More tales of the Astra Militarum from Black Library

• CIAPHAS CAIN •
by Sandy Mitchell

CIAPHAS CAIN: HERO OF THE IMPERIUM
(Contains books 1-3 in the series: For the Emperor, Caves of Ice and The Traitor’s Hand)

CIAPHAS CAIN: DEFENDER OF THE IMPERIUM
(Contains books 4-6 in the series: Death or Glory, Duty Calls and Cain’s Last Stand)

CIAPHAS CAIN: SAVIOUR OF THE IMPERIUM
(Contains books 7-9 in the series: The Emperor’s Finest, The Last Ditch and The Greater Good, along with the novella Old Soldiers Never Die)

Book 10: CHOOSE YOUR ENEMIES

• GAUNT’S GHOSTS •
by Dan Abnett

THE FOUNDING
(Contains books 1-3 in the series: First and Only, Ghostmaker and Necropolis)

THE SAINT
(Contains books 4-7 in the series: Honour Guard, The Guns of Tanith, Straight Silver and Sabbat Martyr)

THE LOST
(Contains books 8-11 in the series: Traitor General, His Last Command, The Armour of Contempt and Only in Death)

THE VICTORY (PART ONE)
(Contains books 12-13 in the series: Blood Pact and Salvation’s Reach)

Book 14 – THE WARMASTER

Book 15 – ANARCH

HONOURBOUND
by Rachel Harrison

CADIAN HONOUR
by Justin D Hill

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Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Notes

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Last Chancers : Armageddon Saints’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

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 might of His inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.

Yet, He is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so that His may continue to burn.

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. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.

This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.

There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

Editorial Note:

Of all the desperate situations faced by Cain, when he had no alternative but to do so, the defence of Lentonia in 938.M41 must surely be counted one of the strangest. Partly due to the nature of the foe, and partly due to the circumstances under which he found himself caught up in the events there.

Editing this portion of his memoirs has been an equally atypical undertaking, since, for much of the events he describes, he was accompanied by an unusually reliable eyewitness, whose account I have used to supplement his own observations. I have also, in the interests of presenting as rounded a picture as possible, reluctantly incorporated a little additional material from the memoirs of Jenit Sulla, which present as formidable a challenge to the patience of the reader as those I’ve been forced to use hitherto, and for which I feel obliged to apologise in advance.

As ever, I have left Cain’s original account of events as close to how I found it as possible, keeping my own interpolations to a minimum, except for those I felt necessary to elucidate an obscure reference or otherwise clarify a potential ambiguity. Although, where Cain was concerned, ambiguity was often the most consistent thing about him.

Amberley Vail, Ordo Xenos

ONE

Given the number of times what was supposed to be a straightforward deployment turned out to be anything but, dropping me and the unit I was accompanying smack into the middle of a desperate struggle to survive, the knowledge that we’d arrived in the Lentonia system long after the war there had been brought to a victorious conclusion was a welcome change of pace. It wouldn’t have done to let my natural inclination to do handsprings and shout ‘Huzzah!’ show visibly, however, as I was popularly supposed to be the kind of idiot who’d relish the chance to put himself in harm’s way in the name of the Golden Throne, so I settled on a vaguely rueful air, as though disappointed at our good fortune. Not that I was exactly relishing the prospect of the next few weeks, which promised little beyond unrelieved tedium and finger food, but compared to the kind of excitement I was used to, I’d take boredom over bowel-clenching terror every time.

Especially as I’d only just made it up the boarding ramp of the last ship out at embarkation, the swarm of tyranids on our tail almost filling the horizon.

‘I’m sure there are still a few pockets of resistance to mop up,’ I said, privately resolving to discover where they were and make sure I avoided them.

‘Of course,’ Colonel Kasteen said, running a finger around the collar of her dress uniform in the manner of someone suppressing the desire to unfasten it. Like most ice-worlders, she preferred shirtsleeves for the most part, reserving the heavy greatcoats generally associated with Valhallan regiments for environments they were fitted to, and had chosen summer kit for the occasion; although the weather in the planetary capital seemed distinctly autumnal if you asked me. Dark grey clouds were scudding across a light grey sky mottled with flecks of blue, and the scent of recent rain had been the first thing to greet my nostrils as the boarding ramp of our shuttle extruded itself to lick the still-damp rockcrete of the pad, as if tentatively quenching its thirst.

In the distance, across the wide expanse of the landing field, columns of steam marked the points where the rest of our heavy shuttles had grounded; the commandeered freighter we’d arrived on didn’t have nearly enough of its own to disembark an entire regiment, of course, but by this time the local traffic controllers had acquired sufficient experience of offloading large bodies of troops and their equipment to divert a veritable swarm of them to pick us up almost as soon as we’d reached orbit, and I’d made sure I was among the first wave to hit the ground. Something I always tried to do when the likelihood of meeting significant resistance was low, as it consolidated my undeserved reputation for leading from the front, and gave me a head start in finding the most comfortable quarters wherever we were due to be billeted. ‘I imagine the regiments already here will be happy to catch their breath while we dot the “i”s and cross the “t”s. Who are they, anyway?’

‘Vostroyans, mostly,’ I said, glancing at the data-slate my aide had just handed to me. Jurgen had tidied himself up too, insofar as that was possible, centring his helmet on his head[1], and brushing most of the accumulated detritus from the ragged clumps of facial hair which more or less assembled themselves into a scurf-flecked beard. Despite these heroic efforts he seemed to have stopped some way short of actual ablutions, however, and I found myself falling into my usual habit of edging upwind of him as I spoke. ‘Three line regiments and an armour group. Plus the Tallarn 236th, who got here a couple of weeks ahead of the others, after being diverted on their way back to Coronus for reassignment. And a Valhallan unit for fire support.’ I don’t mind admitting my voice took on a tinge of surprise at this point. ‘The 12th Field Artillery.’ The regiment I’d begun my long and inglorious career with, some twenty years before.

‘Haven’t seen them since Gravalax,’ Kasteen said, although whether she was pleased at the prospect of renewing the acquaintance or not was hard to tell, since she was fighting off another attempt at strangulation by her shirt collar at the time.

‘We’ve all come a long way since then,’ I said, and the colonel nodded thoughtfully.

‘Thanks to you,’ she replied. ‘If you hadn’t joined us when you did, we wouldn’t have lasted another week, never mind seven years up at the sharp end[2].’

‘Any other commissar would have done the same,’ I said, feeling unaccountably embarrassed for a moment, although I suppose many of my colleagues would have gone about the job in a rather more brutally straightforward manner. (And probably ended up on the wrong end of a friendly fire accident too, which is what tends to happen when you incur the displeasure of a large number of people with guns.) Kasteen looked as though she was about to take issue with that, but before she got the chance, Jurgen broke into the conversation with a phlegm-laden attempt at a tactful cough.

‘I think that’s your escort, sir.’ He sounded vaguely affronted at the notion, as if it somehow cast doubt on his own ability to ensure our safety, although, since the wretched planet was supposed to be pacified by this point, the matter was purely one of protocol in any case.

‘I think you’re right,’ I agreed, as the small knot of vehicles drew closer. A ground car, too large, black and shiny to be military issue, was flanked by a couple of outriders on motorcycles, the pennons flying from poles affixed to the riders’ backs echoing the design of the smaller ones fluttering around the limousine. I didn’t recognise the heraldry, but it seemed to involve a great deal of gold thread, entangling an Imperial aquila like vines clambering up a wall. ‘Look more like Arbites[3] than soldiers.’

‘Governor’s household troops, sir,’ Jurgen said, consulting the uniform guide in his data-slate, something I suppose I should have done myself before now; but in all fairness, I was familiar enough with those of the other Guard regiments among our task force, and the Lentonian militia were all either dead or confined to barracks, pending the purge of any who might have supported the wrong side in the recent insurrection. Anyone else in a uniform or carrying a gun would be fair game, or best avoided, depending on our relative numbers and firepower.

‘I thought they’d shot him,’ I said.

‘That was the old one,’ Kasteen said, a note of doubt entering her voice. Usually we had Major Broklaw to fill us in on these niggling little details, which he dutifully filleted from the brain-numbing morass of the Munitorum briefing materials, so the colonel and I didn’t have to wade through them ourselves. But Broklaw was still in orbit, waiting for the last shuttle down, to ensure our deployment went as smoothly as these things ever did[4]. ‘I heard they found a nephew or something to take over.’

‘Good for them,’ I said, hoping he’d make a better fist of it than the last incumbent, who’d managed to rouse a placid and Emperor-fearing population to armed rebellion with almost indecent haste following his appointment. Truth to tell, I was still somewhat vague about the exact nature of their grievances, but if the erstwhile governor ran true to form it probably had something to do with treating the tithing revenues as his personal cash box, and taking an excessive interest in other people’s wives, husbands, or farm animals[5]. All in all, Lentonia was probably better off without him; but letting the plebs get away with taking decisions like that for themselves would only lead to worse trouble later on, so, as usual, the Guard had been called in to restore order, and visit retribution on whoever it seemed most expedient to blame. And, of course, the local Chaos cults had all crawled out of the woodwork to join in the fun, although, if anything, they’d probably helped in the long run, providing a handy foe the Lentonians could feel good about uniting against, whatever their own differences.

While we’d been mulling matters over, the car and its escort had pulled up at the foot of the boarding ramp, and the three of us walked down to meet it. The outriders saluted with simultaneous precision, the polarised visors of their helmets melding almost seamlessly with the glossy black body armour which encased them, and I found myself suppressing a sudden flare of unease as I returned the gesture with my best parade ground snap: it was like acknowledging a couple of chunks of animate shadow. The slighter of the two – whose build led me to suspect the presence of a woman inside the protective carapace, although without sight of the face behind the blank reflective plate it was hard to be sure – dismounted, revealing a holstered hellpistol at her waist, no doubt meant to supplement the carbine stowed just forward of the saddle and whatever lethal surprises had been installed on the bike itself. She (for the sake of argument) took a step towards the car, reaching out a hand, but before she could open the passenger door for us it popped from the inside, shoved hard by a young man with a shock of blond hair and a wide, welcoming grin.

‘It’s all right, Klarys, I’ve got it,’ he said, sliding across the wide seat to make room for us. The anonymous trooper turned away, her body language making her affront at the breach of protocol perfectly plain in spite of her concealed visage; sentiments I was certain Jurgen shared. The young man stuck out a hand to shake. ‘Jonas Worden, Planetary Governor. Call me Jona. I’ve had a lifetime’s worth of “Your excellency” gash in the last few weeks.’

Kasteen and I took in his worn groxhide jacket and utility cloth trousers, and looked at one another dubiously. He didn’t look like any of the Emperor’s anointed I’d ever met.

‘Ciaphas Cain,’ I said, concealing my bewilderment with the ease of a lifetime of practice, and taking the proffered hand, making sure not to exert the full strength of my augmetic fingers. ‘No nickname, I’m afraid. But in my profession you tend not to make friends.’

‘Really?’ The young man looked faintly surprised, then grinned, as if realising I was pulling his leg. ‘There’s a Valhallan officer calls you Cai. Sounds like a nickname to me.’

‘That would be Toren,’ I said, before glancing back at Kasteen, who was being helped onto the overstuffed bench seat by the same proffered hand. ‘You remember Major Divas?’ No one else I could think of ever used the familiar form of my given name, which was just as well, as I detested it; something Divas never quite managed to grasp, in spite of innumerable hints over the years.

‘Of course,’ Kasteen said, while I settled into the seat opposite her and the young man, and wondered which of the polished wooden cabinets mounted on the walls concealed a decanter. ‘A fine officer.’ She grinned at me, clearly enjoying my discomfiture.

‘You don’t look much like a governor,’ I said, deciding to play the bluff man of action card. That usually went down well with civilians who thought they knew what sort of man I was, and I intended to use the technique a lot in the next few weeks; I still wasn’t exactly overjoyed about being dragged into a political junket, and was damned if I was going to be any more gracious about it than I had to be.

‘I don’t feel like one either,’ Jona said, with disarming candour, and I found myself in some danger of liking him. ‘I used to glean news for the Light of Truth[6], till some dungwit dragged me off to the palace.’

‘It can’t have been that much of a surprise,’ I said. ‘If you were next in line…’

Jona laughed. ‘Nowhere near it. My mother turned her back on the whole festering lot of ’em thirty years ago. Wouldn’t have been here if she hadn’t.’

‘I see,’ I said, although I didn’t, quite. ‘There was still some bad feeling among the rest of the family, I take it.’

‘There surely is now.’ He grinned. ‘Why do you think the Martial Law Council stuck me with the job?’

‘At a guess, because you’re the only member of the family who didn’t want it,’ I said, and he nodded.

‘They were fighting over the throne like rats in a sack. I did some good pieces on it.’ He started to pull out a battered data-slate, then thought better of it, no doubt correctly divining that they wouldn’t mean much to us anyway. ‘Power-broking, character assassination – a couple didn’t stop at character either. Sold a lot of sheets.’ Then he sighed, the animation which had come over him slipping away again, and waved a disgusted-looking hand at our luxurious surroundings. ‘Now this. Your council’s got a poor sense of humour.’

But a strong grasp of the practical, I thought. In my experience, the only people it’s safe to have in a position of power are the ones who don’t want to be there in the first place. Before I could say anything to that effect, however, my aide’s shadow filled the doorway, and his bouquet flowed out ahead of him to fill the car. Jona recoiled.

‘Jurgen,’ I said diplomatically, ‘would you mind following us in the Salamander? I’m sure his ex– our host has enough to do without seeing us to our quarters when the meeting’s over.’

‘It’s no trouble,’ the young man said, in the reflexively polite way of someone who knows you know they don’t mean it, still too stunned at Jurgen’s appearance to take umbrage at my near use of the term he detested. As the door slammed, following Jurgen’s ‘Very good, sir,’ and something resembling a salute, he shook himself as though rousing from a stupor. ‘What was that?’

‘My aide,’ I said, feeling no further explanation to be warranted. ‘Shouldn’t we be going?’

‘I suppose so,’ Jona agreed. ‘Don’t you want to wait for him to unload your transport?’

‘He’ll catch up,’ Kasteen assured him, knowing Jurgen’s robust attitude to anything with an engine, and clearly wondering how best to avoid the journey home.

‘If you’re sure.’ The governor touched a vox control. ‘Back to the gas factory, Fossel.’ He must have caught the questioning look between Kasteen and myself, because he added ‘the Concilium[7]’ for our benefit. The chauffeur, invisible behind a panel of one-way armourglass, rolled us smoothly into motion.

Comfortable as the ride was, especially compared to being driven by Jurgen, and in spite of our host’s attempts to while away the journey with polite conversation about my upcoming itinerary, I found it impossible to relax and enjoy our luxurious surroundings. Aside from the young man’s manifest eccentricity, meeting Imperial Guard officers from the starport in person hardly being the kind of thing planetary governors usually did, I was uncomfortably aware that his previous profession made him a shrewd judge of people, and more likely than most to see through the facade I generally presented to the galaxy. In addition to which, I’d been in enough vehicles like this to be well aware of what a tempting target they made. There were still malcontents on the loose, by Jona’s own admission, and even if they had no idea of who was inside the big shiny car, it was clearly someone of wealth and influence. Protecting it with no more than a pair of outriders was tantamount to towing a sign saying ‘Assassinate Me!’ so far as I could see; in fact I’d been the target of just such an attempt myself on Pererimunda, although, to be fair, on that occasion I’d been the unfortunate victim of a case of mistaken identity[8].

Accordingly, I paid a fair amount of attention to our surroundings as we left the bleak expanse of the starport and began to make our way into the city proper. Like many predominantly urban worlds, the main conurbation was contiguous with the boundary of the landing field, the outer hab-blocks protected from the consequences of a crash or explosion by a thick, high, blast wall, through which we trundled in a short, squat tunnel. Not unnaturally this made a formidable fortification, which the rebels had attempted to hold against the arriving Imperial forces, resulting in a fair amount of damage, particularly once my old comrades from the 12th Field Artillery unlimbered their Earthshakers and got stuck in.

Deep craters in the inner walls, and a few crumbled ramparts, clearly marked the positions where the main fortifications had been. Shells being shells, the hab-blocks around the perimeter had taken quite a battering too, and on first re-emerging into daylight we found ourselves traversing a bleak hinterland of tumbled walls and scattered rubble, through which the hastily patched roadway slashed like a gutting knife. At first I thought it deserted, but before long occasional glimpses of a stretched tarp or the smoke from a cooking fire betrayed the presence of inhabitants, eking out what existence they could among the ruins.

‘Outliers,’ Jona said, seeing the direction of my gaze. ‘Not much trouble, unless they get caught up in a food riot. Most of ’em just want to be left alone.’

‘Most of them?’ I asked, my paranoia going into overdrive, and the governor shrugged. ‘There’s a few rock lobbers among ’em, and gangers squabbling over territory. But they’ll keep till the local militia are reactivated.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ I said, somewhat relieved, but still keeping my hands near my weapons. I was beginning to see movement between the shattered walls, more and more frequently, and wondered if waiting for the rest of the regiment might not have been a better idea.

‘Why are we slowing?’ Kasteen asked, unfastening the flap of her holster, and I hastened to follow her lead; we’d both spent most of our lives in warzones, and knew from bitter experience that even the most subtle intimations of trouble should never be ignored.

Jona looked bewildered, and about as nervous as most civilians do when their guests unexpectedly draw sidearms in a confined space. My chainsword I left scabbarded for the nonce, as it would be more of a danger to ourselves in our suddenly claustrophobic surroundings than to a putative attacker. ‘No idea,’ he said, and activated the vox. ‘Fossel?’

‘The road’s blocked,’ the chauffeur informed us, sounding irritated rather than concerned. ‘Some kind of crowd up ahead.’

‘Armed?’ I asked.

‘Nothing obvious,’ a feminine voice cut in, Klarys I presumed. ‘They’re just milling around. Trading food, probably. Moving up to clear them.’

‘Can we see from in here?’ Kasteen asked, a moment before I could pose the question myself, and the governor poked a control stud. With a squeal of gears the partition retracted, revealing our driver, dressed in the same body armour as the outriders, but without a helmet. Beyond him, the road was now visible, blocked by twenty or thirty ragged-looking civilians. It was hard to make much out, as the shadows were plentiful and deep, but they were an unhealthy-looking bunch, their skin sallow, their movements slow and uncoordinated. All of a sudden, I found myself grateful for the armoured bodywork surrounding us, for I had no doubt that it would be proof against any weapons this curiously passive mob might bring to bear.

Not a single one reacted as the motorcyclists bore down on their position, beyond slowly turning heads to track their movement: the outriders drew to a halt a few metres away, their engines revving, and ordered them to disperse. Still no reaction, and I found my palms tingling, a warning from my subconscious I’d learned to take seriously over the years.

‘Pull back,’ I cautioned, hoping the vox would relay my words, but if they did it was too late; the whole crowd suddenly began to move, like a single viscid pool of degenerate humanity, surging forwards to engulf the riders before either could react. Both troopers tried to gun their engines and pull away, but hadn’t room to turn the heavy bikes. As we watched, helpless and horrified, they were pulled from their mounts and overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers, disappearing into the depths of the mob as thoroughly as if they’d been absorbed by a tyranid swarm.

‘What he said,’ Jona snapped, knowing trouble when he saw it, which was hardly surprising given his former occupation. Unfortunately the chauffeur had kept us moving slowly forwards, confident in his comrades’ ability to clear the way, and by the time he slammed the gears into reverse, with a grinding sound even Jurgen might have winced at, the tide of bodies was already lapping around our fragile refuge. The car bumped, running over several yielding obstacles, before suddenly fetching up against an immovable one with a groan of stressed metal. Unable to see, our driver had mounted the pavement and rammed one of the larger pieces of rubble.

‘How solid is this thing?’ I asked, flicking the safety off my laspistol, while Kasteen chambered a round into her bolt pistol, and began an urgent conversation about reinforcements over her vox-bead. Reinforcements we both knew were unlikely to arrive in time.

‘Solid enough,’ Jona said, although I doubted that; the colonel’s bolt pistol could definitely punch a hole through the armourglass window, although doing so from this side would undoubtedly deafen us, not to mention fill the passenger compartment with razor-edged shards. Our attackers didn’t seem to be carrying any armour-piercing small arms, however, so getting in would take them a little more time than that.

Or not. Blank-eyed, heedless of the damage they were doing to themselves, they kept battering relentlessly at the bodywork, clawing at the metal and armourglass in their single-minded determination to get in. The window nearest my head crazed where one of the rioters butted it repeatedly, flecks of blood and brain tissue marring the transparent surface.

Most disturbing of all was the silence. Throughout their frenzied onslaught, not one of them spoke, although given their behaviour that was hardly surprising; I’d seen things in Jurgen’s hair that showed more signs of intelligence. Even the sounds of their movement were inaudible, muffled by the thick armour enclosing us.

‘They’re insane!’ Kasteen said, more of a dispassionate tactical assessment than an expression of alarm, despite her vehemence.

‘Or on combat drugs,’ I agreed, although where they might have got them from was beyond me. I turned to the governor, who was looking pale, and hyperventilating: a bad sign, as, offhand, I could hardly think of worse circumstances in which to be stuck in a confined space with a panicking civilian. ‘Any of the local gangers use ’slaught, ’zerk, stuff like that?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

As I’d hoped, answering the simple, direct question brought him back a little, and I pressed my advantage.

‘You’re a gleaner, right? Anything unusual, you’d know.’

