snickering abandon, chewing down on power cables and armour joints. Every time a fighter has to shake one off, it gives time for Garstag’s brothers to close in and finish the task.

Terminator plate gives them a huge advantage, and this is no standard Tactical Dreadnought armour – like everything else, it has been changed, expanded, thickened and mutated. Brannad has a curl of sucker-encrusted hooks for a right arm, writhing like a nest of serpents. Artarion has a fanged mouth snapping over the barrel of his heavy bolter, which is linked to his body by permanent strands of glistening mucus. Garstag himself has the greatest of the Gifts – a chainsword of living talons, crackling with corposant and dripping with ever-renewing toxins.

Garstag does not attempt to emulate the swift strikes of the enemy. He trusts in his colossal ability to absorb punishment and strides through the murk in stately measure, taking hits from bolt-rounds and barely flinching. The Kardainn are fighting as the Death Guard have always fought, like a gauntlet closing on a throat, slowly, building pressure, building and building until resistance snaps.

An Iron Shade leaps out at him from the darkness, sable armour glinting, sweeping a power blade close, two-handed. He’s far faster than Garstag, and the crackling edge sinks into his leading shoulderguard. Living ceramite closes over the wound instantly, sucking the sword from the Space Marine’s grasp. He reaches for his bolt pistol, but Garstag can grab him now, seizing him by the throat with his claw. For a second the Iron Shade fights back, thrashing out as his boots leave the deck, but then Garstag squeezes – a savage contraction of servos and fused sinew – and his attacker’s neck is broken. Garstag throws the limp body aside and it crashes into the blood-foamed filth.

Then there is another coming at him. Perhaps he is some champion, his path cleared by the sacrifice of a lesser warrior. He carries his own chainsword in one hand and a bolter in the other. The combined assault is formidable – a punch-rain of shells backed up by heavy swipes of gunning linked teeth. Garstag is rocked by it, smashed back on his heels and forced to parry with his blade. He sees the deathmask of his enemy loom out of the murk – a pair of backlit lenses like a ghost’s eyes – and realises he has miscalculated his momentum.

But the enemy is suddenly thrown to one side, hit by a perfectly judged shot from an injector pistol. The dart slices out from the shadows and catches him at the neck, right in that minuscule sliver of weakness between helm and gorget. The champion reacts instantly, grabbing the barb and throwing it to one side.

Garstag could strike him then, but chooses not to. There is no longer any point. Instead, he watches as the Iron Shade is rapidly consumed from within – a spasm, a shake, then blood fountaining from every armour joint. The Space Marine falls to his knees, vomiting through his helm’s grille. Garstag can hear the fizz of flesh being eaten even under his armour.

The rest of the Corpse-spawn are beaten back now. They are falling away, harried on every side, pursued down the corridor by the Kardainn, dogged by swarms of Little Lords, struck by falling spars and foaming gouts of corrosive liquid. Garstag sees others of the Population joining the hunt now – which for them is really a race for scraps of carrion – breaking out through rust-weakened holes and rents, their faces locked into desperate grins and their eyes staring.

And Slert is there too. Strange Slert, odd Slert, who is hateful but useful, and who seems to spirit into existence at the most opportune moments. The Putrifier is holstering his injector pistol and looking at the twitching results of his work. His bottle-lensed helm is impassive, but his awkward body mimics the death spasms of his victim.

Garstag growls at him, feeling phlegm build up in his throat, and flexes his claw. He would like to plunge his talons through Slert and see how long it takes for the war of poisons to play out. But he holds back, of course, for he knows that the combat anger is on him, and that it will subside, and that Slert is one of Vorx’s protected, and that all these things are important.

‘Clumsy, Kardainn-master,’ Slert says, amused, still looking at the corpse in the murk. ‘He would have cut your throat out.’

‘Why are you here?’ Garstag asks.

‘I’ve been roaming.’ As Slert speaks, a Little Lord plops down from the roof space and splats onto his shoulder. It coos affectionately into Slert’s clogged earpiece, and Slert lets it nuzzle. ‘This is all very unusual, don’t you think?’

Garstag looms closer, his hooves splashing in the bloody, oily mire. ‘Get away from me. Stay away from me. I have the just desire to slaughter, and you are now very close.’

Slert shrinks back. The Little Lord spits at Garstag, then darts under the cover of Slert’s cloak. ‘Not nice,’ says Slert. ‘Things are running ragged on this ship. Where are we? You know that? No, you know nothing.’

Garstag doesn’t care. He was promised a proper war, one that had been in preparation for mortal generations. These dregs are not what he came for, but for the time being they are all he has. He can still hear fighting echoing down the accessways, muffled and dampening.

He moves off, but Slert dares to reach out, to pull him back.

‘Someone activated the warp drives,’ Slert says. ‘Dangerous, dangerous. We might all be atoms now. Know anything about that, Kardainn-master?’

Garstag turns on him, towering over him, his heavy helm-plate pushed into Slert’s face.

‘Nothing. I do not care for the ship, and I do not care for you. We have a realm before us, its back broken and ready to scour. That is all I care about. All. If you want to play games, go and find another degenerate.’

Slert laughs. ‘So many to choose from.’

But Garstag has swept off, not listening. There are faint signals on his helm display – blotches of yellow in the gloom. There might be boarding parties still alive somewhere, and they all need hunting down.

‘So you won’t say where you were?’ Slert calls after him.

Garstag keeps moving.

Vorx is returning. He has left it too long already, but there were thoughts to be thought and numbers to be considered. He has not killed, and that will be noted. He guesses Dragan will have finished many of the invaders. Garstag will have accounted for many more. Before the wrench, Vorx had even considered sending a party to seek out Naum, though he is glad now that he didn’t. Naum would not have understood the situation at all. Naum is a tortured soul, for all the Gifts he has been given, and that is a great pity.

Vorx no longer sees information flowing across the interior of his helm as he did in the distant past, because his visor substrate is now a part of his face. So his visual field is a complex thing – a psychological layering of true vision, machine overlay and dream projections, spiked with electrical impulses from what was once a tactical broadcast implant. He cannot close his eyes, which are lubricated by a steady trickle of moisture from capillary glands. When he sleeps, it is merely a haze of torpor marching with vivid, eyes-open dreams.

These are the ways we exemplify the lessons, he thinks. These are the ways we shape the old faith.

He climbs back up from Philemon’s cubbyhole, breathing heavily. His gauntlets grasp flaking iron and scrape across blistered synthleather.

To reach the bridge again, he has chosen to pass through the Sanctuary. He does not know what place this was when Solace was an Imperial vessel. Possibly an audience hall for visiting dignitaries, or maybe some equipment chamber hollowed out of its machinery. Now it echoes with enormity, broken up by slender columns that strike up through a jungle of vegetation. The Sanctuary must be two hundred metres long, a snaking gallery that threads through the belly of the ship like a bloated liver, sucking up the poisons and the swills and slowly fermenting them. Vats bubble with simmering things, only to spill over into thick mulch below as their feet corrode away. Ferns and kelp-tubes thread upwards into the high gallery, each as black as nightshade and pocked with glowing phosphor-spines. Creatures whimper in the foetid shadows, all vectors of powerful plagues, their jaws pink with scurvy and their eyes half-closed from the close press of sores.

Vorx likes the Sanctuary. It is a miniature representation of the Many Gardens of the Plague Planet, which are in themselves mere reflections of the One True Garden. It is the closest his people will ever come to having shrines. The Lords of Silence come to these groves when they are able, to breathe in the air, to feel the churn of the rotting soils beneath them.

The Sanctuary is disturbed then, just as all things on the ship are. Its branches sway as if a wind blows through them, and spiky leaf clusters shed in thumps. The creatures nuzzle and burrow to avoid him, so Vorx travels through the groves unimpeded, and the strands and fronds drag across his armour. He only pauses once, in one of the many dark glades, to see a fresh species of orchid pushing its head through the leaf matter.

He stoops to regard it. Its stem is a virulent green, its bulbous head strikingly purple. It has sacs under its petals that shiver when he breathes on them. He reaches out with a finger to touch it, and feels tiny pricks from hidden stingers folded within its delicate frame. They give him an unusual wave of pain that endures for several seconds before his physiology is able to transmute it.

Vorx smiles. He will have to return to this glade soon. He may ask Philemon to categorise the orchid, to take cuttings. Slert may even wish to use it for refining purposes.

The Sanctuary is bountiful. Like all such gardens, it creates more than it destroys. Nothing remains the same for long – there is always the slow creep of change. That is the thing that sets his kind apart from the old Imperium. The Corpse-spawn desire, above all things, stasis. They preserve, they record, they clamp down hard on the passage of time. They are caught in their single moment, one that should have been confined to history ten millennia ago, a moment that freezes their muscles and keeps their mouths and minds shut. It will be a mercy to end that empire, for there is no greater agony than rictus.

Vorx keeps walking. Foliage tugs at him as he passes, wrapping tiny strands around his boots and kneecaps. Everything in this place would kill him, if it could. It would strangle him, render him down, suck out his vital juices and refine them into something more diffuse. He does not mind that. It strikes him as an apt metaphor for his position at the head of this warband. He is perfectly aware that maintaining command is a matter of survival. If he delivers victories, he will be suffered to lead. If he fails, sooner or later someone will challenge him. Deposed leaders are not permitted to remain at liberty. Death is one of the better outcomes for them.

He is philosophical about that. The galaxy has become an angrier place during the course of the Long War, but he does not share in its many pathologies. He can remember fighting in the Legion soon after it had ceased to be the Dusk Raiders and become the Death Guard, when his armour was bone pale and bore the marks of filth as a badge of pride. Before that, he can remember fighting and living on Barbarus as a child, and that was a true nightmare. Nothing could be as bad as that again – a scrabble for survival within a planet-wide prison that crushed the soul and shredded the nerves.

Mortarion freed them from that. This is what Dragan and the other latecomers will never properly understand. Vorx is not a blind fanatic, and understands that the primarch has weaknesses, but he will never forget that first act of liberty. Unless you had tried to scratch a gasping living on the stinking white soils of that hell world, unless you had actually witnessed what the mountain lords could do with impunity to the cowering mortals and unless you had seen what the Deathlord had done to free them, you could not truly comprehend. That was why the Death Guard had never fractured, for all the sniping efforts of that semi-feral Typhus and the many other rogue warlords and pirate-kings. The originators of the Legion are still grateful. They will never forget. And Vorx is one of them.

He reaches the end of the Sanctuary and climbs swiftly up stone steps that are crumbling at the edges. The air is wet and stagnant, and the lumens are still flickering. Some are covered with flocks of moths that scatter as Vorx passes.

Soon he is back in the innards of the ship and hears the ongoing efforts to make repairs and put things in order. He sees slave crew scuttle away from him and takes the grim salute of Unbroken as they lumber past in the semi-dark. He traces an old path back to the bridge, one that is sopping with moisture and overhung with grimy stalactites.

When he emerges, he sees that Dragan has been busy. He has coopted members of his own factions to secure key locations across the yawning bridge cavity. The Unchanged crew take his orders without question, and they are slowly bringing the listing vessel back into something like equilibrium.

Vorx approaches the old throne dais, nodding at Dragan as he reaches it.

‘Siegemaster,’ says Dragan.

The title is an old one. Other Legions used to have it. The Iron Warriors, Perturabo’s bitter castle builders, used it as an honorific. In the Dusk Raiders, it was more sparingly employed, reserved for fleet commanders right up until the end of the Great Crusade. Vorx does not know if anyone else uses it in the Death Guard. He only continues to do so because Mortarion ordered him to, for unknown reasons, even though he guesses Dragan takes it as an affectation.

‘I have asked the Tallyman to consult the numbers,’ Vorx says. ‘This is all unexpected.’

Others are coming closer now – his senior Unchanged staff, limping away from whatever tasks Dragan has given them and drawing up to the throne. Hovik is with them, but Vorx is most interested in two others – Drez-Uil, the Eyesmith, and Tjafa, the pseudo-Navigator.

‘It was a warp activation,’ Hovik starts. Her face is greyer than usual, and there are flecks of vomit on her lips.

‘I know,’ Vorx says. ‘The circumstances can be determined in time. For now, we need to understand where we are.’ He beckons to a servitor gang captain and gives the signal to lift the main shutters. Then he turns to Drez-Uil. ‘What can you tell me?’

The Eyesmith is a shrivelled man. His uniform is marked by strange damp patches that seem to move of their own accord, and his mouth has withered away to a narrow siphon. His eyes, as if in compensation, have bulged to obscene proportions and are showing the first-stage signs of compoundification. If he survives the transition, he will end up with insectoid hemispheres that will enable vision across a whole swathe of spectra.

That is not why he is named the Eyesmith. That is an older title, reserved for those who dare to apply the augur sounds to the madness of Eyespace. Drez-Uil is an artisan, a skilled applier of augur and auspex to the roiling tumult of warp-void interfaces. The work has taken its toll, but he still maintains the capacity for speech, which is something.

‘We are displaced by several block-stages,’ Drez-Uil says. ‘I am still attempting to triangulate, but it is indubitably true that we are in true-void, free of the Gate, fully instantiated into the physical.’

Vorx draws in a long breath. There had always been an alternative possibility – that the Eye had pulled them back in.

‘But the Beacon is gone,’ interjects Tjafa.

Now then, Tjafa is a horror. A great-great-great-scion of Solace’s early Navigators, she is a wretch and a twist of flesh, a stark ribcage and angular bones under a clinging velvet gown that sucks the last dregs of light out of the entire chamber. She has grey hair piled up in knots and bunches, stretched tight from her rouged skin. Her arms and neck are bound with silk tresses, each covering a little bulge on her dry skin. They are all eyes, all of them closed and strapped tight. Tjafa is covered in eyes the size of fingerprints, all twitching and fluttering under their bonds and straps of faded velvet.

‘It can’t be gone,’ Dragan says. ‘We’re well into realspace.’

‘There’s nothing,’ Tjafa counters haughtily. ‘Nothing at all. We were warned of this – that breaking the Gate would break the galaxy.’

‘I find that rather hard to believe,’ says Vorx quietly. Overhead, the servitors are hauling the shutters open in a clanging series, exposing bleary realviewers. The void looks dark and blank, but for the motes of clear starlight. There are no ink-bright clots of colour, nor shimmering daemon-shoals. It has been a while since Vorx has seen unadulterated vacuum. He finds it sterile and displeasing.

‘Well, perhaps it will come back,’ says Tjafa. ‘Or perhaps we are just too far out. But I can’t guide you far, not in this.’ She sniffs. ‘Everything is broken. This ship is falling apart.’

Tjafa likes to revel in an imagined superiority. She fancies she can still take on the airs of a real Navigator, a member of one of the proud Houses that still dominate traffic across the mortal galaxy. It is a pathetic display – her neck would snap under a finger’s pressure, and in any case, Vorx judges the long tyranny of the Navigators will be coming to a permanent end soon. There are other ways of plotting a route in this new dispensation, and she is already a throwback, a mutation of a mutation, gradually being bred out into irrelevance.

He doesn’t say that, though. For the time being she is still useful, and until they know more, they are vulnerable.

‘If you will persevere, madam,’ he says, ‘that would be appreciated. Philemon will aid you.’

By then the bulk of the shutters are being chained into position, and the view is one of almost unbroken blackness. Solace is still venting from somewhere, and a thin cloud of green-grey spores drifts across the ventral field.

‘You have done well to restore the ship so swiftly, mistress,’ Vorx tells Hovik. ‘Now we need to move again, to move purposively, to chart a course and follow it.’

‘To where, lord?’ Hovik asks, bewildered.

‘We have entered the time when all trajectories are possible,’ Vorx says. ‘Set coordinates. The god will ensure they are the right ones.’

He says this a lot – ‘the god’. For Vorx, there is no pantheon. The allegiance of other powers is, for him, mistaken or wicked. There is only one genuine deified motive entity in the universe, the one that his primarch knelt before. If that were not true, how could he commit such acts? How else could he cleave to the path that has spilled so many oceans of innocent blood?

Hovik bows, awkwardly, and limps off to enact the order.

‘You were not here,’ Dragan says, his voice low.

Vorx does not look at him. ‘It was in hand.’

‘I took it in hand.’

‘You are my most trusted servant.’ Vorx smiles inwardly. That will cut him.

‘You were not here.’

It is becoming a habit for Dragan to repeat himself, as if that lends heft to his words. Vorx turns to face him, deliberately, slowly. ‘They had the measure of us,’ he says, matching tone of voice so that only the two of them can hear. ‘Did you see the signals? They were preparing more torpedoes. Gunships. They would have landed Dreadnoughts. They were Space Marines. They might have won.’

‘I do not think–’

‘We have our orders. We make for Ultramar, just as instructed. If it takes us a year, if it takes us decades, we do it.’

They face one another for a moment. Vorx is the larger, his bulk engorged like millennial layers of ocean silt, added to every year, but old now, worn into defiance by many, many lifetimes in old service. Dragan is leaner and his body is marked by fewer Gifts, but he is famished for the conflict that will earn them.

‘We are separated from the fleet,’ Dragan tries, cleaving to his line.

‘It will have dispersed by now,’ says Vorx. He moves closer to Dragan. ‘There are no choices, champion. It looks that way now, but believe me, there are none. We are being shown an empty sky. That is a temptation. You see the chance for glory, to follow the mortal warlord, to carve a name for yourself. Resist it. Resist the Despoiler’s call. We have our orders. We make for Ultramar.’

Dragan looks back at him. His helm-visage is sharp, the vox-grille terminating in a savage blade-sweep. Vorx can sense the frustration in him, locked under pressure like poison gas in a grenade.

‘You do not know where we are,’ Dragan whispers. ‘You have no bearing. The primarch is out of reach.’

‘For now,’ says Vorx, clapping him on the shoulder in a gesture he knows will be infuriating. ‘Have faith.’ He turns away. That is a profound insult within the Death Guard, for whom facing – the enemy, the ally, the elements – is a cardinal virtue.

There is purpose in this. Dragan must not think him weak, nor that he is out of ideas. Until Philemon can delve into the entrails of the future there is considerable uncertainty, to be sure, but the illusion of command is not something to be cast off.

‘Can the Cultivator fire the main engines yet?’ Vorx asks.

‘She says yes, with some danger,’ says Hovik.

‘Then let her do it.’ Vorx moves at last to the throne where he will take his seat. ‘This is a new universe, brothers. A new vista. How exciting. I wish to see more of it.’

CHAPTER FOUR

Solace moves more surely now. Rhoe Twe coaxes more life from its addled innards, and great chambers fill with fire. Work gangs drag heavy pallets of promethium canisters to the gate mouths, where spine-clamped plague ogryns shovel them into the shimmering maws. Conduits stiffen and flex, and pipelines bubble.

The last of the Iron Shades are culled. The Death Guard are thorough. Kill teams prowl through the furthest reaches of the ship, hunting for any faint signs of life. The armour is taken from the corpses and sent to the bio-forges. The weapons are carried off and given to the Unbroken attendants to assess and divide up. The progenoids are ripped out by Kledo, who never talks about what he does with them. He takes the eyes too, and some of the other organs, but does not even pretend that this is for something useful – he has his hobbies. The rest – the thick-set flesh and bone, product of centuries of severe and serious-minded honing – is burned. The Unbroken do not wish to have reminders of what they once were hanging around. The Unchanged would like to eat the corpses, but they are not allowed to. There are some standards left. Some things are still not done.

The numbers are collated. Forty-two Tactical Marines were landed. All were killed. Seven Unbroken were similarly ended, in addition to several hundred Unchanged. Those numbers are unexceptional. The Iron Shades were under-resourced and fighting on hostile territory. They would no doubt have planned to land more in short order, forming bridgeheads and bringing over heavy weaponry, but that never happened. The feeling on the ship is that everyone was fortunate. Or blessed, perhaps.

They send the numbers to Philemon. He enters them on his ledger. He pores over the thick man-flesh leaves and scrapes them with his long quill. He compares the outcome to previous engagements with similar enemies. He compiles a cross-reference table and scribbles out notes and marginalia. The Little Lords watch, some bored, some transfixed. Several of them plop down from the shelf to take a closer look. One of them defecates from excitement, causing snickering from the others. Philemon is irritated, puts it in a glass jar and screws the lid on. The jar rattles around after that, with the tiny daemon ranting inside, and is ignored.

There are many jars in Philemon’s chamber. Some are greater than human-size, all of which are filled with cloudy liquor. There are shapes floating in those jars that are hard to make out. Others are smaller, containing tinctures and salves, ointments and witch-brew. In one jar, bound with iron bars and capped with a silver lid, dwells the daemon Countquick.

Countquick looks like a scraggy crow, a black-feathered avian from Terran pre-history. The world he was taken from has no crows, never has done and never will, but daemons are apt to take on archetypes from the broad sweep of human experience, and crows are a favourite. Over the centuries, the once-glossy feathers have dulled, and there are bald patches on Countquick’s skinny hide. Its eyes, which flash yellow when angry, are filmy. This is strange, because daemons do not normally age or decay, but who knows what magicks are at work with Countquick? Philemon clipped its wings, put it in the jar and whispered words of binding on the seal. Sometimes he lets the daemon out, but only after saying certain rites and making sure that wards and shackling runes are traced out in disease-free mortal blood, which is a time-consuming task and so rarely done.

Countquick has killed 10,345 mortals and consumed their souls. If you let it, it will tell you all about them. Most of the time, though, it mutters aimlessly. The Little Lords squat on its jar and stick their tongues out at it, and it squawks back and hisses at them.

Countquick is not its real name. Its real name is so maddeningly complex that to say it out loud would burst your eyeballs. Philemon calls it that because the daemon understands the occult of the warp, the resonance and the repetition of the sacred numbers. You have to trick it into helping you, but now it is so ravenous and desperate that such tricks are often possible.

Philemon comes up to it, peers into the jar and shows it the ledgers. ‘You approve, daemon?’ he says.

Countquick squints at the numbers. ‘I remember when. Your lord Mortarion was born,’ it says.

There are two strange things about the way Countquick speaks. One is the pause inserted into every sentence, as if its mind – or what passes for a mind – has some tick or impediment that cannot be eradicated. It is a regular affliction, and does not seem to be getting worse. Philemon has never understood this. A daemon is not a physical thing in the truest sense. It cannot be infected or degraded by the plagues of the world. Its visual and auditory aspect is chosen, or dictated by sorcery. But then again, Philemon has never investigated too thoroughly. Daemons are ineffably perplexing. That is why he keeps them in jars.

The second strange thing is the way Countquick’s beak moves. A real avian does not speak. Its long beak is designed to peck the eyes from hanged corpses, not to form syllables. But Countquick speaks. In order to form the sounds, its beak is flexible and its tongue rolls and licks and flickers like a human’s. Even after many centuries, Philemon still finds this unsettling to watch. There is a great blasphemy in the display, one that he cannot quite shake from his mind despite the many other blasphemies he has either committed or witnessed. A crow should not speak like a man. It should not speak at all.

‘Yes, you have told me this often,’ Philemon says.

‘I saw all of them. Born in the warp. Like stars. Being kindled.’

‘I don’t really care to hear this again.’

‘One by. One.’

Philemon shows the daemon the results of his calculations. There is trigonometry on the man-flesh sheets, traced out in blotchy ink patterns, all annotated with more ledgers. ‘Do you approve of this? Any mistakes?’

Countquick glances at the working. Its gimlet eyes dart. ‘You place so much. Faith in these things.’

‘They tell me where we are now,’ says Philemon. ‘Amid the halls of darkness, far from the witchlight of the Corpse. They tell me we cannot follow the Deathlord, not right now. We are becalmed, lost in a pit of our own making.’

‘So. Poetic.’

‘That is what the calculations tell me. Vorx wants to know what to do next.’

‘He could try. Making his own decisions.’

Philemon laughs. ‘These are but guides.’

The crow hops weakly from one claw to the other. ‘Even before we sent. You the Destroyer Hive, you cleaved to this occult. You counted and. You computed. That was never part. Of what was intended for you. Now it has become. Manic. Stop it.’

Philemon puts the parchment away. ‘Too late. You changed us alright, but you never get exactly what you want.’

‘We always get. What we want.’

‘Demonstrably false. You’re in a jar.’

‘For. Now.’

Philemon smiles. ‘We have an abundance of freedom. The spaces between worlds are emptier than ever before. I see symmetries in the equations I have never seen before. Abaddon has unpicked something profound, hasn’t he? You know what he’s done, don’t you?’

Countquick turns its head away.

Philemon laughs. ‘So be it. I’ll discover it in time.’ He limps over to the table where the Little Lords roll and caper. He finds the one brought to him by Vorx and picks it up.

‘I could let you out more often, you know,’ he says to Countquick, ‘if you were a little more helpful.’

The daemon ignores him.

‘Fair enough,’ says Philemon equably, setting off for the bridge with the Little Lord and the parchment. ‘I wouldn’t trust me either.’

Solace is powering on now. Gantries are hoisted back into position. Armour-plating swells back into place, the las-burns pop and blister away. Thick coolant coagulates over ingress wounds, hardens, scabs over. Augur arrays swivel back into functionality, and the ship’s core burns with a sullen red heat again. The Population scurries about in the darkness, squabbling over foetid scraps, sickening and weakening but never quite dying.

Vorx watches the viewports carefully. Drez-Uil is struggling, trying to make sense of semi-functional readings that scatter and skip across his picter lenses. Fluid is dripping everywhere, splashing on the screens and making them smear. Tjafa has flounced off, readying herself for what she supposes will be a painful and semi-successful stint in the amniotic sphere. Dragan has ghosted away too, retreating – for now – to wherever he goes when the darkness is on him.

It is Hovik who makes the first breakthrough. She is leaning over a sensor column, turning a dial slowly, her face underlit by rapidly strobing lights.

‘My lord,’ she says.

Vorx walks over to her. She is using ancient equipment. Everything on the bridge is ancient. Without its incorporated biological growths and deep-sunk organic fusions, it would have given up long ago. The Death Guard no longer tend machinery – they have forgotten how. But they understand cells and respiration and circulation, and so much of what they use employs these methods.

‘I have a partial match,’ she reports, gesturing towards the cracked lens cover.

Vorx takes a look. He sees overlaid stellar schematics – lines of soft phosphor traced over a lattice of hand-drawn sigils. He sees correspondences, albeit only partially.

‘We have come a long way,’ he murmurs.

‘I cannot read these runes,’ Hovik says, isolating calligraphic script on the facsimile of parchment.

Vorx struggles to do so. Once, he would have been able to read Gothic as easily as any other language, but two things have changed since his early career – he has grown older and his mind is less rapid, and Gothic itself has evolved. It is now a language of internal contradictions and overlapping meanings, a palimpsest that never quite lets the old layers get wiped clean. It is uglier now, filled with more ornament than it ever used to have.

But some words are technical, and alter little.

‘Segmentum Obscurus,’ he reads. ‘Sector, subsector… I cannot make that out. Gods of regeneration, we are a long way out.’

Hovik looks at him, concerned. ‘Imperial space, sure enough. But I hear nothing. No astropathic bursts in the psy-scoop. No warp-wakes. It is all… empty.’

Vorx looks harder. Hovik is right. The sensor readings are too few. It is as if some hand has scraped the universe clean, pulling the glimmers of life – always tenuous – from its dark surface.

‘I sense shock,’ says Vorx. ‘Trauma-response.’ He turns to her. ‘The Despoiler has wounded reality, Hovik.’ He laughs – a coarse, throttled snort through his congested airways. ‘Perhaps Dragan is right. Perhaps Abaddon was the real thing.’

The allusion passes over her head. Hovik, like all the Unchanged, cares or understands little of the politics of the Eye. She knows nothing of the furious warfare carried out over centuries within its tormented heart, or of the theological differences between its protagonists. She does not comprehend that a single Plague Marine might have to balance many competing loyalties – towards his warband, his Legion, his primarch, the Despoiler’s dominions, his own oaths made millennia ago, his desires. She has enough cares of her own – the ship, the many demands of the crew, survival.

‘I see nothing to aim for,’ she says, used to Vorx’s cryptic musings and focused on the task at hand.

He cycles the range a little further out, feeling like a fisherman throwing a net over a dry wasteland.

Then Drez-Uil, half-buried amid old and creaking augur platforms, gets something. ‘Long-range void sounding,’ he announces, working furiously. ‘Distress, I think – hard to pick out.’

Vorx is moving. ‘Lock it down,’ he orders. ‘How far?’

‘On the edge of our scopes,’ says Drez-Uil. ‘And we are heading away from it.’

‘Full turn,’ says Vorx, and the command is relayed by Hovik to the navigation pits. Slave crew jump to action, hauling levers, stamping trajectory scrolls and sending them trundling down vacuum tubes. Stars wheel across the realviewers as Solace awkwardly comes about. ‘Reel it in.’

Philemon enters, cradling a Little Lord and some rolls of parchment. He draws alongside Vorx and watches the picter lenses scroll.

‘Found something?’ he asks.

‘I do not know yet,’ says Vorx, greeting him with a nod. ‘A lure to chase, at least.’

‘Your daemon is restored.’

Philemon hands the Little Lord to Vorx, who glances at it, grunts, and turns back to the augur. The creature blows an outraged raspberry and hops up into the rafters, where it sits, sulking.

‘I looked into the numerology,’ says Philemon.

‘Hmm?’

‘We hold fate in our hands,’ says the Tallyman. ‘For the first time since the Hive came among us. There are real choices here, siegemaster. You understand me?’

Vorx half listens. He is watching the phosphor-blip as it travels over the lens.

‘It has never been thus in living memory,’ Philemon goes on. ‘We have been permitted to raid, here and there. To bleed the Corpse a little, a slice or two of flesh. Now the door is opened. This brings danger. You will see it soon. We will all need to learn.’

Vorx is looking at the signal of the ship. Some details are emerging. It is Imperial, and it is running. It looks small.

‘Where is the Lord Primarch?’ he asks.

‘I do not know. We have been displaced, in both time and location.’

‘We have our orders.’

‘So you keep saying.’

Vorx turns to face the Tallyman. ‘Some things endure. I will find him again, fight at his side, just as I promised we would.’

Philemon’s face is exposed. His concern is obvious. His sore-thick lip twitches. ‘You have the care of this warband, lord,’ he says. ‘Do not neglect it.’

‘Aquatic hunters,’ says Vorx.

‘Quite.’

‘We need data.’

‘I understand.’

Vorx sighs. ‘I will give this to Dragan. I will lend him Garstag and the Kardainn. They can take what they want from it, as long as I have the information.’

‘Go yourself.’

In another age, Vorx might have raised an eyebrow. He no longer has eyebrows. He barely has a forehead.

‘You need to kill,’ Philemon says. ‘You need to give them trophies.’

‘I am not some petty warlord.’

‘Yes, you are.’ Philemon smiles sadly. ‘We all are. For now. Play the part a little longer and we may yet survive to see a restoration of what was promised.’

Vorx thinks on this. As he does so, the bridge becomes more animated around him. Other stations pick up the scent, and servitors flex their bound fingers and gape into oculus-enhancers. Solace itself trembles, as if it smells something in the void and yearns to wrap its mandibles around fresh meat.

‘I do not need to prove myself,’ Vorx says.

‘All the time,’ Philemon replies. ‘None of us escapes.’

Vorx emits a sour chuckle. He likes Philemon, and he likes the Tallyman’s fatalism. All the breed share this trait. They, by vocation, peer into the darkest corners of the universe’s foundations, the matterless structure on which all else is built, and it makes them dour.

‘Very well,’ Vorx says. ‘Bring me Exact. I shall scrape the rust off it with the unbeliever’s flesh.’

His Imperial Majesty’s Service Ship ER-587-D runs hard.

The engines are dangerously hot. This is not a warp-capable vessel, and it does not have the heavy shielding units over its enginarium core that a bigger ship would carry. It does not have Navigators, and it does not have much in the way of weaponry. It has a complement of fifty-two armed guardians taken from Najan’s standing local defence forces, all of whom are now on high alert. It has six pulse guns set fore and an old lascannon lodged under the main cockpit overhang, which Captain Kovasha has never had a great deal of faith in and has only had cause to use twice in over ten years.

A service ship is not designed to fight. It is not even designed to be on its own. For the last few decades, ER-587-D has never been out of the shadow of protective escorts. Its management protocols are all built around short journeys between colony worlds, its holds stuffed with synth-grains and bulk carb-loads. Kovasha can’t remember when he didn’t have a destroyer or a monitor within a few hours’ hail distance. His training has always emphasised that – if in peril, run to the shadow of your protectors.

But there are no protectors left. He is becoming light-headed as he sits on his crude command throne. His palms are wet. He feels as if the universe has folded in on itself, the old certainties gone and no new ones ready to take their place.

There is a terrible rumour, spread over the inter-ship vox-net while it still existed, that the Astronomican beacon is gone, and that Navigators have been driven mad by its loss and the entire sector fleet is adrift and burning. Now the net is down. No signals from Najan have been received for four days. This feeds other rumours – that Terra itself has been consumed by fire, that monsters are now bursting from the hearts of men, that the Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes have withdrawn their protection from the Imperium and that planets are being devoured one by one.

Kovasha would not normally believe rumours like that. He is that rarest thing in the Imperium – a calm and rational man – and yet now his all-consuming fear is making him jumpy.

‘How far?’ he asks his sensorium mistress.

Ailah turns to face him from down in the augur trench, looking as clammy as he feels. ‘Nothing yet. But… oh, Throne. I have something on the long-range scanners now.’

Kovasha feels his stomach lurch. ‘Show me.’

His throne-mounted array of lenses switches to near-field, rotated for main-yaw correction. He struggles to focus as the view pans and then drunkenly zooms, but finally something comes into focus, several hundred kilometres off but closing very fast.

He swallows. ‘What is that?’ he croaks.

No answers come. No one on the bridge has seen anything like it, except perhaps in their nightmares.

‘It is on an intercept course,’ Ailah says weakly. ‘We cannot go any faster.’

Kovasha does not know where the destroyers are. There was something a week ago, only half picked up, about emergency protocols being enacted and all Naval assets going to crimson station, but of course that meant nothing to him, and in any case they were due to dock with the mass conveyer Davanger XIII by the scheduled switch time and so could not pay much attention to garbled intercepts.

Only the conveyer wasn’t there. And the comm fell into silence. And it stayed silent. They have been running for Najan ever since, perfectly aware that whatever has happened, it is wholly unprecedented and very serious.

He finds that his hand is shaking, and clenches it against the armrest of his throne.

‘Evasive manoeuvres,’ he says.

Ailah stares at him. The navigation captain, Splaed, stares at him. They are in a volume of empty space. They have standard sub-plasma drives. They do not know what he means by ‘evasive manoeuvres’.

But Kovasha doesn’t say any more. He feels something hot and wet in his lap, and looks down. His nose is bleeding. The drops form a dark web on his fatigues. He wipes the blood away, but it won’t stop coming.

Then he can hear what sounds like buzzing over the ship’s voxcasters, and raps the transmitter attached to the throne. Ailah looks suddenly unwell. She bends over in her seat, clutching her stomach.

Kovasha struggles to concentrate. ‘How close?’ he asks.

Ailah does not answer. Splaed reaches over to her station and stares at the data. ‘Holy saints, it’s right on us,’ he says. Then he suddenly belches and vomits over Ailah’s tactical column, gripping it until his knuckles go white.

Automatic proximity klaxons start up, whirling and wailing. The bridge lumens flicker and die, plunging them all into perfect dark.

‘Emergency power!’ shrieks Kovasha, getting to his feet and reaching for his sidearm. Blood is running freely over his chin now, and he feels faint.

Dull red lumens glow into life, doing the bare minimum to banish the shadows. He sees silhouettes of his crew stumbling around, some bleeding like he is, others gripping themselves in agony that has come from nowhere. The buzzing is getting worse – it makes it hard to think.

He staggers across the main dais. He can hear thumps from somewhere up above, and then a big crash. The ship reels, spinning around as if it has been punched by a giant hand. He hears metal screaming against metal, then a series of explosions.

He curses as he realises that his powerpack is empty. He has been meaning to check it properly for the long days of the race home, but something more important has always come up. He lurches back to the throne, to the compartments built into the arms with all the many essential things he needs to store and use. As he drops to his knees, he hears the crashes getting closer – huge impacts, one after the other, like horrific drumbeats. The klaxons wail, and the buzzing starts to hurt his ears.

He gets to the compartment, reaches for the security catch, fumbles it. He has blood on his gloves, and his chest is now sticky with it.

The buzzing becomes maddening, and he swats at imaginary flies. Ailah is still vomiting – the liquid has turned bloody and black. Men are screaming, women are screaming, and the deck is vibrating underfoot to a steady and increasing slam rhythm. Kovasha can hardly see what he’s doing, but he manages to pull the hatch open and get a fresh powerpack out. Trembling, he slots the replacement into the sidearm and depresses the inlet catch.

Then he’s turning, swinging around to face the bridge, holding the lasgun two-handed and trying to find something to aim at.

The darkness is as thick as bilge, a jumble of blurred outlines against a dull red haze. The buzzing drowns out even the screams now, though he still can’t see any damn flies. His skin crawls. His bleeding gets worse. Splaed is hurling up something stringy.

Then the doors blow apart. Bodies of guardians fly through the ragged gap, their limbs flopping. Kovasha aims his lasgun and fires – three lines of searing heat that light up tortured shapes he cannot identify. For a moment he thinks he has shot into a mess of writhing snakes spilling through the jagged breach to slap and slither across the deck.

But then giants stride into the open, and he sees that the snakes are coils of flesh erupting from thick plates of armour. The giants are monsters of shadow. Their stink is phenomenal, clogging the air. It makes him instantly gag, and he feels saliva pool in his cheeks even as he scrabbles away.

They do not hurry. Pale-green points of light shine from grotesque helms. Miasma clouds them, swirling about their every movement. Kovasha fires again, then again, his finger glued to the trigger in his panic. He cannot see how many there are – five? Six?

They are not saying anything. He can hear only breathing, like a caged animal’s, throaty and phlegmy. His crew are being killed, steadily and methodically, and he cannot do anything. He swivels round, his back against the command throne, and fires some more. Every las-beam lights up more horror – claws ripping through skin, bones breaking under cloven treads.

Then one of the monsters comes for him, stalking with deliberation, absorbing the las-fire as if it were a patter of raindrops. Kovasha sees a fractured helm and twin lenses that shine with a sick, pale light. He sees a huge scythe sweep through the clouds of flies and dust, ludicrously big with a blunt blade that drips with an oily residue. The monster isn’t even really using it – it’s holding the weapon one-handed and killing with its other fist, barely reaching out.

Kovasha, in his mindless terror, notices odd details. He notices that the monster has numbers etched on its armour, hundreds of them, alongside other little signs and symbols he does not recognise. He notices that there is a larger image on the hemisphere of its shoulderguard – a finger held up against a closed mouth. He notices, even in the dark, that the colour of the plate is indeterminate – a mottled pattern of greys, blacks, greens and ivories, like lichen on old rock, overlapping and overlaid in a parody of sedimentation.

Then he is looking right into the monster’s eyes. He can smell its sulphurous aura, hear its claggy breaths within the cavern of its chest. He wants to scream out, but his throat has seized up. He cannot fire his weapon. He cannot move.

The monster leans over him. ‘You are fortunate,’ it says, in slurring Gothic that sounds like something from the dawn of time. The accent is heavy, alien, palpably ancient, distorted by a vox-mask and the tubes and whatever else lurks under that nightmarish faceplate.

Kovasha can barely process that. Fortunate? Is that a sick joke?

The monster looms closer, and the stench nearly makes Kovasha lose consciousness.

‘You will teach us,’ the monster says. ‘That is what preserves you. Consider it a trade.’

Kovasha understands none of that. This has become unreal, like a drug-induced dream, something that cannot possibly be happening.

‘Where–’ he blurts, spitting up more blood.

The monster waits, patiently. ‘You are trying to speak. Try again.’

‘Where–’ says Kovasha.

The monster gives him time.

‘Where. Are. You. From?’

That seems to give it pause. It rests on the scythe, and a gurgling chuckle slips from its helm.

‘Where are we from?’

It draws in a long, wheezing breath. Kovasha thinks it is amused, though he has no idea why.

‘Not the first time I’ve been asked,’ it says. ‘And it is a story. But, then again, we have plenty of time. So listen.’

II: THE MANSE

CHAPTER FIVE

A long time ago, it seems now.

From the void, the world of Eliathada looks beautiful. No one calls it that anymore. Almost no one in the galaxy even remembers the name, save for that warpstorm-tossed remnant of a race who used to own it, and they never come here. The word means ‘sublime soul garden’ in a tongue that was once spoken the length and breadth of known space.

Vorx considers that as he sits back in the lander. Like all vehicles of his Legion, it is a bastardised version of a standard Imperial design – heavy, pocked, battle-worn. Mucus slithers down the interior of the viewport. Centipedes writhe in the corners of the chamber, their backs palpitating with a blotch of lurid colouration.

Vorx is one of the few left that knows the name of this planet, and what it meant to those who christened it. All planets in the Eye of Terror have names given them by the eldar. The words are figurative and allegorical, twisting with the many meanings that are only possible in that treacherous xenos tongue. Eliathada does mean ‘sublime soul garden’, but it also means ‘prideful wasteland’, and also ‘dry valley of dreams’. Vorx admires the way a single word can have so many interpretations. When he was in his mortal youth, he hated xenos with a passion driven by his training and his bioengineering, and would not have appreciated the subtlety. Now that so many centuries have passed, and he has become so much less ignorant, he finds that he no longer hates anything very much. That is one of the Gifts of the god, he knows.

He does not know, however, why Mortarion chose this place to make his own. Perhaps the primarch desired something pure to corrupt. Or perhaps he liked the name, harking back as it does to the greater garden, the One True Garden, and saw some kind of fateful resonance there.

From orbit, it is green, as verdant now as old Terra must have been at the dawn of time. It is an emerald in the void, spinning slowly amid a sky of violet and vermillion. Every colour on the face of the world is ramped up, distilled and intensified. Some of its colours do not exist in the purely physical universe at all and have names only the daemons can pronounce. From a distance, Eliathada shines like a lantern in the dark.

Nor does Vorx know why Mortarion never renamed it. The primarch, it is true, has an exaggerated interest in names, bordering on obsession. Since the great shame of the flight from Terra, in which the entire Legion was harried and humiliated and nearly broken apart, that obsession has only grown. It was said that even during the Crusade, before the primarch obtained his daemonhood and became something little less than a god himself, those relentless superstitions were already making their presence felt. That was in the days before the Destroyer Hive, of course, while the Death Guard still resisted becoming what they were always destined to be. Now that they are on the other side of that transition, like moths squirming out of the chrysalis, it is interesting to see how much has been retained.

So the world was never renamed. Those who were driven there in ignominy barely referred to it at all, thinking their retreat would be temporary. Even when that dream faded, and the Manse began to grow and stretch out permanent roots, they never reached for some Barbaran label or other to give a sense of solidity to their endeavour.

It was left to others to call it the Plague Planet, mostly in mockery or fear. The hateful Thousand Sons, those arrogant and deluded tricksters, were the probable origin, for they had carried over their ancestral distaste of all things earthy and honest.

Vorx despises the Thousand Sons more than he despises any citizen of the Imperium. In fact, he reserves mostly affection for the remaining defenders of Terra, seeing them as ignorant and waiting for salvation, but he cannot forgive the sins of Magnus’ progeny, for they should have known what they were doing. Even in their folly and destruction they have persisted in being a Legion of, as Garstag puts it, ‘arrogant shit-stained bastards’. Still, in all likelihood it was they that coined the name, which the planet’s new residents eventually took up themselves in a kind of defiance.

The Plague Planet it has remained ever since, even in the annals of the Imperial Inquisition, who speculate on what such a world must be like from the scraps and snippets they glean here and there.

Vorx smiles. They can have no idea.

It is Vorx’s belief that there are only a dozen – perhaps two dozen – planets in the galaxy truly worth a damn. Terra, incomparable Terra, bauble of every war that humanity has ever fought, is one of them. Mars is close behind. Barbarus most assuredly wasn’t, and it’s very much for the best that it’s been consigned to ashes. Soon the list gets harder to add to.

Until you get to the Plague Planet. Now, then, here is a rock a warrior could die for.

The lander plunges down to cloud level, and Vorx sees the familiar patterns of glow and diffusion. The entire globe is swathed in that humid cover, constantly changing, morphing, discharging and replenishing. The lander penetrates the outer level, and for a few moments the descent becomes rocky. Vorx relaxes, knowing that the transition is brief. Mortarion has generated those clouds to keep his realm shrouded from the rest of the Eye. The primarch ensures that they remain unbroken, lit from below by the exercise of his forges and his devilish manufactoria. Those clouds are the most profound poison, concentrated toxicity, capable of dissolving entire starships if the whim of the god directs it, and only the Legion’s own transports traverse it unscathed.

The lander breaks through, and the hidden surface of the world below slides into view. When the Death Guard first arrived here, it was a formless sphere, studded with eldritch ruins and haunted by the thin voices of xenos ghosts. The ghosts are gone now, for that species of indulgent semi-death is not tolerated in this place of dark fecundity. In its place, mountains have been raised. They are not natural. Their sides, glistening with cultivated slimes, are too steep, too dark, to have been formed by tectonics or erosion. They are pillars of extravagance, thrust up from alien soil by spine-bending labour and the injunctions of sorcery. Over ten thousand years, the pinnacles have pushed higher and steeper, crowding up against one another, until the entire planet’s crust resembles a giant porcupine skin, the valleys glowing with vivid green fire, the peaks as black as the souls of their creators.

Every inch of ground below is riddled with the tunnels of an immeasurably vast army, once baseline human, now a variety of sub-species steadily ground down and remade into the image of beasts. They drudge in the toxin-thick chasms, hauling raw materials for new spires of filth, sustained only by remorseless faith and the raw flesh of their own dead. They suck in spore-rich air, making their mutations gradually more flamboyant, and tread the old roads with packs on their misshapen backs. As the galaxy ages, those tracks have been worn away ever deeper, driving further into the crust of the world even as the cliffs above them pile higher.

Atop each of those cliffs stand great fortresses, the least of them a rival for the greatest fastnesses of the Imperium. Green aurorae flicker across parapets of black iron, briefly exposing the steep-angled profile of giant artillery ranks. Daemon engines prowl the ramparts, their exhausts gouting black slurry. Immense shroud creatures swim in the sulphurous heavens, trailing long cloaks riddled with mould. Rib-thin campaniles toll endlessly in discordant monotony, their dull iron-cast bells hammered by teams of bestials to mark the creation of fresh joys and miseries.

Deep down, buried within the world’s unquiet mantle, are the fabled networks of laboratories, apothecarions, fermentation chambers, brew cauldrons and rot pits. They merge into one another, blending into a twilight world of steam and toil so that not one living soul, perhaps not even the Deathlord himself, knows their full extent.

Spiralling chimneys vomit smoke every hour, adding to the inky, gravid clouds that swim across the bio-industrial landscape. Rain falls in thick torrents, cascading down the steep fortress sides and washing filth back down to the base of the chasms. Bacteria burst and divide in those cataracts, breeding voraciously in the humid depths before flowering in new and esoteric forms once the dim green sunlight filters back through the murk.

Vorx casts his jaded eyes across the vista and feels his old soul rejoice. The Plague Planet is the lodestone of his people, the crucible in which their blessed Gifts are developed. They inherited a dust-dry morgue and turned it into a vista of magnificence. This is a vindication of their esoteric creed, of the belief that through entropy comes apotheosis, of the wholehearted embrace of mortality in all its truest and most honest aspects.

The lander is shaking down, buffeted by moisture-heavy winds. The far horizon is lit by sooty pyres, and Vorx sees a mighty daemonship rise up slowly from a cradle of rusting spines. Even within the controlled atmosphere of the lander he can taste the many and wonderful pheromones that only exist here. He hears the boom and roll of drums, the braying of indentured herds, the background drone of a quadrillion flies, all directed towards one glorious end.

Evangelism.

This place is the mother church, the incubator for every bio-creed and flesh catechism, the pregnant source, the fertile seed. It is all for dissemination elsewhere. The Legion will only rest when all planets are Plague Planets, and the bells toll out across a galaxy made into this image of spectacular decay. They are the willing disciples, cast adrift in a cold and insipid universe. For a long time they have been working alone, driven onwards only by internal commitment and orders so old they could have been ossified before the age of the Doomed Warmaster. There was no word from the primarch himself, who was said to spend his days in his mouldering scriptorium. The Legion held together during that time, although it has frayed at the edges, some tempted to cleave their own path, others drawn by the siren call of the Despoiler. That was always a regret to Vorx, who has not heard the voice of his primarch for many centuries.

But there is change in the air now. The plagues taste a little different. The chime of the bells has a strange timbre. Even the bestials sense it, and they lift their elongated faces to the seamy heights.

The lander reaches its destination – a raised scaffold draped with black vines, half-hidden behind the miasma of forgesmoke. Waiting around the receiving platform’s perimeter are a variegated collection of the Plague Planet’s denizens – bestials wearing corroded metal plates and long rags, priests of the god in threadbare robes, several carrying great bells dangling atop heavy staffs. One of them, by his stature, is clearly Unbroken, but he does not wear his armour. His fleshy, mould-black body is barely contained by iron-thread mail. His sallow head, riddled with blotches that indicate some blood contagion, pokes stalk-like from a moth-eaten fur mantle. His eyes bleed softly with pale green light, and when he opens his tooth-spare mouth, the same light spills from between grey gums. He leans on a knotted length of wood, itself made seemingly fragile by the gnawed tunnels of borers, but which has somehow endured for as long as the war has.

Not everyone knows the name of that staff, either. Vorx, who studies all such things, knows that it is Wyrmwold, the last sliver of living matter taken from Barbarus and invested with all that world’s spite and futility. Everything else was destroyed, but this final splinter is still clutched tight in claw-like hands. It is a relic. The reasons for keeping it, beyond sentiment, are unclear.

Vorx descends the ramp and bows before the staff-bearer. ‘Slivergristle,’ he says reverently.

Slivergristle is a curiosity. He was once Kregar, a Plague Marine who fought in the Great Crusade. Like the rest of them, he endured the defeat under Terra’s vertiginous battlements and fought all the way back to the shameful Eye. Unlike most, he did not remain locked in that prison, but found some means to slip out before the bounds were fully set. He travelled to Barbarus, where he managed to retrieve Wyrmwold before the virus bombs fell.

Then something changed in him. He travelled strange paths – some say beyond the Halo Stars and into the deepest dark – and when he returned, he told even stranger stories. His speech had become as warped as his body, and it was reported that pacts had been made in the daemonic choirs to consume his essence as the result of an unspecified slight or prideful action. That was never proven, not even by the greatest priests of the god, but something had definitely taken place, for Slivergristle cast off his armour, took up the threadbare cloak of a pilgrim and never left the Plague Planet again.

‘I am an eater of the Neverborn,’ he told any who asked. That, too, is unproven, and yet Vorx believes it. He believes that Slivergristle has been possessed more than once, but that his ague-shot body treats trapped intelligences as one more infection among the hundreds of others, and is thus able to dissolve them. Vorx further speculates that the youngest and most foolish of the daemonic choir see this as a challenge and jostle for access to this most eccentric of hosts, hoping to master him and claim his soul. One by one they have all been digested, leading to little more than corposant-lit halitosis.