He shook his head, though whether in negation or to clear it would be anybody’s guess. ‘The last year or so there’ve been nothing but wild stories,’ he told me. ‘The insurrection, then the heretics – there were even supposed to be psykers among ’em, but nobody actually saw any.’ The whole car lurched, a development I didn’t like the feel of in the least.

‘They’re climbing onto the roof,’ Kasteen said, clearly wondering whether to try putting a bolt through it to discourage them, before deciding against the experiment, much to my relief. The top armour would be the weakest, to save weight, but it might still be strong enough to direct the full force of the explosive charge back towards us. The floor, on the other hand, had been heavily reinforced against mines, lowering the car’s centre of gravity, and thank the Throne for that: they’d probably have had us over by now if it wasn’t.

Sure enough, the battering sound above us grew louder, and the ceiling began to develop some ominous dents. Isolated from us in his armourglass box, the chauffeur produced a combat shotgun from under his seat, and racked it with an ominous clack, clearly anticipating the end in a matter of moments.

I was just on the point of commending my spirit to the Emperor, and hoping He hadn’t been paying too much attention to my activities of late, when the world around us erupted in a flickering orange glare. Searing flames lapped around the immobilised car, our attackers crisping and withering, losing their grips on the bodywork along with their musculature. Naked bones appeared through the sizzling flesh, skulls leering at us for a moment before falling away; then the firestorm ceased as abruptly as it had begun.

‘Are you all right, sir?’ Jurgen asked, his familiar and welcome voice suddenly filling my vox-bead, as he brought the hurtling Salamander to a shuddering halt amid a blizzard of shredded roadbed from beneath the locked tracks. He waved a cheerful greeting over the jagged lip of metal where a carnifex had ripped the top of the driver’s compartment clean away in its eagerness to get at him during our desperate flight to safety. Unsurprisingly, it seemed, the regimental enginseers were still concentrating their efforts on getting the Chimeras back into shape, my personal transport having to wait its turn in the name of operational efficiency.

‘Fine.’ I kicked the car door open, and piled out instantly, drawing my chainsword as I went; there were still scattered pools of blazing promethium from the heavy flamer burst in our immediate vicinity, not to mention a fair number of combusting corpses, and if our fuel tank had been ruptured the whole thing could go up at any moment. Nothing attacked me, although if any of our assailants still lived and were making a run for it I couldn’t tell, the thick pall of foul-smelling smoke from their fellows’ immolation concealing most of our surroundings from view.

Now that it seemed I’d escaped sharing their fate I had an image to maintain, so I glanced back at Kasteen, Jona and the open-mouthed chauffeur, with an appropriately heroic flourish of my weapons, and beckoned to them. ‘All clear,’ I said, rather spoiling the gesture with a cough, as I got a lungful of greasy smoke.

‘Lucky the armour held,’ Kasteen said, with a rather tight nod in Jurgen’s direction.

‘Thought it would,’ my aide agreed phlegmatically. ‘But it wouldn’t have if I’d used the heavy bolter to scrape ’em off.’

‘I suppose not,’ I agreed, unable to fault his logic, and, scabbarding the chainsword again, I turned to the governor. ‘It seems it’s my turn to offer you a lift.’

‘I appreciate it,’ the young man assured me, scrambling into the rear passenger compartment of the Salamander, while his chauffeur stood guard with the shotgun, glancing left and right in barely suppressed panic.

‘Best check out the riders,’ Kasteen said, leading the way towards the wreckage of the motorbikes.

Conscious of our audience I began to follow her, despite the almost overwhelming impulse to clamber aboard the scout vehicle and get as far away from this blighted wasteland as possible. As I approached the nearest body, Jurgen joined me, his lasgun held ready for use, and his distinctive odour fighting to be noticed over the stench from the crackling cadavers.

‘Messy,’ he commented, looking down, and I nodded. The larger of the two outriders had been partially protected from the fury of the mob by his body armour, but clearly not thoroughly enough. His head was lolling at an angle only possible with a broken neck, while several plates of his external carapace had been ripped clean away, exposing the flesh beneath; and the condition of that had already been accurately summarised by my aide.

After some of the sights I’ve seen, it takes a lot to turn my stomach, but those raking, bone-exposing wounds did the trick all right, not least because I had no doubt that I’d have suffered a similar fate if my aide hadn’t intervened in so timely a fashion. ‘Are those bite marks?’ I asked, incredulous, although the answer to that was obvious after even the most cursory inspection, the manner in which the flesh was torn all too distinctive.

Jurgen nodded. ‘Looks like,’ he agreed, as incapable as ever of recognising a rhetorical question.

‘This one’s alive!’ Kasteen called, forestalling any further comment I might have made, and we hurried over to join her. Klarys had fared a little better, evidently having had time to draw her hellpistol and get off a shot or two before being borne to the ground, although she was unconscious, and her visible wounds were hardly less severe than those of her deceased colleague.

‘Not for long,’ I said, while Jurgen produced a medi-pack from the collection of pouches and webbing he was habitually festooned with and began patching up the worst of the leaks, ‘unless we get her to a medicae.’

Kasteen nodded, her face set. ‘We will,’ she said grimly. ‘Then I’m sending in a couple of platoons to clear the ruins.’ She shook her head, still unwilling to believe the evidence of her own eyes. ‘Cannibals in the heart of an Imperial capital. It’s intolerable.’

‘Desperation can drive people to almost anything,’ I said, although if the tingling in my palms was anything to go by, there was something a lot deeper and darker at the heart of Lentonia than that. Just how dark, though, I had still to discover.

TWO

What with one thing and another, our official reception at the Concilium was rather late in starting. Like most local seats of government, the huge building was vulgarly over-ornamented on the outside, so the local plebeians would be left in no doubt of the exalted state of their rulers and betters, and even more so on the inside, to produce an appropriate sense of awe among those venturing within to petition the Administratum functionaries who thronged the place, or pay their tithes. The effect on Kasteen and I was rather the opposite, however, since we’d seen it all before, and tended to notice things like the way the gilt was tarnishing on the death masks of deceased local luminaries (Jona’s immediate predecessor being a notable absentee), and the inordinate number of fraying threads in the fading tapestries of long-forgotten triumphs. If Jurgen had an opinion he kept it to himself, merely parting the throng of babbling pict-recorders and printscribes between us and the door with grim determination, the butt of his lasgun, and a bow wave of halitosis.

Over a hundred heads turned in our direction as we entered the wide, high reception room, which, to my complete lack of surprise, resembled nothing so much as a gambling den with pretensions to an air of sophistication. Spotting a refreshment table, I made my way towards it as best I could through the scrum, most of the components of which seemed to want a word or a handshake; reminding myself that this was what I was here for, and clearing the way with my chainsword was probably a bad idea, I smiled and nodded like an automaton, pretending to remember names and faces, none of which made an impression strong enough to last a second beyond the breaking of eye contact. When I finally made it to the viands, I found I might as well not have bothered: it seemed Jona hadn’t been exaggerating about the extent of the food shortages he’d mentioned in the course of our journey here. If the top of the social heap were making do with such basic fare, Throne alone knew what the commoners were eating, apart from each other. All of a sudden, the evidence of cannibalism I’d stumbled across seemed a lot less surprising, although the thought of it still stirred my stomach.

The meagre table had one compensation for the effort required to reach it, however: a steaming samovar stood at one end, exuding the welcome odour of tanna and a faint hiss of steam, no doubt intended to make the Valhallan contingent feel at home. Following my nose through the obstacle course of scarlet Vostroyan uniforms, admixed with flowing Tallarn robes, and the rather more ornate garments favoured by local officials and nobles, I pitched up at the urn, while the governor did his best to make himself heard over the babble of conversation.

‘Sorry we’re late,’ he said, his voice shaking a little. He still looked a bit green around the gills to me, although whether this was the result of delayed shock, or his first exposure to Jurgen’s driving, I couldn’t be sure. ‘We were attacked.’ He went on for some while after that, giving the impression that I’d leapt out of the car to face the mob, and seen them off single-handed, while I turned my attention to the tanna.

‘Cai!’ a familiar voice called. A hand fell on my arm, and I turned, selecting an appropriate expression of pleased surprise.

‘Toren.’ Sure enough it was Divas, a tanna bowl of his own in hand, grinning at me in the puppyish manner I remembered so well. ‘I was wondering if you’d be here.’ Rather to my own surprise, I found I wasn’t having to work nearly as hard at looking pleased as I’d expected. The intervening years had evidently been kind to him: the streaks of grey around his temples hadn’t spread very far, and the lines on his face were still faint enough to be barely noticeable.

‘I knew you’d be joining us eventually.’ He grinned. ‘Once you got bored with charging off to chase heretics, as usual.’ Which was one of the reasons I tolerated his company; despite being better placed than most to see past the facade I took such pains to present to the galaxy, he believed implicitly in my heroic public persona. Perhaps because he chafed at the lack of opportunity afforded him to engage the enemy directly in an artillery regiment, which generally potted at them from a safe distance of several kilometres[9], and being even tangentially associated with my exploits allowed him a little vicarious excitement.

‘Little enough, compared to what you and the other regiments have been through,’ I said. So far as I could see, the senior officers of all the Imperial Guard regiments on the planet were assembled in the room, along with their commissars, the high command of the local militia, and the usual random assortment of local notables. Most of them looked haggard and gaunt, on the brink of exhaustion, which was hardly surprising; the fighting had been concentrated around Viasalix, since whoever controlled the capital effectively controlled the world, and city fighting against an enemy who knows the terrain is a grim, attritional business. I had no doubt they’d be heartily glad to hand the mopping up over to the 597th, and take the chance of a bit of downtime before moving on to their next war. Kasteen was conversing with Colonel Mostrue, the CO of the 12th Field Artillery, who didn’t seem to have changed a bit; seeing me glance in their direction he nodded a curt greeting, before resuming what looked like an urgent discussion with her, no doubt filling her in on all the stuff that had been left out of our briefing slate.

‘We’ve taken a battering, all right,’ Divas admitted soberly. ‘A couple of the Vostroyan regiments are almost down to half strength, and the Twelfth is pretty stretched as well. Nothing like as bad as that yet, of course, but still…’ He shrugged.

‘Has the fighting really been that fierce?’ I asked, trying to remember how much combat damage we’d passed coming in. A fair bit, of course, but all around obvious strategic targets, and no sign of the widespread collateral devastation I’d have expected to see if the Guard had taken anything like that much of a battering.

Divas shook his head. ‘Some kind of local lurgi,’ he said. ‘It hit the militia first, then started running through the Guard.’ He looked as though he was about to say more, but before he could, Jona drew everyone’s attention back to me, with a wave of his hand.

‘Anyway, we got here,’ he concluded, his breath and colour restored by a large mug of recaff and a sticky-looking pastry, the last traces of which he licked from his fingers before continuing. ‘Thanks to Commissar Cain,’ at which point every face in the room turned in my direction.

‘I’m afraid the governor exaggerates,’ I said, thereby consolidating the story nicely with my audience; with the possible exception of Mostrue, who’d never quite taken my reputation at face value, and had spent most of my time with his regiment trying to nudge me into harm’s way to test it for himself. ‘But at least I can hold my head up in this company now, having seen a little action on Lentonia.’ I was rewarded, as I’d hoped, with a ripple of polite laughter.

‘You’re all to be commended for your efforts,’ I said, feeling that if I’d been brought here to give them a pat on the back and make everyone feel appreciated, I might as well make a start on the job as soon as possible. Not to mention reassure the population that Lentonia was once again safely within the fold of the Imperium, so anyone harbouring heretical sympathies had better think twice about it.

I filled a bowl with tanna and delivered it to Kasteen, thus bringing myself back into the governor’s orbit; along with that of most of the other Imperial Guard officers, who seemed even more keen to make her acquaintance than mine. (Which I could hardly blame them for, attractive women in the Imperial Guard being something of a rarity.)

‘Toren was just telling me about this mystery bug,’ I said. ‘I take it that’s the real reason the militia are still confined to barracks?’

‘It is.’ Jona nodded. ‘If we deploy them to keep the peace, before we’re sure who is or isn’t infected, it could get a foothold among the civilian population.’

‘Bioweapon?’ Kasteen asked, an instant before I could; a malady which seemed to strike down soldiers while leaving most of the civilians untouched seemed a suspicious coincidence to me too.

The colonel of one of the Vostroyan regiments shook his head, his extravagant moustache bristling. ‘First thing we thought of. But deploying something like that’s way beyond the insurgents’ capabilities.’

‘Unless it was one of the Chaos cults,’ I suggested. ‘Are any of them still active?’

‘Completely cleansed,’ the colonel of the Tallarn regiment assured me, before adding, ‘we would certainly have spotted the signs if they weren’t.’

‘I’m sure you would,’ I agreed. Tallarns are among the most devout followers of the Emperor in the galaxy, and if anyone could be counted on to detect traces of heresy, it would have been them.

‘So, an unfortunate coincidence,’ I said, although my innate paranoia was still having a hard time accepting that, and kept worrying away at the matter despite my best efforts to get it to sit down and shut up. Which, I’m bound to say, failed; and, given how things were to work out in the end, that was probably no bad thing.

Editorial Note:

At this point one of the elisions typical of Cain’s account of events occurs, picking up the narrative again after a period of several days. The following extract may go some way towards remedying this deficiency.

From The Liberation of Lentonia, by Jonas Worden, uncompleted manuscript.

Despite his obvious reluctance to be separated from his regiment, Commissar Cain followed the path of duty, as I had no doubt he would once I’d got the measure of the man. I had harboured doubts before our first meeting, knowing how reputations can become exaggerated, but those had been laid to rest the moment I saw him bound from our immobilised car, resolutely determined to defend us from any further attacks without hesitation or thought for his own safety.

Accordingly, though it clearly chafed him to be feted in public, and fritter away time he would have preferred to spend bringing the Emperor’s justice to those determined to prolong the conflict, he devoted himself to the ceremonial duties we concocted as doggedly as he would have done those on the battlefield.

The stratagem was undeniably successful, although the situation it was intended to divert attention from went from bad to worse. Despite the best efforts of both medicae and magos biologis, no effective treatment for the virus which had struck down so many gallant warriors was found, the victims remaining either comatose or violently delirious depending on their level of sedation. Worse still, in spite of the rigorous quarantine to which all confirmed victims had been subjected, fresh cases kept occurring.

A week after their arrival, only the Valhallan 597th remained free of the disease, and no one expected this happy state of affairs to remain for much longer.

THREE

‘Let’s hope that’s not a glimpse into our own future,’ Kasteen murmured to me, with a jaundiced look at the row of coffins facing us in the chancel of the cathedral. I’ve never been one for Emperor-bothering myself, but I’d been dragged into enough places of worship in the course of my duties to appreciate the ornate grandeur of this particular one, the soaring arches of the nave meeting high above us, obscured by shadows and the rising clouds of incense, while icons of the Emperor and His blessed saints cluttered up every available surface. There were twelve of the polished wooden caskets in all, containing the mortal remains of an officer and a line trooper randomly selected from the casualties of each of the six regiments which had put down the rebellion, to be commended to the Golden Throne with all possible ceremony in symbolic appreciation of the sacrifice of all the fallen. Throne alone knew what had happened to the rest, although I strongly suspected that they’d been interred with more regard for speed than for the niceties.

‘Any illness in the 597th yet?’ I asked, fidgeting on the ironwood pew, which was getting hideously uncomfortable already, and readjusting the scabbard of my chainsword for about the thousandth time, in a foredoomed effort to find a place where it wouldn’t dig into the tenderest part of my thigh. The Ecclesiarchy had been predictably sniffy about the number of sidearms the congregation had brought in with them, but as they were as much a part of the dress uniforms as the braid and the hat plumes, they just had to lump it.

To my relief, the colonel shook her head. I’d spent the last couple of weeks ricocheting around Lentonia shaking hands, inspecting troops, opening buildings, and, for a breathtakingly tedious couple of afternoons, posing for a portrait, which mainly seemed to involve waving a floor mop around; the artist had assured me that it would be miraculously transformed into an Imperial standard by the time he’d finished slopping paint on the canvas, and I pretended to believe him. This was the first opportunity I’d had to talk to Kasteen in person, and, since neither of us was particularly comfortable discussing sensitive matters over the vox, assess how matters stood in the planetary capital.

‘No telling how long that’s likely to last, though,’ she replied, clearly expecting the worst.

‘Did you clear the camps around the landing field?’ I inquired, hoping to move the conversation on to less depressing matters, and Kasteen shrugged.

‘Swept the ruins, but it was hardly worth the effort. Whoever was living there had already packed up and left.’

‘Or got eaten,’ I suggested, and Kasteen frowned.

‘There was enough blood and bone around,’ she agreed, not quite managing to hide her revulsion. ‘But they’ll be brought to account.’

‘No Khornate shrines, I suppose?’ I said, still unable to credit that Imperial citizens could fall so far without a little nudge from the Ruinous Powers, and the colonel shook her head.

‘If there had been, we’d have burned the place out,’ she assured me, and I nodded; I’d have expected nothing less.

At which point the choir struck up the processional, accompanied by appropriately solemn music, and I stood gratefully, while what seemed like half the senior ecclesiarchs on the planet[10] filed in, enveloped in richly embroidered ceremonial robes. Behind them came the local notables, led by Jona, although I failed to recognise him for the first few minutes, as he’d been smothered for the occasion in enough over-ornamented fabric to weigh down an ogryn. Spotting me at about the same time as the coin dropped, he favoured me with a rueful grin, clearly uncomfortable, but determined to see his duty through.

By this time the most absurdly overdressed of the Emperor botherers had broken free of the pack, leaving the secular contingent to seat themselves in the front row of the pews, while the remaining ecclesiarchs ranged themselves about the chancel according to their status and degree of involvement in the ritual. Once everyone else had settled, the presiding cleric favoured us with a self-satisfied benediction, and began to pontificate about the nobility of sacrifice with all the pompous sincerity of someone for whom that meant being a little late for dinner, rather than dying an agonising death on a far distant world in the hope that it might somehow make an incremental difference in the fight to throw back the tide of darkness poised to roll over us all.

‘I now call upon Commissar Cain to say a few words,’ the prelate finished, having apparently exhausted his own supply at last, and I rose to my feet, conscious of the anticipatory murmur which rustled around the cavernous space. My feet echoed on the flagstones as I strolled forwards, trying to look both solemn and unhurried, feeling the pressure of two hundred pairs of eyes on the back of my neck as I did so. Not just them, either: a small constellation of servo-skulls was floating around the vaulting, carrying picters, intended to record my words[11] for posterity.

‘Thank you, hierophant…’ I hesitated a moment, before continuing in response to Kasteen’s silently-mouthed prompt, ‘Callister. We who defend the Imperium with our lives, our blood, and our very souls, are fully aware of the destination to which the path of duty so often leads…’ I broke off again, as a muffled scratching sound tickled my ear. It was barely perceptible, but it raised the hairs on the back of my neck even so; over the years I’d learned to distrust anything that sounded like stealthy movement, particularly if I was unable to get a line of sight on whatever might be causing it, and I had to consciously suppress the urge to reach for my weapons. I took a deep breath, hoping the unintended dramatic pause might be mistaken for a rhetorical flourish; not that it mattered anyway, the pict recordings would be edited before being disseminated to the local population, so I’d end up looking like a silver-tongued orator whatever happened.

So thinking, I launched myself back into my prepared speech, minor variations of which had served me well at far too many similarly depressing ceremonies over the years, only to falter yet again. This time a loud thud echoed around the cathedral, and a ripple of puzzled expressions spread among the pews, turning rapidly to unease as the sound was repeated. Kasteen unfastened the flap of her holster, an example followed by many of the officers from the other regiments here to speed their comrades to the Golden Throne, and I found the urge to do likewise impossible to resist.

‘Commissar!’ the pudgy prelate expostulated in horror as I loosened my chainsword in its scabbard. ‘This is a house of the Emperor!’

‘Then I’m sure He’d approve of us keeping it safe,’ I riposted, in no mood to debate the matter. The scrabbling sound had grown louder, to the point where I could no longer persuade myself that it was merely harmless vermin in the heating ducts; by now the front few rows of the congregation were tilting their heads, plainly trying to pinpoint the source. The thudding had increased too, in both volume and intensity, multiple blows overlapping one another in a steady roll of drums, like a panicky heartbeat. Whatever the cause, it was clearly time to be somewhere else, although I could hardly cut and run in front of so many witnesses. Then inspiration struck. ‘Regina[12]!’ I called above the hubbub. ‘Get the governor to safety!’

‘Everyone out!’ Kasteen called, picking up her cue perfectly, and drawing her bolt pistol to emphasise the point. ‘Make for the doors in an orderly fashion!’ Which, of course, civilians being civilians, might just as well have been ‘Mill around like panic-stricken sheep!’ Nevertheless, she and the other Guard officers managed to start herding the local dignitaries towards the exit, which was fine by me. True, the press of bodies in the aisle was effectively blocking me from making a run for it myself, but I’d been in enough places like this to be certain that the clergy had their own entrances and exits.

‘The back way,’ I said, turning to Callister. ‘Now the governor’s safe, I need to get you–’

‘What’s going on?’ Jona asked, materialising at my elbow, shrugging his encumbering vestments to the floor with every sign of relief. Beneath them he was wearing a shirt with frayed cuffs, and a pair of artisan’s trousers covered with pockets. ‘Are we in any danger?’

Before I could compose an adequate response to that which didn’t include the phrase ‘halfwit’, ‘cretin’ or ‘death wish’, I was interrupted by the sound of splintering wood, and whirled to face the serried coffins behind us. The noise was unquestionably coming from that direction, and for a moment I found myself wondering what kind of vermin or parasite could have found its way into the tightly-sealed boxes to gorge itself on the cadavers within. But the reality was worse than anything I could possibly have imagined.