Such are the stories told of Slivergristle. Whether they have any basis in truth is doubtful, though his favour rides high among the many competing vicars of the Plague Planet.

‘Siegemaster,’ says Slivergristle, and wisps of ghost-light snag at the corners of his mouth. ‘Home to welcome. Travels? Good.’

They were. Vorx’s warband, the Lords of Silence, have been enjoying the favour of the god. The Imperium is becoming less able to prevent their sallies from the slowly breaking gaol of the Eye, and so they have feasted on worlds.

‘The reaping continues,’ he says, in a polite formula.

They walk together towards the platform’s edge. In the distant darkness, Vorx can hear lowing from the ritual abattoirs. He smells the richness of the mote-riddled air. He sees the green-tinged aurorae ripple across the jagged skyscape of spoil-spires.

‘Aware you indeed the tidings of, yes?’ asks Slivergristle.

‘I have heard things,’ says Vorx. ‘Here and there.’

‘True. Of it all, true and in that.’ Slivergristle belches, and a puff of short-lived flame whispers in the darkness. ‘So sceptical, no, I would not so listen. Called back in a reason, yes. Lives he.’

‘I know the primarch lives, brother vicar,’ says Vorx.

‘No, lives he. Blood now boiling, just old like again it.’

These rumours were known about. Word had passed across warbands like the diseases they revelled in, somehow leaping across the immense gulf of the void to be half heard and copied and doubted. That was, after all, why Vorx had come back. There were a thousand reasons for daring the treacherous shoals of the Eye’s borders again, not least the close pursuit of more than one Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes, but that was the choicest of all – that he might be roused again from introspection.

‘I’d believe you more,’ Vorx says, ‘were I to see it with my own eyes.’

Slivergristle grins. ‘Why you are thinking back here in this now, of course? He knows all it of, and watches. Now moves. Heh! After so long.’

They approach an archway. The lintel is of brass and has the figurehead of a bloated face made in scorched metal. It is hot on the Plague Planet, a world lit by the off-draught of furnace towers and the humid warmth of culture pools.

Vorx pauses. ‘I have not spoken with him for a long time.’

Slivergristle nods. ‘Shall you. Wait just more not much. Why you here are, in truth?’

Again, there is more than one reason. For respite, for recovery. To take counsel from Philemon, whom he wishes to take with him into Solace’s bounds. To escape the weary competitions within the warband, just for a time. And yes, to dare the passage of the Manse. All these things are true.

‘This is home, brother,’ Vorx says.

Slivergristle laughs, and nods.

‘For now.’ He grins. ‘For now, but come change it will, oh yes.’

First he goes to his own holdings. They are high on a ridge, like all the demesnes of the Unbroken, peering over the lips of precipices down into the fog-choked valleys below. That is an affectation they all adopt, taken from the distant past. Once, they were not permitted to ascend into the heights. Now they dwell there exclusively, adopting the manner of those who once oppressed them. Even those who came afterwards, like Dragan, who have no memory of Barbarus, even they adopt the custom.

He walks old paths, treading on lichen-sponged stone. His passage is mobbed by herds of bestials, some of whom try to touch him, others who clear the path for him. They light lanterns, and butter-yellow light spills from panels of thick, liquid glass. From time to time he spies members of his order, lumbering through dark fields with scythes in hand. Some salute grimly, in the old Crusade fashion. Others stare at him mutely, their soft lenses refracting in the ever-murk, and he wonders if they have lost their minds at last. It happens, sooner or later, in this place.

It is always night on the Plague Planet. No dawn sun pierces its shifting clouds, and the only constant illumination comes from below, from the phosphorescent mists and the bioluminescent fungi. Every figure is a shadow, silhouetted against that warm emerald light, even the daemons, the greatest of which loom like bloated mountains against fiery cauldrons of soul-fire.

He reaches his domain, which has been called Hope’s Revenant ever since he raised it. He remembers delving into the black soils with his own hands, back when the land was bare and the skies were lit with xenos wails. He remembers raising the walls above the crags, mining the soft stone and cutting it down. He remembers the scaffolds and the work gangs, and the endless slaves brought from raids into realspace to end their days in exhaustion and decrepitude.

Now he looks at the high walls, as black as oil, the parapets lit with that ever-present soft glow. He smells the daemons slithering within, the Little Lords and the plaguebearers who can ghost between the stones like gas. He breathes in and smells his House Plagues, the ones unique to this plot, rotting slowly in the oubliettes.

For the first time in a long while, Vorx is satisfied. Occasionally he thinks of another life for himself, one confined to Hope’s Revenant, where he remains closeted with the books of numerology and the gardens, free to contemplate the Truth and explore its mysteries. He has never given in to it, but believes that the entire Legion shares this morose tendency. The greatest of them, after all, has been indulging it for ten thousand years.

He passes under the high portcullis, and those bestials blessed with elongated necks bow to him. He processes across the inner courtyard, where his steward, Loam, waits dutifully. Loam is a bestial, with a long equine face and buck teeth. His brown hide is wrinkled almost into oblivion, and glistens from perspiration.

‘Welcome, siegemaster,’ Loam says.

The steward always uses the proper titles. Unlike most bestials, he can talk, although the sounds are crude and he will never be eloquent.

‘How stands the citadel?’ asks Vorx, looking up at the inner walls. They are streaked with moisture, dripping slowly. Flayed corpses bump and swing from one high tower, picked at by carrion crows. From somewhere far down below, he can hear the bubble of boil-vats and smell the cooking from the refectories.

‘Rots,’ says Loam. ‘Topples. Come home more.’

Vorx smiles and keeps walking. ‘I wish I could,’ he says, reaching the great doors to his private apartments.

Once within, he climbs the interior stairs, treading paths that he built himself. Every worn stone is familiar, every smell is comforting. Once he would have scorned such notions, having been made immune to all calls of family or community. Now he values these things. He tends to his herds and his slaves, seeing what can be made of them and taking pleasure in their successes.

After a long climb, he reaches his sanctuary. He takes an iron key from the ring at his belt and unlocks the door. When he pushes it open, a rich swell of old smells tumbles out, ones he has not enjoyed for a long time.

He enters a grand chamber perched high at the pinnacle of the tallest tower. Bookcases line the walls, each stuffed with tome upon tome. Most are leather-backed, some bound in human hide, some in stranger coverings. They are mostly ancient, and their age seeps from them like a stink. They are all slowly mouldering away, flaking into nothingness, drooping from the extreme humidity. Worms burrow into them, gnawing trails through thick parchment. Ivory-eyed rats scuttle from stand to stand, hoarding scraps in their pink claws.

The floor is knee-deep in discarded vellum. Quills scratch across writing desks, propelled by invisible hands, inscribing endless lists. Some are chronicles of years, others are typologies of phages and contagions, others are the names of allies and enemies.

Vorx glances at one, the vellum rustling as the quill wobbles across its surface.

Tophar. Mandravaxon. Járnhamar.

None of those words mean anything to him. They may do in the future, or they may not – it does not pay to listen too closely to the outputs of bound instrumental daemons.

He pushes his way towards a pulpit at the far end of the chamber. A single book lies open on its inclined surface, untroubled by the attentions of vermin. Its hide is as white as bone, and its pages as thick as a finger. It is impossibly huge, that book – if looked at from certain angles it seems to go on forever, sinking deep into the library’s mouldy floor, although from most aspects it is no thicker than the rest of them.

He reaches for a metal quill standing in a dusty sleeve and dips it into a well of viscous ink. He holds it over the blank parchment and collects himself.

Then he begins to write. Slowly, carefully, he traces out tiny letters in immaculate Standard Gothic, of a grammar and idiom commensurate with the early Crusade. The first thing he writes is a name – Brother-Sergeant Caias Meldonia, Squad Taxis, Fourth Company, the Emperor’s Blades. He pauses, remembering the face. Location: Attamar, outer reach spinward, system marker 45-56-3. A faint smile crinkles across his sore-clustered lips. The action had been prosecuted well. We were on the outward march from Kletan. He fills in more details, always in the same manner, not lapsing into Barbaran or Mourtaig, the debased vernacular of the Plague Planet, or even current-era Gothic. This record was started at the very commencement of his career in the Death Guard and has been continued in the same vein ever since.

When he finishes the entry, he carefully adds the date approximation according to both the Terran system and Chronolattice, a scheme of his own devising that maps events to a more fluid set of points underpinned by warp dynamics. It is more accurate, at least from a number of important points of view, although it has peculiarities of its own – whereas the Imperial system becomes more inaccurate the further one is from Terra and the further in time one is from the nominal baseline event, Chronolattice works forward to the end of the universe, a constant Vorx names T, for thanatos, and becomes more reliable the closer the apocalypse comes.

He takes time to cross-reference the entry with previous ones. He adds the relevant numbers to several interlinked grids, drawing the numerals with exactitude. Once done, he tallies certain esoteric relationships and determines if significant patterns have emerged, then logs them in a third set of ledgers.

Then he repeats the process with Ammunition Loader Silv Klood, resident of Attamar orbital station IV. Less is known about that death, for the stature of the victim was minuscule, but he records all that he has been able to determine, for completeness is a virtue.

He has many hours of work ahead. The raiding season has been long, and he has much blood on his hands from it. He labours methodically, giving each entry just as much care as the first ones. The first biographies were written ten thousand years ago. This chronicle, this record of deaths served at his hand, stretches back to the dawn of the Imperial Age. For all Vorx knows, it may be the most complete history of any kind still intact. Inquisitors would sacrifice entire systems to retrieve it, if they only knew of its existence. More than one petty daemon has been spun into instantiation purely as a result of symmetries picked out on the pages. Others of the Neverborn have come to Hope’s Revenant and tried to consume the book, believing its contents might elevate them within their crowded and jostling pantheon, but the library is carefully guarded with ether traps and honey pits, and Vorx has designed many subtler defences to confound them.

The book has no title. Or, to be more precise, the book’s title is also its contents. The final entry will be his own. Such psychic accumulation of killing generates a final artefact – when Vorx dies, the last page will complete itself, capping the immense and winding account of a soul’s extension beyond all mortal tolerance. On that day, the tome will close, turned as if by unseen hands. The symbols will arrange and sift, the numbers will slot into new positions, and its fusion of occult symbology will reach apotheosis. It will be the final legacy of uncountable lives, stored and cross-referenced, counted and totalled, a product of magnificent uselessness.

This is Vorx’s great act of spite towards impermanence. He is smiling as he writes it, and the passage of time slows, dilates, warms up.

He never knows how long it has taken, once he stops. When he looks up again, a day might have passed, or a month, or many years. Such is the nature of the labour, and of the world on which it is performed.

On this occasion, when the quill is placed back in the sleeve and the last of the ink dries on the page, he turns to see a figure in his library. Even after so long on this strange planet, with its comings and goings of gods and daemons, its creaks and groans and its bending of the normal laws, he is taken aback. The place ought to have been secure, and he briefly wonders if his life is in danger.

Then he sees who it is and relaxes. The visitor is far more massive than he – a true giant of twisted ceramite and overspilling flesh. He even knows his name, for there are not many of this breed.

‘You didn’t knock, Slaunn,’ Vorx says.

The Deathshroud Terminator does not smile, at least not obviously. His face is entirely hidden behind a landslip of helm and cowl and bursting flesh. His armour is a near-black green, like pond slime, and his ragged scraps of cloak and chasuble are a dirty grey. He breathes like an animal breathes, and his enormous slumped chest heaves with every intake. The god has been generous to him, Gifting him innumerable alterations, blights and contusions. His long manreaper scythe is warped and curving, more like a coil of rope than a length of adamantium, but it is all the deadlier for that.

Slaunn has been there from the start too. He has seen the cold valleys of Barbarus and huddled in that world’s freezing nights. He knows, just as Vorx does, how much better things have got.

‘He’s ready,’ Slaunn hisses, a dry whisper through old vocal cords.

Vorx prepares himself. ‘So soon.’

‘You have been here eight weeks,’ says Slaunn.

That takes Vorx aback. ‘Really?’

‘This is becoming eccentric now, Vorx. Do not rely on his favour forever. You could have done more, were it not for…’

Slaunn does not need to finish that. Vorx can do it for him.

Were it not for the obsessions. The numbers. The recording, the completion of pointless tasks.

‘Well,’ says Vorx. ‘I am ready now.’

‘He’ll be extravagantly pleased by that,’ says Slaunn. ‘Come with me.’

The Manse is not widely spoken of outside the Plague Planet. Few even within the Eye know much of it, save for vague rumours of something colossal and imposing. Virtually none beyond the borders of the hell realm have any comprehension of it at all. For the citizens of the Corpse-Empire, Mortarion has ceased to exist as anything but a warning from the past.

That is as the Deathlord wishes it, and to understand this one must understand the character of the primarch. Even among his fallen brethren he is a complex case. There is nothing straightforward about his rage, as one might say about that hellfire beast Angron. There is none of the control that the witch-king Lorgar learned to exercise. He has carried more with him from the past than most of his brothers, and it is said of him that everything came late, and with difficulty. He was the last to succumb to the full embrace of the pantheon. He was the last to arrive at the Siege. He was the last to retreat from Terra, it is rumoured, though others contest that.

In Mortarion, more than in any other, is conflict. Hatred was everywhere inside him – of his father, of circumstance, of the Imperium, of himself. The poison of his foster world was hard to excise, and even if things had been handled differently by those in command, his would have been a damaged psyche.

Vorx knows these things. They are not hidden from the Legion, and it does not lessen his love for his master. In his religion, damage is not something to be worried about – it is to be celebrated, cultivated, and if possible, extended. They know, they understand, as the Corpse-spawn cannot, that the attempt to stave off corruption is the greatest source of disappointment. You can’t keep it out. Learn to embrace it, to use it, or consign yourself to long and wearying defeat.

For all that, Vorx is anxious. It has been a long time. Time flows strangely in the Eye, but it must surely have been centuries, even as measured by the Plague Planet’s dark rotations. The Legion has got used to silence, to making its own way. Typhus, that insufferable puppet, has been the figurehead for many of them during the Empty Years, though even his many successes have not erased the suspicion he stimulates in the older generation.

We really do know what you did to us, Vorx thinks as he travels. We don’t forget.

He makes his way there on foot, along with Slaunn. It takes them a long time, for the terrain is purposefully difficult. They wind along the steep shoulders of the pinnacles. At times, they are forced down lower, where the air is like milk and the bestials run slave gangs of mortal humans. They stride past the altars, piled high with putrescence, and push their way through the squirming clots of flies. They see the mill wheels, turning forever, and the bones that litter the sodden ground beneath them.

After a long time, the land begins to rise. The black soils glisten with moisture, and dark leaves unfurl around them. Intelligences hiss at them from under warm shadows, and stagnant pools boil uneasily. Great menhirs lurch up along the roadside, worn by an eternity of corrosive winds.

And then, at last, the walls of the Manse become visible, in a caricature of defensive excess. The fortress’ sheer sides soar up from the green-glow depths, hundreds of metres without handhold. The place is like a mountain itself, an upthrust of tectonics, spreading far beyond all practical concerns and into the realm of megalomaniacal insanity. Towers thrust and spiral around one another, all spiked and hung heavily with lanterns. Stone stairways coil around the tilting flanks of the halls within, sometimes leading somewhere, sometimes terminating in kill-pits or smother-pans. Cathedrals to the god, empty places, rear up like abandoned tombs, mouldering away amid a mix of incense and the sweet stink of the dead, the dying and the coming back again.

‘You never quite get used to how… huge it is,’ Vorx says dryly.

‘Still growing, they say,’ says Slaunn, sounding uninterested. ‘The god only knows how.’

This is the Court of the Deathlord, and it teems with supplicants, ambassadors, sorcerers and seers. Bestials man the kilometres-long battlements in conjunction with squatting slums of daemons. Trains of pilgrims file towards the jaw gates, so numerous that they fill the causeways across half a continent. Priests of the god preach at them endlessly, their screeds punctuated by the dull tolling of cracked bells. The pilgrims stare out from moth-worn cowls, their famished eyes waiting for one of their brothers to fall so that they might chew on a little gristle that night. Above them all swim skyships and gun-barges, each leaving lines of inky smog in the hot aurora night. Beyond those are the calls of the drifting shrouds, eerie as whale calls, shimmering in ghostly inscrutability.

Slaunn does not need to make his presence felt here. As he and Vorx make their way towards the gates, the crowds shrink back of their own accord, abasing themselves and making the Sign of Three on their chests. Even the scourge daemons, with their whips of infected leather, stop to stare at the Deathshroud. Blind grox-haulers shudder to a halt, and their wagons of softening fruit slosh on greasy axles. Bestials stare at them with big, shining eyes, panting and letting strings of saliva hang from their tusked jaws.

‘Were the crowds always this big?’ asks Vorx, looking over the throngs with interest.

‘They were,’ says Slaunn, lumbering up to the portcullis.

‘I never really know why they come.’

‘The same reason we do.’ Slaunn signals to the watchers far above. The iron bars begin to grind open. ‘Only, we can get in.’

The gates are, like everything here, a parody. They are, it is said, seven centimetres taller than the Eternity Gate on Terra. Just seven. Mortarion did a lot of things like that – petty things, mediocre digs at fate. The cupola is slightly taller than that raised over the Senatorum Imperialis. The walls are steeper by seven degrees.

Still, the effect is impressive. It takes ten minutes for the parody gates to grind open, hauled by chained gangs of bestials. Only once they’re pulled apart can the gloomy interior of the Manse come into view – a pile of tottering, half-ruined stacks of rotting stones, jumbling and straining upwards, ever upwards, linked by crumbling spans and spirals, creating a fragile, bloated city that juts like a nest of thorns high into the clouds above. Mist curls around its foundations, boiling against the black surfaces and leaving filmy stains on the rocks. Greater daemons bellow from spell-gaols lodged deep in the magick-drenched towers, making the sodden earth vibrate down to the world’s core.

‘Best not hang around,’ says Slaunn, pressing on. ‘We’re already late.’

It is crowded in those courtyards and terraces. Obese priests shuffle from altar to altar, accompanied by gaggles of acolytes with their upcoming sacrifices wriggling in sacks. Sorcerers stalk among them, some Unbroken, wreathed in snapping whips of force. Huge misshapen creatures, limbs stretched and bellies bloated, stagger up the twisting stairwells, lowing and huffing.

There are courts within courts. In some, astrologers consult swinging orreries and tilt their astrolabes up towards the narrow slits of thick glass windows. In others, alchemists toil over bubbling racks; in yet more, surgeons sharpen their blades against whetstones before turning to shivering figures strapped to their tables. Occultists with seven eyes scribble on stone tablets, their quills dipped into the bloody slops of the still living. Daemonologists bind screaming presences within daubed septagrams while the air pops and wobbles from the obscenity of it. Butchers swagger up from the great refectories wearing blood-stiff aprons, and pharmacists struggle under the weight of phage vials.

It is noisy, burgeoning, unruly. Every stretch of flesh is poxed and sallow, every stomach slack and boil-marked. Steam pours out of brass censers, green-tinged flames belch from orifices carved within pulsating flesh walls. The chambers run deep into the earth below and high into the teetering spires above, all jammed with life and death and the many states in-between.

Vorx and Slaunn do not pause to observe the wonders. They move further inside, and gradually, slowly, the crowds thin out. They enter regions lit only by thin tapers, where the stone is dank and covered in slick coatings of algae. The noise fades away, and soon the only other occupants are Unbroken like themselves, sullen and silent, pursuing their own objectives within the plague city’s moribund reaches.

‘Slivergristle told me he had stirred,’ says Vorx.

Slaunn snorts. ‘Listen to him, do you?’

‘Of course.’

‘I wouldn’t.’

Now they are in perilous places. They pass under sagging gates and out into an abyss bridged by a single rotting ropeway. There are shafts there, delved into the heart of the planet beneath, and from them come curls of unnatural steam. Vorx can hear machinery churning a long way off, and muffled shrieks. Everything echoes in uncanny ways, as if there are walls there that shouldn’t be, or rooms that remain unseen.

Eventually they arrive at the Inner Doors, modelled on one of the Sigillite’s own portals, though larger, and with the old Terran designs bastardised into earthy reflections of the god’s peculiar whims. Two Deathshroud wait there on either side, motionless, almost invisible in the cloying dark. They say nothing, but the doors sigh open at Slaunn’s approach.

‘I’ll wait here,’ says Slaunn.

Vorx looks at him for a moment. He wonders if this is some elaborate trap, but that seems a trifle theatrical. There are many ways to kill someone on the Plague Planet, after all, and no one will ever come looking for you.

‘Very well,’ he says, and goes inside.

This is the Inner Court. Vorx has been here only three times before. Many within the Legion, even some of the most senior, never come so far. Only the word of the primarch himself affords admittance, and those words have been scarce.

The last slivers of activity are gone. It is cold in here, and hoarfrost hangs from distant ceilings. The floor is glassy with ice; the dark pillars glitter faintly. The clouds of flies are sluggish, and they crawl rather than buzz across the shadowy vaults.

Vorx walks down a long nave. In design it is Imperial Gothic – imposing, solid, grave. His footsteps resound eerily in the high space between columns.

At the end of the nave there is a throne, shrouded in shadow. Long banners hang from spears set into the arches above, each inscribed with the names of worlds. Scrolls lie on the stone floor, half-frozen, their scripts a melange of human and xenos tongues.

The throne is high-backed, fluted and crowned with a raggedy peak of skulls. Thick cobwebs smother it, and swollen spiders squat at the heart of them. It is far bigger than any designed for mortals. It was smaller when it was first made, but its granite-and-ebony frame has gradually cracked and extended, swelling out along with the bulk of its owner.

Vorx comes to a halt. The darkness is almost complete here. All light and heat have been drained from this place, soaked away from an empty heart. It smells fusty, like confinement.

‘Welcome back, siegemaster,’ says the occupier of the throne.

Vorx has seen many things over his long service and is not easily daunted. It is impossible, however, to not be cowed by the sight of Mortarion. The primarch was always an imposing figure – lean, drawn, sinister – even when he retained mortal dimensions. Since becoming engulfed within the pantheon, the last fetters of restraint have been cast off. He is gigantic now, a cadaver of truly monstrous proportions. His armour has been reforged and gilded with daemonic alloys. His grey flesh has atrophied further, clinging to outsize bones. His back has erupted into spines and vents, while his shoulders are now clustered with muscles for the ragged wings that drape across the throne’s ripped backcloth.

When he breathes, yellow-green steam vents from an ancient, battered rebreather. Vorx sees a concave chest rise and fall under a corroding breastplate. Seamy eyes peer out from under the deep shadow of a threadbare cowl. Pale gauntlets grip the arms of the throne.

Vorx bows. ‘It is… good to see you again, lord.’

Mortarion stares at him. It is always hard to know what those eyes are witnessing. Vorx knows enough of the price of daemonhood to know that the physical universe is something the primarch now perceives only dimly. For all his immense power, he is clinging on, as all who make the bargain do. The majority of the possessed become howling imbeciles, given long enough, but this is a primarch, one of the sons of the Corpse-Emperor, and there is something indomitable about them even in their compromises.

‘I did not foresee this,’ the primarch says. His voice is like the grate of a tomb’s gate being swung lazily open. ‘I did not foresee the galaxy cracking.’

Vorx does not know what that means, and stays silent.

‘I had a different future mapped,’ Mortarion says. ‘I believed my part in all this was over. My duties lay on another plane.’ He chuckles, which makes his neck tremble and the macabre baubles across his armour rattle. ‘The Despoiler convinced me. He convinced all of us, one by one.’ He coughs, and his whole body shakes, stirring the dust on the ground. ‘Did I know, back then, that it would be Abaddon? Horus’ angry whelp? I often wonder if I should have. They were so alike, those two. For a long time I thought he was dead. And then I thought I’d killed him, when he dared come here. But we were always wrong about him. Ha.’

Vorx is not entirely sure he is being addressed. The primarch was always prone to audible introspection, and the centuries cloistered here have only made him more solipsistic.

‘I’d resigned myself to what I’d become,’ Mortarion says. ‘I kept half an eye here, half there, but mostly on the abyss. And that was the choice I’d made, to exchange the Petty Game for the Great Game and leave the old worlds and the old wars to mortal hands.’ His eyes briefly focus, and he appears to see Vorx for the first time. ‘But the galaxy has cracked. I do not know if the Despoiler intended that.’

Vorx tries to make sense of this, and fails. ‘Apologies, my lord. I do not understand.’

Mortarion looks confused for a moment, then recovers. ‘Ah, yes. For you, it has not happened yet.’ He leans forward in the throne, and the slight movement causes lines of dust to fall from the roof. ‘The Despoiler is ready to move. You will hear the call soon. There will be those in your service who already cleave to it and are waiting to throw in their banners with his.’

‘Not on my watch.’

‘No, very good. But it’s coming, all the same.’ Mortarion wheezes, and draws in long breaths from the rebreather’s filter. ‘Everything has been working towards this moment, for him. I have to admit my admiration – he cannot let the past go. He worries at it like a wolf with a hunk of meat, wearing it down to the marrow. He will break the Eye and loose his Angels on my father’s castle. And he will succeed, and that will shake the order of things, but it will not come without a price.’

Vorx listens. Some of this has been hinted at by others, but he knows Mortarion sees things no others can.

‘I contemplated this and reflected on the count of years, and what was done and what was not done,’ Mortarion says. ‘And I surprised myself. I found the old itch coming back. I understood what would happen once the Eye bleeds out into reality, and glimpsed the chance to conclude affairs started a long time ago.’

Vorx still struggles to understand. ‘You will take ship again, lord?’ he asks.

‘When the Rift is complete, yes,’ Mortarion says. ‘There are things I have seen, snatches of dreams that I never thought would be waked from. My brothers are stirring. You hear this? My brothers. Magnus revives his tedious old blood feud, but it will not end there. The few surviving loyal sons will be found again.’ Mortarion chuckles. ‘Abaddon can do what he wishes. I no longer care for Terra – I was there, and damaged it so deeply it will never recover. My business now is, you might say, within the family.’

Vorx hears the words no longer care for Terra, but does not take them in. That must have been some mistake, some lack of understanding on his part, but it is rare for Mortarion to speak loosely, despite all the vagaries and part-prophecy that always litter his utterances.

‘I have seen this,’ Mortarion says, cracking a half-smile that makes the puckered skin above his rebreather flex awkwardly. ‘I believe I am the first to do so. Guilliman will revive. The numbers tell me this, and I have travelled far within the Garden to confirm it. There are groves that hiss his name in the wind. I look into pools and see his face staring at me. Guilliman! Stiff, dreary Guilliman. I’d have preferred another one. The Lion, perhaps, whom I always quite admired. But one will do, even the dull one.’

Vorx tries to decide how much of this is real and how much is hallucination. The Age of the Primarchs is over. All know that. They are either dead or spirited into demigods whose interests bend away from the physical and into the metaphysical. It was a failed experiment, and one whose effects have been slowly dying for ten millennia. The Age of the Psyker is on the cusp of realisation, the one that will bring the next great test for the species. That is what has been believed here for a long time.

But he says nothing. There is a keen light in Mortarion’s eyes now, where for many centuries there has only been emptiness, and it would be dangerous to query that.

‘He… lives?’ Vorx asks uncertainly.

‘He never died. His soul was bound to his body – you could see its echo in the warp, if you knew where to look. But the day is coming, and here’s the irony – the Gate will break, and that shall release him.’ Mortarion is drooling a little now. A speck of saliva hangs on the end of the rebreather, teetering at the point of falling. ‘I’ll be there to meet him, siegemaster. I wish to have you by my side.’

Vorx is still working hard to make sense of it all, but the last statement is what he has been wishing to hear for millennia. ‘The Legion entire, lord?’

‘The Legion entire, siegemaster,’ Mortarion says. ‘I’m calling them back, cohort by cohort. We’re still a force, for all the erosions. We’ll answer the Despoiler’s call, and do so united. We’ll help him break the Gate, and, once out, as the galaxy burns with warpfire and the stars go dark, we’ll cleave our own path – not to the Throneworld, but to my brother’s little kingdom.’

Before he knows what he is doing, Vorx finds himself kneeling. ‘I did not dare to hope,’ he says. He sees then, in that moment, just how truly powerful his primarch has become. He had not realised how empty the campaigns have been without the Deathlord at their head. Despite all the decay, the infighting, all the many changes, Vorx is still a Space Marine, and somewhere within his addled innards he still possesses the gene-seed that binds him tight to his master’s will.

Mortarion rises from the throne, an arthritic movement that sends dead skin cells shedding like grave-spoil. He reaches out, extending a long, bulky arm, and lifts his warrior to his feet. The gesture is surprisingly deft, almost gentle.

‘By my side,’ Mortarion says. ‘As we were before.’ He is still smiling. ‘Prepare your ship, get your fighters ready for the muster. If you have any unfinished business with them, any flotsam to eject, do so now.’

‘How soon?’ Vorx asks.

‘I don’t know.’ Mortarion’s wings extend as his body unfurls, and a carrion stench wafts out from under the gauzy shadow. ‘But make no mistake – all will change, for us, for them, for everyone. We will be out. We will have freedom the likes of which the galaxy has not seen since He walked among us. How to use it? Now, then – that is the test.’

III: DARK IMPERIUM

CHAPTER SIX

Administrator-General Io Battacharya runs down the corridor. Her heart is thudding. She feels stress hormones coursing through her system, just as they have been for the last few weeks. She has not slept for a long time, not properly. When she has a rare pause in rushing around, she holds her hand to her face and sees it shaking.

She reaches the slide doors and punches the code. Inside is the sector coordination chamber. There are several hundred people there already, more than it was ever designed to accommodate. They are shouting, many look like they’re coming to blows, and there are shoving matches over tables.

She pushes through them, looking for Machard. Ducking past a furious-looking man with a torn jerkin, she spies him in earnest conversation with Windib. She makes her way towards them, swerving around more clusters of scared, angry people.

Machard sees her coming and gives her a weary smile. ‘You got back, Io,’ he says, coming to embrace her.

She nods, noticing his stale aroma as he puts his big arms around her. That’s not his fault – they’ve been stuck in these airless rooms for a long time. Windib nods at her curtly. She is not the hugging kind.

Machard gives her a concerned look. ‘Find anything out?’

Battacharya shakes her head. ‘All nodes down. Just like ours are.’ She can’t stop her voice shaking a little. It’s mostly from exhaustion, but they might mistake it for fear.

‘That can’t be right,’ says Windib. ‘It can’t be.’

Leonore Windib does not take easily to system failure. She is a creature of the system, her life devoted to ensuring Najan’s products are grown, tested, harvested and transported with maximum efficiency. She has power of life and death over the production cadres, something she has exercised more than once, all in the service of system integrity. System integrity is life to her.

‘Take a flyer yourself, then,’ says Battacharya, too tired to stay polite. ‘Try to find a functional node.’

Machard calmly places his hand on Windib’s. ‘We can stop pretending now, I think.’

Olav Machard is a reassuringly calm presence. He’s a limited man, well suited to being magister technicae, happiest with the enginseers of the big grain-vacuums and hover-scythes out on the high Resource, but in these kinds of situations that’s actually welcome.

Battacharya tries to calm herself down. She moves closer to the other two, to keep her words from travelling too far. ‘So. This is the situation. Intra-system comms – down. Orbital grid – down. Astropaths – dead. Defence clusters – down, as far as I can see. There might be something working on the far side of the planet, but it would take hours to find out.’

Machard’s brow creases. ‘What could do this?’ he muses. He sees the issue as a technical one, and seems almost to take pleasure in its inscrutability. ‘Electromagnetic burst? Not likely. Not everything. So what about the astropaths?’

Battacharya remembers what it was like in the system-local Tower of Sight, that old steel pinnacle just south of the main defence station. She’d been warned not to go into the sanctum by the thralls, but had ignored them. Then she’d vomited. A lot. It turns out there are worse ways to die than being caught up in the blades of an auto-thresher.

‘There were dictated screeds on the auto-typers, just a few,’ she says. ‘Mostly standard dream traffic, but then it all started going wrong. I didn’t understand any of it. One of them had begun drawing. Things. It was all… horrible.’

Windib is getting impatient. ‘News is getting out. We have fifty thousand workers in this processor node alone, and once they start to panic–’

‘No one’s panicking,’ says Battacharya firmly. ‘Where’s Captain Dantine?’

‘He couldn’t raise a line to the garrison, so he took a crawler over,’ says Machard.

Battacharya has a terrible feeling about all of this. It’s more than physical – for months now, the nightmares have been terrible, and there’s this awful sensation in the pit of her stomach. It started with those first long-range distress calls from the near-void, all bleating something about the Astronomican going out, which was absurd, but the audex snippets just kept coming. And then the scheduled conveyers never turned up. That hadn’t happened on Najan for as long as the records had been kept – more than two thousand standard years. And then the lights had appeared in the night sky, first flickers that looked like shooting stars, then ripples of weird green and purple that made it impossible to sleep and somehow got through even blackout shutters. And then the astropaths had started dying, and then the ranged comms had crackled out, and it began to seem very much like the universe was folding up on itself around them.

‘Stay here,’ Battacharya says to Windib. ‘Get some more staff into the overlook units and calm everybody down. Get them going through the emergency protocols, one by one.’

‘It won’t do any goo–’

‘It’ll give them something to do.’ Battacharya turns to Machard. ‘You have a crawler docked?’

The magister technicae nods.

‘We’ll take it out. I want to talk to Dantine.’

The two of them start to march off, leaving Windib scuttling after them. ‘What’ll you get from him, administrator?’ she asks querulously. ‘He’s just a soldier.’

Battacharya swivels on her heel. ‘You think we won’t be fighting soon?’ she hisses. ‘You think this is something natural? You stupid woman.’

Then she is marching again. Machard stares at the stricken Windib for a moment, then hurries after her.

‘She could have you sanctioned,’ he says, sounding slightly awestruck.

‘Throne,’ she says, never looking back. ‘Scary prospect.’

Najan is an agri world. There are templates for such places, drawn up in the fathomless past and never altered by the Administratum. All agri worlds are of similar size, located in similar orbital zones within their void systems and subject to specific exposure to a prescribed spectrum of solar radiation. Their soils have to be within a tight compositional range, and they have to be close to major supply worlds.

The Imperium is not a gentle custodian of such places. After discovery of a candidate planet, the first fifty years are spent in terraforming according to well-worn Martian procedures. All pre-existing life is scrubbed from the rocks, either by the application of controlled virus-chewers or by timed flame-drops. The atmosphere is regulated, first through the actions of gigantic macro-processors and thereafter by a land-based network of control units, more commonly referred to as command nodes. Weather, as least as generally understood, disappears. Rainfall becomes a matter of controlled timing, governed by satellites in low orbit and kept in line by fleets of dirigibles. The empty landscape is divided up into colossal production zones, each patrolled by crawlers and pest-thopters. Millions of base-level servitors are imported, kept at the very lowest level of cognitive function but bulked up by a ruthless level of muscle-binders.

Soon after this process completes, every agri world looks exactly the same – a flat, wind-rummaged plain of high-yield crops swaying towards the empty horizon. A person could walk for days and never see a distinctive feature. Not that anyone sane would choose to walk in such places – the industrial fertiliser dumps are so powerful that they turn the air orange and make it impossible to breathe unfiltered. A single growing season exhausts the soil completely, requiring continual delivery of more sprays of nitrates and phosphates, all delivered from the grimy berths of hovering despatch flyers. The entire world is given over to a remorseless monoculture, with orthogonal drainage channels burning with chem-residue and topsoil continually degrading into flimsier and flimsier dust.

But that doesn’t matter. A planet can be driven like this for thousands of years before it eventually keels over and becomes a death world. The quality of the crops gets steadily worse, but the quantity can be sustained almost indefinitely, assuming that supply lines are maintained and imports remain consistent. At the end of every season, the great harvester leviathans are stoked up and dragged from their pens and let loose on the grey fields, smokestacks belching and tracked undercarriages sinking deep. These massive creatures of high-sided metal and intricate pipework, the smallest of which are a hundred metres long, crawl across the blasted prairies, sucking up every last speck of pallid grain and piping it directly to antiseptic internal hoppers. Feed-landers come down from high flight, dock with the still-trundling leviathans and extract the raw material, from where it is taken into the city-sized processor vats, blasted with antibiotics, smashed, burned, crushed, then stamped and packaged. Once ready for transport, containers are dragged up into orbit aboard swell-bellied landers, ready for transfer to the void-bound mass conveyers, which deliver the refined product to every starving hive world and forge world in their long circuits.

There is a quaint tradition in the various propaganda departmentos of the Administratum of marketing agri worlds as quasi-paradises, free of the squalor and overcrowding of a standard urban station, and full of bucolic ease. Vid-cards are dropped into communal hab-warrens, extolling the virtues of a life lived outdoors with the sun on your back and a ruddy-faced boy or girl – subject to preference – by your side. In reality, life on an agri world is as unrelenting, back-breaking and monotonous as the vast majority of other Imperial vocations. There are no trees laden with glossy fruit, only kilometre after kilometre of hissing corn. There are no gentle strolls under the warming sun, only punishing work details in rad-suits, leaning into the dust-laden winds that howl around the equator with nothing to halt their rampage. Once the new arrivals have made planetfall and found this out, it is too late. Crew transports arrive on agri worlds full and leave empty. There is a saying among the indentured workers – you come for the soil, you end up part of it.

Najan is no different. Its bulk is taken up exclusively with seven approved strains of nutrient-enriched grains, overseen by the central command station midway up the northern hemisphere. Three million servitors work the Resource, the hyperfields, while little more than two hundred thousand people – less than the complement of a single spire on a mid-range hive world – control the stock of semi-automated vehicles and monitor the lattice of weather-control nodes. There are three garrisons housing a few hundred under-trained sub-Militarum-grade troopers, an astropath tower, a rudimentary orbital defence grid, a Navy station and a few other dusty offices for the various divisions of the Administratum, rarely manned. Najan’s quotas are unremarkable, its operations firmly within the expectations of the subsector command. Keeping it that way is hard work, but it is better to keep your head down than invite a visit from the off-world Scrutias Signa Quantitatis, who make Windib look like the soul of levity and carry splinter rifles.

Battacharya reflects bitterly on that as Machard’s crawler shakes and sways across the short piece of open ground between the command station and Dantine’s primary garrison building. The viewscreens are, as ever, smeared from the endless wind. She is hot, her work-habit stained at the armpits and collar. These places are not intended to be properly defensible. Their survival is predicated on rapid response from the system’s Naval assets, who prowl the void incessantly. All she has ever been required to do is to keep the astropaths happy, maintain a skeleton defence crew to buy a little time if ever required and keep the comms stations manned. In Najan’s two thousand years of uninterrupted activity, the worst that has taken place is a xenos raid, some five hundred years ago. That is legend now, a piece of old news they can laugh about in the canteens.

‘We’re due a Naval visit,’ says Machard, bouncing on the high driver’s seat as the crawler lurches along. ‘They might be able to explain all this.’

Battacharya smiles bitterly. ‘I don’t think there’ll be a visit.’

‘There’s one due.’

‘They’re not coming, Olav. I don’t know if there even is a Navy anymore, at least in this subsector.’

Machard glances at her, alarmed.

‘Throne, though – I don’t know, do I?’ She remembers what she saw in the astropath’s tower. ‘Get us there quick.’

She looks back, to where the lights of the command complex are blinking through the dust and wind. It all looks solid enough – a scatter of low-rise hab compounds set about the scaffolds of the main comm-tower. The big dropsites are back east, the hangars for the crawlers a few hundred metres away beyond the wind wall. Everything is chipped and blasted, lost in a permanent fog of rad-glow and storm clutter.

She turns back. The crawler’s arclights flash across a sloped Militarum-grade blast wall and a toothed compound gate. Flood lumens have been hoisted up to the parapet level, and for the first time ever she catches sight of troops in environment suits patrolling up there.

‘See that?’ Machard says, nudging the crawler inside as the gates cantilever open.

She says nothing. She is beginning to feel more than a little sick.

The crawler makes its way to the far side of the compound before shuddering to a halt. Both of them put masks on and tighten their collars, then the doors push open. The cab immediately fills with flying chaff, and they battle their way down to ground level.

Dantine is waiting for them, flanked by a few of his staff officers, all wrapped up in layers of environment swaddling. Dantine comes up to Battacharya and salutes.

‘Tried to get you on the comm!’ he shouts over the wind’s howl.

‘All down!’ Battacharya shouts back. ‘Can we get inside?’

‘Agreed! There’s something you should see!’

‘Am I going to like it?’

Dantine doesn’t look like he’s smiling.

‘Just come inside, administrator!’ he shouts grimly.

Captain Dantine is a better man than he has any right be. Battacharya does not know the full story, but he must have fallen foul of someone in authority somewhere, and if there were any justice he’d be serving in an Astra Militarum regiment with decent troops under his command. It is unclear how he has ended up on Najan. It seems unlikely he volunteered for the posting.

For all that, he has taken to the tasking well. His predecessor was a drunk and a brute, killed in a brawl involving several dozen of his own men. Since Dantine came to replace him, things have calmed down in the barracks. Amasec flows a little less freely, and the uniforms are put on straight.

Dantine does not normally order patrols on the battlements. Spending more than an hour or so in the open risks eroding the limited amount of good equipment they possess, so, like most of Najan’s human population, the soldiers are mostly kept confined to quarters or drilled in covered yards.

Dantine takes them down into the garrison’s lower levels. As they walk, Battacharya hears sounds of further activity taking place within the base – clunks and thuds of heavy equipment being moved. Machard looks uneasy – he finds military types unnerving, despite his physical bulk.

They enter a green-walled conference chamber, hashly lit by strip lumens. Four men are seated, but get to their feet as the captain enters. They are in standard fatigues – olive green, with flak jackets over a chainmesh weave.

Dantine gestures for them all to sit down again.

‘How’s it going up at the complex?’ he asks, drawing up a chair and rubbing the grit out of his short-cropped hair.

‘We’re going to have a problem soon,’ says Battacharya. ‘The workers know something major’s happened, just not what. We’re not much better off ourselves.’

‘There’s a Naval visit due,’ offers Machard, sticking to his line.

‘I’d have transmitted this earlier,’ says Dantine, reaching for a capsule held by one of his men. ‘Like everyone else, we’ve been having problems with our kit, and now the main-site comm-units are down.’

Battacharya knows what he’s holding. It’s a message capsule, a secure facsimile of a military trans-burst. ‘You’d better tell me what you know,’ she says.

Dantine holds up the capsule. ‘Sent six days ago, in-system, from a Naval corvette. Decoded finally last night. It’s the one and only communication we got from it, and it wasn’t meant for us – it was a full-spectrum broadcast aimed at other vessels in the squadron. The contents were relayed from another ship operating a long way out, and after that the alpha material bears astropathic markers, so this order came in from a distance. We estimate the original was instantiated more than two standard months ago, but that’s only a guess.’

The captain speaks fast, but without hurrying. Battacharya thinks he looks tired, though, and wonders if she looks any better.

‘There won’t be any Naval visit, magister,’ Dantine says, looking briefly at Machard. ‘This is a general order to muster, pulling all assets out of the subsector. Somewhere out there, there’s a big battlegroup sucking up all our local units and heading off into the great beyond. They mention Cadia, and they talk about it in the past tense. Past tense.’

Battacharya lets that sink in. Probably just a mistake in transmission. ‘So there’s an action planned,’ she says.

‘Maybe. But here’s the thing – they were going in cold. This whisper about the Astronomican, it’s not just void chatter. They were crawling through the warp, feeling their way like they were in blindfolds. Never heard them quite so scared about it.’

She still doesn’t believe that. The Astronomican is just a part of the universe, like starlight or gravity. It can’t be gone. ‘We’ve got a lot of service ships out there still,’ she says. ‘And no news of the conveyers.’

‘They’ll all be dead-calmed,’ says Dantine. ‘Tell them, Vrede.’

He invites one of his men to speak, a red-eyed, preternaturally aged wretch with a Sanctioned Psyker medallion hanging from a scrawny neck.

‘You’ve seen the lights in the sky,’ Vrede says, and his voice trembles from weakness. He can hardly keep his hands still – it looks like he might expire any second. ‘It’s not what you think it is. Something’s broken. It shouldn’t look like that.’

Battacharya is very tired. She’s getting impatient. ‘Tell it plainly, man,’ she snaps.

‘The warp, administrator,’ says Vrede. ‘Like a local rift effect, but I can’t see the end of it. We’re on the other side of something, and I can feel it hanging over us. It’s like… a stormcloud, ready to burst.’

‘Nonsense,’ says Machard.

‘What are the effects?’ asks Battacharya.

‘I don’t know.’ Vrede looks miserable. ‘But I can’t sleep. It’s been a week now. You must have felt it too, surely?’

She has. All of them have. That’s what’s making them scratchy, unable to focus.

She sits forward, locking her fingers together. ‘We’re jumping at shadows,’ she says calmly. ‘There’s been equipment failure. Some loose talk on the voxes. We need to keep it together.’ She swallows. ‘There are so few of us, but the job’s important. We supply a lot of worlds. I want recommendations.’

Machard doesn’t have any, and he looks at his hands. Vrede remains haunted, blinking too often.

Dantine speaks. ‘We’ve been transmitting standard distress calls on Militarum channels. But here’s the truth – no one’s coming to help us, not if there’s a bigger target to defend. So I say we pull the shutters down. Disable the servitors, secure the leviathans and get my men stationed at all the complex gates. Get your workers armed too – we’ve got the equipment. Some of it’s still in the issue crates.’

That will prompt panic, at least at first. The bulk of Battacharya’s staff wouldn’t know which way round to hold a lasgun. But he’s right. She knows he is.

‘If it comes to it,’ she says slowly. ‘If something very bad’s going down, there’s one more thing.’

Machard knows what she means. ‘No,’ he says flatly.

‘If we need to,’ she replies firmly. ‘I was told this when I took the assignment. Protect, if you can. Destroy, if you can’t. Nothing for the enemy.’

Dantine smiles wryly. ‘We’re not there yet, I hope.’

Just as he finishes speaking, there’s a hurried rap on the door. A trooper bursts in.

‘The complex, sir,’ he says, looking worried. ‘Something’s happening.’

Battacharya feels a little bit sicker. Vrede has started to dribble. There is an air of desperation in the room far out of proportion to the evident danger. She finds herself wanting to scream.

‘Sure about that, captain?’ Battacharya asks, getting up. ‘I think you’d better show us where the armoury is.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Dragan comes down in the Moranon, one of Solace’s nine Thunderhawk gunships. It’s a charcoal-black brute, its blunt outline made bulbous and dripping, its surly and decrepit machine-spirit gibbering through the internal vox like a trapped animal. Its huge turbines strain against the planet’s desiccating winds on the way down, and it sways and lists in the turbulence.

Dragan rides it out. He never enjoys the descent. If he were one of Angron’s blood-drunk slashers he’d be whooping now, whipping an already-stained blade around in practice for the carnage to come. Dragan is of the Legion, though. He likes his feet on the ground, planted firmly so he can get a considered swing at his enemy.

In the combat-lit crew bay, the rest of them are the same. There’s no sound from any of them – Garstag, his Kardainn Terminators, a couple of slack-jawed gun servitors. The interior judders and slams, the engines thunder, but they keep their mouths closed.

It’s odd, how a Legion works. Many of the Lords of Silence are Barbarans, taken from the gene pool of that mist-wreathed hell planet. A slim majority, though, are not. Most of the non-Barbarans were created in the Eye from stolen gene-seed, implanted by the Surgeons into screaming infants wrenched from feral Imperial planets, and thus have no connection with the forgotten home world. Others, like Dragan, are turncoats and renegades, refugees from distant Imperial Chapters and warbands. Somehow, though, over time, they all adopt the taciturn habits of Mortarion’s own. They stop issuing war cries. They slow down. They let their armour grow thicker, their organs merge, their skin creeps upwards into the filigree of their equipment interfaces. Joining the Death Guard is like sinking into a deep, cold ocean – the substance of it seeps inside, sooner or later, down into every crack and orifice, and you lose the things that once made you what you were.

At least, that is his destiny. For Dragan, the process is not yet complete. He still has his skin. He still has three lungs. He can remove his helm, if he wishes, and his tongue is not yet the length of a man’s arm. He can feel the rot within, chewing at his bones, making the old tattoos on his chest itch, but it has not yet become endemic. He considers Vorx, whose mind has become soft, and he looks at Slert, or even Naum, and a part of him still shudders and wishes to put off those things a little longer.

He has forgotten where he came from, though. He has no memory of his previous life, only that he was once a servant of the Imperium within a Loyalist Chapter. The others use that knowledge, if they wish to taunt him, for they know that no one hates the Corpse-spawn more than him.

You hate what you were, he understands. There is no greater zealot than the convert, he knows. And yet he has no true faith, not like Vorx or Philemon, just a desire to exert strength, to use the Gifts he has been given, to become greater.

It is not about the faith, for Dragan. It is about vengeance for a life he cannot remember. It is about dominance over a species he has cut all ties with. It is about pride, amid a Legion that barely understands the notion.

He wonders, sometimes, if he picked the right set of traitors.

The Moranon booms into its landing cycle, and greasy warning lumens snap on. Dragan hears the retros surge out, and the direction of momentum shifts. He reaches for a chain loop to steady himself, and the Thunderhawk slams down heavily into the dust of another world.

Garstag growls like an animal. The Kardainn-master is brutally huge within that confined space, hunched like a coiled dragon in a cave, puffing out condensation from his many helm vents. His warriors grind into action as the ramp creaks open, stomping into a hurricane of dust and organics. Dragan is last out, keeping his talons closed up for now, letting the wind snatch at his bulk, evaporating the gritty surface moisture built up in Solace’s humid interior.

They have come down in a dustbowl. They are surrounded by nondescript Imperial habs, built to a ruthlessly unimaginative template and shared with every defence station across the galaxy. Lights are blinking in the storm, faint and underpowered. This will be poor killing, he knows already.

He crunches his way towards an access hatch. Garstag heads towards another. They break them open with their gauntlets, tearing through the reinforced steel bolts and heaving the plates out. Then Dragan is inside, ducking down low and pushing along a narrow, sectioned corridor. Dust comes in with him, whipping around his knees and piling up against the prefab plasteel wall panels.

He sees the inhabitants, and they spy him. They take one look at him, disbelieving for a moment, and then they run. He lumbers after them, breathing heavily, cracking the floor with cloven treads. He hears screams from a long way off and guesses that’s Garstag’s work. More gunships are coming down, four or five of them, and that will be more than enough.

He stomps up to what appears to be some kind of command centre and smashes the doors in. There are a few hundred baseline humans inside, some armed, all of them incontinent with fear. He gets to work. Las-beams flicker over his battleplate, lightly scorching the external patina. He reaches out for the first one, hauls him back and breaks his back. He goes after another, shattering an eye socket, and has to punch down again to stop the creature’s anguished writhing.

His killing gauntlet, that mass of angry flesh and metal spines, becomes bloody. He’s been cramped up a long time on Solace and needs to flex his atrophying muscles. Soon he’s after a woman, one with an important-looking uniform. She’s scrabbling to get away from him, stinking of fear, but she’s also got a laspistol and is firing it at him in an impressively determined way.

After a few dozen direct hits, that starts to annoy him. He powers towards her, suddenly speeding up, making use of his old Adeptus Astartes shock-velocity, which he can still call on if he needs to. He smacks her gun away and lifts her up by the throat.

‘Get out!’ she squeaks.