With a further rending of wood, a Guard-issue combat boot smashed its way into view through the end of the nearest casket. Seeing it, the choristers around us promptly panicked and fled, with surprisingly melodious shrieks of primal terror.

‘It’s a miracle!’ Callister genuflected towards the image of Him on Earth, and took a faltering step towards the flailing limb. ‘We have to help them!’

‘That’s not a miracle,’ I said, dragging him back by the arm; the hierophant knew the way out of here, and I wasn’t going to let him get himself killed before he showed me how to find it. ‘Quite the reverse.’

‘Warpcraft?’ Jona asked, sounding intrigued rather than frightened, and I shrugged, in as nonchalant a manner as I could, thumbing the selector of the chainsword to maximum speed. Jurgen’s presence would have answered that question quickly enough, but the mere thought of his image being pictcast to the world alongside mine at so solemn a ceremony had been enough to persuade me to leave him back at the garrison. A decision I rued heartily now, as his peculiar talent for nullifying any warp-spawned influences in his immediate vicinity had saved my skin on more than one occasion.

‘Probably,’ I said, hoping I’d be able to deal with the situation without my aide’s help for once. I tried to sound as if I knew what I was talking about. ‘But this is consecrated ground, so it’ll be weak if it is.’ At which point the prelate looked happier, even if nobody else did. I flinched, as the crackling of breaking wood redoubled in volume, and the abused coffin started to fall in on itself; the others were beginning to look distinctly fragile too. I began hustling the dignitaries away, as best I could with a weapon in each hand. ‘Now we need to get you out!’

He nodded, and turned to go, common sense finally overriding his old professional instinct to poke his nose into things, just as the nearest corpse flung the battered remains of its coffin aside and rolled from the bier supporting it, landing on the cold stone floor with a slap like a pistol shot. It lay still for a moment, incongruously clad in a neatly creased dress uniform, then thrashed its arms and legs as if trying to work out how to stand. I put a las-bolt into its chest as it clambered upright, but it rose slowly to its feet anyway, apparently unperturbed.

‘Keep back!’ I cautioned, with every intention of heeding my own advice, and got my first good look at the thing we were facing. It was unquestionably the cadaver of one of the Vostroyan soldiery, the extravagant moustaches cultivated by the Guardsmen from that world[13] standing out even more fully than usual against the withered flesh and sunken skin of its decomposing face. Its eyes were blank, rolled so far up into the orbits that they showed little other than white, but the animate corpse seemed aware of our presence nonetheless; it raised a twisted hand, the nails of which seemed to have been elongated into talons by the decay of the fleshy fingertips behind them, and shambled forwards. I fired the laspistol again, with no more effect than the last time.

‘Stay dead, damn it!’ I snarled, although whether that was terror manifesting as anger or desperate entreaty I have no idea.

Jona seemed to take it for the former, however, aiming a tight smile in my direction, in spite of the fresh ambulatory carcasses bursting out of their wooden chrysalides on all sides of us. ‘Remind you of anything?’ he asked sardonically, backing away as he spoke. Now that he came to mention it, it did; the way the animate cadavers moved, with grim fixity of purpose, their expressions blank, was uncannily reminiscent of the mob which had attacked us on the way in from the starport.

The main difference was the sound, which I presumed the bodywork of the car had insulated us from before. This time I could hear it, a low, muffled groaning, emanating from all of them, as though they’d just woken to the kind of hangover where even your eyelashes ache. For all I know, they had[14]. At any rate it got on my nerves, and I fired a third time, taking the nearest revenant in the throat. This time the shot did have an effect, as it staggered, then began to move in short random jerks, bumping into its fellows and the biers as it did so.

Encouraged, I put a second las-bolt in the same spot, this time succeeding in severing the spinal column which the first had exposed through the ruin of the revenant’s neck. It dropped like a puppet with severed strings, a disquieting thought, because it rather begged the question of who was pulling them.

‘Will you stop frakking around and just run?’ I demanded, as the whole shambling mob began to close in on us. Which was easier said than done, as the aisle was still clogged with panicking local dignitaries. Among them I caught a glimpse of Kasteen, grimly fording her way towards us against the current, but unable to use her bolt pistol for fear of hitting an innocent bystander.

‘Avaunt!’ Callister cried, having a sudden and inconvenient rush of courage or misplaced piety to the head. He’d taken the golden aquila from round his neck, and was brandishing it in the general direction of the shuffling horrors bearing down on us. ‘In the name of the Emperor, begone!’ Then the closest of them made a sudden snatch, which would surely have seized his arm and dragged him into the reach of its charnel-reeking jaws if its grotesquely elongated nails hadn’t snagged in the trailing sleeve of his chasuble. Exquisite embroidery tore as the talons ripped through it, and the hierophant leapt backwards with a squeak of alarm, bringing down his crozius on the crown of his assailant’s head as he did so. The heavy gold icon of Him on Earth crushed the revenant’s skull, and it slumped to its knees, foul-smelling fluid seeping from its eyes and nose.

‘Well done, your grace,’ I called encouragingly, hoping that he’d finally come to his senses after a squeak that narrow, and he nodded, looking both surprised and pleased with himself. ‘Now move your arse!’ I’d like to claim that my choice of phrase was a deliberate ploy, hoping to shock him into acquiescence by the sudden descent into profanity in these hallowed precincts, but if I’m honest I was simply too annoyed to care. There were still too many witnesses around for me to simply cut and run, however much I might wish to, and the longer these idiots insisted on lingering, the longer I’d be in imminent danger. Fortunately he listened this time, and scuttled back in my direction; which, with Jona now getting mired in the rush for the main door, left me in the uncomfortable position of being closest to the revenants.

Unwilling to turn my back on them, in case they rushed me as soon as they saw an opening[15], I backed away slowly, keeping my chainsword raised in a guard position; which, though I had no idea of the fact at the time, looked as though I was covering the hierophant’s retreat, and did my fraudulent reputation no end of good. The one the prelate had poleaxed was on the floor now, still twitching, but in short, spasmodic movements, while the rest of the pack shuffled around it, spreading out slowly, like a patch of oil on the surface of a pond. Which was a worrying development. Already the ones on the edge of the group were approaching the limits of my peripheral vision, and I found myself worrying about being flanked as soon as I couldn’t keep all of them in sight at once.

I needn’t have worried too much on that score, though, as the revenants seemed to be wary of me, or perhaps of the weapons I carried. None had sufficient intellect left to seek cover, dropping below the level of the pews as I would have done, but they didn’t seem discouraged either, just moving forwards at a steady walking pace towards the gradually diminishing knot of struggling dignitaries jammed in the doorway. I put a couple more las-bolts into the nearest, trying for head shots as these seemed the most effective, but succeeded only in blowing away part of its face and jaw, before an inconvenient pillar hid it from view.

‘Ciaphas!’ Kasteen shouted, breaking free of the scrum at last. ‘Look down!’ I did as she bade, and recoiled in horror; the revenant the hierophant had felled was crawling towards me, leaving a clotted trail of noisome fluid as it came, an outstretched hand on the point of seizing my ankle. I struck down with the chainsword, severing the limb at the elbow, but the animate cadaver didn’t even slow down, continuing to advance as inexorably as a necron. I hacked at it again and again, carving it into foul-smelling chunks, but it only stopped moving once I’d severed the spinal column.

‘Go for head shots!’ I called to the colonel, alarmed to see that while I’d been occupied the undead Guardsmen had dispersed even more widely. Of the hierophant there was no sign at all, which was encouraging in a way, as I’d be able to take the credit for saving his neck, but disconcerting too, as I’d hoped to see where he went and follow him as quickly as possible.

‘No need,’ Kasteen said, a trifle smugly, and fired her bolt pistol at one of the revenants closing in on Jona. Its ribcage blew apart as the explosive-tipped bolt detonated, decorating the intricate wood carving on the end of the nearest pew with half-rotted entrails. I took a shot at the other, which hit, but proved as ineffectual as ever, the las-bolt simply gouging a chunk out of the obscene thing’s right shoulder. Undeterred, it reached out for Jona with its left.

Warned by the slightly soggy explosion of Kasteen’s bolt, Jona looked up in alarm, and ducked out of the way in the nick of time. Unfortunately that left him between two pews, backing up as the motile cadaver plodded relentlessly after him. Even more unfortunately, one of the pillars supporting the ceiling was at the end of the gap, instead of an exit to the next aisle; a fact the young governor only became aware of when he backed into the immovable obstruction.

The brief flurry of activity had given another knot of undead troopers enough time to shamble uncomfortably close to me, so I turned and hurried up the nave, having little inclination to try my blade against the three of them at once; it would only take a single misstep or mistimed blow for one of them to get under my guard, and once that happened the weight of numbers would be certain to tell. The one on the left was wearing a Valhallan artilleryman’s uniform, and I glanced at what was left of its face as I retreated with a faint sense of anticipatory dread, but of course it wasn’t one I recognised. Few of the gunners I’d served with would still be attached to the 12th after all this time.

Finding myself coming abreast of the Vostroyan revenant chasing Jona I took an opportunistic swipe at its neck with my chainblade, decapitating the thing neatly. It collapsed where it stood, only a trickle of foul-smelling fluids seeping from the wound, in marked contrast to the geyser of blood which usually accompanied the severing of a head. The governor stared at me, wide-eyed, although he didn’t seem to be hyperventilating this time, which was probably just as well considering the reek of the twice-killed corpse.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked, because I was supposed to, and the servo-skulls were still flitting about the place picting the scene.

‘Think so,’ Jona said, holding a handkerchief to a slight scratch on his cheek. ‘Wouldn’t have been in another minute.’ He stepped fastidiously over the body. ‘Thank you.’ His words were almost drowned out by a crackle of gunfire, which echoed around the cathedral. Now that their lines of fire were no longer blocked by panicking civilians, the rest of the Imperial Guard officers had begun picking off the remaining revenants, and not before time if you asked me.

‘What just happened?’ Kasteen asked, joining us, her eyes still flickering in every direction in search of a target.

‘I haven’t a clue,’ I told her honestly, hustling Jona ahead of us, towards the welcoming arch of sunlight beyond the ornately carved door. ‘But we need to find out fast.’ Something was very wrong on Lentonia, and if past experience was anything to go by, it was going to get a whole lot worse.

Editorial Note:

Though not strictly necessary, I’ve decided to include another extract from Worden’s account at this point. Cain provides enough information to make the events of the intervening period before he picks up his own narrative again perfectly clear, but since the additional material is available, it seemed sensible to use it.

I have rather less confidence in the wisdom of inflicting the second extract on my readers, but it does at least elucidate the military position into which the 597th was unceremoniously pitched; and those without the patience to wade through it are perfectly at liberty to skip the entire passage. Positively encouraged to, in fact.

From The Liberation of Lentonia, by Jonas Worden, uncompleted manuscript.

After the incident in the cathedral made the true nature of the crisis we were facing all too horrifically apparent, no effort was spared to trace the source of the outbreak, and make sure it was properly contained. Having had the role of governor thrust unwillingly upon me, I was far out of my depth, but I was determined to do whatever was necessary to preserve Lentonia from any further harm. Though the job seemed incredibly daunting, I had the good advice of the Martial Law Council to rely on, not to mention the reassuring presence of Commissar Cain, who had faced and overcome many perils before. His experience, I was sure, would stand us in good stead in the dark days to come.

Ultimately, however, the decisions were mine alone to make[16], and I was determined to face and fulfil my responsibilities.

From Like a Phoenix on the Wing: the Early Campaigns and Glorious Victories of the Valhallan 597th by General Jenit Sulla (retired), 101.M42.

Ever the woman of action, Colonel Kasteen lost no time in apprising the senior officers of the regiment of the full implications of the grisly discovery made by her and Commissar Cain. Not a woman or man among us could have entirely suppressed a thrill of primal horror at the revelation that our true foes were not the misguided insurrectionists we’d been called here to force back to acceptance of the Emperor’s light, but the very dead themselves, ripped untimely from their graves by the foulest of warp-spawned sorceries. With so many of our gallant comrades-in-arms fallen victim to the contagion which had swept through their ranks, it fell to us, the only regiment thus far unscathed, to bear the brunt of this new and terrifying threat. Thus it was that the daughters and sons of Valhalla took to the streets of Viasalix, determined to guard it, and the rule of the Golden Throne, at all costs, including our own lives if necessary.

A price which, ere long, it seemed we might all be called upon to pay.

FOUR

‘Are you sure?’ I asked, despite knowing that no one would have said a thing like that if they weren’t completely certain, and the magos biologis seated on the opposite side of the hololith nodded soberly in reply. I felt a faint flicker of surprise at that, as in my experience members of the Adeptus Mechanicus weren’t often given to such human gestures, but I suppose in his field of expertise he would have had less inclination to indulge in wholesale augmentation than the majority of his colleagues.

‘All the tests we’ve been able to run confirm it,’ he said, in a natural voice, tinged with a bone-deep weariness which, in its own way, was even more startling. Cogboys[17] tend to affect a calm, emotionless delivery, if they haven’t had their vocal cords replaced by a vox-coder to save them the bother; if this particular one was past caring how he sounded, the situation must have been dire indeed. ‘We are undoubtedly dealing with an outbreak of the Plague of Unbelief.’

‘I’ve heard the stories, of course,’ I said, looking from one horror-struck face to another, ‘but I always thought they must have been exaggerated.’ As befitted a crisis of this magnitude, we’d convened in the central command bunker of the Lentonian militia; which seemed fair enough to me, as there were hardly enough of them left on their feet to make use of it themselves. It was ideally suited to coordinating our own scattered forces, however. Those of us physically present were clustered around a hololith projector, in which the faces of the regimental commanders and other officials too busy to attend in person floated like worried-looking balloons, flickering occasionally in the manner of such devices, and occasionally drifting through one another, or the three-dimensional image of the city above which they bobbed.

‘It’s real enough, believe me,’ Colonel Samier, the commanding officer of the Tallarn contingent, assured us, his loose desert tunic rustling as he leaned forwards for emphasis. ‘We encountered similar revenants on Ferantis.’

‘Then you’ll know how to beat them here,’ Jona interjected, his voice fizzling with static as his projected image flickered like an ill-attended campfire. One of the hovering tech-priests poked hopefully at the projectors, and the governor stabilised a little, although he still faded in and out of focus.

‘With the Emperor’s guidance,’ Samier agreed, making the sign of the aquila as he spoke.

‘If you’ve identified the virus, you must be able to begin treating it,’ Kasteen said, her voice and image flickering almost as badly as the governor’s. With the 597th at full stretch, holding down most of the city on its own, both she and Broklaw had been too busy to attend this meeting in person; I, on the other hand, had no desire to find myself pitchforked into the front lines again, and had been more than happy to spend a bit of time in the most heavily fortified bunker on the planet, in the name of effective cooperation with our fellow regiments. By way of a bonus, morale among what was left of the militia would have to improve to even reach rock bottom by this point, and having a Hero of the Imperium apparently going out of his way to liaise with them was helping no end with that.

‘I’m afraid it’s not that simple,’ the magos said, and I glanced surreptitiously at the data-slate on the table in front of me, trying to pick out his name. Moroe, that was it. I vaguely remembered being introduced to him at some reception or other shortly after our arrival, but we’d only exchanged a few words, tech-priests not being exactly renowned for their social skills. ‘According to the records, the virus mutates rapidly. No two outbreaks are ever the same, and an effective treatment has yet to be found. The only thing to be done is quarantine everyone known to have come into contact with the infection, and terminate any of them showing symptoms before they can pass it on.’

‘What about vaccination?’ my old sparring partner, Colonel Mostrue, put in. Like most of the other regimental commanders he was here only as a projection, which didn’t stop him giving me the fish eye just as coldly as if he’d been present in person.

‘Haven’t you been listening?’ Moroe snapped, in a most un-tech-priest like manner; clearly his researches had been taking even more of a toll than I’d realised. ‘There are so many strains of the virus, I wouldn’t even know where to start.’

‘With the Tallarns?’ I suggested, earning a glare from Samier for my pains. Knowing how sensitive the natives of that desert world could be, I turned a little in my seat to address him directly. ‘You must have been exposed to the virus on Ferantis.’ I took another covert look at my data-slate as I spoke, finding that, as I’d expected, it had been the last warzone they’d fought in. ‘You might have developed an immunity to it. Even if it’s a totally different strain, as Magos Moroe has suggested, it could be a place to start.’

Samier started to nod, but before he could speak, the magos biologis cut across him. ‘Perhaps it’s not a different strain,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘You arrived before the rest of the regiments, and worked closely with the militia, who were the first to show symptoms. From there it spread to the Guard, and out into the civilian population.’ He started punching keys and bringing up displays on his own slate, with a speed and precision which hinted at augmetic enhancements in his fingers and cortex, even though they weren’t particularly visible.

What I could see of the Tallarn colonel’s face behind his extravagant beard and voluminous burnoose darkened dangerously. ‘You dare to suggest that we brought this contagion to Lentonia?’ he said slowly.

‘It’s by far the most probable vector,’ Moroe said, clearly missing the warning signs.

Samier’s jaw tightened. ‘Then explain to me how my men are almost entirely free of the disease,’ he challenged.

Moroe looked uncomfortable. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Unless they’re carriers, somehow immune, but still able to pass on the virus.’

Samier grasped the icon of the Emperor hanging around his neck, his lips moving for a moment in some calming litany. When he spoke aloud again, it was with greater deliberation. Which might sound odd, but was actually fairly typical; the average Tallarn will call on the Emperor at the drop of a hat, and generally feel that He’s answered, however unlikely that may seem to anyone else in the vicinity. (Any non-Tallarn, that is; their fellows will take it as read that Him on Earth has revealed His divine will, and go along with even the most palpable idiocy. Luckily they seem to take it for granted that their officers and chaplains are granted the most cogent insights, otherwise they’d be completely unmanageable.) ‘Then by all means, make your tests,’ he said. ‘If we discredit this nonsense as soon as possible, less time will be wasted.’

‘And if you do turn out to be the carriers?’ I said, because somebody had to, and he was least likely to take offence if it came from me.

‘Then we do the Emperor’s work in being the means of salvation for this world,’ Samier responded, with neat circular logic.

‘Throne be praised,’ I said, mouthing the phrase and making the sign of the aquila at the same time he did[18].

‘But that wasn’t what I meant.’ I indicated the schematic of the city, which was speckled with icons like a case of the pox. Which, come to think of it, was far too apposite an analogy for my peace of mind. Each blemish represented a Guard unit, those tagged with the identifiers of the 597th or the Tallarns far outnumbering the others, or an incident involving another group of the walking dead, which had become more and more numerous in the days following the carnage in the cathedral. We’d had riots, too, as the news had spread and the panicking population became ever more desperate to escape the quarantine zones intended to protect them from infection. Throne alone knew where they expected to go, I doubt they knew themselves, but anywhere out of the city seemed to offer an illusion of safety. ‘We’re barely keeping a lid on things now. If your regiment has to be quarantined too, we’re all frakked.’

‘Then we should redeploy at once,’ Samier said, rising from his seat to approach the hololith controls. After a moment, the positions of the icons shuffled around, to leave the 597th clustered in the city centre, securing the governor’s palace, the Mechanicus shrine, and the Administratum cloister. ‘My regiment will secure the boundaries of the quarantine zones, which, if the Emperor wills, we can do just as effectively from the inside as out.’

‘Works for us,’ the evanescent Kasteen agreed, after a moment.

I nodded too, although I was far from happy with the arrangement, which would leave us surrounded by potential enemies with nowhere to go so far as I could see. On the other hand, there was plenty of room in the palace grounds to land a shuttle, and I made a mental note to make sure we had one on standby. ‘Makes good sense,’ I said, as though I thought that was a sound reason for doing it.

‘Magos, a question,’ Mostrue interjected at this point. ‘What’s your prognosis for the Guardsmen already infected?’

Moroe looked surprised. ‘What it’s always been,’ he replied. ‘They’ll die. The virus will then stimulate electrochemical activity in the brain stem, restoring motor and sensory functions, after a fashion. The resulting revenant will be driven purely by instinct, principally aggression, and the need to feed.’

‘Then we should begin culling the sick immediately,’ one of the Vostroyan commissars stated flatly.

‘And burn the bodies,’ I added reluctantly. A nagging sense of something we’d forgotten gibbered quietly at the back of my head for a moment, before making itself heard at last. ‘What about the casualties from the fighting before we got here?’ I asked, already sure I wouldn’t like the answer. ‘They weren’t cremated, were they?’

‘No.’ Samier shook his head. ‘There was no time for ceremonial. They were buried in mass graves.’

A trickle of ice water seemed to run down my spine. ‘Where are they?’ I asked.

Everyone present looked from one to the other, and the floating heads in the hololith seemed equally baffled.

‘The city authorities would have handled that,’ Jona said. ‘But no one’s been keeping up with the filing lately.’ Big surprise there.

‘Try the Ecclesiarchy,’ I suggested. ‘They would have insisted on holding some kind of ceremony.’

‘I’ll get on to Callister,’ the governor promised.

‘Good.’ Much as I’d have liked to have remained in the bunker indefinitely, my morale-boosting role meant that I had to show my face to the troops, and be seen to be looking relaxed and unconcerned by the civilians to boot. I rose, trying my best to seem nonchalant. ‘I’ll discuss it with you when I get to the palace.’

‘You’re coming here?’ Even out of focus as he was, Jona’s face took on an unmistakable expression of surprise.

‘The redeployment,’ I reminded him. ‘We’ll be digging in all around you.’

‘Oh.’ He sounded as though he was trying to make light of the situation, and not succeeding very well. ‘That’s reassuring.’

‘I’m glad you think so,’ I said, wishing I shared his optimism.

Editorial Note:

The following extract adds very little to Cain’s account, but I’ve included it nevertheless, since it confirms much of what he implies about the prevailing situation.

From The Liberation of Lentonia, by Jonas Worden, uncompleted manuscript.

Things got worse by the day. Bands of revenants were everywhere, and the Imperial Guard hunted them down wherever they could, trying to protect the civilians. Many citizens tried to flee the city, and became prey for the walking dead, but plenty were still willing to take the risk, and there were more riots as the Guard tried to keep the enclaves secured.

These disturbances got worse as food and medical supplies became scarcer. Lentonia had always relied on off-world imports, but with the plague confirmed, I was forced to close the system to merchant vessels. If we couldn’t control the outbreak soon, we’d starve.

Emperor forgive me. I knew there was a reason I never wanted this job.

FIVE

Jurgen was waiting for me outside the bunker as patiently as ever, paging through a porno slate, and basking in the cooling temperatures as the sun began to wester over the hab-blocks visible in the distance above the lower, functional buildings of the militia compound. Apart from my aide, his feet propped comfortably up on the dashboard of the still roofless Salamander, the complex of barrack rooms, workshops and parade grounds was almost deserted, the few troopers visible scurrying about their business in ones and twos in eerie silence. A place like this should have been bustling with activity, the tramp of marching boots, engines revving, and a constant crackle of lasgun fire from the practice butts echoing everywhere, but the loudest sounds I could hear were the moaning of the wind, and the gurgling of Jurgen’s digestive tract.

‘Good meeting, sir?’ he greeted me, before dropping into the Salamander and firing up the engine. I clambered aboard gratefully, pulling my greatcoat a little tighter as I did so; although I suspected the shiver I’d felt had little to do with the freshening breeze.

‘I’ve had better,’ I told him honestly. So far as I could see, it all came down to whether the blood of a bunch of religious fanatics contained anything Moroe could create a vaccine from. Not odds I felt happy to be betting my life on.

‘Back to RHQ[19]?’ Jurgen asked, slamming the Salamander into gear, and I nodded, grabbing the pintle mount for support as he spun the treads and took off towards the gate at his usual breakneck speed.

‘Yes,’ I said, knowing Kasteen and Broklaw would be keen to discuss these latest developments a good deal more candidly than we could over a vox-link. ‘But swing by the palace first.’ If we were going to be deploying there we’d need a feel for the ground, which no map, however detailed, could give us, and I always felt happier in a new location after identifying any boltholes or lines of retreat. Besides which, it would give me a chance to talk to Jona; he was supposed to be our point of contact with the civilian authorities, insofar as there were any of those left at all, and he’d been worryingly uncommunicative of late. But then I imagined he had a lot on his mind.

‘Palace it is, sir,’ Jurgen confirmed, slowing with obvious reluctance in order to negotiate the gate without sending the little knot of apprehensive-looking sentries leaping for their lives. The usual fortifications had been supplemented with boxes, chemical drums, and anything else which had come to hand, and the barrels of a couple of sandbagged autocannon looked warily down the boulevard beyond, towards the heart of the city. Undermanned as the post was, I doubted whether it could have withstood a siege by sufficiently determined toddlers, but I dispensed a handful of morale-boosting platitudes as we trundled by, which the infantrymen seemed to appreciate. They dragged a couple of drums out of the way to let us pass with a fine display of efficiency, snapped me an unexpected salute[20], which I returned in my best parade ground style, and began reassembling their makeshift barricade as Jurgen gunned the throttle again, and took off like a gretchin catching sight of an ork with a recipe book.

The slowly darkening city was an eerie sight as we howled down boulevards and thoroughfares deserted apart from the occasional prowling Chimera, their turret-mounted searchlights swinging as they stabbed into alley mouths and the shattered windows of looted emporia. Many of the waylights were still functioning, although deep lakes of darkness lay between these isolated patches of luminescence, casting flickering shadows in the depths of the buildings, in the cover of which anything might be lurking. Several times I caught glimpses of stealthy movement, or thought I did, and swung the pintle mount around to bear on it, but nothing inimical ever appeared, leaving me to wonder whether they’d been produced by solitary looters whose greed outweighed their sense of self-preservation, scavenging rodents, or my own imagination.

If I had begun to doubt the dangers of the journey, however, I was soon disabused by the distant roar of a heavy bolter, quickly joined by another, and then a third. At least one of the patrolling Chimeras had evidently found a group of revenants large enough to require calling for reinforcements. The firing seemed a fair way away, but I’d been in enough cityfights to know how the sounds of combat could be distorted by the intervening buildings, echoes rolling back on themselves or being muffled by the surrounding hab-blocks, making direction and distance almost impossible to estimate with any degree of accuracy.

‘Do you want to see what’s happening?’ Jurgen asked, his voice a little attenuated in my vox-bead.

‘No need,’ I said, quickly scanning the frequencies, and pinpointing the action almost at once. A Tallarn platoon in the process of redeployment had run into a mob of the revenants, just as I’d surmised, and was currently engaged in shooting their way out again. ‘The Chimera crews have got the hatches sealed, and are picking them off with the bolters.’ Which should indeed make short work of the shambling corpses. ‘If we stick our noses in, we’d only get in the way.’ Followed almost at once by attracting the unwanted attention of every surviving revenant in the group, since, unlike the Chimera crews safely locked away behind a few centimetres of armour plate, we were in a vulnerable scout vehicle. ‘Just keep heading straight for the palace.’

‘Right you are, sir,’ Jurgen acknowledged, and, taking the instruction as literally as he did most other things, swung us off the road. The Salamander’s suspension bounced over the raised kerb separating the carriageway from the pavement, then we burst through a pair of ornamental wrought-iron gates, which tore free of their hinges and went bouncing away with a clangour loud enough to be heard over the roar of our engine. Fortunately I’d grown used to his robust approach to driving over the years, and remained on my feet, after making a reflexive grab for the pintle mount the moment I felt the Salamander lurch to the right.

Clods of earth began to fly up from our spinning tracks, and I looked round to discover that we appeared to be hurtling across a wide, manicured lawn, rather more shaggy in appearance than the long-departed gardeners who used to work here would probably have approved of.

‘Where are we?’ I asked, more resigned than annoyed; after serving together for so long, I suppose I should have learned it was wise to qualify instructions like that with ‘keeping to the road’ by now.

‘City park,’ Jurgen informed me, in his usual matter-of-fact fashion. ‘Connects up with the palace grounds.’ A couple of intricately topiarised bushes disappeared beneath our tracks with a faint crunch. ‘Just past the Eternal Garden.’

‘Eternal Garden?’ I repeated, with a sudden sinking feeling. This far from the road we were surrounded by darkness and shadows, in which anything might lurk. Strange, amorphous shapes rose up out of the gloom, shrubberies perhaps, although everything beyond the cone of light thrown ahead of us by the Salamander’s headlamps might just as well have been hewn from solid chunks of the night itself. The glimmering pinpricks delineating the distant buildings surrounding this ocean of darkness seemed as remote as the stars which shone down from above with cold indifference.

‘That’s what it says on the map, anyway,’ my aide amplified. ‘Big building, lots of little ones. And a drive, leads to the road on the other side. Palace grounds are directly opposite where it comes out.’

‘I see,’ I said, as calmly as I could. ‘That should save us a bit of time.’ I pulled out the pocket-sized city guide Jona had thoughtfully presented me with shortly after my arrival, in spite of the fact that many of the major landmarks therein were no longer standing, and began to page through it in search of the one we were approaching. As I’d expected, there was quite a comprehensive entry, which was hardly surprising, given that it was the most notable burial ground in Viasalix.

‘Just what I thought,’ Jurgen said, as imperturbable as ever.

Ignoring the remark, I read feverishly, hoping to discover just how much trouble we were in, and gradually my initial panic began to subside. The necropolis was the ceremonial resting place of the planetary governors and other Lentonian notables, and as such was widely venerated by the locals. There didn’t seem to have been an interment there for years, however[21], which came as a great relief: if no one had been buried since the outbreak, they were hardly likely to pop up again to cause me any trouble.

At which point the headlights picked out movement in the distance, as if part of the darkness had flowed away beyond the illuminated cone. Despite my rational mind insisting that it was probably no more real a threat than the shapes I thought I’d seen in the depths of the abandoned emporia, I checked the heavy bolter and fed the first round into the breech. I haven’t lasted long enough to reach an honourable retirement by letting rationality get the better of paranoia, and this occasion was to prove no exception.

The necropolis, when we reached it, turned out to be a surprisingly elegant building, rather than the over-ornamented stone barn my previous experience of such places had led me to expect. Rather, it was high and well-proportioned, tapering upwards to a sharply pitched roof supported by an elegant colonnade, the caryatids of which all turned pious faces towards the image of Him on Earth looking down benignly from beneath the eaves. The entire edifice had been faced in white marble, which appeared to glow faintly in the dim blue illumination of the stars, and lent it an ethereal quality perfectly in keeping with its rather grim purpose. A number of other tombs, far smaller, and, so far as I could make out in the darkness, rather less tastefully ornamented, surrounded it, like utility craft keeping station with a starship, and at the sight of those my apprehension increased considerably. Who had been interred within them[22], or how recently, was anybody’s guess, and I could be rather less sure than before that we were in no immediate danger.

‘Give it a wide berth,’ I said, and my aide complied, taking us in a long, wide arc around the ominous cluster of ossuaries. I strained my eyes through the darkness, expecting at any moment to catch a glimpse of sinister shadows moving among them, but still I saw nothing; then Jurgen abruptly swung the Salamander back towards the boneyard.

‘We’ll have to cut across the corner of it,’ he said, as though it was only a minor inconvenience. ‘We’ll get stuck in the trees otherwise.’

I turned, looking out to the right, instead of leftwards towards the necropolis. Sure enough, the night seemed darker in that direction, stars and city lights alike occulted by a solid bank of vegetation, looming against the horizon like a low-lying thunder cloud. Hanging on to the heavy bolter by one hand, for fear of another sudden change of direction, I glanced down at the plan in the book, finding the patch of woodland much smaller in its graphic representation than it appeared to be in reality. The drive leading to the gate on the other side of the park was relatively close, but we’d have to make our way through a slalom of tombs now in order to reach it. Which would mean slowing down, which would, in turn, leave us more vulnerable to attack. (Why it occurred to neither of us to simply return to the gate by which we’d entered the park in the first place I have no idea; all I can think of is that we were both so keyed up by that time, and, in my case at least, so fearful of attack, that we were thinking of nothing else beyond our original goal.)

There was still no movement that I could see, so I thumbed my palm[23], asked the Emperor’s protection (despite being convinced that He had far more pressing matters to attend to than preserving my miserable hide, but it never hurt to ask), and curled my fingers around the grip of the heavy bolter. ‘Take us in,’ I said, feeling as ready as I’d ever be.

Jurgen complied, as phlegmatically as he did everything else, and the growling note of our engine dropped an octave. We slowed, and began to move towards the low-lying huddle of satellite tombs at a more sedate pace, the bright glare of the headlights picking out every detail. Some were almost pristine, testament to the industry of the living who still mourned the occupants, while others were encrusted with lichen and climbing plants, which scrambled over crumbling devotional icons, in the worst cases all but obliterating them.

‘Oops,’ Jurgen commented, as he failed to negotiate a turn, and ended up sideswiping a large and imposing mausoleum which barred our way. Cast rockcrete crumbled and split, dislodging a few chunks of debris which clanged and clattered into the passenger compartment, fortunately without braining me in the process, and a particularly tasteless cherub was reduced to gravel beneath our treads. ‘Better drop another gear.’

‘That might be prudent,’ I said, brushing the worst of the dust and pigeon droppings from the peak of my hat; behind us a sidewall collapsed, and the whole edifice slumped like an inebriate who simply can’t be bothered with the effort of remaining upright any longer. I half expected the whole thing to crumble into rubble, but it remained standing after a fashion, although how long it remained so after our departure I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess. With a grinding of gears we dropped to little more than walking pace, turning frequently to pass along the widest gaps between the piles of monumental masonry.

At first, it seemed, the war had left this hamlet of sepulchres unscathed, at least until our visit, but after a few more moments I began to pick out signs of damage to several of the tombs we passed. Doors had been forced, hanging from their hinges or swinging gently in the wind, and Jurgen had clearly spotted them too; he hawked and spat, a sure sign of his disgust. ‘Grave robbers,’ he said, in the same tone of voice he might have used to refer to heretics.

‘Let’s hope so,’ I said, examining the next one we passed as closely as I could from my perch behind the heavy bolter. So far as I could see it had been broken into, rather than out of, which was something at least. ‘There must be a lot worth stealing down some of these holes.’ For reasons I’ve never been able to fathom, a substantial number of the wealthy and powerful seem to feel that if they can’t take it with them they can at least keep it to hand, lavishing a small fortune on ornamentation and objets d’art to make their last resting place look as much like a courtesan’s boudoir as possible.

If Jurgen felt disposed to respond to the remark, he never got the chance; a pallid figure suddenly appeared in the headlights, staring dumbly in our direction, as though mesmerised. That it was a revenant I never had a moment’s doubt, the ravages inflicted on its flesh by the teeth and nails of its fellows perfectly plain in the glare of the luminators, bone showing through in several places where muscle had been torn or gnawed away. The frenzied attack which had killed it had left few of its garments intact, but the shreds which remained hinted at some lowly occupation in one of the manufactories. Before I could take in any more Jurgen gunned the engine, and the hideous apparition abruptly disappeared beneath the Salamander, with a faint crunching sound.

‘Looks like some of them are up and about,’ my aide remarked, as though the matter were only of minor interest.

‘That one hadn’t been buried here,’ I said, ignoring the unsavoury heap of offal left in our wake in favour of keeping an eye out for more. But in that case, what was it doing here? A question I was soon to have answered, as a whole group of the things appeared up ahead, barring our way, like the ones who’d overwhelmed the car on the way in from the landing field. The Salamander was a good deal more sturdy, however, not to mention armed, and this time we’d be far from easy meat.

‘Flamer, sir?’ Jurgen asked, and I was about to answer in the affirmative when the bulk of a sepulchre larger and more ornate than most of the rest loomed up out of the darkness, barring our way.

‘Bolter,’ I said. ‘The backwash from that wall might catch us too.’

‘Bolter it is,’ Jurgen confirmed, and triggered the sturdy little vehicle’s main armament, chewing the advancing revenants to pieces, while I swung the pintle mount, picking off a few on the fringes of the crowd. The handful of survivors continued to shamble towards us, as heedless of the fate of their fellows as advancing tyranids, only to fall beneath our spinning treads for their pains. ‘That’s seen ’em off.’ As he spoke, he swung us ninety degrees, so we were running parallel to the large tomb, and, to my inexpressible relief, I saw the gravel drive we’d been making for just ahead of us.

‘Let’s hope so,’ I said, but no sooner were the words out of my mouth than I felt something clutch at my ankle. I looked down, to find that one of the revenants we’d run over had survived the experience, grabbing hold of the Salamander’s chassis as the tracks passed either side of it, and was now in the process of hauling itself aboard. Drawing my chainsword, I struck down at it by reflex, the teeth whining as they bit into matt-black body armour. The fingers refused to relinquish their grip, and I kicked out at the revenant’s head, with equal lack of effect; my boot hit bone with enough force to incapacitate a living opponent, but there wasn’t a lot I could do to this one that hadn’t already happened.

Then it raised its head, bringing the necrotising flesh of its face into view, and I reeled with the shock of recognition. The household guard uniform ought to have been enough of a clue, I suppose, but under the circumstances I’d had little opportunity for ratiocination, and the sudden realisation that my assailant was Klarys rattled me badly. The last I’d seen of her she’d been on her way to a sanatorium, her injuries severe, but hardly life-threatening[24].

There was no doubt that for some reason she’d succumbed to them, however. Her very presence here attested to that, not to mention the stench of decay that surrounded her ambulatory cadaver. Changing my point of aim, I brought the spinning blade down on her neck, severing her head in a single swipe. The hand around my ankle relaxed its grip, and I kicked the suddenly inert body clear, boosting it up and out of the passenger compartment, while the loose head rattled around the box of armour plate like a discarded scrumball.

Hardly had I time to draw breath than a resonant thud behind me snatched at my attention. Another pair of revenants had managed to board us, this time by jumping from the roof of the tomb we were skirting. I swung my chainsword at the one reaching for me, almost choked by the stench of it, and was rewarded with a spray of corruption as the spinning blade sliced through its chest, neatly bisecting it. The upper section began pulling itself towards me with grim determination, and I struck down, intending to decapitate it as I had done the motile remains of Klarys, but at that moment the Salamander lurched violently, and I stumbled, the whining blade raising sparks from the floorplate instead.

‘Jurgen!’ I called. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ The Salamander slammed sideways into the tomb, raising a cloud of dust, and a shriek of abused metal, before veering away in the opposite direction.

‘Sorry, sir. Bit busy.’ My aide was attempting to fend off another revenant, with only his hands and a hastily-drawn combat knife to defend himself with, which, not unnaturally, made it difficult to concentrate on steering at the same time.

Compensating for our erratic progress, I aimed my blade more accurately on the second attempt, adding another to my impromptu collection of heads, and leaned over the sheet of armour plate separating the passenger compartment from the driver. Then I hesitated. I didn’t dare hack at the revenant, for fear of hitting Jurgen instead, and attempting to shoot it was even less of an option. Leaving my aide to fend for himself was equally unthinkable, however, as if we stopped I had no doubt that we’d be overrun with the revenants I was certain still lurked among the mausolea.

‘Hang on,’ I said, hoping my reluctance didn’t show in my voice, and clambered over the sill of the armour plate, keeping my balance with difficulty. The Salamander was an old one, the guard plates protecting the upper treads removed for maintenance, if they’d even been fitted in the first place, and I found myself teetering perilously close to the rapidly-moving band of jointed metal, all too aware that one misstep would whirl me away to a messy death beneath our tracks.

‘Hanging on, sir,’ Jurgen responded automatically, as though the words of encouragement had been an order, and sliced at the revenant’s throat in what would have been a killing strike if any blood remained in its veins to have been shed. As it was, the gaping wound he opened up had little effect, other than to make its recipient even less prepossessing than it already had been. Then the Salamander jolted over some hidden obstruction, almost pitching me from its back, and I flailed wildly for balance, dropping the chainsword as I clutched instinctively for a handhold. The weapon fell back into the passenger compartment, narrowly missing taking my leg off in the process, where it proceeded to rattle around, striking sparks from the armour plate and pureeing whatever bits of re-killed revenant it happened to come into contact with. I certainly didn’t envy whoever was going to annoy their immediate superior enough to get landed with the job of cleaning that lot up.

Unfortunately, the nearest thing to grab hold of in an attempt to steady myself had been the revenant, and it responded in precisely the way you’d expect, by dropping my aide and turning on me. A cloacal stench assaulted my nostrils as it twisted, trying to get round and bury its teeth in my neck. My only chance was to remain behind it; I’d grabbed its shoulder while trying to remain upright, so I extended that arm across its chest, and took hold of my own wrist, which I’d pushed forwards under the preternaturally energetic cadaver’s armpit. By instinct it tried to duck out from under my upper arm, pushing up with its legs as it did so. Sensing the move, even over the jouncing of the Salamander, I twisted too, assisting it on its way, and throwing it to the side, trying to ignore the disquieting way its flesh gave way beneath my grip. The weight of the thing pulled me up and over along with it, and I fell hard against the upper hull, slamming into the metal a mere handspan from the whirling tracks.

The revenant wasn’t so lucky. For a moment it clung on, maintaining a vice-like grip on the lapel of my greatcoat, while the spinning metal treads abraded its flesh away in a spray of stinking corruption, and I felt myself slipping inexorably towards the same grim fate. Then the cloth ripped, parted by the keen edge of Jurgen’s knife, and the foul thing abruptly disappeared, thrown out ahead of us by the speed of the tracks. Whether we passed over it a moment later I have no idea, but by that point I was past caring anyway.

‘That was the last of them,’ my aide said, while the Salamander finally trundled clear of the huddle of sepulchres. He wiped a bloodied hand across his cheek, and dropped back fully into the driver’s compartment. The engine roared, and I grabbed another handhold as we began to accelerate, leaving the nest of necrotic corruption behind us.

‘You’re hurt,’ I said, dropping into the noisome mess of the passenger compartment, hastily deactivating my chainsword, and scrabbling for the medi-kit. The last thing I needed now was for Jurgen to pass out from blood loss while we were still running at full throttle.

‘It’s just a scratch,’ he assured me. ‘I’ve had worse.’

‘It’ll need a stitch or two,’ I said, leaning across to apply a dressing and a generous slug of counterseptic, which at least staunched the worst of the bleeding. The outer weave darkened a little, but nothing seeped through, and I began to breathe a little easier. At least, I reflected, I’d have an interesting anecdote for the governor when we met.

SIX

‘What do you mean he can’t see me?’ I demanded, in my most commissarial manner, and the household trooper barring the corridor leading to Jona’s private apartments quailed visibly. Technically, I suppose, he was a vassal of the governor’s rather than a member of the Imperial military, and beyond my jurisdiction, but in his shoes I wouldn’t have wanted to rely on so minor a distinction either. His face was hidden behind one of those polarised helmet visors, but his posture betrayed his uncertainty, and the ingratiating tone of his voice confirmed it.