Dragan hesitates, briefly amused. ‘Get… out?’

‘Get out!’

It is ridiculous. She is white with terror, flailing at him as if he were vermin under her bedclothes, and yet it forces a smile across his scarred and weathered face. ‘Call for help,’ he growls.

That’s all he really wants from this. To spread the word, to summon armies worth taking on.

Instead she fires at him again – she’s still got the gun in her hand – and it stings him under his gorget. He barks a laugh and hurls her to one side, cracking her bloodily into a bulkhead.

He wades into the rest of the herd then, lashing out lazily. The volume of screaming is beginning to make his ears tingle.

‘Putrifier,’ he voxes as he works, wondering if Slert’s already engaged. ‘Anything worth killing yet?’

‘There’s a garrison, Gallowsman,’ comes Slert’s eager voice.

‘Superb,’ says Dragan, advancing on the last of those still standing. ‘Leave some for me – I don’t think I’ll be kept here much longer.’

But Slert has his hands full. The Lords of Silence are spread out across the jumble of outbuildings and corrugated habs, and he is among the first to locate the only genuine prospect of resistance. It is a hazed, muted prospect in the night’s driving wind, blurred by the gale of particles that race across this barren landscape.

Slert knows what kind of world this is. He takes indecent pleasure in the knowledge that the Imperials consider it a fertile place, one from which sustenance can be taken. For him, schooled and steeped in the deepest concoctive formulations of the god, they might as well have paved it over with rockcrete and doused the rest in acid. It is a dead world. It is empty, barren and hideous. Nothing should linger here, nothing should be suffered to remain.

For all that, there are opportunities. There will be silos somewhere, and vast expanses of just-about-growing matter. Perhaps there might be a few novel strings of molecules lurking amid all that conformity, something he can wrangle out and distil and spin around. That is, after all, his chief motivation, and the way in which he gives glory to the god. He is biologos, master of Petri dishes and cultures, the refiner of phages and exciting disturbances.

It will have to wait, though. For the moment, the Imperials, credit to them, are putting up something of a fight.

The garrison compound is walled, with defence towers at the corners and guns mounted atop the roof-level platforms within. There are two sets of gates, one on either side, and he approaches the first of them now. There are shooters on the ramparts, protected by a heavy parapet, though they are struggling to pick their targets in the flying stormwind.

Others of his brotherhood are closing in on the compound now, striding out of the howling dark. He can see the outlines of one of Garstag’s juggernauts, even more cumbersome than the rest of the warband’s Unbroken, shrugging off a hail of direct impacts. There are dim green glows on the far side, indicating more of his brothers stalking into range.

Slert has one capability none of the rest enjoy. His mortal eyes wasted away a long time ago, gnawed into pulp by parasites and left to dribble out of their sockets, but he has many more replacements across his whole body, bulbous nodules wedged under the skin that swivel and peer and blink. For Slert, the entire battlefield is a shifting tapestry of false-colour imagery, a ghostly, overlaid shimmer of infection. He does perceive the real, but only as if glimpsed through a dirty, blotchy glass. What he really spies is the infected, the signs of corruption and failure and closeted spawnings. Much of the time this means decay within inanimate objects – he can isolate metal rot and fungal spread and damp and rockcrete cancer – but that is not the purpose of his Gift. His true talent is for the living – for the hot, blood-pumping carriers of bacteria and viruses that cluster around him.

That is what he sees now, straight through the translucent skein of the garrison wall units. Like corpuscles in a bloodstream, he sees troopers jog down tunnels or crouch behind strongpoints. He knows where they are by their life spoor, a signature in the living warp that only his glorious mutations perceive.

And that gives him certain advantages. He knows where the weak links are, and how to exploit them. As the others close in, drawing fire dutifully, he limps up to the walls, extends his gauntlets and clamps them onto a thin joint between panels. The first touch brings the metal exploding out in rivers of corrosion – oxidisation spreading like wildfire, shooting up and out from his grip. Slert smiles and exerts more pressure. The entire section seems to age instantly, rotting from within, and soon it is collapsing in his grip, falling away, exposing a lumen-lit void beyond.

The defenders see what he is doing and rush to drive him back, but by then it is already too late. Slert is clambering through the breach, a nightmare bursting out of the whirling dust. He draws his injector pistol, and every shot finds its target. Guardsmen collapse as soon as they are hit, doubling over and vomiting their own windpipes out.

Slert shoves and barges his way deeper in, cutting down those who get too close with his serrated cleaver blade, dropping those who remain at range with his pistol. By now his Unbroken brothers have made their own incursions, blasting through the walls or tearing them apart with power fists. They are in their element now, gliding like vengeful cadavers through the wreckage, slaying in their deliberate, stolid manner.

A Guardsman rushes him, screaming something about his Emperor protecting this and that. Slert sees him for what he is – mid-thirties, already cradling a few nondescript ailments within his undernourished body, including the liver cancer that would kill him in a few years anyway – and shoots him through the chest. The man goes down like a lead ingot, writhing, clutching at his neck with stiffening fingers. An injector needle gives a far more vivid experience than cancer, one that will fry his nerve ends and make his synapses sing, not that you’ll ever get thanks for gifts like that.

Slert smashes his way through the teetering doors at the end of the corridor, breaking back out into the open – an inner courtyard – and sees the entire place thrown into disorder. Flames have started up, all of them ripe with the stink of unnatural chems, and the fires are now racing out of control. Unbroken warriors are rampaging through the defences in all directions, upending barricades and hacking down those still brave enough to man them. The soldiers are in full retreat now, haring back across towards the north wall, covered by las-fire from their comrades on the far parapets. They’re sprinting, those who still can.

Slert hears a throaty cough, like a grox-herd entering heat, and turns to see a big crawler unit – five metres high on huge tyres and thickly shielded against the wind – gun its engines. It’s only metres away from him, and he reaches out to shoot at it. It swerves, squealing on rubber, and his shot grazes the nearside shielding. It’s being driven erratically, far too fast for its unwieldy bulk, and it nearly topples over.

Slert laughs out loud and shoots it again. This time he hits, and the crawler skids across the dust. Its armour just about holds, and whoever’s driving it manages to spin it straight towards the opposite gates. These are closed still, but burning furiously and clearly weakened. The crawler roars towards them, bumps over a corpse, smashes clean into the barrier, bucks over the tumbling metal, and then gets out.

‘Well done,’ Slert murmurs, wondering if the drivers have any idea what he’s shot them with. A pity – they were resourceful.

Then he turns back to the slaughter. All around him he sees bodies, transparent sacs of contagion, wobbling and bursting and racing away from him.

‘Now then, that’s a specimen,’ he says, picking the next target and lowering the injector.

‘Shit!’ says Battacharya.

Machard drives.

‘Shit, shit, shit!’

Machard keeps his hands on the wheel, gripping tight.

‘What in the hell were…? What in the hell, Olav?’

She’s shaking hard. She’s already been sick – that happened when they were first sighted from the walls – but she wants to be sick again. The shakes are getting worse.

It is a bumpy ride. A crawler, as the name suggests, is designed to go sedately, rocking across the uneven plains of the Resource. Now Machard is driving it very fast, throwing both of them around in the cab.

‘Shit, shit, shit, shit!’

Machard has his foot locked to the accelerator piston. The world outside is a hurricane of blown chaff peppering the forward visor. The last of the light has fallen behind them; ahead there is nothing but the night-storm.

Battacharya grabs her helm and wrenches it off. She’s hyperventilating and needs to calm herself. She can’t get the images out of her head, though. She doesn’t even have a word for what they were.

Monsters. Terror-shapes. Goblins, bogeymen.

The smell of them is still in the cab. It’s indescribable – a mix of rotting meat, medicae fluids and faeces, but that doesn’t convey the extent to which it makes you want to retch, to loose your bowels, to pluck your own eyeballs out and crush them between your own shivering fingers.

She can’t look back. Surely they’re all dead by now anyway, the others. It was so terrifyingly quick, so completely one-sided. They couldn’t be hurt. She’d seen las-beam after las-beam strike home, and they hadn’t so much as stumbled. They’d just walked through it.

Battacharya tries to stop her mind racing. Dantine might still be fighting. She’d seen him rally his troops and retreat back to the armoury, somehow keeping it together in the face of those… creatures.

She couldn’t have stayed. There was nothing she could have done. The priority now was to get to the first node, to overload the weather stations. Once they went down, the entire biosphere would start to degrade, denying them Najan’s only asset – its immense productive capacity.

It’s something to hang on to. The closest one is only a few kilometres away, far from the complex boundaries, and you can set a chain reaction off from any of them. It’s a last failsafe, designed just for this eventuality by ever-vigilant Mechanicus adepts.

She rubs her eyes. She blinks hard.

‘Slow down, Olav,’ she says, trying to get a grip on where they are.

His foot stays where it is. She can see his neck muscles under his helm, and they’re protruding alarmingly.

‘Olav, slow down. We’re out. Come on. Job to do.’

Gradually, he relaxes a bit. He starts to steer properly. The crawler stops jumping everywhere, and the axles stop shrieking.

‘You have the coordinates?’ she asks, fumbling with her forearm implant to get the access codes.

Machard is struggling to talk. ‘Yeah,’ he manages to get out at last.

They’re still going too fast, but that’s the least of her worries. She’s in a cold sweat, and can’t find the numbers. ‘It’s coming up,’ she warns.

The storm’s getting worse – a hail of particle-stuffed wind that slams up against them. It’s near pitch black ahead. They should see it soon – a needle-shaped pylon, forty metres high, blinking with markers.

Something thumps on the cab’s roof, and she jumps.

‘What was that?’ she asks.

‘Can’t see it yet,’ Machard grunts.

Battacharya peers into the flying murk. ‘It must be–’

The rear glass pane shatters, and she screams. Something fist-sized tumbles into the cab and latches on to Machard. He tries to swat it off, and the crawler lurches.

Battacharya reaches out, grabs it – it’s wet and scaly – and rips it from his jacket. The thing wriggles in her grip, twists, then turns on her. A wide grin splits its tiny body, yellow eyes light up, and it goes for her throat.

She screams again, struggling to slap it off. It’s whip quick and horribly strong, like a bag of snakes, and its teeth snap at her face and spray her with spittle. Somehow she manages to elbow the window catch loose, and flings the thing at the pane. It splats hard against the glass, then tumbles out of the gap. She hears a long wail as it flies into the night.

‘What was–’ she starts, then sees Machard.

He’s going limp, his hands slipping from the wheel. A bloody weal glistens at his neck. ‘I… can’t… see…’ he slurs.

‘Olav!’ she yells, grabbing the wheel before he loses control completely. The cab fills with flying chaff.

Another thump on the roof. Then another. Battacharya sees something flop into the cab, wobble towards them. She recoils, and feels something wet below. She looks down, and there’s one squatting in the footwell, hissing at her.

‘Shit!’ she screams, stamping on it furiously.

More of them tumble inside, squirming up the cab frame, swinging from tiny arms through the broken windows. She only catches glimpses of them in the confusion – marsh-green bodies, scabs and warts, spiked fingers and those horrific, far-too-wide mouths.

Something slimy latches on to her jacket, and she screams again. She has a brief image of Machard, his face lost under a pulsing sac of flesh. Then there’s a puff of blood, splattering against the windscreen, and the crawler keels over.

The world tilts off its axis. Her stomach lurches, and she’s briefly weightless, then the whole structure crashes onto its side. The crawler skids, engines whining at full tilt, two wheels churning up the earth as they keep spinning. She’s thrown around, yanked against her restraints, until the crawler hits something hard and jerks to a halt, nearly upended.

The creatures are thrown off her by the impact, burst open as they hit the glass splinters. She’s dazed for a second, blood running down her forehead, but panicked adrenaline is still flooding through her. She unclips her restraint, fingers shaking, and shoves her way out of the splintered hole where the rear windshield used to be.

She can’t see any more of the creatures, but doesn’t linger to check. Somehow the access codes are still blinking on her implant. Ahead of her, less than a hundred metres off, she sees the transmitter through the wind, a dark island of stability.

She starts to run. Her leg spikes with pain, and something’s badly wrong with her ribs, but she’s got to get there. Barley fronds hiss around her as she limps towards the node’s wire fencing. The wind howls, and she thinks she can hear something like… giggling.

‘Oh, holy Throne…’ she murmurs, staggering faster, heart hammering. There’s only one thought in her mind now.

Get to the node. Shut down the weather-net. Deny the enemy the Resource.

She gets to the gate. She fumbles the lock, gets it open, pushes the frame back. The node rises up into the night, its on-off marker beacon almost obliterated by the chaff wind.

She stumbles, light-headed now, gets to her feet again. The entrance to the command station is just up ahead – a blast door set into an adamantium frame, capable of withstanding a direct hit from a howitzer.

She slumps up against it, mercifully cut out of the wind. She’s shuddering badly now, feeling the blood loss, but manages to slot the intake needle into her arm. There’s a click, a whirr, and the blast door lock slides back. A bar of yellow light slides over the ground at her feet as the panels part. A surge of euphoria swelling up within her, she feels the warmth of the interior on her face and stumbles to get inside.

It is absolutely impossible that they should be waiting for her. There is no way in, no gap, no chance of gnawing through that blast shielding. It is a secure chamber, designed to a standard Imperial template and utterly impregnable. For a moment her brain refuses to believe the evidence of her senses, and she keeps moving towards the gap.

The Little Lords are happy to greet her, spilling off their perches inside the command station, thumping to the ground to waddle up to her with their arms spread. They swarm at her, racing up her legs like ship rats and sinking their teeth in deep. Her screams are brief this time, choked off by the mass of minuscule bodies overwhelming her. For a moment she struggles under the squirming mass, one arm extended, before they engulf her entirely, chewing and spitting and gnawing.

It is all over very quickly. The frenzy passes. The Little Lords, soon sated, grow bored and start to wander off. One of them, its belly glistening and its teeth still dripping, waddles out of the open doorway. It looks at the smoking remains of the crawler, on its side in a furrow of driven earth. It looks at the crops swaying wildly in the driving wind. It looks at the night sky, still subject to full weather control.

It does not understand the significance of any of this. It has done what it always does – followed its hungry instincts. It is absurdly happy. Almost all of the time, it is absurdly happy.

Then it swivels around, pivoting on a miniature slop of obesity, to see its fellows start to gorge again.

It belches, picks its nose, then scampers back to join them.

Dantine can see they are breaking through. There is nothing in his arsenal powerful enough to even slow them, let alone halt them. At one point he thought they had actually downed one – a concentrated las-burst from twenty men, all aimed at the same target. The monster had stumbled, tottering over heavily as the combined hits took their toll. Dantine dared to believe, for a moment, that they had at last nailed one of the bastards.

But then it got back up. It hauled itself to its feet, armour-plate glowing from the kinetic energy discharged, its horrific eyes still shining, its claws reaching for the trigger on that bestial-looking firearm. It strode back into the las-storm and started killing again.

And that had crushed them. Dantine and his senior command group fell back to the central building, pulling in every survivor they could, barricaded it and prepared to die there. Even from within the walls he could tell that the wind was still blowing outside. Battacharya’s plan to reach the nodes in time had always been a forlorn hope. This world would fall, intact, to the enemy.

Now he waits for them grimly, knowing that his charge-pack is almost spent. They all crouch behind upended tables at the far end of the long corridor, fewer than thirty now, their weapons readied. They hear the crunch and slam of walls breaking and the agonised yowls of other soldiers being killed in that terrible, unhurried way.

He presses his finger over the trigger, mouthing prayers. He has seen action many times before. He has faced greenskins on far-off worlds, back when he aspired to achieve something with the Astra Militarum. He has faced heretic cultists in the depths of stinking hive towers, and thought at the time that no man could witness horror greater than that.

‘Holy Throne of Earth,’ he whispers softly, the first words of an old Ministorum hymn, a child’s catechism.

Startled, he realises the men around him are taking up the soft chant. They begin to sing, hardly audibly, their guns still held fast.

In faith we are preserved,

The first of the monsters comes around the corner, and the lasguns open up – flash after flash. This creature is as foul as the rest of them – a colossal beast in stinking, slithering armour, grotesquely huge and surrounded by clouds of insects. It carries a scythe that crackles with a pale energy.

Across the whole of space,

Dantine sings with the rest, though he can hardly squeeze the words out of his fear-choked throat. Every shot is hitting it, and none of it makes any difference. The thing walks towards them, taking its time. Some of the defenders begin to retch.

No shameful thought, no unclean deed,

He fires and fires and fires. The monster reaches the barricade of tables and gets to work, lifting them away and crushing those cowering on the far side. It pulls apart human bodies as if they were made of damp paper. A trooper, in desperation, draws a knife and launches himself at it. He is swatted off and crushed underfoot, the knife left trembling where he plunged it, hilt-deep into rotten armour-hide.

Obscures the glory of our race.

The thing gets closer to Dantine, and he sees that there are tiny numbers on its armour, picked out in black ink. They look handwritten, scrawled in some obsessive frenzy over every inch of exposed armour. It wheezes as it comes for him, and he sees flecks of blood and vomit on the fractured breastplate. It has an air of incredible age to it, a spectre of a lost epoch, unearthed at the dawn of time and given flesh to torment the living galaxy.

Dantine’s charge-pack gives out, and he switches grip, angling the bayonet. The monster has seen him, and he springs, going for the creature’s neck. He puts every last ounce of strength into the leap, holding the weapon two-handed above his head, shouting out as he hurtles towards the objective.

The monster catches him – catches him – in mid-leap. Claws snap across his chest, holding him rigid. His weapon spins away uselessly and Dantine finds himself staring straight into the creature’s face.

The mask is huge, well beyond anything human. He can see tubes snaking under the cracked rim, throbbing with dark liquids. He can see flies crawling all over it, and glossy sores on the tarnished ceramite. He can see a pair of lenses backlit with eerie green light, as thick as cream. He can see numbers written all over the ridges of barnacled armour, vanishing into impossibly small characters.

Dantine spits in its face. The spittle curdles as it hits, turning lumpy like old cheese.

He hears a rumble from within the carcass of the monster and realises it’s a deep, corrosive laugh. There’s nothing human about that laugh – the voice is too ruined, too overlaid with corruption and distortion and slow malice.

‘Kill me then,’ Dantine dares it, raging now, more angry at the blasphemy than afraid.

The monster looks at him for a while. All Dantine can see is its dark lenses, unblinking and unknowable.

Then it shakes its head.

‘Not you,’ it slurs.

It squeezes, gently, and Dantine can feel himself passing out.

‘No!’ he gasps, enraged, flailing against the grip, kicking out against the unyielding wall of stinking, mouldering armour.

But the fight is lost. As awareness fades, he realises the worst thing of all – that he’s not going to die here, that he will be denied even a noble end, and that, for him, this is all just beginning.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The sun comes up.

Garstag walks out to the far edge of the complex in order to observe it. It is a little rite for him, a small habit that he sees no reason to extinguish. After every successful action, he makes sure to see the sun come up on the worlds he has conquered. He has seen many suns rise – blazing blue-white orbs that sent shadows leaping across the rocks, mid-range yellow stars that must be reminiscent of Terra for those who remember it, and ones like this one – old and tired and amber, filling a sixteenth of the sky with a weary light.

The complex is still burning. Slert discovered promethium tanks and set them off. After that he drove a few survivors into the inferno, where they were caught between death at his hands and death in the flames. It was a poor game, that, one the Kardainn-master disapproved of. They deserved a chance to die on their feet.

He walks further out, getting away from the acrid smell of charred flesh and metal. The skies are dusty, still blown by an incessant boom of wind. In the distance he can see towers, studding the landscape at regular intervals. Between them is nothing, just a wasteland of rustling corn.

He keeps walking. He passes a huge vehicle, its innards twisted and its internal machinery ripped out. Hoppers, each one capable of storing hundreds of tonnes of material, have been pulled apart, and the dust and grain are mingling into a dry slurry underfoot.

He hears something out in the wastes and walks away from the abandoned vehicle. He sees Kledo kneeling out in the middle of one of the hyperfields and lumbers over to join him. The Surgeon doesn’t appear to notice him coming, or perhaps is merely too engrossed in his work.

Garstag sees what he has been up to. The severed bodies of Imperial servitors are lying in the dirt all around him, dozens of them. Some are clearly missing body parts. About fifty are waiting meekly for his attention, standing in the field with their eyes focusing well into the distance. They’re big creatures, bred for muscle, with absurdly small heads perched atop all that vat-grown bulk.

Kledo looks up. He has a needle in one hand, thread in another.

‘What?’ he snaps.

Garstag does not ask what he is doing. The brotherhood of Surgeons is notoriously secretive. If he had to guess, it would be that there is no clear purpose here, and that Kledo is simply bored. Perhaps he wishes to test the pain tolerances of these things, or merely see if they can be recombined in some novel way.

‘Not much of a theatre,’ Garstag says.

Kledo stops what he’s doing and looks around. The windblown crops whisper back at him. ‘Where was their support?’ he asks.

Garstag nods. ‘It’s a big world. There’s a lot of fodder here.’

There should have been a response. Even if the planet itself did not maintain an adequate garrison, there should have been an alert network within the system, primed to respond. That was how the Imperium operated – it could not guard every single hunk of rock that it laid claim to, but it could act quickly when the alarm was raised. Garstag has seen this many times – a target would be hit, and within hours there would be landers darkening the skies.

It was what they had all hoped for – a cascade of steadily increasing resistance, something to get their claws into.

Kledo puts his bloody materials down and gets up. ‘It’s like they’ve given up,’ he says.

Garstag snorts. ‘You saw what it was like at the Gate. I don’t think they’ve given up. Maybe we have, though.’

Kledo looks intrigued. ‘What do you mean?’

Garstag almost doesn’t tell him. It is hard to know when the time is right. ‘Don’t tell me you would have chosen this target,’ he says carefully.

‘No one chose it. It’s where we ended up.’

‘Yes. Strange, that.’

Kledo suddenly looks angry. His moods are like a child’s – quick and complete, swinging from one extreme to the other. ‘There’s been plenty of talk. Don’t add me to it, or I’ll be stitching you to something foul.’

Garstag laughs. ‘We shouldn’t be anywhere near here. We should have followed the Despoiler out of Cadia.’ He sighs, feeling his muscles ache for more action. ‘You and I both know it, Surgeon. He’s lost his way.’

‘Who?’ asks Kledo, looking shrewd.

It is a big thing, to name the primarch. They do not openly criticise him, for they know that words, even whispered ones, have a way of carrying back to the Plague Planet. For some in the Legion, Mortarion is little less than a god, a slayer-sage elevated into the skirts of immortality. Even for those who think otherwise, he is still the most powerful of them all, a creature capable of turning the universe inside out in the cause of vengeance. Since his return to speech and activity, it has become perilous even to voice doubt, to utter a word of concern.

In any case, that is not who he meant.

‘Tell me, Surgeon,’ Garstag says. ‘Who gives a damn for Ultramar? I do not. I do not care whether it prospers or rots. How about you?’

Kledo thinks for a moment, then slowly nods. ‘We do not set the course.’

‘So what do you want from this? I never asked you.’

Kledo laughs. ‘A better world, more subjects for my predilections.’

‘Liar.’ Garstag stalks moodily away. ‘He’s led us for a long time. I find the obsessions wearying. It can’t go on, brother.’

‘Then do something.’

‘You recommend it?’

Kledo shrugs. ‘Don’t come here fishing for support. Do something, or hold your claws closed. That’s the way of things.’

‘I find it interesting to gauge views, that is all.’

Kledo snorts and gets back to his work. The needle flickers, snicker-snack, and surgical thread weaves. ‘I’ll say this for the siegemaster. He was there. Like I was. We both reached out, saw the walls, and for a moment they were falling. Falling. It was so, so close. And he’s never stopped fighting. I did, for a long time. It’s not easy to keep the hatred alive, sometimes. Especially in the Eye, where there are diversions.’

‘We’re not in the Eye, though, are we?’

‘Neither are we where we were supposed to be.’

‘And you know nothing about how that happened.’

‘Do you?’

They look at one another for a moment, a slight push of strength against strength. Eventually, Garstag looks away. ‘You’re making a mess of those things.’

‘I’m making them better. That’s our creed, brother. You should learn some religion.’

Garstag’s lips curl in something approaching disgust. Even now, even after he has seen and done so much, Kledo’s preferences can prove endlessly dismaying.

‘Think on it,’ he says, turning back towards the ruins of the complex. The smoke from the last of the fires gusts about them, blown at a low level into the fields.

But Kledo is no longer listening. He beckons to another servitor, waiting mutely in line.

‘Next,’ he says, brandishing the bloody needle.

Dantine takes a long time to wake up. He is half-aware of dreams in that time. He dreams of being taken up by men with no faces and carried somewhere far away. He sees stars swinging overhead, hundreds of them. At one point he thinks he wakes, and he feels the shake of an orbital lander, and then the nausea of a rapid ascent.

Then he is out again. He dreams of Battacharya, and somehow knows she is dead. He liked her, and believes she liked him. They might have achieved something together, had they not been stranded on such a nondescript world and haunted by mutually incomprehensible pasts. He wonders why she was posted there. He wonders why he was never brave enough to ask her.

Then he dreams that something is cutting him. He feels something being excised, dragged out of him. He hears voices – terrible voices – speaking through sputum in a language he does not understand.

Then he stops dreaming.

Much later, very much later, consciousness returns.

He blinks, and a shifting world comes back into something like focus.

He feels horribly ill, more than normal for a void transit. He is lying on his back, and he twists over to be sick. He sees the vomitus slap on to the floor, thick and greasy, and the smell appals him.

Then he lies on his back again, panting. He is clammy and cold, and he shuts his eyes. His chest hurts. He does not want to be alive. That thought prompts him to force himself awake properly. Perhaps there is something he can do about that – spite the enemy before the advent of whatever questioning or torment they have in mind.

He blinks again, hard, clearing rheum from his eyes. He tries to get a sense of where he is and what has happened.

He is inside a cell, metal-lined, metal-floored. It stinks. Some of that stink is from him – his uniform is soiled, and his various excreta reek. Foul matter is caked on every surface. The metal is heavily oxidised, stained and calcified. The floor is wet, and little bubbles pop to the surface of oily puddles.

He is on a long bench, also metal, also rusting away to nothing. The lone lumen is a chain-suspended sodium lamp, as dirty as everything else. There are furry things with many eyes crawling up the walls.

Dantine wipes his mouth and tries to sit up. His ribcage is the worst – he must have been hit hard there. His knife is gone, of course, as is anything else sharp. Aside from the smell, there is a taste in the air – a chemical taste, like something fermenting. He hears noises all around him, just as one always does on a starship. Noise resounds within a vessel in space from the total enclosure, running on top of the endemic growl of engines, air-cyclers, water-cyclers, shield generators and the rest – but this one is different to any starship he has been on before. He can detect horrible noises just below the grind of the machinery. Some are moans, some are repeating cries, some are unidentifiable. Dantine is not a cowardly man, but those noises make him shiver.

He looks up. The cell’s solitary door is opening. Weak as he feels, he clenches his fists and prepares to move.

Metal shrieks as the heavy door is shoved inward. Dantine leaps, seeing something huge and blurry in the gap and going for it.

He falls short, nearly passing out the instant he moves, and collapses into his own refuse. On his knees, he feels like weeping. He can barely lift a fist, let alone do his duty and attack his tormentor. He does not resist as huge hands reach for him, lift him up, place him back on the slab.

Then he is looking up into the same eyes as before, at the number-scrawled plates, at the bizarrely pocked and bloated armour.

‘Do not try that again,’ the monster says.

The voice is just as it was on Najan – like a throat submerged in oil, cracking and engine-harsh. The language is also strange and hard to follow, though patently some form of Gothic.

‘Why don’t you kill me?’ Dantine croaks.

The monster gives him a canister of water. He takes it and drinks greedily.

‘I am named Vorx, siegemaster of the Fourteenth Legion, called the Death Guard. You are on the ship Solace, in the care of the Lords of Silence. What is your name?’

Once a thing has a name, you can no longer call him ‘it’; he becomes a person, albeit of the most warped and esoteric kind. Even in the midst of his nausea and weakness, Dantine cannot escape a sliver of awe that creeps in. This warrior is old beyond imagination – that is evident just from the way he looks, moves and speaks. He even smells old – one of the melange of aromas this creature gives off is the kind of decay only the truly decrepit exude.

There had always been rumours, never spoken of except in the most intimate company, of Space Marines who had turned, who had given themselves over to the Ruinous Powers. Most sensible people discounted the notion – a Space Marine could not turn – but still the gossip never went away. Dantine remembered serving with a lieutenant who swore that he’d heard a definite account of this happening, with campaign names and dates. Two weeks later, that lieutenant was summoned to a meeting with the commissariat and never returned. For most, that was proof he must have been spouting heretical rubbish. For a few thoughtful souls though, it was enough to give them pause.

‘Captain Gaval Dantine, Najan Station resident defence force,’ he says.

‘I do not think you began your career on Najan,’ says Vorx. ‘You fought like a man who knows how to use a weapon. Is this right?’

He doesn’t want to reply. He wants to remain defiant, to list his name and position again, until they tire of it and either kill him or bring in instruments of torment.

Perhaps it is the eyes that do it. Looking into those deep lenses, swimming with what looks like some kind of marsh gas, drains his resolve. Or perhaps it is the crushing stink, his physical weakness, the knowledge that everyone who had served with him on that world is now dead.

‘I served in the Astra Militarum for fifteen years.’

‘Fifteen years.’ The creature – Vorx – shifts so that he is standing a little further off. His movements are almost awkward, as if the bones within that colossal hulk have been warped or rearranged. Things gurgle as he shuffles, or they drip, or they weep lines of glistening liquid. ‘That is a long time to stay alive in service. You must have been a good soldier, Captain Dantine.’

‘Not really.’

‘What brought you to Najan?’

He does not wish to answer this. The creature senses it and – surprisingly – lets it drop.

‘No matter. Every man must have his secrets.’ Vorx reaches up to brush a strand of something viscous from his gorget. ‘I have more important questions. The world you guarded was not unimportant. It should have been better protected. There should have been ships on response patrol. There should have been distress signals sent. Why was this not done?’

Dantine doesn’t know. Battacharya hadn’t known. He shrugs and shakes his head.

‘We have analysed your records,’ Vorx says patiently. ‘There should have been Naval support, and regiments of your Astra Militarum on standby. And, at the very last resort, you are under the protection of a Chapter of Space Marines, are you not?’

There seems little point in denying that. Dantine finds he wants to talk, and that disgusts him. He had hoped to be so much stronger.

‘The White Consuls,’ he says.

‘The White Consuls.’ Vorx nods appreciatively. ‘A venerable name. Why are they not here?’

Dantine shakes his head again, miserably. ‘Nothing works,’ he mutters. ‘The beacon’s down. The astropaths are dead. The sky’s… bleeding.’

Why did he use that word? That’s not like him. He’s a soldier, not a poet.

Vorx nods, taking it all in. ‘So you are all blind now, just as the other one said. How interesting.’

Dantine scowls. ‘There’ll be a response. From someone. You’ll be sent back to…’ He has no idea where these horrors have come from.

‘To the Eye of Terror, Captain Dantine,’ Vorx says. ‘You know that name, I assume. It has been our home for a long time, and not by choice.’ He comes closer again, and the aroma of festering meat is hard to cope with. ‘It was a prison, rooted into the fabric of reality. Breaking it open, it appears, has also broken everything else. Perhaps that was anticipated by those who did it. Perhaps not.’ He sniffs. ‘I find myself disappointed. We are cast adrift, and all has already been lain waste. I have my followers to think of. They are made for a life of conquest. If I cannot give it to them, they will find someone else who can.’

Dantine cannot look away, even though he wants to. He feels sick again, as if his body has been scraped empty. He does not know what to say. He does not even know what to think.

‘I am a great horror to you,’ Vorx says.

That is certainly true.

‘A long time ago,’ Vorx says, ‘I was a horror to myself. The universe is full of horror. You can resist it, and drive yourself into madness. Or you can accept it, and then begin to understand it. I would recommend the latter course, though I accept you must feel quite differently. For now.’

The conversational tone is absurd. Dantine has seen what these… things do.

‘Why did you come here?’ he asks weakly, wishing he could think of something better to say, something more accusatory.

‘We did not come here by choice. The warp’s winds blew us here. Before reaching your world we had no fixed point to guide us. Now we know where we are, to a degree, and can plan where to go next. It is the beginning of something unexpected.’

Dantine tries to make himself angry. He tries to remember all those he saw being killed. ‘Why?’ he asks feebly.

‘Not for the reason you think.’ Vorx lumbers off again. He seems to feel the need to keep moving, albeit in his stilted, stumbling manner. ‘There is a nobler way of living. We show this to the galaxy. We demonstrate it in our bodies, and we protect them from those who would harm it. We are the bringers of the god’s blessing.’

Dantine stares at the monster. For a moment, he is entirely lost for words. ‘You… killed them all.’

‘I did not kill you.’

‘Why?’

‘I do not know. Ha. Do you believe that?’ The monster muses. ‘I am a believer in fate. I recognise a conjunction when I see one. For what it is worth, that has kept me alive for longer than most, and I do not intend to turn an opportunity aside.’

‘Why do you do it?’ Dantine can feel himself losing control. He could become angry, if he were not so worn out and nauseous. ‘You were a man once, were you not? You were a human?’

‘I still am, of a kind.’ Vorx is not looking at him. ‘We are all on a spectrum, captain. You are at one end, I am at the other. We are still the same species.’

‘You are mad.’

Vorx chuckles again. ‘I have lost count of how many times that insult has been aimed at me. By your kind, by my kind.’ He is still pacing, as if counting out steps. There are things, sluggish things, that seem to be living in his armour. ‘The accusation is only meaningful if you can give me some suitable account of sanity. I saw the way you lived on that world. I have seen the way Imperial citizens live on a hundred worlds. If you truly believe that this is a sane galaxy, and that we are the aberrations, then I pity you. But then, you have not seen all the alternatives yet. When you do, your mind may change.’

Dantine tries to clench his fist. As the monster speaks, he attempts to gather the strength to lunge at him again. When he cannot do so, he slumps against the bench, defeated. ‘I wish to hurt you,’ he says mournfully.

Vorx stops pacing. ‘Of course you do. I do not blame you for that, but I cannot allow it. See, we have arts for this.’ He reaches down to one of the many pouches at his belt. He rummages for a moment and then draws out a thick bag, stained black from the liquids within. He moves closer to Dantine, opens the bag and brings something out.

For a moment, Dantine does not know what it is. Then he thinks it is meat – raw meat – offered as sustenance. Then he sees that it is a heart, blotchy with blood, and that it is still beating. The grisly spectacle makes him recoil, until a greater horror dawns on him. His hands fly up to his chest, under the ripped jerkin of his uniform, and he feels the ridge of scar tissue there.

Vorx puts the heart back in the bag and ties it to his belt again. ‘Your first lesson,’ he says. ‘How are such things possible? They are not, in the only world you have ever known. But there is a greater one in which all things are made possible.’

Dantine is hyperventilating. He cannot bear to touch the wound at his chest anymore – it makes him feel dizzy.

‘How… did…’ he starts.

‘Hush,’ says Vorx, holding a stumpy, calloused finger to his vox-grille as he moves back to the door. ‘Enough for one day. You will need to rest if you are to be of service.’

‘How am I alive?’

Vorx looks at him. ‘Are you sure that you are, captain?’

He opens the door and steps across the threshold.

‘You are insane!’ screeches Dantine, crawling after him.

Then the door clangs close, and ripples travel across the watery filth on the floor.

Dantine is trembling. He draws in huge breaths, unable to understand how he is still able to do so.

It is a nightmare. I will wake from it soon.

He tries to sing the words of the hymn, the one they recited on the barricade, to give him strength.

But he cannot remember the words. He looks around, at the walls and the ceiling, at the rot and the slurry. He smells the decay, the dankness, and sees how complete his prison is.

By the time he is screaming, the cell door is securely locked. Dantine’s despair adds to the cacophony of voices already raised, just one more addition to Solace’s varied choir.

It goes on for a long time, until unconsciousness takes him again and the cell finally slinks back into its watery, torpid well of silence.

IV: EYE’S EDGE

CHAPTER NINE

There have been musters before, countless times, though it is hard to remember one of such dark magnificence. Some of the ships here gathered likewise at Beta Garmon, a god’s lifetime ago. Some were constructed barely a century earlier, and their keels are still slick and free of the worst deep-stained void patina.

The numbers are mind-bending. Ships have come out from every cranny and vault of Eyespace, dragging themselves from daemon-haunted void docks and up from the lightless gaols of asteroid-delved fortresses. There are sleek corvettes of the Emperor’s Children, shunned by all but their own kind, burnished in gold and chalcedony, and reeking of sadism. They go as proudly as they have ever done, though the old claim to primacy has been long lost amid their unique indulgences.

Then come the renegade warbands, the motley barques looted from Imperial stations, each one bearing a different sigil in blood-red or ink-black. More have been spawned over the last millennium than ever before, and even the archivists of the Eye’s sorcery-infested scriptoriums have long ago given up trying to catalogue them. They are hunted creatures, those renegades, always liable to be devoured by larger predators, and so they hang back within the less-crowded void volumes, their weapons kept hot and their engines fully primed.

More stately craft arrive as the weeks go by, surging up from the warp-broiled depths in ancient and storied warships. The Thousand Sons answer the call, bringing with them pyramid-crested battlecruisers that still retain a certain aesthetic restraint. They are graceful things, those vessels, clean as jewels, pushing softly on blue-white plasma burners. There was once a time when the commitment of Magnus’ sons might have been doubted, as well as their capability, but no longer. Prospero is not a word that haunts them any longer. Nor, for that matter, is Fenris.

The gracefulness ends with them. Next to arrive are the flotillas from Perturabo’s industrial soul-forges, each one as grey as his heart and thick with venting filth. His Dreadnoughts slide out of the warp, occluded in smog and wallowing heavily amid promethium discharges. Many of those craft are steeped in the daemonic, having been fused and augmented over painful centuries within hammering hell foundries. Their blunt prows, blackened with the scorchmarks of battle and never cleaned, jut aggressively in a pitiless display of military uniformity.

Then come the lesser Legions, in terms of numbers and coherence at least. The dusk-black kill-ships of the Night Lords, drenched in projected terror, skulking like thieves on the margins. The ophidian warcraft of the Alpha Legion, spreading out in variegated clusters, distrusted more than most even among themselves, victims of a reputation they spun a long time ago and can now never escape. The World Eaters, stragglers amid the coordination of the cohesive Legions, their destroyers bearing the wounds of continual conflict, spattered arterial red.

Fights break out, of course. Cruiser captains suddenly recognise the prow of a vessel they fought a decade before, or a navigation hail is misinterpreted as a challenge, or a daemon trapped within a battleship’s weapons grid bursts loose and sets itself to devouring. Flashes of cannon fire spot the entire muster-sphere, breaking out at random and then dying away again as feuds are settled or greater powers intervene. As the gathering grows, these breakouts become more severe and more frequent, as if they were beasts clustered at a drying waterhole. There are battles in those weeks that, in another time or place, would be worthy of record, but here, among this outsize mustering, are merely pinpricks against a greater ground of conformity.

This is the Despoiler’s gift to the Eye’s realm. There are feuds and there are hatreds, but there is no greater feud than the one he perpetuates, and no greater hatred. He has bound them, impossibly, into common cause. Not since Horus himself, the great flatterer, the great master of soldiers’ souls, has there been a figurehead so dominant and capable of command.

He is not even here yet. The Vengeful Spirit will come to this place last, as is befitting. When all others are gathered, that ancient Gloriana leviathan will make its entrance, forcing all to yield as it once did over the burning skies of Terra. Until that moment, the new arrivals keep coming. The Word Bearers, one of the three Legions who have retained their old disciplines, take up positions near the centre. Their battlefleets are marked with the bronze-hammered octed and bristle with the screams of the Neverborn. The greatest of those ships are floating cathedrals, stacked with impossibly lofty towers and parapets and bursting with the gifts of the warp. Sacrificial fires burn along their lengths in defiance of physics, and their ranks shimmer with shifting, flickering witchlight.

And then comes the greatest collection of all, the most varied and the most powerful by a distance – the hunt packs of the Black Legion, numerous beyond counting, drawn from every strain of Chaotic allegiance and every vessel marque imaginable. Here are corruption-steeped battlecruisers from the very dawn of the Imperial Age, ravaged by millennia of constant warfare, strutting proudly as pre-eminent slayers of the Corpse-spawn’s dreams. Here are new-founded designs, birthed from the shackled minds of savant shipwrights, freed from the strictures of standard templates and allowed free rein to create monstrosities of innovation. Here are gun-barques that strain with barely controlled energies. Here are personnel carriers with holds crammed full of Black Legionnaires. Here are transports that chain up Titans and Traitor Knights, gifted by forge worlds of the Dark Mechanicum and sent to war under the Black Legion’s ubiquitous standard.

Just as the Luna Wolves were in the Age of Wonder, this Legion is now the first among equals, its mongrel bloodline the healthiest and its clarity of loathing the purest. It has made no pacts, it has retained its soul, and now it swaggers through the Eye in an earned exhibition of dominance.

The Death Guard are the very last to arrive in numbers. Just as it was so long ago, they turn up to bolster an already galaxy-ending display of power. Their living ships burst from the warp’s grip like ejected spittle from a throat, straggling long lines of grimy matter, their grey-green marker lights filmy and weak. These are some of the very oldest ships in the muster, eroded by the decay that blights all things under Mortarion’s rule, but also engorged by it. The ships are paradoxes within a Legion of endless paradoxes – the strongest and sickest, the most archaic and yet the most constantly renewed, the most uniform in their allegiance and yet the most variable in their outward aspect.

They were the last to come under Abaddon’s banner. They were the proudest, the ones who for the longest time maintained their own plans and powers. To see them here is the most striking mark of the Despoiler’s grand vision, the final victory of his gathering-in of the strays.

The Death Guard do not mingle with those of other Legions and warbands. Their presence is not welcome on the grand bridges of the fleet, for even the denizens of the Eye find their bodily corruption hard to stomach. They are, as they have ever been, an army apart.

Dragan knows very little of this deep history. He does not appreciate study of the past, as Vorx does. His hinterland is sparse, a world of slaying motivated by current grudges and slights rather than the elaborate interlinked vendettas of history. He looks out of the viewports of his shuttle and sees Solace from the outside. It is black and brown, matted and congealed, a hunk of rotting vegetation hanging in the void. Its lights are dim, its mighty batteries almost obscured by blistered overhangs. It is hard to reconstruct what the ship must have been like at its birth. Dragan is no shipwright either, and so does not waste effort trying to imagine.

Solace has been his home for almost fifty years, and yet it retains an alien quality. It may be that the ship’s semi-dormant consciousness is deliberately repelling him. Still, he cannot fault its power. The wearing ages have made its bones strong, made its creaking weapons banks devastating, kept its engines stoked and thunderous. Solace will never be a nimble ship. It will never match the raw firepower of a full-line battleship, nor will it deliver the massive armies to war that a conveyer could, but it is a tough old creature, like leather boiled away for an eternity.

He sits back in his seat. He should be on the ship now, preparing himself for the warp stage. Some of his brothers, Slert in particular, are fizzing with excitement at what is to come. Even Philemon, that rot-headed old corpse-counter, is palpably stirred. Vorx, presumably, thinks Dragan is somewhere in the old practice cages, or hunting bilge filth for food, or doing something else on board in secret. Solace is big enough that someone, even an Unbroken, need have no difficulty keeping to oneself.

He drums his armoured fingers on his armoured knee. He can see the shuttle’s pilot up ahead, her body lost in a lattice of looped nutrient tubes. Like most pilots in the service of the Lords of Silence, this one is biologically part of the shuttle, limbs and torso fused into a ganglion of wires and pins. Her eyes are hidden by tubes leading to the external sensors, her fingers lost amid the twist and quiver of signal relays. He can see pox on the skin of her exposed neck, and it is advanced. She might last a few more years before either insanity or bodily collapse ends her. Then she will decay into the matter of the shuttle itself, forming a fertilising layer for its next series of growths and a nutrient-rich base for when Kledo wires her successor into place. That is all part of the great arc of rebirth, the essence of the great creed, for those that care about such things.

He looks back out of the viewport. The vista in all directions is crammed with starships. Even Dragan’s wry soul is stirred a little by it. If you let your eyes lose focus for a moment, it seems as if the void has disappeared entirely, replaced by a plasma-like forest of over-mingled thruster glow.

He sees the one he is after. The pilot says nothing – she has no vocal cords, after all – but the shuttle swings upward towards its destination. Amid illustrious company, this one stands out. Even when set against deep-keeled monsters and storied warships from the dawn of recorded history, it still holds its own. It has perhaps the most malignant of all the profiles in that place, one twisted and altered to decomposing extremes by the power of the god. Were it not for the sorcery that pulses within its ancient heart, it would fall apart. Its antiquated spine is a study in corrosion, its bilges a vile melange of dissolved heavy metals and bubbling plague broth. From most angles its precise dimensions are impossible to determine, for a cloud of warp-flies obscures it for many kilometres out. Over the centuries it has become a kind of permanent ward-field, a thick layer of physically impossible insects, zipping and droning across the void.

As the shuttle reaches the outer skirts of the swarms, the tiny insects part to allow passage. If Dragan had not been a welcome guest, by now the small craft’s exterior would have been chewed down to the engine lines. He watches as the maw of the intake hangar looms ever larger – a gaping hole in the rusting hull, outlined by long yellow teeth that protrude from iron rings. To be swallowed by it feels like being swallowed by a living thing. Presumably, of course, that is fairly close to the reality.

A shadow falls over them. A crackle ripples along the shuttle’s outer skin as the air-gravity bubble slides across. They touch down on the deck within, and from outside Dragan hears the clang of machinery, the bark of coarse speech, the long, echoing wind-down of the engines.

For a moment he sits, at rest.

Then he is moving, stirring himself and heading down the long ramp into the gloomy interior. He is greeted at its base by members of the Traveller’s own retinue, a mirror to the Deathshroud, armed with manreapers and cloaked in silence. They say nothing to him, but beckon him deeper into the innards of the ship. It is humid, and hot, and sunk into a heavy darkness that drips and lingers like bile.

The Terminus Est is a big ship, and it takes them a long time to reach their destination. On the way, he witnesses similar scenes to those he left behind on Solace – gangs of Unbroken working on their weapons and their armour. They do not drill themselves in practice cages, like other Legions might. They do not engage in duels, nor do they make pilgrimage to an apostle to be screamed at. The Sons of Mortarion prepare for war in seclusion, tending to the maladies that they cultivate within themselves. They discover what has changed in them since the last time they went to war, for there are always changes. They listen to the chatter of the Little Lords and the wandering plaguebearers, and attempt to divine a scamper of fate within the multitude of possibilities.

It is all so quiet. The ship’s beams creak, and the mighty engines growl, but the corridors are muted. There is no tense expectation of something immense to come, just a familiar grim sense of resignation, of diligence.

Dragan finds himself irritated by this. There are days when he wishes to shake his brothers, to stir up something within them. There is so little anger in this Legion, despite it being set within a universe where the cause for it is so plentiful.

In due course, his taciturn escort peels away, leaving him alone before a half-collapsed portal. The atmosphere is even hotter than before, and flies buzz everywhere, filling every gap, teetering on every surface. Some are fat blowflies, some are whining mosquitos, and some are the swollen-bodied stingers of the Destroyer Hive. Some are real, some are the excrescences of the immaterium. As Dragan stands before the portal, they flock to him in clumps. They crawl over his armour, they burrow between the gaps. He feels them on his skin and resists the urge to flinch.

Even the most unschooled of the Legion knows not to flinch. This is the first of Typhus’ tests.

‘Come.’

The voice is rotten, as grating as a rough saw’s edge. It feels almost unsuited to this Legion, as if the speaker had been somehow wrongly placed. Perhaps he might have been happier among Angron’s gladiators, or Perturabo’s gloomy technicians of pain. In this, as in other things, Typhus is very much of his own species.

Dragan ducks under the sagging lintel and enters warily. The chamber beyond is large, its roof soaring away into the darkness above. He finds it hard to make much out within, for the only lamps are dull and crawling with tiny black shapes. The floor was once marble but has cracked and subsided, exposing what looks and smells like soil. The columns thrusting high into the unseen heights are running with teardrop lines of water, brackish and lumpy.

For all the decrepitude, it feels like a wellspring, here. It feels like something started on this spot a very long time ago.

Typhus is waiting for him at the end of the long central hall. There is a throne, carved of pale stone, but he does not occupy it. Instead he stands in the centre of a wide circular platform, surrounded by his ever-thickening clouds of flies. When he moves, the flies swirl and solidify and form shapes in the air, all of which dissolve again like smoke. Typhus is like his flagship – a solid core around which only shadows spin.

As Dragan comes closer, he sees enough to form an impression. He has caught glimpses of the Traveller before. He has even seen him fight, from a distance. Up close, though, is a different proposition. All members of the Death Guard have a certain similarity of aspect, but Typhus is in many ways the archetype. Every trope and symbol employed by the servants of the Plague finds its ultimate expression in him, for he was the one to introduce the vectors of change. All know this. All are aware of their Legion’s genesis, and yet none ever speak of it. What is there to say? The deed is done, and there is no going back.

‘My Lord Typhus,’ Dragan says, dropping to one knee.

Typhus stares at him for a moment, his tripartite-cloven helm almost lost within the huge curve of his battleplate. Aside from a single upturned horn, the helm is white, as pale as moonlight on a grave, and the strange purity of it looks lost amid the extravagant degradation.

‘Gallowsman,’ Typhus says. ‘I hear they call you that.’

‘Not a name I chose,’ says Dragan.

‘Where did it come from, then?’

‘I know not, lord.’

Typhus grunts, and clouds of flies burst from his faceplate. He is constantly in motion, turning, twitching, dragging the hilt of his great scythe, as if the restlessness that provoked the Great Change has never settled down and continues to impel him.

‘Your blood is thin,’ says Typhus.

It is a slur, that. A reference to the fact Dragan was not on Terra and thus does not share in the honour of those who fought on the Corpse-Emperor’s own ground. Dragan has heard it many times, and it does not trouble him. Those of the old Legion can cling on to their failure as much as they like – it has always seemed to him a strange impulse, to wallow in that infamous catastrophe, to harp on about it at every turn, to define every step forward in reference to that one colossal step into oblivion.

Typhus moves again, lumbering around his low centre of gravity. The flies buzz, making the air shimmer with a wall of sound.

‘Perhaps you do not even know why we call ourselves the Unbroken,’ he says.

‘I know it,’ says Dragan.

‘Tell me, then.’

‘We survived. We maintained discipline. We kept our ranks and our ships, and we lived to fight again.’

Typhus laughs, and flies spill and tumble. ‘Who told you that?’

‘It is well known.’

‘It is horseshit.’ Typhus turns back towards him, and tongues of steam slip across the marble. ‘I was there when the words were first uttered. I stood with my battle-brothers and first laid eyes on the primarch.’

The primarch. Little enough reverence, there.

‘He was fresh from the surface,’ says Typhus, pacing. ‘There was still the poison mist curling from his robes. He was not even wearing armour. He was so thin. The Emperor stood by his side. The light from His armour was impossible to look at. What did we think? That the primarch was a wretch? Something to be ashamed of?’ Typhus chuckles mordantly. ‘But the primarch had no doubts. He addressed us. He never raised his voice. He spoke as if he recognised every face in that audience, though most there were from Terra. It was the first, and last, time I heard him utter anything remotely affectionate.’