‘Governor Worden has given strict instructions not to be disturbed,’ he told me.

‘Then he’s in the wrong job,’ I said, unsympathetically. ‘Where is he?’

I’m not sure if it was the tone of command, my dishevelled appearance, or the odiferous traces of former revenant still bespattering my uniform which decided him, but after a moment’s hesitation his head turned fractionally towards an ornately carved door at the end of the corridor. ‘His chambers,’ he said, reluctantly. ‘But I can’t let you through. My orders…’

‘Would it help if you told him I threatened to shoot you?’ I asked, amiably.

‘It might,’ the guard admitted. ‘But you haven’t.’

‘Because I never make threats,’ I lied shamelessly. ‘Consider it more a point of information.’ And I let my hand drift casually to the laspistol at my belt. If he’d called my bluff, I’m not sure what I would have done, but I’d judged my man well, and after a brief show of hesitation for the record, he stood aside.

I nodded my thanks, and padded up the corridor towards the doorway, my footfalls muffled by a carpet thick enough to have concealed a ratling with a long-las. I considered knocking, but decided against it, as it would give Jona the chance to tell me to frak off, and there was no point in getting into an argument before we’d even come face to face. I’d had enough conflict for one evening already, and was in no mood for more.

As I reached out for the door knob, my boot clattered against something lying on the carpet, and I glanced down to find that I’d just avoided stepping on a laden silver salver. The plate on it was full of something which would have seemed appetising had it not been left to cool and congeal for several hours, thus rendering it quite the opposite, although the dessert, some kind of pastry, had fared a lot better. I frowned. Jona was undoubtedly busy, we all were, but he hadn’t struck me as the kind of man who’d get too distracted to remember to eat.

I tried the door, half expecting it to be locked, but the catch clicked open; it seemed the new governor was getting sufficiently used to his unexpected elevation to expect his minions to do as they were told. Picking up the tray, I walked in, pushing the door closed again behind me with my foot.

I found myself in a large and elegant drawing room, equipped with the usual accoutrements of sofas, side tables and the like, ranged about a fireplace in which logs had been piled ready for lighting. Jona was at the far end, behind an ornate desk of glossy brown wood, inlaid with the seal of his office, shuffling stacks of paper and muttering into a vox-recorder. For a moment he remained unaware of my presence, then lifted his head to stare at me. ‘What are you doing here?’ he shouted. ‘Get out!’

I’ve been shouted at by far more intimidating specimens in my time, none of whom could hold a candle to the proctor of my old schola progenium (although the odd daemon came close), so the prospect of gubernatorial ire left me completely unmoved. ‘I brought your lunch,’ I said, although for all I knew the tray could have been left at breakfast time, and carried on walking towards him unperturbed.

‘I’m not hungry,’ Jona said, the anger in his voice replaced by uncertainty; something I’ve frequently observed happens if you respond to an aggressor in a manner they’re not expecting.

‘You must be,’ I insisted, the vague sense of something being wrong that had settled over me at the discovery of the tray outside intensifying as I drew closer to the desk. I put the meal down on top of the papers littering its surface, and got my first close look at the man. ‘Throne on Earth, you look terrible.’

‘Too much work.’ His face was flushed, and swollen, the eyes febrile. ‘But everyone’s overstretched. Have to set an example.’ He coughed, turning his head away, and the scratch on his cheek from the scuffle in the cathedral came into view. I’d have expected it to have healed by now, but it was livid and swollen, badly infected.

‘You should still get some sleep,’ I demurred, fighting the impulse to back away. If he was contagious enough to have passed the infection on to me, I’d have been a dead man the moment I stepped through the doorway in any case, which was hardly a comforting reflection.

‘Sleep. Yes, good idea,’ he agreed, rubbing his eyes. ‘Don’t know why they’ve got the heating on this time of year. Do you?’

‘I’ll look into it,’ I assured him, my mind whirling, assessing the implications of this horrifying development. We had to keep his condition a secret, that much was certain. The governor was a symbol of the Emperor’s protection, at least in the minds of most of the populace, and if it got out that he’d succumbed to the sickness, the civil disorder we’d seen already would increase a thousandfold. Not to mention the fact that the minute his relatives discovered the truth we’d be up to our ears in fratricidal nobles, scrabbling to fill the vacant throne, and we had enough distractions to deal with already.

I skirted the desk, keeping the ornate slab of polished wood between us as though that would be any barrier to an airborne virus, looking for a vox. It was right where I expected it to be, and I lost no time in using it.

‘Magos Moroe,’ I began, as soon as the cogboy’s face appeared in the pict screen above it, ‘there’s been an unfortunate development. Your assistance, and your discretion, are both required.’

SEVEN

It was another three days before I was able to discuss matters with the magos in person, and by that time the situation had gone from bad to worse. The plague continued to spread among the civilian population, and the first few cases had been confirmed among the 597th, which made the redeployment we’d arranged with the Tallarns seem like a complete waste of effort.

‘It was bound to come,’ Broklaw said grimly, responding with all the stoicism I would have expected to the news that a couple of squads of our troopers[25] had had to be sacrificed to save the others. At least my own tests had come back negative, so it seemed my brief exposure to Jona had done no harm, but I couldn’t help wondering how long the unexpected reprieve would last.

‘I had hoped it would take a while longer,’ I said, following him into the compact and well-equipped operations centre we’d found after taking over the wing of the palace which normally housed the household troops. An eviction they no doubt resented, but since there were so few of them, relatively speaking, none of them had raised any objections, at least in my hearing.

I looked around for Kasteen as we entered the room, but it seemed she wasn’t back from her meeting with Samier yet. The two of them were supposed to be coordinating strategies for hunting down revenants more effectively[26]; but every day saw more of the walking corpses rising from the dead, and, barring a miracle, we’d be back on the defensive for good before long. At least the ones I’d found in the necropolis, drawn there by the abundance of carrion to feed on, had been cleared out by flamer-wielding Guardsmen by now; but for every pocket we found and cleansed, there were probably a dozen others left undiscovered, where the taint continued to fester and the threat continued to grow.

‘Commissar.’ Moroe was waiting for us, gazing at the hololith display, in which the number of runes indicating active units continued to dwindle with dispiriting inevitability. Divas’s artillery company was still in the fight, though, and I was unexpectedly cheered by that; he could be undeniably irritating at times, but in my vocation you make precious few friends, and I’d have been loath to lose one, particularly in so vile a manner. ‘I have the information you requested.’

‘Any progress?’ Broklaw asked, clearly expecting the answer to be in the negative.

‘Some,’ the tech-priest replied, with the flat intonation favoured by his brethren, leaving his listeners to infer as best they could whether he was pleased, despondent, or indifferent; which, given his audible emotion at our first meeting, I hoped was some sort of encouraging sign. ‘We have indeed succeeded in isolating promising antibodies in the blood of the Tallarn soldiery, just as Commissar Cain surmised.’

‘Excellent,’ I said, feeling the first faint flare of hope since this nightmare had begun. ‘Is there any prospect of producing a vaccine from it?’

‘More than a prospect,’ Moroe said, in the same maddening monotone, which left me struggling as before to discern whether this was good news or bad. ‘We have succeeded in producing one, which, with the correct bio-cultures, we can synthesise in greater quantities. However, our trials with infected subjects have been entirely negative.’

‘You mean it doesn’t work,’ Broklaw said, in the tone of a man who’s just won a bet with himself, and badly doesn’t want to pay up.

‘Precisely,’ Moroe said. ‘For reasons which, quite frankly, continue to elude us.’

‘How so?’ I asked, then held up a forestalling hand. ‘In plain, simple Gothic.’ I’d spoken to too many tech-priests over the years not to realise that the rider was essential, if I didn’t want to be subjected to an interminable lecture that only a fellow member of the Cult Mechanicus would have understood in the first place.

The magos biologis looked as uncomfortable as it was possible to with half a face composed of immobile ironmongery. ‘The serum should prove effective,’ he said. ‘We can find no biological reason why it doesn’t.’

‘I’m sure you’ll discover one soon,’ I said, though whether to bolster his morale or my own I had no idea. ‘How’s the governor?’

‘Degrading rapidly,’ Moroe said, his monotonous voice lending an air of sombre finality to the pronouncement. ‘Hierophant Callister is providing spiritual succour, which seems all the aid possible at the moment.’ Anyone else would have been granted the Emperor’s Peace long ago, but, as I said, political expediency meant keeping the poor bastard alive as long as we could. Besides, I suppose Moroe needed someone to test his potions on.

‘Is he still around?’ Broklaw asked, and I nodded; the ecclesiarch had turned up the previous evening, with the maps we’d asked for pinpointing the mass burial sites, and seemed in no hurry to return to the relative danger of the revenant-infested city; which I can’t say I blamed him for[27].

‘Let’s hope he doesn’t come down with it too,’ I said, conscious that I’d spent some time with the stricken governor myself, and been lucky to get away with it.

‘Possible, but unlikely,’ Moroe assured us. ‘The virus spreads relatively slowly in most cases, and typically takes two to three weeks to manifest.’

‘Then how come Jona came down with it so fast?’ I asked. A memory of our wild drive through the necropolis bubbled to the surface. ‘And his bodyguard, Klarys. She was killed and resurrected far quicker than that.’

‘I was speaking of airborne infection,’ Moroe said, pedantic as only a cogboy could be. ‘Governor Worden was scratched by a revenant in the cathedral, which must have delivered the virus directly into his bloodstream. Such a mechanism may well account for the frequently observed accelerated progress of the disease in others directly wounded by them.’

‘Jurgen,’ I said, a cold knot of horror tying itself around my gut. One of the revenants had laid his face open, a far deeper and more serious wound than Jona had suffered. If the cogboy was right, my aide was probably doomed.

‘He’s over there,’ Broklaw said, completely mistaking my meaning, and a second or two later the aroma of socks of archaeological antiquity announced Jurgen’s arrival.

‘Thought you might need something to eat, sir,’ he said, holding out a plate of sandwiches made with some local cheese, which smelled as though it had spent some time in an ogryn’s athletic support, and a steaming mug of tanna.

‘Thank you, Jurgen,’ I said, taking them mechanically, although you can be sure I would have starved rather than consume either under the circumstances, and studying his face as I did so. The dressing on his cheek was now pale grey, but there was no sign of sepsis in any of the skin that I could see between clumps of beard and eruptions of psoriasis, his flesh remaining as pallid as ever beneath its patina of grime. No sense in taking any risks, though, given the virulence of what we were dealing with. I indicated the dressing as I deposited the plate on a convenient desk, and kept my voice casual. ‘Isn’t it time you took that to the medicae for assessment?’

‘This?’ Jurgen looked baffled for a moment, and scratched the padded bandage absently. ‘I’d forgotten all about it, to be honest.’

‘Then it’s high time you were reminded.’ I winced theatrically, conscious that I needed an excuse to accompany him without Broklaw and the magos thinking anything was out of the ordinary. ‘I’d better come too. See if they’ve got anything for heartburn.’

‘If they have, bring some back,’ Broklaw said, with a jaundiced look at the abandoned snack. ‘That cheese is lethal.’

Editorial Note:

Appended without comment.

From The Liberation of Lentonia, by Jonas Worden, uncompleted manuscript.

Vox record now. Can’t hold… thing. Makes marks.

So tired. Can’t sleep.

Dreams of blood. Always blood.

Can’t be sick. For them.

Hate this job.

Hate them.

Always blood…

EIGHT

I waited tensely, while the Sister Hospitaller on duty in the aid station peeled the soiled primary aid strip away from my aide’s face. He winced a little as it tore free, and a few clinging facial hairs and fragments of scab accompanied it into the clinical waste bin. The Hospitaller tutted.

‘Don’t be such a baby. There’s nothing there.’

‘There isn’t?’ I craned my neck to look at site of the wound, remembering the slick of blood and the ragged edge of torn flesh I’d patched up less than seventy-five hours[28] before.

‘See for yourself.’ The Sister swabbed the last of the clotted blood away, creating an oasis of flesh-coloured skin among the encircling grime, in the centre of which a barely-visible ridge of pinkish scar tissue was fading back to a healthy glow; or at least as close to it as Jurgen ever got.

I blinked in bemusement, while my aide turned his head from side to side, examining the site of the wound from every angle in the reflective surface of the Sister’s desktop pict screen. ‘Told you it was only a scratch,’ he said.

Which might have resolved matters to my aide’s satisfaction, but certainly didn’t to mine. If Moroe was right, and he’d certainly seen enough cases, no one should have been able to shrug off the infection which would have followed on from a revenant bite as surely as night followed day. True, Jurgen had been remarkably healthy for as long as we’d served together, most of the bugs which had tried to infect him finding rather too late that it was more like the other way around, but he showed no signs of contagion at all. Come to that, the gash in his cheek shouldn’t have knitted together anything like as quickly as it had done either.

The only possible explanation I could see was that it had something to do with his peculiar talent for nullifying the powers of the warp; but that led inescapably to the conclusion that there must be something unnatural about the virus itself. Which would certainly explain why Moroe’s vaccine didn’t seem to be working; it probably was on the purely physical level, but if the problem went deeper, and warpcraft of some kind was involved, that wasn’t going to be enough.

So I brooded in silence as Jurgen and I made our way back to the operations room, wondering what to do for the best. If I passed on my insight to Moroe, he might be able to find a way of making the vaccine work, and save this world, its population, and my own hide, in ascending order of importance. On the other hand, doing so without revealing my aide’s secret, thereby bringing down the wrath of Amberley by making him a high priority target for any other inquisitors in the vicinity who fancied adding a blank to their entourage[29], seemed impossible. And why were the Tallarns relatively immune to the disease? It was hardly likely there were any blanks among them, let alone that they all were.

So musing, I passed along the corridors of the palace paying little attention to my surroundings, only coming back to myself with a start as someone called my name. Turning, I found Kasteen walking towards us, the Tallarn colonel unexpectedly at her heels.

‘Colonel. Colonel.’ I greeted them each in turn, Kasteen first, then extended a hand to Samier. ‘I must confess I’m surprised to see you.’

‘And I to be here.’ He sighed, with the air of one prepared to discharge an onerous duty. ‘But the hierophant is requesting an escort back to the cathedral precincts, and under the circumstances he’ll be safer in my Chimera than a civilian vehicle.’

Which was undeniably true; but in his shoes I’d just have assigned the nearest duty sergeant to round up a squad of Guardsmen, instead of running the errand myself. But that was Tallarns for you, never slow to curry favour with the Ecclesiarchy, and I suppose he felt someone of the hierophant’s standing should be babysat by someone senior as a matter of protocol[30].

‘I take it the meeting was productive?’ I asked, and Kasteen nodded.

‘We’ve hammered out some new strategies,’ she said. ‘I’ll be holding a briefing in the morning.’

‘I’ll look forward to that,’ I said, with a lack of sarcasm I found vaguely surprising. ‘I’m sure Colonel Samier’s experience of fighting these things on Ferantis will have given you some useful insights.’

‘Let us hope so,’ Samier agreed. ‘Although at least here the packs are disorganised, operating entirely on instinct.’

‘And they weren’t on Ferantis?’ I asked.

The Tallarn colonel shook his head. ‘By no means. They were being herded by the blasphemous acolytes of the Great Enemy.’

‘You mean Chaos cultists?’ I said, my head buzzing with a half-formed realisation. ‘Wyrds, sorcerers, that kind of thing?’

‘Worse,’ Samier said, glowering. ‘Priests of the disease god.’

‘Nurgle,’ I said, hearing an audible gasp from the Tallarn colonel’s aide at the very mention of the foul name. But Samier was made of sterner stuff.

‘Quite so.’ He nodded. ‘They called this foul pestilence a blessing, and drove its victims against our guns. But we cleansed them all, in fire and our faith in the Emperor.’

At which point Callister wandered into the hall, in earnest conversation with Moroe, the half-overheard gist of which was that Jona was on his way to check in at the Golden Throne before too much longer, and there didn’t seem a damn thing either of them could do about it. At the sight of them together, and the smell of my aide at my shoulder, the last pieces of the puzzle clicked together in my mind.

‘Magos,’ I called. ‘Your grace, I think I have a solution to our problem.’

‘The governor’s condition has stabilised,’ Moroe reported, a few hours later, walking into the command centre. ‘Physically, anyway, although very little of his mind is left. But how did you know?’ Despite his best efforts to sound as bland as cogboys normally did, he couldn’t keep his astonishment entirely out of his voice, and I permitted myself the indulgence of feeling smug for a moment.

‘Seeing you and the hierophant together, it suddenly made sense,’ I said. ‘Especially after what Colonel Samier had just told me. It just struck me that the contagion might have been spiritual as well as physical, and that the piety of his men was what had preserved them from it.’ Which let me skirt neatly around the issue of Jurgen’s abnormal reaction to a revenant bite without having to mention it at all.

‘Which meant that blessing the vaccine would make it effective against the lingering taint of… of one of the Ruinous Powers,’ Callister cut in, to show he was keeping up, and fastidiously avoiding mention of Nurgle by name.

‘It seemed worth a try,’ I said. ‘The Tallarns always say faith is the strongest weapon in their arsenal, and in this case it was literally true.’

‘Can you bless the rest of the stock?’ Kasteen asked, bringing the discussion back from the realms of the numinous to the strictly practical, like the exemplary officer she was.

‘Of course.’ The hierophant puffed himself up a little, clearly delighted to be the centre of attention. ‘Do you have much on hand?’

‘A few phials only,’ Moroe admitted. ‘But now it’s proven its efficacy, we can produce more.’

‘Do we have enough on hand to immunise the regiment?’ I asked, and the tech-priest nodded.

‘I would say so. Most of it, anyway.’

‘Throne be praised,’ Kasteen said, to which the hierophant responded with a reflexive benediction. ‘Can we use it as a weapon too?’

‘I’m not sure I follow,’ Moroe said, allowing a taint of confusion to contaminate his carefully modulated tones.

Samier, however, shared her warrior instincts, and nodded in instant understanding. ‘If it stabilised Governor Worden, it must have neutralised the virus in his system. What happens if the revenants get a dose?’

‘The animating virus in the brainstems should be eliminated, and the cadavers become inert,’ the magos said, as though explaining the obvious, which to him I suppose it was.

‘You can hardly walk up to a pack of revenants and stick a needle in their arms, though, can you?’ I asked sceptically.

‘That wouldn’t work,’ Moroe said, completely missing the sarcasm, as tech-priests so often did, given their penchant for taking everything literally. ‘Their hearts don’t beat, so the serum wouldn’t circulate round their systems.’

‘So we’re back to killing them the hard way again?’ Kasteen asked.

‘Perhaps not,’ Callister said. ‘If the contagion is indeed a manifestation of… the plague lord,’ at which point he hesitated, still clearly uncomfortable with referring to one of the Dark Gods even in oblique terms, ‘mere contact with the consecrated fluid may be enough to exorcise the Chaotic taint.’

‘Leaving the antibodies free to soak through the tissues, and eradicate the virus,’ Moroe added.

‘Then it sounds like we’re looking at spraying from the air,’ I said, approaching the hololith and scanning the topographical display eagerly in search of anything that looked like a military aerodrome. ‘Do the militia have any aircraft available?’

‘Four squadrons of Valkyries,’ Samier told me, without bothering to check any of the data-feeds. Since he’d been liaising with them for far longer than the rest of the expeditionary force, though, I was prepared to take his word for it without arguing. ‘Which, unfortunately, are of no use to us without pilots.’

‘There must be some left uninfected,’ I said, and the Tallarn colonel shook his head.

‘One of the earliest outbreaks hit the ADC[31] barracks,’ he said, looking chagrined. ‘We used aircraft extensively during our initial deployment.’ Thus making sure their crews were the first to come into contact with the virus, of course.

‘What about shuttles, then?’ I persisted. ‘There are plenty of ships in orbit we can requisition them from.’

‘Jona issued a planetary quarantine order, remember?’ Kasteen said, her frustration burning through the forced calm of her delivery. ‘None of them can land until it’s rescinded.’ Which we couldn’t do without revealing his condition to the entire planet.

‘Frakking great,’ I said, with feeling. ‘How else are we supposed to disperse the stuff?’ I turned, as a familiar odour wafted in my direction, to find, as I’d expected, my aide approaching. ‘Yes, Jurgen, what is it?’

‘Vox-message, sir,’ he replied, handing me a crumpled sheet of scrawled-on paper, which adhered unpleasantly to my fingertips as I took it. ‘From Major Divas. Wondering if you got his last one.’ He squinted at the note. ‘Sorry about the jam stains.’

‘That’s all right.’ I breathed deeply, remembering to use my mouth, and exhaled a calming breath, making use of the unexpected interruption to restore a measure of calm to my demeanour. After all, I had a reputation for keeping a cool head in a crisis to maintain, however unmerited it actually was. ‘Tell him much as I appreciate the invitation, I’m not really free for social engagements at the moment.’

‘Very good, sir,’ Jurgen said, and turned to leave, sidestepping the hololith on the way out. At which point my eye fell on the icon marking Divas’s artillery battery once more, and I called my aide back hastily, as a memory of our time serving in that unit together suddenly surfaced.

‘Wait,’ I said, ‘forget that. Ask him if they’ve still got a stockpile of chemical munitions.’

‘Gas shells, got it,’ Jurgen replied, with a brief nod to confirm that he’d properly understood the message, before disappearing again in search of a vox.

‘I don’t see what good they’ll do,’ Kasteen said. ‘You can’t poison something that’s already dead.’