Dragan listens. Typhus has an edge of scorn in his words, but it is hard to tell if that is simply the way he always speaks or whether some special element of it is reserved for his master.

‘He said that we were his unbroken blades. He said that we were his Death Guard. The Dusk Raiders were forgotten, leaving us with two new names. To the rest of the universe, we were indeed the Death Guard. Among ourselves, we were the Unbroken. It hasn’t changed. To those outside, we are terror. To those within, we are the persistent.’

Dragan does not know if he believes this story. It has the ring of something told and told again, so many times that it generates an air of truth. Then again, Typhus has no reason to lie about it.

‘That is enlightening, lord,’ he says.

‘Why do I tell you this, you wonder?’ Typhus asks.

‘For my education. As a thinblood.’

‘Ha.’ The Traveller fixes him with a rare static glance. For a moment the clouds of flies clear, and Dragan is staring straight into that terrible horned face. The corruption in the white helm runs deeper than he has seen in any other – it looks like every scrap of armour is held together by something ephemeral, but also bone-strong. This is force of will, perhaps, or maybe just cheap magick. ‘I have heard stories of you, Gallowsman. We need fighters like you in this Legion. Ones with a sliver of anger still in them. That’s the danger, for those of us who have trodden the long path. We forget our fury. The god indulges us. The danger is in that.’

Dragan finds himself nodding. He has thought similar things, often when confronted by one of Vorx’s sermons.

‘We were the Unbroken,’ Typhus says. ‘He never let us clean the filth from our armour. Over time, we stopped wanting to. We never turned away. It was a crooked road that took us to Terra, but once we were there, we extracted our blood price.’

‘And now we return.’

‘No!’ Typhus roars out the word, and the sound is like a blow. The cloud of flies bursts apart as if hit by a shockwave, swirls angrily, then rapidly coalesces again. ‘No. For some reason, for some reason, that wisdom is not heeded. We have the chance now. The road is clear. We could do what we did ten millennia ago and march with the new Warmaster to the Palace. The chance is there, hung before us, and our claws are across it.’

Suddenly, Dragan knows what this is about. ‘Ultramar,’ he ventures carefully.

‘Ultramar!’ Typhus roars. Now the Traveller is even more animated, stomping from side to side, gripping his scythe tightly, sending the clouds spilling and slewing around his every move. ‘Damned Ultramar. Too much was expended on that rabble of worlds before. Just when we have the chance to focus on the real prize, Ultramar rears up again. I despise it. I despise its master. I despise everything about it, and it is not important. Do you give a freshly-squeezed shit about Ultramar, Gallowsman?’

Dragan suddenly finds he is enjoying this. ‘The orders are there,’ he says.

‘And where do they come from? Why are they there?’ Slowly, Typhus controls his anger. His movements become less jerky, more stately. ‘It can’t be helped. I’ve spoken to the primarch. I’ll fight with him, just as ordered. I’ll be at his side. His faithful servant. But you know what this is about – his brother. I had thought that nonsense was all behind us. I had thought they were all dead, or lost. The child-kings were all gone. Speak to the Despoiler, then speak to a primarch, and tell me who you’d rather follow into battle.’

This is lethal talk. Or maybe madness. No one speaks of Mortarion in such a manner, certainly not within the Legion, and Dragan is strangely thrilled to hear it.

‘We will do these things,’ Typhus says, growing sullen. ‘We will break the Gate, and we will spill our poison across the living galaxy. And then we burn a path towards that pointless realm. None of this can be prevented. I am bound to the course now, both by oath and by fate. But you, Gallowsman. You.’

Dragan’s eyes narrow. This is more temptation than he had expected. ‘We, too, are bound.’

Typhus comes closer. The flies buzz and bump into Dragan. The aroma is like that of tombs – a tinge of sweetness over a musty hollowness. ‘I bent the laws of the universe to bring us to Terra, once. I sacrificed my soul and those of my brothers, all for that goal. I did not do it so I could see us waste our strength on some family feuding. You understand me?’

Dragan looks up at him. It is impossible to read the true intention on that ruined face. It is impossible to detect if Typhus is speaking seriously, or if this is just one more test. It is impossible to determine whether his own life is in mortal danger or whether the laws of the Legion still apply in this place.

So Dragan does not reply at once. He thinks of Solace and his fellow warriors. He thinks of Vorx, and Garstag, and Philemon. He thinks what would be required to alter a course already set and how he might effect it. He thinks on the Traveller’s words and remembers the injunction to fidelity.

You are my unbroken blades.

Then Dragan nods, curtly, as a soldier nods when accepting an order.

‘Perfectly,’ he says.

It takes weeks for the order to come in. Or perhaps days, or maybe months – it is always impossible to tell within the shifting temporal strata of the Eye. Across whatever period of time elapses, there are plenty more firefights, boarding actions, scuttling actions and withdrawals. Tension rises. The vast armies closeted tightly together within the thousands of holds teeter forever on the brink of explosion, as ready to turn on their own kind as the Imperials if not held on the tightest of leashes.

In the interim, pacts are reinforced, daemonic allies are summoned or placated, old treaties are reaffirmed on the bridges of a dozen capital ships. Eventually, word begins to spread from ship to ship that the Vengeful Spirit has been spied entering the void volume, its guns run out and its engines burning star-hot. Shutters are slammed down, engines are kindled and command stations hurriedly cleared. Warning klaxons bray out across the assembled formations, and prows swing heavily towards exit vectors.

The void is unquiet in that time. Great swirls of null-colour turn beneath the muster’s heart, flickering with bale-lightning along their flanks. The entire Eye begins to pulse, riven with aurorae and eerie flashes of discolouration. Every mind starts to race, every heart starts to beat faster. The decks tremble under the massed tramp of armoured boots, and standards are hoisted in readiness for the deployments to come. Across the Word Bearers’ ships, Dark Apostles begin their orations, the pulpits wreathed in black-tipped flame. On the World Eaters battle-barges, the fight pits run with fresh blood as legionaries work themselves up into their full pitch of frenzy.

As fractious as the muster has been, once the final order starts to flow down the intricate chains of uncertain command, all thought of internecine warfare is snuffed out. There are many stratagems used by the Despoiler to hold his disparate coalitions together, but the greatest incentive is, as it always has been, to show them the true enemy.

Thrusters boom up to full power, and in that deep well of space it seems as if a thousand new stars are born. Just then, just as the serried drivetrains boom into full-throated life, the flagship itself finally appears.

Thrusting clear of its Black Legion escorts, emerging from an overlapping sensor shadow and into clear sight, like all such harbingers of the distant past, the Vengeful Spirit has, if anything, grown in sheer malevolence since its first incarnation as the fiefdom of the Doomed Warmaster. The centuries spent in Eyespace have blackened it, lengthened its spars and warped its beams until it is cadaverous and rangy, a mass of ebon prows and barbed parapets. It glides like a shark of the lost oceans, supreme in its killing potential, unrivalled in that fleet or any other, a last, dark reminder of the genius of Crusade-era humanity.

Once it begins to move, all others fall in behind it. The entire massed fleet, one ship after the other, powers up to cruising speed. The escort-class ships spread out to the margins, leaving the leviathans to take up position at the centre. It takes many hours for the vanguard to process from the muster-sphere, and many more hours for those behind to fall in. Such is the concentration of the daemonic on those ships, bound by chains or spells, that the warp itself flexes and ripples, caught in sympathetic vortices across the scant protection of straining Geller fields. The skein of real space, already strained, buckles, throwing scatter patterns of distortion racing like tsunamis across a turbulent seascape.

Vox silence descends, and the cavalcade makes its way in eerie quietness out to the staging grounds, where the first squalls of the borderlands begin to roil and churn. Arcs of witchlight crackle and snap, fuelled by the tectonic clash of realities. All ship captains have braved those shoals before and know the dangers. Many ships will be lost on the crossing even if the gods smile on this endeavour, such is the caprice of the Eye’s edge.

The Vengeful Spirit does not slow. As the behemoth forges ahead, spectral lights, grey as ghosts, ripple into gauzy existence alongside it. In snatches, caught from the corner of an eye, it looks as if there might be more ships out there, riding the riptides with contemptuous ease. The ghosts force a path, their marker lights glowing like ships’ lanterns from the age of earth-bound sail. The void shudders, flexes, and begins to break. Rifts tear across it, exposing a lattice of strobing witchlight below. Some rifts explode into whirling vortices, spinning out of control. Others flicker into darkness the second they are born. Many more implode, dragging the fragile materium down into gaping abysses. The wells extend, burrowing like cancers into the foundations of the universe, and soon a thousand tunnels are bored between worlds. Storms grow, squalls lash, and one by one the battleships pass into the flickering jaws of the winding warp-ways.

This is the realm where the physical meets the metaphysical. This is the place where madness crashes up against a static kind of sanity, where the laws of physics are sucked away and dribble into their weakened twilight state. Every ship creaks and clangs. Every shield generator flares and crackles. Geller fields scream, and the background howl of ravening Neverborn becomes ear-splitting.

Solace thunders along with the rest of them, caught up in a barrelling momentum now and unable to stop. There are other ships on all sides, hemming themselves in, locking the Death Guard contingent into a procession of steadily increasing speed. Chronometers, all of them with mouldering faces and rusting hands, spin around in a frenzy, clattering and clicking as the numbers rack up crazily.

The ship skids, as if it has thumped into something solid. Old powerlines blow, and the lumens sway on their supports, making the shadows leap and tremble. For a moment it seems as if the engines will overload entirely, wracked by faltering intakes and buffeted by the hammering gale of the immaterium. A whine breaks out, gets louder, then louder again until it is almost unbearable. The Unbroken stand at their stations, enduring it, while servitors and Unchanged crew succumb to the dreadful pressure, clamping hands over their bloody ears. Armourglass shatters, decks crack, bracings crumple.

Then, after what could have been hours, or days, or even longer, the pressure suddenly splinters into nothing. The riot of colour, the spectrum of the Eye’s unquiet heart, is shredded away and replaced with a tapestry of pure black, speckled with the light of real stars. The howls die away, the clangs echo into oblivion. Ships shoot out into the materium, their prows glowing as if fresh from the foundry’s fires, their engines cycling wildly.

It takes a moment for the Navigators to truly realise what they have done. Inter-ship reports begin to crackle into vox-stations, a guttural mix of a thousand Eye-born tongues and hailing standards. Some report losses, or catastrophes, or sightings of incredible creatures lost far in the hidden depths, but the fleet is intact, still immense beyond comprehension, and more ships are bursting into instantiation every second. The Vengeful Spirit is powering ahead, carving through the void with its coterie of killers in tow. Solace, like all the rest, follows suit, now turning its attention to its gunnery crews and drop-pod hangars.

For the focus of their endeavours can now be seen, blearily, on the extreme forward augurs. Across a million picter screens, it glimmers in soft focus, fractured by distance. On either flank, the virulent stains of Eyespace still linger, but the ships are travelling down the clear channel now, racing across space that offers them no impediment.

And before them, isolated and embattled, a single point of light amid a galaxy of darkness, stands the object of their fury.

Cadia stands. For now.

V: THE WEEPING VEIL

CHAPTER TEN

Dantine returns to Najan. He does not understand where these orders come from, nor why he is incapable of resisting them, but he does so anyway, mutely, weakly.

He is sick. He lifts his hands and sees the pocks and the weals on them. His skin has become sallow, even more so than it was when he worked on the surface. There is a growth on his stomach, hard as a stone. He can push it around under the skin.

And then there’s the wound on his chest. A while back, he dared to lift his filthy jerkin and undershirt and look at it. The flesh was angry, stitched closed with thick, inexpert sutures. A little pus leaked from it. It looked like the kind of infection a Guardsman would die from, were it left untreated. The least-experienced trooper under his old command could have performed more capable battlefield surgery.

He has not looked at it since. He can leave his undershirt in place now, since he does not wash – there are no facilities on the ship, and in any case, he has lost the desire to. He no longer pays attention to his hair, which is running with biting lice. He lets his nails grow.

For his entire life, Dantine’s personal habits have been fastidious. His regiments were always well run, with regular hygiene drills and dorm unit inspections. There were times when this seemed almost obsessive, as if the Departmento’s rules had become a part of the state religion that governed every other part of life. Those rules were a protection, though. Disease was always a big killer in the Astra Militarum, and efforts to stave it off were unrelenting for a reason.

Now he does not care. Mostly, this lassitude appals him. He cannot understand why he no longer cares. But, deep down, buried where his old heart once beat, there is something else. Something infinitely shameful, so that he does not think of it often and pretends that it is just another part of his sickness, but it is there all the same – relief.

He no longer has to make the effort, and that is a pleasure in itself. It is like falling asleep, or sinking into a warm pool of water. He lets it all slide, all degrade. He can feel his muscles atrophy and does not intervene. He can feel his bowels swell with inflammation, and it matters not. This is a kind of release. This is like a fist, clenched for a lifetime, slowly relaxing.

But he resists it when he can. He continues to remember himself. He looks around, at the grimy walls and the filthy decks, and feels like screaming again. They let him walk throughout the ship unhindered, knowing that he will not try to escape. He does not go far. The noises from the levels below continue to fill him with dread, and he encounters enough on his own deck to make him gag.

The smell is just as it was on Najan once the monsters broke into the compound, only intensified. The ship is stained hard with it, from every rivet and bulkhead to every lumen and plate bolt. The air is over-sweet, the corridors are dark and hemmed in. At times he imagines he has been swallowed by this place and is being slowly digested. At times he feels as if the ship is a stomach, moist with juices and ripe to contract around him. At times he feels as if the ship is alive.

But then they tell him to go to Najan again. Numbly, he traces the route towards the shuttle bays. He knows the way well enough, although no one has ever explained it to him and he has never stumbled across the hangars before. He passes other menials on the way and avoids eye contact. This is easy with many of them – their eyes are long gone – but he is aware that others stare at him. Perhaps he looks like an enemy. Or maybe they stare at everything, their minds turned to porridge by the stink and the dark and the noise.

He is greeted at the open door of the shuttle by a human pilot. She is fat and slovenly, her face hidden behind a rusty metal plate, and her hands replaced with input jacks. She says nothing, but clambers into the cockpit. Tendrils extend from the front panels and she grunts as they slot in. Dantine hauls himself into the crew section. He looks at the restraint harnesses hanging from the roof like sides of meat. He should put them on. He doesn’t. What’s the point? What’s the point of anything?

It takes a long time to get drop clearance. Dantine listens to the muffled vox-traffic. To him it sounds like snarls and growls. He closes his eyes. Eventually, the deck rattles and the engines cough into intermittent life.

The transfer to the surface is bumpy and slow. He looks out of the viewports until they are doused in re-entry flame. After that they give him a view of Najan’s desolate surface. The world is brown-grey, almost featureless. He can see orderly swirls of cloud passing below, the product of the operative weather system. It looks just as it did when he first arrived, a long time ago. That memory makes him feel instantly nauseous, so he closes it down. He sits back, his fingers gripping the vibrating bench, and grits his teeth. He tries to remember the words to the old drill manuals and finds that he can’t. He tries again.

The shuttle hits the ground with a thud. When the doors open, dusty wind shrieks inside, making him blink and spit. Dantine stumbles out and down the ramp, wiping at his eyes.

There are menials everywhere. They are all terribly ill, with bloody bandages around their foreheads and sore-crusted hands clutching at rags. He does not recognise any faces, and so assumes that these are crew brought down from the monsters’ ship. He sees some of the old duty servitors in the distance, limping on too many legs or dragging a half-body along with too many arms.

Najan is beginning to smell bad. It is beginning to fester. The wind is no longer dry, but feels like a canine’s breath washing over the fields. The colours, such as they were, have all gone. Dantine’s vision is a mess of greys now, a bank of fog that he peers through. Has the world changed? Or has he changed?

He walks towards his old barracks. The gates are still broken, and the walls are crumbling and charred. In the grey light of day, the damage looks even worse than before. They demolished the entire place, just a handful of them.

The Unbroken have congregated in the old parade ground and now stand like monoliths amid the wreckage. Their leader – the one called Vorx, who seems to have taken Dantine under his wing – is there, as are the others. Dantine knows their names now: Slert, the one with eyes under his skin; Kledo, the one whose soul has withered; Garstag, the slayer; Philemon, the corpse-counter. Dragan, the warrior, hangs back on the edges, and he is the most dangerous of them all.

None of them acknowledges him, not even Vorx. Dantine takes his place with the other menials and slaves, standing in the hot dust, summoned, he assumes, to listen only.

Garstag, who still has layers of blood on his gauntlets, is speaking.

‘It’s a big world,’ he says. The speech is the guttural, halting Mourtaig. Dantine has given up marvelling at how he understands all of these things. ‘We could use it.’

Slert laughs. ‘It’s a dustbowl. There’s nothing for us here.’

‘It could feed us for as long as we wanted,’ says Garstag. ‘We could rebuild here.’

‘For what?’ asks Kledo.

‘He likes the earth under his feet,’ says Philemon.

Dantine watches them intently. His pervasive sense of horror is, inevitably, fading. You can’t stay terrified forever, and in its place come other things – contempt, anger, even fascination.

‘Tell us where we are,’ says Kledo. The Surgeon’s voice is soft, a dry whisper.

Philemon draws out parchment from bags and satchels slung across his armour. The Tallyman is possibly the strangest of the lot, burdened with lengths of mouldering vellum and long lists of scrawled names. His movements are hesitant, almost bumbling, though presumably he is as lethal as the rest of them when he needs to be.

‘My charts are old,’ Philemon says. ‘They will be inaccurate. But we are deep into Imperial territory. We have a number of choices. One. We bring Gifts to this world and make it our own. Two. We strike out on our original course, making for Ultramar. Three. We do… something else.’

Dragan paces at the rear. His energy is in contrast with the rest of them, who are virtually static. ‘What are we thinking in this?’ he grunts. ‘Drifting aimlessly?’

‘We never had the luxury before,’ says Slert. ‘Choice, choice, choice. Too much of it will kill you.’

The Putrifier has something crawling up his leg. Dantine knows that these things are called Little Lords, and he is still mystified as to what their purpose is, or why they are tolerated. They are disgusting sacs, ranging in size from a fist’s clench to a full lung. They strut and caper like foul infants, letting loose gouts of flatus or breaking into vicious little fights. And yet Slert reaches down for it now, picking it up gently. It settles into the crook of his arm, gurgling contentedly.

‘Or we forget all this,’ offers Kledo. ‘The Despoiler’s fleets must still be closer to us than the primarch’s.’

There is division between them. Dantine finds himself compelled by it, drawn into it. The air seems to darken around them, to grow colder, and for a moment he imagines just what it would be like if these monsters took it upon themselves to fight one another.

Vorx raises his hand.

‘You would be bored quickly by this world, Garstag,’ he says. The siegemaster’s voice is the oldest, the deepest, the most avuncular and the most reasonable. ‘Solace is stuffed with supplies – we will not need more for months.’

The others are listening. Some more than others.

‘This is not the Imperium we are used to,’ Vorx goes on. ‘The Beacon is extinguished. Its defenders are scattered. Perhaps there is still fighting at Cadia, perhaps not. We are used to being hunted, out here. We will have to become used to being hunters.’

Dragan snarls. ‘We have always been–’

‘I know, brother,’ says Vorx. ‘Listen to me. Sabatine is the target.’

He lets that sink in. Dantine feels hollow inside. He tries to remember where it is, how far off it is, whether there is any way a warning could be given. In the past, he might have considered a world like Sabatine to be impregnable, but that was before he met these creatures.

Philemon is looking at his master. ‘I know the name. I know what is on Sabatine.’

Garstag is suddenly animated. ‘Is it within range?’

‘A fortress-monastery,’ murmurs Slert. ‘It would be a worthy way to end your life, siegemaster, but–’

‘Look around you,’ Vorx says. ‘Where are they? A year ago, they would have been on our tails. We would have been fighting for our lives, ready to hurl Solace back into the warp. If they live yet, they are weak. The moment may not last. We must seize it.’

Najan’s winds moan around them, kicking up their familiar haze of husks and dust.

‘To end a Chapter,’ says Slert.

‘There were a lot of Chapters at Cadia,’ says Kledo. ‘Maybe they didn’t come back.’

‘Possible,’ says Garstag, his words sliding out carefully, as if he is chewing on them. ‘But still, a fortress-monastery. Nothing easy about it.’

‘It would be a world to remake, Kardainn-master,’ Vorx says. ‘You would have true foundations there.’ He turns to Dragan. ‘What say you, Gallowsman?’

And then, Dantine understands what this is about. It is as if he sees the scene through Vorx’s eyes. The siegemaster has his heart still, dripping in that foul bag, and thus they are linked by the sorcery that prevents him from expiring as he should.

Vorx is daring Dragan to refuse. He is showing him a prestige target, a target worthy of any warband in the galaxy, and daring him to prefer the Despoiler’s road. And he does this knowing it will take them further into the galaxy’s heart, a little closer to the destination he truly covets.

Politics never alters. The outer visage may vary, from austere patrician to worm-eaten sadist, but the core concern remains the same. This is about power.

Dragan knows it too. All eyes turn to him. For a moment Dantine detects uncertainty, just for a heartbeat.

‘They could be down to a tithe of their strength,’ Dragan says. ‘It would still be hard, on their own ground.’

‘Yes,’ says Vorx. ‘Very difficult.’

That is the challenge. That is the accusation of cowardice, just there, wrapped up in that slow, equable tone of voice. Dantine almost smiles.

Dragan’s head drops, just a little. ‘I must lead the assault,’ he demands, trying to claw something back.

‘That is your function,’ Vorx says – condescension swaddled in concession.

‘The ways of the warp are occluded,’ interjects Philemon, sounding uneasy. ‘We are in darkness. To find this place will be–’

‘Another challenge,’ Vorx says. ‘But nothing is random in this universe, as you know, Tallyman. We were brought here. And thus we have a guide.’

They turn to Dantine without further prompting. Six pairs of green lenses, some angled, some round as navels, swivelling to focus on him. The effect is like a punch, and he stumbles back half a step.

‘You will take us to your old home world, won’t you, Captain Dantine?’ Vorx asks.

There is only one answer to the question. He no longer has a will of his own. He no longer has a life of his own. He is a puppet now, a shadow within a world of ghouls and mists. It matters not that he cannot read the warp, nor that he cannot pilot a starship. His soul clings to his body despite its mortal death, tracing a slender path across the dark firmaments of both space and time. They can use that.

So he bows, like a slave bows.

‘Yes, lord,’ Dantine says, breaking just a little more inside.

They leave Najan with barely a backwards glance. The lifters boom off the fields, exploding the dry earth beneath their columns of fire. Unchanged crew members are herded back into shuttles and leashed to hooks before the doors are slammed closed on them.

The servitors watch them go, those altered by Kledo and the thousands more who never stopped working the fields. They lift their withered faces to the skies and see the pale lines of smoke arcing away. Then they return to their work – to hauling, planting, furrowing. They do not notice that the crops are dying now. They shamble through the rows of corn, their eyes as dead as the soil underfoot, following prescribed patterns hardwired into their atrophied brainstems.

Almost nothing is left behind but destruction and a slow grind of contagion that will spread and spread until the entire world is turned to silage. The only thing Vorx has placed on the surface is a wooden plaque, nailed to a wooden pole. It reads, in standard Imperial Gothic, Careless.

The various landers return to Solace. They slip under the rotting eaves of the great ship, angling past trailing lines of solidified effluent. Solace excretes continually, a sludge of faecal brown that stains every orbit it has ever been in. Its many daughter craft know how to evade this and dock without being inundated, though Najan’s orbital zone is now tainted with the long arcs of spore mats.

An air of expectance gradually permeates through the lower levels. Forges that have been out of action since the engagement are kindled again, and their cauldrons bubble into life. Hundreds of Unbroken are garrisoned on the ship, and few were given leave to make planetfall. They are simmering now, surly and impatient for killing.

The main engines ignite. Turgid promethium slops down the pipes. Solace wheels on its centre, then grinds out of orbit, pushing powerfully into the cold. The plasma trains wheeze towards full power, and soon the ship is surging through the void, picking up speed. The Mandeville points are still hours away, but Tjafa’s pod-locked Navigators are roused by brain-spike and dragged, half-conscious, to the amniotic vats.

Philemon returns to his sanctum. He has lists of bodies to collate and maps to consult. There were no fresh plagues discovered on Najan, so his tasks are light. As he descends, the weak light bleeds away to soft darkness.

He almost misses the figure waiting for him at the base of the stairwell, standing entirely motionless, a clot of perfect black amid imperfect gloom. He reaches for his long knife.

‘Work to do, Tallyman?’ Slert asks, edging into a faint lumen echo.

‘As always, Putrifier.’

Slert is smiling under his threadbare cowl. His empty eye sockets gape. ‘And you are a most faithful labourer.’

Philemon keeps his hand on his weapon. ‘You creep around too much. This is not a safe ship.’

‘No, not at all.’ Slert walks towards the entrance to the sanctum, halting before the locked doorway. ‘Some parts more than others.’

‘What do you want?’

‘You spoke to Vorx.’ Slert turns to face Philemon. ‘He asked you to divine what happened after Agripinaa. Any results yet?’

‘Vorx does not know what he wants.’

‘He wants certainty.’

‘He’ll be waiting a long time for that.’

Slert laughs. ‘I fear for him, brother,’ he says. ‘You know him. He’s been a good enough master. He is devout. The alternatives for us would be… tougher.’

‘When the augurs align, when I know the truth, I will speak to him. Him alone.’

Slert looks at the locked door. ‘What do you keep in there, anyway?’

‘You can’t see through my walls?’

‘If I could, I wouldn’t ask.’

Philemon draws closer, edging the blade an inch from its scabbard. ‘You’re right,’ he says, his voice cold. ‘I have work to do.’

Slert does not move, not immediately. ‘I speak to the fighters. I listen to what they tell me. Vorx needs to give them red meat soon. Something for them to turn sour and chew on. Ask them who they’d prefer to follow, him or–’

‘I don’t want to hear it.’

Slert smiles and looks down. ‘If you say so. But we’re allies. Truly. I don’t want to see change, not yet.’

‘Your loyalty commends you.’

‘Who moved the ship, Tallyman?’

Philemon pushes the blade back into his guard. Then he shoves Slert aside and unlocks the door.

‘We’re on course again,’ he says. ‘Be thankful for that.’

Then he’s through, and the door thuds closed.

Slert remains where he is for a while, musing. Then he turns, silently, and stalks off into the dark.

Vorx remains on the bridge for much of the period of transit. He oversees the ship being taken into the warp. He listens to its structure as the immaterium gnaws at it. He listens to the complaints of the bound daemons, who fear their void-loose cousins more than any mortal does. He listens to the cracks, the booms, the heartbeats of distress.

The cadre of Navigators dies quickly. They were always weak, their mutant bodies riddled with the consumptive maladies of the warp-struck, but in the service of the Unbroken they collapse with often perplexing speed. Their Seeing Eyes go blind, their blood turns to molten lead. One of the greatest impediments on a realspace raid is this weak link. Imperial Navigators live short lives too, but they at least have the heritage of the Houses behind them and captains who appreciate their services. The scions of the Eye must make do with scavenged scraps, the mind-weak, the heart-sick.

Now it is worse than ever. It has been said many times since Agripinaa, but Vorx thinks on it, over and over.

The galaxy is cracked. Abaddon has destroyed it. Now we reave its bleeding corpse. We are the blowflies on its wounds. We will conquer nothing, only watch our quarry expire as we reach out to grasp it.

When he thinks these things, his mouth moves silently. One, two, three, his lips say.

He uses Philemon’s arts to guide them when Tjafa fails. He speaks to the Little Lords, who whisper truths into his ear. He presses his helm’s earpiece up against the inner curve of the hull and listens for the cackle of Neverborn riding the hot currents outside.

Thus they make progress. Vorx sees Dantine’s life thread stretch away into virtual space, glittering like a line of silk. For as long as he keeps the mortal’s beating heart close to his own rotting innards, this skein is apparent to him, just as other skeins are apparent from other humans he has soul-harvested. Vorx is old, and the universe is full of such wondrous things, if one knows how to uncover them. Even as his real senses decay and fall out of use, his Gifts make up the lost ground. He does not see in colour anymore, but he detects psychic harmonics as an augur detects background radiation. He does not experience the passage of time in a purely linear fashion any longer, but he feels its wrinkles and its missteps.

He does not ask Dantine what took him from Sabatine to Najan, even though he could find out if he wished to. He allows the man to keep fragments of himself locked away, at least for now. One day, in time, Captain Dantine will tell Vorx all, and willingly.

Four, five, six.

Progress is made. Solace crawls through the void like every Death Guard vessel has ever done – slowly, deliberately, ploughing a blunt furrow. They drop in and out of the warp as the travails of the Navigators and the chitterings of daemons dictate. There is no fixed point anymore. There is only an echoing chasm, running away down to infinity’s base, colourless, lightless, seething with malice. In such a dream place, the servants of the god, and those of the other real gods, have the advantage. They have arts denied to the enemy by superstition. They can swim in this, glide in it, wash themselves in it. For the others, for those who warm their freezing hands by the afterglow of the Throne’s failing warmth, it must be horror beyond all horror.

Vorx sees things on that journey. He sees dead worlds turning in the dark, their seas turned to iron slag. He sees empty ships drifting, no lights, no heat signature, just tombs now, tumbling over and over. He sees the flicker of intelligences dance across the open void, something that was always forbidden by the Law of Reality.

Seven, eight, nine.

Most of all, the void is empty. The Imperium is empty. It has been scoured, harrowed. This is damage on a galactic scale. The pillars of creation are riven, and soon the foundations will crumble. There is no coming back from this. All has changed.

Ten.

He looks up. Hovik is shuffling over to a picter lens, her spine curving more than ever. Her forehead is nearly pressed into the deck below as she hunches. Drez-Uil is trying to divine something, his lips flecked with red spittle. The sensor relays are flickering, picking something up. It might be another empty hulk, from the early signs, but Vorx already knows it will not be.

He stirs and gets up from the throne. As he extends his rotten muscles, threads of unwoven ceramite stick to the seat and armrests, stretching thin. They break as he moves away and curl around his feet like lizards’ tails.

‘Weapons,’ he murmurs.

It is the first time he has spoken for many days. The crew respond, hauling on chains, yanking levers, skating bone-nodes across tallyboards. Kodad’s face appears floating in mid-air, shimmering from the effects of lith-throw and rippling like a sheet of thin plastek.

‘Howitzers priming, lord,’ he reports.

‘Is the Gallowsman with you?’ Vorx asks absently.

‘Lord?’

‘Never mind. All power to ranged guns.’

Solace is already responding. Only some of its functions require crew. All across the outer hull, skin-plates are rupturing, pushed apart by the maws of splinter-guns. Torpedoes slip out from their gravid tubes, shiny from afterbirth, and are dragged into the orifices of launchers. Void shields, blurry as clouds of midges, shrivel across the ship’s physical limits and snap down hard. Slave crews ratchet the long howitzer snouts out, extending thick barrels through yawning gunwales.

‘Magnify,’ says Vorx, coming to stand before a great circular lens. The glass is thick, syrupy, cracked and faded. From within its depths, stars swim and pan. Then something is detected, and machine-spirits greedily lock on. A mouthless station keeper, her ears trailing weak dribbles of slime, looks up from her console to stare at it.

The ship is red, tinged with black. It is spiked like an urchin, and its raised back is crowned with towers. Its thrusters are fully lit, and they glow an angry crimson. It is like a blood clot, spun out of an artery and thrown into the night to pulse and leak. Its guns are out too, row upon row, glinting brassily. Torches have been lit along its flanks. Naked flames writhe amid the vacuum, giving off no heat or smoke, twisting like bound souls.

Vorx studies it. A name comes to his mind, suggested by the form and his diligent researches.

‘Ayamandar,’ he says, softly. ‘Our cousins, the Word Bearers.’

The ship is turning flankwards, lining up broadside. It is a Styx-class heavy cruiser, a capable enemy. Solace might well be bigger, probably older, but the corruption of the Eye makes the old void-displacement and weapons-capability ratings more or less redundant. On such ships, the difference between death and survival really depends upon who’s on board.

Unbroken warriors are arriving on the bridge now, stomping up from the corridors below. All are armed, all are ready. Their desire for combat is like a stink, a musk, a stale odour born of too-long quarantine.

‘Firing solutions calculated,’ reports Kodad from his distant cubbyhole, down in the oily, hellish murk of the galleries.

The same procedures are being enacted on the other ship, Vorx knows.

It would be a close-run thing. Both ships might be destroyed by a committed exchange. That would be a waste, given what little is known about anything anymore.

‘Wait,’ Vorx says, letting his claw-fist unclench. ‘Wait.’

He can sense the movement all across the ship. The entire hold is astir. Unchanged crew are reaching for whatever weapons they have. The wounds caused by the Iron Shades are still scabbed over, but Solace is ready to bleed again.

Dragan’s voice crackles over the comm. ‘Boarding tubes ready,’ he rasps.

He is so eager. Always so eager.

‘Wait.’

Then the voice comes, ringing over the internal relays. It is bronze-hard, the kind of voice used for chastisement and inspiration. It is cruel, though not without purpose. Cruelty is a creed for them, just as indulgence is a creed for the Lords of Silence. It performs functions, it greases wheels, it summons the gods out from their sullen dens and yanks them into actuation.

‘What ship is this?’ says the voice. ‘What banner and what purpose? We are ready to fire.’

Vorx detects another comm-burst, urgent and angry, from Dragan. He shuts it down.

‘Solace, of the Fourteenth Legion, the Death Guard,’ he says. ‘No banner but our own, no cause but that of the faith. Come, now. There’s no cause for firing. We should talk.’

There is a long pause. The two ships drift closer, still a long way from unaugmented visual range but increasingly close to the outer limits of weapons fire.

Vorx watches it come in. It feels like he is reeling it, a fish on a line, its spines wriggling. He enjoys the image.

‘On this ship,’ says the voice.

‘Very well.’

‘Siegemaster…’ Dragan voxes.

‘We are not savages,’ Vorx voxes back, keeping the exchange private. ‘This is our galaxy now. We must start behaving like we own it.’

‘They will kill you.’

‘They will not. In any case, I will have protection.’

‘You will take–’

‘My most trusted servant,’ Vorx says, and closes the link.

For all that, his sluggish hearts are thudding a little harder. He looks at the red ship and sees the pain etched on its every pinnacle. Ayamandar has traced agony onto the void, pressed deep like a long blade’s pull across skin.

One, two, three, his lips say.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The two ships come to a full stop and hang in empty space. As they circle slowly, nudged by the last vestiges of momentum, lights pop and spark in the emptiness around them. These are the lights of Neverborn instantiating briefly, like unstable elements created in a laboratorium’s accelerator. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of them before they gutter out again – a mouth, an eye, the curve of a rib.

This is the state of the void now. Dragan does not know if it is the case everywhere, or just in this region. It is both unsettling and intriguing.

The delegation takes a shuttle – a big, cumbersome old hulk with a top-mounted lascannon. It has the name of an old Imperial world, Chattackta, still just about visible on its flanks. They might have chosen to accept the Word Bearers’ offer of a teleport locus, but even Vorx cannot quite bring himself to yield to the warp-meddling of Lorgar’s priest-sorcerers. A ship will do. Then, if the worst should happen, at least they have their own engines and their own guns.

Dragan is combat ready, his body drenched in a hot flush of hyperadrenaline. His power fist rests on his knees, the blades sheathed but poised.

Garstag sits opposite, next to Vorx. Six of the Kardainn make up the rest of the complement. They are all in their bloated and swollen Terminator plate, true giants of slaughter. Dragan wonders if he too will one day don such armour, or whether he will always value the relative mobility of his current protection, the kind he has worn since before the turn. To wear the Kardainn’s colours is to make an irrevocable choice. You do not step back from it again, for that armour will swallow you, mould you, and then consume you. Dragan cannot deny the raw power of it – he has seen Garstag absorb punishment that should have levelled a Dreadnought – but there is always a price.

The older Dragan gets, the more he matures and steeps in the brine of killing, the more he understands that everything is transactional. The gods, the daemons, the magisters of the Imperium, even the empty husk on the Throne, they are all barterers and hucksters, trading a little of this for a soul-full of that. You wish for power? Give me your memories. You wish for strength? I will take your tears.

Vorx would not recognise that picture. The siegemaster thinks of things in older terms, more fundamental verities, and has a pious mind. For all the many pettier disagreements between Dragan and him, that perhaps is the greatest divide.

Dragan turns away to look at the approaching ship. He admires its projected malevolence. Solace, from a distance, looks like a festering liver. This vessel looks like a flayed spinal cord, twitching and vivid. The shuttle glides in across a cityscape of chapels and bone-towers, and he sees iconography hammered onto every surface. The octed is ubiquitous, beaten into iron and nailed to steel. It crowns cupolas and campaniles, it furnishes the mouths of the ship’s macrocannons, it gazes out across long trenches filled with snaking energy arcs.

He can hear chanting. That is impossible, of course, for the shuttle is still within the void, but he can hear it all the same, a drone that echoes from tower to tower. Overlapping choirs are knocking out a dirge that he guesses has been going on for as long as the ship has been occupied. It is a grim, joyless sound. It is a product of rote and discipline, and it is not enjoyable to hear. Then again, at least those wretches have vocal cords. That is not always true of the Unchanged on Solace.

The shuttle docks high up on the prow-facing flank of the largest tower, which juts from the ship’s upper hull amid groves of curved brass and barbed silver. The ornamentation is extravagant – a cavalcade of pillars and gold-filigree screens, crowned with engraved daemon faces and crouching gargoyles. When the doors open, a thick haze of incense sighs over them. The aroma is oppressive, a saccharine cocktail over basenotes of bodily frenzy.

They are taken from the hangars by red-armoured escorts who do not speak. The interior of the ship is lit by flame, the corridor plates black and glistening. Dragan sees altars everywhere, stained and streaked with old blood. He hears cries from below that echo up long shafts, competing with the omnipresent chanting to make the auditory environment as intimidating as possible. In glimpses, as the delegation passes high windows, he sees long naves stretch off into the darkness, all housing crowds of shuffling, robed supplicants. It is as crowded on this ship as it is sparse on Solace. The Word Bearers have always valued fecundity.

They reach their destination – an octagonal chamber with high gothic arches, black-beamed and drenched in cold blue shadow. Candles flicker in narrow alcoves, piled with melted wax like milky tumours. A battle-standard hangs above them, burned at the edges but with its imagery and legend still just about visible – XVII Legion, the Imperial Heralds. That is a strange relic, one celebrating a name that most of Lorgar’s sons have long since learned to despise. Higher up, where the air becomes hazier due to the burning censers, many bodies hang. One of them is dripping still, a faint pit-pat that bounces on the stone floor.

Their hosts are waiting – twenty of them, all in full battleplate of dark crimson and black. Their armour is as ornate as the ship’s, riddled and crusted with complex sigils of allegiance and fidelity. Every one of those warriors has an intricate relationship to the warp-bound, a lattice of entreaties and bargains made with the intelligences, all written out in threads of spun gold and deftly woven down into the ceramite ground. One of them burns with the daemon mark, his outline blurred and jumpy. Another has a leather-like mask stretched tight across his faceplate. Dragan thinks it probably isn’t leather.

The foremost of the group has a helm crowned with splayed vanes and a long, ragged cloak. His faceplate is burnished gold and fashioned in the style of a gaunt death’s head. He carries a crozius at his belt, a heavy item that pulls tight on its chains. Like all members of the old Legions, he is gigantic now, his already-outsize frame burgeoned and extended by the noxious stimulation of a life lived in hell. Every so often, a thin gauze of dark flame gusts and ghosts across the marked faces of his armour, as if he teeters on the knife-edge between the seen and the unseen.

‘Mor Jalchek,’ he says, in that same cruel voice. ‘Apostle of the Weeping Veil.’

Vorx bows. Set next to such tarnished finery, the siegemaster looks slumped and dirty. ‘Vorx,’ he says simply. ‘The Lords of Silence.’

‘We give ourselves these names,’ Mor Jalchek says.

‘Or they are given to us.’

‘What are you doing here?’

Vorx thinks on a response. Dragan knows that the siegemaster will be smiling wryly under that heavy helm-face, inasmuch as his lips still have independent function. He hates that. This is not a place for smiling. These are serious warriors, steeped in the blood of the Imperium, and they must be made respectful.

‘We do not ask for leave to travel the void,’ Vorx says in the end.

‘You were at Agripinaa,’ Mor Jalchek says.

‘As were you, I think. It seems the fates have driven us to the same place.’

‘We were driven here by no one. There is prey in the void now.’

‘Not very much of it,’ Vorx says. ‘The Angels of Death are all gone.’

‘Oh, no.’ Mor Jalchek’s lenses flicker briefly with a reddish, deep-set tinge. ‘You seem ignorant, cousin, so let me enlighten you. The fleets we fought over Cadia are not yet destroyed. They have been driven far from the Gate’s edge, but they fight still. Chapters are answering the call, racing to staunch the wound before it splits apart completely. But they are blind now. Their Throne-leash has been cut, and they stumble in the darkness. We pity them. We come to bring them to the light.’

Garstag, standing on the far side of Vorx, lets slip a guttural snort.

‘You find this amusing?’ Mor Jalchek asks calmly. The cruelty in his voice never wanes. ‘This is a moment of crisis. It will not come again. We reap now, here, so that we will not need to do so a second time.’

‘You are a speaker of the truth, Mor Jalchek,’ Vorx says. ‘I have met many of your kind, and they were all truthful. In that, we have some sympathy, if in little else.’ His fingers stray, briefly, to the many bags clustered at his belt. ‘We were lost, for a time. The warp’s winds were not kind. Now we travel in these strange places, and our trail takes us to the masters of the kingdom.’

Mor Jalchek nods. ‘What remains of them.’

‘You hunt them yourself?’

‘Our sacred task.’

Mor Jalchek gestures – a brief flick of a taloned finger – and one of the wall panels hisses open. The thick metal lifts, bifurcates, then slides apart on a squeal of runners. Steam spills over the threshold, and wisps of engine smoke perspire from runnels on the far side.

A void is revealed, lost in shadow and smog. Something is hanging in the murk, shivering a little. It is hard to make out what, exactly, for grave damage has been done to it by expert hands. There are tubes wrapping it now, all gurgling with fluids. There are hooks, and barbs, and serrated saws.

It glistens. It weeps.

Only one item is distinct, lodged amid the disturbing flotsam like a gem cast amid filth – the half-moon remnant of a pauldron. Vorx is a connoisseur of such things and recognises Mark VI Corvus plate, carefully tended, evidently old, now chipped and dented but with the insignia still visible amid the bloodstains – a royal blue eagle’s head on an ivory ground.

‘This one failed to see the light,’ Mor Jalchek says, with possibly genuine sadness.

‘Evidently.’

‘Even reduced, they do not talk easily. However many we take, we have still found it difficult to find the path.’

‘We could help you with that.’

Mor Jalchek turns to Vorx, interested for the first time. ‘How so?’

‘This path, out of them all, is clear to us. Come to Solace, and you will see it. We are both close now, though not so close that you would be bound to find it without assistance.’

Dragan almost interjects. This is not a transaction, he thinks. This is not a bargain. This is just giving away possessions.

‘Why?’ Mor Jalchek says.

‘Think of the numbers,’ says Vorx. ‘Think of what you attempt. These are not fragile troops. They man their own walls. They have nowhere else to go. Even with these two great ships of ours, it might be difficult. With one, either one, perhaps impossible.’

There is a principle here, one that goes back to the days of Horus. Imperial institutions are, admittedly, like cats in a sack, mauling one another over resources and prestige, though they will fight alongside one another well enough when the tactical necessity becomes apparent. For those on the other side of the Long War, however, things are less clear-cut. They have been known to claw at rivals even as the greater enemy looms up behind them. Hatreds vary in intensity, and those shared between rival gods can become incandescent. It was the greatest mark of the Despoiler’s power that he was able to bind them all together for so long, and he is a long way away now.

So they wait. They watch.

‘The world has been marked for conquest,’ says Mor Jalchek. ‘The pantheon demands it.’

‘Well, I am sure my own small part of the pantheon would agree,’ says Vorx. ‘I do not think we are at odds here.’

They wait again.

‘What is your greater purpose?’ asks Mor Jalchek.

‘The same as yours. To bring lost souls to the light.’

‘To your limited, decayed creed.’

‘Now, then. No need for insults.’

Mor Jalchek radiates an aura of extremity. His armour is a thing of excess. His ship is a cathedral to pain. For him, compromise is a sin, and alliance the first step to moral turpitude. Dragan watches to see which instinct will win out within him – the desire for his enemy’s destruction or the pride in solo accomplishment that surely drives him. Perhaps he has promised this world, Sabatine, to some power of the empyrean. Perhaps he will sacrifice its inhabitants to bring some greater force into the world of the senses. Vorx must know this. He must know what a dangerous game is being played.

‘I will consult,’ Mor Jalchek says at length. ‘I will contact you. In the meantime, stay on your ship.’

‘Where else would we go?’ says Vorx, sounding amused.

‘Nowhere. Not without speaking to me.’

The tone of presumption borders on the absurd. Garstag hisses, moving his weapon a finger’s width closer to deployment.

Vorx is unmoved, though. He chuckles – chuckles – a soft, gurgling sounds that resonates within the caverns of his armour. Somehow, that sound diffuses things. It makes it impossible to take all this pomposity seriously, and that, Dragan has to admit, has a certain tactical value.

‘Very well, Apostle of the Weeping Veil,’ Vorx says, amusement still dancing across his stolid words. ‘Think on it. Consult whatever augurs you employ. I trust you are wise enough to see what the gods have placed before us, and will know what to do with it.’

The tone is so affable. So emollient. It makes Dragan want to snarl, and he clamps the instinct down.

‘So we take our leave now,’ Vorx says, offering a stiff half-bow. ‘But I am sure, very sure, that we will speak again soon.’

‘They will betray us,’ says Dragan.

‘Yes,’ says Vorx.

‘They have been commanded to take the world,’ says Dragan. ‘They will not stop until it is theirs.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then why are we doing this?’

Back in the shuttle’s crew bay, Vorx regards Dragan. Despite everything, he still likes the warrior. He remembers when he first saw him fight. He remembers the boundless energy, spun tight around limbs that seemed capable of pile-driving through rockcrete. He knows almost as much about Dragan’s early years in the Death Guard as Dragan does. He knows even more than Dragan of his past life as a servant of the Throne.

For a long time Vorx thought of him as something like a protégé. A potential successor to Garstag once the Kardainn-master’s time was ended. Maybe a trusted war counsellor. A part of him grieves that Dragan now wishes to kill him and assume command of the warband. Another part of him understands that this is just the way things are. The will of the god must be maintained and exalted in all things, and he would not dream of confronting the threat openly. There are ways that these things are done, methods of retaining the allegiance of the Unbroken, and those who flout the old laws soon die from them.

For all that, he must find a way of channelling Dragan’s ambition soon. He knows what the rest of his followers think. He knows that less than half now see him as their best hope for conquest. That situation cannot be allowed to continue.

‘Because you are right, Gallowsman,’ Vorx says. ‘Despite everything, a fortress-monastery might very well be beyond us. Even if fewer than a hundred White Consuls still man it, we might dash ourselves against its walls in slaughter. We might lose, they might burn Solace. That would strike at my soul. The Weeping Veil are strong, and so, together, I see a cleaner victory.’

‘They will cut us deep, when they can.’

‘Then we will have to be quicker.’ Vorx leans forward, feels his old organs slosh around within his ceramite hide. ‘You are the one who can do this. You retain what the rest of us are losing.’ He places his calloused hand on a calloused knee and feels the remnants of cartilage pop and slither. ‘We need to fight with our feet on the ground. We need a prize worthy of the god. It would be a waste to burn out our guns on these true believers.’

Dragan looks at him for a long time. His entire body, still lean, radiates distrust. That huge fist, blistered with sores and bearing talons the length of a man’s arm, twitches.

Garstag is pretending not to listen. The rest of the Kardainn affect the same disinterest. By ancient convention the honour guard have foresworn involvement in the warband’s power games, but that fools no one. Garstag no doubt has designs on the command throne himself, though he would be a weak candidate, and possibly even knows it.

‘You test me, siegemaster,’ Dragan says.

‘We are all tested,’ says Vorx. ‘That is the great lesson – it will never stop, whoever takes this world.’

‘But, sometimes, I do not think…’ He does not finish that statement, perhaps wisely.

‘Trust me,’ says Vorx. ‘Our paths are leading to the same summit – in time, you will see that.’

The shuttle shakes. Solace is above them now, a huge shadow cutting out the meagre light of lost stars. It will gobble them up soon, fold them within its great cavities.

Dragan looks away. His expression is the same as it always is – a snarl and a grimace of ceramite moulding, the vestiges of an Imperial terror template slowly morphing into something softer.

Vorx admires him. He admires his struggle to retain what he was, to take on the advantages of the Legion without accepting its temptations. It is a doomed struggle, and one day he will fail, but the attempt is valiant nonetheless.

‘It will be conquest,’ Dragan says at last, grudgingly.

‘What we were made for.’

‘I will summon Naum.’

‘If you can. Be wary, though – it has been a long time.’

Dragan looks at him. Vorx can sense his bafflement then, honestly held, unfeigned and unhidden.

‘What do you want, siegemaster?’ Dragan asks.

For a moment, the question floors him. He has not been asked it for a long time, but now he feels that it lurks everywhere, on everyone’s lips. The universe has long since been a place where wants are never indulged – it has been needs for millennia, the endless grind of survival, plunder, the harrying run from bolthole to bolthole.

But Dragan is right. There are choices now. A tyranny of them. They demand better answers, new answers, ones that may not issue from the mouths of primarchs.

‘I want the games to end,’ Vorx says, almost to himself. ‘I want the struggle to cease. I want the truth to be recognised.’

‘But the games have no end. All there is, is the game.’

That is the orthodoxy, spun out of a lifetime in the Eye’s endless churn. There will always be four gods, it is said, balanced against one another in perpetual contest, toying with the mortal plane and raging with the immortal. That is why Dragan envies the Despoiler’s hordes. He envies the Word Bearers and their undivided allegiance. He does not yet fully understand Vorx’s true belief, the reason why he has never taken an order from anyone but Mortarion.

There is a hierarchy, even across the great game. Desire, knowledge, rage – these are the lesser things, the subordinate things, the ones that came later. Before them all was despair, and succour, and the slow release into abandonment. This was what came first, the primordial slop from which all else arose, only then to float like phantasms over it. In the end, despair will prevail again. In the end, every world will be a Plague Planet, and the tide of decay will once more lap at the foundations of reality, drowning all else.

‘Do not believe everything you are told,’ Vorx says, watching as the viewports go black and Solace’s old smells permeate the shuttle interior again. ‘There are still possible victories. And if I read the entrails right, this is where they start.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

For a while the two ships drift alongside one another in silence. It is an odd configuration – two giants of the deep, both armed to the gunwales, holding position with their cold thrusters yawning and empty. The Ayamandar runs with constant light, a strobe of reds and oranges along its spiked hull. Solace is quieter, dripping with darkness, its blurred outline a haze of vegetative greens and greys. All around them the void fizzes and blinks as if electrified, and strange shapes part-form in gasps of smoke, short-lived and misshapen.

Dantine sees none of this. He is more mobile than before, limping from chamber to chamber, driven now by a curiosity that outweighs his fear. He estimates that there are thousands of men and women like him on this ship – probably tens of thousands. Few of them ever speak to him. As far as he can tell, few of them ever speak to one another. They seem strangely content, stumbling across the decks, just as he does. Some have tasks, most do not appear to. This is a listless ship.

And yet it functions, somehow. On a Naval Grand Cruiser, this level of lassitude would have seen the captain executed and the ratings given heavy beatings. The commissariat would have come in, sweeping level by level, restoring fear and efficiency, getting the chains of command pulled taut again.

The people here are not afraid. Some are sick, very badly sick. Most are carrying obviously terminal diseases, and their bodies are falling apart, but they are not afraid. Dantine begins to realise it has been a very long time since he has been among people who do not possess fear. He resists the urge, the dangerous urge, to think of this as a good thing.

It is likely, he reflects as he wanders the decks, that this ship, this Solace, has a self-perpetuating community, much as a big Imperial starship does. There will be children born in the bilges, raised in the sticky darkness, learning a trade in the shadows. There will be strange hierarchies – the upper decks, unimaginably far off and prestigious; the gun gangs and ammunition-haulers, an aspiration; the shit-shovellers and slop-servers, the likeliest occupation for any who survive the knife fights of the under-deck. They brawl with one another, and jostle, and protect, rut, perhaps even love. Then they die.

All is done in the stink, the dark, the heat. This is an alien world, as alien as Dantine has ever encountered. The filth is phenomenal, burned deep into every surface so that it feels less like an encrustation and more like the very matter of the world around them, and yet these souls persist here, against all odds, eking out short and strangely fecund lives before the phages bite, after which their superannuated bodily remains are scraped into boiling vats and served up to the next, unknowing generation.

He tried to speak to them, a while back. He thought it might help, if he exchanged a few words. Deep down, a part of him even thought that he might be able to find a few whose spirits had not been crushed, and he had visions of raising some kind of rebellion.

He spoke to a woman first, tugging at her insect-eaten cloak and making her stop and look at him in the dark.

‘What is your name?’ he asked.

Her face was drawn, a pull of skin across bone, her eyes bulging like those of a mantis. She seemed unable to focus on him, and a line of black drool ran from her cracked lips.

‘Forty-seven,’ she said.

‘That’s your name?’

‘Forty-eight.’

‘What?’

‘Forty-nine.’

He found out after that that a lot of them count. They mutter away in the deeps, scratching for food, or something cool to slap on their boils and sores, and they mumble numbers mindlessly, over and over again.

After that he found a man, perhaps his own age. He grabbed him by the shoulders, dragged him into the lee of a big engine bulkhead and forced him to talk properly. As he did so, hot sparks from the turning shafts spat and wriggled, cooling across the muddy deck.

‘Tell me your name,’ he said, summoning up as much of his old sense of command as he could.

‘Captain Dantine,’ the man replied, looking terrified.

‘No, that’s my name. Just tell me your–’

‘I am dead. I have no heart. I am a curse and a warning.’ The man smiled, a sick grin that exposed gums as red as heartsblood and black holes where the teeth should have been.

That was the last time. Now Dantine ignores the crowds that fill Solace’s corridors. He bumps into them and they say nothing. He shouts at them and they do not hear him. Sometimes he just shouts anyway, hurling out his pain at the ship around him. The noise sinks into the dark metal, is gulped up by it and is dissipated. He stops when he can no longer breathe, bent double, spitting up blood onto the spongy deck.

Eventually, he finds his way to Philemon’s sanctum. He has learned a little of the Tallyman, overheard from the whispers of others. After Vorx, who is referred to like some distant kind of god, Philemon is the most well-known of the Unbroken to the bilge-dwellers. They see him almost like a priest, a distant intercessor on their behalf, though Dantine himself thinks that this is confused and that none of the monsters who run this ship really care anything much for the Unchanged, as they call them – the ones who never took the corrupted gene-seed of the Fourteenth Legion and were thus morphed into diseased demigods.

Dantine has passed the door to Philemon’s realm on a number of occasions, each time when heading in a different direction. The place does not seem deeply rooted – one day, it will be found nestled below the main engine chambers; on another, it is located higher up, past the capillaries leading to the bridge. On this day, he stumbles across it after walking through the chambers of the rank-and-file Unbroken, the rooms like pig pens that house the many warriors of this vessel in their torpor.

He pauses before the door. It is an archaic thing – a wooden-planked panel, bound by rusted iron in swirls that look wrong. It opens before he even pushes against it, and a blush of pale-green mist hisses up from the deck across his bare feet. On the far side, the air is like rancid cream, thick and translucent. He sees things staring at him from high perches – the grotesque Little Lords, gurning and burping. The smell is unbelievable, even for this ship.

Locked inside some kind of glass chamber, a half-bald crow hops on its perch to fix a jewelled eye on him. There are lots more of these chambers, half-visible in the miasma, all different sizes and shapes.

‘Abomination,’ the crow says.

Dantine stares at it. The creature’s beak curls like a long prehensile finger, and the effect is obscene. He should be revolted by the creature. He should try to kill it. Instead, though, he realises that he finds himself merely curious. He repulses it more than it repulses him. He wonders why this is.

‘You do not have a soul, mortal,’ comes a voice from the smoke and murk. ‘It cannot feed on you, and so it is disgusted by you.’

The speaker emerges, limping out of the haze. He wears a long cowl that casts his face into shadow. His armour – for they all wear armour, these monsters – is as lumpen and misshaped as Vorx’s, though free of the maddening numeric scrawl. Philemon’s numerology is conducted on parchment, and reams of it tumble from every surface of this humid room, gently rotting and cracking and eroding.

‘This is the currency of the universe,’ he says. ‘Not coin, not worlds. Souls. This is what we fight over. The strongest become stronger by them, the weaker are consumed. You, though, have been made irrelevant. You are a bystander in the game. You are despised by all sides. If we sent you back to your old masters now, they would burn you before you could tell them where you came from.’

‘Better to burn than be damned,’ mutters Dantine wearily.

‘I wonder if anyone ever really believed that,’ says Philemon, placing a vial carefully on one of his many lopsided shelves. ‘I suppose some must do, or you would not be able to staff your Inquisition.’

Of all the many terrors and horrors on this ship, perhaps the worst has been the way these creatures talk. Their voices are achingly hard to listen to – bubbling with phlegm and grating across ancient withered vocal cords – but it is the mundanity of their discourse that chills him. They murder without a thought. They infect, they destroy, they mutilate themselves and their servants, they create this stinking, terrible realm in which to squat and vomit, and yet their words are so calm, so turgid, so consumed by the trivial.

The Tallyman comes closer, and Dantine smells his rotten-egg breath.

‘You had it easy on Najan,’ Dantine says. ‘The Consuls will fight you.’

‘Yes, that is what we hope for.’

‘I hope they kill you all.’

Philemon shoots him a dry smile, and it makes one of the boils on his upper lip burst. ‘Let me tell you the strength of this vessel,’ he says. ‘It has weapons on it capable of rendering cities to dust. It has bombers, Dreadclaws, heavy armour. There are things locked up in the dungeons here that you would not believe unless you saw them. Some of them frighten me.’ Philemon chuckles, and the crow hops from one claw to the other. ‘The Kardainn are seven-strong, and there are three further squads of Terminators. Thirty-two squads of Unbroken fight under Vorx, another twenty-four under the Gallowsman. Some have given in to possession, and some have so many Gifts they are like living diseases. There are thousands of Unchanged who can fight harder and longer than any human. Some of them are almost impossible to stop once they get going, and we are so very good at getting them going. That is strength, captain. That is terrible strength. You have not seen it unleashed yet, so do not place so much faith in those who have already failed you once.’

‘They would have come. In time.’

‘If any still live.’

The crow is looking at him all the time. Dantine half knows what it is – a ghost, a spirit, a ghoul. Many times, while fighting on far-off worlds, the mud of trenches thick on his boots, he had heard stories of such things. It was never easy to disbelieve them, and now it is impossible. He is inside a dream now. A dream where all his darkest imaginings are made into hard-edged reality, and insanity has solidified into what counts for sanity.

Dantine glances about him. He sees complex calculations traced in brown ink on thick parchment. He sees rusty devices – armillary spheres, sextants, chronometers – half-covered in mildew-spotted cloth.

‘You call us ignorant,’ he says, trying to sound defiant. ‘And yet, look at you. Look at the conditions you live in. Do you not disgust yourself when you pass a mirror? Do you not see what you could have been?’

The crow laughs. Dantine tenses, ready for a blow from the armoured monster, but it never comes.

Philemon looks thoughtful. ‘But I was in the warp,’ he says. ‘When we were becalmed. I still remember. I scratched the days on my armour, one after the other.’

Dantine listens. He doesn’t know what the monster is talking about, but says nothing. The crow listens. The Little Lords still their quarrelling, and they listen too.

‘When the Destroyer came, I resisted it. We all did. We had been trained for it and we had resisted everything, up until then. Defiance, or else death. Every Legion taught that to some degree, and we taught it more than most. I thought there was nothing I could not endure that did not kill me.’

The Tallyman is not focusing now. He is witnessing events far away.

‘But we were out of time, in the end. There were no days to mark anymore. The pain was eternal, no beginning to it, no end. We were just… part of it. Forever. And I still ask myself, now, what really happened. Did we give in? I don’t know. Typhus tells us we overcame it, and in taking it within ourselves, we transformed it. We no longer feel it. We bring the lesson of that to the universe – accept corruption, let it pass within you, move beyond it. We have been doing it for a very long time. You forget, after a while, that there was another life you had. That is less than a memory now. Less than a shadow. But not quite dead yet. Every time I see one of you, a part of it comes back.’

‘You were made to protect us,’ Dantine says.

‘They were. Never made for that!’ the crow blurts. ‘They were made. To end the galaxy.’

‘So what do I see when I look in the mirror?’ Philemon asks, ignoring the daemon. ‘I do not look, so I do not know. Perhaps the sight would pain me. I suspect it would not. You don’t look so good yourself. I suggest you stay away from them too.’

‘Don’t you want, though…’ Dantine ventures, trying one last time, probing at anything that might be a weak point. A part of him just wants to know. ‘A way back?’

Philemon smiles, a gesture that exposes dark-purple gums. ‘There are no ways back,’ he says. ‘That is the only unchangeable fact of the universe. Even the gods do not break that law – tread the path to its end or tread no path at all. There are no resting places. There are no ways back.’

Dantine stares at him, shivering a little. The tone of finality chills him. He would like to imagine that the monster expresses something like remorse in those words, but he cannot detect any. He thinks then that they have indeed been driven mad, and that they now no longer see the world as it is, but as some kind of impenetrable mental prison. They imagine themselves masters of their fate but are instead puppets of a greater power, mouthing religious words that mean nothing and worshipping a deity that, if it even exists at all, can care nothing for them or any sentient thing, for it is just a consumer of these souls, an engine for which the living are merely fuel.

But then there are many in the universe of whom such things could be said. Perhaps the souls they toy with are indeed the only currency there is, and all players, whatever allegiance they claim, accept the same stakes at the same table.

So does the heretical thought slip in for the first time, like a sigh of hearth-warm air over an open threshold.

He looks up at the Tallyman’s ruined face.

‘They’ll kill you,’ he says. ‘The Emperor’s Angels. They’ll kill you all.’

‘They might,’ says Philemon. ‘But then, as you’re discovering yourself, there are worse things than an honest death. So we’ll see. We’ll see it all, in the end.’

It’s two days, standard, before the comm-signal comes in from the Ayamandar. That is a long time to contemplate a course of action, even for a Legion so bound up in ritual and portent. Perhaps they have consulted with some other entity at distance, but it would take longer than that to send and receive anything using the astropathic choirs, so it remains likeliest that they were just thinking things through.

Vorx spends most of that time on the bridge, motionless, watching the opposing ship as it circles around them slowly. He is undisturbed by the bridge crew, who are used to his obsessions, and limp and scuttle around him as if he were just another part of the ship’s structure.

Only the Little Lords dare to impose themselves, breaking his concentration. On each occasion, he stoops to pick them up and they coo and snicker at the attention. They extend long black tongues to lick at the old wounds on his armour, and they spend hours clumsily attempting to fix the long rents in his decaying ceramite.

Eventually, something lights up on a panel, and an Unchanged attendant with red rings under empty eye sockets scrabbles around for a decoding filter.

Long before he has done so, Vorx has interpreted the runes piped to his internal system. He gives some thought to subtext, for the senders are particular about inserting multiple layers of meaning to even the basest missives, and he extrapolates what he can.

The results are pleasing enough – no overt insults, no overt threats. It is refreshingly pragmatic – perhaps, he thinks, that is the way things will be from now on.

He stirs himself. A Little Lord is dislodged from his shoulder and slithers down the ridged edges of his plate. Hovik is already hauling herself up from the sensor pits in order to be in place for the coming order burst.

‘Summon the Gallowsman, summon the Kardainn-master,’ Vorx says, lumbering back to his throne. ‘Open a channel to Rhoe Twe.’

The bridge of a Death Guard warship is a sluggish place. Orders are followed, but the movements are languid, hampered by the withering of muscle and the slow softening of minds. For all that, commands find their homes in the end, and Solace judders and booms into something a little more lively. Lumens flicker up to operational intensity, and cracked picter lenses flicker back into life.

Out in the void, the Ayamandar is lighting up too. Tiny tongues of flame blurt and throttle in braziers, and its flanks glow with rekindled searchlights. The huge empty caverns of its main thrusters shimmer with the first rush of ignited fuel, then burst out into thunderous activation.

‘Standing ready, lord,’ comes Rhoe Twe’s voice over the comm. ‘Kindling in process. The furnaces will take a while to–’

‘Expedite if you please, Cultivator,’ Vorx says. ‘They are expecting us to lead them.’

The bridge deck flexes a little then, as Garstag clomps his way out from the access doors. Dragan is not far behind, swinging his naked bladed hand, which seems to have grown a little since the slaughter on Najan.

‘We have an answer?’ asks the Kardainn-master, as wary as the others at the prospect of an alliance with heretics.

‘They accept our terms,’ Vorx says. ‘The world is to be taken, its spoils divided in equal shares.’

Garstag laughs. ‘They will have their knives out long before that.’

‘So everyone keeps telling me.’ Vorx sounds a little weary of this, and Garstag has the sense to let it drop. ‘Bring Drez-Uil to me,’ Vorx says to Hovik. ‘And Captain Dantine. The last stage will be the hardest, and I wish to demonstrate that we mean what we say and can do what we claim.’

Solace’s engines are running now, its arteries unclogging with thick shots of tainted promethium. The bellows are cranking up, the pilot lights are flaring into rolling balls of dirty flame. As ever, the old structure creaks and bangs. The Little Lords scowl and put their claws over their ears. They do not like this level of disturbance, and one of them burrows under the feet of the command throne, its claws scraping rapidly on the deck.

‘So what did he say?’ asks Dragan, curious despite himself.

‘The Apostle? That he accepted the tactical situation. For a moment, I almost believed him. Where is Naum?’

‘Proving hard to track down. There are rumours that he’s under the main prow, and I’ve sent twenty of my blades to find him.’

‘Go yourself. I want him in the first wave.’

Dragan nods cautiously. ‘Then it will not be long,’ he says.

‘Not long at all.’ Vorx takes the heart out of the pouch at his belt. It is still wet with blood, still beating. As he handles it, it trembles, and the pace of beats picks up. ‘It knows. Somehow, it knows.’

He looks at Dragan, and there is something there now. A stirring of spirits, rising up from sluggish depths.

‘Fury is coming, Gallowsman,’ he says. ‘Fury is coming to another world.’

VI: THE GATE BREAKS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The fleet breaks up, spirals away from the core, splinters like gravel dashed against stone.

The greater number bear down on distant Cadia, carrying desolation to that hated world under the Vengeful Spirit’s shadow, but there are other targets in the grand scheme. Other worlds in the Gate sector are walled and guarded, and other worlds offer threats to the flanks of Abaddon’s advance. Despite its proximity to the Eye, humanity’s borders here teem with life, every half-habitable asteroid carved out and built up into hyper-cities and mega-fortresses, and the High Lords have crammed every single gun tower with precious souls.

The Despoiler’s captains know their assigned roles. Their warp drives reignite, the still-hot enginariums drumming up again to full potential. Destroyers streak off into the empyrean, followed by the wallowing hulls of the major killers. Daemons shriek and gambol in their wakes, sensing the chasm of reality flexing around them.

The names of their targets are ancient, known to every slave child of the Eye and murmured by every cult-priest over every altar. Cadia. Nemesis Tessera. Belis Corona. Scelus. The rote is a litany of hatred, hissed from chapped and bleeding lips for ten thousand years. Curses are laid on those worlds within the bronze cathedrals of Sicarus, ramping up the hostility of the slumbering warp and rousing its denizens from torpor. They are close together, by galactic standards, huddled within the sclerotic clutch of major warp conduits, each one a citadel and an armoury of the most resilient kind.

Orbital stations bristle with long-range gunnery, and permanent fleets stalk the space lanes above them. Entire armies drill endlessly within mighty barracks, and fresh tanks trundle off never-ending production lines. Outside the Sol System itself, there is no greater concentration of defences in the entire galaxy, and all of them need constant resupply and refuelling. Their machines are never allowed to degrade and their weapons are never allowed to rot. They must be fed with the metal marvels of old Mars. They must be given teeth.

Thus it is that Agripinaa assumes prominence. Agripinaa, the closest great forge world to Cadia. Agripinaa, the source of its finest armaments, its Titan Legions, its heavy armour and its ranged artillery. Agripinaa is an iron world, never at rest, studded with foundries and seas of liquid metal. Its skies are lead-grey, its surface clad in unbroken construction. No hives or habs pucker its ancient surface, only manufactoria, kilometre after kilometre of them, dazzling the mortal mind. Fires vent like daggers of blood, and the dark iron glints hot under the running clouds. Red lightning snaps over the cowled heads of the priesthood’s minions, skittering from one control tower to another in a never-ending, semi-ritual procession. Skitarii maniples travel in machine lockstep across the high causeways, while below, in the pits and the shafts and the wells, the hammers rock, the pistons slide, the wheels turn.

Agripinaa has done this for longer than the Imperium itself has endured. The ziggurats were raised in the forgotten Age of Strife, long before the Traitors made their pacts, long before there were Traitors, long before the first foundations of that secret throne room were delved under the warring crusts of Terra. On Agripinaa there are secure vaults, lost under rad-stained sands, containing flaking paper blueprints from the dawn of the human age. Some of these vaults are lost even to those who still inhabit the world, for the accretions of the long, long years have buried so much in forgetfulness. There are whole cities lost on Agripinaa, smothered by later frenzied constructions, plundered for their resources before being allowed to steadily erode into the substrates of the old continents as the endless, metronomic activity continues far above them.

It would take a baseline human a week to travel from the highest exhaust vent down to the lowest coolant sink, clambering down the soul-crushing press of girders and pylons and into the gaseous depths. Not that an unaugmented human would survive the journey – Agripinaa was long ago made extravagantly toxic, its atmosphere turned to poison gas and its aquifers acidified. On Agripinaa, the augmetics start from the birth pods – infants yanked from gurgling metal wombs, their heads branded and their blood drawn. Every scrap of flesh is shaped, stamped, wired up and clamped down. Their lungs are made able to process the atmospheric poisons, their eyes made capable of withstanding the flares from the forges, their fear centres tugged out, their endocrine systems tailored for whatever drone function Agripinaa demands of them – obedience, aggression, endurance.

Agripinaa has weathered storms before. The sector was ravaged in past centuries, the so-called twelve Black Crusades of the Imperial loremasters, each time more severe than the last, each time requiring more strenuous efforts to rebuild, to bear down on non-conforming elements, to purge datasets and binary-sinks. It has always recovered. It has always covered over the wounds with freshly-poured rockcrete. It has always built greater manufactoria where the old ones were annihilated. This was necessary. Without Agripinaa, Cadia would be starved of its machines. Without Agripinaa, the other worlds would be naked and defenceless. This is the place that gives them teeth. Thus, by necessity, it has been marked for destruction.

Agripinaa has been under attack for a long time already. Plagues have been thrown at it, carried on hulks vomited up from the Eye’s turbulent borders. Hordes of shambling dead have clogged its vents and its cog clusters. Rogue tech-priests have damned what remained of their souls by destroying critical systems and jamming integral works. One third of the great command ziggurats have gone dark, their innards seething with civil conflict. Agripinaa’s daughter worlds – its supply depots and its Naval dockyards – are all aflame now, grappling with the sudden emergence of suicide squads and activated sleeper units.

That was just the start. The softening, the tenderising – it was all that could be done from afar, all that could be accomplished without breaking the Gate’s wards and sending physical warfleets to truly summon the apocalypse.

Now the fleets are here. This is Agripinaa’s reality. The first alerts sound on system-edge, prompting an immediate response from stationed void assets. Imperial Navy attack groups race to intercept, bolstered by the colossal shadows of the Basilikon Astra’s heavy maulers. Space Marine strike cruisers dart from under those lumbering giants, their flanks coloured in the livery of a dozen Chapters. Defence plates activate, their concave summits sliding back to reveal nova cannons and system-class disintegrators. Whole maniples of skitarii mobilise, their spine-clusters spiked into activation, their viewfinders whirring up to bottle-green luminosity. From deep within Agripinaa’s iron guts, shutters grind back from the maws of silo-temples, and the god-machines of the Legio Praesidium Vortex emerge from their deep tombs, war-horns echoing across the burning metal plains.

And yet they can have no idea. Somewhere, deep within all those ruthless logic-minds, bled of emotion and dread, they must still see what comes from them out of the Eye’s lightning-raked skirts, and be daunted. Their oculi whining to gain focus, they must look up at the skies and struggle to comprehend what has taken place, and feel the coldest flicker of doubt.

What they see has no precedent. What they see has no explanation. What they see has no rational basis, for hell’s borders have been shattered, its fetters thrown off, and the vengeance of the damned now spills across realspace.

The moment can only be fleeting. It all happens so fast. The flames are like a breaking wave, the daemon screams like shattering crystal, the massed thrusters like the ignition of new stars. There are so many. So, so many.

Thus it begins.

Solace thunders into range, flanked on either side by fast-attack craft of the World Eaters and Night Lords Legions. The orbital zone around it is half void, half flying debris, clotted with shrapnel since the destruction of the outer orbital defence stations. Molten pieces clang and bounce from the ship’s outer shielding, spinning madly before being engulfed in fresh walls of plasma and thruster burn.

Everything is in perpetual motion, a whirl of confined cause and effect. Giant warships sweep across the reeling visual plane, each one sucking in clouds of smaller craft. Wings of gunships and void-fighters streak and duck through flashes of las-fire. The burning planet’s surface rolls below them, swinging lazily as if stuck on a pendulum, its torment caught in glimpses within the tumble and plummet.

Vorx is standing on the command bridge, calculating, assessing, issuing an order every so often and watching the grand display unfold across his many picter lenses. Explosions pepper the forward augurs, rolling silent flowers that bloom and fade and are then dragged out into dying slivers. The deck shakes as the big guns fire, belching acid bombs into the oncoming prows of Imperial war vessels.

Solace’s weapons are old. Some were forbidden even in the earliest days of the Crusade, while others have been slowly made blasphemous by the corruption of the Neverborn. Some fire solid rounds, others ghost-green las-blasts, but most are more imaginative – phosphex and corrosives, metal-gnaw and bone-rot, core-decay and fuel-spoil.

The ship tilts leeward, hit by a brace of burrowing torpedoes, its hide ripped and venting. Vorx directs return fire, gently nudging Solace’s own inclinations, and a withering slamline of adamantium-eating canisters spins out into the void. The impacts are void-silent, clouts of lime-yellow puffs strung along the flank of a Cobra-class destroyer. Only moments later the destructive agents do their work, chewing through armour layers and rupturing a generator feed-line. Vorx has already ordered Solace on to new targets by the time the Cobra’s outer skin is blown and its atmospheric controls are smacked out of tolerance. It falls away, easy prey now for the swarms of mid-range killers sweeping up in Solace’s wake.

Vorx has his mind on greater things. Amid the crash and the shatter, there are true monsters in the herds, sentinels that must be eliminated if the landings are to be effected. He sees the Slaverer, a World Eaters battleship, smash its way into close contact with The Throne’s Divine Demands, a Retribution-class ship of the line, and that titanic clash is beyond him. He sees a squadron of Navy cruisers in close formation batter an incoming wedge of Murder-class skirmishers, and that entire sector of the battlesphere erupts into dazzling pyrotechnics. There are a thousand individual struggles here, all combining to form the immense conflagration that stretches far across Agripinaa’s tortured horizon, reaching out like some giant, single, flickering claw to clutch the forge world and tear it from existence.

‘That one,’ he whispers, picking out a blip on the overloaded sensor wheels, a dab of phosphor amid a speckle of a hundred other targets.

Hovik is already working to bring them in close. Rhoe Twe drags up a little more power from straining plasma coils. Drez-Uil, shackled now to his greasy panopticon throne, shouts out vectors that the servitors mumble and transmit down to implementation decks.

Vorx is alone on the high bridge. The rest of the Unbroken are preparing for their own battles – the tight-locked thrust of boarding actions or the hurtle down into planetfall. He knows Dragan will be goading the gunnery teams before making for the torpedo bays, grinding a little more from them. He thinks that Garstag is making ready for teleportation but has not yet detected his locus, which is strange, but there is so much going on that he cannot attend to it.

‘That one,’ he says again, reaffirming it, marking it, making it his own.

It is a mass conveyer, a huge carrier, lightly armed but with steep-sided armour plates and a heavy profile. It is bigger than Solace, approaching battleship size, but clumsy and slow, and lacking major armament. Squadrons of frigates, all in Mechanicus red, shoot alongside it as it powers up from Agripinaa’s orbital dock layer, building up to escape speed through the burning wreckage.

Such a thing is not a major target for the assault commanders. It is clearly running from combat, shepherded out by its escorts, seeking refuge from the maelstrom’s heart before the orbital zone is overrun. Thus it is being ignored, for there are a thousand true attackers driving straight at the invaders, their lances spitting and their broadsides roaring. As the battle thunders over the forge world’s glowing edge, the surviving orbital stations open up in a combined salvo, sending waves of armour-battering ordnance screaming out of recoiling macro-barrels. It is overwhelming, computationally complex, unfolding across the full gamut of all three dimensions. There are thousands of things to be concerned about. Thousands of more lethal things.

This one ship, though, intrigues Vorx. He has fought the soulless disciples of the Machine-God many times and has learned their ways. They do not retreat from forge worlds. They do not send their assets out into the void for another, better day. In combat such as this, where their pride and industry are threatened with annihilation, they use every last one of their ships, all their guns, all their dreary, flesh-stripped troops. Even if that mass conveyer only carried a scattering of lascannons and was chock-full of inert cargo, it would still be sent howling into the heart of combat and used, if for nothing else, to soak up incoming fire while the greater Ark Mechanicus battleships dealt out the true pain.

So something does not ring true. Perhaps the World Eaters are too distracted by their blood-frenzy to notice it, and maybe the warpsmiths of the Black Legion are so intent on getting down to the surface that they are overcommitting. This is not a tactical weakness Vorx possesses. He does not really hate this enemy – it is rare for him to hate – and he has never hurried an advance in his life. So he has the luxury of study, of reflection, and sees that a mass conveyer of the Basilikon Astra has no place being there at all.

‘All fire concentrated on the prow,’ he orders, noting with satisfaction how smoothly Solace turns into the attack trajectory and how solidly it is absorbing the constant barrage of incoming las-fire from many fronts. The armour on the ship is like a layer of rotting fat, sucking and dissolving the hits that come in, making the ship absurdly but agreeably resilient.

Solace picks up a little more speed, now powering close to its optimal velocity, booming through the crowded battlesphere and crunching through the thickets of lesser craft. Its sides flash and flicker with a constant hammer of close-range fire, picking off the gunships and boarding torpedoes sent to intercept it. Kodad is doing well, surrounding Solace with an aura of well-aimed destructiveness. A Naval battleship in the middle distance briefly locks on to them, causing warning runes to scroll across the picters, but it is almost immediately engaged by a World Eaters strike cruiser hurtling along at ramming velocity, and the two of them fall into bloody close-contact mauling.

The mass conveyer powers on. Its escorts recognise the danger and swing in closer. Solace takes hits – serious ones, ones that might drive deep under all that fat and damage something critical.

‘Ignore it,’ Vorx says. ‘Concentrated fire, main power to the lances.’

It is getting rough. They are getting knocked hard, and the void shields crackle and buckle. The frigates spar like enraged insects, cutting down further, but Solace just barrels closer, drinking the hatred up, dulling it, blunting it, slowing it all down. The ship’s structure flexes, indicating that core power has been shunted aforeships, burning down the conduits to the lance generators.

The mass conveyer is still running on its old course, a huge hunk of red-flaked metal carrying the eroded sign of the Mechanicus on its facing armour. Vorx studies it – immense side-plates, tall as hive spires, big aft-slung burners sending crimson plasma coruscating out into the shrapnel-flecked vacuum, tiny viewport lights at the very summit of a rear-mounted command bridge. It is a brute, a grim pile of undistinguished slabs designed with no sense of the organic or the mortal. It is the work of those who have let their spirits go cold, and such construction does not deserve to endure in this galaxy of wonder.

Kodad lets loose, and the first lance-beam arcs out from Solace’s prow array, wreathed in spitting fronds of pale-green plasma. The beam strikes true, smacking into the conveyer’s snub-nose and splashing messily over the void coverage.

‘Again,’ says Vorx, bracing himself as more hits come in. Other ships are responding now – Imperial vessels, Mechanicus vessels, Legion vessels. It is still a whirling madness out there – ships sliding across other ships, fire barrages searing across the void and blowing augur nodes, fighter wings burrowing into every cranny between the rolling behemoths – but through it all, the conveyer drives its straight path, edging closer to wherever it was ordered to be.

Its bow-plates begin to crack open. Just a trace at first, a line of fire down the long snub-nose, then a vent of gases and a haul of metal. Vorx allows himself a half-smile. Something has been hidden in that ship, warded by nondescript armour designed to protect Titans during transit. Now it is being revealed, forced into the open, a hand exposed before its time.

Solace fires again, scores another hit, this time striking at the join between moving panels. The liquid energies cascade through the opening gaps and corrode through to softer materials beyond. The conveyer barely flinches, but damage has been done – Vorx detects void-shielding harmonics ramping up, and his augurs isolate violent power shifts across the giant’s energy lattice.

The conveyer’s escorts are diving in hard now, slamming everything they have at Solace, trying to rip off its heavy shields and get a clean shot down into its rotten insides. A vicious rake of torpedoes finds its mark, strafing the starboard under-hull and making the lumens plunge out for a few seconds. Damage reports flash up on grimy lenses, half-hidden behind ingrained detritus. A Little Lord cries out in terror, clambering up a pillar hand over hand and wedging itself in the angle of the roof braces.

‘Hold course,’ says Vorx softly, watching, watching. The target races into true-visual, gobbling the space on the forward viewers and turning the void a dull red. ‘All we have now – fire at will.’

The command filters down the long chains, the vox-circuits and the muttering servitor relays, and everything explodes – lances unleash, macrocannons splurt, phosphex launchers belch. Solace briefly disappears behind clouds of its own discharge, a billowing wave of corrosive horror that streaks out across the gap and crashes, hard, into the flickering shell of the conveyer beyond.

The detonation is blinding, a nova of void energy that flares and burns and then blasts itself out. The shockwave sends the hurtling frigates toppling prow-first over their gravity centres. The conveyer’s opening doors are hurled apart, ripped from their hinges and sent teetering for a frozen moment amid a seething roil of wild energies. The entire structure staggers, barged off its steady course, its blood-red burners thundering hard to compensate.

And then, for the first time, all can see what has been hidden on that ship. Its bow-plates are stripped clean, revealing a cavernous interior, ribbed and barred and braced for strength. Jutting out of all that cross-fixed metal is a single barrel, an obscene length of rust-red iron studded with effigies and skulls and all the tedious ephemera of the Machine-God’s acolytes. The interior of the conveyer is a vivid red, as bloody as the rest of it but glowing now like the heart of a blacksmith’s furnace.

Vorx immediately recognises what has been hidden there, and for a moment feels a tremor of excitement in his cynical old bowels. This is a rarity, something precious to the enemy, something to be concealed during the ascent to the battlesphere and used to cause a single instant of outrageous destruction. Perhaps it was intended for Kossolax himself, the nominal commander of this stitched-together armada, who presides over the hell ship Conqueror at the very centre of the fiercest fighting.

It is preparing to fire, caught off guard and now rushing to deploy the payload festering within its bowels. Curls and slivers of lightning scamper across those great apertures, snaking down the length of the gun itself. The void, already tortured by a million pulses of las-energy, begins to boil, and visual distortion ripples across the barrel’s gaping maw.

‘Place us in front of it,’ Vorx says.

Vorx has been commander of this ship for a long time, and his authority on the bridge is absolute. Even so, Hovik looks up at him, just for a second. She is so hunched now, bent double – the end cannot be far for her, or perhaps the transformation into something better. Who can tell? In any case, she is perturbed, and for good reason.

‘The… gun, lord?’ she asks.

Vorx gazes down at her fondly.

‘Close as you dare,’ he says. ‘Scrape the paint off it, if we can.’

They do not comply at once. They can see the danger, the ludicrous danger, and they are not quite inured to it despite all they have been shown of the god’s benison and their commander’s tactical experience.

But it is only a hesitation – a momentary failure, for they are a good crew, one into which Vorx has poured all his long benevolence and careful acumen.

‘By your will, lord,’ says Hovik. She turns Solace to intercept, her grey eyes dull to fear.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Rhoe Twe is stumbling, for the deck is lurching around heavily and her legs are buckled and lesioned. Death has been pawing at her shoulder for a long time. She is not overly concerned about her increasingly difficult life ending, but there is always duty enough to keep her on her feet, and she does care about that.

She was born on this ship. She knows no other existence but that of its clammy corridors and its slopping decks. Her eyes are milky white, her skin like translucent parchment. She is perfectly adapted to the dark, to the slightly higher than standard gravity, to the heat and the moisture. She reaches out to grab on to pipework, steadying herself. She knows where every rivet and piston-head is, and treads around the obstacles surely.

This is mostly instinct, now. You can’t learn Solace’s layout in the normal way, for it changes all the time. Bulkheads shift, enginarium components move. Some sections are becoming heavily organic, pulsing and perspiring in the dark, whereas others clang with unusual internal noises. Every time Rhoe Twe removes a casing, she does not know what she will see – a nest of bloatworms writhing amid the valves, a pair of proto-lungs shivering as they suck up engine oil, or perhaps just bare metal, clicking over as it should.

That is why she is the Cultivator, as much a custodian of living things as inert materials. One day, far into the future, the entire ship will be a single amorphous organism. She is helping to make this a reality, to coax and to nurture. It is hard work, back-breaking and relentless, but it gives her a certain measure of pride. She has sons and daughters growing up in the lower decks, already learning to grasp a ratchet and siphon a fuel sump. If they survive the mutations and the plagues, one of them might one day become Cultivator. And if they are blessed with fertility, in centuries to come one of their progeny might be there, on that mystical and long-awaited day when Solace speaks for the first time, not in hisses of steam or scrapes of iron but in a real voice with real words.

Rhoe Twe moves off again, a welder gun in one hand, the other pushing against the grease-slick walls. A brace of lifter-servitors chunters along behind her, their bulky frames grating up against the mesh roof of the narrow ways. Weak lights glow and flare in the heavy dark, exposing caked-on grime and curdled run-off.

Vorx is asking a lot of her, but then he always does. The plasma drives are dangerously hot, their enormous chambers shaking with a haze of racing pre-burners. She has seen conduits give out, filling entire sub-levels with poison gas. Now it is the main isolator unit, the gangle of valves and pressure pumps that switches motive power from the warp drives to the plasma drives. Something has collapsed within the main tower, and so she hurries to clamp it down. This takes her a long way from the enginarium control, down under a row of big plasma conduits, tubes the diameter of a hab-unit that shoot under reinforced deck-plates for five hundred metres. She can hear the contents swill and boom within the pocked enclosure, yearning to burst out and drench them all in a tide of flesh-melting corrosiveness.

What will be, will be, she muses, humming a merry prayer to the god while fighting her way down the narrowing capillary route.

It is then that she sees the shape, a long way down, half-hidden behind a screen of pressed-metal gantries and criss-crossed struts. The air is thicker down there, made into a backlit swamp of sick green, so that the colossal engine components around them are black silhouettes over a churning chasm.

It is a walkway, slung perilously between the convex outlines of big support piles. Something moves across it, half-visible in the drifting smog. An Unbroken, surely – too huge to be anything else. Maybe huger than that, even – a Kardainn, bulked up by all that overlapping plate.

Rhoe Twe crouches for a moment, unsure what to do. The servitors behind her clatter to a halt. Surely the Unbroken will detect her, but perhaps the din from the drives is too much. Or perhaps he is off on his own mission, displaying all that single-minded resolve that they do so well, oblivious to anything around him that poses no threat.

The mists clear for a moment, blown into tatters by the belch from a brass valve-head, and she sees things a little more clearly. Yes, it is the Lord Garstag, heading down to where the warp drive foundations are turbo-bolted into the underpinnings of the enginarium zone. What can he be doing there, she wonders. What could bring him down to this place while there is fighting to be done?

But then the miasma closes again, wafted by powerful currents from below. Up ahead, she hears the first harsh rattle from the innards of the isolator tower. It sounds like a major component has come loose, rattling around its housing and threatening to break out.

She glances down again and sees nothing. He is gone. Perhaps he was never there at all – Solace does send phantasms from time to time, especially when the mind is oppressed or preoccupied.

So she presses on, panting and sweating, her servitors in tow. She must remember to inform the Lord Vorx about this, when time allows.

But there are things to do while the ship is fighting. So many things to do.

Hovik does as she is asked. That is impressive, for this manoeuvre must look to her like suicide.

Solace is lumbering now, struggling to maintain speed. One of the many dozen frigates has scored a palpable wound, and it sears the plasma drives and bleeds out momentum. Another enemy has managed to get a cluster of torpedoes hitting just aforeships of the bridge, knocking out a major sensor cluster. The effect on the bridge is strange – like putting on blurred oculus filters.

But the enemy cannot stop this now. Solace is too close to its target, too massive and with too much of that all-important momentum. The crippled conveyer is trying to nudge out of range, but its engines are not designed for battlefield response. Somewhere on that ship, Vorx thinks, they are beginning to panic.

Solace’s bows slip across the churning well of the gun’s maw. Its shadow slides across still-crackling iron plates, darkening an already dark-red hull. The gap between edges is now perilous – just a few hundred metres, in void terms almost nothing. Scraps of plasma lightning jump across the emptiness, briefly linking the two behemoths together before sparking into nothing.

Vorx feels another faint thrill, another faint stir. He has placed his ship between the cannon and its target. It is a sacrificial move, one destined to provoke the tech-priests to fire now and unleash whatever they have wrapped up inside those layers of ugliness.

Now Solace is fully across the kill-zone, interposed between the gun’s muzzle and the rest of the battle. Vorx can feel the tenseness on the bridge, the tightness of the jaws, the darting looks up at him from the pits. Any moment they expect to hear the explosions, the race of fire from the lower decks, the cold gasp of the void as it comes to grip them. He lets himself imagine the same thing, just for a second. He visualises the eruption from below, and the howl of flame and racing atmospheres, and enjoys it.

To linger any longer, however, would be indulgent. The priests on that conveyer do not want to fire. Vorx is old enough and learned enough to recognise the pattern of their precious weapon. It is nova cannon-class, though larger than all but the very most ruinous battleship-slung varieties. Such guns are designed for extreme ranged fire, and its gunners would not detonate at this proximity, given the choice. That basic situation, though, on its own, would not normally be enough to keep them alive. A daring Mechanicus captain would take the risk to clear their sights, even if Solace’s destruction did some collateral damage of its own.

But Vorx knows all the species of Imperial system-class weapons. He has spent centuries cataloguing them and cross-referencing them. He knows the difference between a shell created on Lucius and one created on Mars. Indeed, he knows the difference between a shell created in the northern-hemisphere macro-factories of Lucius and a shell created in the same world’s slightly less capable southern-hemisphere standard-production forges. He has often found such knowledge useful, for all that younger minds scoff at it, and this situation is no different.

That cannon, he sees by its marks and dimensions, fires rift shells. On impact, rift shells open a short-lived tear into the warp, sending everything within their blast-sphere ripping into immaterialism. It is a horrifying weapon, capable of eating clean through the armoured hide of the greatest of warships, and requires enormous resources to deploy and engage.

But it has its drawbacks. The destruction sphere is massive. Solace is now so close that, if the cannon fired, both ships would be sucked into the resultant vortex and caught up in a mutual embrace of destruction. The conveyer’s true target would thus never be hit, and whatever plan it was intended to achieve would go unexecuted. The Mechanicus would hate that. Right now, Vorx knows they are running every algorithm ever burned onto their systems to extract the weapon from this situation without its loss.

They will not do so for long. Very soon, perhaps even this very second, they will realise that there is no escape from this tangle and that they really need to fire. The order will burn across the command synapses in the conveyer’s heart, damning both ships to oblivion.

So Vorx acts. This momentary hesitation, generated by the tech-priests’ greatest and most excusable failing – pride in their creations – was all he required to get into position.

‘Tox-dump, all vents, full capacity,’ he orders, sending the comm-burst simultaneously to all command nodes with highest priority attached, knowing that the more acute of his section commanders will already have guessed what he has in mind and set things in train.

And they have. Hatches slam back, pipes stiffen into full capacity, blast doors grind open. A thousand orifices across Solace’s underside gape, and the greenish flicker of void shields snatches out.

The ship’s bowels open. The effluent is thick, black, stiff and frothing – a concentrated slurry of everything foul and curdled from the very depths of the warship’s chem-drenched intestines. It is the liquefied bones of strangled Neverborn, the excreta of the apothecarions, the refuse of the bioweapons labs, the run-off from Slert’s crowded experiment tables. For decades it has all stewed in Geller-shrouded containment tanks, fermenting and coagulating and spawning under heat lamps. New things have emerged in that soup of horror – chains of metal-gnawing molecules that copulate madly with strings of flesh-dissolving bacteria. The whole morass is shot through with the daemonic, bound by the warp and coalesced into void-defying globules. When it shoots out like projectile vomit into open space, it does not freeze-dry and explode – it only gushes more strongly, streaming in incontinent torrents in search of firm matter to latch on to.

The impact is horrific – tonnes and tonnes of it in a roaring, bubbling cascade, crashing lumpily into the crackling cannon jaws and flooding down into the chasm beyond, overwhelming and choking, foaming like an incoming riptide. The conveyer’s weakened void shields are smashed aside. The cataracts seethe across every exposed plate. The lightning is drowned, the fires are drowned, all is drowned under that magnificent, stomach-turning payload of ruin.

A purged Solace proceeds on course, stately and unhurried, while the conveyer crumples in on itself, its structure now being eaten alive. There are explosions from deep within as power cables are burned through. It loses trajectory, its acid-pocked prow dipping back towards Agripinaa’s gravity well, and great jets of fire escape from its under-hull. The nova cannon is now a semi-fused hunk of virulent metal, doused in foulness and folding in on itself like paper in a clenched fist. The tox-dump carries on eating, fizzing and consuming and melting, causing fresh explosions to ripple along the intact metalwork.

Vorx watches it die on the rear-facing viewers. There is a pleasing irony in the weapon’s demise, he reflects – the biological gaining revenge on the mechanical. This is the kind of lesson that might be heeded, if only by more imaginative minds.

‘Marvellous,’ he breathes, observing the gathering pace of destruction.

The luxury does not last long. Such flamboyant behaviour provokes a response, and already mainline attack ships are swivelling. Solace may not be the most assuming of vessels, a dreary hunk of grey-green matter amid a fleet of peacocks, but they know what it can do now.

‘Void shields back to full coverage,’ Vorx orders, returning to the throne. ‘Pick up speed. Drop two points towards re-entry.’

He is already thinking again, studying the intricate web of threats and counter-threats. He sees the remnants of the conveyer’s escorts muster for yet another attack run, and their combined danger is considerable. He sees patterns emerge in constellations of larger vessels. The Blood Angels are here, and their strike cruisers are cutting through Kossolax’s formations with impeccable void mastery. The balance of power still remains with the Despoiler’s forces, and it is likely that planetfall will be achieved soon, but nothing is yet written into fate.

Solace is getting battered. The tox-dump trick cannot be pulled again, for the ship’s innards are empty, so the next engagement will have to be of a more conventional kind – standard ranged weapons, boarding actions, the cut of blade and bolter in the dark. Dragan will be happy about that.

Rhoe Twe is working well. They are pulling clear of the wreckage, carving a careful path. Kodad has the broadsides combining effectively. Now it is all about decisiveness, picking the right target.

Vorx sees a ship plummeting fast to meet them from higher up in the sphere, piloted expertly, lean and blunt-edged. Its flanks are near-black grey, limned with silver. It is fresh from a kill of its own, and the straggling remains of a Thousand Sons frigate cling to its thruster trails.

It is on an intercept course. Its flanks are burning, though not with impacts – boarding pods have been launched, and its solid-round batteries are gearing up for a salvo.

For a second, he struggles to place the livery. It is Adeptus Astartes, that is clear, though the names and numbers elude him.

Then he places it.

‘The Iron Shades,’ he says with relish. ‘Come about. That is our target.’

VII: CASTELLANS

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The skies were once slate-grey, made choppy by winds from the Keldar sea and piled with cloud. The rains would be hard and cold, angled steeply and dashed against the dark rocks of a treacherous shore. Birds would wheel in those storms, thrown wildly. Men and women would look up and see the elemental fury of their home, and take quiet satisfaction.

‘This is a violent world,’ they would say. ‘So much the better, for breeding the strong.’

Now the skies have no storms. The grey is gone, replaced by a dull red that strains the eyes and makes the heart beat too fast. The birds do not fly but crouch, bewildered, in their high eyries. The waves beat thickly against the rocks, but no spray flies. All is sluggish now, dark in the lee, glimmering like old oil.

Xydias no longer looks to the coast for inspiration. For years he made his meditations high above the north-facing Delos Gate, feeling the ice-sharp wind against his face. He would watch the physical storm and reflect on the metaphysical storm. None would disturb him in those times, not even a fellow battle-brother. For just a few minutes, immediately before dawn, he was alone with the elements. When the first of the world’s suns rose, sending a long line of silver spreading across the broken horizon, making the wave-tops glint like spear tips, he would close his eyes.

‘As Ultramar, so the galaxy,’ he would say, recounting the last words uttered, reportedly, from the lips of the primarch himself to the first Chapter Master before leaving distant Macragge.

It had always been an ambitious goal, so far from the heart of power. The precise reasons for the exodus were long lost to the vagaries of time, though the intent was never doubted. Close to ten thousand years of service, unbroken, defiant, set right up against the borders of reality. Ultramar would never be remade here, on the fringes of the Eye itself, but a fraction of its resolve persisted, lodged deep. Worlds were raised and kept guarded, populations made orderly. The law came to the Sabatine subsector and was nourished, putting down roots.

Now Xydias only sees the end of that long story. In his darkest moments, he thinks of the line of Chapter Masters engraved on the basalt of the Hall of Honour, flickering by the light of oil-taper candles. He thinks of his own name, Cymar Xydias, the very last. He thinks on the artisans who have chiselled those names, one after the other, centuries apart but linked by that single thread of history.

Mostly, defiance remains. He plans, he makes provision. He ensures that all around him is set right, and that the walls are still guarded. He does not allow doubt to enter his disciplined mind, certainly not despair. He remains, as he has ever been, efficient and active.

But his name has no successors. It remains there, near the base of a single slab of stone, with empty space for more. That empty space is a rebuke. If he allowed it to, it would haunt him.

Xydias strides along the corridor leading from the Gyges Gate towards the inner keep. Dawn is still an hour away, and only the weakest red light bleeds through the narrow windows. It is bitterly cold, though his armour shields him from the worst. He has been armoured, without respite, for months now. All of the remaining garrison have been, by his orders.

He is weary to his core. His hands, locked away in those heavy gauntlets, hang by his side. To remain on his feet, to remain awake and alert – these are challenges now. Perhaps the loss of the Astronomican is part of this. Perhaps they never truly realised just how profound the link was with the beacon, invisible to all but the psykers and the Navigators but somehow sensed. Its removal has done more than cripple shipping and supply routes – it has removed something essential and intangible, the great link to the Throneworld that they all, even the Space Marines, needed to feel.

He must believe, in the absence of any proof, that Terra is still unconquered. He must believe that somewhere, resistance is being mustered.

He reaches the end of the corridor, where the doors stand open. Two guards bow low as he approaches – Chapter serfs in grey carapace armour and blue tabards. They make a decent show of looking alert and their gear is in good condition, but Xydias can see the fatigue in their eyes.

He pauses before crossing the threshold. He looks at them both. ‘Nineteenth Company,’ he says, observing the designations on their breasts and nodding. ‘Rotated back from the Orvian Exterior Line. Well done. Well fought.’

They mumble thanks.

‘The Emperor protects,’ Xydias says.

‘In eternal faith,’ they both reply, making the aquila.

Then he moves on. He would like to spend more time with them, find out more from their own mouths about what they have seen out there, offer words of encouragement that might move beyond platitudes, but there is already so little time, and so many others who deserve his attention. The Praetorian squads have been well trained and well equipped – he must remember to trust what has been done here over the centuries to make these people strong.

He enters a round chamber with slit windows set into the wall at regular intervals. The roof is domed and carries a fresco of the primarch meeting the Emperor on Macragge. A long crack snakes from floor level to the apex, still unrepaired from the bombardment three weeks back. The floor is a dark, polished marble, and around the chamber rim sit columns with assorted battle-honours set within shimmering forcefields – a helm, a gladius, the tattered remnants of an old war-standard.

Atramo is there in his deep-blue Librarian plate, the tallest and broadest of those assembled save Xydias himself. Opposite him is Memnon, Fourth Company captain and the most senior of his surviving officers. Next in the semicircle is Tadacar, Praetorian Castellan-Commander, then cowled Diamada, mistress of astropaths. Memnon’s Chaplain, Kandred, has returned from fighting on the Bulwark Ridge, and his armour is stained dirt-red. The acting master of the fleet, Landion, completes the makeshift command group, and is the most pitiable of all – he has no fleet left to command, just a couple of half-functional monitors at high anchor over the monastery’s spires and what remains of the Chapter’s atmospheric flyers.

‘My brothers,’ Xydias says, directing a perfunctory bow towards the Space Marines, then a brief acknowledgement of the two baseline humans. ‘I will ask you, mistress, the same thing I ask at every dawn.’

Diamada smiles thinly, her eyeless face gaunt under a heavy cowl. ‘And I shall give you the same answer, lord. Nothing but screams.’

Atramo grunts in agreement. He was a sour fellow even before this began. ‘I begin to think this is no fleeting effect. I begin to think this is the way of things now.’