‘We won’t have to,’ I said. ‘The shells are set to airburst, to disperse the payload as widely as possible. If we substitute vaccine phials for the original load, one barrage ought to be enough to take out the largest concentration of revenants.’

‘That would work,’ Moroe agreed, after staring blankly into space for a moment. ‘Assuming the prevailing weather patterns hold, which seems approximately eighty-seven point three two four per cent probable over the next nineteen hours, falling to–’

‘Thank you, magos, that seems very reassuring,’ I cut in hastily.

‘We should take out enough to turn the tide, at least,’ Kasteen said, with rather more confidence than I felt. ‘After that, we can clear the city sector by sector.’

‘And then the other pockets of infection,’ Samier added. He was gazing at me with the faintly bovine expression of awestruck admiration I was more used to seeing on the faces of civilians at official receptions. ‘You truly walk in the footsteps of the Emperor, commissar.’

‘No more than we all do,’ I said, feeling a show of self-effacement would be best at this point. Sure enough, it had precisely the effect I’d anticipated.

‘Don’t be so modest, Ciaphas,’ Kasteen said. ‘If this works, you’ve just saved the planet.’

‘If,’ I said quietly, conscious, not for the first time, of how much could hang on so little a word.

Editorial Note:

Not for the first time, I find myself wondering if the additional clarity afforded by the material presented here is worth the effort of reading; but in this case I must regrettably conclude that it is. Although Sulla’s prose is as much an ordeal to wade through as ever, she does summarise the events of the wider campaign to which Cain, typically, gives short shrift.

From Like a Phoenix on the Wing: the Early Campaigns and Glorious Victories of the Valhallan 597th by General Jenit Sulla (retired), 101.M42.

In those last desperate days we were hard pressed indeed; for, hard as we fought, and despite the advantages we possessed of greater speed, mobility and ranged firepower, these were matched by the countervailing advantage of our enemy, that of superior numbers. An advantage, in fact, which could only increase, since every one of us who fell was a potential recruit to the dire ranks of the walking dead: I soon lost count of the number of times I saw some shambling revenant sporting the uniform of one of our allied regiments, and began to dread the day when I was to behold the ravaged remains of some familiar visage from our own among them. How our gallant comrades in arms were able to bear the sight of the cadavers of those they’d fought alongside turned to so fell a purpose I could scarce imagine, but the toll taken on their morale must have been considerable, and I could only commend their fortitude and devotion to the Emperor.

As the number of revenants continued to rise, and of those defending Viasalix continued to dwindle, a change began to come over the wandering packs of the unquiet dead. Whereas at first they had been relatively few in number, they began to coalesce into far larger groups, presenting a correspondingly greater threat to those who sought to confront them; so much so that, until the lesson was learned, a number of patrols were overwhelmed attempting to engage them at close quarters, erroneously trusting to the firepower of their weapons to preserve them from harm. After that, we began to keep the ranges open, and to keep squads close enough together to support one another.

Even this proved insufficient to fully prevail against their ever-increasing numbers, however, and with great reluctance we were forced to relinquish control of outlying areas, concentrating our forces in the centre of the city around the governor’s palace. As if scenting victory, the hellish legions of the undead flocked inwards, surrounding the fortified precincts, and laying siege to Lentonia’s greatest symbol of Imperial power.

Why things without reason should act in such a manner seemed baffling, all the more so since they had shown not the least sign of tactical acumen up to this point. The shocking reason for their change in behaviour was shortly to be discovered, however, and by none other than Commissar Cain, who, true to his quietly heroic nature, unhesitatingly sought out the most hazardous assignment for himself.

NINE

If I’m honest, I was hoping for a relatively quiet life after that, basking in the kudos of having come up with the solution to our problem, while someone else got on with the job of implementing it. I didn’t get one, of course; for some reason, it seemed, every revenant in the city chose that night to throw themselves against our defensive line, in a never-ending wave of shuffling carrion.

‘I didn’t know there were that many cadavers on the continent, never mind in Viasalix,’ I said, viewing the tightly-packed streets beyond the perimeter walls by the light of the arc lamps mounted around them, which, in happier times, illuminated the front of the building for the aesthetic appreciation of passers-by during the hours of darkness. Now they’d been turned to cast their radiance farther out, across the streets and the dark expanse of the park beyond; a pale shimmer of reflected light deep within it marked the marble sides of the imposing sepulchre at the centre of the necropolis, through which Jurgen and I had passed so dramatically. Everywhere I looked there were more shuffling revenants, thronging the highways and packing the lawns and gardens of the park so deeply that the fringes of the pack faded into invisibility beyond the reach of the lights. ‘There must be thousands of them.’

‘There are always more dead than you think,’ Broklaw said sardonically, sweeping his amplivisor across the throng. A muffled drumbeat of weapons discharging punctuated our conversation, as the troopers defending the palace precincts poured a constant stream of fire into the densely packed meat below, while our other units harried their flanks. But it was like trying to flense a leviathan with teaspoons; however much damage we did, there were always more revenants to take the place of the fallen.

‘Something’s got ’em stirred up,’ my aide said, materialising unexpectedly at my shoulder, the usual harbinger of his approach having been masked by the stench of corruption rising from below. He handed me a message slip, this time mercifully unmarked by any traces of a snack. ‘Major Divas’s compliments, and they do have gas shells among the inventory.’

‘Well, that’s something,’ I said, as a party of troopers trotted across the courtyard below and began hosing down the cadavers beyond the railing with flamers. The smoke began to drift in our direction, and the smell abruptly became ten times worse. ‘He can deploy the vaccine as soon as the magos and the hierophant can create another batch.’

Callister and Moroe had left with Samier a few hours before, ahead of the revenants’ arrival, and with any luck would have begun their work by now behind a screen of Tallarn troops determined to keep the carrion off their backs; a job they were welcome to, so far as I was concerned. At least it didn’t look as though they’d have much interference to worry about; all the revenants on Lentonia seemed fixated on us, for some reason.

‘You really think we can hold this lot off for that long?’ Broklaw asked, his tone enough to tell me what answer he’d give to that question if prompted.

‘The Emperor protects,’ I said, as if I meant it, and fervently hoped that He would: because so far as I could see, the major was right. The flamer troopers below were already scuttling back into cover, their still burning victims being mashed against the barrier with a cracking of ribs audible even over the crackling of the flames as the wrought-iron railing bent visibly under the pressure of the press of uncountable bodies behind it. A few chips of rockcrete began to work loose from the footings, pattering like gravel against the cobbles, and I flinched involuntarily. At this rate we’d be overrun in a couple of hours.

Leaving Broklaw to his gloomy prognosis, I made the rounds of the jittery troopers, boosting morale as best I could with rote platitudes and the occasional bleak jest, but to a man and a woman they were spooked, and I couldn’t blame them. I was too, though I could hardly admit it, taking refuge in a pose of grim resolve which I found relatively easy to maintain. I concluded my peregrinations back at the operations centre, where Kasteen greeted me bleakly.

‘It’s not looking good,’ she said, indicating the hololith.

‘No, it’s not,’ I agreed. I couldn’t say for sure that every revenant in the city was now besieging us, but it certainly seemed that way. There were certainly few, if any, contact icons elsewhere that I could see, the groups of them which had been drawn to the borders of the quarantine zones by the prospect of fresh meat having abandoned their battle of attrition against the dwindling Vostroyan defenders on the very brink of victory. ‘Any idea what’s attracting them here?’

‘Not a clue,’ Kasteen said, ‘unless it’s your magnetic personality.’

‘Hardly likely,’ I said. There were foes in the past which had sought me out, under the delusion that my reputation was merited, but they’d been in search of an honourable duel against a worthy opponent, and died disappointed on both counts. But they’d been sentient, even cultured in their own bizarre fashion, whether xenos or Chaos-touched, and these lumps of rotting meat animated by an unnatural virus weren’t even self-aware.

‘Whatever it is, it’s a big mistake on their part,’ Kasteen concluded, with more bravado than sober tactical analysis so far as I could see.

‘Let’s hope so,’ I said, enlarging the image of the area around the palace. The artillery battery was only a couple of kilometres away, but until Moroe got another batch of vaccine produced, and Callister blessed it, we’d get no help from there. We could always call in a conventional artillery strike on the densely-packed revenants, of course, but they were so close to us we were liable to take the brunt of the barrage ourselves if things went wrong, and we weren’t quite that desperate. Yet. Then, as the three-dimensional representation of the palace and its environs continued to expand, my eye fell on a crucial detail I’d so far missed. ‘What are these tunnels?’

Kasteen shrugged. ‘Just the usual, I suppose. Remnants of the undercity[32], and a bolthole for the governor if things went wrong.’ (Which Jona’s predecessor had never had the chance to use, his assassins having rather unsportingly struck in the open air.)

‘Of course.’ I felt the palms of my hands begin to tingle, as a distinctly unwelcome idea insinuated itself. ‘They are properly sealed, aren’t they?’ The last thing we needed was to be outflanked by a mob of walking cadavers popping up from beneath our feet.

‘They are,’ Kasteen assured me, to my great and unspoken relief. She adjusted the display, bringing the tunnel system fully into view. ‘There’s an old flood barrier here, and the sluices have been welded shut.’ She indicated another choke point. ‘That’s supposed to be an escape route, leading into the service tunnels, but the household guard had it bricked up during the insurgency, while they tried to work out which side to support.’

‘So long as it’s still holding,’ I said. It wasn’t likely that any of the revenants would work out how to use a spade or a pick, but I hadn’t lived that long by taking anything for granted. Then my innate affinity for tunnel systems kicked in, and with it a sudden realisation. ‘That service tunnel runs almost as far as the artillery park.’

‘So it does,’ Kasteen said speculatively, clearly having the same idea that I’d had. ‘And we’ve still got the phials of vaccine the hierophant blessed.’

Because we’d hoped to get our troopers immunised with all due dispatch, but, in the event, the mass attack by the revenants had left too little time to get that organised. She turned to me. ‘You’re our resident expert on tunnel fighting[33]. How quickly can you get through to the battery?’

‘That depends on how clear the tunnels are,’ I said, considering the matter. There was no telling what might be lurking in the lightless labyrinth, but I’d lay good odds it was a lot better than what currently had us surrounded. On the other hand, I didn’t want to seem too eager to make a run for it, while the rest of the regiment kept the revenants off my back. ‘But I’m not sure I should be the one to go. It sticks in my craw leaving the rest of you in the lurch, and I don’t mind admitting it.’ For a moment I wondered if I’d overplayed my hand, but Kasteen was already smiling ruefully.

‘I knew you’d say that. But no one else knows tunnels like you do. You’re our best hope.’ Her smile hardened. ‘In fact, you’re our only hope. If you don’t get through, we’ll be like the poor devils outside by the morning. If they’ve even left enough to get up again after they’ve finished feeding.’

‘No pressure, then,’ I jested feebly, trying not to think about it. We’d served together a long time by that point, and the notion of losing the closest thing I had to friends was a dispiriting one.

‘I’ll assign a squad to go with you,’ Kasteen said, which was a comfort; at least I’d have a demi-score of troopers to hide behind. Then I thought a little more about the implications, and shook my head with a pang of heartfelt regret.

‘I’ll just take Jurgen,’ I said. ‘We’ll move faster and more quietly alone.’ Not to mention the fact that if I wasn’t able to get through, and found it more prudent to run in the opposite direction, I’d be spared the necessity of fabricating an excuse for the sudden change of plans.

‘You’re the expert,’ Kasteen said.

‘Yes,’ I agreed, rather wishing I wasn’t.

TEN

Accessing the network of tunnels beneath the city turned out to be relatively straightforward, the entrance to the erstwhile governor’s funk hole being hidden behind a butt of some local wine which the household troops who’d sealed the portal had apparently decided would be easier to shift if they drained it first, judging by the fruity aroma and the litter of broken goblets they’d left behind them when the job was done. By the time I’d collected the precious phials and stowed them carefully in a padded satchel which I slung from my shoulder so it rode behind my hip, mindful of the danger of fouling my laspistol should I need to draw it in a hurry, a group of our sappers had already smashed their way through the newly-cemented brickwork. They leaned on their crowbars as Jurgen and I stuck a cautious head apiece into the passageway beyond, which was smoothly finished in rendered rockcrete, no doubt so a fleeing aristocrat wouldn’t get his robes mucky.

‘Smells a bit,’ my aide commented, as unconscious of the irony as always, and I nodded, filtering the ambient odour from the one beside me. A faint cloacal tang betrayed the proximity of a sewer, overlaid with traces of dust, mould and damp, and for a moment I felt quite nostalgic for the warrens of my childhood. Most significantly, however, the unmistakable stench of corrupted flesh was blessedly absent: if there were any revenants down here, they certainly weren’t massing for an attack.

‘Seems clear, though,’ I said, and tapped the vox-bead in my ear. ‘We’re moving out.’

‘Emperor speed,’ Kasteen said, her voice attenuated by the tiny vox-receiver. ‘The Twelfth are expecting you.’

‘Tell Toren to get some tanna on,’ I said, with what I felt to be a transparent display of bravado. ‘We’ll probably need one when we arrive.’ I almost expected Divas himself to chime in at that point, with one of his usual fatuous remarks about wishing he was with us, but heard nothing on the 12th Field Artillery’s operational frequency apart from a faint hissing of static. Which was hardly surprising; the low-powered signals from a vox-bead wouldn’t punch through much of the intervening rock and soil.

‘I’ll do that,’ Kasteen promised, as we stepped through the ragged hole in the brickwork, and I turned back to the loitering sappers.

‘Seal it up,’ I said, despite my natural aversion to having my line of retreat cut off. They were going to anyway, so I might as well pretend it was my idea.

Not waiting for them to comply, because it would feel too much like being sealed into my own tomb, I led the way into the darkness, Jurgen trotting beside me. Luminators had been set into the ceiling during the tunnel’s construction[34] , but we refrained from kindling them, mindful of attracting attention. Instead, we followed the relatively faint cone of light cast by the luminator my aide had clipped to the bayonet lugs of his lasgun, which did the job more than adequately. I was also heartened to see the melta he favoured when expecting more trouble than usual slung across his back, where he could reach it easily if needed; a wise precaution, as things turned out.

After a hundred metres or so we reached the end of the new tunnel, and found ourselves facing a sheet metal door, somewhat incongruously bearing the cogwheel sigil of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Jurgen shouldered his lasgun, and reached for the melta.

‘Wait a moment,’ I said; an obstruction here simply didn’t make sense. If I was building a secret passage for the express purpose of running for my life along it, I wouldn’t want anything to hold me up, even for a second. I placed my fingertips against the cold steel surface, and pushed cautiously; sure enough a pressure latch clicked open, revealing a faint crack of darkness. ‘Douse the light.’ My aide complied, readying his lasgun again, and I pushed the panel all the way open, silently, on well-lubricated hinges.

As I’d expected, the floor on the other side was level with the surface we were standing on, tripping and falling flat on your face hardly being conducive to an expeditious getaway, and I sidled out into the tunnel beyond, letting my other senses expand to fill the void left by the absence of light. The smell of the sewer was stronger here, which was hardly surprising, as it connected to the service tunnel we were now in by way of an access shaft a few hundred metres further along; as I strained my ears, I could just discern a faint, liquid trickling in that direction. Overlaid with it, and distorted by the echoes, rodents scuttered and chittered, alarmed by our intrusion, but, to my relief, I heard nothing like the shambling gait of a revenant.

‘All clear,’ I murmured, and Jurgen rekindled our light, sending the boldest of the local vermin, which had edged closer to investigate our unfamiliar sound and scent, scuttling for the refuge of the shadows.

‘Frakking disrespectful to the Omnissiah,’ my aide commented, as the doorway we’d entered the tunnel by swung closed, to reveal another Mechanicus sigil on the outer side, along with an age-browned prayer slip adhering to it with the aid of a dollop of sealing wax. It looked just like an access panel to some part of the city’s infrastructure, of interest only to a tech-priest assigned to minister to that particular system; and as none actually existed, no one would ever glance at it twice. ‘Asking for trouble, I reckon.’ A request which might well have been answered, given the fate of the man it had been constructed for.

Further conversation being superfluous, I led the way at a rapid trot in the direction of our destination, conscious that time was of the essence; if we delivered the vaccine too late to relieve our comrades, my reputation for inspiring improbable last-minute victories in the face of certain defeat would take an embarrassing knock. Besides, I liked Kasteen and the others, and had no desire to see them reduced to revenant fodder. After a few moments the smell of the sewer got considerably more pungent, and I noticed the access shaft off to our left: a floorless niche in the stained brick wall, into the depths of which a ladder descended. A faint sound rose from it too, which at first I attributed to fast-flowing water, but as I became more aware of the pattern of the echoes, it began to sound suspiciously like voices.

‘Is someone down there?’ Jurgen murmured, clearly having heard it too, and without waiting for orders he switched off his luminator again. I halted abruptly as we were plunged into darkness, and waited for my eyes to adjust. Sure enough, a faint glow was seeping up the shaft from beneath our feet.

‘Looks like it,’ I replied, equally sotto voce. ‘But that’s not our concern at the moment. We need to get the vaccine delivered.’ Not to mention the fact that I had absolutely no inclination to go looking for even more trouble. We’d report it when we checked in at the 12th, and send a squad of storm troopers to check it out. Chances were it was just a gaggle of civilians who worked down here looking for somewhere to hide from the revenants, in any case.

‘Right you are, sir,’ Jurgen agreed, and snapped the light on again. Then pulled the trigger of his lasgun.

For which I could hardly blame him. A group of the motile cadavers were blocking the tunnel ahead, at least a dozen strong, shuffling towards us, their hands outstretched. I cursed, blaming myself for having become so fixated on the sounds drifting up from below that I’d missed the noise of their approach. Then the crackle of the lasgun firing a full burst drowned out everything else anyway.

‘There’s too many of ’em, sir,’ Jurgen told me, unnecessarily, as the leading revenant staggered under the blizzard of fire which was chewing its chest away. ‘I can’t get to the melta.’ Which was also depressingly obvious; the moment he stopped firing to switch weapons, the whole pack would surge forwards. If we turned and fled, we could outrun them easily, but our way back into the palace was now blocked; and if I failed to deliver the vaccine, I’d never live it down. The sewer, on the other hand, was running in more or less the right direction, and if we took to that, we stood a good chance of evading the cadavers without adding too much time to our journey.

‘Down the ladder!’ I shouted, hoping that the ghastly things couldn’t climb.

To think was to act, and I scrambled down the rusting rungs in a heartbeat, landing ankle deep in a slick of foetid water. I hadn’t paid much attention to the layout of the sewerage system, not anticipating a diversion through it, but my sense of direction proved as reliable as always, and I found it easy enough to visualise the way we needed to go. The light was stronger in that direction, enough of it leaking towards us to let me dodge hastily out of the way as Jurgen descended, with rather more speed than elegance[35].

‘That’s shaken ’em off,’ my aide opined, as the revenants milled uncertainly around the aperture in the ceiling, apparently unable to comprehend our sudden disappearance.

‘Unless any of them fall down the hole,’ I added, unwilling to wait and find out if chance and gravity would achieve what volition couldn’t. I began to lead the way towards the light in the distance. ‘Mind your feet,’ I added. ‘The main channel looks deep.’

The sewer itself was about three metres high, with a vaulted rockcrete ceiling, the noisome water flowing down it confined for the most part to a channel down the middle; on either side the floor was raised to just below the surface, enabling us to make relatively rapid progress despite the bow wave which sloshed over our boots each time either of us took a step. Jurgen hesitated a moment, switching his weapons while he had the chance, and waded after me, his melta charged and ready for trouble. Deprived of the light attached to his lasgun, I switched my own on, and briefly regretted it as I caught sight of the flotsam swirling around my feet.

We’d barely gone a hundred metres when a loud, echoing splash warned me that the inevitable had happened, and at least one of the cadavers had tumbled down the hatch after us. I glanced back, just in time to see another dim shape plummet into the stinking fluid beneath the hole, jostled in the wake of its fellow by the press of bodies above. Alerted by the sound, Jurgen swung round and discharged the melta, but whether he hit one of them I couldn’t say; the thermal backwash boiled the sewage around the target point, raising a cloud of rancid steam, which clawed at my throat and nasal passages, and left my eyes stinging.

‘Should have stuck with the lasgun,’ he said ruefully.

‘Just keep moving,’ I said, with an apprehensive glance at the artificial fog bank filling the sewer pipe. Within seconds it rolled over us completely, reducing visibility to a handful of metres and rendering our luminator useless, the light merely scattering back at us from the enveloping mist. I doused it, preferring to rely on the pattern of echoes to keep me close to the wall, and just hope that the shallows didn’t abruptly narrow, or disappear altogether. With our own light extinguished, the one in the distance pushed through the cloud of vapour in a fitful glimmer, which at least gave me something to aim for.

Hearing the irregular splashing of faltering footfalls somewhere in the murk behind us, I drew my weapons and picked up the pace as much as I dared. With the sounds muffled by the surrounding fog, there was no telling now how many of the revenants were behind us, although at least the worst of it was beginning to clear. After a few more metres, the light I was aiming for began to shine more brightly, and I was able to pick out the dim shape of the lichen-slick wall beside me. The murmuring of voices was louder here too, and I strained my ears, grateful for the extra help it gave me in remaining orientated. I still couldn’t make out any individual words, but there seemed to be several people conversing.

‘Hadn’t we better warn them?’ Jurgen said.