He has been hit hardest of all by the change. The path of the Librarian has always been strenuous, a test for the mind and the soul as much as the body, but now things are excruciating. Xydias has heard the cries of anguish from Atramo’s cell in the deep of the night, and has had to order him to refrain from probing beyond the veil unless in combat – as Diamada says, it is nothing but screams now.

‘The rules are broken,’ Atramo had told him, months ago now, when it all changed. ‘Everything I learned, studied, all gone.’

That much became obvious soon enough. There can be no pretence about the daemonic anymore, for they are seen in every street and over every cathedral, translucent and fighting hard for instantiation. When they make it, ripping themselves through folds in the air and the earth, the killing is unrestrained.

‘And if this is eternal, we adjust to it,’ says Memnon sharply. Those two are wearing at one another like ill-aligned wheels in a machine.

Xydias instinctively sympathises with his captain. Speculation is of no use, and the best must be made of things, but he feels his weakness acutely. The Chapter has been taking damage for a long time. First there was the disaster of the Boros Gate, the catastrophe that destroyed close to five whole companies, half the Chapter’s total. He had not been there, but had ceded operational command, as was the custom, to his counterpart, Chapter Master Titus Valens. Valens died in that bloodbath, replaced by his nominated successor, Ridian Artemanis.

When the call for Cadia came, it was also Artemanis’ place to answer. This was the way of the White Consuls – a Chapter Master to oversee the wars, a Chapter Master to keep the walls. Such a dual arrangement had many strengths, and it had enabled rapid recovery after Boros. As a result the Chapter was able to field ten companies for the grand muster at Cadia, albeit at various levels of readiness for combat, and with the numerically weakest – the Fourth – leaving much of its complement on Sabatine as a skeleton guard force.

Xydias had come close to overriding precedent and demanding to lead the Cadian offensive. Artemanis was in most respects his junior, despite the formal equality of rank, and would surely not have resisted a direct injunction. The burning shame of Boros had played on Xydias’ mind for years, and to lead the Chapter into that greater battle would have been a way of making restitution.

But the power of the law, in the end, was too great. Everything they had built on Sabatine had revolved around the law, both its spirit and its letter. To deny that now, when everything was racing towards oblivion with such terrifying speed, would have been a renunciation of it all.

So he had stayed. He had watched almost the entire Chapter’s total strength make for the void. He had seen the fleet leave, its thrusters glowing white-blue on the run towards the Mandeville points. No one had been in any doubt that the situation at Cadia was critical, and so the bare minimum guard remained in the Sabatine’s great monastery – eighty battle-brothers, thirty of whom had been accelerated from service in the Scouts and twelve who were still in recovery from near-terminal wounds in other battles. Two Castraferrum Dreadnoughts, Brother Argan and Brother Jerimias. Three regiments of Sabatine Praetorians, totalling just under seven thousand troops, only a fifth of that sent with the fleet to Cadia. Auxiliary serfs, militia and standing urban defence forces, plus a token orbital presence.

It had been a great risk. In normal times, such near-complete off-world deployment would never have been undertaken, but all knew the cost should Cadia fall. As a Chapter of the Astartes Praeses, it was the White Consuls’ most solemn duty to ensure that the guard on the Eye of Terror was maintained at all times.

Most solemn duty. Xydias feels the accusation in those three words, and they bear down on him now like a physical burden. In the past, his Chapter guarded an entire realm of far-flung worlds, sending guardians to administer and oversee them. Now they cannot even master their own failing citadel.

‘Report, if you please, castellan-commander,’ he says.

Tadacar clears his throat. ‘Controlled withdrawal from Caldama and Bastion-Tor continues according to schedule. Losses within anticipated parameters, and the garrison at Hartad evacuated almost intact. Last elements of the guard on Orvian are now beyond contact – the Fifteenth Armoured assumed lost. No reports from south of the forty-fifth parallel, all zones there also assumed overrun. Acceptable control maintained across the Three Cities, though reports of incursion increase. Commissars have been stationed at all main gates, as ordered.’

It is a grim tally. Sabatine is an administrative centre, a world studded with dense settlement and straggling urban hinterlands. For millennia it has been as well ordered and as peaceful as any Imperial world could be, but the sudden surge of cult activity, fuelled by the psychological shock of the Astronomican failing, has proved impossible to contain. Once, daemons were just rumours to these people, clamped down on by the priests and Inquisitors. Now all can witness them capering bloodily from spire to spire, grinning through their slaughter, and it has turned the minds of an entire planet.

The rules are broken.

‘In my judgement, the time has come,’ Xydias says. ‘We have responsibilities to this world, but when we can no longer exert control, we must guard our own. The fortress is too vulnerable.’

Atramo nods, but Kandred resists. ‘We can hold the Three Cities,’ he urges. ‘The Imperial Cult retains its strongest hold there. Just three squads would suffice to keep a lid on disorder.’

‘Just three squads,’ says Xydias, amused. ‘From which duties would you pull them, Kandred?’

‘As you said, lord,’ Kandred says, ‘we have responsibilities.’

That is correct, and the reminder makes him wince. The White Consuls have always taken that seriously, nurturing the potential of the millions placed under their watch. Already many citizens have been evacuated inside the monastery’s high walls – senior administrators, military staff, astropaths and priests – but capacity is limited and now the halls are bursting.

‘Your devotion to them is commendable, brother,’ Atramo says, ‘but we cannot disperse our strength any longer. The fortress must be fully guarded.’

‘You have seen what they’re doing to our people out there?’ Kandred asks, a vein of anger in his controlled voice.

‘I have seen it all,’ says Atramo. ‘More, even, than you.’

Xydias is privy to counsel from Atramo that none other hears, and so the words ring both true and chill. Atramo says the warp is now spilling like floodwater over the entirety of the galaxy, drenching the void with its contamination. He says that the stars themselves are in pain, and that the laws of physics are being strained beyond tolerance. No ships cross those treacherous gulfs without taking catastrophic damage, and even the Navigators cannot peer into that morass without losing their minds. No help will come from the void, Atramo says, for the only ones who traverse it now are already damned.

‘I understand the argument,’ says Memnon, as ever in lockstep with his Chaplain, ‘but the tactical squads can be recalled at a moment’s notice. Better to keep them fighting than patrol the walls in idleness.’

‘It will not be idleness for long,’ Atramo says.

‘That is the truth,’ says Diamada, who also experiences the horror more completely than most. ‘Forgive me if this is speaking beyond my station, but you have already done more than duty demands. They are coming now. We all know it – some of us feel it – and survival is the first duty of us all.’

‘The regiments can fight for a few more days,’ Tadacar says. At first, Xydias thinks this is designed to put pressure on his decision, but then realises what he means – they will sacrifice themselves to guard the withdrawal, just as they have been trained to do. That is yet another spike at his soul.

‘There is no escaping it,’ Xydias says. ‘If any of those we sent to Cadia still live, they are far out of range. We cannot even send our gene-banks into the void, such is the peril there. We have done what we can. Now we take to the walls.’

Kandred tries a final time. ‘They are fighting for us, lord. They chant your name, and then they march out to die. We could march beside them, if we chose, for just a little longer.’

Xydias turns to him and sees his scarred face, his dark eyes, his utter commitment. There is no insurrection in those words, just belief. Kandred is an exemplary Chaplain, fuelled by the fire of faith. For a moment, staring into that furnace, Xydias feels his own resolve tested. It has been too long since he took to the outer battlefield himself.

But then the comm-bead at his neck pulses – a priority burst from Gamand, the master of signals. He silently shunts it to his earpiece.

‘Apologies, lord,’ comes Gamand’s crackling voice. ‘Two inbound markers detected, hostile, battlecruiser-class. Arrival within six hours. Orbital protocols – what remain of them – enacted.’

Xydias smiles darkly. At least there are no more choices now.

‘Argument noted, my brother,’ he says to Kandred, thinking of the slab of names and its empty terminus. ‘But we pull back to the walls. The fortress must stand, if all else is lost in darkness.’

He feels the first stirrings of hyperadrenaline – an automatic response, triggered by the very thought of battle.

This is a violent world, he thinks. So much the better for breeding the strong.

Vigilia Carceris, the Guarded Peak, stands alone. The nearest conurbations are several hundred kilometres away, spread out across the fertile lowlands of the Mandau Depression. To the east of the urban zone, the land rises sharply, a folded country of glistening black rock. The only tracks through that hard country are narrow and impassable, except for the mechanised transports of the Chapter and the Praetorians. Eventually, the highlands surge further up into steep-flanked mountains, barred by grey snow and hounded by the salt-thick winds, until that ever-rising country meets the grey press of the wild ocean and drops again precipitously.

At the land’s extreme extent, the Oraun Peninsula thrusts out far into the Keldar Sea, a spar of cliffs and jumbled peaks that soars hundreds of metres above the churning swell. Its sides are as sheer as spear shafts, striated with lines of ice and needled rock pinnacles. The air is thin across that high mass, and no trees grow across the slick-wet stone. This is the landscape used to prove the mettle of aspirants – they are tested against the chill, the weather violence, the driving wind. When the storms break across the cliffs, boiling up out of the endless grey ocean to smash into that spur of stone, it is as if the gods are hurling their fists at it in anger.

The easternmost tip of the Oraun would be a formidable defensive bastion even if no citadel had ever been raised there – a high knuckle of solid bedrock, bordered on three sides by plummets to the white surf, jabbed imperiously out into the storm-surge as a statement of immortal defiance. Over the millennia, though, the natural summit has been moulded and delved and hammered, eventually becoming a home fit for a Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. Its foundations were laid in the immediate aftermath of the Great Scouring, when a bruised and rebuilding Imperium still commanded the secrets of ancient manufacture. The vaults of Vigilia Carceris are cut deep into the naked rock, the walls raised high above it. Its outer curtain traces the lines of the cliffs, creating a bow wave of black adamantium that soars even higher, both proud and austere. Parapets are lined with defence lasers, inside which towers are raised – heavy-set, heavily buttressed, overlooking one another to create close-packed fire-lanes and kill-zones. Gaols, forges and armouries have been carved out in the dripping foundations, until the many chambers run into the hundreds and an entire city emerges within those rock-cradled bastion walls.

A fortress-monastery is a gigantic thing. It houses tens of thousands, from the lowliest servitors to warriors only a step less capable than the Space Marines they serve. Every single battle-brother of the Chapter is enabled by an interlocking web of a hundred attendants, all given their function to ensure that his weapons are blessed, his armour is maintained, his chambers are kept pristine and his rites of devotion are accommodated. Cavernous hangars ring with the constant din of metalwork. Shuttle bays thrum with a ceaseless cycle of landing and launching. Immense reactors buried deep in Sabatine’s crust provide power levels commensurate with a line battleship, driving huge void-shield generators and fixed lascannon batteries. Every surface is engraved with warding sigils against corruption, and every battlement is patrolled by lethal sentinels. Great rockcrete stages stand under the spiked shadow of gun-lines, the largest of which are capable of receiving regimental landers. Thunderhawks prowl like carrion crows above the high gates, arched and studded in the gothic template so familiar across the sprawling territories of the Throne.

Vigilia Carceris has stood unbroken against every assault ever sent from the Eye’s edge. Aspirants from the Sabatine protectorate worlds have been taken up inside its walls for millennia, a ceaseless supply of new blood for the Chapter’s never-ending wars, only to emerge again on white ships to sail the unquiet tides of the restless void.

Now that movement is stilled. A few stragglers from its retreating armies race under the cover of the guns, trailing smog behind overworked turbines. Klaxons blare across the narrow courtyards, sending even the mute servitors trundling for cover. Searchlights scan and pool across the high towers, and void shields burst into gauzy hemispheres over the spire summits. The seas are no longer slate-grey, but red like a burst artery, and the crash of waves has been replaced by the echoing song of half-born daemons. The western horizons are burning, marked by the battles along the perimeter of the Three Cities that cannot be won, for Chaos has come to this world, unbound and infinite, and the tide of it now only flows one way.

Soon the heavens are scored, scraped by long trails of fire. The clouds above the citadel flash wildly, lit from beyond. Comet trails sear down from the hidden heights, plunging through thunderheads to crash into distant seas. This is orbital wreckage – Sabatine’s shattered defence satellites, plus the remains of the enemy vessels they took down before their destruction. In normal times, that grid would have been bolstered by hundreds of capable ships, and in their absence the token defences are taking a battering.

It only takes a few hours before ordnance is scything through the flame-wreathed heavens – orbital lasers hurled from the undersides of great battleships, lime-green and forge-red. The beams smack into the hard ground and splinter from the cliffsides. Plumes of steam boil up from the shoreline, growing greater as yet more las-strikes rain down.

The rain becomes a deluge, a single massive column of coruscation that zips and roars, crashing over the void shields and spraying madly. Vigilia Carceris is lost behind a wall of fire, a thumping curtain that sends rock shards bouncing and foundations shaking. The fortress lets loose with its own defence lasers, and the inferno ramps up further. The air shakes with heat. The rocks begin to glow.

This is the opening salvo, the softening-up. While the guns of the citadel are fully occupied, their operators’ zoom-sights blazing with light and their shield generators shrieking with overload, the twin battleships are emptying out somewhere up above, their hangars streaming with lines of attack ships, their drop-pod bays ejecting, their launch tunnels hurling landers along the rails and swinging out into the las-crossed void.

Some landers are taken out by the remaining orbital defences, blasted apart before they can duck into re-entry. Other vessels remain in the low-void layer, going after those scraps of satellites and defence platforms in a hammer-rain of hard-round fire. Most, though, shoot straight down planetwards, spiralling through hails of beam-shards, kindling re-entry fires of their own before they smash into the up-racing world.

As they emerge below the cloud layer, punching like bullets out into open air, gunners on the citadel walls unleash their first defensive volleys. Many incoming landers streak down far outside the guns’ effective range, but a few foolhardy or misaimed pods stray into the kill-zone and are blasted apart. The Oraun highlands are soon showered in blown ironwork, still burning from the descent, tumbling at high speed across the stone.

The citadel is now shrouded in flame, doused in a void-hurled column that spits and smashes, turning the void shields white-hot and pushing them concave. The gouts of steam grow and merge and hiss up from the seas below, rearing high above the parapets. Return fire is overwhelmed, damped down by the volume of incoming ordnance from above.

This gives greater cover to the landers, which are now falling freely across the peninsula. Drop pods slam down, throwing up smashed boulder fragments on impact. The doors cantilever open, thudding hard, and troops lumber out carrying bolters and flamers. Larger pods make planetfall next, spewing forth the striding machine mountains of Helbrutes and other stalking, roaring, half-mechanical horrors. The biggest units, crowned with brass death-heads and embossed armour-plate, hit the earth in clouds of thrown smoke and grit. When their great doors swing open, corrupted tanks rumble down the ramps, rocking as their studded tracks grind against the crust of a new world to slaughter. Some of these are looted Astra Militarum vehicles, their armour marked with the octed and the sign of the god and crewed by spine-clamped, limb-locked cultists. Others are the preserve of the Legions – Rhino transports in crimson livery and flaming braziers, or daemon-bound crawlers with hunched spines and rust-streaked dozer blades.

The pace of planetfall rises exponentially. Out of range of all but the largest of the citadel’s land guns, truly massive carriers wallow down, their thruster arrays kicking out columns of sooty flame. When their hatches crack open and the embarkation ramps telescope out, whole hordes of the lost and the damned charge out into the open. They are clad in scraps and armour fragments, snatches of Imperial military garb and rags from the bilges of Traitor warships. Some have no eyes, some obscenely bulging torsos. Those from the Word Bearers conveyers are cut and tattooed and marked with the ritual favour sigils of all four gods; those from the lumpen hulls of Death Guard landers limp more slowly, dragging club feet through the smouldering dust. They grin as they advance, hoisting hook-spears and stubber guns. They can’t help grinning. All they do, all the time, those half-dead sloggers, is grin.

The impacts keep on coming. Yet greater transports thunder earthwards, many hit hard on the descent but able to absorb the strikes. They disgorge heavy artillery – daemon engines with towers of bronze that hiss with steam, malice and agony. The dust and flame mingle, swirling, making their outlines hazy. Eye-lenses glow in the miasma, and released bloat-drones wobble through the murk, lone seeker-lenses already whirring and loft-turbines buzzing.

The tank squadrons grind ahead, angling long barrels to aim at the battlements. The outermost walls of Vigilia Carceris are already lost in a shaking gauze of heat and kicked-up dust, but their size is still apparent – a mountain of smooth dark adamantium, solid amid the hammering inferno. Artillery units grind into position, hauled by chain gangs and slavering mutant ogryns. Pot-bellied mortar cauldrons are stoked for their ignition spikes, lined up in long ranks.

The ground is breaking up, split by the weight of treads and hooves. Flying debris joins the steam and dust, mixing into a maelstrom that clogs lenses and silts up viewfinders. It is not just the physical that suffers, for the weft between worlds has already been ripped by Abaddon’s Rift, and it only takes this incipient violence, this mustering of energetic hatred, to yank it aside completely.

So the daemons come, spilling out of fleet drop-ships or jerking into reality from the curdled air. Little Lords bounce and wriggle, shrieking with high-pitched glee even as they are trodden on by the advancing Unbroken kill-squads. Slack-bellied plaguebearers lurch out of the brume, swarming with bloatflies and dripping with butter-yellow bile. Other summoned horrors slide and jump in the broken light, creatures with bloody horned faces or stretched, bestial limbs. A stench rolls ahead of them, one that catches in the throat and chokes with vomit. The cultists scream and go mad, running wildly from a mix of terror and elation. The noise is deafening, swollen by the engines and the war cries and the massed trample of armoured boots.

For a moment, a gust of the world’s stormwind briefly pulls the walls of flame and dirt aside, and a glimpse of the citadel flashes before them all, gaunt and ravaged and burned down to black. Faint lights shine along the parapets, and banners snap in the skirling tornado. The void shields are still in place, a ceiling of reactor-fed energy that resists the orbital barrage and sends it rolling in cataracts down the far cliff edges. There are walls within walls, towers ranked atop towers, all crammed with guns and defenders and the stubborn pride of an Astartes Praeses Chapter. An aquila can be seen, etched in royal blue on a white ground.

Then it is gone, blotted out, just another burning mountain amid the murk. The guns roll, the tanks drag, the ranks of Traitor Space Marines begin the long haul under scything lines of fire. They are hungry, they are famished, and the feast has only just begun.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Time has already run out. Dragan is impatient, primed for battle, and yet still Solace imprisons him. He strides down the dark ways, his shoulderguards scratching against the overhanging roofs, hunting.

This far down, things would normally be crowded. Multitudes live down here, whole spawn families of the Unchanged, eking out meagre snatches of existence in the stink and the cold. He used to come down here with Slert, who liked these places, and they would explore the farthest reaches together.

‘This is where I do my best work,’ the Putrifier had always said, grinning in the gloom. ‘These people. Incubators, all of them.’

Dragan is moving faster now. The empty halls echo from the wet tread of his boots, for the inhabitants have been herded into landers and sent down to the surface. Some will not survive the journey. Many more will die before they get anywhere close to the walls, but they will each absorb a round or two before they do. That is the calculus in these things – a single round, manufactured at cost to the enemy, is of greater value than a human life, created without thought within a fertile sump of pointlessness. Dragan wonders if Vorx approves of that exchange, or whether all that cant about the god and their high purpose is just so much bilge fodder when the necessities of battle call.

The signs are here, now. There is fresh blood on the walls, black and glimmering under the sweep of his helm lumens. He can smell the beginnings of the spoor – machine oils fused with the over-sweet stink of mutation. An hour ago he heard noises too. Big, echoing bangs, like iron beams being slammed into unyielding decking.

This is another insult, this errand. A part of him almost refused, but to make the challenge now, at this juncture, feels wrong. There is already too much in motion, too many things he doesn’t understand. There can be no argument with this battle, and so the only objective remaining is to play his part in it, to win glory in the eyes of the Unbroken who are yet unpersuaded by his talents. That is the truest course, the patient one. Those who doubt him doubt his impetuosity, so he must demonstrate his ability to play the long game too.

The smell grows stronger. The copper taint of new slaying becomes intense. The bulkheads around him are slippery with fear. Dragan guesses that even before the Unchanged were rounded up and sent stumbling into their transports, they avoided this place. There are many monsters in the dark and the deep, but some are worse than others.

He feels his knives slide against the puffy flesh of his killing hand. He does not draw his pistol with the other one – such a weapon is of little use here – but he goes more warily, sensing closeness. These are gaping places, chambers that swell and resound, their ceilings lost in fly-thick clouds, their floors knee-deep in oily water.

One day, he will understand the need for this grime and gunge. He will revel in it and see it as a badge of identity. He remembers what Typhus told him on the Terminus Est.

He never let us clean the filth from our armour. Over time, we stopped wanting to.

That must be how it begins. First you ignore it. Then you accept it. Then, finally, you are defined by it.

He hears a sound – a faint hurr-hurr, sunk down, hissed through such clogged oxygen arteries that respiration must surely be an impressive achievement.

Dragan halts, taut as a hamstring, looking into the wall of darkness.

‘Unsleeping,’ he calls out, and the word echoes from the columns and the vaults around him.

For a long moment, punctuated only by the heavy drum of his heartbeats, nothing.

Then, far off, at the end of this great hall, something moves. It is bigger – far bigger – than it ought to be, even for one of its cursed kind. Solace is a fecund place, stuffed with rotting meats and nutrient-rich fluids, its airways viscous with the changing harmonics of the daemonic. All things grow here, sucking in the fungoid and the decaying, slowly becoming just another tumour on the face of this withered ship-corpse.

The thing moves, shifting one massive leg, and Dragan sees the expanse of dark-grey flesh spilling over the joints and cables. There is more of it than there was, the last time. Every time it grows a little more.

A pair of tiny eyes blink. Those eyes are the worst thing, sunk within a harrowed face, almost entirely lost behind a nest of rusted cabling. They are red, wholly bloodshot, with matte-black irises. They do not focus well. They seem almost independent of one another, as if the mind controlling them has begun to lose the last grips of control.

‘I do not… know you,’ comes a voice from the gloom, high up, muffled by matted gunk over its gigantic vox-emitters.

‘You do, Naum,’ says Dragan, holding his ground. It is rare that he is dwarfed by anything, but this mass of twisted organics and galaxy-old ceramite has become bloated beyond any reason, towering, thrust out, as misshapen and ill made as an infant’s first scratchings at construction. ‘We fought together. Remember? On Erveb?’

The eyes blink. Tears run down from them, pale and twinkling in the faint lumen-flash. The creature shifts on its centre of gravity, a fraction of movement that makes pistons sigh, and more of its face emerges into Dragan’s helm-beam.

Naum’s face structure is much as it must have been ten thousand years ago. The bone is visible in places where the last of the skin has flaked off, but there are sinews and gristle still clinging on, gilding the profile with a faint vestige of old humanity. On an Imperial walker-sarcophagus, that face would have been locked away, shielded by a frontal plate, as if embarrassed by the things they do to their fallen. Here, the faces are kept proudly on display, surrounded by a high collar and disfigured by the random insertion of gurgling pipework. All that remains of Naum of Barbarus cannot be forgotten, but becomes a badge of failure to look out once more on the battlefield.

‘Erveb,’ Naum hisses. His voice is very soft, very deep, generated in worn-out boxes slung somewhere in that cavernous chest cavity and piped through clogged speaker-maws. ‘No. Hungry.’

He takes another step, a single heaving, hesitant step, and it is as if the entire wall before Dragan has detached and come swinging for him.

‘We are above another world,’ Dragan says, avoiding the urge to speak faster. Naum will not be seeing any of this as he sees it. Even Vorx, his mind rotted by devotion, sees the world of the physical with more clarity than this one.

Naum blinks again. Lines of dry brown staining run down his chin, and there is a stray human finger there, dangling from his collar on a last thread of sinew.

‘Am I asleep?’ Naum asks.

‘You know the answer to that,’ says Dragan patiently.

This wretch ought to be asleep. All of his kind ought to be chained down, locked away, dosed with soporifics and dream suppressants, only roused when their prodigious killing power is required. Others of his order do as they are supposed to, staving off complete madness through the blissful imposition of tranquillisation and only having to contend with the horror of living for those few brief hours of bloodletting.

But Naum does not sleep. Something went wrong with him, and now he cannot. He has been awake for a long time – for more than nine thousand years, so they say. Given that, the fact that he can speak at all is something of a miracle. One sent from the god, no doubt.

‘Eat… you?’ Naum says, licking bony lips with a black tongue. Dragan can see that he has been weeping a lot.

‘Make planetfall here, Naum,’ Dragan says calmly. ‘The casket is waiting. Then you can eat all you like.’

For a moment, Naum does not respond. He does not understand. His colossal body, with its growths and its metal struts and its swollen armour plates, shifts uneasily. Dragan wonders what on earth he must be experiencing. Existence on this ship is already like a dream, or a nightmare – for Naum, the boundary between states has long since ceased to exist. All that remains is a fog of pain, of sensations he no longer has names for. He is not visibly enraged and psychotic, as a Helbrute of Kharnath might be, only… obstinate.

‘Eat… them,’ Naum says at last, seeming to grasp something.

‘Yes. As many as you like,’ says Dragan again, feeling like a barrier has been broken.

There is endurance, that is known. Some feats within this Legion make the mind turn, some expressions of that old capacity for resilience, but for this – this – there are no words. Not that Dragan knows, anyway. What is left in there to endure? What remnant of an old willpower still burns away, refusing the siren embrace of complete insanity?

Condensation runs down Naum’s outer shell. In the dark, he flexes power claws bigger than Dragan’s whole body. Ancient bone shards click, rotting flay-skirts rustle. The eyes blink, once, twice, squeezing tears down wrinkled, ash-dry flesh.

Then the black gums are exposed – something like a smile, or the dream image of one, semi-remembered and blurred by the fog of being.

‘Show me,’ he says.

Night comes to Sabatine. This is the darkness of battle-smog and burning wreckage, the palls over vehicle carcasses and gun emplacements, and it smothers the skies and engulfs the land.

Slert is there, along with his six battle squads of Unbroken and hundreds of Unchanged. The entire plain ahead of him is crawling – infantry masses and tank columns, grinding and yammering under the flickering flame cover. It is hard to gauge numbers in the gloom and the movement, but there must be many tens of thousands of troops now engaged or moving to engage. Solace has landed almost all its Unbroken, committing close to six hundred to the battlefield. The Ayamandar has landed, if anything, more, and the Word Bearers terror troops stalk through the drifting smog like dark-crimson revenants.

The citadel has two land-facing gates, both encrusted with lascannons and overhung with defensive strongpoints. The Word Bearers are pushing towards the far gate on the northern flank of the battlefield, driving their armies of cultists straight into the fire-lanes. It’s brutal work, and they’re losing hundreds, but the gap is closing, and now the mobile armour is beginning to find its mark.

The orbital barrage has slowed now, cutting out as the invaders close in around the citadel in a huge swathe. It is replaced by a more targeted pattern of ranged fire – thumping volleys from the landed artillery lines and the first strafing runs from the atmospheric gunships. The enemy has its own flyers, but these are kept close to the citadel’s protective las-cover, hovering virtually under the eaves of the towers within. The exchange of solid-round fire is blistering, carving tracer-lines through the hot dark and lighting up the parapets in flashes of impact.

‘By the god, they’re weak now,’ comes a familiar voice at Slert’s shoulder.

He turns to see Garstag stomping up behind him, kitted out for the siege warfare to come. He carries his chainsword two-handed, and his lenses flare a soft pale green in the murk. Three Little Lords cling one-handed to his pauldrons, swinging happily as the Kardainn-master swaggers.

‘They don’t have the guns to clear the plain,’ Garstag spits contemptuously. ‘Those walls won’t hold long either.’

Slert shrugs, just as another arc of stone-eater artillery screams overhead to smash into the parapets beyond. ‘Maybe, maybe,’ he says. ‘Stronger than they look, I would suppose. So are you here to grumble, Garstag, or to get that blade wet?’

Garstag growls. He does not have much of a sense of humour. ‘Just get me inside.’

Slert goes back to what he was doing. His position is a few hundred metres back from the southern gate’s causeway, and the terrain in-between is now seething with marching plaguewalkers. Few Unbroken march with them, for the rate of attrition from the wall-mounted gunnery is brutal. Even the Death Guard tanks are holding back, though the largest of the superheavies are beginning to find ways to blast holes in the parapets.

Slert’s position is behind a cluster of jutting rocks, out of the most direct lines of fire but well within striking distance of the walls. The vantage is boiling with activity – gangs of servitors and cultists from Solace, toiling away with hulking equipment brought down by drop-ships. Vats have been dragged into place and are now chained together by tangled lengths of cabling. Most of the illumination comes from the dirty panes of armourglass – lime-green and fervid orange, sweltering within the rusted-together tanks. Plumes of backlit steam gust from the seals, dribbling virulent toxins from every valve. These are big containers – the largest nearly the size of a Knight walker – and the servitor crews tending them are hundreds strong.

Slert looks it all over. It has taken a long time to assemble under constant fire, and six feeder tanks were lost on the way down. It would be good to have more time, a little more space. It would always be good to have more time.

‘Enact it, then,’ he says grudgingly. ‘Let’s see what this world is made of.’

The order gets barked down the line. Unbroken guards shuffle back, shoving aside the dumb clusters of servitors. A plaguebearer daemon, seemingly lost, shambles past, limping awkwardly as it blunders out in search of prey.

Levers are thrown, dials are spun, great wheels are hauled by teams of bloat-bellied plague ogryns, and the whole chained-together contraption clangs like a hollow bell. Witchlight belches from the exhausts, followed by inky spurts of foul oil. Clattering generators rattle into life, and the boom, boom, boom of industrial pumps makes the ground drum.

There’s a cough, a scrape, and then the tubes slam taut. Noxious fluids burst down feeder lines, snaking through a dozen connectors before reaching hydrant mouths and bursting out in a foaming torrent.

Some of Slert’s attendants are too slow and get caught up in the deluge. The screams are short-lived, their bodies dissolved down to the bone in moments. This is more than acid. This is one of Slert’s special brews, one of his matter-eating broths that just keeps on chewing. It swills out across the cracked and broken terrain, gallons and gallons of it, and the stone splinters and squeals. Steam shrieks up, violent and outraged, as the broth pours down channels and burns its way in further.

This is burrowflay, or rotrock, or matterchew, a species of daemonic solvent with only a little less than half a mind of its own. Once released, it will worm and wriggle its way into any weak point it finds, prising it and thinning it and rendering solid matter down to a gunge of semi-warp-shifted molecules. Already it has gouged a smoking well into the landscape ahead of them, and it is carrying on, sliding down under the crust and into the veins of stone beneath. The clouds of green steam billow, and the landscape reels.

Slert nods towards the Unbroken under his command, and they trudge after the retreating tide, splashing through the scummy liquid as it boils and chunters. How does this substance gnaw through solid rock and yet leave ceramite alone? How does it know where to swirl and where to slither away from? How can it understand where Slert wishes it to go and do as he bids? Just one of the wonders of the empyrean, the great benisons of enchantment. All things are possible with the god if one is willing to suffer in order to learn, and Slert has suffered so very greatly to gain this knowledge.

His warriors have turbo-drills and macro-hammers. Some have great encrusted shields for warding the worst of the slop, and others haul tracked earthworkers and delving claws. In their wake come servitors with bracing rods and scaffolds, and slave gangs dragging lumen cables. Where the burrowflay chews they pile in, descending quickly until their shoulders are soon at ground level and falling fast. They wade through the dissolving earth, carving out the tunnels that are already bending towards the distant citadel walls. Soon they will be underground entirely, shielded from the enemy’s guns and following a subterranean path that will claw the very foundations of the walls from under their feet.

Garstag grunts again. This is the closest he will ever get to issuing a compliment.

‘How long?’ he asks.

Slert watches carefully. He has taken great care with the mix, and there are still things that can go wrong. But it is working thus far. Working well.

‘Leave the gates to the fanatics,’ he says carefully, trying not to sound smug. ‘You’ll be inside that place within the hour.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Vorx is walking towards the hangars. A Little Lord, the one he brought to Philemon to recover, waddles along beside him. Out of courtesy, Vorx slows his pace, allowing the puffing creature to accompany him to the Thunderhawk.

Hololiths glimmer around him, glowing like traces of a ghostly spider’s web. They show runes and trajectories and damage reports. They overlap, they shift and slide, and he absorbs them all. Nearly all of his forces are on the surface now, squeezing the citadel hard. He sees the vectors of his Legion’s few flyers as they pummel the outer walls. He sees the progress of tank groups, laying low the first level of defences before creeping forward. He watches the kill tallies click over and notes the names of his warriors who die. Lists will be drawn up when this is all over.

The fighting has begun in earnest now. Breaches have been blasted into those ramparts, holes through which the twin Legions pour. The volume of cultist troops is enormous, and daemons come with them. Having overseen the assault plans, he must join them now. He must tear himself away from the ledgers and the scan-logs, and breathe the fyceline-acrid air of another world.

He sees Philemon at the end of the corridor. The Tallyman has Little Lords clustered all over him, clinging to his armour and his quills and his strings of counter beads. Philemon looks flustered. He has had much to put in place for this assault, and only now will he join it.

‘Enjoy this, brother,’ Vorx says. Together they walk on down the corridor, surrounded by a scuttling mass of tiny bodies. ‘You wished for hunting – now you have it.’

‘It was a warp kick,’ Philemon says, pulling at the hem of his cowl. ‘Something got into the pulse-lines, an overload somewhere. We could have been atomised. We could have gone into full-shift, and now we’d be soul-food for the Neverborn. We were in a gravity well. By the god. I still do not understand it.’

‘You are not an engineer, Tallyman,’ Vorx says. ‘And now we are fighting. It can wait.’

Philemon remains agitated. ‘You know why they did it. You know why. They wanted us blown so far off course we couldn’t follow the order.’

‘A dangerous way to achieve that goal.’

‘This is serious.’ A Little Lord reaches up to Philemon’s chin, and the Tallyman, uncharacteristically, slaps it away. ‘We were fighting then too. We were all engaged. And someone knew – they knew that the beacon would be gone and that we’d have to claw our way blind through the void. Who would know that, Vorx? What conversations were had before we left for Agripinaa?’

‘You tell me, brother. Did you ask your daemon?’

‘I plucked some more feathers. There’s a shroud over this. We should be halfway to Ultramar by now.’

Vorx looks at him as they walk. He wonders why the Tallyman is so discomfited. ‘There would be better ways to achieve that goal,’ he says. ‘Less dangerous ones. I think someone made a mistake.’

‘Garstag was seen in the enginarium,’ Philemon says. ‘We looked into the Cultivator’s memories, Countquick and I. Garstag was down there. Why was he there? What business has the Kardainn-master in the engines?’

‘Garstag?’

‘What business, eh?’

Vorx wonders if this is just combat stimms. Their bodies are not what they were centuries ago. Every engagement erodes them a little more. Their blood roars through weaker veins and seeps out into slacker muscles. Maybe Philemon is feeling it.

‘Garstag knows nothing about warp drives,’ he says.

Philemon snorts. ‘You’re blind, Vorx. I have already told you, and you do not listen. We are a long way from your protector, and the longer we linger here, the worse it will get.’

Vorx halts. ‘Do you really think I am blind, Philemon?’ he asks gently. ‘Do you think I have done nothing, knowing what is whispered? Calm yourself. I have done as you recommended. We are at war again now, just as you counselled, and we will win this one handsomely.’

‘Your allies will betray you,’ Philemon says. Vorx almost punches him. ‘They have deployed seven hundred and forty-three warriors to our six hundred and twenty-one. They have thirty-four thousand, five hundred and sixty-seven troops drawn from their bonded slave caste and command the allegiance, currently, of a hundred and twenty-eight daemonic creatures. They have fifty-six major armour pieces and–’

‘I, also, have done the sums.’

‘The warp is thinning over that citadel,’ says Philemon. ‘Countquick tells me something big waits on the other side, and it will not be friendly to us. You know these people – you know why they desire a world like this. Just one sacrifice, one big drawing of blood, and they will have all the power they could ever command.’ He is becoming exasperated. ‘This is what they do.’

‘My friend,’ says Vorx, and means it, for they are friends, after a fashion, ‘our task is to take this world and give honour to the faith. That is my only intention. Your concerns are noted, though your intimation that I am ignorant of the dangers is unwelcome. All is as it should be. Now, I wish you to add your blades to the others. I have only one specific command – otherwise, you may slay where you will.’

Philemon looks up at him. Doubt clouds his face. Unlike most of them, Philemon still has the lingering traces of human features and mannerisms, and does not spend his life masked behind a decaying helm-face. ‘Anything,’ he says.

‘They will fight hard, at the end. I would not wish for… one of us to take the credit for a successful outcome. You must detain him, Philemon. Wrap him up in fighting. I know you know how to do it.’

Philemon looks at him doubtfully. ‘Is that not dangerous?’

‘Only for the enemy.’ Vorx smiles under his rotting mask. ‘Kledo has orders to find the master of the city. When he does, I must be at his shoulder, ready to claim the kill.’ He places his gauntlet on Philemon’s shoulder and feels the mass of boils and pustules blistering under the hard surface. ‘Try not to worry. All have roles, all have purposes. Even now, the matter unfolds according to the god’s grand design. Sooner or later, this will become apparent to all of us. Even the lowliest.’

Dantine has fought on many worlds before, but not like this. He has gone into battle with a lasgun in his hands and a burning horizon ahead, but not like this.

A part of him thought that he might be left behind on the ship, and so he curled up in his cell, alone, hoping to be forgotten. He knows that it was his soul-trail that brought them here. His life on Sabatine as a lieutenant in the Astra Militarum left its trace on the warp, just as all life leaves its trace there. Perhaps his valour even made its mark, his capacity for bravery among squads of loyal men and women. But it is likely that the other thing made a greater impression – the shame of his demotion, betrayal, discovery. The warp, Dantine thinks, seems to absorb the darker sides of human nature more readily than the lighter. It is a sink for the emotions but drinks more readily of baser instincts.

Nothing he ever did in the past, however, compares to this. He was taken alive on Najan. He was made into a tool for the monsters. And now he has led them here, to the world of his birth, where they will destroy it all. His name is all over it. If any annals are ever written of this sordid episode, somewhere, in some footnote or cross-reference, it will be said that Captain Dantine, the weak, the traitorous, was the cause of it all. It matters not that he intended none of it. It matters not that he had no choice. Choice, intent, weakness – these are things to be despised, says the Inquisition. Only outcomes matter. Only orders followed or objectives achieved.

They came for him near the end of the muster. Vorx must have sent them, he thinks – two of his Unbroken, foul-smelling, with seeping eye-lenses and fungus-brown armour. He could not resist, of course, and was dragged from his cot and thrown into a shuttle bay with hundreds of other Unchanged. Somehow he found himself with a rusty lasgun in his hands – an ancient marque, more like a flintlock than a serious weapon, its powerpack already half-depleted and leaking acid.

On the descent, he reflected on the use of the word ‘unchanged’ for those human slaves the Death Guard employ. It is a strange name, for they have all been changed in many ways. Some of that is physical – they carry sores and boils and infections beyond count. Most are dying of something or other, although few seem to mind that, or even notice it. Some of their slavery, then, must be mental too. They cough up blood, and then grin. They wheeze and gasp and clutch at their throats, but no word of complaint passes their scabrous lips. Some are little more than imbeciles, the ones that grin all the time and seem like flesh puppets, but others retain at least some faculties. These are the ones that man the crew stations, that aim the ship’s great guns, that pilot the shuttles and refuel the landers. They are mad, by Imperial standards, but not insensible.

Then again, as Vorx told him, what is sane about anything in this galaxy? What is the greater madness, to be sick and happy or healthy and desperate?

Such blasphemy, he thinks. How swiftly I have fallen.

After making planetfall, he finds himself jostled towards the front line along with the others. There are no orders, no ranks, just a stumbling, headlong race. He struggles to breathe, to keep his feet. His chest hurts, his hands ache. He barely recognises the world he once served on – it smells foul, corrupted. The ground is hot from the massed orbital lasers. It is pitch-dark, and the flashes of the explosions do little other than disorientate him, so he just stumbles with the rest of them.

Only slowly, after a long march, does he get some sense of where he is. Great las-beams smash through the press around him, immolating those in their path. Shells land in the crowds, blowing the invaders into tatters of flying flesh scraps, and no one stops moving. He sees the pale lenses of his tormentors in the gloom, but they are far away, herding them like cattle. In the distance, somehow, over the crash and boom of ordnance, he can hear agonised cries and chanting in harsh tongues.

Then he sees walls above him and realises how far he has come. The battlements are already ruined, their summits lying in a sawtooth slump of rubble. Bodies are piled up, absurd amounts of bodies, and they create a haphazard ramp up to the breach. Las-beams fly around him, making the air fizz, yet none touch him. The toothless wretch on his left side is hit by an explosive bolt and flies backwards into the dark. Another takes his place, and they keep climbing. He glimpses the great dark hulls of tanks crunching across fields of corpses, lights flaring, engines revving.

Everything is blurred, everything is moving. He is not afraid. He feels cold, always cold, and guesses that is because Vorx is far away.

He reaches a crown of buried corpses and smouldering wreckage, and spies the enemy for the first time. They are crouched in their positions on the inner rampart edge, holding the line, firing methodically and well. In the dark, he recognises the colours he used to wear – grey and blue – and sees the charred remains of battle-standards snapping crazily in the crosswinds.

Somehow he has made it to the front line. The other bodies move jerkily, caught in a freeze-frame. The Unbroken, masked by the hordes of stumblers, are fighting their way inside the citadel, grinding towards the interior where the towers rise and the searchlights whirl. Mobile armour comes with them, smashing through half-demolished walls, barrels swivelling. Overhead, gunships hover on heat haze that makes the air shake, emptying magazines into far-off targets.

He has not yet fired his weapon. He feels like a spare part, a piece of driftwood thrown up on a dark tide. The air fills with more las-fire, vivid and searing, and it makes his eyes water. He stumbles, falling to his knees on a pile of powderised stonework. Before he knows it, he’s falling, tumbling down the far side of a long heap. When he regains his feet, he has slipped far, down into the citadel’s grounds, and can see the enemy on either side of him, much closer now.

From somewhere, a desperate hope suddenly kindles. He holds his gun up, holds his other hand up, and staggers towards the nearest barricade.

‘Do not… fire!’ he croaks. ‘I can… fight with you.’

This is the only way out. One last time, fighting with those he has doomed. If he kills one of the monsters this way, just one of them, that would be something.

He gets closer and can see the glint of grey helms over the heaps of rubble.

‘Let me…’ he shouts.

The first shot hits him in the shoulder, throwing him back. The beam slices straight through, punching the mesh of his uniform and fizzling out the other side. He reels and drops to one knee. Then another one hits him, slapping into his chest and hurling him onto his back.

It doesn’t hurt. It is just cold. He feels a trickle of blood in both wounds, but it is black and stinking.

He rolls over, coating himself in mud. Both those wounds should have been fatal, but he is still breathing. He tries to lift himself, and his arm gives out. He collapses back to earth, and his face hovers for a moment over an oily puddle.

There is a flash in the skies – some starburst of munitions going off – and for a fraction of a second he catches his reflection in the water.

No wonder they fired. He barely looks human. His eyes are bulging, his cheeks hollow. His old uniform is just rags now, exposing a horrifying body – jutting ribs, swathes of bile-greased fat. He has no teeth – when did he lose those? – just an empty mouth that runs with bloody saliva. He has no hair, and the skin on his scalp is flaking off, uncovering the skull beneath.

He hangs there for a moment, over the water, staring. If he still had a heart, it would be hammering. His fists clench, dragging through the bloody gravel. He wants to scream, but he has already done so much of that.

This is how I look to them.

And he finds then that he cannot even remember what he looked like before.

He gets up. He is panting, but not from exertion. He is still cold, but there is something else inside him now. He is confused. He might be… angry.

He swings round, back towards the barricades. From behind him, he can hear others sliding and stumbling down the long slope. His people. His people.

He opens fire. The lasgun whines, sending the first shot into the night. Then he fires again and starts to walk. Soon he is joined by the others, and they advance in something like formation. The fires roar overhead. Smoke tumbles across the cityscape, and it coils around his boots.

He will be at the barricade soon. He will be unstoppable when he gets there. He feels a spark of pleasure in that. He guesses he ought not to but can no longer remember why.

He fires, and fires again.

Dantine has fought on many worlds before, but not like this. It is better this way, though, he thinks. It is something he could learn to like.

The charges blow, demolishing the entire tunnel wall ahead of them. Garstag is running before the last of them ignites, his huge body hurtling into the flying debris.

For the most part, Garstag moves slowly, but when he has to, when the old rages are stoked again, he can still generate frightening momentum. His chainsword swings, batting aside falling rock, and he barges through the rest of it, shouldering aside tottering pillars and wheeling around to find a target.

The rest of the Kardainn come behind him, cutting and blasting. Slert’s Unbroken are still working the turbo-hammers, enlarging the breach and securing its edges against collapse. It already stinks in here, the spoor they brought with them caking the fire-heated stonework, the foetid air spilling up into sterile chambers.

Garstag powers upwards, smashing aside the damaged remains of a doorway and crashing into a vaulted hall beyond.

They are waiting. Alarms sound, tinny and shrill, and whirling warning lumens make everything bloody. The las-fire is not as it was on Najan – it is precise, directed, massed on single points. Garstag runs right into it, his body taking the hits. His battle-brothers are close on his heels, and they wade into the fight, building up the swing of their scythes.

Garstag says nothing. He pants, he grunts, he works the gunning blades, but no words pass his lips. He can hear the enemy shouting to one another – orders, warnings, even that stale old injunction ‘For the Emperor!’ It seems to help them. Garstag has never uttered a war cry, not even when he fought in the Barbaran Legion and these divisions had not yet emerged. Like all his Legion, he enters combat in silence, letting his work speak for him. To invoke another, even the primarch, would be to admit weakness, a lack of self-sufficiency, to open the suspicion that there is luck or favour involved in these things.

He shrugs off more hits and lumbers towards the first barricade. They have barred the width of this chamber halfway along its length – dozens of them, all armoured, holding their ground and keeping discipline. He finds himself admiring that even as he crunches through the first barrier and starts his chainblade whirling again.

Behind him, he can hear more invaders pouring up through the breach, their armour steaming from the last dregs of Slert’s broth. Bolt-shells crack out, spinning into battleplate and exploding, throwing bodies aside. The first tang of blood enters the melange of aromas, and it spikes Garstag’s battle-mood further.

It takes him a moment to realise that not all the bolt-shells are coming from the Unbroken. The chamber is dark, already filling with smoke, and he almost misses the faint flash of white-and-blue power armour.

They are high up, the Corpse-spawn, in a gallery level that runs around the rim of this chamber, and they are breaking out of cover now, hemming them in and pinning them down. Garstag sees Artarion take a flurry of hits, stumbling over them, his breastplate cracking. By the god, that might even end him.

Garstag presses on, taking a detonation on his right pauldron. He slaughters freely, working his way down the barricade. Once at the far side, back under some cover, he can turn his attention to the Space Marines.

‘Putrifier,’ he barks over the comm. ‘Slert, where are you?’

His visual field is already cluttered, spiralling with locator runes. More of the enemy are racing into the chamber’s far end, trying to staunch this wound, and the volume of las-fire rakes upward. More of this, and even he will take too much damage.

‘Just do what you’re doing, Kardainn-master,’ Slert’s voice comes back, sounding like it’s a long way off. ‘I have my own errands to run.’

Garstag finally pulls up the Putrifier’s locator amid all the junk and sees that Slert is nowhere near. He’s heading deeper, into places where no true defenders will be, only huddled, terrified fodder fit for nothing but the sustenance vats.

‘Slert!’ he roars. ‘This is no time to–’

But he never finishes. Three Tactical Marines of a White Consuls squad have vaulted down from the gallery, and already they are mobbing Brannad. A heavy weapons team drags something multi-barrelled in through the far chamber doorway. They are fighting furiously, these defenders, and the attack on the barricades falters. Even the carapace-armoured defenders are rallying, making up in numbers and coordination for what they lack in individual power.

Garstag snarls and guns his chainsword up a notch. Slert can do what he wants.

‘The rot stops here,’ he voxes to his counterparts, irritated, striding with greater purpose now. ‘Tear them apart.’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Finally. Finally, there is fighting again, true fighting. Fighting that hurts, fighting that is a test.

Dragan feels his muscles burning. His killing hand is dripping with blood and power armour coolant. His bolt pistol is almost out of ammunition, his armour dented and charred.

A White Consul comes for him, sprinting down the long gallery. They are all within the citadel now, just part of the contagion that spreads through it. Word Bearers run rampant, carried by their momentum of terror and atrocity. Tanks rolls down the narrow streets and up steep ramps, bolstered by whole squads of Unbroken. Flames have broken out all over, fast-kindled slicks of oil, and the smoke gets everywhere, making the atmosphere bitter and choking.

Dragan sees one of the Unbroken blasted apart, riddled with hits from at least two bolters. He sees a gang of Sabatine Praetorians slaughtered by a single Word Bearer carrying a bronze axe. The slaughter is free-flowing now – they are in among the enemy, in their halls and their corridors, their dungeons and their command towers.

The White Consul crashes into contact, and the two of them trade crushing blows. Dragan has to work hard to move his claw to block a swipe from a power sword, to push back, to go for the jugular.

These adversaries are fast, precise, working in interlocking squads that back one another up and press forward in tandem. Already Dragan can see more locator signals approaching, racing into battle.

He cries out as he punches back with the claw, hurling the White Consul into an already-teetering column. He swivels, trying to draw a bead with the pistol, but his adversary is not yet done – he lunges back into contact, thrusting his power sword two-handed.

Dragan feels the blade bite, carving down under the layers and layers of filth and sediment and rotting ceramite. He pulls away, swinging forcefully and nearly yanking the sword out with him. His claw whistles hard and fast, punching into the White Consul’s midriff and driving through the cabling. Impaled, the Space Marine still fights, scrabbling for a bolt pistol to fire at point-black range.

He nearly makes it. Dragan jerks his killing talons suddenly upward, lifting his adversary from his feet and crushing his lungs. Then he fires his own pistol straight into the Space Marine’s gorget, blowing his throat out with a single shot.

After that he’s moving again, shaking the corpse loose and running, making use of the power and speed that he still possesses, even as his battle-brothers sway and stride behind him.

The gallery has its roof blown off at the far end, collapsed after being hit by a Thunderhawk’s battle-cannon, and smog is piling in from the maelstrom outside. Dragan can just make out the burning profile of towers beyond, still with the flickering trails of void shields but now swarmed by gunships. The invaders are getting close to the citadel’s inner layers now, fighting steadily up every artery and causeway. The going is stone-hard, the defence ferocious and committed. How could it not be? There is nowhere for these people to go.

Another Space Marine races to engage him, haloed in a wave of solid-round fire from dug-in Praetorians. Dragan fires the last of his bolt-shells, missing narrowly. He can admire the commitment here, even the skill, but in truth these enemies are just symbols for him – obstacles to be overcome, like whetstones to sharpen his own capability.

The two of them slam together, blade against claw, and their limbs blur. He absorbs another stab and staggers back. His enemy goes after him, feinting before thrusting, but Dragan is bigger and stronger, his body flooded with the Gifts of the god. He slices in turn, a vicious transverse whip that scores across his enemy’s breastplate and carves up the armour. Phages catch where his poisoned talons dig deep, and the blood is thicker than it should be, but still the Space Marine fights on, driving his blade into Dragan’s stomach, once, twice, severing muscles wetly.

Dragan cries out, furious now. He headbutts the Space Marine and their helms crack together. He butts again then swings a leaden punch, catching him full on his cracked faceplate. A lens is shattered – more blood sprays. For a moment he thinks he’s done enough, but the Space Marine stabs with the sword-tip again, going for his throat. Dragan yanks away from danger, and the killing edge shoots a finger’s width past his chin.

He punches a final time, putting all his weight and fury behind it, a piledriver of a strike that caves in the ceramite and digs down into flesh beyond. He feels the skull crumple, the burst of hot fluid, and knows this is – at last – enough. As he rises, searching for another kill, he is panting, covered in sweat, his twin hearts booming.

The wall ahead of him collapses, blown apart by the impact of something enormous. He hears the drum and boom of engines and a vox-distorted roar, then the Dreadnought emerges from the dust and flying debris, striding out in an aegis of battle cries. Dragan can just make out shouts of ‘Jerimias!’ before an assault cannon opens up.

He flings himself to the floor as the world dissolves into a thunder of destruction. Locator runes blink out across his swaying visual feed, and he knows that his brothers are dying.

‘Shit,’ he curses, crawling over the corpse of the Space Marine he has just killed, reaching out for his bolter.

The Dreadnought sways closer, treading heavily through a crumpled landscape of tangled steel and rockcrete. White Consuls are advancing behind it, using it for cover, and Dragan sees two Word Bearers caught up in the barrage and shredded.

He runs a quick mental tally – the surviving Unbroken in the gallery versus the enemy – and realises they cannot win this.

‘Shit,’ he says again, grabbing the bolter and preparing to leap to his feet.

He never makes it. From behind him, from the stairwell that they have just gained with their own tally of bloodshed, something even bigger emerges.

Freed from his prison on Solace, Naum seems ludicrously big, as if he has uncurled and stretched out and relaxed held-in lungs and stomachs. He staggers into the ruined gallery, his huge shoulders ploughing through the vaulted roof and showering his path with clumps of plaster. Just like the rest of the Unbroken, he is hardly raging – his mouth gapes, and his tiny eyes amid all that plate and flesh and dust are merely blinking, as if startled by the light. He is covered in blood, his claws dripping with it, and a battered White Consul is still clutched in one fist, dragged like a child drags a half-forgotten doll.

The Dreadnought lets loose on him, booming battle cries and sending streams of shells smacking into the leviathan’s leathery hide. The Space Marines follow up, generating their own chorus of bolter-fire.

Naum never even cries out. The projectiles thud into him, stripping and tearing, rocking the Helbrute back on his immense, squat legs. He just keeps on going, lowering his shoulders against the withering barrage, throwing the bedraggled corpse aside and reaching out for the origin of this fresh pain. Dragan watches his tiny grey face crumple into a kind of confused agony before he strides past, closing on the Dreadnought. Other survivors, both Unbroken and Word Bearer, scramble up from their prone positions and join the assault. This engagement is accelerating fast – the terrain around them is taking a hammering from the flying shells, and another column blows apart in a hail of stone-flecks.

Dragan gets to his feet, taking aim, ignoring the blood running down his chest. Just as he does, he gets a priority comm-burst from Philemon.

‘Gallowsman, withdraw to my position.’

‘Are you mad?’ Dragan growls, opening fire. He keeps low, trying to draw a bead on that accursed Dreadnought before Naum obscures his line of sight entirely. ‘We’re closing on the heart of it.’

‘That is the issue. Look around you. How many Word Bearers in your attack?’

Hardly any. The brunt of this is being borne by the Unbroken, and they are paying a heavy price. Even as he watches, another Plague Marine is smashed to the ground, his armour torn open by the blistering onslaught of the assault cannon. Naum swaggers into close range, swinging his enormous fists and finally croaking out something like anger.

‘Vorx has let this slip,’ Philemon goes on. ‘You know it, brother. We’re being used. He won’t move against them until it’s too late.’

Dragan hesitates, crouching down again. The crescendo of bolter shells is driving all other sounds out, and another wall is teetering on the edge of destruction. He sees a White Consul go down under heavy fire and another Unbroken blasted into lumps of gristle. The two giants are close to wrestling range now, and they are tearing the masonry up around them.

‘They’re crawling through the tunnels, rounding up the mortals. You understand what they intend. They’ll let us take this place for them, but it’s just an altar. He doesn’t see it. Gallowsman – pull back here. Someone needs to act.’

Dragan curses. His internal battle maps are jumpy and out of kilter, but he does see some patterns there – Word Bearer units ignoring the main clusters of defence, heading into the hab-zones.

Damn him. Vorx was always a credulous fool. This was on the cards from the start.

‘Where are you?’ Dragan voxes, pulling back, firing all the while. Naum is hammering at the Dreadnought now – huge, two-fisted blows.

‘Three levels down. Bring what you can. The zealots are the enemy.’

Dragan looks up a final time. The fight between the two leviathans is already apocalyptic, and Naum has taken some heavy damage. He would like to watch this, but does not fool himself that there is anything he can do to alter the outcome.

A sick feeling washes over him. He has been too keen to get to the action, to exercise that prowess so long kept under wraps. They have all been too keen.

‘Understood,’ he voxes, and begins to move.

He can summon many more. He can pull them out and muster at Philemon’s position.

This is working against Vorx. This is seizing the chance. Despite everything – his long resentment, the knowledge of his destiny, his overbearing confidence – there is still a step to be taken. Perhaps this is the last vestige of his old self – that iron discipline – struggling to shuffle out of contention.

When the moment comes, you have to take it.

He looks over at Naum, who is lost in his combat now. The blows being exchanged by those two are immortal. Almost regretfully, he opens the comm to the Unbroken under his direct command.

‘Pull back,’ he voxes. He withdraws to the stairwell, firing all the time. ‘Regroup at coordinates to follow. We have new targets. Repeat, we have new targets.’

Slert likes being underground. Being blind in these places is no handicap at all, and the sensation of cold, old walls pressing in tight is one he is used to.

He detects bodies, thousands of them, most very close. They have packed them in, the Imperials, hoarding them like gold in the dungeons of this ancient place. Perhaps they thought they would be safe in here. He has some sympathy for that. A Chapter fortress-monastery would, in ordinary times, be among the very safest places in the galaxy.

But, as Vorx has reminded them on many occasions, these are hardly ordinary times. The White Consuls have been unlucky. They were cut off, left high and dry, their strength bled from them in a war on the edge of realspace. They have done, in this situation, what nine thousand years of constant doctrine has told them to do – get behind the walls and gather what strength remains – but these things no longer hold true when a daemon can spew forth from the air at the click of fingers. The masters of this world, so close to the epicentre of Abaddon’s Rift, were already partly overrun before Solace got here, and this is just the final act. For all the talk of tests and danger, Vorx must have known there was little risk here.

The true danger comes from elsewhere. That is the great lesson of history, something the Death Guard have always appreciated – the real enemy is seldom the one you can see, in front of you with sword in hand, but the one you can’t, in the shadows, or in the past, or within yourself, coiled ready for the moment of ripening when all plans are suddenly undone.

Slert is not alone. He makes his pilgrimage down the tunnels with his guards, the Unbroken of his cadre, limping through the dark in their phosphor-pale battleplate. He has his servitors and his slaves, hauling the contraptions he has brought down so reverently from Solace. They are huge, those machines, marked with the sign of the god and dragged on corroding segmented tracks. They hiss and they gout, powered by that familiar fusion of the mechanical and the divine, studded with grapple-mounted vials that swill dark fluids.

Slert would not like to lose these things. He has poured much effort into them, working the bellows, refining the pumps. They are fragile, for all their apparent sturdiness – a single well-aimed bolt-shell would puncture the bladders and flood the tunnels – and thus he goes deep, keeping the Unbroken ahead and behind, scurrying through the narrow ways of the citadel’s forgotten foundations.

His Gifted eyes are busy throughout. They peer up, they peer out, focusing and blinking under the skin. He can see constellations of souls above, rammed tight, like glowing mats of coral under a night-black ocean. The guard will be light on these places, for the castellans are more than busy elsewhere. That is what he must hope, in any case.

Time is also short. For so long they have had all the time they could ever want, in the Eye and out of it, and yet now it is racing, ageing them, wearing at them. Perhaps this is a blip, an aberration, and the Long War will return to its silted-up course. He does not know yet which option he would prefer.

He blinks. He senses the sicknesses, the fears, the mortal pungency of anticipation.

Slert would have liked to have seen the primarch, to have examined him with his many perceptive eyes. He would have liked to have entered the Manse and witnessed, just for a moment, what glorious contagions have been created in that superlative body. For this reason, along with many others, he still cleaves to Vorx’s path, the one that will take them back to Mortarion’s side. All know that he is back, but few have seen him yet. To fight alongside him, at the head of the Legion just as in the Age of Wonder, that would be the pinnacle of a life. That would be worth all the toil in the laboratoriums and the toxin banks.

They are a long way from that. They are in the heart of the wasteland, locked together with two enemies that wish to kill them. The numbers do not look good. The augurs do not look good. Something must be done to swing the scales back in their favour, and so he is condemned to leave the real slaying to Garstag and pursue this grubbing course at the root of the world.

Slert presses on, goading the slave gangs into greater speed. He hears the whispered reports of the Unbroken as they stagger through the dripping vaults and lets his many eyes do the rest.

When his ramshackle cavalcade finally breaks out, bursting upwards and outwards of the long and winding well shafts, it is met by screams and panic. Slert smiles at this, clambering arduously over an eroded stone lip, and limps out towards them. These are mortal humans, hundreds strong, locked in a chamber they must have thought entirely secure, and here are monsters now clawing their way up from the floor itself. How nightmarish for them. How like every bad dream they have ever had.

‘Calm down,’ he says, amused by the reaction. This is merely the first of many chambers he has to process. Already the devices are being hauled up, lifted by strong, calloused hands. ‘Believe me, this is for the best.’

They are trying to get away but they cannot get out. They are like rats in a trap. Slert looks out at them, and his many eyes blink. He sees the flow of their overlapping bloodstreams, like the tracery of branches against a winter sky. Nothing he tells them is a lie. Even down here they can hear the nearing booms of combat, the approach of those who have no concern at all for their welfare, and so all this, really, is for the best.

They are clawing at one another now, trying to force the doors open.

‘Begin,’ Slert tells his slaves, and the machines are dragged into position. ‘Quick as you can.’

It doesn’t take long. He smells it first, then feels the chill as the air sighs out of the chamber. Though he cannot see it, he knows what is happening. The first blooms will be rising now, followed by the larvae that have been so carefully harvested. It must be quite, quite beautiful.

‘Try to relax,’ Slert says to them all, remembering how it was in the void so long ago, before all these things were known of, and how much better it has become since then. ‘Silence will make this a great deal easier.’

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Kledo is hunting. This is something he enjoys – being cut loose, away from the slow-moving mass of the warband’s forces and out, almost, on his own. He takes only six of the Unbroken with him, ones less weighed down with Gifts and lighter on their hooves. Together, they fight their way around the margins, ignoring the set-piece actions where the tanks thunder, worming their way higher, narrower, further.

Kledo has some art, here. He is not just a flenser of muscles and an unpicker of veins – he can create mists that confuse, generate fogs that blind. This is not proper sorcery, not a real and solid grasp of the greater principles of the warp, but a minor and fleeting understanding of optics, of frail psychologies, of the disarming properties of the whisper and the moment of doubt.

Such things do not work on the Corpse-spawn of the Emperor, of course. Space Marines must be fought, when they cannot be eluded, and the warriors of this place prove as irritatingly efficient as any Kledo has ever encountered. His squad of seven is now down to four, and they have only managed to kill one of the enemy in return. Were it not for the intervention of warriors of the Weeping Veil during one episode on an exposed transit-span, they might have all been killed.

They slipped off after that, leaving the zealots to fight on. A shameful action, it might be thought, and one at odds with the philosophies of the old Legion. Kledo is not, he knows, a very fine example of Mortarion’s gene-breed. He is too individual, too wedded to moral shadows. He has no faith, not really, just an appreciation for what his station and learning allow him to do. Vorx seems to understand this, and so the command he has been given here, to rove ahead and locate the master of the fortress, suits all concerned.

The invaders are advancing freely now. He can hear the tidal crash of combat echoing down every corridor, swelling up like water against the sluices. This citadel is overrun, strangled from every direction, smothered by the weight of the forces sent against it. Kledo still cannot quite believe that there are so few Corpse-spawn left here, and can only guess that the apocalypse must have overtaken them.

He pauses, kneeling and resting his bolt pistol on the floor in front of him. His three companions halt in the gloom, respiring softly through their battered and pocked vox-grilles.

Kledo sniffs. The air is pungent, not just with fear and spilled blood but with something else. Something familiar, something delightful.

Gene-seed. Vials and vials of it, ranked in vaults, kept at the optimum temperature, secured behind glittering stasis fields. He should have known they were getting close – this is one of the central hubs, a grand, octagonal tower that the enemy fought hard to retain. It must be killing them to know that it will fall in its entirety soon – there is vicious fighting all across the lower layers now, the confusion of it allowing Kledo and his quiet band to slither ahead of the game.

Kledo finds himself salivating. He creeps forward, scanning ahead. Just around a sharp corner, there is an open hallway, scorched and raked with bullet holes, littered with bodies piled high. Halfway down that hall, set in the right-hand wall, there is an opening, a pair of bolter-blown doors. Light spills from the jagged edges, antiseptic-bright amid all the murk. He can see the faint, very rapid strobe-flicker of lumens. He can smell the chemicals more strongly. They smell the same wherever you find them, these caches. They are prescribed like that, by Mars, and they never vary. Kledo amuses himself by thinking that in all of these strongpoints, even on Chogoris, even on Fenris, there will be a chamber just like this, a little sliver of the tech-priests’ domains lodged in every monastery of every kind. At heart, the Imperials understand just what Kledo understands, that the body is just another machine, to be tinkered with and extended and stretched out. They have not yet grasped the opposite truth, most of them, that machines are really just like bodies too, and that it is actually very simple to blur the line the other way, should you have the inclination to do so.

For a moment, he thinks the way to the vault is open. He creeps forward again, coming up from his crouch, and the scent of all those lined-up vials makes his stomach grumble. Oh, such joys to be had with the contents of those glass cylinders. Oh, such wonders to be performed.

Then he freezes. At the far end of the hallway something is moving, heedless of stealth, rushing back from another fight. In an instant, Kledo knows he has found what he has been hunting – this one is greater than the rest, with a crested helm and grime-spattered armour. He carries a thunder hammer, though the energy field has been extinguished somehow. It is caked with burned-black blood. Two others come with him – retainers, by their look. They are also battle-ravaged, covered in the visible signs of hard combat, and they carry notched blades. All three stride through the evidence of destruction, hurrying to make the shattered gateway, to shore up this last defence for just a little longer.

Kledo opens the secure channel to Vorx. He uses the device Vorx himself gave him, the one that cuts through the hiss and muffle, and speaks directly. ‘Target located. Will engage, but you may need to be swift – there are treats here, and I am eager to gather them.’

Then he is charging, his warriors coming with him. The White Consuls are moving too, a little faster, their movements a little more motivated by anger, by that edge of desperation that comes before destruction.

By the time the first blow comes in, Kledo is almost giggling.

This is going to be horrible, he thinks, just as always.

Vorx watches it all unfold. Thus far, he has not lifted his scythe in anger. He watches the citadel burn, and it gives him no pleasure.

He came in on the Thunderhawk Thar. He saw from high altitude the rings of fire around the entire place, which he knows from history is called Vigilia Carceris. He knows that it has been the seat of power in this subsector for the duration of the Long War, and that it has been an exemplary model of the Imperial governing pattern.

There is much to admire in that pattern, for all that Vorx thinks it misguided. The measure of an enemy is not whether you agree with them, for there are a thousand species of disagreement, but whether they live out their philosophy with integrity. That is why he despises the Thousand Sons, for they lie to themselves about what they do and who they are, but he has never sneered at another soul, ally or enemy, who faced the truth of the universe as they understood it and did not shrink from the consequences.

The White Consuls, to the best of his knowledge, were of the latter breed. They made their home on the cliff edge, peering like falcons into the turning gyre below. More than most Chapters of the Imperium, they knew the balance of madness that motivates the warp. They could have stationed themselves somewhere more remote, even close to the petty empire of their dead primarch, and thus lived a few centuries longer. That they didn’t, and chose this eternal vigilance poised atop the seeds of their doom, is something to admire.

Vorx watches the noose slip tight. He processes the streams of lumen-blotch data brought to him from a thousand scattered bio-mech flies. He senses the harmonics of struggle and defiance. He listens to a hundred vox-streams at once, filtering them with his old, subtle mind. A painting emerges – a piece of gaudy art, endlessly changing, fixed around clustered points of incoming statistics.

He watches the Apostles of the Weeping Veil as they fight, and cannot suppress a mite of distaste. It is an effective strategy, this terror-causing, this pain-worship, and yet it leaves him cold. He knows why they do it – as Philemon told him, assuming he didn’t already know, the warp is thinning fast over the citadel, and the presences on the other side are already swimming closer. The more the Apostles generate anguish, the quicker they will achieve their goal. Just as Slert predicted, they are already diverting forces to the catacombs, sacrificing a fraction of speed in order to reap a harvest of another kind.

He watches the Lords of Silence take the brunt of the main assault in the higher towers. He observes Dragan leading the most effective inroads, making the best use of Naum he has ever seen. The Gallowsman has so many gifts, he thinks. So much raw talent.

He watches the rings of defences crumble and implode, one by one, each level fought over bitterly. He sees clouds of pestilence rise from the burning earth, worming their way under the environment masks of the enemy soldiers. He sees the Consuls rally, again and again, clinging to every strongpoint with that damnable determination. Even when they are encircled by the choking fires of their own burnt dead, cut off, beaten back, they come at the invader still. They empty their bolters and exhaust the power units on their lasguns, then reach for blades. Their disruptors blow, their steel is notched, and then they clench their fists.

Such power of belief, thinks Vorx. Such blind, impressive, ill-directed belief.

Soon he can take the Thunderhawk in closer to the heart of it, dipping between spires that all glow from inner burning. The atmosphere is a poison now, a slough of fyceline and promethium, thick as the sullen seas that seethe beyond the cliff edge. Fuel dumps must have been hit somewhere, sending churning walls of red-black filth rolling through every chink of open space, staining the stone to darkness, making the entire citadel a bitter, guttering candle. Carcasses are lumped in open courtyards, some already bursting with the tiny phage creatures that will soon spill across the entire planet. Ahead of him, embedded in ruined rockcrete battlements, he sees the skeleton of a gunship, its bones carbon-dark and still smoking thickly. In the distant street levels below, tanks are toppled like children’s toys, their tracks twisted into ribbons. A few war-standards still flutter weakly from balconies, torn and threadbare. The aquilas, those most enduring symbols of the Corpse-Emperor, have been smashed and ground underfoot.

Vorx draws closer to the great ribbed towers with their gothic eaves and domed pinnacles. He sees the pockets of remaining resistance, islands now in this storm of ruin. And it is only then, buoyed on the hot currents of the city pyre, drifting amid the embers of a crumbling empire, that he hears from Kledo at last.

Kledo, cunning Kledo. Sent ahead to isolate the greatest of the warriors within this collapsing fortress, the one soul destined to die at Vorx’s own hand. Vorx even knows his name – Cymar Xydias, who has already served for centuries and will die as he has lived – unyielding, spitting defiance, carrying himself with that maddening, error-strewn dignity.

The Thar is turned towards the signal. Vorx does not hurry. Kledo will be fighting by now, set against a foe he has no chance of besting. The Thunderhawk booms its way under the parapets of the inner citadel, angling to avoid its smoke-streamed walls. The gunship reaches a high balustrade scattered with blown brickwork and hovers on its smoggy turbines. Vorx stirs himself, reaches for Exact and departs the gunship, leaping heavily from the juddering platform. His twelve bodyguards come with him – all in Tartaros plate, carrying cleavers, mauls and morning stars, all dragging themselves through their own mires of entrail-spilling Gifts.

Kledo voxes again. ‘Getting difficult. Haste appreciated.’

The Surgeon’s voice is strained. Vorx does not hurry. Instead, he watches. The device he gave Kledo is not, as the Surgeon imagines, a simple comm-bead. It has the eyeball of a daemon locked within its lead heart, plucked from the beautiful face of a Keeper of Secrets and slaved to Vorx’s patient will. When the siegemaster closes his eyes, he sees the world through Kledo’s position, his vantage swinging from the amulet set about Kledo’s neck.

Thus Vorx has the leisure to witness Xydias’ last great kill. Even as Vorx sends his bodyguards off to seal the chambers beyond and prevent any interruptions, he sees the White Consuls Chapter Master hurl the thunder hammer into Kledo’s midriff, smashing the ceramite and twisting the shards deep into puckered skin. He sees the lesser warriors grapple around the two Titans, neutralising one another and succumbing to their own necessary deaths.

In truth, though, Xydias is the only one there who matters. He is as magnificent as Vorx hoped he would be, and he far outclasses Kledo. The mismatch is almost embarrassing – Xydias bludgeons Kledo, cracking him back a pace, then again, with two reverse sweeps of the hammer. Kledo tries to fire at him, close range, and has his gun hand mangled for his trouble. Xydias is enraged, of course, calling out to his Emperor with every strike. The fury is incandescent and generates its own strange, intangible aura of kinetic power. Kledo’s cynicism has no purchase on this, and so he is smashed back again, slamming into the wall at his back, his corroded powerpack dented amid plumes of kicked-out dust.

Still Vorx does not hurry. He enters the antechambers leading to the gene-vaults and treads over still-warm bodies, White Consuls and Death Guard, Space Marines and Unbroken. Now he is close enough to hear the real, echoing cracks and slams of combat, though there are still a few doorways to traverse.

The others in that place are soon dead, all but the two who concern him. Xydias loses his companions, but so does Kledo. The Chapter Master has proved enough for all of them. Now he is closing on the retreating Surgeon with the light of retribution in his bloodstained helm lenses.

‘Where… are you?’ Kledo pants, working hard just to stay alive.

Vorx maintains his steady pace. He sees Xydias smash Kledo’s helm open, exposing that narrow, eroded face. He sees Xydias land a heavy punch, shattering Kledo’s shoulder, then follow with a one-handed swing of the thunder hammer that lifts Kledo up and hurls him across the blood-pooled floor.

Vorx crosses the last threshold just in time to see, with his real eyes, Xydias grab Kledo by the neck-guard and haul his limp body back up, only to slam it down again. The Chapter Master raises a boot and stamps imperiously on Kledo’s exposed face, crunching bone.

‘Enough,’ says Vorx, steadying himself and brandishing Exact.

Xydias whirls to face the newcomer. The chamber floor around him is clustered with corpses, like some lost battlefield on some lost barbarian world. The few remaining lumens gutter and swing, fizzing with sparks. The destroyed doorway to the gene-seed vaults lies open still, and the Chapter Master stands before it. Kledo, what remains of him, twitches weakly.

Vorx can see that Xydias is exhausted. He has already killed so many, fighting for hours, standing before the combined power of two Legions and pouring all his defiance out at them. His weapon has been rendered defunct, his armour is pitted and broken, and still he walks, keeping himself erect, maintaining that rolling, menacing gait that is the natural consequence of so much remorseless physical conditioning.

‘Go back,’ Xydias threatens Vorx, raising the thunder hammer. His voice is cracking a little but still strong. ‘Go back to the hell you came from.’

That would not be difficult. The entire galaxy is now turning into that very same hell, in these regions at least.

‘Know this,’ Vorx says in his archaic Gothic, trying his best to be readily understandable. ‘Your Chapter’s gene-seed will be destroyed by my hand. None will be taken. None will be defiled.’

By now, Xydias is running. He throws himself, body and soul, into the first strike. His thunder hammer smacks hard into Exact, and the blow is shuddering, one that even Vorx has to work hard to brace against.

‘Traitor!’ Xydias hisses, his voice distorted by the distilled venom of the betrayed.

‘The bodies of your warriors will not be mutilated,’ Vorx continues quietly, throwing Xydias off and ramming the scythe’s heel at him. ‘Those taken alive will have honourable deaths.’

Xydias is fast. He is powerful, intelligent and precise. Another strike cracks Exact away, and the Chapter Master powers into the opened gap, landing a gauntleted punch on Vorx’s breastplate.

‘The Throne endures!’ Xydias roars. ‘Terra endures!’

Vorx has to battle harder now. Containing this inferno is difficult.

‘The names of the slain will be recorded,’ he says, straining to match the heft and velocity of the thunder hammer’s strikes. ‘That is a kind of immortality. A better kind than the one you were promised.’

They rock and swing around one another. Vorx is the greater in stature, a swollen creature of the god, and Xydias has to push himself to the limit just to make contact. The Chapter Master is already wounded from many earlier fights – Vorx can see the infections pulsing their way around his body – but somehow it doesn’t slow him.

‘The light will come again!’ Xydias thunders.

And that, of all that has been claimed or boasted, is a genuine sorrow. It will never come again. There has not been light, genuine light, for ten thousand years. Vorx should know – he witnessed it, the original blaze of hope, being extinguished by the Doomed Warmaster at the behest of gods he now serves.

So this pain must end. This delusion must end. Better to prosper in darkness than batter away at some false dawn like a shroud-moth on a lantern.

The final movement is neither fast nor deceptive – it is just unstoppable. Vorx thrusts his scythe point-first, turning his hands and wrenching the curved blade upwards. It hooks under Xydias’ breastplate, bites deep and keeps on going, bursting his primary heart and slicing open his lungs. Vorx heaves, and the Chapter Master is hoisted from his feet. Vorx twists, holding him up, feeling the blood gush down the shaft and splash on his gauntlets.

Xydias spasms, struggling to make his limbs work, to fight back, to control the hammer that he still grasps tightly. Unbelievably, for a moment he almost makes it. He almost gets in a final blow.

Then, inevitably, he fails. His arm goes limp at last, and the thunder hammer crashes to the ground. His helm is the last to drop, held shiveringly rigid to the end.

Gently, Vorx lets the body down. He pulls Exact’s blade out slowly, doing no more damage to the already ruined armour than necessary. Xydias collapses, his head lolling. Vorx bows stiffly over his corpse and offers him the old salute, the one that the Barbarans used to offer the honourable slain in the days before decay ate its way through all the old protocols.

Then he turns to Kledo. By the time Vorx lowers himself cumbersomely over the prone form of his Surgeon, Kledo is struggling hard to breathe.

‘What… kept you?’ Kledo rasps.

Vorx dips his head closer. He sees that Kledo will live, if he is allowed to. The old resilience, the mark of the Legion, runs through all of them. You have to deal out so much punishment, so much extravagant violence, to end the Death Guard.

‘I know,’ says Vorx, allowing himself at last to shoot a little poison into the words.

Kledo has the gall to look bewildered. His bloodshot eye flickers; the red saliva at his ruined mouth foams. ‘What do you know?’

Vorx bends a little lower, so that his helm’s crusted grille is next to Kledo’s ear.

‘I know it was you,’ he hisses. ‘You bastard, Kledo. I know it was you who moved the ship.’

VIII: IRON SHADES

CHAPTER TWENTY

The strike cruiser is coming in fast, piloted with its owners’ habitual controlled aggression. Vorx watches it smash through the half-hearted cordon of two World Eaters frigate-class haulers and make directly for Solace. Its sable flanks glint from the flash of explosions on all sides, but it is being threaded with a determination that marks it out and sets it apart.

‘Come about,’ Vorx orders, gauging how prepared they are for this. ‘Ready for defensive broadside.’

Many look up at him, but only Hovik, poor ruined Hovik, dares to speak. ‘Lord, we are vulnerable,’ she says carefully. ‘Lances burned out, damage taken on both flanks.’

It only takes a second for Vorx to see that she is right. He allows himself a moment of self-reproach – he had enjoyed the destruction of the nova cannon and has let that colour his judgement. After so long, he ought to know better.

‘Well observed,’ he says, bowing to acknowledge the correction. He is not a vindictive commander. ‘Move us away, then. Just a little time, to get things in order.’

The orders pass down the chain again, barked with somewhat greater urgency. They are being assailed from many directions, but it is the strike cruiser that causes the most consternation. It is powerfully armed for void combat, enough to trouble Solace in its temporarily diminished state, but in truth that is not the principal cause of concern. There will be Space Marines on that ship, all itching to board Solace and start doing what they were built to do. If enough were landed, given all else that they have to contend with, serious and lasting damage could be caused.

So they will run, for now. They will pull clear, letting the ship recover and the crew restock the guns. A little distance is called for, after which this threat can be dealt with decisively.

Solace pivots somewhat clumsily, then boosts hard for the battlesphere’s edge. The manoeuvre costs it more las-strikes along its back, and a row of bio-vents takes a raking, but then it is picking up speed.

Vorx watches the augurs closely. The Iron Shades strike cruiser is in full pursuit, its thrusters burning white, and it will be in bombardment cannon range shortly.

‘Gallowsman,’ he voxes. ‘What state the guns?’

Dragan does not reply immediately. Over the link, Vorx hears the discharge of a weapon, followed by what might have been a wet thud. ‘Starboard broadside operational in twenty minutes,’ comes the voice eventually, sour as ever. ‘Damn sloppy.’

Vorx winces. He does not quite approve of Dragan’s robust attitude to the crew, who will be doing their best. ‘Very good,’ he replies. ‘Inform when ready to fire.’

They keep running. The battlesphere is still crowded, still perilous. They take more las-strikes, scattering across the rear void shields in kaleidoscopes of thrown neon. Solace knocks away a little, straining against the hits, and the deck lets out shrieks of stressed metalwork.

Far below, the landings are beginning on Agripinaa. Kossolax has launched the planetary assault early, while the orbital zone is a long way from being secured. Vorx catches a glimpse of the big landers being disgorged from the carriers, lines of them, tumbling out of their holding cages and burning away into the forge world’s methane-rich atmosphere. This is a gamble. Such impatience could deliver a hammer blow to the enemy, silencing the fixed defence lasers and opening the floodgates, or it could deliver a reprieve, if too many transports are destroyed and the focus of the fleet is diverted.

Vorx sees that the Blood Angels are already responding, hurtling towards the iron-black continent below, as eager to get into close combat as the World Eaters are. How enthusiastic they all are. How willingly they succumb to those indulgent rages.

Something feels strange about the ship. Solace is shivering as it runs.

Vorx glances up at the forward viewports. He can see the press of ships thinning, the open void beckoning. They just need that small window of recovery, a moment’s pause to gather Solace’s enduring capacity for revival.

One, two, three, say Vorx’s silent lips.

Kledo moves. This is the moment – this is the chance.

The entire ship is in confusion. The Population runs from station to station, thrown from their feet and sent clattering across the decks. The Unbroken are striding out to their assigned locations, preparing for imminent boarding actions. The ship itself, that giant sleeping consciousness, is fixated on itself, on repairing what has been damaged.

He goes swiftly, hugging the dark. He has rehearsed the route many times, knowing where to avoid, whom to elude. It would be noticed, even in this madness, that the Surgeon is not in the apothecarion, and so he has only a little time.

Kledo is thrilled. His hearts are beating harder, just as they do when he is trying out something new with the needles. In the normal run of things, he would have no chance of leading a warband this size. He is not enough of a battlefield warrior, and such things still matter to those of the old Legion. Two things, though, have given him the chance. The first is Vorx’s weakness. The siegemaster has been locked in his own obsessions for too long now, neglecting the first business of his calling. He has grown soft, melancholy, wrapped up in arts best left to the Tallyman. And there is Mortarion too. Kledo is of the same view as Dragan, who has made his displeasure with the primarch’s call evident. The great warrior-monarchs of the past should have stayed in the past. This is a new age now, one in which new weapons will be needed.

The second reason is all around him. All know that Solace is changing. All remark on it. All step around the changing deck layout and push aside the throbbing arterial cables. It has become commonplace, something to smile at as they idly muse on how things will end.

Kledo knows very little about the mechanics of starships, but he knows very much indeed about the living body. He knows how to dominate the will and shrive the flesh into submission. He knows how to make all sentient creatures his own, to cause them agony and dole out relief in such exact processions that soon they only live to serve, to administer his desires and further his goals.

Solace is becoming alive now. Solace is something he can control, and if he controls Solace, he controls the Lords of Silence.

His armour is festooned with the instruments of his profession. Needles dangle from loops of tubing; drills swing from prehensile mechanical arms. His back is weighed down by heavy canisters, all full of the choicest tinctures from his hidden vaults. Philemon likes to think of himself as a master of the occult arts, and Slert believes himself the most creative of alchemists, but Kledo, overlooked Kledo, can match them both. They have all been consumed by their own long games and shifting allegiances. Dragan will sulk and plan and Garstag will champ at the bit for freer slaughter, but they do not have the resolve to act decisively, not like he does.

He slips down further, finding his way through paths few of the Unbroken know exist. The air becomes hotter, wetter, closer. His boots sink deep into spongy matter, and liquid pushes up to glisten on the surface. The pipes are thickly clustered here, running in bound parallel courses, throbbing with a semi-consistent rhythm. It is so much like a heartbeat now.

This is where it begins. Kledo has studied these chambers over many years, probing and measuring. The walls are no longer orthogonal – they curve and sweep, they tremble when touched.

He goes further, pushing against curtains of pale-grey organics, and the touch leaves a sticky residue of bile against his gauntlets. The pipework is covered in threads of dark veins. The floor is sodden and bubbling. The noise of the engines has long gone, replaced by the muffled boom of that echoing proto-heart’s rhythm. Flies are everywhere, instinctively drawn to the truth that Vorx has yet to acknowledge – that sentience has done more than taken root here. It has flourished and extended, burrowing tendrils of awareness throughout the entire structure of this ship until iron is turned to flesh and adamantium to bone.

Kledo reaches his destination – a big chamber, many metres high and wide, though the precise dimensions are lost in a haze of drifting corpuscles. Something vast and flabby trembles here, suspended on bowing sinews and lost amid the curls and snags of gristle. It has chambers of its own, mottled sacs that heave and relax.

He gets to work. He prepares the vials and links up the various canisters. The shots will travel down his arm, into the injectors that he has mounted on the back of his hands for greater control. The quantities to be employed are prodigious – Solace is a big creature – and so will have to be administered with finesse.

The air changes. Flies buzz closely around him, mobbing him, crawling over the instruments. He swats a few away, feeling their fat bodies splat against his palms, and carries on. From above, he can just about detect the ongoing noises and movements of void combat, the impacts that send shockwaves travelling down deck after deck before being baffled in the sumps.

Kledo is ready. He takes a breath. His two hands bristle with injectors the length of a child, each one linked up to the cocktail of neurotoxins strapped to his back.

It is rare that Kledo prays. He has so little faith. This time, though, he whispers just a fragment, just in case anything is listening.

‘Guide this,’ he breathes, ‘and I shall create such carnage in your name that the heavens will weep from it.’

Then he thrusts the needles in, right up to the hilt, and the plungers slam home.

Dragan is shouting. He is striding, moving up and down the long gun-lines.

Hundreds of crew struggle to get the machinery operational again. Some howitzers have been completely destroyed, blown into lumpy towers of molten metal and entombing their operators. Others are merely out of alignment, and their gangs haul on the rust-thick chains to bring them back onto the slide-rails.

Every surviving gun angles steeply upwards, rooted in the deck of the ship and pointing up to the gaping gunwales. A filigree of void shields glistens across the apertures, and it suddenly looks fragile. In combat, the gun-deck is a very dangerous place to be – it is one of the primary areas targeted by the enemy, and given the need for firing orifices, a catastrophic hit will punch the atmosphere out into the void here more rapidly than almost anywhere else.

This has to be done quicker. This recovery has to be more effective. Dragan has access to tactical data the Unchanged do not, and he sees the incoming predators on the long-range scans. They are already firing, sending off range-finding bow-chasers, and they are gaining. Right now, Solace is toothless, slow and vulnerable.

Dragan surprises himself with his vehemence. He had never intended to work this hard for Vorx, not in this battle. It was hard to forget Typhus’ injunction, and still the words ring in his mind, but combat has a way of reinforcing loyalties. This is about survival now, and he will do nothing to jeopardise it – not here, not yet.

He sees Kodad, the gunnery captain, and shoves his way over to him, pushing aside a tilting ammunition scaffold.

‘We need to fire now,’ he growls.

Kodad nods, his face awash with muck and sweat. Bodies toil in every alcove and under every arch. From somewhere Dragan can hear the bovine bellows of plague ogryns being goaded into action.

Kodad gives the order, no doubt earlier than he’d have liked. Shouts ring out, bells clang, chains yank tight. Bulky shells slide down the runnels and clatter into the breeches. An old klaxon sounds, though it is washed out and croaky from neglect. The deck judders, throwing up its slops and scraps.

Dragan wheels away as the first reports ring out. The immense barrels slam back into their housings, filling the gun-deck with smoke. Spent casing fragments fly out, spinning across the deck and rocking to a halt. The crew scrambles to collect them up, to spray thick coolant onto the glowing bracings, to prepare for reload.

It is impossible to know how effective the shots have been – Vorx will have a better vantage from the bridge. Dragan moves up the line, spying a crew working a little less hard than the others, its numbers thinned by earlier explosions. He draws his pistol again, preparing to apply motivation.

He never gets there. Solace swings around violently. The lumens crash into nothing, then flicker on again, then out for good. Huge crashes – almighty crashes – swell up from below, making the guns shiver in their stocks.

For a moment he thinks the reactors have been hit, maybe gone critical. He has never experienced such wild dislocation, and he struggles to keep his feet. The rest of the crew are less agile and are thrown around like chaff in a thresher.

‘Keep firing!’ he roars, reaching out for something to hold on to.

He feels sick, strangely. He feels like he has been poisoned. The deck carries on bucking, relentlessly. It feels – and this is insane – like the ship is literally trying to shake something off its back.

‘Keep firing!’ he shouts again, not knowing whether anyone is heeding his commands or whether this is some terminal spiral into oblivion.

He fights his way back along the gallery, clambering over the guns’ tangled moorings. Dimly, he registers other data – boarding torpedoes incoming, the ship’s gravity centre skidding all over the place, conduits bursting open and flooding the atmosphere with sprays of acidic lubricants.

They are getting in, he realises, infuriated and impotent, and there is nothing now to stop them.

Kledo screams. It has been a long time since he last screamed, and it makes his withered vocal cords throb.

Somehow, he keeps his claws pushed down, connected with that shivering mass of flesh and pumping fear-stimulants and mind-suppressants into it.

The sensory inload is overwhelming, gigantic, all-smothering. Kledo had no idea. He had no idea just how far Solace has grown, how powerful it has become. He stares into the ship’s mind, its half-aware self, and sees an almost infinite potency there, gigantic, sullen, dull like fog.

He has a choice now. He can try to pull out, to escape with his life and sanity, or he can push on and exert his will over this behemoth.

Kledo fights it. His fingers squeeze on the triggers, pumping more suppressants into Solace’s bloodstream. The electrodes at his temples flare, and he feels the sharp snap of pain as alien matter back-floods into his own circulatory system.

They are connected now, the two of them, like a foetus in a womb. Kledo has his innate strength to draw on, his knowledge and his long preparation. Solace is barely conscious, a slumbering leviathan, but it is reacting to the invasion, kicking back, wallowing up through the shallows.

For a second, Kledo sees the prize before him. He sees the vessel’s control centres, its ganglia and its long, straggling connectors, lodged deep into every system and structure. He sees the electric glows as the proto-thoughts shuttle and commute between organs, regulating and feeding. He understands how it works, and almost grasps what would be needed to control it. He reaches out, his consciousness travelling down those same conduits, and has the sensation of vastness, of control.

Then he is in the void. He, Kledo, is in the void, an immense, single object, flickering with a coronet of las-fire, powered by colossal thrusters that throb red like a wound. He sees the other objects flying around him, some tiny, some as huge as he is. He sees a sable strike cruiser coming in very close, loosing its cargo of fighters. He feels the scampering of the crew within him and understands that he could crush them all – a squeeze here, an exhalation there.

This is horribly dangerous. This is not what he wanted. Control was the objective, not some merging of minds. Kledo fights harder. Somewhere, in another, far-off reality, his fingers stay tight on the plungers, pumping in more of the chemicals. The ship must be rendered dormant, quiescent, turned into something he can enslave.

The pain ratchets up. Solace is aware of him. Kledo can smell the intelligence there now, blind but clarifying rapidly, numbed by his injections but hard to fully extinguish. It is like a sea, deep and turgid, rolling under heavy gravity, slow but with an incredible, inexhaustible force.

This has been a mistake. He has overreached, stretching out for something beyond his ability to hold.

Kledo has one option left – a concoction he has never tried before, a combination of neurotoxins so potent that every subject he has ever exposed to them died in immediate psychic shock. He had been keeping it in reserve, loath to use it unless necessary, but now, surely, he is out of alternatives.

It is still hard to make the selection. He is losing his mind, and he can feel his poisons reverse-seeping into his own bloodflow. His fingers do not work as they should; his neck is searing with that hot, tight pain. Though he can no longer see, he somehow knows that the organs around him are swelling, bloating, pressing against him and trying to crush the life from him.

This has been a mistake.

He forces a finger to twitch, to click down on that last switch. He can almost taste the poisons gushing, bubbling and frothing as they surge into open veins.

Solace wrenches away. It jerks, it spasms. Systems shut down, gasping, and ventricles burst.

Kledo is hurled away from the link, the needles ripped out, doused in a torrent of inky fuel. The world swings wildly, and he cracks his head against a sparking nest of blown wiring.

The ship is screaming. Its thrusters gun into full burn, flinging it into a crazed spiral. Repeated thuds slam along its flanks – what are they? Impacts? Explosions?

Kledo is crawling now. His head is banging with starbursts, his whole body flaring with agony. He coughs up blood. He has unleashed something within Solace – some reaction that is spreading and burgeoning. In a human body, it would be burning towards the heart, choking it off and rendering it insensible.

Where is Solace’s heart? Where will the shock come?

Kledo drags himself away. He has failed badly. He does not know what happens next.

Where is Solace’s heart?

Vorx drops to his knees. Everything is exploding. The roof collapses further down the bridge dome, crushing crew beneath its fall.

The atmosphere is rushing past him, as if the ship has suffered some major breach, though no such report has reached him. Every signal he receives makes no sense. He is feeling light-headed, bleary.

Solace is in agony, and a chain reaction has been set off somewhere. Vorx staggers over to an augur station and tries to understand the cacophony of signals blaring across its hololith column.

The Iron Shades are on board, some of them at least, but Solace is now travelling incredibly fast.

Cracks race across the ceiling, deep ones that score into the metal struts. He must get out, get away from that danger.

The warp drives. He sees the numbers click over, faster and faster. By the god, if that does not stop soon…

He lurches, going for a column that will shut everything down, flush the tubes, blow the main interconnectors and jettison them straight into void. As he moves the columns collapse, the roof falls in, adamantium smashes and slams around him and the cogitators explode into balls of static.

Vorx smells the warp and sees the unshuttered realviewers go white. He tries to get away, but the entire bridge is falling in around him.

‘Gallowsman–’ he voxes, just as the first beam crunches into his helm.

He goes down hard, more impacts landing.

Blood runs down the inside of his helm.

The warp drives, he thinks.

Then he’s gone, he’s out, silent amid the falling wreckage.

IX: PLAGUE PLANET

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Dragan meets up with Philemon in a courtyard just below the fortress’ soaring chapel complex. A personnel carrier lies, smashed, against its far end. It is raining soot, a drifting pall like black snow. His warriors lurch through it, dozens of them, their armour gradually turning black. Far above, beyond the flames and the smoke, the clouds are flickering with strange light. The wind does not feel natural in this place. Further back, Legion Rhinos roar their way into the courtyard from the streets beyond.

‘You’re sure,’ Dragan says.

‘It has already started,’ Philemon says. ‘I have attempted to contact the siegemaster. No reply.’

Dragan looks at Philemon for a moment. He had always had the Tallyman down as one of Vorx’s closest allies. What is his purpose in this? Is he seriously fostering some kind of revolt at last, or is this just a tactical move to stave off destruction by the Weeping Veil? Perhaps both, perhaps neither.

There is no use speculating, for Philemon is right about the matter at hand – time is running out, and someone needs to act. Wide stone stairs, heavily gouged, lead up to an open gate. Walls soar up on either side, monolithic like all Imperial constructions, scored with the giant impression of the hated aquila. Dragan cannot hear screaming any longer. All that remains is the heavy crump of munitions, the low grind of gunships plying between the spires. There is fighting still. The Space Marines are clinging on. Word Bearers and Unbroken kill-squads are still finding resistance to squash.

Naum enters the courtyard then, cracking the stone as he staggers between the disembarking troop carriers. He drags a cluster of bio-cables and armour pieces, black with amniotic residue and the last flickers of electrical power. Others of Dragan’s command are en route, and more will come as they heed his call, but so slowly. Always so slowly.

Dragan turns to see figures emerge from the gates above – Word Bearers, clad in their dark-stained crimson plate.

Dragan climbs the steps towards them, flexing his claw. As he does so, he sends a silent Prepare command to the Unbroken at his back. Philemon climbs too, his bolter drawn and his books stowed in chained clumps across his back. Little Lords scamper with him, picking up the strips of parchment that fall from the piles and trying to stuff them back into bundles.

‘Stand aside,’ Dragan says, reaching the gate’s threshold.

The Word Bearers level their guns. From the base of the stairway, Naum looks up, eyes cloudy with confusion. The ash falls faster, and flames lick across the parapets.

One of the Word Bearers, the leader of their squad by his markings, takes up position under the gate’s lintel, a crackling brass power blade held loosely.

‘This place is secure,’ the warrior says. ‘Find somewhere else to tarnish.’

Dragan never stops moving. ‘Stand aside.’

The Word Bearer takes a step towards him. ‘Like I said–’

Perhaps he believes the Death Guard have forgotten all initiative. Perhaps he thinks that they will shamble up, stupidly, and debate this with them, or perhaps he thinks that his allies are so thick-headed they would just slink meekly away.

Dragan’s talons punch through his chest before he has the chance to move.

‘Aside,’ Dragan growls, then flings him bodily into the gate’s edge.

Bolters open up, a chorus of hard bangs, blowing Unbroken from their feet. The Death Guard return fire, and the stairs instantly become a crashing, debris-blasted battleground. Philemon swings into action, firing liberally, escorted by screaming Little Lords that fly at the enemy, ripping and gouging. Naum lets loose with a dull roar of confused outrage and smashes his way heavily up the stairs, his immense arms already swinging with gathering momentum.

Dragan is a whirl by then, a blur of speed and power. He hacks at the nearest Word Bearer, gouging lines through the brass and ceramite, before spinning into the next. A bolt-shell whistles past his helm, another strikes him on the kneecap, but he’s still moving, cutting and punching, driving under the gate’s shadow.

He breaks through the cordon, heading under the gates and then into chambers where Imperial banners have been torn down and trampled. There is blood on the polished floor here, but no bodies. The scale of the architecture around him becomes ever greater – a succession of loftier spaces, solemn spaces, lined and scored with the imagery of the Ministorum. Graven images line the stone walls, and relics of old wars lurk in side chapels where statues of the fallen loom. Amid all the smells of battle, the pungent undertone of incense still lingers.

More Word Bearers race to intercept him, to prevent the Unbroken getting through, and the fighting intensifies under the sorrowful gaze of the Emperor’s Angels. Dragan drives his way through them, absorbing the hits and repaying them in kind, swept up now and buoyed by his battle-brothers around him. Naum is fully engaged, his stupor banished by the sights and smells of battle, flailing around as if truly possessed. He seems to have picked up one of the Word Bearers in his left claw and is using him as a bloody cudgel.

Dragan sees more Unbroken go down under bolter barrages, and not all get back up. Philemon himself runs into trouble and is soon fighting hard against two determined Word Bearers, despite the shrieking assistance he gets from his coterie of Little Lords.

Only one pair of doors remains – gilded with images of serpents and angels, the burnished surface marred by great rents. Dragan can hear something on the far side – a roar, like a sea coming in. Light is spilling from the gaps between the doors, red as embers.

He slams into them, breaking them open, and the crimson haze spills across him. Dragan stares out, past the empty-eyed statues, past the lines of candles and the smoky braziers, past the ranks of protective Word Bearers and their slaved cultists. He sees what has been done, what has been gathered together, and finally understands the Tallyman’s urgency.

From behind him, he hears his battle-brothers labour as they fight their way to his position. He hears Naum’s huge bellows and detects the helm-laced signals of yet more Unbroken converging on this location.

But it will all be too late. As he looks out and sees what is about to happen, he knows it must be too late. There is no defeating what comes next. No time to muster a defence, no space to do what must be done.

The Weeping Veil have made their move, and now only pain awaits.

‘What were you trying to do?’ Vorx asks.

Kledo is struggling to speak. That is not surprising. His mouth is a bubbling swamp of blood, and his cheekbones are gone. Xydias was really quite brutally efficient.

‘Garstag–’ Kledo attempts.

‘Yes, Garstag,’ says Vorx. ‘Working for me. Hunting the ship for me, asking questions for me. No one suspects him, for some reason. Maybe the way he looks.’

Kledo laughs, and blood trickles down his ruined chin. ‘Ah,’ he says.

‘Just tell me why.’

Kledo collects himself. His breath is filtered through collapsed lungs. Somewhere within his body, the flesh is rapidly reknitting. He was a Space Marine, once, and his much-altered body retains some of that old restorative capacity. ‘The chance,’ Kledo says, chewing on what remains of his tongue. ‘To master the ship. You won’t lead, Vorx. Someone had to act.’

‘So many tell me this. We’ll win here, though.’

‘But your… habits. Your mind. It’s gone.’

‘We bring faith to the galaxy. You could have waited. Trusted. The rewards would have come.’

Kledo laughs, and winces from the pain of it. ‘What rewards do you have for us, siegemaster? What rewards does the primarch have for us? I do not wish to run an old war again, over and over. I wish for something new.’

Vorx looks at him. ‘Then you are a fool,’ he says. ‘We were given something new, once. Look where it got us.’

Kledo laughs again. It seems he cannot stop. ‘You are the Legion,’ he says. ‘A weapon made for an older galaxy. You never evolved. We never evolved. I’d have changed that.’

Vorx shakes his head. ‘I tolerated you, Kledo, for what you could do for us. In power, you would be an abomination.’

Kledo tries to smirk. ‘Yes, I think I would.’ He hacks up blood. His hands are trembling now. ‘But I damaged Solace. I don’t know if it can recover.’

‘It already has.’

‘They’ll know,’ Kledo says, searching now. ‘The others. They’ll know.’

Vorx moves gently, placing both gauntlets around Kledo’s neck. ‘Your wounds were given by the Corpse-spawn. This was carefully arranged. I will grieve with the others for your loss, when your body is found here.’ He starts, carefully, to press. ‘You thought me weak, Kledo. Dragan thinks me weak. The Weeping Veil, those deluded pilgrims, they think us all weak. It is in the pattern, though. It is all in hand.’

Kledo is gurgling. He fights back, pathetically, for his strength has already been driven from him.