‘I suppose we should,’ I agreed, as if the thought had occurred to me too, instead of the obvious one of just slipping past while the revenants were distracted with fresh prey. Then again, whoever was down here probably knew the tunnel system well enough to guide us to our destination more quickly than we could reach it by discovering an alternative route for ourselves. So thinking, I turned aside at the niche in the crumbling wall through which the light was shining, as decisively as if that had been my intention all along.

As I’d expected, the gap led to a metal door all but indistinguishable from the counterfeit one through which we’d entered the tunnel complex in the first place, except that this one stood ajar, allowing the light and the voices of the occupants to leak out into the sewer. I was about to push it open, when my aide jerked a disapproving thumb in its direction.

‘Tech-priests aren’t going to like that, either.’

‘No, they aren’t,’ I agreed, pausing to look at the Mechanicus icon embossed on the door. It had been defaced, apparently by repeated hammer blows, but whether the vandalism had been deliberate or was simply a by-product of an attempt to force entry, I couldn’t have said. Nevertheless, instead of flinging it open and striding through, as I’d intended, I widened the gap just enough to admit us, and stepped into the space beyond, my weapons ready.

It appeared to be a surge chamber, intended to accommodate a sudden increase in the water flow; a large, rectangular tank, with a steel mesh walkway running around it roughly two-thirds of the way up the wall. A ladder close to where Jurgen and I were standing gave access to the upper level, and, according to my instinctive affinity for environments like this, the metal door leading directly onto the catwalk probably opened straight into the tunnel from which we’d been forced to divert. All this, however, was peripheral to what we found inside.

It was harder to say who was the most startled, us or the room’s occupants; Jurgen and I, because we’d been anticipating a party of sewerjacks cowering down here until either the emergency was over or the revenants found them, or the nest of heretics we’d blundered into, because, in the manner of their kind, they were delusional enough to think they were clever and safe from discovery. Be that as it may, you can be sure Jurgen and I recovered first, probably because our lives were punctuated by such unpleasant surprises so frequently we were almost used to them.

‘Intruders!’ the nearest fellow howled, presumably in case the rest had failed to notice a couple of heavily armed men standing right in front of them. He was dressed in rags, and so caked with filth that he made Jurgen seem positively fragrant by comparison; and for a moment I found myself wondering if he and his fellows might be no more than harmless toshers after all. Then I noticed the inverted triangle of buboes suppurating in the very centre of his forehead, and all doubt was banished. I’d seen enough of the twisted works of Chaos by that point to recognise the mark of a willing worshipper of Nurgle, and struck out with my chainsword, decorating our immediate surroundings with the degenerate’s entrails.

Which, I’m bound to say, could only improve them. The floor was covered in ordure, just a few centimetres deep where we were standing, but elsewhere heaped and moulded into drifts and mounds with some clear purpose behind them; repellent as the sight was, to say nothing of the stench, I felt a nagging sense of familiarity as I beheld it. I had no time to ponder its significance, however, as more of the madmen were running into the attack, slithering a little on the dung-slick floor, rusted blades and sharpened bones whirling in their hands. I downed one with a flurry of laspistol shots, and turned to parry the strike of another, whose flaking blade exploded in a shower of oxidised shards as it met the spinning teeth of my own. Before I could dispatch him, the vivid flare of Jurgen’s melta discharging lit up the room, dazzling me as it so often did in a confined space, and the wretch slipped under my strike, taking advantage of my momentary disorientation to stab up between my ribs with the sliver of broken metal remaining to him. I evaded the clumsy thrust easily, taking his arm off at the elbow for his pains, and he collapsed, howling, while my aide cremated another of his brethren.

‘Shut up,’ I said, irritably, ‘I can’t hear myself think,’ and silenced him with a swift kick to the throat which crushed his larynx, leaving him to thrash about for a few minutes until he expired from lack of breath.

‘Most impressive,’ a voice drawled, and the magister of the coven strode forwards to challenge us, with the lazy deliberation of a tarocchi player who thinks he holds all the Inquisitors. Despite a body so deformed with tumours and buboes he seemed less human in countenance than an ork, he moved with the easy grace of scarcely contained abhuman strength; one eye was swollen shut and weeping pus, while the other was bright and febrile. He barely gave the remains of his dismembered and vaporised acolytes a second glance as he picked his way through the heaps of filth with surprising fastidiousness, pausing to reposition a rotting fruit or a decomposing rat corpse here and there as he came. ‘But I wield our Grandfather’s gifts directly.’

‘And I wield a laspistol,’ I said, in no mood to bandy words with a madman, pulling the trigger as I spoke and putting a las-bolt through the middle of his head. A gout of corruption gushed from the site of the wound, and he staggered, a look of almost comical astonishment on his face, then, to my dismay, the diseased flesh began to flow back together, knitting seamlessly around a fresh, pus-leaking canker.

‘Another bloody wyrd,’ Jurgen muttered, bringing the melta to bear. ‘Why does it always have to be wyrds?’

‘It doesn’t always,’ I reminded him. ‘Sometimes it’s ’stealers, or necrons, or mutants, or… something.’

‘Every time we go down a hole,’ Jurgen persisted, with the distemperate tenacity he generally exhibited when he felt hard done by. ‘It ought to be against regulations.’

‘That was unforgivably rude,’ the heretic said, sounding as though I’d just committed some social faux pas at a cotillion he was hosting. He reached down and plucked a human skull, still decorated with scraps of rotting flesh, from one of the piles of filth in the middle of the room, and the reason for the nagging sense of familiarity I’d felt on entering suddenly snapped into place. The whole chamber was a three-dimensional map of the city, like the one in the hololith back in the operations room, but sculpted in ordure and waste instead of light. And the skull had been resting on the mound representing the governor’s palace. ‘I had been willing to let you share in the joys of Grandfather’s blessing, but you don’t deserve such an honour. So I’ll just bring a few of his pets here to tear you apart instead.’

‘Good luck with that,’ I said, the whole thing making sense at last. That must be why the walking dead had flocked to the palace; this lunatic had found a way of directing them. Samier had told me he’d seen the same thing on Ferantis, although I hadn’t expected to witness it for myself. ‘You really think you can use one of the revenant heads to order them about?’

‘And why not?’ I could say that the light of insanity blazed up in his one good eye as he spoke, but it had actually been blazing pretty noticeably from the first moment we saw him. If you’re going to sell your soul to the embodiment of physical corruption, and beg it to riddle you with disease, you’re hardly playing cards with a full deck to begin with, if you ask me. ‘Their resurrection is a gift of Nurgle, to his handful of faithful followers. After years of hiding our true allegiance from the lackeys of the corpse god, he has at last rewarded us by sending his blessing to our world.’

‘I hate to burst your bubble,’ I said, ‘but it was pure chance the plague carriers ended up on Lentonia. They could have been reassigned anywhere. And I doubt there’s a planet in the Imperium without a few deluded fools trying to suck up to the lord of the midden[36]. You’re nothing special.’

‘Special enough to commune with our ever-living brothers,’ he retorted, clearly stung. ‘And now this conversation is at an end.’

Warned by a sound behind me, I turned, to find the revenants which had followed us down the hole from the upper level entering the chamber. Both of them looked pretty much the worse for wear, particularly the one Jurgen had winged with his melta shot back in the sewer, which groped its way in with one arm reduced to a fused and smoking stump. I decapitated it with a single swipe of my chainsword, then turned to finish off its companion with a flurry of blows before it could get within arm’s reach of me. Throughout the brief burst of action, my aide kept his melta pointed squarely at the wyrd in front of us.

‘You were saying?’ I asked sarcastically.

‘Then it seems I must take care of you myself,’ he said, with a faintly irritated snap. He opened his mouth impossibly wide, the jaws cracking audibly as they distended, and a torrent of foul-smelling vomit spewed towards Jurgen and I, far too much of it to have been contained in a single body. Where it touched the floor, or the piles of filth, everything dissolved with a sinister acidic hiss. I leapt instinctively behind my aide for cover, a good call as it turned out; the torrent of corruption parted around him, flowing harmlessly on either side, to leave us both standing unscathed.

‘My turn,’ Jurgen said, pulling the trigger of the melta, and obliterating the stupefied expression of the magister along with the rest of his face, head, and upper torso. The twitching body fell into a tower of reeking corruption, intended to signify one of the inner hab-blocks if I remembered the streets in that quarter right, with a liquescent squelch, and flailed around blindly. Its hands twitched, grabbing handfuls of filth, with which it seemed to be trying to patch itself up. Jurgen took a couple of steps closer, and the thing’s motion became more frantic and erratic. Then, as it came fully within his warpcraft-nullifying aura, it finally lay still. ‘Regenerate this,’ Jurgen said vengefully, and vaporised the rest of the body with a point-blank shot.

‘Good man,’ I said, feeling he deserved a pat on the back, and made for the ladder I’d first noticed on entering. The rungs were rusty, but seemed solid enough, and I scrambled up them as quickly as I could, eager to put as much distance as possible between myself and our nauseating surroundings.

As I’d anticipated, the door on the catwalk led us back out into the service corridor we’d been forced to divert from, and I cracked it open cautiously; or as cautiously as possible, given that both hinges and locking mechanism were thoroughly rusted, and it squealed like a bayoneted gretchin as I pulled it ajar. Given our surroundings, I had no olfactory warning of my aide’s approach, and the groaning of the door drowned out his footfalls, so I must admit I jumped a little when he spoke.

‘All clear, sir?’ he asked, and I nodded cautiously, failing to hear anything immediately threatening.

‘I think so,’ I said, and followed him out into the tunnel, keeping my weapons handy nevertheless; after our little diversion, I wasn’t planning to sheathe either of them until we reached the artillery park. Despite my apprehension, nothing made a grab for me in the darkness, and I kindled my luminator.

An action I instantly regretted. An agitated shuffling immediately began behind us, and, glancing back, I saw the revenant pack which had pursued us before still clustered around the shaft leading down to the sewers. Becoming aware of our presence, they began to shamble in our direction as quickly as they could; which, fortunately, was a good deal slower than either of us could manage.

‘Come on!’ I urged, breaking into a trot, despite the urge to move a lot more quickly than that. The faster we ran, the sooner we’d tire, and over the kind of distance we still had to go, exhaustion was going to be the real enemy. Slow the revenants might have been, but they had a definite edge in endurance, and once we began to falter they’d begin to close in again.

‘Right behind you, sir,’ Jurgen assured me, and we began our long, lonely run through the darkness. The going was reasonably good, with few obstructions, and the unsettling shuffling sound behind us quickly began to recede; but it never faded away entirely. In fact, after a while, it was beginning to grow perceptibly louder again, even over the rasping of the breath in my lungs. I risked a quick glance over my shoulder, and saw an unmistakable flicker of movement in the depths of the tunnel.

‘They’re catching up,’ I warned, and my aide turned, loosing off a couple of melta blasts into the gloom.

‘Not for long,’ he said, although truth to tell I doubted he’d have had much effect at that range, and picked up his pace a little. ‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, slowing down again. I could hear movement ahead of us as well, and gripped the hilt of my chainsword a little tighter. Then I caught sight of a glimmer of light too, far distant, and bobbing a little, as if it was moving fast. Given my last experience of unexpected lights down here, that wasn’t much of a comfort either. Just as I was beginning to feel distinctly spooked, a familiar voice echoed in my vox-bead.

‘Cai? Is that you? We can see a light up ahead.’

‘Toren?’ I asked in astonishment, trying not to let the sudden surge of relieved elation colour my voice too much. ‘What the hell are you doing down here?’

‘We got a little worried when we noticed you were overdue,’ Divas explained, a moment or two later, while the squad of storm troopers he’d brought with him hurried on past us to deal with the revenant pack; a job which, judging by the sudden eruption of lasgun fire, they took to with a will. ‘So I rounded up an escort and came to see what had happened to you.’ His expression suddenly changed as I took a couple of steps towards him. ‘Throne, Cai, you smell like you’ve been wading in–’

‘Long story,’ I interrupted, holding out the satchel; if I didn’t recall him to business quickly, I’d still be explaining while the last of the 597th were being ripped to shreds. ‘Are the shells ready?’

‘Payloads already removed, to take these,’ Divas assured me, accepting the bag a little cautiously, and keeping his fingers well clear of some prominent stains.

‘Good,’ I said, falling into step beside him. ‘Then there’s only one more thing I need to make sure of.’

‘Which is?’ Divas asked, with his usual expression of eager expectation.

‘Did Colonel Kasteen pass on the message about the tanna?’ I asked.

Editorial Note:

In the absence of any further comment from Cain about the matter, I feel obliged to insert the following. My apologies.

From Like a Phoenix on the Wing: the Early Campaigns and Glorious Victories of the Valhallan 597th by General Jenit Sulla (retired), 101.M42.

Though pressed hard, our stout defence of the governor’s palace, and of the Emperor’s anointed representative housed within it, never faltered, wave after wave of the abominations of nature which besieged us being thrown back throughout the night. About an hour before dawn the atypical sense of purpose which had seized them, driving them ever and anon against our guns, seemed to leave them as inexplicably as it had first arrived; only later, when Commissar Cain returned, with a typically self-effacing account of his exploits in the tunnels beneath the city, did it become clear that this must have been the moment when he won his duel with the Chaotic sorcerer whose foul arts had goaded the carrion army against us. With their unholy master’s control broken they reverted to being driven by instinct, many turning against others of their kind in their insensate feeding frenzy.

Shortly after dawn the barrage began, shells bursting in the air overhead to release the sanctified vaccine, which rained down on living and dead combatants alike. For my part, I must own, I breathed deeply, seeming to feel the very essence of the Emperor Himself being drawn into my lungs, and, at that moment, I felt as though no foe of Him on Earth, however powerful, could stand against me if I fought in His holy name.

Though the revenants battled on, the fight seemed to seep out of them, a lassitude of both will and limb gradually becoming apparent; until, at last, they sank to earth, as inert as all things without life should be, and the natural order returned at last to this troubled outpost of the Emperor’s realm.

ELEVEN

Well, that’s about it,’ I said, flinching involuntarily as one of the nearby Earthshakers lived up to its name. With the city all but cleared of revenants there was little need to keep firing off vaccine shells that I could see, but it kept the gunners out of mischief; and there may have been the odd pocket of infestation the clearance teams had missed, so another few rounds probably wouldn’t hurt. ‘All the infected Guardsmen have been purged, the rest vaccinated, and there seem to be enough militia survivors to maintain some semblance of order once we’ve gone.’ A job I didn’t envy them in the least. The capital had come off worst, but enough of the contagion had spread to other parts of the world to ensure that Lentonia wouldn’t be properly back on its feet for a couple of generations. Probably even longer, if Jona’s relatives got their collective arses back on the throne, now an appropriately heroic tale of his death in the front line of the defence of the palace had been discreetly nudged into circulation.

‘Thanks to you,’ Divas said, a trifle indistinctly. With the crisis past, I’d found the time to take him up on his invitation to get together for a meal and a drink, and a chat about old times, most of which he seemed to remember a great deal more fondly than I did; but then he’d been lobbing shells at a far distant enemy, for the most part, while I’d been a lot closer to them, and generally fleeing in terror.

‘Thanks to us,’ I corrected. ‘If you hadn’t come looking for Jurgen and I, it could all have turned out very differently.’

‘Now you’re just being modest,’ Divas said, which was only partially true; given some of the perils my aide and I had faced together over the years and survived, we might well have fought off the revenant pack, but the time we’d have lost in doing so could easily have cost the 597th their lives. His intervention had been decisive, from where I was sitting. But if he wanted to hand me all the credit, I’d be happy to take it.

‘Makes two of us, then,’ I said, pretending reluctance, and pushed my empty plate aside. ‘Heard where you’re going next?’

‘Coronus,’ Divas said. ‘On the Word Eternal.’

I pricked up my ears at the name of the troopship. ‘Us too,’ I said, smiling broadly, as I picked up my goblet of amasec. ‘So it sounds as though I’ll be having the pleasure of your company for a while longer than we thought.’

Divas was a terrible tarocchi player, with a tendency to bet far more heavily than his hand justified; and if that didn’t amount to a pat on the back from the Emperor for a job well done, I don’t know what did.

[On which uncharacteristically pious note, this fragment of the Cain archive meanders to an end.]

NOTES

[1] The typically Valhallan fur caps, like the greatcoats Cain has already alluded to, generally being donned only in sub-zero temperatures.

[2] When Cain joined what was to become the 597th, in 931.M41, the two former regiments making it up were practically at one another’s throats; typically, his account of that period of his career glosses over the credit that he undoubtedly deserves for welding them into an effective fighting unit, concentrating instead on what he perceives as his self-interested motives for doing so.

[3] Like many seasoned warp travellers, Cain tended to use the term ‘Arbites’ colloquially to refer to local law enforcers as well as actual members of the Adeptus Arbites; which, given the bewildering variety of nomenclature on different worlds, he can hardly be blamed for. Where actual members of the Adeptus are present, however, he is usually punctilious about the distinction: since he doesn’t mention any Arbitrators in the course of his narrative, it seems safe to assume that the handful one would normally expect to find on a populous Imperial world were either too busy to socialise or had been killed in the fighting.

[4] And because the CO and second-in-command of an Imperial Guard regiment would never travel in the same shuttle, to ensure accident or enemy action would be unable to cripple it by their simultaneous loss.

[5] Wives and husbands, if the rumours are true, but not the livestock. Probably.

[6] A well-regarded local printsheet.

[7] A colloquial contraction of ‘Basilica Concilium,’ the meeting place of the governor’s advisory council, and de facto seat of government.

[8] The real target being the local Arbitrator, who’d sent his car for Cain as a courtesy.

[9] The very reason Cain had had for contriving his assignment to them at the beginning of his career.

[10] Not quite that many, though several were certainly present.

[11] And everyone else’s; contrary to Cain’s usual opinion, not everything was about him.

[12] Kasteen’s given name.

[13] So distinctive a fashion that they almost constitute part of their uniform; indeed, it has been suggested, not entirely facetiously, that the size and degree of grooming are at least as reliable a signifier of status as the official insignia of rank.

[14] More likely it was simply air or the gases of decomposition passing over the vocal cords.

[15] Highly unlikely, as revenants generally act purely on instinct.

[16] Not entirely true, as the world was still technically under martial law, and he could have been overruled at any time; but the population were more likely to listen to edicts issued in the governor’s name, and the Imperial Guard more than had its hands full.

[17] A mildly disparaging term for enginseers, and by extension tech-priests in general, often used among the Imperial Guard.

[18] Where Cain became so familiar with Tallarn custom isn’t clear, although some portion of the Archive yet to be edited may throw some light on the matter.

[19] Regimental headquarters.

[20] Since commissars are outside the chain of command, troopers aren’t technically obliged to salute them, although a substantial minority do so anyway; probably from a sense of prudence for the most part, although in Cain’s case it generally seems to have been motivated by genuine respect.

[21] Jona’s predecessor as governor having been far too unpopular to be granted any posthumous honours.

[22] The scions of local noble houses, for the most part, of insufficient status to be accorded the privilege of eternal rest directly alongside Lentonia’s ruling dynasty, and those rising merchant families wealthy enough to pay back a lifetime of snubs from their self-ascribed ‘betters’ by defiantly crashing their final party.

[23] A gesture in which the thumb is pressed into the palm of the hand, so the fingers resemble an aquila wing, intended to ward off misfortune or invoke good luck, common on many worlds in the Damocles Gulf and adjacent sectors.

[24] Presumably her helmet had been removed in his presence, though he didn’t bother to mention the fact.

[25] It’s unclear here whether he means two squads in particular, or enough troopers in total to make up that many units.

[26] In fact all the regimental commanders were attending the meeting, but the others were so depleted by this point that only the Valhallans and Tallarns were able to assign soldiers to actively hunt the revenant packs instead of simply holding the ground they occupied.

[27] Cain may be being a little more cynical about Callister’s motives here than is warranted: as the Emperor’s anointed representative on Lentonia, the governor’s position was of spiritual as well as temporal significance, and the hierophant may well have felt it his duty to remain and offer prayers to ease his passing.

[28] Lentonia had a slightly longer day than Terran Standard.

[29] Which would be all of them: don’t pretend you wouldn’t be tempted to poach him given the chance.

[30] Given the exceptional piety of Tallarns in general, and their Imperial Guard officers in particular, it’s quite likely that Samier was eager to consult the hierophant privately in the hope of some extra spiritual guidance.

[31] Air Defence Corps.

[32] Given the age of most Imperial cities, which are measured in millennia, it’s hardly surprising that the ground beneath them is almost invariably riddled with the built-over remains of generations of previous settlement, forming a honey-comb of forgotten cellars, service tunnels and the like.

[33] A legacy of his early life in an underhive.

[34] Or renovation: such subterranean passages generally having been in place for centuries.

[35] It’s unclear here whether that last comment applies to Jurgen or Cain himself; although, under the circumstances, I doubt that either was eager to hang about.

[36] Not quite true. I doubt there are any Chaos cults on Terra or Mars, for instance, and followers of the Dark Gods tend to be thin on the ground on Space Marine Chapter worlds.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sandy Mitchell is the author of a long-running series of Warhammer 40,000 novels about the Hero of the Imperium, Commissar Ciaphas Cain, as well as the audio drama Dead In The Water. He has also written a plethora of short stories, including ‘The Last Man’ in the Sabbat Worlds anthology, along with several novels set in the Warhammer World. He lives and works in Cambridge.

An extract from Last Chancers : Armageddon Saints.

I need to stop grinning, it’s starting to get weird, but my jaw won’t respond. I just look down at Colonel Schaeffer. Everything else has stopped. Arms, legs, tongue, brain. None of it’s working at the moment, like I’m some scuttling prey-thing caught in the gaze of a deadly hunter.