‘Everyone asks me what I want,’ Vorx says. ‘I want what I have. I want this, here. This is our time.’

Kledo’s limbs jerk. What remains of his face goes red, then purple.

‘We will make it to Ultramar,’ Vorx says, softly now. ‘We will fight under the primarch’s banner. After that, who cares? What more could there be, but that?’

Kledo dies, gagging. His limbs fall limp, his chest shudders still.

‘You wanted something new,’ says Vorx contemptuously. ‘Now you have it.’

Vorx relaxes. He looks down at the Surgeon for a little while. His expression is just as it always is – that mask of corrosion, the armour-mark of another age.

He looks up. The gene-seed vault lies ahead, whirring faintly. He casts his eyes over the shelves, looking at the ranks of tiny vials.

Before he can move, a priority signal worms its way up from the sea of many runes swimming across his visual field. With some reluctance, he activates it.

‘The Veil have moved, lord,’ says Philemon, sounding both anxious and irritated. ‘If you can hear this, time has run out.’

So little faith. All of them, so little faith. Vorx has half a mind to stay where he is and let the consequences of their doubt damn them.

He stands, though. He looks around. Then, slowly, he reaches for the incendiary device, the one that will chew through anything organic and render it down to drifting atoms.

He primes it and holds it up before the gene-vault. For a little longer he gazes down the lamplit rows, at all the learning there, all the potential, all the power.

Then he tosses the live charge, letting it roll along the floor into the vault, and turns on his heels, scythe in hand.

There are thousands there, tens of thousands, culled from every cache and refuge in the fortress. They stare, dull-eyed and terrified, chained together in groups a dozen strong and herded onto the chapel’s capacious marble floor. Every shackled group has a robed cultist to guard it, armed with a long, serrated knife that snarls and glows with bronze-tipped flame. Above them soars the nave, fifty metres up, its blank stone now swimming with whirling swatches of lurid illumination. In the great voids, in the curving vaults and the iron-lined shafts, energies have been kindled, spiralling in mid-air like nebulae. The images hanging in stately isolation are all defaced – turned upside down or scratched out. Crude octeds six metres across have been engraved into the granite tomb faces, and flames snap and ripple across them.

These are the citizens of Sabatine who took refuge in the citadel, dragged up from the deep places, chained together and hauled into the chapel. Their faces are grey, their mouths slack, staring at the swinging lights as if mesmerised. Their clothes are ripped, hanging off them like ribbons, their movements sluggish. Cult-priests swagger among them carrying flails and smouldering censers, declaiming in a language Dragan does not understand. Other cultists, arranged in choirs around the edges of the crowds, are chanting, repeating a sequence of syllables over and over. The sound makes the stone itself resonate, a vibration that thrums up from the crypts below, running up the pillars and shivering the high arches.

Dragan has emerged through east-facing doors set several metres above floor level. He can see Word Bearers stationed all through the grand chapel, at least a hundred, guarding every ingress and overlooking the teeming throngs. He hears Naum and Philemon fighting in the chambers beyond, sloughed into combat by those outside and struggling to make headway. Even if they slaughtered all that opposition in moments, they would struggle to make any dent against those ranged against them in here.

He can already feel the rites accelerating. Dragan has little sympathy with the nature of the warp, but he does not need to – a child could detect what is happening. The chapel’s ceiling is already translucent, bowing under enormous pressures from above. He can see frail shapes on the far side – enormous figures, coiled like foetuses, struggling hard against shackles imposed by the damaged physical universe. There are three of them, gigantic beyond reason. One is lithe and disturbing, a pale shade with barbed hands and a crown-of-thorns head. Another is bullish and blood-red, already roaring. The third is bird-like, spindly and scrawny but reeking of sour magicks. They are so close, tearing at the thin wards that keep them from bursting into physicality. In their wake he detects legions, cohorts, ranks of the Neverborn on the cusp of spilling down from that incipient rift, scrabbling with cold fingers to make the leap into reality.

Such desecrations are easier now. This is what they are learning, what the priests of sacrifice already know. He cannot understand why Vorx was so trusting.

‘Desist!’ Dragan roars, preparing to vault down from the balcony, to make at least a gesture of defiance.

At the far end of the nave, the master of ceremonies turns to face him. He has taken himself up into the great Imperial pulpit and stands beneath the shadow of a desecrated aquila. Dragan recognises Mor Jalchek’s vaned armour from the Ayamandar, the tides of black flame that hiss across his ceramite plates, the crozius that he now bears openly and unchained. The Apostle is surrounded by his retinue, a motley collection of the warp-sick and the void-touched.

The air is singing. It tastes of blood already, and there is more to be spilled. Rage is futile here, for the preparations have already been made. There is a crackle of ozone, a leap of green-edged lightning, and a gust like stormwind races down the long, tall nave. Before Dragan can move, he feels the ice-chill of a warp translation – a teleport, or some other location-shift sorcery, wrapped in a smoky cloak of foul, fly-blown detritus.

Vorx shudders into being at the opposite end of the nave, far from both the pulpit and Dragan’s vantage, his outline clattering with broken hoarforst, his scythe glassily caked in it. As the ether winds gust he looks briefly magnificent, unveiled into hidden splendour with bone-pale armour and an erect, warlord-like bearing, before the clouds thicken about him again, his spine curves and his battleplate curdles, and he is just Vorx once more, the siegemaster, relic of the ancient world thrust like a canker into the agonised present.

Mor Jalchek deigns to acknowledge him. ‘In time to witness the taking of this world from you!’ he shouts, his hard voice ringing down the long vaults. ‘You should never have shown us the way here.’

Vorx stands there, isolated, the last fronds of his sorcerous passage still spitting around him. He does not respond to Mor Jalchek, but shoots a final glance, meaningfully, at Dragan.

‘Do nothing,’ he voxes, a dry whisper among the cacophony of massed chants and cries.

The Apostle raises his crozius, which crackles and shudders with black flame gusts. The air is ripe now, ready to catch, spitting like boiling oil. Naum’s cries are still audible, getting closer, but Dragan follows the order, remaining where he is.

Mor Jalchek throws his arm down again, sweeping it like a dagger-strike, and every priest on the floor of the chapel plunges their knife into the heart of a captive. Then they work their way through the crowds, going quickly, expertly slaughtering in their practised, efficient ranks. The flames in the braziers leap, the air flexes, a hundred blades flash, again and again, the crescendo of sacrifice that will rip the last shreds of the veil aside and unleash the daemonic apocalypse.

Dragan looks up to the translucent vaults. He braces himself for their collapse, for the rush of the Neverborn and the hurricane of murder. Every Word Bearer in turn lifts his blade, saluting the eldritch army they have ushered into being. Mor Jalchek cries out in ecstasy, a shout of triumph that echoes from chancel to chancel.

And nothing happens.

The priests keep stabbing, but the bodies do not fall. No blood splatters on the marble, just a thin black dribble where the steel is withdrawn. The citizens sway a little, wince a little, but then the blank looks return. The priests grow panicked and hack away, but nothing changes, nothing is sacrificed.

‘They are already dead, Mor Jalchek,’ says Vorx dryly, the cloud of flies growing around him, multiplying exponentially. ‘Stab as much as you like – we got to them first.’

Mor Jalchek is slowly realising the truth. He calls out to his warriors, and they lower bolters at the crowds. The priests, seeing what is happening, scramble to get out of the way.

‘There will be no rituals here,’ Vorx says calmly, striding down from his teleport locus and swinging his scythe in lazy arcs. ‘No daemons, no magicks, no gifts from the gods. We have claimed this world, and our plagues now encompass all of it.’

The Word Bearers open fire, sending volleys of mass-reactives into the crowd. The mortals go down in clumps, blown apart and hurled into one another, but still no blood is spilled, and still no souls are released. These are just meat-sacks, flesh puppets and revenants, the product of Slert’s piped poisons, and no god will dignify the culling of such spoiled goods.

Dragan finds himself laughing as he watches. He looks out at the terror on the faces of the priests and laughs harder. Vorx is striding into the heart of it now, swinging his scythe in those crushing parabolas, taking on the Word Bearers who are belatedly turning to face him. Above it all, the vaults begin to solidify, darkening back into stone and iron. The whirling lights fade as an angry howl of frustration shimmers across the gulfs.

And now the flesh puppets are rising up too. They are limping towards their tormentors, reaching out to grab at the necks of the robed cultists and drag them into the quagmire. The Word Bearers wade into the midst of them, firing solidly, but even they begin to get bogged down, snagged into a thickening slush of clutching fingers.

Naum finally emerges then, smashing his way through the wall behind Dragan and lurching wildly into the fray. More Unbroken pour through the gap, locking on to the fighters of the Weeping Veil, firing with steady precision. Teleport loci begin to whirl into life on the fringes of the chapel, all of them pale green and tainted with blowflies. Garstag strides out of a mist of smashed crystal, his armour seething from the transition and his toothed chainsword snarling.

This is carnage now. This is sudden, glorious carnage.

Dragan leaps from the balcony, crunching down to ground level, and races at the beleaguered Word Bearers. They are suddenly easy prey, hampered by the bodies lurching into them, stricken with uncertainty. Dragan lashes out, catching one at the neck with his talons. The warrior swings round, shaking him off and aiming his bolter, but Dragan is already at him again, cracking the weapon away and going for the throat. The blades bite deep, severing the helm and wrenching it off. Then he is moving further in, striking out, hunting the next target.

The numbers have turned. The crowds are almost inexhaustible, a half-living wave of insentient meat that clutches and throttles. More Unbroken arrive, and Dragan begins to realise that they were not all summoned by him – this has been planned, timed, measured for maximum impact. There is calculation here. There is numerology.

He fights his way out into the centre of the nave, beginning to feel the sharp kick of battle-lust again, the first time he has enjoyed it for a very long time. Soon he is with Vorx and the two of them charge the enemy, scythe and talons in concert.

‘Most trusted servant,’ says Vorx dryly, slicing across a retreating Apostle with that terrible blade.

‘Siegemaster,’ Dragan replies, falling in alongside, joining in the killing.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

That is not quite the end. It is a defeat, one that forces a hurried withdrawal, but it is not quite the end.

The Apostles of the Weeping Veil remain cohesive, and they remain powerful. They are driven from the chapel by force of numbers and the sudden switch of momentum, but Mor Jalchek does not die in the rout. He leads them out into the shattered remains of the fortress, and there they rally.

For a while after that, the outcome remains uncertain. Remnants of the White Consuls make a final counter-offensive, led by their Captain Memnon, which retakes one of the main bastion towers. The Death Guard, having committed heavily to contain the threat at the chapel, are beaten back across three other sectors by vengeful squads of Word Bearers. Amid the smoke and the debris, orders are lost, mistakes are made. The attrition rate begins to bite, and gunships come down in gouts of burning promethium.

But the time of decision has been passed, and now fate runs in one direction only. Slert’s toxins have filtered through every part of the under-fortress, and more of the living dead emerge, steadily adding to the hosts that now march with the Lords of Silence. The threat of the Neverborn recedes, the barrier between worlds does not weaken further, and soon the only daemons stalking down those flame-raked streets are plaguebearers and Little Lords, spreading their blights gleefully like pheromones.

With his great objective denied him, there is only so much of this pain that Mor Jalchek is willing to tolerate for Sabatine. After a savage feint in which an entire segment of the inner citadel is demolished by timed incendiaries, his orbital landers finally fight their way down. This is a dangerous manoeuvre, and a number of the drop-ships are lost before they can pull away again, but a substantial proportion of the Weeping Veil makes it into orbit, pursued by the Death Guard’s surviving Thunderhawks. With their numbers thinned and their pride crushed, there is no reckoning to be had in the void, and the Ayamandar beats for the Mandeville Point. Vorx lets it go, for there is still hard fighting on the surface, though he permits Hovik to shadow for a while, keeping all guns trained on the cruiser until it retreats fully into the void.

Then there is merely the slow death of the fortress to be attended to. The last of its defenders are hunted, run down in their final bastions, overwhelmed at last by the air that chokes and the flies that blind. The baseline humans by then are either truly dead or corrupted by the gathering smog, and it is only the Space Marines who remain, incapable of despair even as their world finally comes crashing in on them and all hope is snuffed out.

There is no wanton cruelty. Vorx is true to his word – those who are not killed in the fighting are given an honourable death. Countless numbers of humans are inducted into the half-life of thralldom, their wills extinguished and their souls crushed, but the Lords of Silence do not see that fate as something to mourn – for them, it is an improvement on what went before.

And so Vigilia Carceris is taken, its foundations scoured and its archives burned. Little Lords dance across the proud parapets, defecating on the symbols of the immortal Imperium, while the waves crash futilely below, starved of their energy by the unnatural humidity.

It will be recorded in later years that this was the first great loss of an Adeptus Astartes home world in the aftermath of the Cicatrix Maledictum. Scholars on Terra will make note of Sabatine’s destruction, and fear that it presages the start of an unstoppable tide. Events will be set in motion as a result, decisions made, desperate pacts sealed.

At the time, though, whether on Terra or within the Imperium Nihilus, none of this is guessed at. All that is known is that a battle has been won and the god of decay has been well served.

The last of the flags come down. The guns fall silent.

Hunched monsters with pale green eyes emerge into an uncertain haze, their movements slowing again, their helms venting breathily.

Over the burning metal and the rotting flesh, a pall descends. Slowly, uncertainly, as if all such mundane things are now to be questioned in this universe of changes, it begins to rain.

He stumbles through the ruins, breathing heavily. The pain in his chest seems to have gone now – he barely remembers he had it.

He does not see well. Everything is grey, like rancid milk. Other bodies, rough around the edges like his, are like ghosts. Occasionally one will blunder up to him, and they will stare at one another, trying to recall something important. Then the other one will lose interest and shuffle back into the mists.

He has killed many people. He knows this because their blood is still hot on his hands. He licks this blood from time to time, and for a while afterwards he feels more… defined. It is not necessarily a pleasant sensation, for the pain comes back quickly too, and his eyes are sore. It feels better to sink back into that vague sense of not-quite-there, the blurring of awareness and the softening embrace of dreams.

He is conscious of a narrowing. It is like the world is closing in around him, both fading and becoming heavier. He is permanently cold now, and things are drying up. He does not sweat, and his mouth is parched.

He limps past the sharp edge of a bombed-out building. One half of an eagle motif, double-headed, lies in the ruins. He stares at it for a while, wondering why it is making him feel terrible. He doubts that he could be properly sick now even if he wanted to, but the feeling of nausea is still possible, so he hurries on.

Eventually he is on the edge of the city. He can smell salt, and he feels a chill wind against his face. He shivers, wondering if he should go back the way he came. The walls are little more than piles of broken stone. He could just keep on walking, and the cliff edge will come. For some reason, he knows how steep those cliffs are, and how far he would fall.

The rain is freezing, and what remains of his clothing sticks to his body. He staggers, he slips. Before long the walls are behind him and the rocks are becoming slippery with foam. He can hear the crash of surf, and he sees clouds racing.

It will not take long. He will hardly feel it.

But then there is a shape in the mist, a pillar of stone that slides out of the fog.

‘Captain Dantine,’ says the pillar.

He concentrates, hard. The pillar becomes larger and more defined, swelling into the colossal shape of a monster. It moves, and he sees arms and legs. There are fat little horrors that squat all over it, and books hanging from chains about its neck. A ragged cowl is sodden in the downpour.

‘Captain Dantine,’ the monster says again. ‘Stay where you are.’

The thing comes closer. He does as he is told, of course. He waits, panting softly, the rainwater coursing over what remains of his body.

From somewhere, he pulls out a name. Philemon. The corpse-counter. The monster looks in bad shape – wounded, perhaps, or merely bedraggled. Amid all the flotsam and junk that festoons his body, there are bags hanging at his belt, and some are damp with something thicker than water.

‘You were hard to find,’ says Philemon irritably. ‘I thought we might have lost you already. By the god, look at you.’

He can barely understand the words. Everything is grey. His only motivation, to the extent that he still has one, is to keep walking, and maybe find that drop into oblivion.

Philemon reaches for his belt and pulls out a pouch, one that looks vaguely familiar.

‘Vorx is not wholly pleased with me,’ he says. ‘I should have trusted him a little more, he thinks. Not taken so much initiative. And so I have a number of penances to perform. And one of them, it seems, is you.’

The monster comes closer, and he can feel rotten breath on his face. That stirs a memory. He reaches up to his chest, and a faint throb can be detected there again.

‘Vorx is grateful to you,’ Philemon says. ‘Vorx thinks it would be a waste to let you go. He wants to find a way to keep you.’

He looks at the bag. Dimly, he is horrified by it.

‘I don’t know what we’ll do exactly, given how far you’ve dropped, but something might be worked out,’ Philemon says. ‘There are ways and there are means, restorative magicks. Come with me, now.’

He hesitates. He could keep going, head into that grey obliteration. It would be the end of all of it. His fingers are shaking. It is so, so cold.

He looks up at the monster. It is waiting for him. Then, inevitably, his head drops. He nods. He begins to turn back towards the ruined city.

The monster falls in alongside him.

‘Don’t look so miserable,’ it says. ‘You’ve been chosen, for some reason. Vorx will find a way for you to serve.’

He takes no pleasure in that. He takes no pleasure in anything. As he stumbles, he looks at the bag swinging in the monster’s clenched claw. He watches it sway and feels that he hates it.

But there’s nothing to be done. No resistance.

He keeps walking, and knows the dark ship is next.

They will not let him go.

He puts one foot before the other, then the next, an automatic movement.

Damn them. They will not let him go.

It takes a long time for Slert to re-emerge. He has been travelling far, arranging for more deployments of the contagions. Tankers have been dropped from Solace, and these are now travelling out across the highlands, escorted by squads of Unbroken. There are cities waiting, teeming still with life and possibility. Most of them are already under assault from their indigenous phage creatures, but the process can always be given a helping hand. It takes a while, even for someone of Slert’s talents, to infect an entire world. He will need to be patient.

Still, there is much to be satisfied with. The toxins he released into the citadel were effective, just as they needed to be. They have a new army now, enough to replenish the losses they took fighting the Weeping Veil and the White Consuls. Many Unbroken were slain, it is true, and those will take a long time to replace, but such is war. The god will provide, in some form or other.

Slert returns from the western road, heading back towards the smouldering citadel. Already dark green algae are beginning to blotch on the bare rock, fed by the rain that has become a constant stream. A world that was once hard-edged and driven is now softening, filling up, mouldering and warming. He can hear buzzing and smell the sweetening of the rotting flesh as the pace of decay quickens.

The ruins of Vigilia Carceris rise up in front of him, a sodden mass of roofless towers. Its bulk is still considerable, but its symmetry has gone. It stinks already, and Slert can see the pestilences cradling within it. Given a little time, it will blossom into its full potential. Perhaps Vorx will make it a fortress of his own, a place within which to gather strength. Or perhaps they will leave soon, taking the victory and striking out into the deep void.

Just as he thinks of the siegemaster, Slert sees him approaching, limping down the old road from the shattered gates. He salutes and walks towards him. In the background, an orbital lifter is coming down, churning its way through the rain, bringing more delights for the conversion of this world.

‘A victory,’ says Slert.

Vorx comes to a halt, shrugs, but does not disagree. ‘How goes the work?’

‘There are millions here. We could do something with this place.’ He looks at the siegemaster carefully. ‘If you wanted to.’

Vorx says nothing. He seems morose.

‘A shame,’ says Slert. ‘What happened to Kledo. We’ll need to think about what we do for a Surgeon now.’

Vorx nods. ‘A great shame. Something will turn up.’

‘And the ship.’ Slert feels like he is pressing now. ‘What happened?’

Vorx sighs. It rumbles out from his colossal chest, and the numerals on the battleplate seem to shift and align in the poor light. ‘A mystery, Putrifier. Some quirk of the warp, triggered by what we did over Agripinaa, I judge. I will ask Philemon to continue his investigation.’

‘He has not uncovered much, so far.’

‘No. He has not. He did not serve me well.’

‘But I served you well, did I not, siegemaster?’

Finally Vorx looks at him. ‘You did, Slert. Your plagues were things of magnificence. I wish you to continue with them. Turn this whole world into a new garden. You can do this for me?’

‘With great pleasure, lord.’

Vorx is looking out at the highlands now, watching them drown in the rain. Slert knows he is imagining what will happen to them – the sloughs, the rot, the pools of stagnant water. It is surprising how fast things can change, with a will.

‘And after that?’ Slert ventures, uncertain how far to push things. ‘Ultramar? Or some other place?’

Vorx thinks for a long time. He looks old, now. Terribly old, like something dragged up from the base of a primordial mire. This war has been going on for so very long.

‘All things are possible now, Putrifier,’ he says eventually, starting to walk again, still limping. ‘All things are possible.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Scars and The Path of Heaven, the Primarchs novels Leman Russ: The Great Wolf and Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris, the novellas Brotherhood of the Storm and Wolf King, and the audio drama The Sigillite. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne, Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion, the Space Wolves novels Blood of Asaheim and Stormcaller, and the short story collection Wolves of Fenris, as well as the Space Marine Battles novels Wrath of Iron and War of the Fang. Additionally, he has many Warhammer novels to his name, including the Warhammer Chronicles novel Master of Dragons, which forms part of the War of Vengeance series. Chris lives and works near Bristol, in south-west England.

An extract from Black Legion.

‘Khayon, I know you’re here. I can smell your mongrel stink.’

Daravek’s voice was a rusted hacksaw, a thing of flaky corrosion and rotting edges. ‘Show yourself. Let us finish this.’

He was talking a great deal, almost always a sign of desperation in a warrior. I dared to think that control of the situation was slipping through his fingers, and challenging me like this was the only way he could try to reassert his dominance.

Around us, above us, sirens were crying out their warnings. They had been doing so for several minutes. In Daravek’s defence, he had done very well to last this long.

But I had him. At last, I had him. Tonight I would bring his bones to my lord Abaddon.

Thagus Daravek was an immense, bloated monster, swollen by the favour of his patron Gods. Wet filth crusted the overlapping plates of his battle armour, sealing the seams with undefined biomechanical vileness. The ceramite around his torso and one of his legs was warped with diseased swelling and fusion of the flesh within, and horns of bronze thrust through punctures in the mangled armour. The bronze spines were veined, somehow alive, and bleeding vascular promethium. The vulture’s wings that rose in ragged majesty from his shoulder blades were spindly, trembling things despite their size, the feathers and tattered bones burning in heatless waves of warpfire. Ghosts, or things that looked like ghosts, reached out from those flames.

‘He is here,’ Daravek said, deep and low, as he paced. His jaundiced eyes drifted from warrior to warrior among his elite guard. Blood decorated his face from the slaughter so far. It bubbled, slowly dissolving on the active blade of his axe. ‘I know he is here, riding within your bones. Which one of you was weak enough to fall to the mongrel magician?’

Even as I clenched my consciousness away from the risk of discovery, even as I dissolved my essence thinner than mist and threaded it through the blood of my host body, I felt a stab of irritation at the word ‘magician’, uttered in Gothic heavily accented by life in the highlands of Barbarus.

But now was not the time to amend the warlord’s ignorance.

‘Was it you, Symeos?’ he asked one of his warriors. The metal chamber shook around us. Statues to incarnations of the Undying God and the Shifting Many trembled, given shivering life by the assault on the fortress. Symeos tilted his helmed head, bearing his throat before his master’s blade.

‘Never in life, Lord Daravek.’

Daravek levelled his axe at another of his closest brethren. Some of them shared the same traits as their liege lord – the warped bloating of preternatural disease, the encrusted corruption of once pristine battleplate. This one did not; he was cadaverous in a drier, more ghoulish sense. There was something parched about him, something that spoke of undesecrated tombs beneath the earth, decorated with the untouched dust of centuries.

‘Ilyaster?’ Daravek asked. ‘Was it you, brother?’

‘No, my lord,’ Ilyaster said with the ugly rasp that served as his voice. He was unhelmed, and the words were a carrion-scented breath through blackened teeth.

Daravek swayed to the next warrior. To me. His eyes met mine, his toxic respiration caressing my face. ‘Tychondrian,’ he said. ‘You, brother?’

I was also unhelmed. I snarled through jaws that could barely close due to the length of my uneven fangs.

‘No, lord.’

The fortress gave another titanic shudder around us. Daravek turned away, laughing, truly laughing. ‘You could all be lying, you worthless wretches. Nevertheless, the day is far from done. We must get into orbit. We will go where Abaddon’s mongrel cannot pursue.’

I was instrumental in the birth of the Black Legion, yet the truth is that I was absent for many of the battles that formed its genesis. While my brothers waged war and fought to survive, I worked in an isolation that bordered upon exile. I cannot say that I never resented Abaddon for this, but I have always understood it. We each play the part to which we are best suited, and he did not need another general, or yet another warrior. He needed an assassin.

This is not a rare role for souls of great psychic strength among the Nine Legions. We possess talents and masteries that make murder something of a specialty. In a realm where deception and assassination are plagued by a million unnatural considerations – where stealth and a sniper rifle are next to useless; where physical laws scarcely apply; where every single foe is preternaturally resistant to venom and poison – those with the power to remake reality make the finest murderers.

Use of the Art, manipulating the matter of souls, allows one to bypass such limitations. A warrior who may never best his brothers with a blade can bind daemons to his will. The same warrior, who may be mediocre with a boltgun and bear no awards for either valour or mastery, can rewrite the minds of his foes to his own wishes. A marksman that has learned every scrap of intelligence about his target may try to predict his foe’s actions, but a sorcerer that has seen into his enemy’s soul knows every iota of lore without needing to resort to crude guesswork. And if you give credence to such things, the sorcerer may have walked the paths of fate and seen a host of possible, probable futures, and can manipulate events to bring about the most desired ends.

Yet if I am making this sound easy, I am doing a disservice to the slayer’s craft. Most of these undertakings are monumental. Many are impossible without a coven of allies and apprentices, both of which I have used in abundance across the millennia. Sometimes, however, I work alone, and those sorcerers capable of such feats must be psykers of immense strength. I do not say this lightly. My reputation among the Nine Legions has been hard earned, and there are precious few sorcerers able to match me in might. Most of those that can tend to waste their talents in the unreliable impracticalities of precognition and prophecy. A tragic waste. Some say the best blades are those that are never drawn, and there is wisdom in such a philosophy. But power must be wielded, tested and trained, lest it wither on the vine.

You have heard me speak of Ahriman before. I know you know his name, from his many predations upon the Imperium. My brother, my naïve but most admirably honest brother, Ahzek Ahriman once told me that he alone among the Nine Legions stood above me in talent with the Art. It was typical of his habit for blending humility with arrogance, to say nothing of manipulation.

I cannot speak for the veracity of his words. In the long years of my life, while almost all of my sorcerous rivals lie dead, a few of them came close to killing me. There are others whom I would never wish to face, and still others that carry reputations equal to, or greater than, mine.

In our Legion’s early years, I played my part as expected. My new duties for Abaddon required a breathtaking amount of preparation, and I adhered to these requirements with unfailing focus.

I was never swift in my work. I was, however, very thorough. When Abaddon needed haste, he sent warriors or warships to do his will. When he needed precision, when he wanted a point made or a lesson learned, he sent me.

When Abaddon first told me he required Daravek dead, I knew not to expect any deep conversational insight as to how he wished me to achieve his goal. It was always my place to study the target, to ascertain the consequences of various methods of death and to bring about a result most favourable to our emerging armies and the warrior-monarch that led us.

Abaddon expects results. Any one of the Ezekarion requiring the painstaking force-feeding of information, unable or unwilling to compose battle plans in his own right, would be discarded or destroyed as useless. The same stands for the chieftains, subcommanders and champions that fill the officer ranks beneath us.

This serves a twofold purpose. First, although he leads the Black Legion’s greatest battles and oversees our function, in this manner Abaddon forces his ranking officers and elite bodyguards to constantly adapt and act on their own initiative.

The second purpose, no less vital, is one of trust. By this delegation his closest brothers know they carry his trust. The rest of the Legion, and the entirety of the Eye itself, knows this as well. The Ezekarion speaks with Abaddon’s voice. Each one of us wields his authority. You cannot overstate the exultant effect this has on morale.

It was my duty as Abaddon’s silent blade that brought me to the fortress of Thagus Daravek, Warlord of This, Master of That, Butcher of Them and a dozen other titles that I refuse to consign to parchment even all these millennia later. One of them mattered more than the others, and that is the one I shall use: the self-styled Lord of Hosts.

He challenged us at every turn, a warlord who wanted to rival Abaddon, and thus he was sentenced to death. Our emissaries to other warlords would arrive only to find that oaths had already been sworn to Daravek. Our fleets would translate into a system only to sail into one of Daravek’s many ambushes.

We of the Ezekarion, and the armies we commanded, had been bleeding the Legions for some time, carving them apart as we fought for our right to exist. None retaliated with the same ferocity as the Death Guard, and no warlord was as wilful, or as dangerous, as Daravek, the so-called Lord of Hosts. The title fit. On more than one occasion he had gathered fleets comprised of warbands from several Legions, tasked with the purpose of resisting our rise. Yet always he avoided direct conflict with Abaddon. Always he remained one step ahead of us, refusing to come within range of the Vengeful Spirit’s guns.

For every victory we earned through the running blood of his warriors, he stole one back in kind. He had to die.

I was Abaddon’s instrument. It took months of watching, waiting, hiding and scrying to locate his sanctuary world, and I was blessed with fortune as well. Traitors within his ranks stood ready to work with me. I could not fail. I would not fail. Not this time.

Daravek and his warband laid claim to a world of calcified pain. Despite the madness of those words, they are neither weak poetry nor a strained metaphor. The planet’s crust was formed of tortured breaths, fearful dreams and the echoes of human and eldar agonies throughout eternity, all of it bleeding from the warp and rendered into a cold landscape of knuckly, misshapen bone.

This would have left me enraptured during my first years inside the Eye. When I walked the world’s surface, however, I was neither breathless nor awed. My mind was elsewhere, tangled in other difficulties. This was my fifth attempt on Daravek’s life. As useful as I was to Abaddon, his patience was not without limit.

‘Kulrei’arah,’ Nefertari had informed me before I left to undertake the duty. That was the name this globe had once carried as part of the eldar empire.

We had no name for it. It didn’t deserve one.

If you touched the osseous ground with bare skin, you could feel the senseless, red reflections of the dreamers and sufferers whose torment formed this place. Even without touching the bony earth you could hear the murmurs rising from its cracked, marrow-stinking surface.

What wracked imagination had conjured such a planet into being? Was this Daravek’s psyche at insidious work, shaping it to his desires? Or was it merely the Eye’s etheric discharge taking form – the warp’s excremental run-off changing a world without any guiding will?

And yet, as daemon-haunted worlds are weighed, the climate and landscape of this nameless sphere were practically tame. On Sortiarius, the home world of my former Legion, it rains the boiling blood of every liar ever to draw breath. In the season of storms, this sanguine tempest is often acidic enough to dissolve ceramite. Some say this is Magnus the Red’s rebellious subconscious at play, scourging himself for his past treacheries. I cannot speak to the truth of the matter, but it sounds appropriate for my father, as conflicted as he is.

Patches of this nameless world’s surface had, through preternatural corrosion or unrest, been reduced to deserts of bone dust. It was within one of these oceans of skeletal powder that Daravek’s fortress lay, half-buried in the dust of eroded nightmares. Its crooked spires reached skywards, surrounded in a fog of toxichemical mist. Monstrous industrial mouth-vents along the sides of each tower breathed the poison gas across the surrounding desert, offering yet another line of defence. Despite this, the bastion was still a place of pilgrimage to the beastmen and mutants that populated the world – their bodies, given over to varying degrees of rot, lay across the desert in their scattered thousands. This latter element fascinated me. What would bring these creatures on such a pilgrimage, into the face of an almost certain death? What did they believe awaited them within the fortress’ walls, those few that were strong enough to walk through the poison mist to reach it?

I recovered several of the corpses for educational purposes. Speaking with the shards of their souls, I ascertained from their pious wailing that they left their subterranean tribes and marched upon Daravek’s castle of corroded iron in the hopes of elevation into his ranks. He would hardly be the first to try and pervert the gene-seed implantation process to function on mutants, adult or otherwise, but tales of success in altering the Emperor’s original ritualised process were – and still are – as rare as you might imagine.

After each summoning I would sheathe my jamdhara knife, hurl the shrieking ghosts back into the warp’s winds and incinerate the remains to erase any evidence of my investigations. Avoiding detection was paramount. Slowly, invisibly, I began my infiltration.

It took almost a year of psychic permeation before I was ready to kill Daravek. Everything had to be precise. It had to be perfect. I could take no risks this time.

I still wonder if I acted too swiftly.

The creature’s name was a gathering of syllables that I would struggle to pronounce aloud, despite speaking several hundred linguistic variants of humanity’s proto-Gothic root tongue. This creature, whose thoughts were a turmoil of bestial instinct and slavering loyalty to its armoured masters, toiled its life away in the fortress’ dark depths. Here the only sounds in existence were the brays and yells of the menials raising their voices above the ceaseless crash of coal-fire machinery. This was the creature’s life, from birth to death.

In this dark realm, the creature moved among its kindred, clutching a rusted and broken machine strut, almost two metres in length. It thrust this primitive spear through the back of a second creature’s neck, ripped it free, then wielded it as a club to shatter the face of a third slave. This third unfortunate fell to the ground, raising its arms futilely as it was impaled through the chest.

The spear was now bent, rendering it useless. The creature left it in its kinsman’s chest and turned to the others drawing closer in the stinking, crashing darkness. It could kill one of them, perhaps two, but dozens of red eyes gleamed back in the gloom. Jagged war-shrieks and more human-sounding cries of anger and fear sounded out through the dark.

The creature did not fight its kinsmen. It turned from them, took three running steps and hurled itself into the pounding, rattling mechanics of the closest machine station. The pistons slammed. The gears ground. The creature’s final thought, not surprisingly, was washed red with panic and pain. The machine slowed momentarily, then chewed through the obstruction.

This happened again and again. One of the creatures would erupt into sudden violence, killing without warning, striking down those at its side. Several simply threw themselves into the jaws of struggling mechanical engines.

Within the space of a single minute, eleven of the machines had stalled, jammed by dense clogs of flesh and bone.

In one of the spires, a legionary overseeing the work of high-level functionary slaves stared unblinking at a console that started to flash with red warning signs. He was already dying when the console’s alert runes began flashing, suffering catastrophic ischemic shock as a carnival of messy embolisms savaged his brain.

The Space Marine – a warrior named Elath Dastarenn – remained standing. He stood slack-mouthed, dead-eyed, and keyed in several codes to deactivate the console’s warning sigils, silencing the terminal from reporting its findings elsewhere.

I believe he said something mumbled and meaningless as his synapses flared those final times. Whatever the wordless murmur was supposed to mean, I cannot speculate. Bodies, and the brains that drive them, do strange things as they die.

The legionary holding the rank of Armsmaster ceased speaking halfway through addressing his squad. He drew his sidearm in a slow snarl of arm servos, placed the bolt pistol’s mouth against his left eye and discharged a bolt directly into the front of his skull.

Atop one of the gunship platforms, a crew of mutant thralls braved the toxic gases with rheumy eyes and blood-pocked rebreathers, working to refuel a Thunderhawk. One of them unlimbered a crude flamer from beneath her cloak, a weapon she did not have the clearance to possess. She had spent several days building it piece by piece, despite lacking the intelligence to do so, and now brought it forth to bathe her companions in a roar of semi-liquid fire.

She ignored her flailing, dying herdmates, even when one of them crashed into her and ignited her gas-soaked clothing. Aflame now, she pushed the nozzle of the jury-rigged short-burst flamer against the refuelling port of the grounded gunship, but nothing emerged when she pulled the trigger. Her last act was to thrust her burning arm directly into the hole that opened into the promethium tank.

I saw the explosion just under a minute later from where I watched, several kilometres away on a low ridge.

On several other towers, anti-aircraft cannons rotated and lowered, no longer scanning the low atmosphere for threats, instead tracking the flight paths of the fighter wing patrolling above the ramparts. The servitor-brains inside these turrets would later be found boiled alive in their suspension-fluid cradles. Long before that, however, they spat volley after volley of cannon fire into the sky, bringing down most of their own aerial defences.

The primary cannon – an anti-orbital annihilator fusillade – detonated in the middle of this treacherous display due to its fifty-strong crew of mono-tasked servitors acting without orders, overriding all fail-safes and overloading the poorly maintained power cells set in the weapon’s foundations. The three tech-priests tasked with overseeing the primary cannon’s function had slaughtered one another without warning or reason, acting in cold and calculating silence, effectively abandoning their servitor wards.

I saw this explosion as well. It was considerably brighter than the first.

Power began to fail across the fortress. Partly this was because of slave crews turning on one another. Partly it was due to the sabotage of several power generators. And partly it was because one of Daravek’s own elite warriors, the legionary’s armour heaving to contain the disease-bloated flesh within, had fused several melta charges to his own body and detonated them at the tri-cortex plasma locomotor that controlled coolant for the fortress’ entire reactor district beneath the planet’s surface.

An uprising began in the fortress’ depths when a legionary powered down and deactivated the prisoner cells, flooding the lower levels of the castle with warp spawn, devolved mutants and mortal captives who were being kept as food. The legionary cut his own throat with his chainsword before he witnessed the fruits of this labour, and the vox speakers in his gorget that demanded reports heard nothing but his last breaths gurgling through his destroyed vocal cords.

Several legionaries rampaged through the warband’s barracks and armouries, butchering their unprepared brethren and slaughtering arming slaves. Each of these wayward warriors was inevitably killed in turn by his brothers, but not before each had done what damage he could. Within each victorious squad, another warrior would then turn on his brethren without warning, unloading a boltgun at point-blank range into the backs and heads of his brothers, or carving limbs from bodies with a power sword before being finished by the survivors.

Dying daemons clawed their way from several of these corpses, their soulless lives extinguished on the floor by the bodies of those they had possessed. Others I simply abandoned where they fell, moving my senses and consciousness to the next warriors whose souls I had spent months studying in preparation for this night.

One by one, death by death.

I remember every man, woman and child whose mind I touched, whose body I puppeteered, whose flesh I gouged out hollow as a haven for a daemonic parasite, purely because of what I am. A legionary’s brain is sculpted to retain everything from the moment of his awakening as a Space Marine to the second of his demise.

Far from the fortress, I was sweating in my armour and chanting, endlessly chanting, hunched in the confines of a crawl hole I had dug with my bare hands. Even with my consciousness free of my body, I felt my physical form reacting to the pressures I was placing upon it with such a protracted psychic sending: the ache of my over-bent spine; the tickle of saliva running from my moving mouth; the painful spasms of my twitching fingers.

Months and months of preparation had led to this moment. Soul by soul, being by being, I moved through the fortress, touching some minds as a mere caress, amplifying their basest instincts and spurring them to bloodshed. Others, those I had silently and unknowingly prepared over the many months, I plunged myself into, knife-like and savage, tearing their consciousnesses into mist, overriding the function of their muscles and bones with my will.

Even among those I had been spying upon for months, hollowing out for this specific purpose, resistance was tenacious. I was weary and their souls were strong, and rather than waste time seeking to overcome them I would move onto others. I was too focused on my work to keep track of every failed attempt, but in more than one district of the fortress my attempts to rally the slaves against their masters failed, as did my attempts to force the Death Guard to butcher their slaves.

It was working, though.

Bulkheads that led to avenues of escape were sealed and overridden with their mechanical processes shot. Corridors were collapsed with explosives. Gunships that managed to lift off were brought down by fire from the battlements. Section by section, district by district, the fortress was cast into darkness and pitched into disorder. A year’s work, all culminating in a single evening. The jaws of the trap slowly closed.

It was not perfect, but by the lies of the Shifting Many, it was close. So damn close.

Soon it was time to hunt Daravek. I sank my unseen claws into one last prepared and vulnerable mind, tearing his shrieking, violated thoughts free and binding my own in place. I settled into this new host, gathered my strength and waited.

Daravek was by no means easy prey, and he was anything but a fool. He had reacted with precision and competence, moving through the fortress himself, quelling the uprisings through the brutality of his axe and by ordering entire sections of the fortress sealed, flooding them with alchemical toxins to extinguish any living resistance. It might have worked had the sections actually been sealed, but many of his unit leaders and subcommanders were mind-eaten wrecks that failed to comply with his orders, or were murdered by their subordinates before they could act. In many cases, they were dead before they could even receive his orders.

But despite all my preparation, I was building an uncontrollable fire in haste and with imperfect tools. Daravek felt my nearness. He knew what was happening, knew this was the payment for resisting Abaddon’s past approach and offer of alliance. He had seen this before. Not on this scale, not to this degree of precision, but he knew the hand that held this blade.

‘Khayon is here,’ he had said.

He halted his massacring advance in one of his ritual chambers, demanding answers from the remaining bodyguards at his side. They endured this with stoic, regal loyalty.

When his eyes locked to mine, I felt the toxicity of his breath against my mutated face. ‘Tychondrian,’ he said to me. ‘You, brother?’

I snarled a denial through a fanged mouth that the warp had mangled and reshaped into something of absolute lethality.

‘No, lord.’

He laughed. By the Pantheon, he was enjoying this. ‘You could all be lying, you worthless wretches. Nevertheless, the day is far from done. We must get into orbit. We will go where Abaddon’s mongrel cannot pursue.’

The chamber shook once more with the discord I had orchestrated across the fortress. Daravek turned away from me, levelling his gaze upon the next warrior of his inner circle. All I had to do was shift my stance, lengthening my shadow beneath the flickering glare of the overhead lights so that it touched Daravek’s in lightless union.

I forced my psychic command into that patch of conjoined darkness.

Now.

Prosperine lynxes, extinct with the annihilation of my home world, were ill-named for comparative purposes. Before their destruction, they had resembled the equally extinct Ancient Terran tigrus-cat or the sabre-toothed smyladon rather than any other feline: hugely muscled, bulky with strength and speckle-striped in natural warning to ward off other predators. However, they eclipsed even those prehistoric beasts in size. A Prosperine lynx’s great head, with an arsenal of spear-tip teeth, would reach the height of a Legiones Astartes warrior’s breastplate.

That is what leapt from Thagus Daravek’s shadow. Claws first, the beast melted out of the darkness and launched, roaring, onto the warlord’s back in a move of impossible agility.

In shape it was a Prosperine lynx, but in form it was purely daemonic. This creature possessed neither flesh nor blood, and its fur – black and striped with lighter grey – was closer to smoke than hair. Its claws were the length of gladii and formed from volcanic glass. Its eyes were the kind of white that burns.

I was moving the moment it struck. I spun to the warrior next to me, igniting the lightning claws I wore as gauntlets. I could – should – have slaughtered two of the other bodyguards before they could react, but I was slowed by the unfamiliar might of the Terminator war-plate around me. Nor were cumbersome lightning claws my weapon of preference. I carved through the closest Death Guard only for the blades to lodge within the corpse for precious seconds. When I dragged them free, my chance to slaughter Daravek was lost – though he still thrashed beneath the daemon-cat’s weight and fury, his other bodyguards now moved between us.

Reality bleached down to flashes of instinct and insight, cutting, weaving aside, swinging left and right with the cumbersome claws. Despite my gouging Tychondrian’s consciousness free of his flesh, his body still resisted my control. He had been stronger than I expected. That made me slow.

Tychondrian’s body was a limping, bleeding ruin by the time I reached Daravek. Scarce seconds had passed, but it was an assassin’s eternity, where every heartbeat counted. The taste of failure was already running its bitter way over my tongue. I knew, facing the embattled Daravek as he wrestled with the thrashing, snarling lynx, that I lacked the strength to finish him from within Tychondrian’s shredded form.

Nagual, I sent. Even my silent voice was ravaged. Tychondrian was dying, the distraction of weakness rather than pain flooding through his fading muscles and slowing his internal organs. I was down on one knee, unable to force myself back up as the body died around me. Nagual… Finish him…

Master, the lynx sent back in acknowledgement.

Not a word in truth, just a ripple of awareness, yet the lynx was struggling alone. Daravek gushed a flood of alchemical flame from his wrist projectors, bathing the creature that thrashed upon his back and shoulders like a living cloak. Nagual’s smoky corpus caught fire, and the beast vanished.

Suddenly unbalanced without the daemon’s weight, Daravek took a moment to turn and stabilise himself. In the same second, the daemonic feline roared from my shadow, leaping out to crash into the Death Guard warlord once more.

Cannot kill alone, sent Nagual as his fangs scraped sparks across the ceramite of Daravek’s shoulder guards. His claws found better purchase, tearing mangled shreds of armour plating free and ripping through the meat beneath, yet each savage wound sealed almost as soon as it was carved. Prey is blessed. Gifts from the Undying God. Gifts from the Shifting Many. Cannot kill alone.

I couldn’t rise. I couldn’t shoot. The arm I raised did not end in a double-barrelled bolter clutched in an armoured fist; it ended raggedly at the elbow, severed moments before by one of the other bodyguards’ blades.

‘Khayon.’ Daravek spat my name from his bleeding mouth, advancing on me, step by slow step. ‘I. See. You.’

The daemon’s snarls turned frantically feline as Daravek gripped Nagual’s biting face over his shoulder and began to sink his fingers into his skull.

Master!

I tore myself free of the useless husk that had been Tychondrian, suffering the disembodied vulnerability of an unseen etheric form. My body, my true body, was kilometres from here – hunched and chanting and utterly useless. In the air around me, I felt the shivery threat of shapeless daemons drawn to my unbound spirit, hungering for the taste of a human soul. No time for caution.

I closed myself around Daravek, seeping through the cracks in his armour, sinking into the pores of his skin, driving into the meat of his mind. Possession is among the most desperate and difficult ways to attack a soul. It rarely works without intensive preparation, and he sensed me at once, as surely as if I held a blade to his throat. Immersion within a soul comes with a horrific sharing of overlapping senses as the brain plays host to two souls, awakening the mind with painful hisses of meshed memories and sending burning stabs of sensory input along overburdened optic nerves.

Not this time. Daravek’s spirit was iron. Trying to puppet his flesh was to shout into a storm; I was hopelessly overwhelmed against his strength. He repelled me from his flesh through force of will, and hurled the daemon-cat away through force of muscle.

He was bloodied and battered, cut off from the survivors of his warband, his fortress falling around him – yet he still lived. He turned, paying no heed to the blood he vomited down his chest-plate, disgorging internal filth through the grate of his teeth and seeking me, wild-eyed and raving.

No. Not seeking me. Seeking my ally, the traitor now revealed in his midst.

‘Ilyaster.’

One of his inner circle still lived. Ilyaster, that patient and parched creature serving as Daravek’s herald, standing as ever with his liege lord’s scythe of office in his hands. He too was wounded from the fray, his Cataphractii plate mauled and spitting sparks from its back-mounted power generator. I had not touched him, nor had my daemon familiar.

Ilyaster pulled the ceremonial weapon from the corpse of the brother warrior he had just beheaded, and raised it to ward off his own lord.

‘You.’ Daravek’s mouth ran with black blood as he regurgitated the accusation. ‘You betrayed me. You summoned Abaddon’s mongrel. You!’

The shadow-lynx advanced from one side, Ilyaster from the other, wounded but determined.

Now. It had to be now. Daravek could destroy all three of us if he was allowed to retake control of the battle.

But I had nothing left. I hurled myself into him once more. He repelled me without effort, as defiantly as though his soul were warded by steel.

Weakening by the moment, I drove back into his mind, thinning myself into near-nothingness, offering no solid presence for him to repel a third time. I did not need to master his flesh, merely steal a moment of opportunity.

No assault this time. This was attunement, a harmonising with his body’s mortal processes. I flowed through his physical form, riding his blood, feeling the singing sting of adrenaline and electrical impulses from his nervous system.

Pain.

I willed pulses of flame to dance along the cobweb of his nerves, forcing his muscles to contract, to clench, to spasm.

It was enough. Enough to loosen his grip on the axe, enough to paralyse Daravek the span of a single breath.

The daemon-beast was a hammer weight of taloned shadow against my face and chest. The ceremonial scythe was a lance blow cracking into my side. I felt myself falling to the ground, weighed down by the body I had suffused with suffering.

Feed! The daemon’s snarls came with each jarring, reaving blow of his clawed paws. Feed! Blood! Meat! Life!

I was Daravek in that moment. Every word was a thunder crack against my shattering skull. The daemon, the minion of Abaddon’s mongrel assassin, was taking me to pieces. I could not move. My armour was shattered by my own ceremonial scythe in Ilyaster’s hands.

And yet, I was laughing. Daravek was laughing. I had no power to compel him to such a reaction.

Khayon. I spoke my own name, forcing my spirit into cohesion, keeping myself together. I am Khayon. I am Khayon.

Memories flashed, acid-vile in their intensity, of warriors I had never met and wars I had never fought. Strangely it was this, of all things, that Daravek hated me for most. This voyeuristic sharing of his thoughts; this defiling insult of living inside his skull. And yet, even then, his snide laughter echoed all around me.

He backhanded Ilyaster hard enough to shatter the other warrior’s breastplate and moved for the immense doors leading to the fortress’ teleportation chamber. I had to stop him. I had to kill him.

But I could not. I could not hold myself inside his form. He would not let me. He hurled me from his flesh with the ease of a man waving aside an insect. My shock only made it easier for him to shed my consciousness from his own, and he did so with silent psychic laughter.

Almost, Iskandar! Almost, this time.

He repelled me with such brutality that all sense and sensation fled from me. I saw nothing, sensed nothing, and merely plunged through blackness. At the end of my strength, only oblivion awaited.

For a time, I did not exist. For a time, I was past consciousness. In that deep and timeless black, I remember only one thing: when it began to end. There came the sensation of fangs, jaws that closed together in the nothingness. Weapon-teeth sank into whatever was left of Iskandar Khayon, biting down into the matter of his lost soul.

Jaws that arrested my endless fall, that held me in a bladed, impaling embrace… and that brought me back.

I woke with the arrhythmic drumming of my twin hearts straining inside my chest, and a gasp of bitter air spearing its way into my lungs. My vision returned, but slowly, victim to smears and hallucinatory blurs.

When my muscles ceased spasming, I managed to rise on unsteady feet, appalled at the weakness of my limbs. Sweat greased my flesh in a disgusting coat. Blood had trickled from my eyes, my ears, my nose, my gums. The pressure in my skull began to ease as I sucked in great heaves of air, fuelling my locked lungs and overworked hearts.

Nagual emerged from the shadow cast by my crouching form, licking blood from his obsidian teeth.

Master? the daemon lynx asked, as if I were not standing right before him.

Is it done? I was so drained, I could not be certain I was even reaching outside my own head, let alone to my distant daemon. Is he dead?

The great cat turned back towards the burning fortress, kilometres away and far below us in the desert bowl.

The prey fled. Could not kill alone. Had to save you, master. Your soul was lost.

Breathless, exhausted, I exhaled into the nameless world’s reeking wind and looked up at the stars, where Thagus Daravek and his surviving brethren were surely safe aboard one of their warships, no doubt already sailing to yet another hidden sanctuary that would take me years to find.

Defeated, a failure for the fifth time, I looked down at the lynx. I would go to the fortress and claim it for Abaddon. I would find out if Ilyaster still lived. And then, after this latest loss, I would go home.

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To Hannah, with love

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Johan Grenier.

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ISBN: 978-1-78030-960-6

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