It’s his eyes, I swear. No one else looks into me the same way, piercing my soul without effort. Icicles as cold as the blood in his veins, pushing deeper and deeper with every breath we stand there, gazes locked.

My rictus is starting to unsettle the crowd, their tense silence stretching along with my lips and cheeks. They are waiting. Waiting for my proclamation.

To say I have mixed feelings would be like saying getting shot by a lascannon is a bit dangerous. I really thought he was dead. I mean, frag it, I thought I was dead for a while.

But he is standing there right in front of me, as real as anything. Here, in the depths of Acheron’s underhive, at least twenty kilometres from anything resembling Imperial authority. It’s a reminder that beyond the ork-towns, past broken habplexes and collapsed manufactory levels, the Imperium’s war for Armageddon rumbles on, a years-long stalemate that has consumed millions of lives already.

‘Kage.’

He utters my name like a curse, teeth gritted.

‘The Burned Man! The Burned Man!’ My company raise their voices in protest at the use of my given name.

Schaeffer doesn’t react, he just stands there watching me.

I feel his contempt and my smile fades as his scorn washes over me. The surprise, delight maybe, gives way to memory. The remembrance that this is Colonel Schaeffer of the 13th Penal Legion, the Last Chancers.

The memory that he is a total and utter bastard.

‘The Colonel!’ I say again, quieting the crowd with raised arms. I point to Schaeffer. ‘The man that plucked me from nothingness and threw me into every hell-war he could find. I wasn’t supposed to survive, was I, Colonel? Not the tyranid spore mine swarms of Ichar IV. Not the xenos infiltration of Coritanorum. Not the fire warriors of the t’au.’

I take a breath, eyes cast upwards to the ceiling and the mass of the mountainous hive city unseen above us.

‘And not here, in the fires of Acheron.’ I lower my gaze and meet his, refreshed by the thought of my elevation. ‘Yet, here I am. Preserved from death at each turn, and now raised above death by the hand of the Emperor Himself.’

I see his first reaction. A narrowing of the eyes, tightening of the jaw.

‘But you know that, of course. You came looking for me.’

‘Traitor!’ shouts one of the Guardsmen with him. I think it’s Lorii at first. She looks like Lorii.

Except she doesn’t. She looks nothing like Lorii. Pale skin, but not white. Dark hair. At least twenty centimetres shorter.

And Lorii is dead. It cut her open.

It used my hands to do it.

Another outburst of jeering rings down from the audience, but I just shrug.

‘A power far higher than you has judged me,’ I tell the anonymous trooper. ‘Judged me and delivered me from the abyss.’

‘The Burned Man! The Burned Man!’

It really doesn’t take much to get my followers worked up, and they have been in an agitation since news came that the orks were coming down through the south-west ducts. Hearing that we’ve captured an Imperial expedition has pushed them over the edge. I can barely see them but I can feel the pent-up anger, a seething, living thing that roars through their throats and glares through their eyes.

A thing that thirsts for blood.

At my left, Nazrek stirs, its bulk shifting as it feels the surge of emotion. A noise like gravel crushing flesh rumbles from the ork’s throat. Grot sniggers in its high-pitched way.

I really hadn’t expected it to be the Colonel. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have arranged this celebration. The crowd are too excitable. If I don’t calm everything down, someone’s going to throw something, and then someone else is going to copy them, and it’ll be a bloodbath.

It’s a fine line between stopping them killing these troopers and denying them vent for their growing anger. Anger that has swelled in recent days, for no reason I can uncover. Just a rage that has stirred up the orks, the rival warlords, even the Imperial Guard camped outside the hive. Everyone seems eager for a renewed war.

‘Here he is, delivered into my grasp by the Emperor,’ I tell my audience, reaching out a hand to Schaeffer and then closing my fingers into a fist. ‘For years he was the master. Now he is powerless. The balance of the scales has tipped in my favour, yes?’

There’s a roar of approval in answer.

‘But remember, I was once like those with him. They are his thralls, here in service to the God-Emperor. Dutiful, following orders, finding their place in the scheme of the Master of Mankind like all of us.’

Schaeffer’s brow furrows as he listens, but he remains silent.

‘Spare them our condemnation until we know their souls,’ I tell my people. My fist becomes a pointing finger, beckoning to the Colonel. ‘But this one, he comes with me.’

I stride from the stage without looking back. Nazrek lumbers after me, grunting, while Grot hurries behind. The rest of my lieutenants touch fingers to their flame-badges in salute as I pass.

My chambers are down a short corridor adjoining the sump vat. They used to be an overseer’s office, I think. An armoured door bars entry, but I leave it open and wait inside.

Karol and three of his gang bring the Colonel along the corridor. They escort him rather than manhandling him, reluctant to lay hands on Schaeffer. He looks like he is on a parade ground, back straight, arms swinging as though on marching drill.

His eyes are moving now, taking in everything, passing over me, looking at Nazrek, the guards, the environment. I back away from the door as he approaches, allowing him to enter. The outer chamber has a couple of benches and a small table, the walls bare plaster, cracked in places where the ancient hive city has settled over the ages.

I give Karol a nod and he leaves with the others. I close the door, giving the lock handle a spin.

‘Thank the Emperor yo–’ I begin. Instinct causes me to duck and twist as I turn back towards the Colonel.

Schaeffer’s straightened fingers, intended for my throat, miss by a few centimetres. I guess he’s not here to bring me in alive.

I drive my knuckles into the point of his jaw. As he reels from the blow, I kick hard at the side of his knee, tripping him.

I back off, hands raised, rather than following up.

‘Hold on!’ I bark at him. ‘Give me a fraggin’ chance!’

Schaeffer stands up, flexing his fingers.

‘I knew you were not dead,’ he says. ‘I did not know how, but I knew it. No body, no proof.’

He steps to the right. I move to keep the table between us.

‘I’m a hard man to kill. That’s why you like me so much.’

There’s a flicker of acknowledgement but his gaze hardens.

‘When I heard there was a warlord called the Burned Man, I did not think much about it at first. Even so, it nagged at me. I had to see for myself whether it was true or not.’

‘And it’s true.’

He drops his shoulder as though he’s about to head right but I’m not fooled. I vault the table as he lunges around to the left.

‘You should know by now, Kage. You cannot run from me. You cannot hide from me.’

‘Learnt that the hard way,’ I laugh. The armoured door is behind me. No chance to turn. If I put my hand back to feel for the lock wheel the Colonel will be on me like a Narusian panther.

Escape isn’t the point. If I open the door, Nazrek and the others will come piling in.

Schaeffer interrupts my racing thoughts, a booted foot connecting with the lip of the table, skidding it towards my legs. He follows it, fist pulled back.

I roll, shoulder hitting the ferrocrete hard, jarring my neck. I come to my feet and keep going, jumping up onto one of the benches, throwing a kick back as he comes after me. My heel connects with his forehead but he bulls through the strike, seizing my knee and thigh.

I twist, trying to spin my other foot around. He ducks, blocking my boot with his shoulder. Tucking myself into a roll, I tumble free but land awkwardly on my head. I roll without looking, his stamp crashing into the floor a split second after my neck has moved.

‘You should have had your friends kill me when you had the chance.’ The Colonel steadies himself as I back away. I feel a lightness at my left hip an instant before I see my combat knife in his hand.

‘You sly fragger.’

No sudden onslaught this time. The Colonel edges forward, blade held ready. He knows I’m good with a knife. Really good. And that means I’m good at dealing with someone else with a knife. First rule of the knife fighter: don’t bring a weapon if the enemy can take it off you.

‘You betrayed me. You left us to die.’ It’s the first time he’s shown any real emotion, his frown deep.

‘I never betrayed you.’ I step back and my calves touch the other bench. ‘I finished the mission. You would have done the same. That’s what being a Last Chancer is about! Finish the mission, even if nobody gets out alive.’

There’s a slight hesitation, but he continues on, taking another step closer. The blade tip weaves left and right, small movements to mask the moment of intent.

‘That’s right.’ He locks that stare on me again. ‘Finish the mission, even if it means not walking out alive.’

My priorities are rapidly changing. There’s a laspistol in my bedroom, the door to the next chamber between me and the Colonel. I don’t take the weapon to the audiences; I don’t like the idea of bringing a gun among a bunch of people that might want to use it on me.

I make one last bid for clemency.

‘I thought I would die,’ I tell the Colonel. ‘I grabbed von Strab and threw us into the furnace chasm, to kill us both.’

‘So why are you not dead?’

I shrug. ‘The Emperor saved me.’

I forget how fast he can move, even though he’s at least twenty kilos heavier than me. I have to take a cut to my forearm to deflect the knife from my eyeball. Spinning, I chop my hand into his neck, hoping to stun him.

I don’t. He backhands me across the jaw, the whip of his hand giving the instinctive blow terrible force. It knocks me onto the bench, where I sprawl, head banging on the wood.

My vision fuzzes as he looms over me.

‘Thank you.’

He stops, confused by my words.

‘What?’

‘Thank you,’ I tell him, sitting up. I tilt my head back, submitting my throat to the knife edge. ‘For saving my soul. I will die purified.’

Schaeffer leans over me, the blade descending towards the artery in the side of my neck.

‘I came here to kill a traitor,’ he growls. It seems like his words aren’t for me.

I lower my head, meeting his stare. My words come slow and honest.

‘I am not a traitor.’

I can feel the tension in his body, expecting me to counter-attack, to seize the knife. I take in a ragged breath, hardly daring to let it out again. The wrong move and my blood becomes decor.

‘I didn’t have you killed because why would I want you dead?’

‘There are a lot of reasons,’ the Colonel replies. ‘You listed them. Ichar IV. Coritanorum. Brightsword. Acheron.’

‘And I understand why that happened. I know the Emperor guided me here. And I gave myself to Him, and I have been redeemed for my doubts and sins.’

The knife trembles just a fraction. I still don’t dare move.

‘This doesn’t have to be the end of it,’ I tell him, the words coming without thought. But it’s not desperation, it’s not the base clinging to life that drove me for so much of my life. It’s truth, uncensored, spilling from my thoughts to my lips. ‘Sooner or later you open that door and get killed by the people outside. This is a bad place to die for no good reason. There’s something happening, something big, I can feel it. Better to live and fight it.’

The Colonel stares at me for what feels like an age, seeking deception that isn’t there. I say nothing else. Eventually he steps back. I notice that he doesn’t offer me the knife.

‘It’s getting dangerous down here,’ I tell him. ‘It’s going to explode soon and I’d be better off somewhere else.’

‘Your people are not going to let me simply walk away from here. Or you.’

‘I know.’

The Colonel not trying to kill me is an immediate improvement on the situation, but it doesn’t solve any of the bigger issues.

‘I have a bolthole,’ I tell him, tilting my head towards the adjoining chambers. ‘Fake vent cover, out into the tunnels that run under the sumpways.’

‘That will not help the men and women who came with me.’

‘No.’ I flop down onto the bench, wracking my brains.

‘We need to isolate the objective and then determine the best direction from that,’ says the Colonel. ‘Like any other mission.’

I nod and extend a hand, inviting him to continue.

‘Your followers harbour significant anti-Imperial sentiment.’

‘No, that’s not it. They’re just protective of their territory.’ I stand up, moving to the door to the next room. I can see two bottles on an upturned crate. One’s water, the other is a strong spirit we call Flamer Fuel. I step inside and pick up the water. ‘They’re also protective of me. Maybe a bit too attached, really. They’re good people… but desperate. Needy.’

I take a swig of water and offer the bottle. The Colonel hesitates and then takes it off me, swilling the liquid around his mouth for a few seconds before swallowing.

‘The Burned Man. It is a story, nothing more. A lie to impress the simple-minded,’ he continued.

‘No lie.’ He passes back the water and I stopper the bottle to put it on the bench. As I keep talking, I right the upturned table. ‘They know who I am, what I did, where I came from.’

‘And how the Emperor saved you?’ Schaeffer shakes his head. ‘The rumours that I heard told of a man who plunged into the fires and emerged with angel wings, alight with golden flame. Admit it, it is a convenient myth. At least, convenient until you need to leave your miscreant followers behind. You were never good at taking responsibility, Kage.’

‘It’s what happened,’ I insist. ‘I couldn’t say for sure about the wings, but other than that, I fell into the flames and they burned me.’ I take a step closer and he stiffens. The tip of my finger traces the molten swirl down the side of my face. ‘I burned but I lived. The… thing that was inside of me. The thing that made me betray you, that killed Lorii… It was a force from the abyss, a messenger of the darkness. But the Emperor purged it from my thoughts and rescued me. Redeemed me!’

Schaeffer says nothing as he scrutinises me again. With a sigh, he steps past me and takes the water bottle. He opens it and lifts the rim to his lips with his eyes still on me.

‘Why?’ he growls.

‘Why did the Emperor save me?’

He nods.

‘The same reason He saved me a hundred times before, I suppose. Every bullet that missed. Ducking just a moment before that spore mine exploded on Ichar IV. Giving me the strength to break the god-plant’s mind control on False Hope, to resist xenos hypnotism in Coritanorum. How many times has He saved you, Colonel?’

He opens his mouth, to argue I’m sure, but then closes it without saying anything. I can guess his thoughts, because I’ve had the same ones.

‘Just chance, right?’ I say. ‘The bullet’s gotta find someone, only the survivors can claim they were blessed, the dead got nothing to say. Luck? Coincidence? But then you have to ask yourself, if it’s all just good and bad fortune, what’s all this business about our souls being saved by the Emperor? Either the God-Emperor is watching, and maybe taking a hand, or He isn’t… Like that mad, broken preacher Gappo used to say. What if He wasn’t listening when you pray? Or Kronin, poor bastard. Talking only in verses from the Litanies of Faith. Should’ve been dead in a chapel, gutted by a tyranid. Maybe he saw something he could never explain. Felt something… immortal? Inhuman?’

‘Are you saying that is what you felt? The touch of the Emperor upon you?’ For once, there’s no disdain in the Colonel’s question.

‘I truly did. The flames licked at my skin and I felt a power inside me, lifting me from their embrace. In the flames I saw the face of the Emperor, in their roar I heard…’ I’ve told this story a hundred times, it gets a bit more flowery with each retelling, but as the Colonel stares at me without reaction the poetry slips away. I strip it back to the basics. ‘There was a weight, a pressure in my head, like when the abyssal messenger was controlling my thoughts.’

Tears start to roll down my cheek as I remember it, harsher than before. There’s something about the Colonel standing there, listening, like maybe he’s sharing it too. I remember how he’s nearly died Emperor only knows how many times. And he’s been put back together, stitched up, worked on by the Martian tech-priests. He just listens, intent, no questions.

‘There was fire on me, and I fell into one of the underhive tunnels broken by the chasm. But as I lay there, I felt the metal under my fingers and I dug my nails into it and I clung to it like I was going to slip back into the flames. I remember praying. Thanking the Emperor for giving me my last chance. And you. I asked the Emperor to protect you. It hurt. Hurt so fraggin’ much I thought I was gonna die anyway. Not the fire, but the knives inside my head. I pushed into the pain, brought it close, and then tried to bury it, calling on the Emperor again and again. Then it was gone, leaving me. It felt like a gentle breeze through my soul.’

When I’m done, I stand there shaking, staring at his face for some sign of what he’s thinking. He looks me up and down, slowly, gauging every bit of me.

‘And that is why your followers will not be happy for you to leave. They see you as a connection to the Emperor. Their prophet, their guide.’

‘I don’t say any of that stuff, though some of them say it for me.’

‘You do not deny their claims.’

‘They can believe what they want. If I start arguing, all of this comes tumbling down, and me with it.’

‘Which brings us back to the question of how you will extricate yourself from your followers.’

‘Do I need to?’

The question surprises him and the Colonel rubs a knuckle along the side of his nose, thinking for a few seconds.

‘What are you proposing?’

‘We all get out of here, out of Acheron.’

‘You are a deserter. You have others in your ranks that abandoned their posts. Why would they return to the Imperial Guard?’

‘I’m sure you can handle that side of things. If you have a mission, that makes us the new 13th Legion. That’s not the biggest problem. I’d be happy to deal with that if we can get to the Imperial lines. No, it’s the thousands of orks between us and there that’ll be the hardest thing.’

‘You have been fighting the orks since our parting, what makes this so different?’

‘There’s fighting to keep some territory, maybe some raids, keep the power balance. And then there’s leading fifteen hundred men, women and children out through ork-held underhive.’

‘Children?’

‘There are families down here, came to the Burned Man looking for protection.’

‘You really love playing the saviour, Kage.’

‘Nobody’s playing,’ I tell him with a grimace. Then my mood improves as an idea settles. ‘But the holy saviour story would probably convince them to come with us. I spin a yarn about you coming to take us out for some Emperor-blessed war effort, that we’ve all been called upon by the Power of Terra.’

The Colonel growls. ‘I am not going to concede that you have been blessed by the Emperor.’

‘You’re so stubborn!’ I pace back and forth a few times, hands clenching and relaxing. ‘I’m telling the truth! And even if you don’t believe me, what’s the problem? Do you want to get out of here or not?’

‘Compromise is the crack in the wall of sanctity. Principles are not stubbornness.’

‘You sound like a walking Thought for the Day,’ I snarl.

‘I have other concerns. About you. Your recent past.’ Schaeffer folds his arms. ‘You have always been self-serving but your actions during the von Strab mission go beyond self-preservation. I cannot trust you.’

‘You’ve never trusted me.’

‘I have always relied upon you to do the best for your own survival. What occurred in the court of von Strab, the way you turned on us, was beyond survival. It was vindictive and homicidal.’

‘And it wasn’t me!’ I kick the table leg in frustration. ‘I told you that! There was a spirit of the abyss within me, pushing me down inside my own thoughts.’

‘Which you claim to have single-handedly purged.’

‘Not single-handed.’ I sigh and shake my head. ‘It was the Emperor. The breath of the God-Emperor passed through me.’

‘I brought Oahebs for a reason.’ The Colonel turns his shoulders slightly, his posture directing my attention to the door. He tilts his head a little, eyes unwavering. ‘Do you want to be sure that all of the dark messenger has gone?’

I’m about to spit out another angry reply but stop myself. The Litanies of Faith are full of martyrs that died for the Imperial Creed. A bit of doubt from the Colonel isn’t all that great an obstacle.

‘All right, we’ll do it your way,’ I tell him, moving to the lock wheel. I spin it open and push the door just wide enough to poke my head out.

Nazrek, Karol and the others turn in surprise.

‘Him dead?’ growls the ork, leaning to look past me into the chamber.

‘I have spared him for the moment,’ I say archly, directing my words at Karol. ‘I need one of the others. Send for the one called Oahebs. Remember, they’re not to be hurt until I’ve decided what to do with them.’

Slamming the door before they can ask awkward questions, I turn the wheel back into the locked position and let out a long breath.

‘The benefits of blind obedience,’ says the Colonel. ‘But it is hollow without respect for you. It’s based only on the power you claim to have.’

‘I know.’ This time I head for the Flamer Fuel when I go into the next room. There’s a plain metal cup beside the bottle and I half fill it. I stop, hand halfway to my mouth. ‘I know what I went through, but that doesn’t mean I’m not waiting for some ambitious spark in that lot to think maybe they’d do a better job of it.’

I return to the bench, drink untouched.

‘And it’s not been going well, these last ten days or so. A lot of setbacks. I mean, really vicious fighting.’ My head starts to pulse, a throb that’s been bugging me for about the same amount of time. I down a mouthful of Flamer Fuel, letting the sensation of burning tongue and throat distract me from the ache inside my thoughts. ‘Perhaps it’s the Emperor telling me it’s time to move on. Maybe an omen of you coming here.’

The Colonel looks thoughtful for a few seconds, looking away. When his eyes return to me there’s a peculiar quality to his gaze, like uncertainty.

‘What is it?’ I ask. At first he doesn’t look like he’s going to answer, but then relents, unfolding his arms, fists still clenched.

‘There have been bad auguries from the astropaths for the last sixty or seventy days. Navigation in and out of the Armageddon System has been getting more difficult. Wild talk about the Astronomican dimming. Being clouded.’

‘Like the Shadow in the Warp?’ I suggest.

‘Not the tyranids,’ says the Colonel.

‘The orks, then. Nazrek talks about it. The “big green”. A sort of orkiness they all share, gets stronger the more of them there are around.’

‘Not orks,’ Schaeffer says heavily. ‘I think your abyssal stowaway, the one you say you have expunged, was a precursor of something else. The warp is stirring in strange ways.’

‘I’ve been doing this long enough to know that means a prize opportunity to do something insanely suicidal for the Emperor.’

‘You are mistaken. I have no mission, Kage.’ He says it almost apologetically. It’s then that I realise he’s not just talking about the big events, but the words are more personal.

‘That’s why you came after me! Getting bored, were you? I hear stuff. The lines have been drawn on the map for a good while now. Imperial forces dug in out there, the orks mostly happy to stay in here. You got stuck sitting in a trench with frag-all to do, didn’t you?’

I laugh at Schaeffer’s glare of annoyance.

‘What justification did you come up with?’ I neck the remaining alcohol, burning away the last of my reservations. ‘Did the Burned Man pose a threat somehow?’

‘I came to kill a traitor,’ the Colonel growls, stifling my humour. ‘That was reason enough.’

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2012.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Vladimir Krisetskiy.
Internal art by Wayne England.

Old Soldiers Never Die © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2020. Old Soldiers Never Die, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-80026-369-7

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For Judith, who’s also rare and special.

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